OCT - Oryx and Crake

October review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, 2003. [Man Booker Prize Shortlist category]

I'm not even sure how to start writing about Oryx and Crake. It is a strange book, not that I expected anything less from Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale has long held a spot atop my list of favorite feminist fiction, and I've been interested to see what else Atwood can do. Oryx and Crake has been described as post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction, adventure romance, and a number of other things, and it is the idea of "speculative fiction" that I think I got hung up on the most. Atwood has a way of resonating even today; I re-read Handmaid's Tale during the Obama-Romney election of 2012 and it was chilling in the context of the reproductive rights fight. Reading Oryx and Crake and then thinking about it in these post-election weeks (yes, super late review) was chilling in a different way. In this dystopia, science is paramount and genetic engineering rules (ruled) the world. The narrator, Snowman, is ostensibly the only human of his kind left as he relates his life and the catastrophe that brought him to this moment, living mostly in a tree and acting as a sort of half-assed prophet to the newly synthesized Children of Crake. He tells of his old friend whom he refers to as Crake, how he climbed the scientific ladder at a genetics corporation and created these new beings devoid of emotion and sexual drive. The possibility of this future is not necessarily what chills, instead it is the possibility of its decline under the next presidency. Science may not be on the top of the agenda in Trump's America and while we may avoid bringing about Oryx and Crake, we may be on the precipice of a dystopia of another kind. 

At any rate, back to the narrative. The most controversial aspect of Snowman's tale is the genetic engineering, the idea of "playing God," and "how much is too much, how far is too far?" (p206).  The truth is that most of today's technology could fall under the scope of "playing God" in some indirect manner or another, from modern medicine to weather apps, and but the "how far is too far" is quite apropos, placing the impetus on the individual. After all, "God is a cluster of neurons, he'd maintained," Snowman says of Crake's philosophy. "The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment." (p228) What is the future without innovation and drive?

Snowman/Jimmy often talks about his love of language, how early on he had collected old words, "He developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them." (p195) One of my favorite parts of the book, when I felt the most aligned with the narrator, who spent a portion of his post-graduate life as a glorified copywriter for a drug company, fomenting the change in lifestyle brought about with science as paramount. It is a slight nod to the future we find Snowman in, the last of his kind, trying to remember the names of everyday objects to keep himself sane, forcing himself to "Hang on to the words... When they're gone out of his head... they'll be gone, everywhere, for ever. As if they had never existed." I am hoping to collect such words, such books, to keep them for myself and for posterity.

I am unsure how to end this post, or what it was even about in the first place, but that is pretty much how I felt when I finished Oryx and Crake, so I guess it's in keeping with the narrative.

SEPT - The Underground Girls of Kabul

September review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg, 2014. [Investigative Journalism category]

Once upon a time, investigative journalism was something that I was very interested in pursuing as a career path. The most salient definition of "investigative journalism" that I could find during my search for a book of this genre delineated it as, "a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest to shed light on a specific issue, such as crime or social justice." For Jenny Nordberg, that specific issue is the bacha posh. Nordberg's book The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan examines the bacha posh, a phrase translated from Dari as "dressed up like a boy" that is used as sort of a blanket term for the phenomenon of girls being disguised as boys in Afghanistan. (I use the passive voice here because it is generally not a decision made by the girls themselves, although there are exceptions. Usually the decision is made by the parents who have not borne a male heir and desire the social stability and visibility granted by having a male child.) Nordberg paints a compelling portrait of a number of these bacha posh who have undergone--and maintained--the disguise for varied reasons, shining a light into a heretofore unexamined corner of Afghan culture. 

I was immediately intrigued by this study, but I couldn't help a niggling discomfort that underscored my intrigue: what rights does Nordberg have to tell this story? This is, ostensibly, a tender subject and practice in a society that is notably difficult for girlhood, and I was uncomfortable with the author's insertion of herself into the issue. But early on, Nordberg establishes that her primary subject, a parliamentarian named Azita who chose the bacha posh life for her daughter, has given permission to tell her story (p25), saying "It could be interesting for people. This is the reality of Afghanistan." Nordberg, a Swedish journalist, broke the story to the New York Times in 2010 and spent years developing personal accounts and researching cultural and historical aspects of this practice. Her book lays out a number of different bacha posh experiences, probing the question of whether bacha posh exists as a kind of third gender or if it challenges the idea of a gender binary altogether--personally I wish more space had been given to this particular discussion, as it stands it is only brought up toward the end of the book through Zahra, a teenage bacha posh who is resistant to returning to her "girl state," but I suppose there is only so much one can ask from a broad investigative text. 

One section that resonated me in particular was Nader's story, a bacha posh who has continued the lifestyle into adulthood, who now runs what amounts to a literal underground meeting of like-minded individuals, practicing tae kwon do and "her own brand of organized resistance" (p217). When asked about the importance of her athletic endeavor, Nader replies about subversion and controversy, but also notes the following: 

"But it is also because when we use our bodies, we do not feel weak anymore. When a girl feels the strength of her body, she knows she can do other things, too." (p217)

Realizing one's own strength is especially poignant for me as a woman who has come into her own through the discovery of roller derby and commitment to a lifting regime, a woman who has learned how to use her body, albeit in a safer space than the tumultuous social landscape that is womanhood in a Middle Eastern society.  I recognize that any attempt I make to identify with this story is paltry in terms of privilege and social histories, but it is a small thing that I can build upon, some small measure of connection that feels important in the current climate.

AUG - My Lady Jane

August review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows, 2016. [YA Historical Fiction category]

I have long been fascinated with the Tudor era in English history. I read all that I could about the wives of Henry VIII and as many other historical figures as I could find, but for whatever reason, Jane Grey never really surfaced. Maybe because her reign was so short--they call her the Nine-Day Queen--she hasn't been given much page time, but I was thrilled to find My Lady Jane, which is a historical retelling of her reign, with a little fantasy sprinkled in. The salient change in this universe is the existence of beings known as E∂ians (pronounced eth-y-un), or people who have the ability to shape-shift into an animal. Namely, King Henry VIII, who turned into a lion and ate a court jester once, provoking the phrase "don't eat the messenger," according to the storytellers. The premise of My Lady Jane is this: 16-year-old King Edward is dying and must find a successor, and he lands on his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, who he decides will be married to Gifford Dudley, son of Edward's most trusted advisor. Gifford, often referred to as "G," is an E∂ian who becomes a horse whenever the sun crests the horizon, a change that he cannot help or control in any way. Jane does not want to be married, let alone be queen, so once Edward is declared dead (spoiler alert: in this version he actually is not dead!) she has a slight crisis. The book is divided into two parts, Part One, "in which we revise a bit of history," and Part Two, "in which we throw history out the window." Part Two expands upon the conspiracy to (poison and) overthrow Edward and details the E∂ian rebellion that helps Edward take back the throne.

One of the most enjoyable things about this book, I think, was the self-aware storytelling. The prologue sees the three authors establish themselves as the weavers of this tale, referring to themselves often and inserting sly commentary throughout the relation of the tale. A few notable examples are the nods to popular culture at the time, such as having G (who is a closet writer) muck up the composition of some famous Shakespeare lines and then slyly nodding to the conspiracy theory that he would actually become the man behind Shakespeare (p489). The cavalier way the Lady Janes (as the authors appellate themselves) deal with history and consistently acknowledge this attitude keeps the tone of the book light, and it helps the reader to have as much fun with it as the writers clearly are having.

Obviously Lady Jane is my favorite character in the book. She is presented as somewhat of a mystery, nose always buried in a book (sound familiar?) rather than engaging with the court around her. My favorite little detail, however, is her synonym habit. When she learns of her fiancé-to-be, that he is purportedly a ladies' man, she thinks,

"So. Her husband-to-be was a philanderer. A smooth operator. A debaucher. A rake. A frisker. (Jane became something of a walking thesaurus when she was upset, a side effect of too much reading.)" (p35)

Although I disagree on principle with the idea of "too much reading" (is there such a thing??), I really appreciated the commitment to Jane's synonyms throughout the book. Again, there were moments where she would acknowledge she was doing it and the narrators would essentially come in and say that it was ok, it was what made her Jane.

JUL - The Mechanical

July review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis, 2015. [Steampunk Sci-Fi category]

July's choice for the ERC is The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis, the first in his new Alchemy Wars series. There were plenty of options for steampunk sci-fi, but something about The Mechanical struck me as different. The concept behind The Mechanical is one that is familiar, ever since the revelation of Asimov's I, Robot: that of robot sentience and self-awareness. Set in an alternative universe where Dutch scientist Christiaan Hyugens invented a magic-imbued clockwork automaton for use in the Dutch army, revolutionizing the technological advancement of the era, as well as the tenuous link between the Dutch and the French. 300 years after this discovery, the Dutch Empire has incorporated these mechanicals into every fiber of their society. Jax is a servitor mechanical, known colloquially as a Clakker in the jargon of the text, which is a mechanical man bound by something called a geas, an intrinsic set of rules and requirements the mechanicals are physically incapable of disobeying. The story opens with Jax on a mission from his owners, taking a painful break to watch some heretics being hanged, including a rogue Clakker. Jax watches as his compatriot declares his freedom from the geasa, and it is a beautiful juxtaposition of the nearly incapacitating strictures of the geasa under which Jax still labors and the apparent free will and self-actualization of the rogue Clakker who staunchly meets his unmaking. It is established from the back cover blurb that Jax would at some point become such a rogue, and it is part of our journey as readers to watch this unfold. 

One of the most salient threads throughout The Mechanical is the discussion of the soul and what it means to have Free Will. Jax's errand to begin the our story is to visit Pastor Vissor, who is, unbeknownst to him, a secret French Catholic and therefore heretical member of the underground revolution. I will give fair warning that after this paragraph there will be slight SPOILERS, so read on if you dare. The thread becomes even more tangled when Jax and Visser meet again toward the end of the book, after Jax has been freed of the geasa and possesses his own Free Will. The snarl is that Visser was captured in his attempt to elude the authorities and was forced to undergo an experimental procedure that imbued him, a human being, with the painful and unbreakable geasa. So, the next time they meet, their roles in the narrative have essentially been reversed, and Jax spends a good amount of time pondering how their respective "souls" change throughout the text:

"This shell before him wore the flesh of Pastor Luuk Visser. But its soul, if it had a soul, had changed. This man-shaped thing before him was something twisted." (p346)

At earlier places in the text, references are made to Jax being human-shaped, so this is an especially striking comparison of Visser's change. The line between human and machine is blurred, as is the heretofore-apparent characteristics separating one from another.

This dichotomy is dealt with in many different and subtle ways throughout the text, proving that Tregillis is truly emerging as one of the top new voices of his genre. His writing style is eloquent and practiced, and his vocabulary is to die for. Tregillis is so deft with his perspective shifts: it is as simple as changing the pronouns used in reference to Clakkers depending upon who is speaking. For example, at one point when Jax is freed from the geasa, he meets a high-ranking but disgraced member of the French resistance who has different views on Clakkers than most of Dutch society, but still sees them as not entirely citizenry. As Tregillis shifted perspectives between Jax and this revolutionary, the pronouns used to describe Jax shifted from he/him to it almost imperceptibly and I loved it. 

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.