I Had Seen Castles

I have slowly built up a love for everything concise, starting with my first experiences with Ernest Hemingway and carrying over into my appreciation for the likes of McCarthy, Silko, and Salinger. My interest in the styles of these writers hopelessly carried over into my own writing, and as a result, my current vision of the most basic elements of "the story."

I found this book to be a remarkable gem of a story. Its spare and controlled prose paint a somber picture of the effect of War on John at the cusp of his adulthood. I could not help but compare this book to Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front and notice how similarly--and yet also how differently--the effects of war are presented.

There was much less of an emphasis on the brutality of the war than Remarque's novel, but I appreciated that. I feel as though the focus of the book was on John's transformation from "conscientious objector" to veteran, and all of the emotional weight that the war and his abandonment of Ginny puts on him.

I liked the format of the story--the memoirs of an aging and lonely veteran. I have this thing about books that try and capture real moments and relationships with real ambiguity and real heartache. I think this book succeeds in that it doesn't cross the border to "too depressing" or "unrealistically uneventful" in trying to portray these complex issues.

The Golden Compass

At some point I made a comment in class that I had held off reading His Dark Materials because I didn't think I would be "into" them. I had used up three lifetimes of a Fantasy Literature phase in my pre-teen and teen years on The Lord Of The Rings and by sophomore year in high school I had significantly moved into a more contemporary age of literary preference. Not only did I want to take a pretty significant break from fantasy for a while, but almost every other fantasy book that came out after my LOTR fascination seemed like a hasty attempt to cash in on Tolkien's impassable genre monolith, particularly books that were arranged as a trilogy.

I take a lot of advice about the quality of literature from my wife, who is a dedicated reader (much more dedicated than I could ever claim to be). I was intrigued to learn that His Dark Materials ranks about as high on the list of her favorite books as one could expect to attempt to rank books for as avid a reader as she is. She never really recommends books to me (being more aware than anyone of my combination of unplaceable reading preferences and unappeasable expectations) but I got the feeling that I should get into The Golden Compass at least.

It's great.

I loved Pullman's writing style. Coupled with the intricate universe that he has built, his storytelling really takes wing. Great description, wonderful vocabulary, and a pace that it easy to follow (a particularly important quality for young adult literature, I have come to find) as well as intriguing. The prose is well thought out, engaging, and free of that frustrating quality that seems to plague most children's fantasy: drawn out passages of detail that struggle to remain relevant to the book's plot, message and character development. In particular I liked how the point of view shifts omnisciently between characters--I felt like it brought the book together much better not having to be confined to Lyra's perspective for the whole book.

The only outside criticism I can find on this book--anywhere--is its very tangible rejection of organized religion. I know that when the movie adaptation came out, there were legions of religious groups that blindly instigated attacks and boycotts based on this element. Pullman has been pegged as an "atheist" by nearly all of this brand of critics, the most violent protestations stemming from the argument that, since this is a children's series, Pullman's main agenda must be to incite a rampant theological revolution in today's youth, using His Dark Materials as a vessel for his Godless doctrine.

Not only is this kind of accusation unfounded, I think that it is a terrible reason to argue whether a book should be read. I think that it is a shame that there is, somewhere, a kid who has been prevented from reading this book due to his parents' lack of individual discretion. Aside from the fact that Pullman is clearly not an atheist (because the admission of an "Authority" or otherwise spiritual overseer in his story would contradict this title) Pullman's willingness to express his opinions on the ramifications of a satirical composite of the cultural impact of organized religion does not qualify as a reason to attempt to prevent anyone from reading anything.

This story was original and engaging and I plan on reading the rest of the series. I feel as though this kind of story has never been written before, and I find that exciting.

Looking For Alaska

I had meant to read this book a long time ago, but I never got around to it after it received a review by my wife that was not negative but indifferent. The story is good, she said, but the way Green writes is pretty unconvincing and nothing too special.
I didn't want to waste time reading anything that I might not have been completely enthralled with, so I didn't bother.

Having finally read it, I can't say that I proved her absolutely wrong. I did like the book, but I think that I've picked up on a few things that I liked that my wife either didn't notice or forgot to mention:

While the teachability of this book has been hotly debated, I think that one positive aspect of the book in an educational setting is Green's ridiculous penchant for inserting very challenging vocabulary and phrasing into Miles's narrative. I got a great deal of satisfaction reading the observations that Miles makes because of the advanced level of intelligence that prompts them.

At the same time that I praise this element in Green's writing, I think that it makes his characters unbelievable. I really liked Alaska as a character, and Green definitely sets her up as a strong catalyst whose personality is bigger than any writer could attempt to capture on paper. Still, in order to make Alaska a likable rebel/intellectual, that same process of inflating defining characteristics makes Alaska & Co. altogether unlikely as accurate representations of real people.

This is where I would say that this is okay by me--if Green wanted to create real people in his book, then we would have a completely different (albeit boring) novel--but since it is clear through additional notes, quotes, forwards and afterwards that Green models nearly every character, place or situation after his own experiences, the attributes that he builds his characters from become shoddy imitations of genuine characteristics.

The best thing that this book has going for it is Green's ability to enter the mind of an adolescent. Green is a fairly young author, and I think that this has a lot to do with his ability to sympathize with the complex emotions that accompany the teenage years--particularly the ambiguity of relationship drama between 18 year-olds. He really hits the nail on the head with an underrated grasp on the fundamentals of teenage angst, and he pairs this nicely with the roller coaster of emotions that follow a teen's first experiences with death. Because of this strong element, I can see why so many high school students are raving about it.

Here is the best instance of this:

"The silence broke: 'Sometimes I liked it,' I said. 'Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.'
'You mean it felt good?'
'No. I don't know. It felt. . . pure.'
'Yeah,' he said, dropping his usual eloquence. 'Yeah, I know. Me, too. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural.'
It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things" (226).

I think that it is important for kids to understand the last bit of that quote--that there are thoughts and emotions that sometimes bombard you after significant events that everyone deals with. Green manages to not sound like a motivational speaker when telling us this, so it works.

Though my wife and I are still convinced that he was hired by tobacco companies to make smoking look like something only dramatically cool kids do.

Living Dead Girl

After hearing Erin and Tim book talk this novel, I picked it up because I wanted to see if I could get through it. It sounded so intense and disturbing that I decided to make it my "stretch" book. It is technically in that category of YA that can be referred to as "issue lit," and I only say this because while books in this category might all share certain elements, I don't think there is a universally accepted formula for what constitutes an issue book. In this case, let me just say that the girl in the story goes through traumatic events that count as issues that some unfortunate young girls might go through.

The girl is abducted at 10 years old and is physically and sexually abused for the next five years by "Ray," a controlling psychopath who calls her Alice and threatens her with death if she tries to leave him or seek help from anyone.

There are different ways that an author can create a world that is hopeless and depressing--which fills the reader with an intense unease and feelings of dread--but I found that a tasteful presentation of these methods of writing is not present in Living Dead Girl. The intent of the voice and style is clearly meant to be "in your face" (as so many internet reviews like to vaguely describe it) but in this case the entire work seems more like an unrelenting foray into the personal experiences of a victim of sexual captivity. While there is an amount of interesting word play scattered throughout Alice's broken and emotionless narrative, that narrative as a whole is a monotonous litany of seething meditations on graphic, overly-explicit scenes of abuse.

I find that my preference for literature almost unfailingly includes stories where I never actively think--mid-story--about the author penning the book one page at a time. It is my experience that the mark of good literature is that it removes the author from the equation completely, leaving the reader to experience the world the author has created as a separate experience than something that was made up by the person writing it.

In this case, from beginning to end I could think of nothing but how Elizabeth Scott, the author, was at some point in time researching first-hand events and thinking up one brutal scene after another so that she could compile them all into this one tedious novel. Scott has said in interviews that she had recurring nightmares about Alice's story and felt as though she needed to write it down.

It is not my intention to put aside the gravity of the issue of child abduction and abuse, nor do I want to wrongly assume anything about Scott, but by the way the story dives into such tortured and nihilistic prose with its endless examples of abuse, I feel like Scott may have been too enamored with the "idea" of a sex slave while writing, using Alice's situation as a channel through which she could explore her ability to push the envelope of controversial writing.

My stance on this book is not that it is controversial. On the contrary, I find very little about it that is controversial. There are untold millions of books that have gotten negative press for far more graphic and sensitive subject matter. I think that the book is just a big letdown, to tell you the truth. I don't feel as though the overall "message" is one that anybody can learn from, particularly anyone in grades 9 and up. I think Scott could have done a lot with her chance to shed light on an as-of-yet untouched societal hazard, but she squandered that chance to instead portray a hopeless narrative which ultimately falls under some sort of shock-horror-fiction genre. My ultimate stance is still that Living Dead Girl is a tasteless exploration of human depravity. Many other books have handled darker subjects, though through their quality of writing they have become masterpieces.

"There is no such thing as a 'moral' or an 'immoral' book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all."
-Oscar Wilde