The Italian Novel

When I think of the Italian novel I admit that this kind of book was not my first thought (though it really should have).  Why not novels by Italians?  For the longest time it was The Mysteries of Uldolfo by Ann Radcliffe which I had very often thought of as the Italian novel (which is really silly when you think about it... she wasn't even Italian, and worse, I haven't even read it yet!).  I blame it on Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

The year before last I focused on Italo Calvino's novels, which where different, fascinating,  often weird and sometimes a challenge to read, but I never thought of him as Italian (very much).  This on the other hand is Italian!  The real deal.  These two books My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name are only half of what is known as the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante.  I have decided to talk about them two at a time  (because talking about each one would eventually be tedious).  

I am listening to the audiobooks, narrated by Hilary Huber, who has become very familiar to me (after listening to over thirty hours so far), and I appreciate her narrative style.   Her pronunciation of names and her neutral voice overall, is pleasant to listen to.  

My ultimate aim is to read the last of this series The Story of a Lost Child which has been listed as a must read by 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die 2018 edition.  It is a long route to take to get to the eventual goal, but I don't mind.  The first two books were riveting.  They were also suspsenseful (a Kazuo Ishiguro type of suspense), I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does, it is always spectacular (good or bad).  

Essentially these novels are the story of two girls who began by growing up in the same neighbourhood.  Their relationship is a confusing one.  It wobbles from competitive, to jealous, to toxic to affectionate and back again.  It is also, in my opinion, perverse.  Perverse because neither of the girls can leave each other alone for very long.  So after reading two novels about them I have become less inclined to root for the narrator of the story, Lenu but at the same time I really dislike the other girl, Lina.   I have to often remind myself, after feeling disgusted at some nasty thing that has happened between the girls, is that they are girls.  And in the next novel, I have to remember, they are teenagers.  

I'm not surprised.  It is stated at the very beginning when initial description of the neighbourhood was being set, that women of the neighbourhood were the most vicious and spiteful.  

                                  
Novel number two doubles down on the nastiness and again, Lina is just despicable.  But I don't lose sight of the fact that she is also a victim of circumstance.  Both young women are brilliant and thirsty for knowledge, but it is only Lenu who gets the opportunity to commence with a greater education (this story is staged in the late fifty's).  Lina is left behind, and lashes out in frustration at Lenu (though Lenu sometimes likes to rub it in).  Both girls are equal in that they are both poor, and both have parents who are ignorant, but where things change is that Lenu's parents eventually agree to further education whilst, Lina's outright refuse.  This is where I feel the greatest connections to the characters, that passion for literature, for scholastic achievement, also, the frustration of having  parents who do not encourage or understand this intellectual need.
But we differ in that when I recognize a toxic relationship between me and someone else, I distance myself from the toxic one.
My over-all feeling about these first two novels is that they are saga-like, operatic, I could imagine them being performed.  Mostly I am reminded of a friend of my husband.  He wanted to show me what his dog did when she sniffed a cotton ball with nail polish remover on it.  The poor pup would go in for a big sniff, then commence to have a stupendously large sneezing fit, but then, she would go back for another sniff!

5 to 1

Number one on the list 100 Must Read YA Books in Verse.  I don't think it was rated as the best book, just simply the first in a long list.  It was a good, quick read and the subject was something I had never read about before (though I saw, once, a documentary about India's girls so I can see the seeds for such a novel).  I won't get into the wherefore's here.  Just suffice it to say I am grateful that I do not live in India.

Again, (referring to After the Kiss) this novel is told from the perspective of two people, the female in verse the male in prose.  It is another really neat way of differentiating between the two as well as perhaps defining the characters (I'm not saying between sexes, but between personalities).
So, this story is in our future, the year is 2054, so not too far.  India has run out of women and chaos has ensued.  A closed off city has been built to protect what is left of the girls, and a new society is born.   With the ratio of five boys to one girl, there are competitions to show the suitability of each male where the girl ultimately chooses her mate.  Now bring on the dystopia...

I just want to veer off topic for a moment and ask, why do dystopia's get dumped into the genre of science fiction?  This novel, for instance, is not advanced technically in any way, not even in the science of genetics (which you would assume if you were a creepy, futuristic society intent on the breeding of girls).  But this isn't the case with this book.  Nothing sciency at all.  Goodreads even gave it a romance rating which, in my opinion, is really inappropriate.

So I think that at the most, this novel is food for thought, and I like that it is different from anything I have read so far.  I will also say that it has inspired me a little to want to write in the same way (though I haven't a clue about what!).

Binti

Looking for some lighter reads for my job-library's collection, I thought that I would have a look at the novellas that were either winners or nominees for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.  I've been meaning to do this for a really long time, but now I had a very good excuse for having a look.
Of course, Nnedi Okorafor's name has popped up here and there for a while in other award lists, and I had also been wanting to read something of hers...  so this was a perfect moment to do so.
Tor publishing will give you a good deal on these novellas for Kindle so I bought the first one not knowing what to expect. 
I was amazed!  I was smitten!  I was grateful that the other two novellas in this series were available right now!  Never have I been so happy about buying something online and getting that instant gratification of reading as soon as possible!  Binti was wonderful, and the following novellas were great too.

I enjoyed them so much that I didn't stop there.  I have bought most of Okorafor's other books as well, and I am going to read as many as possible this year.  I am especially looking forward to reading her comic books.
So, if you just want a quick read, an introductory jolt of African futurism, this is where to start.  I have just read an article recently that supports this idea at Bookriot.  I can't wait to read what comes next.

After the Kiss

Chosen from Book Riot's 100 Must-Read YA Books in Verse.  One of the really neat things about my new job is that it is in the same town as a library, so I have been taking advantage of the interlibrary loan system.  Which meant that this year I would give this list a try as I A.) love lists and B.) love verse novels. 
A lot of my reading goals this year are about young adult literature, awards etc, and I thought I would fit in genre as well because my library has novels arranged by genre.  I had originally thought this might be placed in the romance category, but after I finished reading it this morning, I felt that it definitely was NOT. 

This story is about two girls who have been played by the same boy.  Camille (new girl in town) tells her story in enjambement:-

“the goal is to keep yourself moving, remember? don't linger. don't hover. you are not going to stay.” 

She moves around a lot (her fathers job) and it is really hard for her to make connections with people.  I like how her verse softens her and shows how she rigidly encases herself in a protective shell.

Becca (hometown girl with boyfriend Alec), is all over the place and her free verses reflect all of the inner turmoil of her life, her obsession with her boyfriend to the exclusion of everything else.  Then there is the catalyst, a car accident, which forces Becca to get a job to pay for repairs, and make Alec one sulky boy who is not getting all of her attention.  Before the kiss:-

“my own chocolate center has filled up with poison,
the roses he gave me all twisted black” 

Becca's life is full to overflowing with work, and her school (this is the last year before graduation) and when the inevitable happens (Alec kisses Camille at a party and it is photographed by one of Becca's friends), everythings falls into chaos for Becca and also for Camille. 

Becca of course is heartbroken, Camille confused and embarrassed.  Alec seems like a nice guy who makes up haiku off the cuff and is very intense which is appealing to both girls.  Really, what he did with Camille was just an impulse, she's a really nice and clever girl who gets his haiku...

"you seem you could use
  a little kind of surprise
  maybe some haiku?"

 Becca's free verse, with the occasional apology to other poets (she borrows from various poets and substitutes her own words) is amazing.  I love how the verse is chaotic and a little choppy, showing how deeply she feels, how hurt she is, but also how creative her personality is. 

I loved this book, all of the different types of verse was just brilliant.  I loved the two girls, each amazing in their own ways.  I especially love how they both dealt with the same situation (Alec).
Phew! Just 99 more books to go!

2017

So 2017 was a major year for me.  First, there was lots of anguish over my place of work and the harassment I was receiving from the administrator. Next I made a major decision to leave my job.  Also, I had begun to take courses online and most of them were focused on Japanese literature and culture, but a lot of them were going to be useful in my job.  It was a big year.  A difficult one.  I had to suffer a lot before I reached a place where I could be free of stress and unhappiness.  My emotions were riding a pogo stick, it was exhausting. 
Once I had reached the conclusion that I had to leave my job, I began to sleep better, the end was in sight.  While my original plan did not work out (getting a job at the public library), a job fell into my lap during September, with more hours and at a high school, plus I would have to commute (something I had already resigned myself to doing if I had got the job at the public library).  I already had a pretty good resume put together so, like I said, it fell in to my lap.
Next came for  me a period of steep adjustment and some anxiety (residual from being harassed for more than five years in my old job) and some things I like, coincidences.  I think I might have commented on the fact that my first semester I felt like I was floating, and kind of high with happiness.  It was a very strange feeling (but constant... no more pogo-ing of emotions!).  Physically, I was improving too.  It was overwhelming to see how better I felt without stress in my life.  It was equally overwhelming to know just how bad it was before, and I felt bad for all of the co-workers I had left behind. 
Now for the coincidence.  I have been taking online courses, and some of them are through Keio University in Tokyo.  I had already completed two courses on rare texts and was looking forward to the next course on sub cultures.  Which is where the coincidence comes in because my new library has a great collection of manga, and I had never read any in my life.  I didn't know anything!  So that course came along at a perfect moment.  Since I had enrolled in the spring, this just felt like destiny!  I have lots more to say on the subject, but for now I just wanted everyone to understand the origins of my new interests.  Manga has already been added to my labels... I look forward to using it a lot!

Makes Me Mad, Mad, Mad!

Scientific experimentation, that is.  To be specific, experimentation on animals and people.

I began listening to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler last weekend (narrated by Orlagh Cassidy).  This was a really good book.  Cleverly done, and written in such a way as to slowly whip me into a froth about the subject matter, a family experiment: raising a baby girl and a baby female chimp together.  The story is not so much about the experiment but about the aftermath.  What happens to the subjects when the experiment is over? This is my favourite quote from the book:

      “The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.” 

Around the same time as listening to this book, I watched a documentary on television called Three Identical Strangers. It is about triplets who are raised separately without any knowledge of each other who reunite when they are nineteen, by accident.  It is a sad, shocking story, with scientific experimentation at the root of it.  There was no reason specified for this study and no conclusion.  

I just finished a book yesterday called  The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson.  Another bizarre story about scientific experimentation.   

All of these mentioned above are just random choices I made to meet certain reading categories, but I am flabbergasted by the co-incidence.   I loathe this topic!  I did all the research when I first became a vegan and I already know what happens in the laboratory to animals.  When I was in college I took developmental psychology (briefly...I was so disgusted by some of the reading, about experiments performed on babies that I chose to skip the rest of the course).  I unsubscribed from PETA because I hated the way they felt they needed to shove this info in my face repeatedly.  That wasn't the only reason, but I don't want to get too deeply in to the politics of it here.  

Going back to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, whilst Fowler's book rattled the mad-o-meter she wrote a clever, eloquent and uniquely graceful story about what makes a family. Her protagonist, Rosemary Cooke's  conclusions about the experiment were profound.  It gave me food for thought and stuff to get cross about...
At the root of it all experimentation for the sake of it, for intellectual curiosity, makes me angry in several ways, so while the book was a good read, I didn't like how it set me off on a ranty tangent about psychologists etc.,
I was scowling and anxious until the very end.

Slowing Down is Hard To Do

Even with the best of intentions, I have read 64 books this year so far.   To be fair 45 of those books were manga (more on that later!), but still... it's a lot.  It's not easy to slow down.  I have many talks with myself about doing something else, and it's always an argument!  I think the biggest reason I haven't made any new blog entries over the past year is because I whipped through books so quickly that I didn't give myself the chance to think about what I read, let alone think about what I might want to say about it.   I wasn't going to do that again, so here I am late Sunday night, thinking about a book I read over a week ago.

No-one forgets their first dystopian... or at least it was that way for me.  Thirty-four years ago I read 1984 by George Orwell as part of high school English.  It was my second book by him (having been subjected to Animal Farm  by a really mediocre teacher which spoiled any possible appreciation I could have felt for it at the time).  I was blown away!  This book was remarkable, enraging, and  sinister.  When I was an adult, one of the first things I did was buy as many of George Orwells' books as I could get my hands on.   But still... even with the advent of the movie  in 1984, and that amazing soundtrack by The Eurythmics, it was not something very relate able, because Orwell's world Oceania seemed so removed from my own.

Not so with The Circle by Dave Eggers.  It was a gripping read, I kept hoping that the protagonist Mae Holland,  would get out somehow, but I was forgetting how that went for Winston Smith in 1984.  I shouldn't have been surprised at all, because without even knowing anything about this author, or his motives behind writing this book, I can firmly state that this is an updated version of that classic dystopia 1984.   I know it so well, but I didn't start to suspect it until Mae began public speaking, and quoting her insipid slogans that became mantras for the masses.  I admit at that point I was looking for more evidence to support my supposition, and I found a lot of it.   I'm not criticizing Eggers for doing this.  He did a splendid job of updating this essential story, hence making it eerier because it is so close to us now, technologically and socially.  

Last week, on the day when I had just read that part of the story about the wrist bands in the novel I had a student come in to see if I could charge his Fitbit... spooky!  It galvanized me in a different way, and it still upset the apple cart!  And it was a relief in other ways in that I am not a big user of social media (I rarely post), and I don't use a lot of apps.  Honestly, the most useful ones I have are all book related.  

Like other books that have inspired me to make changes, The Circle has inspired me to work on communication with people, have face to face encounters rather than leaving things to an email or a text.  As well, I am firmly entrenched in the anti-twitter camp.  I thought it was stupid when it first came out, and I think it is just plain rubbish now (especially considering a certain leader's over-usage of it).   Last year I saw a poster or two about using social media responsibly, so I think, given a chance, I will help to promote that too.

I am not a technophobe.  I love having so many resources at my fingertips, doing the job that I do, accessibility to information and it's many forms is, in my opinion, vital in the role of a librarian.  But at the end of my workday I switch everything off, and go home.  Do something different.  Meet friends for walks or coffee, go to the local library, listen to music or an audio book on my commute to and from work.  Cook food, clean the house, work on my crochet, take naps.  Read.  Live.