28 Books in 28 Days

For the month of February, I read a book a day (or, more properly, 28 books during the month; I wasn't interested in actually completing one whole book every single day).  It was awesome, and really not that hard (granted, I read pretty quickly); it just cut into my internet time, and a little bit of my cuddling time and a little bit of my sleeping time, but nothing too drastic.  Obviously I deliberately selected books of a length and complexity that I felt appropriate to this challenge -- no Les Miserables or War and Peace!

1.  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, 308 pages, Feb 1

Loved this one. Memory and family and '70s psychology and animal liberation. “Language does this to our memories -- simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies.  An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

2.  This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman, 222 pages, Feb 2

A “golden boy” forwards a sex video an eighth-grader crushing on him sends him, and everything is ruined.  I’m not sure how I feel about this, particularly the ending, since it’s all him-centric (until the end where she’s fine?) and I’m not sure where the judgment falls.  Or I suppose there’s not any and that’s the point, but I don’t like that either.

3.  Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, 309 pages, Feb 3

Autistic Maxon and bald Sunny are living a perfect suburban fake life.  He goes to space to start a moon colony of robots but a meteor hits the spaceship.  Meanwhile her mother is dying, she’s taking her autistic son off medication, and she’s refusing to wear the wig anymore.  General theme, I guess, is be wonderful and weird and yourself.  The sex scenes were surprisingly hot.

4.  The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, 253 pages, Feb 4 [for Cambridge’s February book club], reread

Technician Harlan lives in Eternity, which is where the Eternals who manage Reality (century by century) live.  They make carefully plotted Changes that are intended to better the human race by altering reality in the future Centuries. Very man-centric (as per most Asimov), though the woman turns out not to be completely useless.

“...and we and we try to plot out all the infinite possibilities of the might-have-beens and pick out a might-have-been that is better than what is and decide where in Time we can make a tiny little change to twist the is to the might-be and we have a new is and look for a new might-be, forever, and forever…”

5.  Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, 299 pages, finished Feb 5

More explicitly political than the TV show, but also less interesting and not especially well-written.

6.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, 335 pages, finished Feb 7

Good, but weird, and difficult to read since obviously I don’t speak Spanish.  Not one I super loved, but I’m glad I read it.

7.  Zone One by Colson Whitehead, 259 pages, Finished Feb 8

I’m kind of tired of zombies, but this was less about the zombies and less about survival and more about human psychology and culture (and trying to rebuild), which I liked.  He really writes very beautifully and strikingly, and I plan to check out more of what he's written. I liked all the nonsense with the provisional governor soliciting sponsors, whose products were the only ones one was permitted to use (no looting), which is not something I'd encountered before but seems spot-on.

8.  Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler, 274 pages, finished Feb 9

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Rebecca feels her life took a wrong turn when she married Joe and ended up stuck with his three daughters and his family party-planning business after his death, so tries to get back her old life (meeting up with her high school boyfriend, reading more intellectual things, etc.) before she realizes that this life is pretty good.  There’s a lot more bittersweet in there.  I was not completely enthralled the entire time, but if I’d known it was going to end the way it did I might have been more at peace. “Look...face it...there is no true life.  Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be.  You just do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

9.  Arcadia by Lauren Groff, 289 pages, finished Feb 10

About Bit, who grew up in a hippie commune that later sort of fell apart, and the lives he and the other now-grown children try to make in the "real" world. I liked the first half better than the last half (I have a soft spot for communes), but the best part was the language and how it was written, with such joys as:

“Ike tries to answer, but his mind jitters off like a lizard when he thinks, and he is left with a handful of tail-thought.”

10.  Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, 243 pages, finished Feb 11

Short stories, with a bit of the magical about them. One of them was about a bunch of horses who were reincarnated presidents and kept arguing about whether they were in heaven or hell or what.

11.  The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane, 241 pages, finished Feb 12

An older woman living alone is surprised by a ‘government carer’ who appears and seems to solve all her problems. It was beautiful and well-done, but I am kind of indignant on behalf of the character, whom I feel that the author betrayed.

“...and afterwards in conversation -- just a few days later -- Ruth realized he’d forgotten all about it, and she was furious at the way she fell in love with small things that turned out to be meaningless.”

12.  Room by Emma Donoghue, 321 pages, Feb 13

From the point of view of a kid born to a woman who had been kidnapped and kept prisoner for years, about their life in the shed where he spent his whole life to that point. I thought, from hearing so much about it, that this was going to be a lot more traumatic and grittier than it was, but I really liked it.  This is probably the thing I've read from the point of view of a child which I think is most authentic and interesting and properly done. I also love a lot of what the mother has to say to people in the latter half of the book.

13.  One of Ours by Willa Cather, 371 pages, finished Feb 16

I was surprised how much I liked the writing, but the story really makes me deeply uncomfortable.  Here, this young man is too sensitive for life and wants more than this provincial life (basically), so then he goes off to war and finally finds likeminded fellows and blooms (uh, seriously?), and then dies and his mother is glad of it because he would have been disillusioned by the world afterward.  Meh.

“He was a jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not thin-skinned.” (I feel like this is the saddest line ever, much in the vein of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

“[...]a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing progression, moving as close as they could without forming a solid mass.[...]  There was a solemnity about a storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity.  The myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite end.”

14.  The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.  by Adelle Waldman, 240 pages, finished Feb 17

I saw this reviewed as a description of the kind of guy who’s enlightened, not an asshole, but who wastes women’s fertile years and never settles down with them, etc.  Which I guess it is; it’s the most reasonable indictment (if it is one) of the Millennials I’ve seen thus far.  I find it vaguely anxiety-inducing to identify terribly closely with some of these thoughts and scenes (some from the male and some from the female perspective).

“Contrary to what these women seemed to think, he was not indifferent to their happiness.  And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.”

15.  See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid, 182, finished 2/19

So I actually didn’t especially like this, though I had expected to.  The “lyricism” etc. turned out to be just thoughts going in circles, and while bits of it were intriguing, I didn’t really like the effect.  Or the characters.

16.  Lexicon by Max Barry, 388 pages, finished Feb 20

I really liked this.  Poets using words to control/persuade people, the bareword, all the drama, the psychology, the shielding, the plotting.  Tied in to Tower of Babel mythology.  I especially liked the news stories (cover stories) about the events in the book.

17.  Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin, 343 pages, finished Feb 22

About an intesex kid being raised as a guy (he apparently was never informed there were other options, but he does identify as a guy, so there's that) who is raped by his best friend and winds up pregnant, just as he's starting his first serious relationship and while his dad is running for office. Lots of secrecy and shame and confusion. I think it's a good book to exist and for kids to have access to, but I imagine it's a kind of triggering read for people who have similar experiences or thought patterns. He ends up in a good place, but there's a lot of blame-taking and gender essentialism and suicide ideation stuff in the middle. It's told from several characters' perspectives (him, the girlfriend, his little brother, his mom, the doctor).

18.  Love is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett, 199 pages, Feb 22

Short stories about family and such set in Nigeria.  I liked “My Smelling Mouth Problem,” “Trophy,” and “The Little Girl with Budding Breasts and a Bubblegum Laugh” best.

19.  Tampa by Alissa Nutting, 263 pages, Feb 22

Very much a gender-reversed Lolita (a 24-year-old woman becomes a teacher specifically so she'll have access to the specific type of 14-year-old boy she's attracted to -- quite the sociopath) except much more sexually explicit.

20.  The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 217 pages, Feb 24

Actually pretty good.  A young man marries instead of pursuing the not-yet-divorced (and with pressure, presumed never to be) cousin of his fiancee, regrets it and keeps trying to set up an affair, but she finally leaves and he doubles down on his life and such.  Very duty-driven, and then at the end, about the change in New York society in a very short generation.

“He reviewed his friends’ marriages -- the supposedly happy ones -- and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland.  He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were:  a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

21.  The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, 109 pages, Feb 24

Laurel comes home to be with her father when he gets eye surgery, from which he never recovers.  The funeral, complete with everyone from the town, the new (younger) wife Fay who is terrible, and a couple days reliving the past in the old house.

22.  Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan, 280  pages, Feb 26

Memoir about parenting (and a lot of ruminating about the difference between fathering and mothering and what doing either says about you and your gender that I'm not really personally sold on) by a transgender woman who transitioned while her children were fairly young.

“But then, this is one of the fundamental contradictions of parenthood -- the unending necessity to teach your children lessons that you yourself still have not learned.”

“Is this one of those moments you always remember because it’s so adorable?  Or because it was the first clue you had that your child would someday grow up to shoot the president?”

23.  Virgin:  The Untouched History by Hanne Blank, 257 pages, Feb 26

History of virginity, what it's meant (physically, socially) at various points in time. I was pleased to learn that it has at some times been much more a thing of power, like the vestal virgins and women who went into convents in order not to marry and thus to retain legal personhood.

"This isn't to say that virginity is relative and therefore irrelevant. To the contrary, we have more than two and a half millennia of written history that make it abundantly clear that virginity is relative and therefore immensely relevant."

24.  Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell, 290 pages, Feb 27

A father vanishes without giving any indication of why, which gives way to some family drama.

"Aoife has to resist the urge to grind her teeth, to throw something at the wall. Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?"

"He feels, he realizes, jealous of himself, as if he is looking back at the scene from a distance."

25.  Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 247 pages, Feb 27

Lovely even if I don’t agree with the faith.

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  Every one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.  Maybe I should have said we are like planets.  But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations.  The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.”

26.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, 336 pages [audiobook, though], finished Feb 27

A precocious girl contemplates burning down her apartment as sort of a protest against her parents and the world, while the concierge in her building persists in hiding that she's actually a very cultured woman.

27.  Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout [Pulitzer], 270 pages, Feb 28

A series of short stories set in one small town.

“[She] felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.”

“Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’  Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.  Which is why you need the little bursts as well.”

“[...] she had the sensation that she had been seen.  And she had not even known she’d felt invisible.”

28.  The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, 218 pages, Feb 28
“I don’t know why I did it.  But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a life-long pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together -- I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not.  Often enough in my life I have done things I had decided not to do.  Something -- whatever that may be -- goes into action; ‘it’ goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, ‘it’ makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, ‘it’ keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be.  I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior.  But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided.  It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.”

Creation Myth

This story was written for a college course my freshman year. We had been studying creation myths and were then assigned to write ones of our own. Mine was received to great accolades, which I found amusing, as I had written it as snarkily as I could and felt it was probably directly ripped from an amalgam of every science fiction story I had ever read. At any rate, here it is, edited only lightly (as apparently my grasp of semicolons at the age of 18 was not as flawless as I had heretofore thought):

The Creation of the World (Among Other Things)

A very long time ago, before the world had been created, there existed a spirit. He had no name, but in later years, he has become known as The First One (for obvious reasons). This First One had no body. He was merely a spiritual being that existed in empty space. Well, not quite empty—the space had random balls of gas that gave off light, now known as stars, strewn around it, apparently randomly. The First One could not see the light given out, however, for he had no eyes, and without eyes, there is no perception of light. He was, however, perfectly fine without being able to see. He had no need to see, as he could sense where these stars were. Actually, he did not even have to sense, somehow he just knew. (Incidentally, The First One was not really a “he” either—spirits have no need of gender. He is now referred to as a “he” just to make it easier for those telling the stories, and for those to whom the stories are told.)

The First One does not know how he came into existence, so we cannot know either. He does not remember coming into being, but he knows he has not been in existence forever. He deduced that he had to have been created by something, probably the same something that created the space and the stars, but he was not sure what this was, nor did he really care. He saw no reason why he needed to know how he came into being, as long as he had (a quite logical view, but one that humans, unfortunately, do not share).

The First One had mental abilities. He could create things just by thinking about them and willing them into existence. He discovered this one day when longing for company. Though his mind could amuse him for years, he had been in existence for thousands, or perhaps millions or billions, of years, and he now desired the company of some other being. Since his only experience was with the space (no company there), the stars (ditto), and himself, he logically began thinking of another being similar to himself. It began as an imaginary friend sort of thing, but because The First One had these powers, his “imaginary” friend became real after he had longed for it for hundreds of years. The First One was greatly shocked when, one day (though there were not really days—or years, for that matter—since there was nothing revolving or orbiting the sun, nor, in fact, a sun per se, just millions of unremarkable stars) another being popped into existence. It took him some time to figure out what was happening, as he had never before had contact with another consciousness. In fact, at first, he was a little concerned for his mental health. He did not know if this consciousness was indeed a separate entity, or if he was fooling himself into thinking it was out of some insane desire for company. Eventually, he decided it did not really matter, as long as it alleviated his loneliness and boredom.

The two spirits reveled in the company of each other for some time. Then, The Second One began probing as to her (again, not really a “she,” but the myth has evolved to refer to The Second One as “her”) origins. The First One communicated to her how he had basically thought and willed her into being. They decided to try again, and see if both of them could produce other beings. They could. The First One was naturally better at it, since he had had previous experience. However, The Second One caught on quickly. Soon, there were many spirits occupying the star-strewn space, which we now call the universe. They all enjoyed creating things out of their minds.

Since these beings were intelligent spirits, with no physical manifestation, they communicated through their consciousness. Now, it would be referred to as telepathy or mind reading; however, this is not exactly what it was. The beings basically shared a common consciousness. They knew what the others knew and sensed what the others sensed. Somehow, though, they were yet somewhat separate. We cannot comprehend fully how they were, as it is beyond our realm of experience. There was no actual sending of messages or thoughts; whatever one thought, the others sensed. They could tell that it was originating outside of their own minds, but other than that, it was very similar to the process of their own thoughts. This link existed because each of them had been constructed out of another’s mind. It is impossible to create an intelligent being without having some sort of connection with it.

One of the newest beings, The Little One, somehow made matter with his mind. It was probably an accident, as they had never really thought about matter. The only matter about was stars, which they generally ignored, as they were of no use to these spiritual beings. Nobody had ever thought to try to make anything other than company, in the form of other spirits, nor would they have known how to go about it if they had thought about it. Somehow, though, The Little One created particles of matter, which he arranged into interesting shapes. (The spirits still could not see, but The Little One could sense his matter, since it was his creation. The others could therefore sense it through him.) This accidental discovery started a fad among the younger beings, who began spending all of their time in contests to see who could make the most interesting and novel things out of this matter.

The space began to be fairly cluttered with random clumps of matter. This was not really important, since the spirits had no matter in and of themselves, so it was not as if the creations were taking up space they needed to live in. However, some of the Elders (a few of the older spirits who had created most of the others and who had more traditional mindsets) grew upset at the way the younger spirits were treating their space. They mandated that each spirit who wanted to play with matter in this manner got a specific area of the space. These areas were marked by stars. Each spirit who so desired got one star, around which he could strew his creations. If they expanded too far, the gravitational forces of someone else’s star would capture them, and the spirit would lose his creations, so they were pretty good about only taking up the space allotted to them. The spirits did not create this gravity, nor had they ever sensed it until now, when it became relevant to their existences.

The Elders were still not happy about the fad of matter creation; however, there was nothing they could do about it. They felt a vague uneasiness about the whole thing, since it was meddling with something unknown. Matter and the laws of physics had never before intruded upon their existence, and they felt no reason to be wasting time with such trivialities now. The newer beings, however, did not care about this, thinking (as many young beings do) that they knew better than the older spirits and that since their way was new, it was progress.

One day (for now that there were planets orbiting stars, there were days, years, and other measures of time, or at least the possibility of them, had anyone felt inclined to use them), another young spirit decided it would be fun to make a physical dwelling for his consciousness. He formed a body, which he then occupied with his mind. Soon, everyone was imitating this novel idea. They did not inhabit the bodies all the time, for it would be quite boring to be constantly limited by the physical laws matter was subject to. They created worlds as habitats for the creatures they inhabited, as well as other creatures to interact with the ones they inhabited.

The Elders saw the state of chaos and disrespect into which their universe had fallen, and through their superior brain power (it was closer to the original, and was therefore stronger), bound these young, irresponsible beings to the bodies they were playing with. They were now forced to remain forever in the bodies they had made only to entertain themselves. Separation of the spirits into bodies encouraged them to think more and more within themselves and less and less among the others, causing them slowly to lose their telepathic ability to communicate. In the beginning, it was their choice; they chose to sequester themselves and withdraw from the society of beings. Once they realized the consequences of that choice, they tried to reverse it, but it was too late.

These embodied spirits became the ancestors of every intelligent form of life on every planet. Each one had been embodied on his own planet, in the body he had made for himself to play in. Therefore, the beings on various planets differ widely. Some died out because they had not prepared their bodies to survive very long, and some died out because they had neglected to design a means of replication. There were many, however, who survived. Though the bodies they designed may not have been perfect, they still had enough mental powers to change them slightly before their powers dissipated. The designs for the bodies were still not flawless, but they were good enough to last, and in many cases, they could adapt over time to better fit their environments. Obviously, one of these planets where this occurred is one that we now live on. And this is the beginning of mankind as well as all the other intelligent races on other planets.