A Wizard of Earthsea

This book was cute and fun but very simple and not very involved. There did not seem to be a clear structure. His quest of self discovery was random and odd and took him all over but never really led him anywhere. I never understood the point of any particular action, which is a pet peeve of mine. I don’t just want to read something, I want to feel it and experience it. The passive tense, referring to events as though they happened long ago, was extremely frustrating for me. I felt like I was listening to some old man ramble on about some legend instead of experiencing things with Ged.

            I can understand how this book is such a classic because it was one of the first of its kind. Apparently the concept of wizards as young people hadn’t been created and fantasy itself was not well developed. However, I have read many teen lit fantasy books about young wizards that struck me as better than this one. 

The Sparrow

Why do we write tragedies? I know the Greeks thought that through pain and negative emotion we cleanse ourselves of bad feelings. Well, sobbing over a book just makes me feel worn out and sad.

            The Sparrow was beautifully written and composed. The characters were believable and interesting, and I found the exploration of levels of faith to be intriguing. The entire book works from the past and the present to one event. The whole book, you know everyone but one person is going to die. I spent the entire book bracing myself for the deaths. I knew they were coming. That didn’t make it any less shocking.

            The book alternated between present tense descriptions of the characters as they began and undertook their trip to another planet and descriptions of the one survivor after he returned to Earth telling his story of what had occurred.

            I was a little disappointed that the moment the whole book was leading up to, the event that changed everything, was not told in present tense. I wanted to see and feel everything and instead it was all just told to me. It was like the difference between reading a book and having someone tell you a quick plot summary.

            Instead of hearing and feeling and living with the characters as they died and suffered, the reader was put into the same position as the priests who were listening to the sole survivor tell his story. I suppose that made it easier to empathize with them, but I really didn’t care about the priests. I cared about the explorers. And they all died unceremoniously.

            I was expecting them to die off one by one in tragic ways. But no. They were killed really quickly and in violent ways. Maybe the author was trying to shock readers. I was bracing myself for the deaths but I was still shocked.

            I really appreciated that there was a paragraph that clearly demonstrated why the book was called The Sparrow. It made everything fit nicely, the whole tragedy packaged up with a neat little bow. And lots of sadness. 

Ender's Game

I legitimately enjoyed Ender’s Game. I don’t know why that has been such a rare occurrence lately. Perhaps I’m getting smarter and realizing that authors aren’t gods, they’re just people who wrote something down. Ender’s Game, albeit not the work of a god, was wonderfully captivating. I loved the concept of fighting the buggers using children, although I never quite realized why that was necessary. I understand the necessity of training the kids all their lives for the battles, but are their reflexes really that much faster? I didn’t buy it. I suppose they may have been hoping to find their commander sooner, so he could grow up before he had to fight. But they probably could have slowed down their ships if necessary.

            I know enough about science to know that most of the space travel stuff was terribly unreasonable, but that didn’t stop it from being fun. I think what I liked most about the book was how it came full circle. His first fight, where he beat up the kid and then kicked him until he died, to win all future battles- that was all foreshadowing. I really love foreshadowing. I love when you reach the end of a book, and you realize it couldn’t have ended any other way. If I get to the end of a book and just start thinking of better endings, the book seems even less godly and more like a muddled up pile of words. I wish Ender’s Game has been a little more streamlined though. I would have liked to see it end right after the last battle instead of giving us some details of their lives after the war. I want to image Ender forever as the young commander who defeated the buggers against his will, not as a 20-something on some other planet. With that ending, he is no longer immortal. Also, Ender’s relationship with Valentine creeped me out. Brother/ sister relationships aren’t supposed to be that passionate, unless I’m doing it way wrong. Actually, I think Ender’s siblings did more to take away from the story than add to it. Ender being a third made him slightly more of an outcast, but not enough to add to the plot. And the side plot of the two siblings controlling the world back home didn’t really develop into anything impactful.

            Okay so I guess there are some things I would have changed. Overall though, it was a good and entertaining read that also made me think. What more can you ask for?

The Bell Jar

If I keep a diary for a year and type it all up with a chapter for every week, can I sell it off as a novel? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what Sylvia Plath did with The Bell Jar. There is very little plot, nothing ties itself up at the end, and there seems to be little purpose to any particular paragraph.

            I suppose her year was a little more exciting than most, since she spent most of it in insane asylums. But where is the line drawn? What constitutes a novel and what constitutes a memoir? Are we allowed to rip off reality and shamelessly sell our friends’ lives to publishers under the guise of ‘literature?’

            It would certainly be a lot easier than inventing an entirely new story. I could easily type up my life, change a few names, and call it good. I’m not sure how many people would want to read it, though. I suppose that before you can go and sell your life, you first have to live a pretty exciting one.

            Would it be easier to invent something entertaining or go live it yourself? David Sedaris always seems to throw himself into crazy situations that inspire well thought out, impactful and concise essays. Reading them, I often wonder how much of it is made up. I mean, it would be so easy to pretend that you overheard something on a train that you didn’t. No one can call him on it! And he writes about his family’s embarrassing moments as often as his own. I wonder how they feel about supporting his career in that way.

            It would be easy to invent, but every story is based on some sort of reality. We all write about what we know at some level or another. So what makes The Bell Jar such a classic when it is basically just a documentation of one woman’s year? One thing I’ve learned about classics is that they aren’t necessarily the best book of that kind ever written, but they are usually the first. Sylvia was one of the first to write about mental illness, so her mediocre quasi-memoir is now read by millions of high school students. Congrats, Sylvia. Way to play the system. 

1984

1984 has a cool concept. Looking back on the book, that’s about as much as I can say about it. The story was dry and slow and uninteresting and the love affair was confusing. I didn’t gather that Winston’s wife was alive until well into his romance with Julia and everything about their relationship seemed untrue. She loved him without ever talking to him? He hates her and wants to kill her and then the next day risks his life to see her? Julia herself admits to having had affairs with lots of men, and Winston finds this an attractive quality as it shows her hatred of the party. If she had slept with so many men, what made Winston special? They didn’t get along very well. Julia wanted to rebel in small ways for her own pleasure, while Winston wanted to understand and change society.

            Half of the book was composed of descriptions of Winston’s varicose ankle and the gross food and the dilapidated buildings.   Orwell wrote this book as a warning against totalitarian governments, and you can tell. The entire premise of the book is just “this is really not fun, you don’t want this.” The idea of a totalitarian world where you can be arrested for thinking against the Party is a pretty cool concept. The plot is not.

            The Party’s goal is to take away all happiness and joy from their citizens, in order to maintain control. Reading this book had the same effect. 

1984- Truth

Throughout his novel, George Orwell is constantly addressing the issue of truth. If The Party changes every document and forces everyone's opinion to change, then what is true? Does it even matter what happened, or is it possible to alter the past? Without a static written record, the past only exists in our own memories and those are easily corrupted. 

This reminded me of a common concept of historical study. History is written by the victors. Our concept of the reality of the past was based off of the writings of those who prevailed. The winners of wars undoubtably rewrote history in their favor, and therefore made "facts" which thousands of students now are forced to memorize. It is very difficult to determine exactly what is true in the past, especially when even the present is open to interpretation. 

Three people can look at the same situation and perceive three different things. The Scientific American described a study testing people's perceptions of reality. People were asked to kick American footballs at goals, and estimate the size of the goal. Those who kicked well perceived the goal to be much larger than they had before the experiment, and the poor kickers perceived a smaller goal than they had previously. Our brain provides a psychological justification for bad performance! 

Although we like to trust our eyes as objective data collectors, our perception of the world is not static. How, then, can we expect historical records to be accurate? How can we trust anything to be accurate, if we can't even trust our own eyes, let alone someone else's? 

Reading Orwell's novel, it is comforting to remember that it is, after all, just a novel. 1984 has come and gone, and the Thought Police are not yet monitoring our every action. Although with NSA monitoring texts and phone calls and GPS tracing of every device, 1984 may yet be the future. 

Anna Karenina

           In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy takes the reader on an emotional journey interspersed with painfully long descriptions of scenery. The book seems to center around Anna Karenina (the title would certainly lead a reader to believe that) but in the end, her death is merely shrugged off, and the story continues.

            Anna is a character driven by love and only love. There seems to be no rationale to any of her actions beyond her search for love. This is most obviously shown by her leaving her husband for a lover, but also by her treatment of her son and the way she teaches an English girl because that is the girl she loves. This abandonment of logic over passion certainly lends her towards irrational actions based on feeling, but her needless suicide is still shocking. She certainly has reason to be sad- she has lost her husband, her son and the love of her society. But the reason she dies seems to be for Vronsky. She fears his love for her is waning, and that he remains with her out of duty only.

Anna Karenina was recently remade as a movie starring Keira Knightly, because every 18th century movie ever stars Kiera Knightly. Fortunately the film contains fewer lengthy descriptions of scenery than the book does.

            Many identify Anna as a feminist character, and applaud Tolstoy for placing such a character into Russian society at that time. Anna does insist on living life on her own terms, and insists on attending the opera even though she knows there is nothing but scorn for her there. Anna herself is less of a feminist than a women who throws everything her society cherishes away for the idea of love. The sharp contrasts between Anna, who faces exile, public humiliation and eventually suicide for her affair, and her brother Stiva, who faces no punishment at all for his promiscuity, highlights the double standard of the Russian aristocracy.

            Although he loses out on the namesake, Konstantin Levin is just as central of a character as Anna herself. An awkward aristocrat who never quite fits in and has more than a little trouble with the ladies, Levin’s character has been said to be based off Tolstoy himself. Of course this is second-hand information, as I never met Tolstoy personally.  Levin loves a girl named Kitty, but is turned down because Vronsky is expected to propose to her. Vronsky ends up falling in love with Anna, who is already married, and it all gets very complicated and altogether Russian. In the end, Kitty and Levin end up married in the country. Vronsky doesn’t believe in ending his stories like Disney though. No “Anna died, Levin and Kitty are married, happily-ever-after” type endings. Instead, the book drags on about Kitty cleaning the house and the picnics they take. A tree falls and almost crushes Kitty and her son, and Levin saves them and discovers he does believe in faith. And that is where Vronsky decides to end his 900 page novel. 

Defining a Classic

Sometimes books beckon. Sometimes the short summaries on the inside cover hint at great mysteries or past worlds or exciting knowledge, and the book just begs to be read. Sometimes, books live up to these expectations of magic and grandeur and sweep you off to new worlds of enlightenment and personal discovery. Other times, they are just hideously torturous and excruciatingly boring smooshed-up trees.

I don’t know how many of these books will be a joy to read or how many might end up a dud.  I do know that I will do my best to learn as much from the dry and slow literature as I do from the exciting science fiction. No matter how sluggish of a read or disengaging of a plotline, there is value in every work because it is someone’s interpretation. I may regret saying that as there are certainly varying levels of value. But I think the impact a work of literature can have depends much more on the reader than the writer.

I am reading classics. My quick google search defined classic literature as “a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, either through an imprimatur such as being listed in any of the Western canons or through a reader's own personal opinion.” This gives classics a very open definition and leaves deciding if a book is “classic” up to me, as I refuse to believe that the Western canons can possibly know more about quality literature than I do. The books that have lasted for generations and endured as a top choice of the Western canons are most likely the books shoved into the public’s hands, and therefore, the books they choose. The designation of classic literature is a bit of a societal conspiracy- classics are the books written at the right time, by the right person, to catch the public attention. Some do not gain fame until years later. Some are beloved simply because a well-placed society man penned them first. You hear stories all the time of classic books that were turned away by publisher after publisher because they were “too controversial” or “too vulgar” or that one single reader did not appreciate the story as millions of fans later would. How many “classic books” were never published because the writer was too poor or the publishers decided they would never sell? How many potential classics died within their writer’s minds? How many classics are lying, disregarded, in a used bookstore, waiting to be discovered?

A book’s value is not decided by what society or some snooty publisher believes. The reader decides its value. Those books that bring magic are the ones that matter, but the writer alone isn’t responsible for the magic. You get out of a book what you put into it. If I can inject my own magic into Lolita or The Grapes of Wrath or whatever story ends up reading slower than the minute hand on the last day of school, then maybe I can squeeze some great mysteries and exciting knowledge out of it. At the very least, I’ll be able to coherently discuss classic literature, as any self-proclaimed bookworm should. 

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a semi-autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, under the pseudonym Hannah Green. The book explores her experiences with mental illness after being committed to an insane asylum. 

People enjoy what they relate to. Every piece of literature is born from at least one tiny truth, one kernel of reality. A story based entirely on imagination, with no human aspects or emotions, would never be enjoyed. People may want novelty, but they demand a basis in reality.

 Deborah’s imagined kingdom of Yr is reality spun into fantasy. She believes that Yr is it’s own reality, entirely different from the rest of the world. As she recovers, she slowly realizes that all the aspects of Yr that make it different from Earth were actually half-remembered pieces of reality.

Her experience with mental illness, and the strangeness of the hospital where she is treated, are alien to most readers. The sprinkling of passages from the doctor’s and Deborah’s family’s point of view give mentally sound patients something solid to relate to. As the story progresses, readers finds themselves sinking deeper and deeper into Deborah’s mind. Although her reactions may be unorthodox, the reasons for her condition are firmly human. At first, a reader may be repelled by the idea of empathizing with a clinically insane patient, just as the nurses and ward staff were. Readers may use the solid and firm reality of a book to separate themselves from D ward, just as staff members used their jingling keys to signify their otherness.

The stigma at the time, and Deborah’s own mantra, was that mental patients were different. Those locked in the ward were other, and foreign. The reader may find themselves chanting along with the gods of Yr, saying “you are not of them” to comfort their own quiet fears. The reader may feel the safety of isolation at the start, but is eventually forced to face the reality that the inhabitants of D ward are undeniably human.

The reader’s journey parallels Deborah’s. As she alternately works to both prove and disprove Yr’s existence, we work to prove and disprove our difference from the inhabitants of D ward. It is difficult for a reader to resist finding ways their minds differ from Deborah’s, in order to justify their own sanity. It is equally difficult for the reader to avoid seeing parallel’s between their own mind and Deborah’s, and wondering if readers belong on D ward as well.  

Deborah eventually decides to abandon Yr and the honest insanity of D ward for a complicated reality. She discovers a world of challenge and beauty and social stigma, a far cry from the perfect and calm rose garden that she was never promised. The reader discovers a world of open insanity that simultaneously denies and offers freedom. Those locked in D ward are denied the freedom to leave, but are allowed the freedom to be purely and entirely themselves, with no stigma or fear of judgment. The patients are allowed the freedom to be insane and open their imaginations, while those outside are forced to conform to the rules of reality.

This book has endured as a classic because people are drawn to the otherness but then relate to Deborah’s struggle, even if they resist it. Accept reality, or give in to insanity? Live in this hard world governed by society, or create your own kingdom and host of godly friends? Accept your own fragile insignificance, or believe that “you are not of them?” Dr. Fried never promised Deborah a rose garden in the real world. Perhaps because the rose garden was inside of Yr all along.