JUN - The Secret of Lost Things

June review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay, 2007. [Book about Books category]

Picking a book about books is possibly the hardest category I've had to do. I only landed on The Secret of Lost Things really because I was down to the wire--past the wire, really--and it was on my To Be Read bookshelf and it seemed perfect. I have difficulty with decisions, ok? As has often happened with this challenge, this book found me exactly when I needed it: The Secret of Lost Things is about a girl who recently lost her mother and packs her life up to move from Tasmania to New York to try to find her way on her own and ends up employed at a strange and labyrinthine book emporium named The Arcade.

Rosemary Savage is young and naive and she makes a lot of mistakes by the end, but she is unabashedly trying to find her place in the world. She works hard for what she wants, even if those things are a little misguided, but she is pretty sublimely unapologetic for most of her decisions. She has experienced such loss, loss of her mother and her home and her country, and she cuts herself loose from the tenuous links she has after that loss to move forward. She is shoved forward by her friend and mother-surrogate Chaps, who buys her plane ticket, but once there she pushes forward on her own. Rosemary creates her own space, makes herself a new home all her own in a little run-down apartment, something that I have been working on for the past few months, making my space my home again after all the shifting I've undergone. Rosemary's description of her new apartment struck me, the timbre of it, talking about surrounding yourself with small things that make you smile to foment an aura of homeliness.

Books about books are possibly some of my favorite books to read. The Shadow of the Wind is one of my all-time favorite books and Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore rocketed to the top of the list as well when I found it a few years ago. I could list all my favorite books about books forever and still have more to talk about. The Secret of Lost Things does fall into this beloved category, and I enjoyed it, but I don't think it will be joining the ranks of my favorites. It had all the makings of a favorite, but somehow failed to deliver.  Being a coming-of-age story as well at heart, it makes sense that not everything was resolved or defined at the end (I did like that parallel), but I thought I'd signed up for a literary mystery and I was left lacking and a little disconcerted at the end. I did love learning about Melville and the possibility of a lost story, and I was excited to do a little research of my own on the matter, but I was left wanting more. I suppose that isn't the worst way to be left at the end of a book, and I am going to funnel that wanting into my To Be Read pile, and thank The Secret of Lost Things for what it gave me when I needed it.

MAY - Station Eleven

May review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014. [Disaster Fiction category]

When I read Station Eleven walking home from work one day, a girl passed me running the other direction. As she came abreast of me, she called, "Is that book any good? I want to read it!" She turned her head as she ran past for my answer, and I turned to walk backwards and call back to her that I loved it so far. Station Eleven elicited many such interactions with both friends and strangers whilst I read it, and it is one that I am looking forward to discussing. It is a book that makes you think, makes you imagine, makes you connect. My derby sister, Emilie, bought it for me for my birthday, one in a kick of post-apocalypse books she's devoured lately. I figured that a freak plague-driven-apocalypse certainly counted as disaster fiction, and hungrily added it to my Eclectic Reader list. {I will note that it's possible there are spoilers in this post, but it's hard to write about it without because the book offers its own spoilers as it moves from time to time, so it's not my fault this time!}

Station Eleven is about a lot of things. It is about a lot of times. The gist is that there was an inexplicable plague that sprang up and killed a significant chunk of the population, and the book bounces around between the night it began, the years before, and Years Since. There are a number of characters who serve as constellation points whose connections slowly come into focus as the story moves--well, not forward, due to the non-linear scattered-jigsaw way it is written, and it reminded me of Jennifer Egan's masterpiece A Visit From The Goon Squad in that way. I even drew up a character connections map, like I did for Goon Squad! (Yes, I'm a nerd, we all know this already.) The first thing Emilie asked me when I told her I'd finished was who my favorite character was, a surprisingly hard question! The two frontrunners were obviously Miranda, the shipping mogul ex-wife of an actor, and Kirsten, and the traveling actor survivalist, respectively. After much consideration, I think I rank Miranda as my #1, not solely because she was the author of the titular Station Eleven comic, but also because she epitomizes getting knocked down and standing back up again stronger--even if it means eventually ending up alone on a Malaysian beach at the end of the world wondering if that is all. I do love Kirsten, of course, as she is a survivor with a Star Trek tattoo ("Survival is Insufficient") and a player in the Shakespeare traveling theater company, but there was a way that she felt too distant from me for me to really mark her as my favorite. 

I think the reason this book resonated so much with me in the same way that Goon Squad  did is that it is primarily about people. The resilience of human souls when faced with the utter unknown, and how their failings and successes are equally important. I have been thinking a lot about resilience lately, albeit on a smaller scale than fight-or-flight having to survive a world-ending flu, and it is stories like this that remind me of how simple and beautiful resilience can be. Stories like this that remind me that I'm ok, and that I too can find and share and tell stories that will make others feel that they are ok, too. 

APR - Mad, Bad & Sad

April review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignaensi, 2009. [Psychology (non-fiction) category]

My selection for Psychology (non-fiction) was Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, a book about the last two hundred years' worth of "extreme states of mind" in women. It chronicled the way women have been diagnosed over the years and evaluated the gradual shift in societal perspectives on these unusual women. Beginning in the 1800s, Mad, Bad & Sad tracks the inception of female mental illness and institutionalization as a sort of storage term to remove unruly women from their families purview. There is a lot of name-dropping, making sure to cover the "greats" like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe and Zelda Fitzgerald, and it is here that the tone of the book seems to shift, organizing itself more around these cases rather than the societal views that the beginning of the book dealt with. The book was written in 2009, so there is a bit of a contemporary gap that I would be very interested in seeing Appignanensi deal with, but alas. 

I have long been enamored of both Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two tragic writer women who figured prominently in the more contemporary chapters of this book. I cannot say exactly what it is that draws me to these women--it is surely not any sort of personal connection to such oceans of sadness or dejected kinship, other than my love of words and the way these women used them. (This is not to say that I have never been Sad with a capital S, I suppose, but it is not the primary focus of my love for these writers--I do not love them because they ended their lives in tragedy, I guess is what I'm trying to say.) I was introduced to both women in high school, under the tutelage one of my favorite teachers, my AP Lit teacher Mrs. Culver. Virginia intrigued me because of her breakthrough stream-of-consciousness style, one that I tried to emulate in my journal for so many years. Sylvia's rawness in poetry electrified me, and The Bell Jar made me wonder about what my future held, as a senior in high school on the cusp of The Real World. It has been said that all the great artists are great because they have experienced sadness and pain in a way that rips through their art, and these two women certainly felt their share of sadness. The lapis-colored lens of their lives has more than once prompted me to look at my own experiences and be grateful that I have never been that Sad, but it has also showed me the ways in which such Sadness is relative, a fact that I was reminded of reading this book. 

My overall feelings about the book were those of intellectual intrigue. It was a long haul, and I trekked with this book to Italy and back, reading a little bit every day, whenever I could. It was thick with information, facts and anecdotes and tidbits, not always easily consumable in short bursts (sometimes I had to re-read), but I did my best.  I liked the way it moved through history, moving through different women and diagnoses. I wanted to be a history major for a time, but I had trouble in history classes; memorizing names and dates and disparate facts has never been how my brain processes information, so in a way, Mad, Bad & Sad humanized the history for me, presented me with fully-fleshed stories rather than bare-bones timelines. I am sure I should read this book again in order to retain the plethora of information that I was presented, as I must do with most dense information of this nature, and I look forward to it.