The English Geek

The Hunger Games: a movie/book/my-opinion-on-violence Mashup

Back in the fall of 2008, when I was still a new librarian, I'd get a little bit anxious about recommending books to the collection developers. I didn't quite understand the process of how they found or chose the books for the library shelves, and I didn't want to seem pushy or step on anyone's toes. But when I read Janssen's review of this new book called The Hunger Games, I knew immediately: my library needed this book because I needed to read it and because of my gut's insistence that this one would be huge. So I stepped out of my comfort zone and told the collection developer (who has since become a favorite work friend) about the book. 

Then I bought my own copy because I didn't want to wait to read the library's, and because I knew Haley and Jake would want to read it, too. I gulped down the story in two days, handed the book to Haley who did the same, and then started recommending it to friends. "I know it sounds crazy-violent," I'd always start my recommendation with, "because it's a story about teenagers trying to survive being killed by other teenagers. But it is so good, and the violence isn't even the point, and it isn't described in detail, either."

That I always wanted to preface my recommendation with a warning perhaps speaks to my reticence at recommending books I love in the first place (having been criticized quite often for my reading tastes). But there is also this knowledge: parents of teenagers are still protective. We don't want our teens being exposed to too much, be it violence or sex or video gaming or swearing or strange ideas that might make them think for themselves. We have this fear because we simultaneously know that the amount of time we have to influence them is dwindling and we aren't 100% certain we've influenced them enough. We want them to have good stuff in their lives. We want them not to experience the extreme harshness of the world. We also know that is unavoidable.

Despite the violence, however, I still found The Hunger Games recommendable. I knew that teenagers would love it for its fiesty, strong main character, for its adventure and its story ingeniuty and even for its love triangle (a plot device I confess to absolutely hating because really: even in future dystopias how many teens actually get caught between two love interests? or maybe it was just me who could hardly handle her one love interest?) And I hoped that maybe they would see the eventual point of the story, which to me seems so obvious I can't believe I'm writing the next sentence: violence only begets more violence.

When the movie came out last month, I was, strangely enough, not excited to go. I didn't entertain the idea of a midnight showing; in fact, we didn't see it until Saturday morning. (I'm cheap like that: I try to go to the first matinee showing of movies, since the tickets cost a buck less.) I kept thinking wait a second! I was an early Hunger Games adapter. Why am I not excited? and Haley finally put it into words for me: because so many people were hopping on the bandwagon so late. Some of them, as proved by the outrage over Rue being a black girl, hadn't even read the book. And since I tend to not like to do what the trends say I should...my enthusiasm for the movie wasn't extreme. 

I still enjoyed it, once I finally made it there. I think they did a decent job of including important points, with a few notable exceptions: the actual desperate hunger that most of the people of Panem experience (if you hadn't read the book would you know why Gale's name was in the reaping 42 times?) and the threatening menace of The Capitol. Katniss's affection for the stew. Her father's illustrated book of edible plants. What about the story behind the Avoxes? I think they should have developed the story of Peeta and Katniss in the cave much better, and included the still-warm bread that District 11 sends to Katniss when Rue dies. Plus, in the book Prim's cat Buttercup is orange, but it's black and white in the movie. Is there a shortage of orange cats in the movie world?

When I left the theater, in addition to thinking about what I liked and what I was disappointed by, I had a certainty: the violence in the story was going to be an issue. Especially since, in the movie, you cannot enter the characters' minds like you do in the book so you don't understand as well their motivations. Why is Peeta hanging out with the Careers? How does he end up wounded and in the river? What happened to the girl who built the fire? Why was Katniss so devastated when Rue was killed? None of that translated in the movie. But we also can't see as clearly the fact that Katniss was doing her best to avoid the violence. You can sort of see it, a little. She doesn't actually kill anyone who didn't threaten her first. But you are only outside of her head, watching.

When I got home, I checked in on Facebook, and one of the updates I read was my niece's husband's:

"Human beings are better than that. Decency and morality are much more prevalent in kids than the movie gives credit for and parents wouldn't simply stand by and watch their children get taken."

While allowing Jeff (would he be my nephew-in-law? I suppose so!) (whom, by the way, I am not ridiculing but simply using to make my point) his opinion, I had to personally disagree. The districts in the society created in The Hunger Games are controlled by the violence of the games. Like any dystopia worth its weight, The Hunger Games is ruled by a tyrannical government. The people in the Capitol might disagree, but the rest of the society wouldn't. The parents stand by and allow their children to be taken because they are being ruled by tyranny. They don't have a choice. Just as, say, the Native Americans didn't have much choice when they were relocated or murdered or murdered while being relocated. Or the Japanese people in the 1940's didn't have any say over being moved from their homes to internment camps. (And this by a non-tyrannical government!) Katniss's small rebellions are a start of parents being able to stand up for their children—but only a start. And the problem isn't the decency and morality in the teenagers (who are forced to compete; perhaps the lack of menace from the Capitol means this doesn't translate in the movie) but the lack of decency and morality in the government and the privileged few who live in the Capitol and wealthier districts.

Another friend insisted to me that The Hunger Games is likely to create a rash of school shootings because it promotes children killing children. (Just as Star Wars caused us all to take up killing each other with light sabers and channeling the Force.) To my mind, this friend is missing the point of the storyline, which really isn't much more simple than the ancient "man's inhumanity to man." Look down through history: has there ever been a time when people weren't brutal to each other? I'm not a historian but I don't think there have been many. Aside from the Careers, the kids in the arena are doing what they've been forced to do, which is fight for their lives. (And really, in a sense the Careers choose, either, considering that they've been trained to see it as an honor; they're just better prepared.) They don't have a choice, unlike the people involved in school shootings.

Still, I keep questioning myself: why doesn't the violence in this story dissuade me from being affected by it? I would like to say it is that the entire story arc provides the counterbalance for the violence: the Capitol uses violence as a weapon until the people rise up and roust out the government. But that isn't entirely the truth because I've been recommending the books since they first one was just a blip on the popularity scale and I didn't know the entire story arc. Perhaps it is because the story doesn't glorify violence; violent things happen but they aren't made glamorous or intriguing. (THIS article gives a good summary of all the violent points.) This lack of glamorizing violence in a violent story allows for the point to shift elsewhere: how much tyranny will one person accept before pushing back? Or one entire society? How does a person put into a violent situation maintain control of her humanity? How do small kindnesses translate into a greater good? What does it mean to be brave?

Or maybe it's because really: none of this is new. You've read all about the Reaping if you've read Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery." You've read about publicly-viewed execution games if you've read (or watched) The Running Man. Or even Survivor. There is something of the Roman colosseum in the story, isn't there? And The Lord of the Flies, of course. The Olympics, even, in a round-about way. It's a different face to the same story of a sharply-pitched contrast between wealthy and poor, or the story of a government doing deplorable things, or the one about people rising above, despite. 

But ultimately I am not dissuaded by the story's violence because of my reading philosophy. (Which I wrote about HERE.) "I believe that there is a morality to be found in good novels that cannot be undone by their inclusion of questionables," I wrote then. "Bad books encourage the practice of evil; good ones describe the practice of evil, the implications of it, the way it spreads, the way it is everywhere. But they also offer up some small little spark of hope—a piece, even if only the tiniest, of the light of truth that is scattered everywhere."

I'm not offended by the inclusion of violence because, ultimately, the violence isn't the story's truth. It is one of the ways it tells its truth, yes. But it isn't the point. And I stand by my original response: this qualifies as a good, recommendable series, even though it is the crazy-violent story of teenagers killing teenagers. 

Tell me: what is your opinion on the violence in The Hunger Games?

{What I Love} no16: more than One Book

"I don't understand," this old conversation goes. "Why do you have to bring home so many books? Kaleb has a pile and Haley has a pile and you have 17 piles and they're scattered all over the house."

Actually, it's not even a conversation. It's sort of a rant that I try not to respond to anymore, because just as I don't understand Kendell's lack of interest in reading, I don't think that anything I say will help him understand my interest in reading.

"It's not like you can read more than one at once," the rant generally ends.

That's another thing I don't tell him anymore: of course you can. Read more than one book at a time, I mean. Well, I suppose not literally at the same time. But I am often working on more than one book. For example, right now I am reading:

1. Waltzing Again, a collection of interviews with Margaret Atwood. I'm keeping this in my van to read when I find myself waiting for someone (usually the carpool). I haven't gotten very far, and I might not finish it before I have to return it, but that's OK because I'll still get something out of it.

2.  Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. This is my main book right now. It has to be because it is long. It took me nine months to get to the top of the hold list, though, so I'm determined to finish it. I grow more and more picky about the kinds of fantasy I want to read. If it's too evocative of Tolkein, if it falls into cliched or formulaic characters or plot points, if the main character is impossibly, invincibly good at his or her given skills—these things tend to annoy me and lead to me not finishing the book. So far, though, Thronesis very slightly only a little bit Tolkein-esque, and that simply in the language; I'm finally deep enough into the story that I can keep all the characters straight. I think this is a fantasy I will finish. If I'm not reading it, I keep it in my purse so I can snatch a few extra reading minutes here and there.

3.  The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. My friend Doug loaned me this amazing book nearly a year ago. I put it in my "read soon" pile and then never got to it, but he let me know he needed it back so I'll be finishing it tonight. It is completely unlike anything you'd expect from Forster—no British high society. Instead, this is a short, swift, and entirely fierce  dystopia. It is so good that I am ashamed both for taking so long to read Doug's copy and for not knowing it even existed before he told me about it.

4. Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. Even though I think Kindles might just bring about the end of the (literary) world as we know it, and even though the new Kindle commercial-—the one with the mom sitting on the beach reading her Kindle, and her kids are over in a pavilion also reading their Kindles, and she says something like "it's the best way to read" and I want to stab her eyes out so she has to learn braille and give up her wanton reading ways (that sounds more violent than I intended) (and also please note that if you are a Kindle reader I will only want to stab your eyes out if  you are also self-satisfied and, you know, all wealthy about it like the woman in the commercial)—obviously makes me a little bit crazy, I have a confession. I don't own a Kindle but I do have the Kindle app on my phone. Unlike Kindle Commercial Lady, I don't love reading on the Kindle, but I do understand the appeal a little bit more. I'm treating it as my back up: if I forgot my book and find myself stranded somewhere with nothing to read, then I crack open this Kindle book. (Usually this happens in a movie theater.) I got it one day when it was the special deal of the day on Amazon, for just a dollar. While I didn't love Jordan's most recent book, I am enjoying this one in the small bits I've read so far. 

5. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. I've been listening to this one while scrapbooking, cleaning the house, or, once, running. It's a World War II story told from a handful of different perspectives: Iris James, who is the postmistress of a small Massachusetts town, Emma Fitch, who is the new wife of the doctor in the same town, and Frankie Bard who is reporting on the Blitz in London. As I love books with multiple points of view, this works for me. I'm not as sure about the audiobook thing—I haven't quite got the knack of following along with the story. But the story! It is moving and inviting.

6. The Translated Poems of Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer won the Nobel for literature last year. I am working on understanding his thinking—some of his poems are simply bizarre beautiful objects I don't understand but still appreciate for their beauty. I want to also understand them.

I almost didn't realize it until writing this list just how many books I am reading at the same time! Totally doable. Totally pleasurable, especially when random bits from completely different books magically intersect, each informing the other.

Are you a reader of more than one book at a time? Or do you focus on just one? And what are you reading right now?

{What I Love} No15: library perks

There've been a lot of discussions, lately, over the validity of my career choice. True: I don't make a lot of money. I have to work on Saturdays. There isn't a ton of room for advancement (although I'd like to think that the library values me enough that if I needed desperately to work full time, they'd help me do that).

But, you know, despite the negatives, I love my job. The most stressful thing at work? The elevator. It smells vaguely like a carnival ride thanks to some persistent elevator-peeing boys a few years ago and the fact that it tends to need to be worked on quite often. Faint, ancient-urine + motor-oil scents = carnival ride in my book, but there isn't an amusement park thrill I'm less likely to visit than the library elevator. Being claustrophobic means I don't get along with them in the first place, but throw me in one that has the tendency to stop between floors? Cue elevated heart rate and sweaty palms.

Anyway---if the elevator is my job's most stressful part, I count myself fairly lucky in where I work. And plus, there are plenty of perks! For example, I get to talk about books to people who (usually) love reading. I get to see new books and place them on the shelf. I get to have my very own shelf to put my recommended reads and it's still thrilling to me when someone who doesn't know me picks up a book I've suggested. And! another perk: sometimes we librarians get to do the really cool stuff, which in my book (tee hee) is interacting with real, live authors. I mean: holy cow. I drove to Salt Lake City in the car with Marilynne Robinson! I had dinner with Laurie Halse Anderson! Ursula K. Le Guin almost decided to come to our library, and when we did To Kill a Mockingbird for our city reads program, Harper Lee sent us a letter. Yes, it's true, I have touched a letter written by Harper Lee.

Swoon.

Sometimes those writerly interactions result in another perk: the ARC. Advanced Reader's Copy, to spell it out. In December I got to read the ARC of Dan Wells's new novel, Partials, and let me just say: reading a real, live, bound book that still had some typos in it? Strangely thrilling to this aspiring writer!

I love dystopian and post apocalyptic novels (There is a difference). (One day I must get around to writing about why, and then I could link back to that post without having to write "I love dystopian novels.") As they are thehot genre right now, especially for adolescent readers, this makes me a lucky lover of dystopias—except when it doesn't. Some of the new crop aren't exactly the highest caliber, and some have thoroughly disappointed me; these are the ones written because it is the hot genre and not because the author had a completely convincing world view or political opinion to enrich the culture he or she was creating. The best dystopias are warnings, I believe, about where our current thinking might take us. So, even though the genre grabs my attention, and the new books get me excited, I'm still sort of picky about which ones I'll actually read. Partials, however, falls squarely in the camp of books-I'm-glad-I-read.

The book's premise:

Roughly twenty-five years ago, Partials—who are genetically-modified seemingly-human soldiers that the government invented to fight in a war—decided to up rise against humanity. In the process, a virus, RM, was released that killed almost the entire human population. The humans who are left were those who were immune to the virus, and they have gathered together on Long Island, where they're trying to rebuild humanity. The only problem: all the new babies are infected with RM right after they are born, and then die within three or four days of birth. The government of this human society has created an edict called the Hope Act, which means that every girl who is 18 or older must get pregnant, and continue getting pregnant, in the hopes that a child will be born who is immune to RM. So far, this hasn't happened and people are getting desperate. Some have formed The Voice, a ragtag group of outsiders who fight against the government's constraints.

Sixteen-year-old Kira, who has received medical training and works in the labor and delivery unit of the community's hospital, ends up taking her desperation in a different way. She has a sort of ah-ha moment of realization about the study of RM and wants to explore new directions. This desire leads her on her adventure, which is the crux of the story.

What I thought:

The thing I loved about Partials, and what I think sets it above the average group in the crop of recent dystopias, is that it grapples with some big questions. Why does humanity have the penchant for self-destruction? Why does absolute power always absolutely corrupt? Why do we allow our fear of the Other to damage us? Why do we tend towards violence as a solution to nearly every problem? How can we thrive without technology? What does it mean, really, to be human?

If a good dystopia takes a current scientific issue to its extreme application, the question this book asks isn't really "what if we develop technology that is more powerful than we are?" but "What if we never learn how to control our hunger for power?" In that sense, even though it's a dystopia founded in technology, it isn't really about technology but the social experience.

Another thing I liked was the teenaged characters. (More about the adult ones in a bit.) It is interesting that the teenagers, given the right knowledge, are able to see what adults cannot. I think that sometimes proves true in real life, too. Being less jaded than we are, teenagers are able to see a fresh perspective and thus things we overlook. The adult characters, however, seemed a little flat, too bound by their desire to save the world to see a new way of doing just that. Several of the reviews I read (after reading the book!) said the same thing.

Another thing lots of the reviewers said: they didn't think there was enough foreshadowing for the big surprise at the end of the book. Really? I sort of had the opposite reaction. Of course Kira...well, I can't really say what the big reveal is because I'm hoping you'll read the book too. But I saw the surprise coming and I think Dan Wells did do a good job in foreshadowing it.

So, there you have it: Partials by Dan Wells. A little gritty, a little edgy, but not smutty in the least. (In fact, the lack of almost any perceptible sexual tension was something else I enjoyed; the romantic triangle is getting more than a little bit worn out in my book.) And, if you like that sort of thing, it's got a lot of battles. I tend to sort of just skim over battle scenes, no matter how compelling the book is, and this book stayed true to that. Battle scenes? Eh. Sort of boring to me. (That is true for movies, too.)

The only problem with reading an ARC? (Aside from the fact that yes, there really are typos fairly often, and strange quotation marks in random marginal spots.) It's that now I have to wait even that much longer to read the sequel. Put perhaps, just maybe, I might get lucky again with another ARC. It's one of the perks, you know!

Prized: A Book Note with a Little Annie Wilkes Tossed In

Last week at work, a patron asked me to help her. "I'm looking for that book. The one that's like The Giver. You know. A...topia? And all the kids are reading it?"

Ummmmmm. That's sort of hard, given that there are officially 1,297 new teen dystopian novels out right now that all the kids want to read. I finally figured out which series she was looking for --- The Hunger Games, which really isn't a whole bunch like The Giver anyway. (I think that Anthem is the dystopia most like The Giver but it's certainly not the book all the kids are reading.)

Really, the amount of dystopias right now is astounding. It's hard to keep up. And honestly, some are better than others. One of my favorites I read last year was Birthmarked. The society in the novel is set hundreds of years in our future, when Lake Superior has become an "unlake" due to climate change. The wealthy people live inside the Enclave, where there is electricity and running water. The poor people live outside, without those luxuries but with a little bit more freedom. The freedom, though, is tinged by one of the demands the Enclave makes: a quota of babies must be "advanced" to live inside the Enclave---essentially, the mothers are required to give up some of their babies. As in theory this means the babies live in prosperity instead of poverty, the mothers reluctantly agree.

Gaia Stone, the daughter of the midwife and an adept apprentice midwife herself, had two brothers who were advanced, but as she has a large scar on her face from a burn when she was small, she stayed at home with her birthparents. As events transpire, she experiences her first delivery, begins to question her society's rules, searches for her mother, and tries to uncover the truth. There was romance and adventure and menace and her bravery seemed exactly the right size to the threat. This was my favorite dystopia (I liked it better than Matched which I also read last year) because of the concepts of the society: the poor seeming to live in peace with their conditions, albeit an unpeaceful one. The government's ability to get entirely competent mothers to hand over their babies. The affects of environmental degradation upon the remnants of our world, and the way little bits of our technology and of our language still held sway. The minatory government.

I couldn't wait to read the sequel, Prized. Except, I had to wait until I could get to the top of the hold list. And then Haley wanted to read it first. And then I read Britt's review, and she didn't love it so I waited until I had negative three days to read it. (Translation: it was three days overdue when I cracked the cover. Sigh. Even working at the library I still stink at getting my books back in time.) But here's what happened when I did get started: I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. to finish it, even though I was already exhausted when I started. It's been a long time since a book has made me stay up until three in the morning. This sequel held, like the first book, adventure and romance. A controlling government. And problems with births and genetics.

Britt didn't love it because she felt like the characters didn't act the way the first book suggests they would. I think she's right, especially Gaia, who felt a little bit soft. But my main complaint with this sequel is that they government didn't feel menacing enough. As I read I kept thinking back to The Knife of Never Letting Go, which has similar themes but was sometimes almost unbearable for me to read because of the government's sinister qualities. In Prized, it just didn't feel harsh enough. Indeed it was nearly bucolic. Since Birthmarked was set in such an unforgiving society, it didn't hold true for me that Sylum, the society in Prized, was less intense. It felt...rushed, somehow, like there were details missing.

What I did like was the relationship between Gaia and Leon, who brought the romance in Birthmarked. I think his response to the situation he finds himself in—which I don't want to detail so as not to ruin the story for you—was entirely him. I mean: he's a complete ass. He says abusive and manipulative things to Gaia in an attempt to strike back at her for her mistakes. He's not nice. But his response is human and completely dead-on for his personality.

Someone else (and as I think about it more, perhaps it was Britt) said that they didn't like that the author put Gaia right into the inner workings of another dystopia. I didn't see it, really, as other. I think that Sylum is an extension of the Enclave in the fact that they are each different models for the way a group of people might act under extreme environmental duress. The same forces that shaped the Enclave shaped Sylum; details of the setting and location made the groups develop different coping mechanisms.

And, honestly: I would have been fine if the story had simply ended with Birthmarked. Dystopias aren't the only hip & happening YA trend. Trilogies are, too, which sometimes is a good thing. Sometimes the story starts to feel forced, however. In fact, the author says on her webpage that she had originally intended for Birthmarked to be a stand-alone book. She revised the ending when her publisher offered her a three-book deal. Perhaps this creates what I think of as the Annie Wilkes phenomena. Annie Wilkes is the main character in Stephen King's novel Misery; if you saw the movie it is Cathy Bates' character. She forces her captive, the writer Paul Sheldon, to write a novel he didn't want to write, a continuation of a series he'd already written the last book for. Annie isn't content with just any old solution to the death (and thus the end) of the main character. She wants a plausible, well-written story and makes sure that Paul writes it. He has a moment of realization, when he figures out how to reanimate the character, about just how good the book will actually be, despite Annie's insane methods of making sure he delivered it.

Sometimes a publisher pushing to have a stand-alone book made into a trilogy creates the Annie Wilkes phenomena: another book that is better than the author thought he or she could write. A more developed story and further, meaningful adventures for the characters we readers have grown to love. Sometimes it just feels forced. Prized was almost Annie-Wilkes worthy. Maybe Caragh O'Brien only needed to be hobbled a little bit to produce a sequel that wasn't mildly disappointing. But. I am still holding out for the conclusion!

God is in the Trees.

I read Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam & Evewith my SDBBE girls. The cover is this one:

and we've discussed who's face that is in the tree. Since when the book opens, Eve has Adam up a tree—he's trying to get away from her because he thinks she talks too much—one of the suggestions was that it was Adam's face.

But the more I think about the story, the more I think it is God's face, watching Adam and Eve as they begin to figure out the world. I think His gaze is compassionate and, perhaps, he is also trying to keep his laughter hidden, because they are pretty funny.

Twain intended it to be a humorous book, but I confess: I don't always appreciate humor. This personality trait has occasioned more than one person to look sideways at me when I'm just sort of, you know, sitting through a funny movie, not really laughing much while said person is guffawing his head off. I've been accused of being a stick in the mud. I don't really know what is wrong with me—it's not that I don't like to laugh. Humor just isn't my favorite genre.

Despite that, I did enjoy this book and it did make me laugh, especially Eve's observations about language. Sometimes the humor made me roll my eyes. Sometimes it annoyed me. And as the end neared, I felt like the humor lessened the story somehow. I wanted to get deeper inside the characters than ridiculosity was allowing me. As the story progresses, Eve learns things, and she has a sort of wisdom born of her innocence, but she's still childlike.

Even though, when she and Adam eat the apple, they are cast out from the garden and death enters the world (the tigers, which were previously strawberry eaters, start eating the horses), Adam and Eve's knowledge doesn't come as a flood. They still learn slowly and by experiments they don't exactly understand. Eve especially loves figuring things out. She believes she was made "to search out the secrets of this wonderful world. . . . I think think there are many things to learn yet—I hope so; and by economizing and not hurrying too fast, I think they will last weeks and weeks." Despite her childlike innocence, she loves learning.

But when death enters their intimate part of the world—when Abel dies at Cain's hand—this is when she learns the bitter part of knowledge. Until Abel dies—until days after his death, when Eve finally realizes that this, this cold sleeping body that won't awaken is death—she is trying to gain knowledge. After she knows death, she has obtained knowledge, wisdom, and the sorrow that comes from both.

I think of her character in the story, explaining what she knows about a thing as basic as air:

By a series of experiments we had long ago arrived at the conclusion that atmospheric air consisted of water in invisible suspension; also that the components of water were hydrogen and oxygen, the proportion of two parts of the former to one of the latter and expressible by the symbol H₂O. My discovery revealed the fact that there was still another ingredient: milk. We enlarged the symbol to H₂OM.

(On the same page we are told that Adam has figured out that 6 times 9 are 27, and that cows make milk by condensing it from the air through their skin.)

They almost  have things figured out. They have the right pieces, hydrogen and oxygen, 6 and 9. They just don't know how to fit their pieces of knowledge together. They draw completely wrong assumptions from their experiences.

Contrast that to the Eve we meet after Abel's death. She doesn't say this, but I realized it: she didn't only lose Abel. She lost Cain, too. That wide variance of bitterness that knowledge brings us! This knowledge changes her; she is no longer innocent because her knowledge is no longer theoretical. It is personal.

And she cannot understand it.

She has these pieces of knowledge she has gained from her experiences. Death has entered the world. Her first son killed her second son. God does not stop bad things from happening. Sorrow doesn't go away. But she doesn't know how to understand the pieces, what they mean, how they fit together. What is being made.

They drove us from the garden with their swords of flame, the fierce cherubim. And what had we done? . . . We did not know right from wrong—how should we know? We could not, without the Moral Sense? . . . But to say to us poor ignorant children words which we could not understand and then punish us because we did not do as we were told—ah, how can that be justified? We knew no more then than this littlest child of mine knows now with its four years—oh, not so much, I think. Would I say to it, "If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements," and when it took the bread and smiled up in my face, thinking no harm, not understanding those strange words, would I take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother-heart, let him judge if I would do that thing.

This is the Eve I wanted to know. I wanted to know her suffering, not because I want her to suffer but because everyone suffers. What do we do with the suffering? How do we put the pieces of our knowledge into a meaning we can grasp? Eve can't see the meaning within her sorrows. She questions God and His motivations, and this makes me feel better about my own questions, my own doubts and failures at understanding. Her conclusion, unspoken but suggested in her words, is that God is unfair to do what He did.

It is just the same as her conclusion about the milk in the atmosphere. She has knowledge but cannot see from God's perspective. She can only see from her own and so arriving at the real conclusion is difficult. Eve is not sitting with God in the tree. None of us are. We only have our pieces of knowledge gained from our experiences, and we stumble. We puzzle and recalculate and leave the box of pieces in dark corners when they seem impossible to assemble. We cannot always make sense of them.

This, I believe, is universal to all of us, not just Eve. This world, the one with death and sorrow and betrayal and unemployment and poverty and medical emergencies, tries to teach us. It gives us the pieces. But since we're all down on the ground, living our lives instead of looking at them, we can't always comprehend the knowledge we are gaining. It comes slowly. We don't always understand.

But neither did Eve. and I think God, looking down from his tree, was not offended by her questions. I think he knew she just didn't understand yet. At least, that is what I hope, both for Eve and for myself. Because it is so easy for me to make the wrong assumptions. To assume that my sorrows happen only as punishments, for example, and that if I were a better person I would have fewer. I don't quite have God's perspective yet. But, like Eve, I am doing what I can while I live to figure things out.

2011 Books & Music

I put this list together for a project at work, but I thought I'd share it here, too. The list of my favorite 2011 releases, by genre:

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Grown-Up Fiction

1. The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman (which, OK: I haven't finished yet, but only because I am savoring it slowly)
2. Sister by Rosamund Lupton
3. I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
4. To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
5. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

(Side note: the 2011 new releases I want to read but haven't yet: State of Wonderby Ann Patchett; The Marriage Plotby Jeffrey Eugenides; The Stranger's Childby Alan Hollingshead; The Night Circusby Erin Morgenstern, The Cat's Tableby Michael Ondaatje, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and 1q84by Haruki Murakami)

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Teen Fiction
(I am completely unsure as to why I didn't write about any teen fiction this year.)

1. A Monster Calls  by Patrick Ness. A combination of Siobbhan Dowd and Patrick Ness? With illustrations that powerfully capture the emotion in the story? Oh, my. I can't tell you how much I loved this book. Enough that I haven't brought myself to write about it yet.
2. Divergentby Veronica Roth. One of the better of the new crop of dystopian novels.
3. How to Save a Lifeby Sara Zarr. Told in alternating chapters, this is the story of two teenagers: on who's pregnant and might want to give her baby up for adoption, one who's trying to deal with the grief from her dad's death.
4. Chime by Frannie Billingsly. Another dystopian novel, this one is so well written it's like jewelry, somehow.
5. Between Shades of Greyby Ruta Sepetyas. A historical novel about Stalin's rule in Russia. I don't think this topic in history is very well known, and this isn't a happy book. But beautiful, still.

(The 2011 new teen releases that I'm still waiting to get to the top of the waiting list: Ashfall by Mike Mullin; The Scorpio Racesby Maggie Stiefvater; Blood Red Road by Moira Young; Legend by Marie Lu; The Unbecoming of Mara Dyerby Michelle Hodkin)

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Nonfiction

1. Just my Type by Simon Garfield. Have I ever blogged about my affection for fonts and typography? I don't believe I have. I should, one day. Suffice it to say: this book has an entire chapter about Comic Sans. No font nerd could resist it.
2. In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imaginationby Margaret Atwood. Hello...my favorite writer. Her words about science fiction that began as a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's review of Year of the Flood. What isn't there to love for me?
3. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet by Eavan Boland. Just her name, with its Irish connotations, gives me shivers. Even better, this is exactly the sort of book I love to read, with its mishmash of writing and the writing life and poetics and poems and thinking and discussing.
4. Blue Nightsby Joan Didion. I loved her The Year of Magical Thinking, which is about the year after her husband's death. Blue Nights, equally as powerful, details the time after her daughter died.
5. A Widow's Storyby Joyce Carol Oates. I'm not sure why the details of someone else's grief are compelling to me. But this one---the story of Oates' dealing with the death of her husband---just works for me.

 My Favorite Released-in-2011 CDs
(I only am listing three because I only discovered three. I'm trying to broaden my musical horizons but so far I'm not being very successful.)

1. 21 by Adele. Although I ran with these songs as company many times during my marathon training, they evoke for me the first long autumn run I did. "Turning Tables" is perhaps my favorite song on the album—nearly a soundtrack for some autumn moments—perhaps because of the lyric "next time I'll be braver, I'll be my own savior." I don't often manage, like I used to, to find exactly the wisdom I need in a song. But I needed that line. I still need it.
2. Ceremonials by Florence + the Machine. In real life, I think Florence might bug me a little bit—too dramatic. But in music, gah. I love her work. I am approaching this CD like I used to approach CDs: learning all the songs by heart.
3. Ahk-toong BAY-bi by a whole bunch of musicians. This is a CD that was released in England to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the U2 CD Achtung Baby. It's a cover album---lots of different musicians covering each song from the original. It's got Depeche Mode on it, singing "So Cruel," which is just about all I need, but, hello: The Fray singing "Trying to Throw your Arms Around the World"? and Patti Smith doing "Until the End of the World"? oh, and Damien Rice's version of "One"! and Snow Patrol on "Mysterious Ways"! This has been on nearly-non-stop rotation on my playlist. I love it. So. Much.

Did you have any 2011-new-release favorites?

on being a Book Expert

Today at work, I helped a dad and his daughter find a book she was looking for. They'd searched the shelf where it was supposed to be but hadn't found it. When I came over, I found it right away. This happens all the time at the library—and it's not even a sixth sense like some people think. It's just that we know the idiosyncrasies of the Dewey Decimal System and where things are likely to be "hiding." Still, it made me smile when, as I walked away, I overheard the dad say "See, that's why she's the Book Expert and we aren't." (I totally heard it capitalized!)

Of course, I'm far from the Book Expert. I still have to fumble a little when patrons ask me for a title suggestion. Sometimes the fumble comes because I'm drawing a blank—I know what book I wantto recommend but the title won't come to my tongue. (Sometimes I can walk to the shelf and find the book faster than I can remember the title or author, as is always the case with, gah, what's his name...Tony Hillerman!, a writer I find readers of all tastes seem to enjoy.) Other times it's because the genre is my weakness. Time traveling romances? Well, there's Diana Gabaldan...and that's as far as my knowledge goes. Luckily we have databases for that sort of thing, but still: I fumble. I'm not yet one of those expert librarians I've seen at work, who can dash off suggestions as fast as you want them for any genre you can name.

And just to keep me from taking that "Book Expert" comment to heart, not a half hour later one of my colleagues was checking out my staff picks shelf (we each have a shelf where we put books we love). "You usually have good stuff on your shelf," he said, "but tonight it's just sort of, ehhhh." (Smilla's Sense of Snow, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and Memoirs of a Geisha were among my offerings.) As "ehhhh" isn't the goal of the staff picks shelf, this response was not my favorite.

You'd think that working in a library would help me feel like the world is made up of readers. Sometimes it does, like on Saturday when I walked up the stairs behind a twelve-ish-year-old girl who was clutching a copy of The Giver and telling her mom how she couldn't wait to read it again. Or tonight, when a different twelve-ish-year-old walked by my desk with a pile of books, telling her mom she'd been simply starving for something good to read. More often than not, though, the library helps to reinforce what the world seems to be telling me: even though they are important to me, books don't matter a whole lot in the world.

I felt this same sort of discouragement when I was teaching. I imagined that if I just pushed the right buttons (shared the best sort of writing), I'd uncover every. single. student's love of reading, even the ones who thought they didn't love reading. Of course, it didn't happen that way—most of them continued on thinking reading is a waste of time just like they did before they started my class, except they'd had more poetry and essays and Ursula Le Guin shoved down their throats.

If I listen hard enough, it feels like the entire universe is, in fact, sending me a message that the things I love most—namely books, and reading them, and the writing of them, and language well-used—are not important. Publishing's budget shrinks and shrinks. As do libraries'. The amount of people reading on a regular basis grows smaller and smaller. The demand for real books declines as that for ebooks rises. Newspapers close up shop, magazines vanish, the demise of the little literary magazine is upon us. Movies and video games and TV and Facebook are where people like to put their energies.

I get discouraged.

Because, honestly. I do check Facebook from time to time, and I watch TV. I've been known to see a movie. But none of those things makes me as happy as I am when I'm curled up somewhere comfy with a book (and perhaps a beverage). It's even better when the house is empty and I've somehow convinced myself to ignore my other responsibilities and simply read without feeling guilty. (That, along with thighs that didn't touch, is one of the things I miss most about childhood, that opportunity to read all day without feeling one titch of guilt.) Reading makes me happier than almost anything else. And I don't understand why other people—seemingly the majority of the human population—don't enjoy it.

But then, sometimes the universe says otherwise. Like the other night, when I watched Rick Harrison—the dude from Pawn Stars—on David Letterman. Letterman asked him how he got so smart and knows so much about history, and his response astounded me. He explained that he'd been sick a lot as a kid, and so he got in the habit of reading. He learned to love to read, and that love helped him learn and led him to his career.

I loved hearing that. Especially since all day my kids and husband had been teasing me with a line from some kids' TV show: "She likes to read. I like to have fun." The world telling you that what you love is pointless and lame is one thing. Your family teasing you with the same idea is something different. I needed that little reminder that it really isn't the entire universe that thinks that.

And, you know? I'm also not the world's best Book Expert. But I do have some skills. On the off chance that you need some recommendations for good poetry to read? I'm totally your librarian. Or dystopian novels. Or even essays. Plus, I did manage to grow up and become something that, when people friend me on Facebook, completely fits their perception of me. I've loved books all my life, and that I found a way to make a career (of sorts) out of that love is a lucky, happy thing. Most of the known universe might think that books are dumb or lame or a waste of time and resources. But there are some of us still out here, reading away, and those are the kindred spirits I'm glad to have around me.

Book Note: To Be Sung Underwater

I cannot go so far as to call it an obsession. Hardly even a passing thought, really. Except for when I find myself in certain landscapes—namely, those of my hometown—I sometimes discover a thought rising up: what would it be like to bump into him? The adult version of the teenaged boy I used to obsess over. (I cannot believe I am the only person to have this thought.) In some ways it would be good to know what happened to him, how his life turned out, what became of his ambitions. In reality, however, it could prove to be disastrous. Not because of the threat of all those emotions rushing right back; I'm hardly the person I used to be. But isn't it better to keep that idealized, adolescent version of the person in your head? Reality—aging bodies and wrinkling skin and yellowing teeth—doesn't get any prettier with age, does it? And then there's the version of reality you're actually living, as opposed to the idealized and hopeful version you thought you'd get twenty (some-odd) years ago. I'm not certain the trade off (knowledge for the idealized version) would be worth it.

 

Still, the way that thought springs up with nearly predictable regularity (based on landscape or a song on the radio or even, very occasionally, the whiff of some memorable scent) leads me to believe that it is one of our more primal urges. Tom McNeal's novel, To Be Sung Underwater, suggests the same thing. Only, Judith Whitman (the book's protagonist) doesn't only think about it. She does, after much thinking about it, as well as the hiring of a private detective, make up a story to tell her husband and daughter about why she'll be gone for the next few days and then travels back to the small Nebraska town where she spent her last two years of high school. Not for your traditional high-school reunion, however, but to reacquaint herself with Willy Blunt, the boy she fell in love with just before she graduated.

 

Judith's relationship with Willy (a character I like so well I can forgive the author's choice of names for him) is so intense it makes your teeth hurt. They meet briefly one summer, but not until an odd set of circumstances brings them together do things start to spark. A construction worker with ambitions to start his own business (not a goal his father, who's been a farmer his whole life, sees as a good one), Willy is a dreamer and a romantic. The dates he plans for Judith are full of countryside and rising moons. Judith is almost instantly wrapped up in Willy. They don't know how to name it, or why, but the relationship is edged with a fatal sadness; nothing gold can stay. And while she intends, after graduating from Stanford, to return to Nebraska and to Willy and to his marriage proposal, Judith ends up staying in Los Angeles and marrying someone entirely different. 

 

Two decades later, her life at home in L.A. is not going swimmingly. She's not quite 100% certain but is fairly sure that her husband Malcolm is having an affair with his assistant. Camille, her teenage daughter, is in that prickly adolescent phase when closeness and trust seem an impossibility, and at any rate she's always liked Malcolm more than her mother. Judith's job—she's a film editor for a TV show—is starting to feel pointless and altogether too difficult. "First at work and then everywhere I went," she explains, "I'd be thinking things like, too much is too much, or enough is enough." The leads her to a strange action: she rents a storage unit, where she recreates the bedroom where she'd lived in Nebraska, down to the handmade quilt she'd purchased all those years ago at an estate sale.

 

All of this seems to be a novel about a woman having a midlife crisis, and maybe it is. Maybe her actions—the storage unit, the private detective, the trip to Nebraska to seek out an old boyfriend—speak to the tension of not being certain the life you have is the life you want, but being absolutely sure that the time to change that life is mostly gone. Rather than looking forward to figure out who she might become, Judith looks backward to see who she used to be, and finds she might have liked that person better. In that sense, it's not about a mid-life crisis, exactly. Instead, it is about looking at your life's intersections, the places you made decisions that forced you to turn a way you hadn't anticipated, to understand if you shouldn't have kept going straight after all.

 

Adultery is a divisive subject. I have friends who won't read books that include it. But I'm really not even sure if what happens when Judith shows up at Willy's reclusive cabin could be called "adultery." In a strange way, her marriage to Malcolm feels more like the real adultery, because she never stopped loving Willy. She simply got tangled up in the new opportunities life gave her after she left him in Nebraska. Yet, like their adolescent relationship, their experiences as adults are edged in sadness. Not just outlined with it; steeped. There is the fact of reality and of how they have each changed since they were last together. This is especially true for Willy, who never moved on from Judith's departure. "For you I was a chapter," he says, "but to me you were the whole story." He has formed a successful life, with a wife and children and a thriving construction business. But he is, quite simply, unhappy.

 

Saying "I loved this book" about To Be Sung Underwater might be a strange statement. It's not a happy book. But it's simultaneously full of knowledge, beauty, and a quiet, peaceful joy. That contrast made it linger for me. I've continued to think about it: how, for example, the book's title neatly closes up its ending, and how it makes living the idea of how choices define us and which ones are the hardest to make. Choosing between something that is wrong for you and something that is right can be painful, but the choice eventually resolves itself. It is the choice between two right things that is the hardest, and the one that you continue to look back at, until life turns again and you can no longer see which way to go.

Exquisite Autumn

On August 31, I went running at 8:30. It was already hot, the heat wafting up from the sidewalk in little waves, a palpable thing to shuffle through.

On September 1, I went running at 8:30. I stepped outside into cool air, the temperature of shade even in the sun; an unruffled wind lapped at my heels.

I can't think of another year when fall arrived so abruptly. Although even in the mountains the trees haven't started changing yet, the air has here in the valleys. It's cooled off just enough that I can enjoy the sunshine on my forehead again. The light is a different color, too, that golden hue of summer's end. Now we're a week into September; it's rained once and all the other days have been deliciously warm.

This afternoon I ate lunch outside on our back patio. I read my book while I ate, something I nearly always do when I'm eating alone. I looked at the mountains; I let the sun fall on my legs. The impeccable timing of literature happened when I read this sentence: "Who could sit here and look at this and not believe in the good intentions of the world?" (from the novel To Be Sung Underwater  by Tom McNeal)

Today, in the middle of an exquiste, perfect, early-autumn afternoon, I believe in nothing but the world's good intentions.

I Think I Love You

(a book note)

When I was almost 15, I fell in love with the band Depeche Mode. This happened after my Lake-Powell friend Carrie's older sister introduced me to Alphaville (one of my life's seminal moments); Alphaville lead me to my local alternative radio station (KJQ), which lead me to the larger DM oeuvre. (Because who, in 1986, hadn't heard "People are People"?) I became a Depeche Mode junkie: I saved all my spare money to spend on buying cassettes, which I listened to over and over again. "Dressed in Black" became my personal anthem and understanding "Stripped" became a litmus test for boys. Lucky for me, my dad enabled my music addiction; his big stereo downstairs was wired so we could also play music on the upstairs speakers. I could listen to music while hanging out downstairs (probably reading) and while forced into upstairs slave labor (cleaning the kitchen). I'm certain this drove my family, who didn't quite share my taste in music, insane, and probably prompted my Big Gift that Christmas: my own stereo. I never had to be music-less again.

 

Much as I loved the music, perhaps what I obsessed about more was the lead singer, Dave Gahan. It didn't hurt that he looked vaguely similar to my eternal adolescent crush. I admired everything about him: his dark, velvety voice; his penchant with words (I assumed, of course, that since he sang the songs, he also wrote them, an assumption that left out the real lyricist, Martin Gore); the mysterious, brooding aura he assumed in the videos. I scoured magazines for articles about him (luckily my library took Rolling Stone). I accumulated a sparse but highly valued collection of magazine images of him that I grouped together on my bedroom wall.

 

Since "normal" wasn't ever one of my qualities, this adolescent obsession of mine didn't enter the realms of your average adolescent obsession. In other words, I didn't spend hours imagining what it would be like to make out with Dave Gahan. I never kissed my posters of him. I hardly ever thought of him in a physical way. (Well...not very much. Really.)  Instead, my fantasies involved hanging out with him in an English pub, where we'd drink soda (I might have even known what his favorite beverage was at that point in my life) and just, you know, talk. About his song lyrics—where in his soul they came from, and how he wrote them, and how true they were. I thought "Here in this House" was the most romantic song in existence and "Strangelove" the only real love song ever written, and I wanted to tell him that.

 

Poor Martin Gore!

 

And while Petra, the protagonist in Allison Pearson's novel I Think I Love You has a quite different obsession—David Cassidy, obviously—I think she'd relate to my experiences. Petra is head-over-heels in groupiefandomness with David Cassidy. She and her friend Sharon spend hours assembling magazine pictures and posters of David Cassidy, kissing said posters, and reading Tiger Beat, which Sharon's aunt gets her from America, and The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, which comes to their small town in Wales via its London publishing office. Sharon and Petra have just, finally, made it into the "in" crowd at their junior high, so when they're not obsessing over David they're a little bit anxious about keeping on queen-bee Gillian's good side. Petra especially. She should be practicing her cello more often, since she's going to be performing for Princess Margaret soon, but instead she panders to Gillian and dreams about conversations with David. "I never revealed my favorite song to the other girls," she explains. "If I told them, then they could copy my idea. . . he was going to be so impressed I hadn't chosen one of his obvious hits, wasn't he? 'Gee, that's amazing, Petra. You dig "I am a Clown"? Wow. No one else ever noticed that song and it means so much to me.'"

 

See, Petra and I are soul mates.

 

If this was only a book about a teenage girl obsessing over a musician, I don't think I would have liked it. I enjoyed it because it captured a bit of what it's like, in the beginning of your teenage years, when every decision and conversation and action seem to have unexpected results; sometimes a surprise good ending but more often they shove you off a cliff into the icy puddle of your own despairing, lonely existence. Petra is caught up in all sorts of little anguishes: the bit with Gillian, but there's also her mother who's highly disappointed in her husband and never loses an opportunity to tell Petra about it, and the tug between wanting to be a better musician and just hanging out with her friends, and that unsettled, distrustful feeling of being the last girl to need a bra. (I feel your pain, Petra. I'm still waiting to need one.) It also tells the story of Bill, who writes for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, and Petra and Sharon's story twenty-five years post-David obsession.

 

And even though I was skeptical about this book—it seemed to have a high potential for cheesiness—I ended up really, really liking it. I can't say I loved it, mostly because the adolescent Petra sometimes comes across with that wiser-than-her-age thing that often happens with teens in novels. What bugged me about this was how much I liked what she was saying, balanced with knowing she couldn't know this at 13. An example:

 

You chose the kind of friends you wanted because you hoped you could be like them and not like you. To improve your image, you made yourself more stupid and less kind . . . The hierarchy of girls was so much more brutal than that of boys. The boys battled for supremacy out on the pitch and, after, they showered away the harm. The girls played dirtier. For girls, it was never just a game.

 

It's exactly true, but thirteen-year-olds don't realize any of that. They just know their friends make them miserable sometimes, or that they make their friends miserable.

 

That aside, though, I highly recommend this one, mostly for its redemptive qualities. Even some of my very own friends didn't understand my Dave Gahan obsession. They all knew I loved Depeche Mode, and even liked the band as well, but they didn't share my mania preoccupation affection and thought I was slightly odd for it. Even now that I'm grown up, and even though it's more than a little bit embarrassing, I confess: I still listen to quite a bit of DM. This garners more than a little bit of familial mockery from both Kendell and Haley, but I hardly care; the music still reminds me of how it felt to feel like that. I could explain what I mean, but I love how Petra, grown up now, puts the musical reunion: it's a sort of "emotion recollected in tranquility, of all the women like her in this auditorium who are looking back on their thirteen-year-old selves, on the pressure of all that yearning. Wanting to be loved so badly. That was the great engine of life, revving up back then, if only they'd known it." Now that my engine has already revved and is starting to sputter, revisiting that version of myself reminds me of emotions and experience that shaped me, even though sometimes I've forgotten how.

 

Especially if you, too, suffered through your own bout of adolescent obsession (Didn't we all? Wait...did we all? Or are Petra and I on our own here? Which musical personality did youobsess over?), I think you should read this. Or, go listen to some Depeche Mode just so you can hear what I mean.