Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead Books, May 2017
336 pages

This book. Is so. Funny heartbreaking beautiful. It is about family, warts and all. It's about religion, and being female, and writing, and poetry, and memory, and growing up, and going home. It's about love, and all the good and all the pain that can bring.

Priestdaddy is technically a memoir, but if you're looking for a straightforward, average memoir, this is not that. You had better be prepared to let Lockwood take you on her journey in her way, because she's not going to conform to your expectations. The writing is spectacular, unsettling, and bursting out at the seams. She spirals into digressions with the virtuosity of a scatting jazz vocalist, like she's galloping through the English language with her hands white-knuckled on the reigns, leaving this reader breathless and slightly disoriented and utterly thrilled. Sometimes she writes like her father, the titular priest, plays guitar: with gratuitous effusion in a way that almost (but not quite) makes sense.

Lockwood's family has an astonishing number of warts. They are eccentric in a way that is so astounding, sometimes shocking, that it's almost hard to believe - Lockwood is a standard-bearer for the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" because I'm pretty sure some of the things she writes about would be considered too outrageous to be allowed in a novel. Nothing escapes her sideways gaze; the gaze is both pointed and compassionate. Sometimes she is full of anger. But she also loves expansively, if in complicated ways.

This whole book is complicated. It's funny and erudite and full of light and sometimes she's talking about things that are crass or horrible. She writes about her childhood in ways that the memories come across as both sharp and slightly unreal, as childhood memories often do. She indulges extravagantly in hyperbole, such that sometimes you're not sure when to take her seriously, and then she will reach right into your chest cavity and grab hold of your beating heart with a furious concision and you take everything absolutely seriously and feel sick. And then in the next paragraph you will love the people in her life, because she obviously does, and she is holding them tenderly so that you do too.

I know this is not a book for everyone; if you are easily offended by coarse language or bodily functions or any whiff of blasphemy, you will probably not make it past the first chapter. Likewise if you can't handle chronological jumping, digressions, or someone poking and prodding at language just to see what she can make it do. But I loved it, and I can't stop talking about it or thinking about it, and I am delighted at the feeling that Patricia Lockwood is just getting started.

Winter by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

House of Anansi Press, 2011

210 pages

Disclaimer: I love winter. So does Adam Gopnik. And I have decided that I'm going to try to stop apologising for this love of mine, as fashionable as complaining about the snow and cold weather is: winter is a wonderful season, and Gopnik spends quite a lot of time validating my fondness of it. If you thought that maybe five lectures and 210 pages was too long to spend talking about winter, you would be wrong. Gopnik manages it and one gets the impression he could have kept going. And this reader - and most readers, I'd wager, even those who have no love of cold and ice - would have been pretty happy to keep following.

Winter is part of the Massey Lectures series, the printed version of the spoken lecture series heard every year on CBC's Ideas. I quite like the idea of reading each of the lecture series, although I haven't gotten very far with this mission and they just keep on piling up (there is a new one every year. How am I supposed to keep up with that?) 

Gopnik's love for this season - this accident of nature, this clockwork shift to ice due to an axial tilt as our planet orbits the sun - is incredibly well-informed. If you look at the tags on this post, you'll get an idea of the sorts of range this book has. He starts with an exploration of the way the way winter has been viewed through the years has shifted, from being a season of bitterness, loss, and hardship, to being a season of warmth, light, and fellowship. He proceeds to an investigation of the polar winter, winter as place, and specifically the draw it held for Victorian explorers. The third lecture is essentially about Christmas, and the place it holds in the Western secular holiday year, as our festival of cold and light. Then there is an extended digression into winter sport, which is mostly about ice hockey, though he spends a serious amount of time looking at the advent and evolution of ice skating period. (Gopnik is a hockey fan, and is quite clear about that, so the entire chapter devoted to expressing his love of the game is not a surprise.) And finally he looks at what it may mean to us to lose winter, either by moving away from it, or by the self-inflicted wound of climate change. Throughout each chapter he is looking at the psychology of winter; that is, what does winter instill in us, culturally, individually? What ideas and thoughts and meanings do we instill into the season? What is winter, exactly, and what has it been?

Books like this that investigate a single idea from so many angles tend to really capture me, particularly if they're done well, and I think this book is. The writing style is very informal - Gopnik's introduction explains that things, as written out, are essentially transcripts of some practice lectures he gave, with a bit of tightening for readability. At times, when a sentence construct felt a little weird, I read it out loud to myself and that fixed the problem. Gopnik is thoughtful, funny, insightful, and relaxed. He circles around particular points and draws his arguments tighter and tighter. He lets the reader in on secrets, he tells us fascinating facts, he laughs at the absurd even as he respects it.

But there was a bit of a thing, and I almost hesitate to even bring it up, because the problem with noting something like this is that, these days, it can be enough for people to pillory the book and the author unfairly. (It can also be enough to earn me the label of "too sensitive" and I hope I don't deserve it in this case, but I am wary of that too.) It was noticeable, and it did bug me, so:

Gopnik is looking a lot at history, and it is a primarily male history. There are not a lot of women in this book. Franny Mendelssohn, sister of the more familiar composer, gets a brief, positive mention. Anna Brownell Jameson, the writer of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada - her diary, essentially - gets a lot of page time in the first lecture. And that is about it, except for some nameless skaters flirting with men in images of skating in Central Park, affectionate mentions of his wife and daughter, the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen, and then - the throwaway and unnecessary reference that solidified my feeling that maybe Gopnik should have been paying a bit more attention to the issue of gender in his lectures - a Playmate makes a very baffling metaphorical appearance. It's not that the book feels like a frat party, exactly. I don't think Gopnik is generally disrespectful of the female, the feminine, and certainly not of individual women. But I was noticing a lack, and then the Playmate comment made me actually wince. It wasn't offensive on its own, but given the lack of female presence in the book, it took on a bit more of a profile than it should have.

The thing is, history, as written by most, and as enrolled in these lectures by Gopnik, is very heavy on men and very short on women, and these lectures are a look into the history of our relationship with winter. Men feature prominently. Women don't as much, so when they do feature, I'd like it to matter. I'd like it to not be played for laughs. I'd like it to not feel a little bit as though we are the temptresses, the objects of desire, that our only relationship with winter is as it allows us to express our otherwise forbidden sexuality (as in his argument about the social role ice skating fulfilled for women and gay men around the turn of the twentieth century). Given his admiration and respect for Anna Brownell Jameson, I don't actually think Gopnik really does think of women only in this way. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite reflect that.

There is still lots to love about this book, and lots of really excellent things about it. Sure, Gopnik overreaches his point sometimes, or gets a little repetitive as he circles around his argument; but mostly it's well-written, very accessible, entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, gentle, kind. He captures the feeling of winter, particularly in his first chapter and the chapter on Christmas, the awe and wonder and affection and respect that I hold for the season. It is hard for me to know if someone who isn't as fond of winter as I am would be swayed by his argument, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to be touched by it. Recommended, for Canadians especially: we whinge a lot about this season. I don't think it would hurt us to think about it a little more deeply than just complaining about shoveling and cold.

A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

A Short History of Myth
by Karen Armstrong
Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005
159 pages

I took a long time to read this book. It occurs to me that maybe this is not a bad thing. While it might have been nice to read it much faster, and I might have been able to absorb more if I'd read it more than two pages at a time, it still worked. That is to say, I didn't have a lot of time for reading this past month, and so it was good that I could put down this book and walk away and then pick it back up either minutes or days later and not really miss too much.

It is indeed a short history. Armstrong covers human myth from prehistory to contemporary times in less than 200 pages, and this causes some difficulties. Particularly in the early part of the book, Armstrong makes some claims and wild generalizations that I found too broad to be easily swallowed, and sometimes she offers no references or arguments to support her statement. The most egregious example of this would be when Armstrong suggests that the brutal, demanding, bloodthirsty "Great Goddess" persona likely dating back to many paleolithic myths was born of male resentment ("Why should a goddess have become so dominant in an aggressively male society? This may be due to an unconscious resentment of the female." pg39.) Maybe so, and maybe there is lots of data to back this up elsewhere, but a claim like that ought not be offhand and unsupported if you expect me to take it, or anything you're saying, seriously. I'm a lay reader, not particularly versed in human culture in paleolithic times. In a couple of cases, Armstrong's claims about people and cultures in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages seemed over simplified and under supported, which made those sections of the book rather frustrating.

That said, she did say it was a short history, so I forged on, thinking perhaps that I should get a more in depth history sometime. Something I would likely have to read more than two pages at a time.

I'm glad I kept reading, because Armstrong does a good job with the ages post-Neolithic, or maybe that's just because I do have a little more background knowledge. And her final, overarching argument, however brief (as befits the book) was convincing enough to be unsettling. She makes a strong case for myth as primitive psychology, for myth as a way humans have made sense of the big questions and the angst of being humans in a big, scary, uncontrollable world. In conjunction with a belief system and ritual, myth becomes the internalized way we deal with our deep fears and insecurities. Myth and its accompanying rituals help humans face death, destruction, change, and our insignificant place in the world.

Finally, Armstrong argues that with the onset of humans privileging science and technology over our collective myths, and refusing to identify anything that cannot be objectively proven "true" as valuable in our understanding of the world, we have lost our connection to the deeper things that make us human. By discounting myth as "just a myth" we have lost an integral part of what allows us as individuals and societies to cope with the unknown and the unknowable. We become disconnected and disillusioned, and Armstrong argues that Western society has sunk into a general malaise due in large part to our inability to understand and to value a collective mythology. She is not necessarily arguing for religion here -- she points out flaws in that structure, though also clearly believes it has value -- but for literatures and arts that get at the deeper, universal truths of being human, that can become transformative experiences for contemporary people and societies.

I don't necessarily think it's quite so simple, but I do think that Armstrong's arguments -- for the purposes of myth, and for the hazards of losing it -- make a great deal of sense. Her suggestion that literature and the arts are part of our deeper psychological sense-making, and therefore hold an incredibly and increasingly important position in contemporary, myth-less lives, is also agreeable to this reader. As an introduction to the Myths Series (including Atwood's The Penelopiad, Jeanette Winterson's Weight, and A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok) A Brief History of Myth does an excellent job of making a case for why the series should exist.

This book is not without its bumps, but it does what it advertises. If you're looking for meat, go elsewhere, but if you're looking for a lighter primer on myth and its functions, this is a good start, mostly well-written and enjoyable.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
by Barbara Robinson, narrated by Elaine Stritch
HarperChildren's Audio, 2006 (novel originally published 1971)
2 discs

This is a clear case, for me, of the narrator of an audiobook making a story. From the minute Elaine Stritch's delightful voice began this tale, I was hooked. I think I would have enjoyed this mildly if I'd read it myself, but having it read to me in a dry, wise, and perfectly-timed way elevated the experience.

The story is short: there is a family in town, the Herdmans, made up of six delinquent children and their absentee mother. We meet them through the eyes of our unnamed narrator after they have burned down a neighbour's toolshed and absconded with the donuts delivered for the firemen. These kids are notorious and nasty, bullies at school and general troublemakers everywhere else. So no one expects to see them at church (reasonably; they're only there because the narrator's little brother boasted there were refreshments) -- and no one expects them to be interested in the church's Christmas pageant. The pageant has been the same year, after year, after year... but with Herdmans in the starring roles, this year's pageant is going to be something else entirely.

I am not sure there is a whole lot of meat here for discussion with my parent-child book club. A number of the kids are in Christmas pageants of their own, so that will be fun to compare; and I'm going to be interested to hear what they have to say about the Herdmans. From an adult perspective, it's clear the Herdman kids have some serious behavioural issues, possibly stemming from poverty and neglect at home, and it's just as clear that they're not getting the kind of help they need from the adults in their lives. I'll want to hear what the kids have to say about that. The message of redemption will also be interesting to talk about even though the book ends before we find out of the Herdmans are really changed by their experience. And we can talk about how changing things unexpectedly can lead us to see things clearly, how it can lead us to understand things we've never understood before.

All this said, it's a funny book, and it's supposed to be funny. I want to look a little bit behind the funny, but I also want to leave the book intact for these kids to enjoy. It's a sweet story, religious (it's about a church Christmas pageant, after all) but not pushy, and extremely short. It ended so quickly and with so many unanswered questions on this adult reader's part. The build up to the pageant was pretty big, and the pageant itself felt a little bit anticlimactic. But I still thoroughly enjoyed myself, in large part thanks to Elaine Stritch. I can totally see myself borrowing this little gem of an audiobook every year around this time to get myself into the spirit of the season. If you've read the book or seen the TV movie but never listened to the audio, I highly recommend finding yourself a copy and having a listen. It won't take you long, and it's worth it.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, translated by Alan R.Clarke
read by Jeremy Irons
HarperAudio, 2000
4 discs (unabridged)

I am not sure I'm going to endear myself to people when I discuss this book. There are a lot of people who are very fond of it. I am not sure I am a fan. This book is pushy.

We read this for my adventurous genre book club. It was picked by the staff member who was covering my leave -- the second book she picked that I probably would not have (the first was horror by Stephen King, which despite my admiration for the man I just could. not. do.) And I'm really glad she was doing the picking, because I am not sure I ever would have gotten around to reading this if she hadn't, and it was a good choice, I think. Incidentally, the Stephen King was a great pick, too -- the group really enjoyed it, and we had an awesome discussion despite my wimpiness. I expect my group will have fun with this one too, but for different reasons.

On the surface, this is the story of Santiago (who is only given a name once, and thereafter referred to as "the boy"), a shepherd in Andalusia who has a recurring dream about treasure near the Pyramids. He drops everything and heads off to search for it, discovering that this search for treasure is his Personal Legend, meeting some interesting characters along the way, and learning rather a lot about life, the universe, and everything in the process.

And on the surface, I should love this. I love fantasies, I love fairytales, I'm a fan of a good quest story. But overall the effect is pretty meh. It's not the fault of the audiobook; good old Jeremy Irons does his best. It's not the fault of the simplicity of the tale, which I rather liked. It's not even the fault of the religious overtones (er, "overtones" is maybe an understatement). It's the fault of the author, who wouldn't get subtlety if it jumped up and bit him (subtly or otherwise). It's the fault of the Personal Legend and the fact that we are beaten about the head with the Message that if we are working towards our Personal Legend, all the universe will conspire to help us. And fine, agree with the Message or not, but please cease beating me with it. I get it.

What I want out of a book like this is a good story, even if it is bare-bones-simple as this one, and it doesn't have to be realistic. So I got that, and for that reason I managed to listen to the audiobook the whole way through without chucking it out the car window. The characters, even if they are just sketched in, are likable and/or interesting enough. They're a bit fairy-tale, in that they're mostly ciphers with a specific purpose in the story, but that has never stopped me. My imagination is well up to the task of filling in, in this particular kind of situation, and I actually quite liked Santiago, or who I imagined Santiago to be.

I am not against allegorical fiction. If there is a message, I am okay with that, if it is done properly. Properly means it doesn't take centre stage so often as to throw me out of the story and contemplation of what other things I might find inside. Properly means that the message is incorporated into the story in such a way that it feels comfortable and natural, an outgrowth of the story as opposed to ... whatever we got here. Here, the Message was brought up so often that it felt like neon signs were flashing: "Get it? Get it? There is a design! You only have to live your best life, follow your dreams, and good things will happen! See? See? Even if it's not easy, follow your dreams and good things will happen! YES? Get it? PERSONAL LEGEND! MAKTUB! ALSO LOVE! Do you see it?"

Which... yeesh. I don't like my fiction yelling at me. I don't find it inspiring at all.

I'm glad I listened to the audiobook, although maybe in the end that was a mistake too, because I do find that anything that recurs noticeably in a written text is magnified in an audiobook. But it was an easy listen, where I might have gotten frustrated with the read. Maybe I am too jaded at this time in my life, but I did a lot of eye-rolling and muttering, and while I was never fully irritated I did start to get there at points. Maybe that's a comment on me, and maybe I should be sad about that. On the other hand, I've read books with the same themes and the same message that didn't inspire the words "Oh, come on, really with this again?" repeatedly.

I wanted to like this book. There are things about it that are quite endearing, and I can see why it's managed to remain so popular. But it wasn't the right book for me.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

Green Grass, Running Water
by Thomas King
HarperCollins, 1993
431 pages

So.
In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep. That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen.
I can tell you that.

I am not sure how to talk about this book. Aarti has done a much more concise job than I will; please do go read her musings on it. She makes a more enthusiastic case than I do, though I don't think I liked this book less.

There is a lot that can be said about this book. I loved it, I really did. I've owned it for years, have started trying to read it a couple of times and always enjoyed the first little bit, but for some reason it kept getting shunted. Not this time, and I read it quickly and avidly. I loved pretty much everything about it. The language, the imagery, the rhythms that read easily and lend themselves to a reading that almost has the power of an aural experience. I loved the setting. I even started to love the characters, flawed and wonderful as they were.

Let's see about some sort of summary... well, there's Lionel, and if the novel has a hero, it's probably Lionel. Lionel is a somewhat aimless, meandering character, a television salesperson just about to turn forty. He has almost negative initiative and what little inertia he started out with has long since petered out. But he's not happy. He lives in Blossom, Alberta, not far from the reservation he grew up on, but he rarely goes to visit. His sister Latisha is doing well for herself running the Dead Dog Cafe, a restaurant catering to gullible tourists. His uncle Eli lives alone in a tiny cabin in the shadow of an enormous dam -- a dam he's managed to keep from running for over ten years in an enormous, drawn-out legal battle with the company that built it. Eli is friends, or perhaps frenemies, with the owner of the dam, Clifford Sifton, who comes by every morning for coffee and a request that Eli get the hell out of his way. Lionel's cousin Charlie, formerly a television salesman at the same place where Lionel finds himself stuck, is now a bigshot lawyer... working for the company the owns the dam. And finally Lionel's sometime girlfriend Alberta, a college professor (who is also seeing Charlie) is on her way home for Lionel's birthday, wishing she could trade in both her men for a baby. All of these pieces, and several others, are about to collide at the annual Sun Dance.

This doesn't even touch on the four Indians and Coyote, whose sections were by far my favourites. Overall, the effect is less chaotic than it likely could be because somehow King manages to keep it together; but it's beautifully messy, rambunctious, uncomfortable, joyful, and absolutely hilarious.

It's a wonderful reading experience, this one, and different. Because of the rhythm, the fact that it reads very much like an oral story in many places, it's not your usual novel. There aren't so much chapters as little sections, and it jumps all over the place. It circles back on itself multiple times; a reader paying attention will catch nods back to other parts of the story, and back to other bits of Canlit, even. I love books that do this, because every time one comes across one of these little winks to the reader, I always feel like I've been given a little gift.

What struck me while reading this book is the casual, endemic, embedded racism that becomes exposed by King's lovely bright light. We have the government's role, which is almost a laughing-stock in the book; this is the insidious, systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed by those of us outside the system. It's the reason the dam was built where it was, not in any of the three recommended locations. It's the reason, ultimately, that Lionel is stuck where he is. It's the reason that Alberta's family's fancy-dance costumes are confiscated at the border when they're going to visit relatives in the States.

We have society and the media's role, exemplified in this book by Western movies and books: Indians as the bad guys, cowboys as the good guys. It's not as simplified in Green Grass, Running Water as it sounds here, but it is, in some ways, that simple.

And then there's Bill Bursum, Lionel's boss, owner of the television store. His is the casual, off-handed racism that grows out of the above two types, and it's also the most cringe-worthy. He treats Lionel terribly, though not outwardly -- well, and his other employee, too, and she's female, so one thinks maybe Bill Bursum is just generally a pretty casually racist, sexist guy. But he's also the kind of guy we all know and most of us probably wouldn't give a second thought, until we look a little bit closer. He's not a bad guy, he's just... incredibly small-minded. He's that guy who makes politically incorrect jokes and comments and expects everyone to laugh; we might wince, but we probably don't challenge him on it.

If I keep going, this review is going to be a mile long, but it's also important to note: this isn't an issues book, it's a book where the issues are present but incidental to the telling the story. I haven't even touched on the fact that this book put me in mind of Carl Hiaasen, in a good way, thanks to the humour and the way the space is so integral to the tale. And the way some characters, at least, end up where the reader feels they should. I haven't delved as much into the wonderful imagery and imagination. I haven't talked about how the setting is perfect and awe-inspiring. I haven't touched nearly as much on the women in this book as I'd like to, either. And the funny. I haven't made this book sound nearly as funny as it is. But perhaps that's for the best, because you really, really have to read this book to understand. Highly recommended reading. Fall right in and float, and trust King to take you on a stunning, convoluted, thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

Feathers

by Jacqueline Woodson

G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2007

118 pages

This is a beautiful, simple, complex, shining little book. It's a book that I'm sure would mean different things to me at different ages -- it's got so many layers, some of which I haven't sorted yet. When I suggested we read it for the parent-child book club, I'd only read pieces and several reviews. I'm a little scared now, because it is a very complex book, and the main character is older by years than the kids in the group -- I have some as young as six -- but I'm also really happy, because I think the adults are going to get a lot out of this, and at the same time there is plenty of fodder there for the kids to think about. And lots of fodder for discussion both between kid and parent and between our group.

The story is a relatively simple thing: Frannie is eleven years old and in school at Price Elementary in New York. It's the seventies, and the schools are still segregated, if informally -- Frannie and her family are black, and they live on one side of the highway. All the white people live on the other side and go to school there. But one day a white boy walks into Frannie's class, and that's the beginning of a really gorgeous story about family, friendship, fitting in, bullying, memory, and hope.

Woodson has language wrapped around her little finger. I believe the woman could do whatever she wanted with it and I would follow happily. More than that, she has that feeling of what it's like to be a child dealing with big questions and difficult situations down. Frannie is often confused, worried, sad, and frustrated, but she's also happy, hopeful, and funny. She's self-involved, but she's starting to look at the world around her with more awareness, beginning to empathize with other kids, and trying to do the right thing.

Add another layer, now: Frannie's older brother Sean is deaf. The relationship between the two kids is beautiful, too. Frannie has the mixture of overprotectiveness and awe for Sean that one might expect to find in a younger sibling who can hear. Sean puts up with her, but more than that, obviously loves her deeply too. They play games, talk, help each other, and occasionally get on each other's nerves. Further, they support each other through a difficult family time: their father is a long-haul trucker (though this is never explicit -- one of the things I like about this book is that Woodson lets the reader figure things out for themselves) and so not often home, and their mother is pregnant again, after several high-risk and ultimately miscarried pregnancies, including an infant that died between Sean and Frannie. The two kids have different perspectives on this, but stick together through it. Aside from their relationship, the little glimpse into the world of a congenitally deaf teenager adds something special to this already special book.

I could keep going, keep digging deeper. The bullying storyline is pretty straightforward, and I think will probably form a core for our discussion of this book next month. Then there's the relationship between Frannie and her best friend Samantha. Sam is extremely religious, the daughter of an evangelical pastor. Frannie's not so much.

This was another aspect I worried about a bit, as we are a public library and I have no idea at all about the religious proclivities of our book club members. I knew that there were Christianity-based religious discussions in it ahead of time, but I decided to go ahead with it anyways for two reasons: one, the kids in the group will already be having the kinds of conversations with others about religion that Frannie is having with Sam; and two, this aspect of the book deals with respect for others' beliefs, not with conversions or Jesus-pushing. This is not a preachy book, and if you're the sort of person (like me) who shies away hard from inspirational or Christian fiction, have no fear. I suspect, frankly, that it's the sort of book that will let people take from it what they will.

I may try to find a good book about a Muslim or Jewish family just for kicks. My feeling from this book club is that they'd totally be in to that. Anyone have any suggestions? Something under 100 pages is best, and though this book had an older protagonist I usually try to keep the protagonists in the 7 - 10 year old range.

The main driver for my choice of this book was that I wanted, for February, a book dealing with black history that wasn't about slavery, the Underground Railroad, or segregation. Those are all topics that the kids will get in school, and it was important to me that they get another dimension of black culture in history, that they know that there's a heck of a lot more to black history than that. There aren't a lot of books for this age group depicting black families or black culture in a way that doesn't explicitly deal with slavery or immediate post-slavery. Feathers was perfect in that respect.

Seriously, this is a kids' book that should be read by everyone, not just kids. I got an incredible amount out of this book, and I don't think I can stress how absolutely perfect, how beautiful this story is. I think that if you have children in your life between the ages of eight and twelve, you should get them this book, and read it with them. If you don't have children in your life, read it anyways. It's a hopeful, multifaceted, gorgeous book, written in such a shining way.

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor *guest review by fishy*

fishy and I have pretty different reading tastes, in a lot of ways, which is why it's great that he's happy to review a book here now and then. I've read a little bit of Flannery O'Connor and while I was certainly impressed, I have to admit that I didn't enjoy it very much. So instead of my take, here's fishy:

***

Thanks again to Kiirstin for letting me post occasional reviews here. I enjoyed writing the last review very much, but I have struggled with the follow-up.

The Violent Bear It Away
Flannery O'Connor
1960 Farrar, Straus & Giroux

I picked up this book largely at random while strolling through the library. I read an article about Flannery O'Connor in The Atlantic maybe 4 months earlier and I had thought at the time I should read something by her.

The book opens with Mason Tarwater ("the Old Man"), bootlegger and prophet, dead at his kitchen table at Powderhead, a backwater farm. His great-nephew, Francis Mario Tarwater ("Tarwater") a teenaged boy kidnapped as a child by the Old Man, struggles with how to dispose of the body. We flash back through their dozen or so years together, the Old Man paranoid and controlling; Tarwater independent and willful, but with a reality born from the Old Man.

In flashback we encounter Rayber, Tarwater's uncle, and Rayber's "simple" son, Bishop. Like Tarwater, Rayber was abducted by the Old Man and taken to Powderhead as a child, but was rescued by his father. Rayber attempts to rescue Tarwater as a child, but is shot by the old man, and left half-deaf. The novel continues with Tarwater travelling to meet Rayber and Bishop, and in their encounters either escape the destiny laid out for him by the Old Man or fulfill it.

Through a series of tragedies, the family consists only of these four characters. The set-up here is self-consciously neat. Closed and archetypal, the characters felt like they were arranged in two dimensions to rest neatly in quadrants, each aligned strongly on an axis. Damned if I can figure out exactly what those axes are. With the strong focus on religious themes and a small cast of archetypes, I read this as a parable. The slightly surreal environment that feels like it has thick air and a heavy echo fit with this reading beautifully. Nothing really had a sense of scale, and the sense of place and time was very loose. A parable, or stretching a bit, a fable: all the characters here have a slightly anthropomorphic feel.

A number of reviews say the work contrasts the passion of the Old Man with the secular Rayber. I use the term 'passion' because I struggle with the lexicon of belief, but I mean a religious passion: both torment and engagement. But calling Rayber secular I think is dishonest. Rayber is all about suppression; his secularism is a willful reaction. He too was "infected" by the Old Man's passion, either by his genetics or during his abduction. Rayber himself feels it was awakened by the abduction, but the actual origin escapes him.

There is a clarity to the Old Man's belief that borders on childishness. Rayber and Tarwater aren't lucky enough to inherit his clarity. For Rayber, the right and the sane are at odds. For Tarwater, destiny is a hopeless chain. Tarwater inherits the destiny from the Old Man: He must baptize Bishop. A pointless act, in Tarwater's mind; Bishop is simple, almost vacant. For this to be Tarwater's destiny seems an insult to the strong willed boy, but the compulsion is seated deep.

Bishop and the Old Man reside in a world of simplicity and a sort of dark innocence. Actions flow from inevitability, both exist like twigs in a stream they don't bother to understand. Where Bishop is passive and reactive, the Old Man rages violently at virtually everything. Rayber and Tarwater live in a reality of conflict and uncertainty, for both of them, the devil is more internalized.

This last point is the one that made this novel so interesting to me. Here is a honest representation of faith as torment. Tarwater's internal monologue is presented as a stranger who speaks to him. His monologue is temptation, distraction and resentment. I imagine this sort of monologue is familiar to most, but in this theology, it is the voice of the devil. In this theology, the devil is always present in us, challenging us away from the right path with confusion, while truth and God are permanently inaccessible. God might speak to us once in lifetime, but more likely our life is defined by resisting the chatter of the devil.

But the "secular" Rayber is not really any different. I can't tell if his secularism is intentionally ironic, or if this is really how O'Connor imagines the secular mind. For someone of great belief like O'Connor, you can imagine that the secular mind is one that has to constantly battle off faith. She depicts Rayber as a man afraid of letting down his guard, lest he be infected with the dominating faith of the Old Man. But this guard insulates him from love and humanity as much as it does from faith. I think it is a narrow view of the secular, of course, this is the secularism of rejection, a negative only.

I knew in advance of reading that Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic. A number of times through this work, I stopped and asked myself if I would be interpreting the material differently if I hadn't known she was a devout Catholic. This book is not marketing material for Christianity, the faithful here are tormented and ugly. I found one or two reviewers that said they read it as a cautionary tale about fundamentalism, I don't see how anyone could support that claim. While the images of religion can be stark at times, the pains of the faith are clearly something the author feels must be borne. The cautionary note here is about trying to suppress something seeded strongly inside you. Rayber has avoided the fundamentalist zeal, but he pays the highest price for his success.

At the end, I asked myself if my knowledge about her beliefs caused me to interpret differently, I came to the conclusion that it would not. There is a lucid honesty to this that paints her theology in all its Catholic torment. O'Connor said her work was representative of Christian Realism.

I liked this book, mostly because it presented a sort of faith that I can understand. It comes back around to passion, in it's old meaning of suffering. Her faith is one of great violence, not one of a warm grandfather. Reality is full of violence, as is the Bible. Is violence in conflict with God, or a core component of God? I think it is a type of theology that is deeply unpopular in mainstream North America right now. When I say that I can understand this sort of religiousness, I don't mean that I like it. I mean that the torment and the absence of God in this sort of religion at least aligns with the reality we see around us. No troubling ellipses here.

Does My Head Look Big In This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah

I did that thing again where I sent the book off to someone else to read before I was able to write the review. In fact, I finished the last four pages as everyone else was setting up for a meeting, ran the book inside to the co-op student, and ran back outside to the meeting. Unfortunately I think those last four pages didn't sink in as well as they could have and I can't remember for the life of me how this book ended.

Which is okay, actually, because it was far more the journey than the ending with this one. When the book gets returned I'll read the last chapter again, and that's fine.

Amal is a sixteen-year-old Australian-Palestinian Muslim. She attends a prestigious (and snooty) private prep school, gets good grades, has good friends, has a few enemies, and is deep in the throes of a crush on her chemistry bench partner Adam. And now she's decided to wear the hijab full-time.

And that's basically it, for a plot summary. What you will miss from that is just how engaging and smart and funny a narrator Amal is. This book is told in first person, and present tense -- which I almost didn't even notice. Once I did notice it was all present tense, I thought, "really?" and flipped back a couple of chapters, and sure enough, the entire thing is. It works perfectly -- it's like Amal and I are sitting and having a cup of tea and chatting and she's telling me this story. And I love Amal. She's a pitch-perfect teen: occasionally very immature, occasionally very mature, most of the time a regular teenager dealing with things in a teenager way. She has a wicked sense of humour and is sharply observant, but not preternaturally so. She's usually on top of a quick comeback if someone says something completely idiotic, although every once in a while she's struck speechless and ashamed, and that makes sense too, even if the reader desperately wants her to say something snappy and make the other person look like the idiot they are. She's an interesting mix of superficial and dramatic, and deeply convicted. Her voice made this story for me.

I picked the following short passage to quote because it was something I recognized. I'm not a teen anymore by any stretch, but I still do this to myself every once in a while:

I get so caught up in my daydream that my eyes start to go fuzzy and my skin all prickly. It's only when I feel my throat choking up that I snap back to reality.

There were a lot of quotable bits in this book. I meant to get more -- but then I gave the book to someone else.

I'd recommend this book just for Amal, and already have in some cases. But this book is a good read for more than that. Being someone who has no acquaintances who wear the hijab, my exposure to this particular religious garb is extremely limited. Actually, if we're honest, my exposure to anyone who is not Christian or agnostic or atheist is very limited, and the only people I know personally who dress or do things differently due to their religion are the Mennonites who frequent the library, and some of the Mennonite kids I went to school with. So just on that basis, this book was an eye-opening read for me, because I know so very little about Islam. It had never really occurred to me in any meaningful way that someone might wear the hijab because they wanted to; I always thought it was something that was expected of, perhaps forced on women by culture or tradition. Was I ever wrong. In some cases, of course, that is what happens -- but Abdel-Fattah attacks and shreds that particular notion in Amal's case. And I completely relished the whole experience of learning something new with this book, and (I hope) gaining a better understanding of an expression of faith that I had no familiarity with before.

And here: I was about to write "gaining a better understanding of a group" but thought better of it given that a lot of this book is devoted to making it clear that "groups" don't really exist in a way that can be generalized about. Even within communities identified by culture or tradition or religion or geography there can be major differences. And I know this, but it's easy to be lazy and generalize and I'm going to be even more on the lookout for that bad habit within myself now.

As one might expect, this book does occasionally drift into "issues" territory -- every once in a while there is a clear "that's not what Islam is about" moment or, in the case of one of Amal's friends, a lot of "thin is not equal to beauty." In these cases, sometimes the book edges from being fun and educational to being a bit preachy. But overall, this book avoids that territory quite well. And one thing that wasn't an issue, something I really, really appreciated, was Amal's relationship with her parents. Her parents are present, supportive, kind, intelligent, and they love Amal to bits. And she returns that. She has her typical teenage issues with her parents -- but it's really nice to see a teenager with a healthy, loving relationship with her family represented in a YA book.

I want to recommend this book to every teen girl I know. Some might be uncomfortable with the idea of the religious theme, but don't be: the execution is deft and I never felt like the book was trying to convert me. In fact, anyone of any religious feeling at all will almost certainly identify with Amal's struggles no matter what your denomination, and anyone with no religious feeling will not feel crowded. And if you're not a teen girl, read this anyway. You might find some of the drama a little over-the-top, but you might recognize your teen self in it; and you'll almost certainly end up looking at the world a little differently than you did when you started. It's not a perfect book, but it's a good one, and well worth the fun read.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Before I started Eat, Pray, Love I was a little worried it might be too God-y for me. I have a very complicated relationship with organized religion, and in many ways my experiences have not been terribly good. And currently, though not forever, I feel it's best to leave it at that. And so when I'm reading anything, significant amounts of God tend to turn me off. But, my mother's recommendation aside, Elizabeth Gilbert herself convinced me to give things a try, because I like the way she thinks. From her introduction:

And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded word -- GOD -- into my book and since this is a word which will appear many times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.

For me, just the act of pointing out that "God" is a loaded word is enough. The last part of that sentence made me laugh out loud, because she covers all of us -- those who have very specific ideas of God, and those who don't want anything to do with God, and all of us in between. From that moment on, I decided to read this book because I felt I could read it as her experience, and not feel like she was preaching at me. And it never did feel preachy. Sometimes it felt like she was gently suggesting advice -- a good friend, an older sister -- but it never, ever felt like she was trying to convert me and I got behind that 100%.

Let's get this out of the way first: the last third of the book was a bit of a letdown for me, and I've been trying to figure out why. I've come to the conclusion that it feels, overall, as though Gilbert is finally withdrawing. Throughout the first two sections, we get all her pain and all her love and all her thoughts and failures and triumphs, bared to us in almost graphic clarity. The third section seems somehow less intimate, which is interesting given that significant portions of that third section are about sex. I was going to say "which is odd" but it occurs to me that sex, physical and emotional intimacy between two people (in this case, anyway), may be one of the hardest things to write about in a clear-eyed, no-holds-barred way -- breaking that bubble of intimacy so that the world can share in it through one's writing is perhaps not something Gilbert wants to do, or can do. And that's okay. So in the third section there is more of an outsider-looking-in feeling, than the incredible closeness that one feels to Gilbert in the first two sections.

The third section didn't ruin the book for me by any means. And part of what I have enjoyed about it so much is the way it makes me think, and examine my own thoughts and assumptions as well as the assumptions of others. My mother and I were discussing this criticism from her book club when they read this book: Gilbert is too self-indulgent. Mandy also mentioned that she's read reviews calling the book narcissistic -- here's some news, critics: it's a memoir. So yes. Narcissistic, if you want to be nasty about it. I like memoirs because I enjoy getting that very personal look at the world from someone else's perspective, and I get that in spades from Eat, Pray, Love.

But self-indulgent is something slightly different, and with respect to my mother's book club, I disagree with them. I even got a little ferocious when talking about it with Mom. I know a few things about depression, and one thing I do understand is that one doesn't get over a deep depression by denying oneself healing. In Gilbert's case (which I am admittedly looking at through her writing, one side of the story and all that) I suspect anything less than what might be called "self-indulgence" would have been fatal. In fact, one of the things I was most impressed with was that she had both the clarity to understand what she needed to do to dig herself out of her hole, and the guts to actually do it. When dealing with depression, one has to be selfish. Because, as Gilbert herself says at one point, being miserable not only hurts you, it hurts and inconveniences others around you, too. But our good Protestant culture here in North America very much frowns on some types of selfishness. It takes a brave, strong, and/or desperate soul to ignore society and visit Italy for four months to do nothing but eat, talk, and nap in order to begin healing.

Gilbert has a very distinct voice, and I really, really liked it. When Mom and I were talking about self-indulgence, I realized I was beginning to defend Gilbert as I would a friend; her writing style, and the things she opens up about in her book, make her seem familiar -- someone I could call up and have a great chat with. This doesn't happen to me very often with books, and I liked it. Part of it was that I found a lot of what Gilbert had to say completely relatable. Try this:

Instead of being amused, though, I'm only anxious. Instead of watching, I'm always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look, I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"

I know that brain-busy-anxious feeling all too well.

And on a lighter note:

Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. "We are ROOSTERS!" they holler. "We are the only ones who are ROOSTERS!"

It almost makes me like roosters. And finally, a piece of wisdom that I think is incredibly important, coming to us from her Guru via Gilbert:

She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fin weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's now how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

I don't think this book is for everyone, although I do wish it was. But I read it at a good time in my life to read it, a time when I am thinking about choices I have made and have yet to make, a time when I am finding myself sometimes treading water frantically just to keep my head out. It was, overall, a really interesting, beautiful, raw, and very worthwhile read for me. And I would advise trying it -- just trying it. Mom was surprised that she liked it as much as she did. My grandmother was surprised she liked it as much as she did. I was really surprised that I liked it as much as I did. But I tried it and I really enjoyed it, so I recommend trying it, and if it doesn't work the first time, wait five years and try it again. I suspect this book changes with time.