DEC - Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold!

December review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold! by Terry Brooks, 1986. [Published Before You Were Born category]

This is probably one of the most open-ended of categories, "published before you were born" (which for me is 1991), and that's possibly why I left it until the end of the year: I couldn't make a decision with all the possibilities that were given me. For a while, I toyed with the idea of going back to a classic, something I've chipped away at but never fully finished, but I ultimately decided to go with a quick, fun read and Magic Kingdom For Sale fit the bill. Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold! by Terry Brooks is his first post-Shannara endeavor and one that cemented his status as a solid fantasy writer in the 1980s. It tells of Ben Holiday, a jaded widower and high-powered lawyer who is bored with his life when he comes across an advertisement in a Christmas catalog, promoting the sale of an honest-to-God magic kingdom for sale for the very low price of one million dollars. Unsurprisingly, Ben decides to take this strange offer, and very soon we are in the magical kingdom of Landover, where everything is pretty much dying and only slightly resembles the blossoming land that was promised.

We follow Ben on his journey from high-powered Chicago lawyer to bumbling king of a failing magical kingdom, and it seems that everywhere Ben turns, things are going to hell. His less-than-skilled court magician, Questor Thews, accidentally causes him to sleep away 7 of his 10 allotted decision-making days (he is allowed to back out with only a nominal fee within 10 days of acceptance of the mantle) and no one in the land is willing to recognize a new king. Something called The Tarnish is eating away at the kingdom, something Questor associates with the lack of a rightful and capable king. Ben has to try to secure the pledges of the various powers in the land, all the while attempting to convince them that he is worthy of their pledge as well. The cast of characters Ben accumulates over the course of his journey, both in his band of followers and in those he meets on his journey, are each unique enough to remember, but not entirely deep enough to have significant development or character arcs. Everyone stays pretty much the same, pretty much the way you knew they were going to be from the beginning, if that makes any sense. Rather, the character development is expected rather than organic. This is the way Ben and Questor must come to think because this is the way the story must end. And I am not saying this in a negative or derogatory kind of way: sometimes you just need to know where a character is going. As is to be expected, there is a point in Ben's quest where he has to go where everyone has spent the entire book telling him not to, and it is here that he truly understands the man he is supposed to be in order for this whole kingship thing to work. Like I said, relatively unsurprising, although entertaining.

Magic Kingdom was most definitely a "lighter fare" fantasy read, something I could dip into every night before bed or on the bus on my way to work without having to rebuild an elaborate world in my head prior to opening it up again. Brooks's prose style is very straightforward, very telling, although he is capable of quite the turn of phrase. It was an excellent choice to cap out the year, reading by the fire while the snow blew and all those winter cliches, and it was fun to see an early Terry Brooks try his hand at something smaller.

Eclectic Reader Challenge 2016

Year Number Three of the Eclectic Reader Challenge 2016!
Here are this year's categories:

Categories

1. A book about books (fiction or nonfiction)
2.  Serial killer thriller
3.  Paranormal romance
4.  A novel set on an island
5. Investigative journalism (non fiction)
6. Disaster fiction
7. Steampunk sci fi
8. Any book shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
9. Psychology (non fiction)
10. Immigrant Experience fiction
11. YA historical fiction
12. A debut author in 2016

NOV - Five Quarters of the Orange

November review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, 2001. [Fiction for Foodies category]

I love Joanne Harris, and Chocolat has long been one of my favorite food books, so it made sense to return to her for this category, fiction for foodies. Five Quarters of the Orange is at its heart a story of mothers and daughters, with Framboise Simon representing both aspects at turns throughout her narrative. Framboise is the young girl bristling against her hard mother in German-occupied France, as well as the weathered old woman who desperately tries to be a different kind of mother for her own daughters. Like her mother, she harbors a secret, but she ultimately has to decide whether she will let it hold her back or if it will define her in its keeping. Though we are her readers, her assumed confidantes, we are as much held at arm's length as the rest of the world is, in terms of knowing the secrets inside of Framboise's guarded heart. The tale Harris weaves is an intricate attempt to know those secrets, all the while understanding the woman and the mother who made her that way.

As a novel in the "fiction for foodies" vein, Five Quarters performs admirably, as anything by Joanne Harris is wont to do. There is an undercurrent of food running throughout the story, from the recipe book Framboise inherits that contains her mother's secrets and her recipes to the little cafe Framboise opens upon her return to Las Laveuses as a different woman. She writes of her mother's book, "My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity" (pg 4). There is a sensuality to all her prose about food, a way the dishes seem like a part of the family, and this even extends to Mirabelle (Framboise's mother)'s naming choices. She describes her own name and that of her siblings, the older sister Reine-Claude and the older brother Cassis:

"My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe--Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake, Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer." (p8)

It is never made clear, because we do not receive much insight from Mirabelle herself, what exactly her feelings behind her children's names are, nor what exactly stimulated the seemingly baseless hatred for oranges that Framboise uses so slyly in that summer of her ninth year. The simplest line to draw would be that they were Mirabelle's favorite fruits, and she bestowed their names upon the fruits of her own labor so that they may share her love. But Mirabelle is a cryptic woman, even when we are allowed access to her thoughts, via her recipe book. The naming is simply one of the many intricacies of a mother that is left to the imagination throughout the text, as many facets of motherhood are. Another facet is interestingly played with in the nigh-mythic fish nine-year-old Framboise is obsessed with catching, called Old Mother by pretty much everyone, it seems. While it may mean nothing, there are parallels drawn between Framboise's pursuit of Old Mother and her fight against her own, human mother, both in her youth and long after her mother's passing. These two figures represent a sort of test of mettle for Framboise, something to be overcome (if not understood) in the end. (No spoilers, you'll have to read for yourself to see whether she passes either of those tests!)

OCT - The Martian

October review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: The Martian by Andy Weir, 2011. [Sci-Fi in Space category]

My Mark Watney is a little beaten up too...

First of all, let's make one thing clear. I think space is terrifying. Sure it's exciting and the Unknown and all that, but something about the complete and total loss of control and disconnection from pretty much everything in the world is just really unsettling to me. I didn't see Gravity because the previews of Sandra Bullock flying through space agonizing over not being able to reach anyone really REALLY unsettled me. So I'm not entirely sure why I picked this up. Other than it being a category requirement, and all. I suppose I could've gone with something like more hard-core sci-fi rather than something so grounded in my reality, but the point of this challenge is to push your limits, eh?

So the plot of The Martian by Andy Weir is that an American astronaut named Mark Watney was part of a manned mission to Mars that was aborted only six sols in (a sol is 39 minutes longer than a day, I learned) due to a freak accident and Watney was left for dead. But you know what? He wasn't dead! Right here we start to get into horrific territory, my friends. If the fact that the Mars Curiosity rover sings happy birthday to itself once a year makes you a little sad, imagine a person doing that. I know. Devastating. But somehow, Weir kept me invested enough in the workings of Mark Watney's mind to ignore the fact that I was scared shitless (even though this could never conceivably happen to me. But still). In the preview for the film adaptation for the novel, Watney, played by Matt Damon, says he's going to have to "science the shit out of this planet" to survive. That was really the striking part for me, watching the way Watney's mind worked, the way he methodically tackled the completely plausible cause-and-effect mishaps that plagued him, and how he persevered.

I feel like it would be very easy to wax poetic about the way that this story is really all about perseverance of the human spirit and working together to overcome all odds, but Weir makes those statements pretty clearly towards the end of the book, so I'm going to let him have his day. What I would like to talk about, however, is an article by Weir about the humble and nerdy beginnings of this story. Basically Weir said he planned his own manned mission to Mars and learned everything he could, and then slowly realized that there was an amazing story hidden in his obsession. I truly enjoyed Weir's prose, the way he allowed Mark's voice to carry through the communications he was logging for posterity, and differentiating them so from the chapters set back on Earth--or, God forbid, the third-person descriptions which set off an eerie feeling that serious shit is about to go DOWN. At least from my relatively basic understanding of space and science, everything seemed plausible, believable, maybe made moreso by the fact that Watney wasn't necessarily an expert either, explaining all his conclusions and laying things out for us readers. Yes, he is probably a zillion times smarter and obviously better under pressure than any of us, but he was likeable. Down to Earth. (HAH. That was a joke. Because he's stuck on Mars. Get it?)

I don't want to spend too long on this book/review, as I have approximately 3,000 words to catch up on in NaNoWriMo (because I'm a masochist who loves being too busy for her own sanity), so I will end on this note: Space has long since been considered "the final frontier," but in recent years it has not had the allure that it had in the 60's and 70's when spaceflight was on the tip of everyone's tongues. Andy Weir and his characters brought space back into the forefront of our minds (at least in my humble opinion), made us realize that the final frontier still has a LOT more that we don't understand and haven't even scratched yet. And while I think the possibility is super exciting, I am more than happy to leave the scratching to some other brave soul while my feet are firmly planted on solid ground.

SEPT - Eve: A Novel of the First Woman

September review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Eve: A Novel of the First Woman by Elissa Elliott, 2009. [Retelling category]

I have long been interested in the character of Eve, both as a historical figure and as a character against which the modern day woman is constantly held up. I took a number of Women's Studies courses in college in which Eve figured largely, and my writer's eye has always been drawn to old stories told new ways. Eve is Elissa Elliott's re-imagining of the first woman of Biblical fame, told from both her perspective as well as that of her three daughters, incorporating flashbacks to relate the story of the expulsion from Eden as well. Through these generational perspectives, the story of the summer everything fell apart for the First Family is recounted, from their first encounters with a world outside their own insular one to the infamous fratricide of Cain and Abel. At the end of her tale, Elliott offers an Afterword in which she attempts to underscore her decisions for the book, as well as outline some of her sources that allowed her to move forward with those decisions. I found it extraordinarily helpful in my reflection to have some of Elliott's first questions about how she drafted her story. Her discussion of precedent and context and literary injection allowed me to sink myself deeper into not only this tale that Elissa Elliott has forged, but also the character that inspired its re-forging.

First and foremost in my musings about Eve is the agency she is given through her own perspective. By being allowed to tell her own story, Eve is given a power here that she has never quite seen. Elliott's addition of daughters also contextualizes her experience in a particularly female way, lending a female generational connect to rise up. Naava is the eldest (14 years), vain and capricious, who takes care of clothing the family with her weaving. Aya is the middle daughter, born with a deformed foot, responsible for feeding the family with her fabulous and inventive cooking. Dara is the baby, still very simplistic, taking most things in her life at face value but still managing some moments of profoundness. The three girls can also be read as different stages or foils of Eve's own belief and views of the world: Naava is extraordinarily self-centered and convinced she knows best out of all, an inkling of which can be seen in Eve's decision to eat the fruit in the Garden; Aya is the most faithful, always unilaterally supporting the god she has been taught, even holding strong when her mother falters and becomes confused by the new gods from the city people; and Dara is the caring free spirit that is most similar to Eve's inception in the Garden, so pure and selfless and open. Elliott's narrative style paints Eve's story in a different light, as all perspectives come from the mouth of a woman in this text: the male characters are only seen through the eyes of the female characters. Eve and her daughters are the only ones given chapter headings, given a direct platform for narration. It is also interesting to denote which of the female characters are given first-person perspective to relay their tale, versus those who are always third-person.

In a similar vein, Eve's perspective brings up a question that actually figures in the reader's guide in the back of the book, one that has been important to me from a very young age: Is it valuable to look upon Elohim as male and female? Eve first questions Elohim on page 65, asking if Elohim is one or the other if she and Adam are both made in His image. I have often pondered this and I think it is important to view both/all aspects of Elohim equally, which is why I rarely use gender pronouns in discussion, save for quoting as I've done above. This questioning is a common theme throughout Elliott's story, as she examines the role of belief in religion through the family's exposure to the city people and their separate gods, a pantheistic point of view that seems to echo the family's Elohim but is decidedly different in its execution. I appreciate this questioning, this examination of belief arrayed in each of the characters, as I mentioned with the daughters. Dara mentions that "Elohim had also told Mother that she should never stop questioning, that you are dead, once you do." (p 267) Particularly striking is a moment when Dara, the youngest, is talking to her father and he asks her questions about the city gods she has learned about since coming to work for the prince's household, and she replies, "I don't know, I have to think about that." (p 364) The fact that such a young mind is encouraged and expected to ponder her own opinions on such matters is heartwarming and reminiscent of my own upbringing, both in Montessori and in my Jewish community.

Early in her story, Eve says, "Such strength in words! Such power in a breath!" (p64) I underlined these words in my book, and I have long felt their truth. In writing this book, Elissa Elliott has given strength and breath to one of the most interesting females in human history and I for one have benefited greatly from it.

AUG - The Mind Gym

August review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: The Mind Gym by Gary Mack with David Casstevens, 2001. [Sports category]

Mind Gym and my derby quad skates

The Mind Gym: An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence was recommended to a friend of mine who expressed fears that she was experiencing a plateau in her derby career. This skater had shown a meteoric rise from newly-passed skills to A-team starting jammer, but she has recently been feeling like she isn't going any farther. I don't know if I would describe what I'm feeling as a plateau in the way that she does, but I decided picking up this book would be worthwhile for my athletic career, especially with B-team tryouts coming up. I had straddled the line between C and B teams since last November, skating as an alternate for the B team, and now I was considering trying out for a full spot on the roster, and I was nervous. I was nervous to embrace my progress, nervous to leave my comfort zone and the team that I felt had made me a lot of what I was. I angsted about tryouts and talked to a lot of my friends who had been skating at a higher level than I for longer, and they all told me pretty much the same thing: that I had to examine what I wanted for myself, what my personal goals were, and understand the headspace I was in before I made my decision. This was not news to me.

Ever since I became an athlete in high school, I have struggled with the mental game and its serious applicability to the course or the track or whatever situation I found myself in. I ran cross country and threw shotput and discus in high school, rode horses when I was younger, and most recently joined roller derby, most of which are particularly individual-focused. Derby was the first thing I'd done--pretty much ever--where I had a team and a tryout and a roster, and it didn't scare me or discourage me as much as I thought it might. I have never been particularly thin or fast and I didn't realize how much I'd built those attributes up as indicators of worth--attributes which I did not possess and therefore subconsciously found myself less-than, a mindset I have worked extremely hard to eradicate in recent years. While I have not been particularly thin or fast, I have always been strong, and derby has given me a space to aggrandize and celebrate that strength and to slightly make up for some of the self-denigration I've experienced (at my own hands) in the past. Derby has allowed me a space to celebrate my body and my strength, as well as realize that the attributes I do not possess do not make me any lesser of an athlete. They just make me a different kind of an athlete, and I would not trade the body I have now for anything. I have become more healthy, both physically and mentally, since the first time I laced up quads over a year and a half ago, and I could not be happier with the community and worldview it has brought me.

Me skating against the Lansing Mitten Mavens this past month
Photo courtesy of David Lewis

As I mentioned, a lot of the content of this book was information I had heard before, in some form or another, particularly the points about positive thinking and visualization. As a team, we have recently started to incorporate visualization practices into our bout-day warm-up ritual, and I admit that allowing myself that time to become centered has helped immensely. In terms of the actual text itself, its anectodal sentence structure left me a little less-than engaged, as Mack would move from one athlete's story to another within a few lines, and I wouldn't really connect with many of them because they were blown through so fast. However, Mack's book has been very beneficial to me as a reminder to practice these things that I have known as well as the new things I have learned, to implement them in my own mind gym where I hold all the power over my own progress. One small thing that I will take away from this text is the idea of kaizen, a term utilized in Japanese culture meaning constant daily learning and improvement, as recounted by Mack (p47). I thoroughly believe that learning is an everyday process, one that each conscious choice should point towards, no matter what the subject of those choices are. I try to take the time after each day's practice to reflect on things I did well and things I would like to continue to work on, in order to be the best skater I can be. So while this book wasn't revolutionary to me, the concept of the mind gym and of kaizen are invaluable tools that Mack has brought to the forefront of my training mind, and I hope to implement them through the rest of this season. 

JUL - Gone Girl

July review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 2012. [Epistolary Fiction category (sort of)]

Before you say anything, I realize that Gone Girl does not technically fit the "epistolary fiction" genre, per se. I was traded this book by one of my derby wives (I traded her In The Woods by Tana French which she is obsessed with now) and because I was so woefully behind in my blog posts, I decided I would make it fit for epistolary fiction. To recap, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is about Amy and Nick Dunne, celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy goes missing. As the search and subsequent investigation continues, Nick looks less and less like the concerned husband and more and more like he has something to hide. As events unfold, readers are called upon to question the story itself as points of view change and sympathies radically alter, with the police closing in and the media trying Nick before he is even suspected legally of anything at all. Flynn masterfully depicts the minds of a married couple who have grown apart, become strangers, and calls into question how well anyone really knows the people they love. *~~Please note that this post will undoubtedly contain spoilers because I absolutely cannot discuss what I want to discuss without giving major things away so YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ~~*

One of the first papers I wrote in college was for a class called Reading for Life, and it dealt with The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. For anyone who hasn't read this text, it is a collection of war stories recounted by a remarkably unreliable narrator who often questions the difference between the truth versus Truth (with a capital T), admitting in later stories that earlier ones were entirely concocted. I think this distinction permeates the entirety of Gone Girl and there is no better example than Amy's diary. For the first section of the book, Part One: Boy Loses Girl, we receive Nick's point of view in the present, with the time delineated as how many "days gone," alternated with chapters in Amy's point of view which comes to us through past diary entries that correspond to certain aspects of the present. It is not until later, in Part Two: Boy Meets Girl, that we get Amy's present-tense story, in which we learn she is in fact alive (gasp!) and the diary is a complete fabrication, as is her disappearance. In short, she faked her own vanishing and planted a trail that sort of pointed to her loving husband, complete with a falsified version of past events that paints him as distant, quick-tempered, and borderline abusive. It is in these hours that we as readers begin to glimpse the intricacies--and veritable psychoses--of Amy's mind. I will readily admit that a part of me was elated that Amy was alright and savvy enough to get herself out of a bad situation--strong female characters, and all that--but Flynn does a beautiful job of forcing you to reconsider each of your preconceived notions built up with every passing page. As Amy goes deeper and deeper into her ruse, allowing us to see her machinations, the sheer cold-bloodedness and calculating detestation becomes apparent, and I at least felt myself growing increasingly uncomfortable with my former affiliation with Amazing Amy. I think that this questioning is an essential mechanism in the truth vs. Truth dichotomy, as it demands a re-evaluation of the character from different perspectives which facilitates a blurring of the two definitions. The truth that the police are seeking as to Amy's disappearance and The Truth that Amy constructs line up for a time, but Amy is clearly the puppeteer of capital T, and she demonstrates her power with her return to Nick's side and her editing of the real world. How important is What Really Happened versus someone's chosen truth? Does the difference really matter? I would postulate that both are equally important in terms of understanding a person and their worldview, but one does not necessarily have to be denigrated at the expense of another. Obviously this belief would fall short in terms of a definitive case in the eyes of the police, but the operative narrative here is not that someone is punished, not in the end. In the end, everyone is just fucked up in different ways and some people are better at redirecting their energy into a facade, a veneer of personality or social acceptability.

I chose to discuss Gone Girl in terms of epistolary fiction because of the Truth aspect, and also due to the entirely purpose-driven nature of anything epistolary. In straight-up epistolary fiction, we as readers are given only what is contained within the letters or diary entries or what have you, and these can be taken at face value or viewed as constructions of personality, but I believe Gone Girl is interesting because of its wholly unorthodox take on the subject. The inclusion of diary entries of a woman who is purportedly missing, entries that very clearly paint a certain picture of her husband, juxtaposed with the later revelation that they are entirely confabulated, creates an interesting comparison, a lovely and brutal questioning of the very idea of character. I will end on this quote from Amy, discussing the husks of selves she has worn over the years, in an attempt to rationalize her behavior:

   “I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
   It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. 
   And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
   It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
   I would have done anything to feel real again.” ― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

At the end of this book, I had no idea what real even meant for these characters. Is there a real and a Real? These are questions I haven't quite answered myself, but thanks for sticking around through my musings to see if I got anywhere this month.