AUG - The Revolution of Marina M

August review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Revolution of Marina M by Janet Fitch, 2017. [BRICS country category - Russia]


{note--there will be general spoilers...}

The Revolution of Marina M is one of those books whose covers I saw a lot and stuck in my head until I finally picked it out. (Can we talk about the infuriating placement of library bar codes though? Since when is finding somewhere not blocking some cover content so hard??) A straight-backed, red-haired girl in profile, arms folded confidently and fingers splayed as she grips her own arm. This book tells the story of Marina, an upper-class Russian daughter of a government official who is mixed up (as is all of Russia, really) in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the downfall of the tsar. Fitch plots the revolution through the eyes of one sixteen-year-old girl, seeing purely what she sees of the revolution, how it affects her personal bubble, rather than the large-scale international repercussions.

Marina has occasion to be so many different women throughout her own personal revolution. She starts as the socialite and slips into the revolution by supplying her radical best friend with information about her father's dealings. She is a spy and a starving poet and a factory worker and a prisoner and a wife and a con woman and a follower and a revolutionary and an individual. She says often near the end, that she is "tired of Rooms." She goes on to tell how the rooms defined her relationships to the different people, different lovers, different parts of her life. Her childhood apartments and her relationship with her parents; the Poverty Artel where she moves in with her destitute poet lover and sleeps fully clothed and louse-ridden; the room where Kolya, her childhood crush, takes her when he returns and they stay for three nights of sex and food and abandon; the apartment where she is imprisoned by a mobster; the planetarium to which she escapes and spends a summer as a mute peasant girl; the prison where she is taken when picked up by the police; her best friend's room where she gives in and sleeps with a woman to repay her for saving her life; the old country house that she escapes to only to find it has been overrun by her mother's new-age cult friends. Each room is tied to a person: both a person who controls Marina and the person Marina is in that room, and on the last page of the novel, we end on Marina leaving, walking out into the air and a new start.

I think I could talk forever about my love for Marina's poetics. She uses phrases like "loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls" to describe the works she immerses herself in. She talks of the difference of placing "word next to word" and creating meaning versus simply stringing sounds together, how old stories make her feel and how poets make the most excellent spies. Contrary to what one might think, Marina's revolution does not come with the publication of her work: in fact, that is where she starts, with her father arranging a small collection of her work, and she has to fight to keep it burning inside her as the revolution threatens to tear it out with her heart with every new tragedy. Not to mention her fire, her sexuality, her verve--I found that I met Marina as a friend, though our stories are worlds and years apart.

Janet Fitch wrote at the end of the book, "research was the oxygen in the water of this novel," and that thrilled me. I have long harbored a desire for writing historical fiction, as it takes a story like this to really cement history for me. I like to learn history through a person's eyes who has lived it, not by memorizing dates in a textbook. Never again will I forget that the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, and I am thrilled to learn that it is only one half of a two-part tale so I can learn more! Now that I'm not in school where I have to prove my knowledge in history essay exams (which give me terrible anxiety), I think I'd like to try my hand at writing a historical fiction project of my own. Marina has inspired me.

AUG - What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

August review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz, 2012. [nature category]

What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses was on the shelf in my work's library. As a neuroscience startup with a love of citizen science, our shelves are full of science-y books about how to make sense of the world around us, even if you're not a professional scientist. My coworker recommended this one when I mentioned I needed a book about nature for my Read Harder challenge, and I sped through it!

One of our recent products at work is a Plant SpikerBox that can measure action potentials in plants, even though they have no nervous system! Being an English major, I've only had a tenuous grasp on the science here, so it was fun to read Chamovitz's book as he laid out a methodical narrative about how plants interact with the world, even without being able to move. It even answered some questions I wasn't sure how to phrase, like how pain medicine knows where you're hurting and stops it! Chamovitz ordered his chapters based on parallels between in human sensations and plants, such as "what a plant smells." Plants don't actually smell, but they do have processes which react and respond to odor chemicals!

There were so many other books I had on my list to read, and it made me realize that I don't read a lot of nonfiction, and I should change that. I love these challenges for pushing me out of my standard reading zone.

JUL - The Neverending Story

July review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, translated from German by Ralph Mannheim, 1979. [children's classic published before 1980 category]

The Neverending Story! I grew up on this movie. I wanted a Falkor so bad when I was little, and I used to call my old dog Luck Dragon because she looked pretty similar, if I do say so myself. As I'm sure many a reader of this book was, I was surprised to learn that the 1984 film only covered the first half of the book! Which in all honesty is totally fine with me, because second-half Bastian suuuuuucked. But we'll get to that. The Neverending Story is a book about a small boy named Bastian who is bullied and escapes his tormentors by hiding in a bookshop one day. He meets an old, cryptic man who is sort of mean but leaves a tantalizing book open, and Bastian feels called to it, so he steals it (like you do) and locks himself in the school attic to read all day. (And you wonder why this story appealed to me. Minus the bullying.)

Bastian gets caught up in the story and slowly realizes that him reading the story is part of the story (the original postmodern mindfuck), but can't bring himself to help the Childlike Empress, a fact that they wisely revised in the film. In the book, Bastian gets transported to Fantasia and meets the characters he fell in love with as he ventures. He is gifted with the Childlike Empress's amulet, but using its power comes with a price: he slowly loses the memories he had of being human on Earth. Coincidentally, with the loss of those memories, he sucks more and is ruder and ruder to the people he calls his friends and I was very upset with him. There is clearly some moral coding going on here, as he has to eventually make the decision to return home even though he more and more wants to give up the life he has forgotten and stay in Fantasia as the most powerful thing around.

One thing I loved stylistically about this book was the illuminated alphabet for the chapter titles! There were 26 chapters, and each started with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, illuminated in a full-page illustration that tied into the chapter's narrative. Some of the more difficult letters felt a little stilted, but it was helpful that in a fantasy world you can make up character names that start with X! Another was the repeated intrusion of the Real World into the book, what with phrases like "but that is a long story for another time."

I love stories about stories that take you places, and I did like this book, for the most part. It just dragged on a lot longer than I think it needed to. But who knows, maybe it was better in German!

JUL - Double Bind

July review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Double Bind: Women on Ambition ed. by Robin Romm, 2017. [essay collection category]

Double Bind: Women on Ambition is pretty self-explanatory as a collection title. Robin Romm has commissioned a series of essays from women in wide-ranging fields, from literature to butchery, Hollywood to dogsled racing. Romm starts with an intro that examines her impetus to collect these women's stories and what the word ambition meant to her personally. As a writer, clearly I resonated with the writer essays, but I was interestingly struck by some of the other ways in which I related, and some of the questions these essays raised in me.

I currently don't have my copy of this book on hand as I write, since I lent it to my mother--isn't that what you do with books about women? Lend them to the other women in your life?--and this writeup is long overdue so it is going to be a little more overview than specific, but I think I've got the important points jotted down. To begin at the beginning, this is an essay collection about ambition. What does ambition mean? Romm and her contributors talk about the difference between an ambitious man (seen as positive) and an ambitious woman (often seen as overbearing, out of place, unattractive), and there was another interesting thread about the word itself running through these essays. Many of the women asked the people in their lives if they thought the woman was ambitious; few claimed that word for themselves, citing discomfort with the aforementioned undesirable nature of an ambitious woman, impostor syndrome, and myriad other reasons.

A lot of the responses also dealt with the "have it all" mentality, the perennial question plaguing working moms and stay-at-home moms alike: how do career ambition and home life ambition coexist? These essays covered women with kids: women who adopted children, women who had children and left their careers, women who compromised and devoted a lot to their careers but still missed their children. My partner and I have talked about kids vaguely, in some future era when we're both done with our sports, talked about who would have them or if we would adopt, etc, but this book gave me a little pause. I guess I had painted standard children desire over my own thoughts without ever outright asking myself about those desires. Don't get me wrong, I still want kids, but I need to reexamine the hows and the whens and I am lucky to have a partner who is open and honest and supportive of those discussions.

Reading this book in the midst of my sports season made me question whether you can be ambitious in some areas of your life but not necessarily others. Can I strive for a top slot on the charter team but also resign myself to an under-paying job because it's easier to deal with at the moment? Can I be ambitious but lazy, so my ambitions never bear fruit because I don't allow myself enough time on them? Is there something self-sabotaging about that, something inherently misogynistic about a creeping doubt that maybe I should just be happy with what I have? Don't get too big for your britches, my dear, you might regret it. And the answer I came up with is, I don't know. I think that is the point of this essay collection too: no one really knows. It is the asking that is important, the self-analysis that is expected of women categorically more often than men, the constant weighing of our lives against various other shining stars or gutter flops. What does it mean to me? Well that's the question, now isn't it?

JUN - When Breath Becomes Air

June review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, 2016. [book published posthumously category]

I knew that this was going to be a hard book to read. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, is the memoir of a 36-year-old neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with lung cancer before the end of his residency. It was published posthumously (hence its ability to be counted for this category), but that wasn't necessarily what was going to make it hard. Earlier this year, my father was diagnosed with Stage IV Esophageal Cancer. His prognosis is decidedly better than Kalanithi's, and he has finished his first eight-week round of chemo with little to no worsening of his condition. But still. The way that cancer works is that when it infects your life, it becomes a capital letter. Cancer. You can't think about it the same way anymore. It is not remote, like the tragic but heartwarming story of someone that Lifetime made a movie about. It isn't a cautionary tale about someone forty years ago who got it from cigarettes. My father is the single healthiest sixty-year-old man that I know, and he still has cancer. He did everything (mostly) right. He hasn't smoked in over thirty years. He exercises every day, sometimes multiple times. Sure, his hydration could be better, and he could always do more yoga, but still. Cancer wasn't something that happened to someone like him. And yet.

Paul Kalanithi was almost done with his neurosurgery training when he was diagnosed with cancer. He details the beginning of his career, how from the outset he was fascinated not only with biology and life, but also with what made life worth living and definable, things he could only really parse through by immersing himself in literature. It was hard to read this book, but it was also beautiful, the way he talked about language and life and death. There is a passage Kalanithi writes where he talks about the brain and the mind and his resonance with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that absolutely floored me: "Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life" (p31).

Reading Kalanithi talk about his own illness and his process of divorcing his doctor side from his patient side was illuminating. My father is an engineer, not a doctor, but he has a similar predilection for control and information that he is learning how to balance. That we are all learning how to balance. Thinking about cancer with a capital C and reading about someone who wanted to not only stave off death in his patients but also understand it has helped me in ways that I was not fully expecting. I know that this story is not my dad's story. He is treatable and positive and a fighter (even though cancer doesn't really care how much you're willing to fight, it's just biology).  My dad is healthy, except that he has cancer. My dad is strong. He still teaches spin class (pictured left) even when he has his post-treatment treatment fanny pack, and he still laughs at my jokes and sends me pictures of squirrels. He is doing great and I am so goddamn proud to be here to witness it. I love you, Dad.

JUN - Wide Sargasso Sea

June review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, 1966. [colonial/postcolonial literature category]

One of the reasons I love challenges like this is that it forces me to read things that have been sitting on my shelf for years but I have not had the impetus to pick up. (There are just so many good books in the world, y'all. And new ones every day!) The category of postcolonial literature listed Wide Sargasso Sea atop many of its lists, and as a retelling of Jane Eyre, I was hungry to delve in. Wide Sargasso Sea tells the untold story of the madwoman in the attic, the woman who exists almost purely as a tragic backstory for Rochester, an eerie element of Jane's life, and an impediment to their relationship. Very rarely is her name even referenced when discussing Jane Eyre: often she is simply "the mad wife," a small sliver that is quickly dealt with, a side story tangential to Jane's. She is a question that has always stuck out to me, and one I was grateful to see someone had attempted to answer.

Postcolonial literature is, simply put, literature written by and about people of formerly colonized countries, and WSS does this twofold: it centers the a character from a postcolonial country (Antoinette Cosway, the mad wife) and is written by a woman of similar background (Jean Rhys is from Dominica). The introduction for my copy of WSS is by Francis Wyndham and notes that this book, while inextricably linked to Jane Eyre, stands on its own: "the Bronte book provided the initial inspiration for an imaginative feat almost uncanny in its vivid intensity." Rhys's reclaiming of Antoinette's story is almost an attempt to undo the colonization of her home and her voice, and she does it impeccably.

I've always loved Jane Eyre, so it was interesting to see a different perspective of that story. In addition, I am a sucker for thought-provoking perspective shifts, so Wide Sargasso Sea has long been a part of my to-be-read pile. I was pitched the book as a retelling of JE from the madwoman's point of view: I therefore did not expect the text to change point of view. The three distinct viewpoints of the story mark three distinct parts of her life: the first-person of Antoinette's childhood, growing up on the island; part two switches to an unnamed man's perspective, assumed to be Rochester upon his marriage to Antoinette and subsequent disillusionment; and part three, told through the eyes of a broken woman taken from her home, Antoinette has become the madwoman and echoes the events that take place in JE. Now, I didn't particularly like Mr. Rochester when I read JE initially--every subsequent re-read makes me question what she sees that allows her to marry him--and this retelling made me dislike Rochester more. He is stubborn and arrogant and self-serving and violent, and his perspective did nothing to quell that or humanize him in any way. His character lacking that humanization again made me examine what it is that I love about Jane Eyre, why I keep going back to it. It is definitely mostly for Jane herself, and for the middle bits. The parts that lead up to her leaving Rochester and coming into her own. In a perfect world, Rhys's novel would mesh with JE, Jane would realize that Rochester is a monster and she would whisk Antoinette away to be cared for like the human that she is. A girl can dream, right?

MAY - Moonstruck

May review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Moonstruck Vol 1: Magic to Brew by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle, and Kate Leth, 2018. [one-sitting category]

I read Moonstruck in one sitting, in bed next to my fiance on my birthday morning. I had purchased it from Queen City Bookstore on a derby road trip earlier this year for a number of reasons: because Kate Leth was a contributor, one of the other contributors spelled her name like I do (Caitlin!), it was created by the fantastic Lumberjanes creator, and there are two ladies googley-eyeing each other on the cover. Queer stories with magic in them! What more could you ask for!

I was absolutely not disappointed. "Monsters, romance, and magical hijinks--oh my!" cries the back cover gleefully (and don't think I didn't swoon over that Oxford comma. I did). The blurb continues with a slightly confusing if not entirely-lesbian-appropriate sentence: "But all heck breaks loose when she and her new girlfriend Selena go on a disastrous first date that ends with a magician casting a horrible spell on their friend Chet." Girlfriend and first date in the same breath? I am intrigued. There's a human with snakes for hair on the back! It's rated E for Everyone! Sold.

Chapter One opens right in the middle of the story. More and more I am finding that I fucking love in medias res. It jumps right into the close-up brewing of a cappuccino while two characters discuss how perfect this girl is. The cappuccino almost drops when surprise! horse hands catch it. Bam, magical creatures on page 1. This is Chet, the flamboyant centaur barista, who is listening to our protagonist Julie gush about a girl she likes. So many good things are happening already. Julie is a bookworm, obsessed with a fictional series I can only assume is the magical equivalent of The Babysitter's Club, which also allows for a fun story-within-a-story complete with protagonist commentary on the page. In this world, lots of people seem to be part-animal-part-human, and it is insinuated that Julie is too, but there seems to be some shame around it from the beginning. (Some closeted queer coding, mayhaps.) Turns out Julie is a werewolf, but it's great because Selena is too! And they spend some time working through some of Julie's issues while they work to solve what happened to Chet's butt! (no spoilers...) There are some fun Easter eggs to watch out for, and just a really pure good time.

Moonstruck was so much fun, and I am looking forward to picking up the next collection of issues. I am committed to supporting queer art and artists wherever I come across them, so if you have any suggestions for me, let me know!