her life with books

We may have reached the point where I am not allowed to read anything other than middle grade and young adult nonfiction. This is unfortunate when you are 75 pages into Raven Boys and your hold on Happier at Home just came in, but alas, alack. Here is a random assortment of the true stuff I’ve been reading.

Meltdown!: The Nuclear Disaster in Japan and Our Energy Future by Fred Bortz

I remember news coverage of the  2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and remember something about a nuclear something something, but because I am a privileged American, I let things go in one ear and out the other. Bortz pulls your attention into the geological factors that lead to such seismic incidents, cultural factors that allow Japan to, um, exist basically on top of a fault line, and, most significantly, how the world gets power from nuclear plants and how dangerous it is when these plants are damaged, like the ones damaged by the earthquake in Fukushima in 2011. This is fairly dry stuff – science and all – but damn if I learned a lot about nuclear physics, power plant structure, and the shocking SHOCKING capacity for human error. All this privileged American stuff sure requires a lot of trust that some dude will read a meter properly and not contaminate my home and the earth at large for HUNDREDS OF YEARS.

Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives by Albert Marrin

Speaking of terrible, problematic, dangerous power sources… how about a book about oil? I didn’t realize that I was reading two such similar books simultaneously until the final, almost identical chapters laying out the pros and cons of alternative energy means because where Meltdown! is science-heavy, Black Gold is all history. Did you know that cars used to be considered “clean” forms of transportation, because the alternative was piles of horse manure in the streets? Did you know that World War II was ended in a large part because Germany ran out of oil? Did you know that Britain invaded the Middle East (aka Iraq) in an effort to bolster their navy by securing some Middle Eastern oil? Did you know that no matter how expensive gas prices are at the pump, we are GOING to run out of oil? Maybe you are not a privileged American who spends her time reading romance-y books for teenagers and knew all this, but I didn’t. I found this book startlingly engaging.

And also, the answer is: solar.

Speaking of post-industrial angst… Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London is a little love letter to Mr. D, equal parts biography and amateurish literary analysis. According to Warren, Dickens was a God Amongst Men, walking around and writing stories that ignited the British Upper Class into their Oprah-caliber “best selves.” Before Oliver Twist, nobody gave a rip about the poor factory children! Thank you, Charles Dickens!

I am being facetious, because I have an academic distaste for children’s biographies that veer towards hero worship. It is a fine primer on Charles Dickens’s quite interesting life (did you know that for a spell, his family LIVED in PRISON while Little Dickens worked in a factory??) and an adequate overview of his important work, significant social influence, and the bizarre, exploitative economy of 1800’s Britain.

This is a review in two parts.

Part #1 – Satire

I think I alluded to being a comedy sophisticate earlier this week. That was probably a lie. I probably just like the comedy I like and the comedy I don’t understand, I poo-poo. Tim and Eric, for example – supposedly quite funny according to comedy “experts” and friends alike… but I can’t stand it.

Take also for example, Penelope by Rebecca Harrington. Although almost nothing at all like Tim and Eric, I read this novel that is supposedly a biting satire of Harvard undergraduate social conventions and felt the same “Uh, I just don’t get this” feeling. Harrington’s heroine, Penelope, is a new freshman straight from the suburbs of Connecticut. Penelope’s “thing” is that she is unaware of social norms to the point of Aspergers, and she has only the vaguest, almost-academic interest in interacting with other humans. She discusses Agatha Christie novels with monied 19-year-olds at exclusive parties while accidentally drinking herself under the table, doesn’t notice her earnest neighbor’s advances but somehow allures herself into a friends-with-benefits relationship with a SUPER-monied, SUPER-elite monied playboy, and otherwise bumbles around this book seeming alternately cute and oblivious and vaguely mentally ill.

This is all supposed to be funny, but uh, I just don’t get this. If you want a top notch college satire, pick up Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons – it’s about a hundred times more subtle, complex, and compelling.

Part #2 – New Adult?

This is a book populated almost entirely by 18-year-olds. If the book had taken place three months earlier in time, this would be a YA novel. Or maybe not even that – take the 2010 YA book The Ivy. An assortment of college freshmen from various walks of life arrive in Cambridge and learn to social climb, led by one protagonist who is particularly normal and thus able to observe the absurdities of monied 19-year-olds, put these absurdities in relief, and then tug on the reader’s emotions when the protagonist loses her strong sense of self and begins to become absurd herself.

Anyway, I didn’t really like Penelope, but I liked The Ivy, I think precisely because The Ivy is YA. The Ivy isn’t a fine work of literary fiction by any means – it’s fluff, but it’s not trying to be literary. It’s satire, but it’s not trying to be satire. And also, throughout The Ivy, I actually cared about the protagonist and wanted her to succeed, even in her silly mission to oust popular mean girls and find a boyfriend. In Penelope there is this distance, like the author and the reader are just meant to observe Penelope and her silly 18-year-old self, to laugh at her, to poke fun at youth.

This is maybe the problem I had with Dare Me, except exaggerated because of the satire.

But for what it’s worth, maybe Harrington’s over the top exaggeration isn’t quite so exaggerated as I think – about halfway through the book, I observed that silly Penelope and her strange mannerisms, habits, and complete lack of self-awareness… and thought that maybe another academic observer might have thought College Jessica to be just as odd a bird. So it’s quite possible that this is a work of genius, a work of satire, and I am just a clod who likes what I like, and that is mostly young adult.

The Giver was my hands-down, all-time favorite book from the 4th grade up until I wrote 4 papers on it in 6 months. Thanks, grad school! Now that I have analyzed and criticized and studied it to death, it doesn’t hold the same exalted position on my personal Bookshelf of Life, but it is still one of my go-to recommendations, especially for adults who haven’t read kid lit since they were 9 and think YA is a dirty word. It’s a quick, tight read, engaging, and the issues at hand – personal freedom, human nature, eugenics, etc –  are sufficiently highbrow. I do believe it has earned its praise and position in the children’s lit canon.

Until grad school, I was very content to ignore the two companion/sequel novels to The Giver. But then they showed up on a syllabus, and grad school allows little room for righteous reading indignation. I read Gathering Blue and The Messenger with a certain level of detachment; the existence of these books wasn’t as pure as The Giver, they couldn’t possibly be held up to the same standard, The Giver was The Giver, but these were just books. And I think it worked – I was able to appreciate the two books for what they were – stories that were more like The Giver in theme than storyline, that took strange supernatural turns, that were at times pleasantly atmospheric and mythological.

But still. Just books.

I knew that Son would be different. It had been so long since The Giver and its sequels were published, it would be the final installment, and I knew it would be about a birth mother. Ms. Lowry was returning to the community where she began – Jonas’s community – and she would have to pull out some stops to both satisfy original readers as well as justify some of the wackier storylines in the two sequels.

And despite mixed professional reviews, I think Lowry did just that. The novel’s protagonist, Claire, is a very young birthmother whose birthing career is cut unexpectedly short when her first delivery is deemed unsatisfactory. Instead of returning to community life in the fish hatchery, though, Claire becomes obsessed with keeping tabs on her child – a child we quickly learn is baby Gabriel who plays such an important role in The Giver. Without giving too much detail, Claire eventually leaves the community and spends the rest of her life in the supernatural, barely-civilized, liminal world of Kira and Matty, trying desperately to be reunited with her lost son.

This is not a tour-de-force, not a book that will stand next to The Giver in my mind or in the canon. I probably won’t hand it to friends and family. However, I don’t think it’s Just-A-Book. Lowry manages to combine the realistic and the fantastic in a way that feels more fable or fairytale-like, rather than an awkward mash-up of world-building. Claire is an interesting case study in cultural conditioning vs. human instinct, of the way deprivation of knowledge can make a person, a people, vulnerable and desperate.

And of course, there is the delight in realizing that Claire’s story is being told in concurrence with Jonas’s story, allowing the reader a coveted second perspective of that fascinating community that Lowry sucked us all in with on that very first page of The Giver – the errant plane, the spinning bicycle wheels, and “NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED.”

Maybe that’s what I wanted from a Giver sequel all along – to be indulged.