Eleanor & Park

This blog has fallen off in the past months, and for that, I am sorry. 

Frankly, reading just hasn’t been a priority.  Instead, in what may be my last summer off in my career, I spent most of my time writing, not reading. 

It’s not a decision I regret, at least not whole-heartedly.  I wrote an 85k word novel in about two months, from June to August – I’ve never started and completed a work of that size before, so I can’t deny the pride that comes with the accomplishment.  But between that project, a number of short stories, chapters on another larger work, and of course some blogging, I didn’t have a lot of time left over to read. 

I’d complain, but I rather enjoyed the break. 

2016 has been a weird year for me regardless of my shift from reading to writing.   Anxiety and depression have been my constant companions for over a year now, starting back in 2015.  (It’s not a sob story, it’s a fact.  I’m dealing with it, slowly, and it’s getting better. That’s the important part.)

Part of this reality is a surprising difficulty in choosing what to read. 

For the majority of my life, I had no trouble picking a book and putting it down if I started to hate it 20, or 50, or 100 pages in.  But since anxiety took up residence, the decision to start a book has been paralyzing. 

Picture this: You are driving an unfamiliar car down the freeway.  It’s snowing, heavy enough to make the roads icy and dangerous without being enough to shut them down entirely.  Your hands are clenched on the steering wheel, tension in every muscle as you move forward ever so slowly.  Every movement, every turn, every press of your foot to the brake is carefully calculated so you don’t end up in a crash. So you make it home again. 

This is anxiety. 

This is what my world has felt like, what the world for far too many people feels like.  And for some reason, picking a book has been like choosing to suddenly go 50 mph on that icy road and hope for the best. 

As you can imagine, I’ve simply chosen not to drive. 

Things were safer this way. 

What little reading I have done is largely fanfiction or other works, like Crichton’s Jurassic Park, that I’m intimately familiar with and thus hold no risk.  They are safe.  I know the characters, the basic plots.  I know I like them.  Safe.

There is no anxiety that I won’t like them, because I know them. 

The unintended side effect of this reading pattern has been that instead of anxiety over what to read, I’m experiencing it because I know I should be reading something better.  Something new, more fulfilling, less bullshit fluff that offers nothing new to stimulate my mind. 

As much as I love the community, I’m getting sick of reading fanfiction – and it doesn’t help that I mostly read just the one basic story.  I’m more invested in the writing of it, hence the 85k novel that’s slowly getting edited and posted.  I’m active there still; I haven’t lost that.  I still love the characters, the romance, the inner workings of the world built into the game. 

But I’m bored. 

Before I knew it, I’d made the decision to stop reading almost entirely, and like it or not, it was crushing my soul. 

Then one day just after school started up again, I had an off hour during the day with nothing to do.  And because it was sitting on my desk and recommended by a friend, I picked up Eleanor and Park. 

Reading this book is like being sore for days, maybe weeks, and then suddenly finding that perfect stretch that releases everything that’s been pent up. 

I devoured this book. 

It’s such a simple story: two teenagers who fall in love.  It doesn’t sound like anything special; how many hundreds of stories out there are about teens in love? But something about Eleanor and Park is unique, and lovely.

Their connection is pure if not innocent, haunting without the ghosts, beautiful and messy and so very real. 

When my husband came home to find me sitting in my office, 20 pages from the end with tears streaming down my face, I screamed at him to leave me alone to finish it. 

He did, wonderful, supportive, and probably confused man that he is. 

And when I did finish it, I promptly opened it to the first page and read it again. 

Since reading this book, I’ve stepped back into the world.  I’ve read AT LEAST four other books in the weeks since I closed its covers, and while I’m still writing, still creating, everything I thought I’d lost to anxiety has been reborn.

Eleanor and Park is the kind of book that makes me fall in love with reading all over again. 

It’s not a feeling I’m unfamiliar with.  I’ve fallen out of love with reading, with writing, before.  I spent all of 2014 playing video games, sucked into the worlds so lovingly created by Bioware.  I was still reading, of course, but that was never my focus.  I’d get sucked in by Shepard (Mass Effect) and not The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  It wasn’t until March of 2015 that I even considered going back to the passions I’d so loved before, and then it was only because I started reading Dragon Age Inquisition fanfiction. 

I remember getting a Dragon Age tattoo that spring and thinking that in all my life, I would always remember Inquisition for getting me writing again.  I hadn’t pursued creativity like that since I was in high school. 

And with that writing, my reading vanished. 

I have never been so happy to be pulled under by a book again. 

It's not a perfect change -- October has been mostly fanfiction again, because once the school year booted up into high gear, I lost myself to anxiety and sleep-deprivation once again.   There is a repetition, a cycle, to my loss of reading time, and so I knew that would happen.  But Eleanor and Park helped remind me of what could be, if only I give myself the chance to fall in love with a book again.  

The Handmaid's Tale

So.  It's been a long time since I was on here. 

I'm sad to say that I haven't done as much writing as I would have liked in that time -- more work, painting walls and cleaning out boxes in prep for a move, and then finishing up the school year.  But now it's June.  Our house is sold and closed, and our new place is almost unpacked.  I have nothing to do until August, except watch Netflix and read and relax. 

I could not be happier about it. 

In the midst of all that, I did read a couple of books.  Most of them were dystopias -- I read and taught Fahrenheit 451 with my sophomores, and since one of my friends recommended it to me, I started 1984, though I admit I didn't get very far.  It makes a great sleep aid though. 

The most interesting book I covered in all this time away from my armchair was Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. 

I've tried to read this book before, with mixed results.  It's a dry start, full of reflection and short sentences and frankly, not a lot to get me interested.  This time, though, I was reading it from a different perspective.   As part of their final, my students had to read an excerpt from this book and analyze it.  It's a cold read, which means they've never seen it before, and they had to analyze the role of women in this society. 

As I was proctoring this time, I found myself reading the excerpt over and over again.  Of course, I'd read it as part of the process of writing the final with my fellow teachers, so it wasn't quite as cold to me.  But each time I read it, I caught something new -- some new detail I hadn't noticed, some new color or metaphor or something to keep me interested, something to keep me coming back on my next pass around the room.

It was almost odd:  This excerpt was only about 20 pages into the book, which is about 15 pages further than I'd ever gotten, and it was only about 300 words.  But there was so much there!   Before long, I was answering the same prompt as my students, albeit in my head instead of on the page.

I'd never really understood what this book was about.  It's first person, and since I am not a young adult, I don't tend to enjoy this style of writing as much anymore.  It's not that I won't read it, it's just that it's harder for me to get into it, and combine that with the dry, at times emotionless, narration style of the Handmaid that is telling the story meant that I had trouble getting into it.

As it turns out, the excerpt was exactly what I was missing to get me into this book. 

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a dystopian future of America, where women have been stripped of rights and society has been restructured under the strict hand of the Bible, specifically the Old Testament.   In this future, which begins roughly around the 1960s-70s, most people are sterile as a result of toxins, nuclear exposure, genetically engineered viruses, and more, which means that people are in a desperate struggle to reproduce. 

This is where the Handmaids come in.  They are relatively young women who are capable of reproducing, which is established generally by having reproduced before (even if it was before the rise of the Republic of Gilead, which is this future society).  The powerful men in society whose wives cannot reproduce, called the Commanders, have access to these Handmaids; once a month, during the Ceremony, they attempt to impregnate them, which I hopefully do not have to explain. 

A successful pregnancy -- one that is carried to term and produces a baby without birth defects -- guarantees the Handmaid's safety for life, which cannot be said for everyone. There are others out there, the older women (the Marthas) or those who refuse to submit and accept a place in the new world, who are essentially disposed of by being sent to the Colonies, where they will clean up nuclear and toxic waste for the short remainder of their lives.

The world that's been created is complicated -- sex is forbidden without permission, but pregnancy is celebrated, even if the Handmaids have to utilize the services of others in the attempt.  There are ceremonies that surround everything, and everything is based in Scripture.  For example, the Handmaids' use is predicated on a verse in the Old Testament where Leah requests that her husband impregnate her maidservant since she cannot give him a baby, and then her servant will give birth literally on her lap so the baby will be born from both of them.

It's quite ingenious how Atwood took this one bizarre verse and created an entire world around it.

The Handmaid telling the story is resigned to her life in this future.  This is her job, her duty, now.  In her former life, she had a husband, a child, a family, but all that is gone.  Instead, she sits in her room in her Commander's house awaiting the Ceremony or visits the markets to do chores for the family to earn her keep.  She reflects on her former life, and gradually the reader learns about her, but just as she is limited by her world, so too are we as readers limited. 

As she tells her story, as we learn about how the world became the Republic.

And I have to say: it's more than a little terrifying how many similarities our current world has to how to Republic rose to power. 

It's not the rights themselves that are similar: Women in this future aren't allowed to read, or make decisions, be outside without a companion or hold a job.  We, obviously, have far more rights than this in 2016 America, and thank god. Without being able to read, I couldn't write this blog, and then where would you be??

But I digress.

The attitudes prevalent in the book are pervasive in America, and to me, that's the much more concerning issue.

Take, for example, the day the Handmaid discusses as the first clue as to their future.  She was on break, running next door to the gas station for cigarettes, and her debit card stopped working.  She's frustrated, like any of us would be, as she knows there's money in the account, and she goes back to work.  That afternoon, her boss gathers all the women in the office together and fires them all, saying that "the legislation just passed" and "it'll be on the news soon" so he's just getting it over with: It is no longer legal to employ women.

Not long after, the Handmaid finds out that she's no longer allowed to own property, that all her money and assets have transferred into her husband's name, and before long it is barely safe for women to leave the house.

Such is the Republic of Gilead.

But think of modern America -- Think of the uproar around the Stanford rape case, where media like the Washington Post focused on how destroyed the rapist's life is because of what he did, instead of how he destroyed the victim's life, on how she will need to rebuild, potentially struggle with PTSD, and all sorts of other issues.  American culture is one of victim blaming, where rape is less of a crime than dealing drugs.  People have said all sorts of horrific things about this poor woman, all the things she did to 'cause' someone to rape her instead of blaming the actual rapist.  Women are subjected to so many rules, even if they are unspoken.   Don't walk alone at night.  Don't drink without friends. Don't drink too much, or wear anything too revealing, or do any of the things that might put you at 'risk.'  It's only a short step from blaming women for being raped to becoming one of those cultures we claim to despise that subdue women in the name of their protection.

That's what's happened in Gilead, and that's what could happen to us.

Now, it's certainly possible that this is a little too extreme, but there are undeniable issues facing women in this country.  Think instead, then, of the job that the Handmaid suddenly loses.   I'm a teacher, and sure, it's unlikely that I'm going to walk in and find my job gone in August.  But it's undeniable that I make less money as a teacher, a field dominated by women, than I would as an administrator, where far more jobs are held by men.  This holds true for nursing, again a primarily female field, versus doctors;  I know that field is rapidly being populated by women as well as men, and I'm glad for the progress, but there's no doubt that doctors make far more money than nurses.

John Oliver can explain the realities of this better than I can:

It's not exactly the same as Gilead, and I understand that.  But it doesn't change that the attitudes are similar: women's jobs are less important, less valued, and thus paid less.

Then there's the abortion debate, which I won't even go into.  Suffice it to say that it is punishable by death in Gilead, and with the religious right's desire to make it illegal again in this country, with Donald Trump talking about making performing an abortion a felony, we are not on a positive path.  And yet again, it's a discussion that singularly impacts women.

And while no one is forcing anyone to get pregnant, nor do pregnant women have any extra rights or privileges, there is certainly an attitude that values pregnancy and reproduction in this country.

I can't help but think of how people respond to the fact that I don't want kids --oftentimes it is almost as though I slapped them.  People, including those closest to me like my mother or mother-in-law, cannot fathom that I don't want children.  I've been told that there is something wrong with me, that I need psychological treatment to fix me, and similar.  I've been told that I should be grateful I probably could get pregnant when there are so many that can't.  I've been told that I'm not doing my duty, that it's my job as a stable adult, a strong woman, to have children.

So sure, no one is forcing me to get pregnant.  But it is without a doubt a part of my identity as a woman in America, a part that others, including near-strangers, don't hesitate to force on me even when I don't want it.

There's nothing so overt in American culture as there is in The Handmaid's Tale.  Atwood knows this; after a rather abrupt ending to the Handmaid's story, she finishes the book with a pseudo-lecture from a college professor in 2195.  He is attempting, through the lens of history, to explain how Gilead rose to power, how it evolved from the attitudes of America, and in doing so, Atwood makes a pretty convincing case for how it could have happened.

It makes me a little nervous, truth be told.  No one has outlawed reading, or made pregnancy women's sole function, or anything so extreme.  But the foundation is there, in how the American people respond to the plights and decisions of others, and without serious reflection and change, this dystopian future is one we could someday embody.

I'm not sure how to recommend this book.  Perhaps if you're looking for something dry and bleak? Or need something to scare you even further than Donald Trump and Brexit?  It's a worthwhile read, I won't deny that, but it will not be everyone's cup of tea.

Brief Hiatus

Hello, readers!

I will be on a brief hiatus (approximately 6 weeks) while my husband and I attempt to both buy a house and sell our current one.  Anyone who tells you this isn't that much work is probably a realtor :)

I'm still reading, and I'll be back soon, probably with dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World, which somehow, even as an English major and now teacher, I've never read.

Thanks for your patience!

Percy Jackson & The Olympians

So if you have nothing better to do and have been closely following my "Read in 2016" page (and if you have, thank you!), you'll know that in the last month, I cranked through the entirety of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & The Olympians series.  This process took me about eight days total, despite there being five books and well over 1000 pages involved.

I feel like those Dos Equis commercials: I don't always read Young Adult literature, but when I do, I read it at a ridiculous pace.

It's not just that it's YA Lit -- that reading level alone ups my speed since it's just not as challenging -- it's that this series is awesome.

I have always loved Greek mythology.  When I was a kid and I'd ask my parents for stuff to read, ancient mythology was always what I got.  They bought me books upon books of Greek myths and stories (among others) and it's a love I've retained into my adult life.  So when I started teaching 10th grade this year and found out I got to teach Greek myths, I was super excited.  The Olympians, Perseus, Hercules, Atalanta, they are all part of a fascinating and unique culture that I have never been able to get enough of.

To my surprise, my students were (for the most part) just as excited.  I had no idea, but apparently they've either read the Percy Jackson series or watched the movies, and since I tend toward movies like Deadpool, I'd never heard of this.

Turns out, it's a modern-day adaptation of Greek mythology, complete with all the insanity of all the rivalries, monsters, and battles of the original stories.  The basic premise focuses on a series of demigods, including Percy and his friends Annabeth and Luke, who are all part of Camp Half-Blood, the only safe place for those who happen to have an Olympian parent.  There, they are trained for the battles they will no doubt encounter for the rest of their lives -- monsters are attracted to the scent of godly blood, and since demigods are still mortal, these kids are susceptible to their attacks.

The whole set up is clever and absolutely fascinating.  In the first, The Lightning Thief, they visit the Underworld, located under Los Angeles, and Olympus, located on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building.  Percy battles the Minotaur and Medusa and many more in his quest to return Zeus's master bolt, which has been stolen and set off the simmering rivalry between he and his brothers, Poseidon and Hades.  In the second, The Sea of Monsters, Percy voyages across what in our world is the Bermuda Triangle.  In his world, he's crossing the setting of the Odyssey, complete with the whirlpool Charybdis, the island of Circe, and the cyclops Polyphemus.  And the other three go on from there -- the whole world of Greek mythology is adapted and tied up into this universe.  It's fabulous.

There's nothing all that amazing about the story of Percy Jackson -- it's a pretty basic quest myth, though I'm sure that done intentionally considering that mythology is one of the most universal creations of the human race.  But the universe here is what makes this series stand out, and that's what drove me through the entire thing in only a few days.

I will also say this: When I asked students if this series was worth reading, they responded with an enthusiastic YES.  They know mythology as a result -- my test scores have been awesome because the kids already know a lot of this background information so they can now apply it more effectively.  They are not always readers (as is normal for 15-16 year olds), but they have read this, and that speaks volumes.

There are two more books between "The Sea of Monsters" and this one, but I like this cover best :)

It's a fabulously interesting series, and if you've ever loved Greek mythology, it's for you.  Get reading!

In the Heart of the Sea

I enjoyed this book, but I have to say this: Parts of it are really gross.

In the Heart of the Sea is the true story of the shipwreck of the whaleship Essex, which sailed from Nantucket in early 1819 and eventually was attacked by a whale and sank in November of 1820.

It's quite the bizarre story, one that's inspired a fair share of fiction over the years, the most famous being Mehlville's Moby Dick.  And yet after I read it, and the more I read about the movie adaptation that recently came out, the more I think the truth is far stranger than the fiction could ever be.

There is so much here to read and understand in this book, and yet at times, the truth of the matter is quite disgusting.  After all, this is nonfiction, and it's about a whaleship -- that means author Nathaniel Philbrick is going to explain what it means to whale, and to the 21st century reader that is myself, it's a little gross.  Discussions of how blubber is sheered off and boiled down, the stomach-turning descriptions of oil and blood coating the decks of ships and soaking through the clothes of the sailors, and of course the violence that is whaling itself are all exquisitely detailed.  In another book, on another topic, I'd applaud that kind of research, and I guess in a way, I do.  But yuck.

Thankfully, that only comprises a short amount of this book's story, and thus I was able to safely skim over the nasty bits and instead focus on what was perhaps the most grueling survival story I've ever read.

The voyage itself was anything but uneventful.  The Essex was damaged in a storm just days out of Nantucket, and then it spent months struggling through rough waters before it finally rounded Cape Horn to head into the Pacific Ocean.  Once there, though resupplying was fairly standard, the crew was part of the destructive forces that eventually endangered the Galapagos tortoises as well as directly responsible for setting an entire island on fire, thus destroying a substantial amount of flora and fauna that lived there.   So many of these events seem unrelated to what eventually befell the ship’s crew after the whale attack, but as Philbrick writes, it becomes easy to see each piece of the puzzle fall into place to affect the outcome of its sailors. 

[As a side note: Philbrick also includes a massive map of the world at the time so readers can follow the location of each event as it unfolds.  It was an incredibly useful tool at times as I tried to figure out where, exactly, this ship was in the endless ocean.]

Once the Essex reached the whaling grounds in the Pacific, they set to work, and for a time, they were successful.  It didn’t last though – one day in late November, an enormous whale suddenly, and seemingly without cause, attacked the ship.  It made two passes, both times slamming into the vessel and causing extensive damage.  In fact, both First Mate Owen Chase and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson's accounts of the attack and sinking indicate that total, the attack and the sinking took about ten minutes. 

That is shockingly little time for a ship to founder. 

A drawing of the whale attacking the Essex

The crew salvaged what they could, and then suddenly their story becomes one of survival – and an insane survival it is.  The sailors spent over 90 days trapped in three tiny whaleboats, subsisting on hardtack and ridiculously small amounts of fresh water.  Though they did once find an island, it quickly became clear that they couldn’t live on it, and so they returned to the boats, heading for South American once more.  Then, as they wasted away and their shipmates started to die, they resorted to cannibalism, a prospect that is so stomach-turning that I can barely even comprehend it. 

It’s an almost unbelievable story.  I read the section where they are stranded in about two days; I simply could not put it down (even with the gross parts).  This is a huge credit to Philbrick as a writer – I’ve read plenty of nonfiction, and not all narrative nonfiction is as captivating (both immediately and long-term) as In the Heart of the Sea.   This book gives insight into not only the events of the shipwreck, but also the whole of whaling culture as it engulfed Nantucket and its people.  Together, then, readers get this enormous, intense picture of how everything came together to create a culture that encouraged such drastic measures as whaling to gain profit as well as push men past their limits to get home. 

I originally picked up this book at a book fair a few months back, but what got me started actually reading it was the recent release of a movie adaptation.  I did not see this film, however; now that I’ve read the book, I think I’d be interested, but I’m not sure.  Everything I’ve read about the movie suggests that, really, it’s more an adaptation of Moby Dick than it is the true story of In the Heart of the Sea.  That’s a little disappointing – sure, Moby Dick is a great story, and an American classic, but it’s fiction, and this nonfiction story is far stranger a tale than Mehlville could ever create.

In addition, all the movie imagery suggests that the whale plays a much bigger role than it actually did in the tale of the Essex.  Take a look at this movie poster:

That’s a scale that’s almost impossible in nature, and definitely not one that represents the ~85 feet of whale as recorded by Owen Chase or Thomas Nickerson.  Plus, all the previews suggest that Chase is, well, chasing the whale – that’s Moby Dick, not the Essex. 

I read one review that said something like, “It’s 2016, no one wants to watch a movie about whaling.”  And yes, I can absolutely agree with that.  But if that’s all the movie is, then it missed the point of the book entirely. 

This is a story about men who faced up the hand they were dealt, tossed into the open sea by a whale for no apparent reason.  It would have been easy to give up – survival was unlikely – and yet they kept going in spite of everything.  They faced the challenges with the tools their culture had given them, and ultimately, quite a few of them survived. 

Theirs is, perhaps, a quieter type of courage – they didn’t run into burning buildings or face down enemy soldiers or any other of those big acts of courage that are so often praised in 2016.  But they accepted what happened and kept going, and that, I think, makes their story worthwhile.