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.

A book worth banning…

…is a book worth reading.

Check out this great video from Open Road Media in celebration of Banned Books Week.

http://players.openroadmedia.com/getPlayerHtml.php?playerId=orimPid0&type=load3_0&distribution_id=693&items=1&embedver=3_0

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Banned Books Week 2012: September 30 – October 6

Banned Books Week is back – celebrating 30 years of advocating for literature and readers’ rights.  (They’ve got great “Banned” and “Forbidden” artwork this year that, for some reason, Blogger thinks the .jpeg isn’t an image or video. *ruh-roh* )

I’ve done individual book posts in the past (my Johnny Got His Gun post is still one of the most visited posts which makes me think that the book is still on school curriculae – good) but I’ve got a busy week this week and I’d rather focus on reading books.  To that end I intend to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower (which I’ve never read) and start on Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (as well as read Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll short story collection for BNBC).  I may also post a bit about my thoughts on book challenges.

So get out there and read!  (Got my “I read Banned Books” button ready on my nametag at the store.)

Current book-in-progress: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Joseph Anton, and The Doll
Current knitted item: Shrug (I think I have a Christmas stocking or two to finish…)
Current movie obsession: Headhunters is streaming on Netflix!!  Now I can watch Jaime Lannister Nikolaj Coster-Waldau all dressed up and clean in a suit.  Yummy.
Current iTunes loop: Mumford & Sons Sigh No More (yeah, yeah, I know they have a new album but I was just introduced to the band so I’m trying the previous album on for size)

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.