Book Thirty-eight: The Knife of Never Letting Go

Book Thirty-eight: The Knife of Never Letting Go
Pages: 479
Finished: 4:25 a.m. July 28

So, you guys? I'm a little overwhelmed. This book is CRAZY. Seriously. Because, you guys? I totally just read it in two and a half hours. The WHOLE BOOK. That's 479 pages of normal sized Young Adult book text in less than three hours. You know how I read Catching Fire in one night because of how good it was? and how I can't read the last Harry Potter in anything less than 5 and a half hours straight through, don't call me I won't answer the phone, must cry for Snape insanity? This was like that, but a different kind of intense, plus there is a talking dog. Let me repeat that: There is a talking dog in this book and it is endearing as hell. It is pretty much exactly the way I picture dogs talking. Like in UP but cuter because I get to give the dog whatever voice I want.
PS. I've only read one other book all the way through in the past three weeks, and I don't understand why we can have all these really easy to read interesting books for young adults, but I feel obligated to slog my way through Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to make myself feel guilty about being an American who didn't have to go through difficulties.
Issues with the book were not completely absent. Pretty much half the book is misspelled. This bothered me for about forty pages, and then I just tried to think of it like Huckleberry Finn, and it was fine. It makes sense that if you have a narrator whose words you can see, you would see them misspelled if he doesn't even know how to read. P.S. Super adorable when he tries to read. I mean it.
The premise of the book is also interesting. Human settlers leave Earth (or I'm assuming it's Earth) and land on a new planet. The new planet causes everyone to be able to hear all the thoughts of all the men. Different groups of people have different reactions. The story goes on from there. The way that they give you these bits and snippets of history and "truth" is also very vividly written.
Probably not for fans of sci-fi, but an enjoyable read, so maybe you should try it anyway.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Thirty-seven: Garden Spells

Book Thirty-seven: Garden Spells
Finished: July 21
Pages: 290

Obviously, I have been remiss in my posting. So, you'll have to stick with me as I try to remember what I wanted to say about a book that is now living at my mother's house, hopefully being read.
I liked this book. It was sweet, and light, and everything that you want in summer reading. It wasn't too realistic, it had that magical hint that can either make or break a light summer read. Okay, maybe it wasn't a hint of magic. Maybe there was an apple tree who was my favorite character. No, it didn't walk, or talk, or anything else, it was just a charming tree.
The story is reminiscent of other chick-lit-y books: two sisters separated by years and choices come back together in their home town and deal with all the drama that comes from that separation, both between each other, and between the family and the town.
I liked the interesting magical details: scorching hand prints, a man so full of love and lust that he glows at night...it was the little things that really made the story so delightful.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Thirty-six: Nine Parts of Desire

Book Thirty-six: Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
Finished: July 2
Pages: 239

When I was in Borders the other day, I was looking for another Geraldine Brooks book to read. Having read People of the Book, I wanted to read her other novels, so I grabbed this one. At the time I thought it would be similar to People, a fictionalization of real events. Instead I was pleasantly surprised to find a book that is a work of non-fiction, based on Ms. Brooks' experiences as a foreign correspondent living in the Middle East for 6 years. Her look into the lives of Islamic women of all different backgrounds and opinions gives a remarkably even-keeled informative look into this world, a world of which I am sorely lacking information.
I like learning about different cultures, and while all books, even ones written with journalistic integrity cannot help but be biased towards whatever beliefs the author holds, I feel that Ms. Brooks tried very hard to be open-minded and come with honest questions seeking honest answers. I must be honest, I was impressed by the obvious scholarship shown in her meticulous research, as well as being impressed by the caliber of interviews she was able to have over the course of her time in the Mid-East. There are conversations in the book with the wife of Khomeini, as well as his daughter; King Hussein of Jordan and his wife Queen Noor; as well as her ability to get regular women and men to talk to her, those people who are not in the spotlight but dealing with the same issues. She quotes the Koran and the hadith (stories about the life of the Prophet that are not strictly in the scriptures of the Koran, as well as the laws and regulations of a number of different countries, cases that have come before the various courts and the reactions of the people.
This one quote, to me, sums up the eloquence with which she speaks candidly about all her subjects:

It wasn't until I went to Cairo and started seeking out Muslim women that I realized I hadn't made a close female friend since I left school.
I'd forgotten how much I liked to be with women. And yet there was always a sourness lurking a the edge of even the sweetest encounters. Squatting on the floor of a Kurdish friend's kitchen, helping the women with their bread making, I realized what an agreeable thing it was to be completely surrounded by women, to have a task that was ours alone. As the women's deft fingers flung balls of dough under my rolling pin and the fire roared beneath a baking sheet of blackened metal, I felt contentment in shared work well done.
But an hour into the labor, as my shoulders ached and scalding sweat dribbled down my back, I began to resent the boy toddler who kept ambling up to the steaming pile of fresh bread and breaking off tasty morsel in his fat little fists. His sister, not much older, was already part of our bread-making assembly line. Why should he learn so young that her role was to toil for his pleasure?
The nunlike clothes, pushed to the back of my closet, remind me of all those mixed feelings. Every time my hand brushes the smooth fabric of the chador, I think of Nahid Aghtaie, the Iranian medical student who gave up an easy life in London to go home and work at low-paying jobs to advance the goals of her revolution. I remember her, in Qum, drifting toward me over the marble-floored mosque to tell me that she'd prayed for me "to have nice children." And then I think of her beautiful face-the small visible triangle between brown and lip-radiant on the morning of the murder of Rushdie's Japanese translator in July 1991. "This," she said triumphantly, "shows the power of Islam." I told her that, to me, it no more showed the power of Islam than an Israeli soldier's shooting of a Palestinian child showed the power of Judaism. Why not, I asked her, cite the "power of Islam" in the humanitarian work that Iran was doing for the flood of Iraqi refugees that was then pouring over its borders? "Because nobody notices when we do such things," she said. "But every news report in the world will note this execution."
Eventually I became worn out by such conversations. Friendships with women like Nahid were an emotional whipsaw: how was it possible to admire her for the courage of her convictions, when her convictions led to such hateful reasoning?

The title of the book comes from a quote said by Ali, the husband of Muhammad's beloved daughter Fatima and the founder of the Shiite Islam. He said, "Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men" (39). In the Catholic school of thought, she goes on to say, girls are seen as the less sexually active gender and so must therefore always be careful around those sex-crazed boys. Islam is the opposite, women must be careful because they are the sex-crazed ones. There are also a lot fewer rules in the Koran than in the Bible regarding sex. It is interesting to see how different and yet still repressive so much of any society can be.
Anyone who wants to learn about the different ways that Muslim society views women should read this book. It is exceptionally well-written and eye-opening.
Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Thirty-five: Five Quarters of the Orange

Book Thirty-five: Five Quarters of the Orange
Finished: June 21, 2010
Pages: 336

I have read one of Joanne Harris’s other books, Chocolat. That book is certainly similar in a number of ways to Five Quarters. Both set in France, with strange names for many of her characters, and food. Food always plays a huge role in her books. Little wonder that she has put out a couple of cookbooks.
Set during the German occupation of France, this story deals with the lives of three French children, their mother, and their interactions with a German soldier. The children (Boise is nine at the time, the eldest, Cassis is not even sixteen) spy on their neighbors in order to gain favor with Tomas: “We were wild animals, just as Mother said, and we took some taming. He must have known that from the start, the clever way he set out to take us one by one, making each feel special…Even now, God help me, I can almost believe it. Even now” (108). Over the course of the book, the relationships between all the various characters come to light as Boise, now an old woman, discovers her mother's recipe book and all the secrets it contains.

Woke at six this morning, for the first time in months. Strange, how everything looks different. When you haven’t slept it’s as if the world is sliding away bit by bit. The ground isn’t quite in line with your feet. The air seems full of shiny stinging particles. I feel I’ve left a part of myself behind, but I can’t remember what. They look at me with such solemn eyes. I think they’re afraid of me. All but Boise. She’s not afraid of anything. I want to warn her that it doesn’t last forever.

Many of the issues the characters face are ones that are of their own making. Although you would think that I would place the blame on the Germans, and the secrecy that didn't allow for free expression which led to the tragedy in the book, but I don't. I place the blame on the shoulders of all the characters, especially Boise. She causes a lot of the trouble in the book through her own choices to be trouble herself. Although in the end she regrets some of these actions, “Of course, by then there were to be no more oranges, ever again. I think even I had lost my taste for them” (222), I felt that she was not as remorseful as much as avoiding blame and consequences.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Thirty-four: The Disappeared

Book Thirty-four: The Disappeared
Finished: June 8
Pages: 235

How do you write about unspeakable things? How do you put into words the loss and despair faced by the survivors, by those who lived through these atrocities, who have families who go through them? How do you say these things, so that people will stop talking and listen?How do you put the loss of thousands upon thoughts of people into words?

This is the struggle faced by people who want to write about the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the killings in Cambodia under Polpot. How do you write about something so violent, so horrible that it defies all speaking of it? Because in a way to put it in words is to acknowledge that human beings are capable of such violence. To put it in words limits the horror to the words on the page, and I don’t think that any words can truly encapsulate the systematic murders of any number of people, much less thousands upon thousands of people. Kim Echlin attempts to put the horror into words in the book The Disappeared.

She attempts to humanize the victims, to give faces to those who are now nothing but dust. She also attempts to give voice to the horror of the survivors, those who truly survived, and the walking dead to survived but not completely. For, as horrible as it is for those who are dead; the true pain is felt by those who keep living. “The tortured stay tortured. After the bodies were cleared, imagine what people had to do. Imagine the stench that clings” (103). Her unique blend of the far past, the recent past, and the present, jumping back and forth in the narrative, disorients the reader while also allowing the reader to feel the whirlwind romance of our narrator, Anne, as she meets, loves, loses, finds, and loses Serey, a Cambodian student and musician who is trapped in Canada after the closing of the Cambodian borders. When the borders re-open, Serey leaves without the much younger Anne to search for his family. Ten years later, Anne follows his face, haunted by images on the television. Some aspects of this book I think were really well done. I like the impact of the occasional super-short chapter. Some of her prose is excellent, calling up emotions and images that perfectly capture a moment or feeling. For example, when talking about her childhood, being brought up by a single father, on page 11 she says:

When he read to me he sometimes looked at the black and white picture of my mother on my bedside table. The focus is soft on the young woman holding a baby, me, and our eyes are locked together. Papa’s voice would drift away and I learned to wait quietly until his attention flickered from the photograph back to the page. I think I began to read this way, studying the words in an open book, waiting for absence to be filled.

The only thing that really annoyed me was the narrator herself. Maybe I’m just not romantic enough to really think that if I had fallen in love at 16 with a man considerable older than me that ten years after he left me I would travel more than halfway around the world to track him down with no address, much less that I would learn a completely new language, brave a war-torn country that was dangerous to travel in, much less without any plan or contact. Sometimes the sap is just so overwhelming that it feels too romantic for a novel about genocide. “I saw the world more sharply with you, as if I had put on new lenses, the left a little stronger than the right, but worn together they shaped blurred edges into clear lines, There were moments I would have liked not to see so sharply. Borng samlanh,[my dearest darling] I wanted to know everything about you. I was young and but slenderly knew myself” (43). Or for example, the entirety of Chapter 45: “I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as your slept” (135).

Overall, I think that considering the subject matter, Echlin did a superb job. I certainly couldn’t put the book down. Many parts of the book will stick with me, much like I can still remember many parts of the movie Hotel Rwanda for the same reason, they are too haunting to forget.

“Long ago, when they emptied Phnom Penh, closed the borders, people remembered things, the last time they slept in a bed, the last time they saw a loved one. There was that last telegram out of Phnom Penh before all lines to the outside world were cut: I ALONE IN POST OFFICE. LOSING CONTACT WITH OTHERS. I AM TREMBLING. HOW QUIET THE STREETS. NOWHERE TO HIDE. MAY BE LAST CABLE TODAY AND FOREVER” (170).

Good reading,
Caitlin

Books Thirty through Thirty-three: The Pagan Chronicles

Book Thirty: Pagan's Crusade
Finished: June 1
Pages: 256

Book Thirty-one: Pagan in Exile
Finished: June 2
Pages: 336

Book Thirty-two: Pagan's Vows
FInished: June 3
Pages: 336

Book Thirty-three: Pagan's Scribe
Finished: June 3
Pages: 368

Okay, as you might remember (or as you read below) I read Babylonne without realizing that it was a sequel to this series, so I decided to read the rest of them to see if I liked it better afterward. The answer is certainly "yes." There is something endearing about Pagan, the young Christian Arab who grows up in Jerusalem during the medieval Crusades, and the fall of Jerusalem to Salahadin. Pagan becomes a squire to a young Templar knight named Roland, and the first three books are told from Pagan's point of view as they adventure from Jerusalem to the south of France. My favorite book, however, is Pagan's Scribe, the fourth, partially because it introduces a new character, Isidore, who I had met previously in Babylonne. The endearing quirks of Pagan's character, the amusing sarcasm that is his irreverant nature, and contrasting deep love for his friends is much more apparent from an outsider's perspective. While I think that perhaps a teenager might enjoy these books more than I did, I certainly didn't hate them at all. They were funny, and the witty banter that Pagan keeps up, first with himself, then with Roland, and finally with Isidore, would be enough to keep me reading.

"Name?"
"Pagan Kidrouk, sir."
"Age?"
"Sixteen. Sir"
"Born in?"
"Bethlehem."
Rockhead looks up. The brain peeps out from behind the brawn.
"Don't worry, sir. It didn't happen in a stable."
Clunk. Another jest falls flat on the ground.

"Why did you leave?"
"It was the jokes, sir. In the guardroom. Not that I object to jokes as such. Some of my best friends are complete jokes. But I don't like leper jokes. Or dysentery jokes. Especially when I'm eating."

The grammar issues that I faced with Jinks' other writing is even more apparent here. The incomplete sentences, as well as multiple tangential phrases did at times make it difficult to keep up. During battle scenes in the first book, and then in other times of fast action, it is hard to keep track of who is talking, but often seemed purposeful, since in the heat of the moment it would be difficult to keep track of what was going on in real life.
I think that the characters were well developed, and certainly Babylonne would have made so much more sense had I read these in order, but at the same time, I had a good time figuring out the mystery that was Pagan in the same way that Babylonne herself did, through a whole lot of digging. I wouldn't recommend this book to a really high-minded Christian, since there is quite a bit of blasphemy, but anyone with a decent brain between their ears would see that most of the irreverence is directed towards stupid characters rather than God. All in all, pretty hilarious, and I'm glad I wasted my days reading them.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Twenty-nine: Babylonne

Book Twenty-nine: Babylonne
Finished: May 31
Pages: 384

Okay, I'll be honest. I picked this up on a whim, when I was looking for the second book in the Mortal Instruments trilogy at the library. Since they didn't have the book that I was looking for, I decided to go with a random book that had intrigued me for a while. Since it's my last week in the library at school for three months, I've been picking up a lot of these books since they are fast reads and generally entertaining. Besides, if they aren't entertaining, I don't feel bad about just taking them right back downstairs.
So, I didn't realize that this book was part of a series when I first picked it up. It certainly stands on its own, but I will say this, it probably would make more sense if I had read the others first. The story is of a young girl named Babylonne who lives during the 1200's in France, and her travels of discovery, both of herself and her absent parents. My hope is that if I had read some of the other books I would have a better understanding of the culture and characters. Babylonne is a member of a sect of Christianity called Cathars, and knowing nothing about either that faith, or the politics of the time, I was lost for a vast majority of the book. The style of writing also takes some getting used to, as most of the book is written in a stream of consciousness style that interrupts itself interrupting itself. Very hard transition to make from the more straightforward narrative I had been reading the past few books. To be sure, Babylonne's voice is very apparent, and she does seem to come alive once you get past the first few chapters and get into the swing of things. She has an entertaining and sarcastic view of the world that certainly does not fail to amuse. For example, when describing her grandmother's snore she says "She has a snore like an armored corpse being dragged across dry cobblestones" (11). I mean, can you really be more descriptive?
I have many questions about her father, Pagan, who apparently is the main character in all the previous books. I think that these questions would be answered already had I noticed that there was a particular order to them. Whoops. Perhaps I will hold off all further judgment of the narrative and its plot holes until I have read the other books. After accustoming myself to the style of prose, I had a good enough time, but we shall see. I certainly enjoyed it enough to read the rest of the series.

Good Reading,
Caitlin