The Giver

Summary from Goodreads:
The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life Assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. Lois Lowry has written three companion novels to The Giver, including Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son.

Now, I am 99.99% certain that I read The Giver in the nineties.  I would have been in ninth/tenth grade when it came out and although that's a bit older than the intended audience, I remembered so much about the book I'm sure I read it.

I chose this to read during my "real-live human reading banned books" stint in the booth at the Coralville Public Library.  I had intended to read Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic because I thought we'd be reading aloud but since we were reading to ourselves (shame) I switched to The Giver.

Such a beautifully written, heart-wrenching book.  I think it's a bit underserved by being labelled a "children's" book because all adults should read it.  Amazing commentary on conformity, oppression, and euthanasia.  I'll definitely have to go on and read the other three books - I bought them all because of the gorgeous cover designs!

Looking for Alaska

Summary from Goodreads:
Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (François Rabelais, poet) even more. He heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

After. Nothing is ever the same.

Guess what, peoples...teenagers have been known to experiment with sex, drugs, and cigarettes.  Including upper-middle-class private school teenagers like those depicted in John Green's Looking for Alaska.  We visit the school through Miles's eyes and he isn't a cool, sophisticated kid - he's a nerdy, naive, inexperienced teenage boy who is obsessed with deceased poets and the last words uttered by famous people.  It's pretty much a given that he'd fall for the manic-pixie-dreamgirl of the book, Alaska.  However, things don't quite work out as planned.  Alaska is self-destructive as all hell, which is all you need to know.  A really well-constructed book; it didn't have the emotional gut-punch that The Fault in Our Stars did (which is good, because I don't know if I could handle that much crying over a book so soon).

I picked this up for Banned Books Week - people like to harsh on the "adult" themes but, hey guess what, teenagers will be teenagers and John Green assumes that they are smart people as opposed to living in a padded room or something.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I started reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower for Banned Books Week.  I was also reading Sandman, so I got a bit behind-hand on Perks.

Perks and I are a like ships in the night: it originally published in 1999 when I was busy with MCATs, lab jobs, med school applications, and homework and really wasn't in tune with the world of fiction.  The book is set in the early 1990s, though, making Charlie and I almost the same age (I was a HS freshman in the fall of 1992 - and if you think Charlie is naive you should have met me at the same age).  Charlie has major depressive symptoms (stemming from an unknown source) and he is deeply affected by loss, the most recent being a classmate's death.  He writes letters to an unnamed friend (it's unclear whether these are actually letters sent or if these are actually diary entries, there's a little wiggle room there) chronicling his freshman year of high school.  Charlie is intellectually precocious but socially awkward, perhaps to an extreme but it serves a purpose.

Charlie falls in with two seniors, Sam and Patrick, who take him under their wings, so to speak, and introduce him to a very different world that exists outside the walls of school and home.  They introduce him to the Rocky Horror Picture Show (his reaction on that first live show was about like mine).  There is drinking, smoking, experimentation with drugs, an exploration of sexuality, and the dawning realization that with all these adult choices comes the reality that human relationships are messy, messy things.  From those issues along one can see that Perks is a book ripe for the bulls-eye of those looking to remove books from libraries and schools.  Even though this is usually shelved in the adult fiction section, teen protagonists often translate to teen readers.  Charlie's letters show both sides of his choices: it might feel exhilarating and freeing to have a few beers or smoke a joint, but that laxity can cause one to do or say things that hurt our friends.

Perks is an eminently quotable book, with any number of gifs on tumblr.  Many lines are well-known such as "And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."  I may not be on the "rabid fan" bandwagon, but I thoroughly enjoyed Chbosky's writing and the final plot reveal.

The only quibble I have is the oft-stated idea that Charlie is doing extra writing assignments and improving there - yet his letters remain very even in quality, very young and confessional.  Is Charlie a bit of an unreliable narrator when he wants to be?

Bye, bye 2010! Recapping the reading

2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house.  In my attempt to "declutter" and "stage" my house for potential buyers I wound up packing up books that I was intending to read!  More stress!

According to Goodreads stats (far more accurate than my count-your-reading-journal-pages method), I read 91 books this year , 9 more than last year, but I only read 28,809 pages compared with 29,709 pages last year.  This probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire.  I had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of December put the kibosh on that.  If I had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (an author I have an obvious favorable bias towards) and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak; I read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me.  Least favorite book was Vixen; it wasn't so bad I wanted to light it on fire, but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research.

I participated in a few challenges this year.  The Women Unbound Challenge was the one I completed, even reading one book beyond what I'd planned.  Sadly, I didn't get the Complete Booker Challenge 2010 finished; I got three of six Booker-winning novels read but just never got to the other three (I did read one Booker short-list, so not a complete bust).  I'm going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011.

My Nostalgia Project stalled out with its initial subject - Flowers in the Attic.  Too intense.  The Booker Project and Newbery Project are coming along swimmingly, the Newbery especially, but the Best American Project had to go on hold when I had to pack all my Best American books in order to how the house.  I didn't make much reading progress on the Nobel Project but I did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor (and I can't quite decide with Vargas Llosa to read...too many good choices there).

In honor of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, I started a blog specifically for reading chemistry-related books (readingchemistry.blogspot.com).  I cross-posted a few science/chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross-post in the future.

This year I also made my first foray into requesting review copies...which added a whole new level of stress because now I feel obligated to read and finish the book I've requested.  Thank goodness I didn't go nuts and ask for many more review copies - packing and moving has gotten me far, far behind on the ones I have right now!

That's it for 2010 - bye, bye and so long!

Banned Books Week: I read "Banned Books"

I do. So sue me.*  And I am proud to do so!  Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is my current staff pick at the store - come to the dark side, we have good books.  Ha!

That does it for Banned Books Week 2010!  Read widely and get behind those books other people feel the need to pick on for having a different perspective.


*I have always wanted to adapt Joe Fox's "I sell cheap books.  I do.  So sue me."  Tee-hee.

Banned Books Week: A Light in the Attic

Meet one of the banned/challenged books that makes me go - why? (Don't get me started on what I think of people who object to Winnie-the-Pooh)

What, pray tell, is wrong with A Light in the Attic?  Hmmm, it apparently has suggestive illustrations and might encourage children to be disobedient.  Or "disrespect, horror and violence."

Excuse me while I go snort derisively.  There aren't any suggestive drawings in A Light in the Attic and if I had ever decided that breaking the dishes instead of drying them was a good idea, I'd have earned myself a hot backside and a one-way trip to my room for an extended grounding.  I used to have a ridiculous number of Shel Silverstein poems memorized - most notably "I Cannot Go to School Today" (said little Peggy Ann McKay, I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash, and purple bumps....and so on and so on) which I used for a play audition (didn't get the part; I get verbal diarrhea if asked/forced to speak in public, probably why I always danced and sang instead of acted or gave speeches).  We had gales of laughter when reading "Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout will not take the garbage out" or when admonished not to pick your nose.  I never got any stupid ideas.

Now, I have an ornery and mischeivous little brother* who had a ornery and mischeivous little friend and the two of them could get into oodles of trouble in a blink.  They didn't look beyond the moment to see if there were consequences to jumping off the roof with an umbrella to see if you could fly (Mary Poppins can be a bad influence, too) or sticking an egg up the exahuast pipe of the mini-van (the two of them could be hell on legs when left to their own devices).  But even my reckless brother would have thought twice before breaking the dishes instead of drying them (he was also a pretty lazy kid so if I'd ever caught him even thinking about putting the dishes away I would have been very surprised) and mom kept him and his friend on a tight leash so they wouldn't get into too much trouble while thinking up silly things to do.

So go ahead - find where the sidewalk ends and fall up but don't bump the glump.

*Technically, I have two little brothers; they are the two halves of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.  One could spend hours drawing and making things up using his imagination while the other could be found hurtling down a sheer cliff on his sled or playing naked in the birdbath.  They were both pesky, as alluded to in my Judy Blume post, and entirely allergic to chores (still are, actually).

Banned Books Week: His Dark Materials

                                 Into this wilde Abyss,

The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,

Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,

But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt

Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,

Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain

His dark materials to create more Worlds,

Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,

Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith

He had to cross. 

~Paradise Lost, Book II, John Milton

 

Thus begins Satan's descent to Earth and his mission to cause the Fall of Man.  Phillip Pullman uses the epic battle of Heaven and Hell as an underlying theme in his fantasy-steampunk-coming of age trilogy, His Dark Materials.  The Golden Compass introduces the reader to Lyra, Pantalamion (her daemon), and her alternate-history world of Oxford, London, and Lapland; there are some spectacularly bad people in Lyra's world (Lord Boreal, Mrs. Coulter, and Lord Asriel, just to name a few) as well as some spectacularly good people and giant, talking, armoured polar bears to boot (Iorek Byrnison, FTW!!).  There is also Dust, a strange particulate that is attracted to adults but not children.  The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist, Will Parry, who lives in our Oxford.  He meets up with Lyra in a strange world, Citt'gazze, and becomes the posessor of the Knife; the Knife has such a fine edge that it can cut through the fabric of space to make a window into another world.  The children also meet Mary Malone, a former nun who researches mysterious particles (the Dust of Lyra's world).  The Amber Spyglass (awarded the Whitbread Award in 2001, Pullman is only children's author to have received the prize) finds the major characters of the series readying for a battle between the Kingdom of Heaven and Lord Asriel.  At the heart of the conflict is Lyra, who must "fall" or grow-up to save all the worlds and prevent Dust from disappearing forever.

 

There are many thematic elements in His Dark Materials.  Pullman's Church is obsessed with the prevention of "sin" aka knowledge; this is why Dust is attracted to adults and not children.  Dust is self-awareness and knowledge through experience (also, the difference between innocence and experience, expressed in the poetry of William Blake).  The Church is trying to rid the world of "experience" - hence the insane project to separate children from their daemons.  The Church of Pullman's novels also abhors physical pleasure, whether through the enjoyment of foods or physical comforts or sexual awakening.  Lyra is a second Eve, one who must "fall" to save knowledge and self-awareness from becoming lost forever.  She is destined to do this even though she herself is not aware of this destiny until almost the end of the trilogy.  Although Lyra and Will are the Eve and Adam of the story, they must ultimately part because neither can live in the other's world for extended periods of time. 

 

Pullman comes down hard on absolutist religious dogma; although His Dark Materials uses a largely Judeo-Christian background, the message about absolutism applies to any fundamentalist religion.  It doesn't set well with some people - the Catholic League went after the trilogy for promoting atheism when the 2008 film adaptation of The Golden Compass was in theatres (books aside, that was a terrible adaptation, just awful plot adjustments).  If someone wants to have His Dark Materials removed from public school classrooms and libraries, I think Paradise Lost should go as well as The Chronicles of Narnia.  Turnabout is fair play; not everyone drinks of the communal wine and the parent, not the school district, should be the one who decides whether their child should read a more philosophical work.  I said public school because a private school of religious affiliation is allowed, under freedom of religion, to have a tighter grip over materials at the school (and one wouldn't enroll his/her children at a religious school unless one agreed with the curriculum/religious viewpoint and, besides, public libraries can suffice if a parent wants his/her child to read a book the private school finds questionable in that instance).

 

I'm all for children reading His Dark Materials.  Pullman's writing is very sophisticated and he doesn't dumb down any of the philosophical elements just because the series is meant for children.  The Golden Compass is more straightforward than The Subtle Knife which is more straightforward than The Amber Spyglass; by the time younger readers reach the third book they will be ready for the themes introduced.  I found myself reading very carefully by the time I reached the third book of the series because I didn't want to miss anything (there's a lot going on in The Amber Spyglass).

Banned Books Week: The Handmaid's Tale

Scene: Lazy afternoon in our family room around my freshman year of high school.  I am sprawled all over the couch reading a book.  My mom walks in.
Mom:  Missy, I need you to...Missy?  Missy!  [I finally look up.]  What are you reading?
Me:  The Handmaid's Tale
Mom:  What's it about?
Me:  It's really crazy - an accident happens, and some women can't have children anymore, and so the government decides to force the women that can have children to have children for the women who can't.  The government thinks this is OK because of the part of the Bible where Rachel gives Jacob her handmaid so he can have kids.  That's just wrong.
Mom:  That's awful.  I need you to gather up your dirty laundry if you want it washed.
Me [whines]:  Now?

And that was that.*  It was also my introduction to Margaret Atwood.  I was in Biology one day and one of the seniors (who for whatever silly reason had not taken the science GER previously) had a copy of a book with a woman in a red robe and white headdress on the cover sitting on the lab desk.  I asked what it was - The Handmaid's Tale - and was then told that it "sucked" and was "really hard to read" and was for "English".  Bonus, guess that means I'll like it, so I borrowed my first Margaret Atwood novel from the school library and snarfed it down.

I loved it.  LOVED.  IT.  What utter crap, that some skeezy government officials can come along and kidnap you and force you to have sex with some guy that you don't even like just so he can have a kid and YOU CAN'T EVEN READ!!!!  THEY TOOK AWAY BOOKS!!!  I think I'd have tried to escape to Canada, too.  And, wait, all these guys can go to a brothel???  Arrrgghhh.  I bet you can guess that I was already into women's rights even if I didn't formally know that it was called "feminism".

The Handmaid's Tale was on a the reading list for one of my English classes later on (I can't remember if it was BritLit or APLit) and, even though I chose another book as my "official" assignment, I read Atwood's dystopic novel again.  By this time sexual harrassment, feminism, and abortion rights had come into play in my vocabulary and I understood how tenuous at times are the rights of a woman to her own body.  How a boy is "cool" for sleeping around but a girl is a "slut" for even thinking about having sex, how a girl who gets pregnant is extremely visible at school but the guy who got her that way can just slip into the background.  It all played into the fundamentalist atmosphere of the novel.

Although an extreme form, The Handmaid's Tale says "This is what happens when you take away a woman's right to govern her own body."  The book also comes down hard on totalitarianism/fundamental religion.  It's depressing as hell, too, because the reader is left wondering Offred's fate when the book ends - did she escape with Mayday or did the Eyes get rid of her?  Is she pregnant and is the baby OK?  How did the tapes survive?

Even though The Handmaid's Tale dropped from 37 to 88 on the ALA's challenge lists by decade, it still pushes buttons.  A recent challenge in Toronto objected to the language, sexual violence, and "anti-Christian" attitude.  When I talk about banned or challenged books, I usually talk about "truth" because a book portrays the "truth" of a situation.  In the case of The Handmaid's Tale, this is a dystopian novel, not a realistic novel or memoir, and instead of a "truth" it presents a "what-if" - Atwood uses the metaphor of a frog in boiling water to illustrate her point about gradual change.  One must be aware of gradual changes, how they can chip away at freedom.  Women need to be vigilant or agency over one's body can be compromised - be it from a government agency or otherwise.

*Not exactly what happened, but pretty darn close.

Banned Books Week: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a hard book for me to read when I was a teenager.  Not vocabulary-wise, but understanding-wise.  I am about as opposite from Maya Angelou as you can get - white, middle-class, privileged, two loving parents, a happy and uneventful childhood in Iowa - and it took a huge mental adjustment just to visualize her childhood and the events she describes in her memoir.  I have to confess I that I thought it was a novel at first; I was so unbelievably naive.  How could people act like that?  Hate someone just because of skin color or hurt a little girl?  Then I started putting together all sorts of other information that I'd learned in school and read in books....yes, Maya Angelou's story was real, as real as my own, and holy crap.

Slowly, I started to find bits that connected me with the little girl and teenager of Dr. Angelou's memoir.  She loved to read, so did I.  We were both dancers and liked the stage.  Even though horrible things happened to her as a child (and I later learned that she had a very hard time of it for quite a while, working through poverty to raise her son), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells one woman's story of how she gained courage and tried to overcome her past.  For those who have read Laure Halse Anderson's Speak, the protagonist Melinda Scordino becomes as selective-mute after her assault; Dr. Angelou tells of her fear of speaking after her attacker is found beaten to death, that she felt her voice caused the man's demise.  Both the fictional Melinda and the real Maya learn to find their voices.

I no longer remember how I happened to be reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; I know it was my personal copy, not borrowed from the library, and I was just reading it for fun.  My mother is a huge reader of biographies, we had shelves stuffed full of bios and memoirs, so reading a memoir "for fun" and not "for school" was pretty normal at my house.  I also suspect my mother had already read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, although I've never asked her, so she knew what I was getting into.  I really think that was her way of introducing me to a situation that we just didn't experience ever in Iowa, so that I could begin to understand racism as a concept and understand how treating somone as less-than-a-person on the basis of skin color is absolutely ridiculous.  African-American History Month was always celebrated in school but we never got into the gritty, dirty parts of history.

It's the gritty bits that get people up in arms.  The book covers all manner of "hot-button" subjects: racism, sexism, sexual violence, child abuse, heterosexual sex, homosexual sex/confusion over sexual orientation, teen pregnancy, and "vulgar" language, to name a few.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the third most challenged book of 1990-1999 and the sixth most challenged 2000-2009 according to the ALA so people are getting their knickers in a twist all over the place.  It's like failing to see the forest for the trees.  Y'all want to stick your head in the sand and act like it's going to traumatize teens (and I'm talking an average of twelve and up here, the actual structure of the writing is too complex for younger kids), then you go ahead, stick your head in the sand and pretend that nothing bad ever happened to anyone.  But then you miss the truth - and the beauty of Dr. Angelou's writing.  She is a true storyteller - she sings loud and clear.  Dr. Angelou is an inspiring woman.  Young men and women need inspiration.

Banned Books Week: The Judy Blume Edition

If there ever was, or will be, a writer forever beloved by tweens and teens everywhere...it will be Judy Blume.

Just look at her books!  Who else writes about how to be loved for yourself, not just your looks?  Or how to stand up for yourself, even if that means going against the crowd?  Freckles?  Dealing with pesky - and I mean pesky - little brothers (I have two)?  Finding someone as goofily creative as myself?  Trying to grow into your own body then learning how to be a grown up in that body?  The books are funny, and Judy tells great stories, but there's always a little bit of a lesson in there (even if the lesson is that your kid brother will always be a pest so you'd better love him for it because you can't get rid of him).

I read the Fudge books in grade school (the first three - the last two came after I was in middle school) and had graduated to Blubber by around age nine.  I read that book a lot.  I had a secret wish to be one of the "cool kids" - even in fourth grade there are "cool kids", then everyone else, then the losers - and Jill Brenner was friends with the Queen Bee, Wendy, the one who decided that Linda, the overweight girl, looked like the whale she was presenting about.  The whole class gots in on it and bullied Linda in increasingly terrifying ways.  I got teased a lot in grade school and middle school and I would have given almost anything to be cool.  My copy of Blubber had a frumpy-looking girl on the cover who resembled me in a scary way; I was growing my hair out and I looked super-frumpy and old-fashioned in my barrettes while everyone else looked like permed Madonnas and Cyndi Laupers.  However, everytime I read the book, I always cheered when Jill stands up to Wendy and protects Linda at the cost of her own "coolness" - I understood what Linda went through and always wished someone would stand up for me (I solved it by standing up for myself).  I hoped that if I were in the same situation as Jill, I would stand up sooner rather than later.

Shortly after Blubber I received a copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret as a gift from my parents.  That's right - my parents.  It was a lovely edition, a blue hardcover with a yellow dust-jacket, and I read it and read it and read it.  The "this is your body on hormones" talk all the girls got in fourth grade only covered anatomical changes and never prepared me for the emotional rollercoaster that comes when your pituitary gland flips all the switches.  My copy of Margaret served as my touchbase whenever I started to doubt whether all this crazy stuff (odor, mean girls, rumors about slutty girls, having breasts/your period vs. not having breasts/your period, shopping for a bra with your mom, deciding what you think about God, etc) happened to other people and not just me.  I was lucky in that I didn't grow breasts until almost junior high, unlucky in that, when I did, they went from flat to eye-catching in a blink.  I also talked to God in my head, which I never mentioned to anyone in case they thought I was nuts; people prayed in church but never mentioned having a one-on-one relationship with Him.  The keel evened out after a few years but I always looked to Margaret when I needed a boost and wasn't at the level of sobbing to my mom about the unfairness that is teenagehood.

Meanwhile, I had read a book, kind of a naughty book for a ten-year-old at least - Forever....  My parents didn't buy this one for me; I borrowed it off a friend who "borrowed" it from an older sister.  I think my eyes were as big as saucers when I read about Katherine and Michael and....what the heck are they doing together?  I was pretty up on the anatomy of the human body but I wasn't quite sure what all you did with it.  With a boy...oh my.  I think if my mother had caught me with it I would have probably gotten an "is-there-anything-we-need-to-discuss" and an "I-think-you-need-to-wait-to-read-this" set of lectures but that would have been it.  As it was, a book that talked about blow-jobs and first-time sex, while fascinating, was actually kind of icky because boys my age were smelly, knuckle-dragging apes...no way did I want to be around any of them.  For any length of time.  With no clothes on...yuck.  When I did come back to Forever..., this time a copy legitimately borrowed from the library, I had graduated from "boys are icky" to "boys are OK but they have commitment issues".  My reaction to Katherine and Michael this time around was one of "oh no, they're not going to stay together??????" - because your first real boyfriend is the one that will last "forever"...and then it doesn't.  I thought my first boyfriend was "the one" and then he turned out to be a cheating turd (I didn't date again until college); Forever... helped me finally understand why there is an ellipsis in the title.

I've read almost everything written by Judy Blume and owe her a great debt of gratitude for writing about tweens and teens and reality in a way that is truthful and accessible.

Unfortunately, there are many people who just don't agree with me.  They want to censor Judy's books.  They don't think that middle school girls should understand what is happening to their bodies or that high school students will do silly things like have oral sex because they think they love their boyfriend (or, these days, have oral sex "just for fun").  Tweens and teens are far ahead of the curve anymore and a parent or educator who just sticks their head in the sand and worries more about what kids are reading than actual reality needs a wake-up call.  Judy writes eloquently about her experiences with censorship and book-banning, as well as cases of educators and writers caught in similar situations, in the introduction to Places I Never Meant to Be. 

Instead of banning and challenging Judy's books - because they talk about God, or sex, or masturbation, or divorce - use those books to open up communication.  READ THE BOOKS, don't make a snap judgement.  Kids need access to Judy's books; keep them accessible.

I should have titled this post "A Love Letter to Judy Blume" - but the post really isn't addressed to Judy (although, I hope she reads it because I love her books).  It's addressed to all those people who want to keep other children and teens from reading her books because those parents/educators/whoever object to their own child reading Judy Blume.  You parent your own children, I'll parent mine (whenever I acquire some, I'll settle for my nieces for now).

Banned Books Week: Johnny Got His Gun

This is the book that set me in the war-is-so-not-worth-it camp.

When my class entered ninth grade, the high school decided to create a course for Talented and Gifted (TAG) students that would combine the English and history curricula.  "Humanities" combined ninth and tenth grade English and "American Cultures" (aka US History, post-Civil War, aka "9th grade history") into a two class-period, one academic year long course.  I was invited to take the class and, hellz yes, I would be MORE THAN HAPPY to combine three classes into one big one; I was thirteen and thought I was pretty hot stuff if I got to play in the smart kids' sandbox.  We read all sorts of books for that class - Sister Carrie, Maggie: Girl of the Streets, The Jungle, The Great Gatsby - as the time periods we studied moved from Reconstruction, to Industrialization, to the Gilded Age, then World War I and the aftermath.

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo was assigned after The Great Gatsby - although Trumbo's novel was published in 1939, we read Johnny in conjunction with the rise of the Jazz Age since it is set during/immediately after World War I.  Johnny takes its title from a popular recruiting slogan used by the US military and incorporated into popular songs.  The narrator is Joe Bonham, an injured World War I soldier, who wakes to find that he can no longer see, hear, taste, or feel anything but doesn't know where he is or how he got wherever he is at currently.  We are trapped in Joe's head with him as he slowly recovers his memory and realizes that he has survived the blast from an artillery shell but is left completely disfigured, with no face, no arms, no legs, no senses.  However, he is neurologically intact.  As he struggles to try and communicate with his caregivers, Joe flashes back to life with his parents and girlfriend before the war.  Ultimately, Joe wishes to become a symbol for the horrors of war, a reminder of the human cost and sacrifice made by the average man.  Joe's desire is never fulfilled.

It is safe to say that this book blew my little teenage, John-Wayne-movie-watching mind.

I was a freshman in 1992-1993.  The US was ending the first Gulf War - Operation Desert Storm.  In junior high, we were asked to write to US servicemen (and it was servicemen, no mention of servicewomen) to help support them - I have no idea anymore what that program was called, it just happened - and a few kids got letters back (I didn't - what does a twelve year old female nerd and dancer have to say to an adult male about to get into a tank in the middle of a desert?  Not much, I can tell you, that would make the adult male want to start a pen-pal relationship without feeling like a skeeze).  We had Channel One (raise your hand if you remember Channel One) and it occasionally had news shots of Desert Storm.  Nothing too scary.  I watched a lot of John Wayne movies; war isn't very scary there, either (I hadn't yet seen Born on the Fourth of July, Patton, The Deer Hunter, or Full Metal Jacket).  Also around this time, I developed a knee problem and I trawled through the medical section of the public library looking for information about knees; I found a book of surgical procedures that had pictures of traumatic wounds and not just any wounds, historical photographs from bombing victims in World War I undergoing cosmetic reconstruction.  Oh my God.

Johnny Got His Gun captured my imagination.  What would it be like to suddenly be trapped in your own body (this was before I'd ever heard of "locked-in syndrome")?  To be an object of revulsion, to be entirely at the mercy of the world for food, for care, for everything?  To be horribly and painfully injured because you did your "patriotic duty" and no one told you this might happen?  You would look like those pictures and worse.  Would anyone truly tell your story as you would want it to be told?  As my humanities class continued forward in history I thought "What about other wars?"  World War II - I looked for pictures of victims of the atomic bombs, of soldiers who died in Pearl Harbor.  Korea - I found information about the advances in mobile surgical hospitals (MASH units - oddly enough, I loved M*A*S*H as a TV show, but never thought of the reality before).  Vietnam - I saw pictures of monks immolating themselves, legless US servicemen, I watched Born on the Fourth of July and The Deer Hunter.  I didn't become a fervent anti-war protester but I did start to realize that there are many, many other things to think about than just a date and the winner of the war.  There ought to be an honest accounting.

Johnny Got His Gun was awarded the National Book Award in 1940.  Although the novel itself was not initially divisive, Trumbo himself was.  Trumbo was aligned with the Communist Party in the US throughout World War II and eventually formally joined the Party in the 1940s.  When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Trumbo and his publishers suspended reprinting of Johnny Got His Gun because Trumbo feared the subject was inappropriate for the time period; inquiries sent to Trumbo (many concerned that his book was suppressed by "fill in the blank") were turned over to the FBI.  In a rather nasty turn of events, the FBI came to investigate Trumbo himself because of his Communist sympathies.  In 1947 Trumbo was one of those called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly witness.  Trumbo refused to testify, was convicted of contempt of court, and was blacklisted in Hollywood (Trumbo covers his decision to suspend printing of Johnny in his introduction to the book, last updated in 1970 with an statistical accounting of war injuries).

The challenge history for Johnny is not extensive - I can really only find one dated to 1977 in Michigan where it was challenged for being profane, graphic, un-patriotic, and un-American.  I really don't remember anything that graphic and, FYI, the truth is not un-American.  These days, I find that I want to get Johnny Got His Gun in front of more people.  It is such a relevant book because the US, once again, is at war and members of the US Armed Forces are coming home with severe injuries.  Or not at all.  Patriotism is not just about waving flags and sending care packages to the troops; it also includes a recognition that men and women are dying and horribly injured in a time of war and the severely injured can become marginalized.  All the flag-waving in the world won't cover that up.

Johnny Got His Gun lets the reader understand what it might be like to spend the rest of your life trapped inside your head, all because you "did your patriotic duty" and served in the military.  It's a sobering thought.

Banned Books Week, September 25 - October 2, 2010

This week I will be celebrating Banned Books Week on Scuffed Slippers and Wormy Books.  Each day this week I will (or will attempt to, schedule willing) feature one banned or challenged book; these are books that I read and either love dearly or respect for the message the author provided within the pages.

Get ready to find out why I "THINK FOR MYSELF"!

#SpeakLoudly - LAH's SPEAK is NOT pornography.

Today, a little birdie blogged about a pastor in Missouri who wants to ban Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak because it is pornography.

That's right - a man who has professed to spread the love of the Lord has found scenes depicting the rape of a young girl, who subsequently manifests depressive symptoms after her assault and cannot speak about it, as pornography.

That pastor's spreading something, alright, but it's not love.  Love says Speak tells the truth, that a girl who has had something terrible happen to her is still a whole person capable of giving and receiving love.  That it is not her fault.  That we hear her and we listen when she speaks. 

Speak was first published as I was graduating college and I didn't read it until this year, ten years later.  Melinda is not alone, even if she is a fictional character.  I have a friend who was Roofied and woke up in a strange man's bed.  Another friend was date-raped by a man who she thought was a friend.  Another was sexually abused as a child.  They did not speak.  Not until much later.  One tried to commit suicide, which is how I know about her assault - she told me so I would know why she tried to kill herself.  Laurie Halse Anderson could have ended Speak so differently, it could have been so bad, but she chose to end with hope.  Hope that Melinda could tell her story and people could understand what happened.  They could be her supporters, not her detractors.

Speak tells teens that it is OK to tell someone that you have been assaulted or a loved one has been assaulted.  Listen to Laurie Halse Anderson read her Speak Poem created from the letters sent to her from teens who read her book and reached out to her:



What would those teens have done without Speak?  Would they have ever told anyone what happened to them?

Pornography is meant to titillate, to arouse.  If you consider Speak to be pornographic then you think it is arousing to watch little girls get raped.  People who like to rape little girls or watch little girls get raped are pedophiles.

We need to #SpeakLoudly to keep Speak available and accessible to teens.  Buy a copy and read it.  Borrow it from the library.  Loan your copy to a friend.  Talk about it with your daughter, son, brother, sister, parent.  Watch the movie adaptation with Kristen Stewart.

Don't let someone else speak for you.

ttyl / ttfn / l8r,g8r (I read banned books - nyah, nyah!)

September has my little bookclub reading our own selections that fit with the term "language" - we can read whatever we want relating in some way to that word.  I had planned to read The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English but I can't find it; the book is still in my database, so I didn't get rid of it, I must have packed it while "decluttering" my office.  The packed boxes are, unfortunately, in my parents' basement.

Rats and *le sigh*.  What will I read now?

I looked around to see what I could read quickly...and I thought about novels written in IM shorthand.  There are a decent number - particularly in the teen/YA section of the store (see? I said I was going to read more YA) - and Lauren Myracle's Internet Girls series caught my eye.  Hmmmm.  Then I remembered Myracle's series is one of the top ten banned or challenged books of 2009....Banned Books Week is coming up so bring on the banned books!!  Where's my "I read banned books" pin?  I think I have a whole envelope-full in my desk...

Back to Zoe, Maddie, and Angela.  ttyl opens as the "winsome threesome" starts their sophomore year of high school, ttfn starts at Thanksgiving of the girls' junior year, and l8r, g8r closes out the last semester of their high school careers.  The girls grow into adulthood over the course of the three books and they behave much like normal teenagers.  They talk about their bodies, having/not having sex in its various incarnations, drinking, doing drugs, playing pranks, applying to college, problems with their parents, problems with boys.  They gossip, swear, use slang.  I can see how parents can get bent out of shape with this series but the reality is that Zoe, Maddie, and Angela sound like real teenagers.  Real teenagers swear, real teenagers worry about having sex for the first time.  Real teenagers make poor decisions.

Myracle shows the girls in both good and bad situations and the consequences of the girls' decisions.  Angela is the first of the girls to get a boyfriend of-sorts but is also the first to deal with unfaithfulness in ttyl.  Maddie makes a poor choice regarding pot smoking in ttfn; although she decides to quit smoking up on her own, she ends up getting arrested while with a group of friends who are buying pot.  In l8r, g8r Zoe decides that she would like to be sexually active with her long-time boyfriend Doug so she goes to Planned Parenthood for an exam and a prescription for birth control and the couple uses condoms; if that doesn't say "responsible teenager" then I don't know what does.  The situations go on and on: cyberbullying, student-teacher relationships, college applications, relationships.  High school isn't some 1950s utopia where your hair is always perfect, your grades are wonderful, everyone is nice to you, and you have the perfect boyfriend; my high school experience was approximately 15 years ago and full of nasty pitfalls (but relatively tame compared to what happened to some kids I went to school with).  I can't imagine what high school is like now (the Internet was new when I was in high school, no one had email until they went to college) but I can tell you that kids need "real" novels as much as they need the fairy tales.

For books written entirely in IM, the series is surprisingly readable.  The level of Internet shorthand is pretty low, using fairly common abbreviations (brb, lol, omg, u, ur, y, etc).  Each girl consistently uses the same typeface/color/font, just like we do on AIM, etc., and their personalities come through the IMs.  Angela uses a lot of dramatic smilies and *gestures* to convey her meaning.  Maddie uses the most slang (it varies depending on who she's been hanging out with).  Zoe's are almost always complete sentences (like me - I haven't converted to internet shorthand very well).  Myracle never breaks with the convention of telling the story solely through IMs between the three characters.  I've read a few reviews for the series that feel using only IM makes for unreliability in the narrators but I think it lends more reality to the situation.  I was watching myself IM the other night and what's the #1 thing I do on IM?  Gossip.  What do the "winsome threesome" do first on IM in their coversations?  Gossip.  It's the first thing they do every time - they talk about what happened at school (particularly if one of them missed something), they talk about each other (especially if two are worried about the third), they talk about evil Queen Biotch Jana, then the three discuss what to do about whatever problem someone's currently having (Zoe's creepy teacher, Angela's move to California, Maddie's relationship with Ian).  That's not unreliable.  That's the reality that is IM.

Can you tell I really liked this series?  I had a lot of fun reading Zoe, Maddie, and Angela's IMs, I identified with each of the girls, and cheered them on when they took on Jana and her backstabbing ways (I had some bully trouble in junior high so I've been there).  This series should be accessible to teens - if you're a parent who really can't stand the thought of your "innocent" kid* reading a book that talks about oral sex then you'd better get ready to heilcopter parent like mad.  Better idea:  read the books your teen wants to read then talk about them.  Teens can surprise you.

*Spoken by a former teen who read all of Anne Rice's Beauty trilogy at the age of 14 while I was in the library waiting for my little brothers to pick out their books.  "Winnie-the-Pooh" is to "ttyl" as "ttyl" is to Anne Rice.  Learning about group sex and S&M didn't make my brain explode or turn me into a raving nymphomaniac (actually, it kind of did the opposite...) but it did make my hair stand on end for a while.

The Satanic Verses

I started reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses last September for BiblioBrat's Banned Books Challenge.  I started reading during the last week of the challenge, which was busy, busy, busy on its own, so I only got about 150 pages read before October took over and The Satanic Verses wound up at the bottom of the reading pile.  Now that September has returned, bringing with it Banned Books Week and the news that some crazy people want to burn Korans to punish Islamic fundamentalists (< sarcasm > because that's totally going to show them < / sarcasm >), it was appropriate for me to fish The Satanic Verses back out of the pile and finish it off.

Rushdie fully expects the reader to suspend belief right from the last line of the first paragraph:

Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day, or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. (p 3)

Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are the miraculous sole survivors of an act of terrorism and wash up on the beach of England.  Each begins to display characteristics representative of an otherworldly being - one displays a halo, the other a pair of horns - setting off a story of acceptance and forgiveness interspersed with commentary on tolerance, faith/doubt, megalomania, and identity.  Gibreel and Saladin form the frame narrative as we learn each man's history and as they try to piece their lives back together in the wonderfully titled section "Ellowen Deeowen".  Gibreel (as the incarnation of the archangel Gibreel) develops visions of the prophet Mahound at the time of his revelations in Jalilia (an interpretation of the life of Muhammed in Mecca) as well as those of a modern Indian peasant girl, Ayesha, who moves an entire village to walk to Mecca - through the Arabian Sea - based on the belief in her revelations from the archangel.

There are many character and narrative threads in The Satanic Verses and they don't all start to come together until late in the novel.  This is a novel to be savored and pondered with wonderfully evocative imagery.  There are also many "doubles" in this novel - two Hinds, two Mishals, two or three Ayeshas (depending on how you count), Gibreel himself and Gibreel the archangel, and a Salman (who might mirror the author depending on how you look at it) - so you must also read The Satanic Verses closely.

This is a controversial novel, there is no getting around that.  When the prophet Mahound issues a proclamation from the archangel that women are to be sequestered, a madam comes up with the idea to have her twelve girls take on the personalities of Mahound's twelve wives; the brothel receives a boost in business from the scheme but the brothel is eventually shut down and the prostitutes and collaborators are executed.  Because the novel uses the life of Muhammed as a basis, the idea that prostitutes are imitating the Prophet's wives can be offensive to some.  Do you want to know what I think?  Those people don't have to read The Satanic Verses, same as people who don't like to see novels about the life of Jesus Christ that depict him doing un-Christlike things don't have to read those.  A novel isn't real, just like any historical novel using the Tudors as basis isn't any more real just because it uses King Henry VIII as a main character.  Some events will be made up for storytelling purposes.  No one is forcing you to read it.

The novel also brings the issue of faith and doubt to the fore with the visions of Mahound and Ayesha the peasant.  How is someone believable when he or she claims to be the mouth of the archangel and brings revelations from God?  What do you do when the prophet suddenly retracts a previous statement, claiming it came from an "evil" source?  This is the controversy over the so-called Satanic Verses, a sura attributed to Muhammed that affirmed prayer to three old female polytheistic deities from the regions around Mecca but later retracted as the work of Shaitan (the devil).  Since the archangel only reveals information to a prophet, never to anyone else, how do we know if the revealments are the actual Will of God?  It requires faith, same as the village that follows Ayesha the peasant on a pilgrimage to Mecca, on foot, through the Arabian Sea; Ayesha affirms that the sea will part for them and the faithful will walk across the seabed; there are believers and there are doubters.  Like Doubting Thomas of the New Testament, does one need proof of the Divine to make the leap of faith?

The Satanic Verses is much more than just a book that pushes buttons for the sake of pushing buttons.  If those buttons set you off, then perhaps you ought not to read this book.  If you do read, look beyond those hot-buttons for the journey of Gibreel and Saladin; it's a crazy ride and, ultimately, a very satisfying one.