The Darkest Part of the Forest

The Darkest Part of the Forest
By Holly Black
2015

Since I really enjoyed The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, I started paying more attention to Holly Black. This book didn’t hit me quite the same way, but it is still a fun read. There’s something really pleasing about her heroines in both books: they know what they want and they go after it. Even when they flounder about a bit, there’s a certainty to them that I like.

Hazel, the main character here, occasionally (okay, more than occasionally) makes idiotic decisions, but she does so with a purpose. It’s always understandable and I’m often left wondering if maybe she’s right. And when she’s wrong, she acknowledges it, which is another rare and attractive quality. I didn’t feel much of a connection with Hazel (it’s possible I’m aging out of YA, at least a little bit), but I liked her.

The book also provides an interesting look at how easily some pretty horrific things can be normalized such that both the characters in the book and the reader reading the book don’t think too much about it… until someone points out that, wait, no, what you had been accepting for so long is actually not acceptable.

Only the most obvious example of this is how cruel, tricky and magical the fae are, but also how accepted they are in the town of Fairfold. They’re a dangerous and disturbing part of life in this town. People just carry on… until they can’t anymore.

The Bible: Kings 1

Mar22 by Rebecca

This book is literally a listing of the various Kings of Israel. This is clearly a summary of events and many of the chapters end with a citation: For more information about King [whatever king this chapter discussed] see The Annals of the Kings of Judah, or The Annals of the Kings of Israel. These are apparently both lost books, with no known copies still in existence.

Anyway, at the start of this book, King David is old enough that it is time (again) for his sons to fight over the succession.

King David’s son Adonijah apparently decided that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission and went ahead and arranged his own coronation. (With Joab’s support, too!) With some prompting from his wife, Bath-sheba, King David immediately arranges for the officially recognized coronation of their son Solomon.

King David dies but not before reminding Solomon of all the betrayals he (David) suffered and all the people he (David) promised not to kill, but reminded Solomon that those promises would not bind him (Solomon). Thus there’s no surprise that Solomon starts off his reign with ordering a variety of deaths (chapter 2). After that, Solomon prays for the wisdom necessary to rule the land, which God grants (chapter 3).*

After some talk about how wise King Solomon now was, there’s a lot of description of the temple he has built to hold the Ark of the Covenant. It was built with much cedar wood (as a gift from King Hiram of Tyre) and gold and brass in a very specific design (chapters 5 thru 7) and then consecrated with much worship and sacrifice** (chapters 8 and 9).

Chapter 10 is about Solomon’s wealth and Chapter 11 is about his virility with his 700 wives and 300 concubines. However, it also talks about how he let some of those wives worship gods who were not the one God and thus he sinned started a pattern of sinful behavior in the line of kings. God decides that in punishment, Solomon’s son would only rule over only one of the tribes of Israel and be king in Jerusalem, while a man named Jeroboam would rule over the remaining ten tribes as king over Israel.

The next eleven chapters (chapters 12 thru 22) list the various kings who ruled and the ways in which they variously offended God and tried to kill one another.

Kings of all Israel:

King David
(King Adonijah, son of King David – had himself anointed king without his father’s blessings)
King Solomon (son of King David) (sinful)
King Rehoboam (son of King Solomon)*** remained king of the tribe of Judah

Kings of Judah:

King Rehoboam (sinful)
King Abijim (son of King Rehoboam) (sinful)
King Asa (son of King Abijim) (faithful)
King Jehoshaphat (son of King Asa) (faithful?)
King Jehoram (son of King Jehoshaphat) (unstated)

Kings of Israel (minus Judah):

King Jeroboam (sinful)****
King Nadab (son of King Jeroboam) (sinful)
King Baasha (having assassinated King Nadab) (sinful)
King Elah (son of King Baasha) (unstated)
King Zimri (having assassinated King Elah) (sinful)
King Omri (having defeated General Tibni the other claimant after King Zimri’s suicide) (even more sinful than Jeroboam!)
King Ahab (son of King Omri) (even more sinful than King Omri!)*****
King Ahaziah (son of King Ahab) (sinful)

While there’s all sorts of civil unrest within each of Judah and Israel as well as between them, there’s also all sorts of conflict and temporary alliances with the various kings of Syria.

And thus we are through Kings 1 and thus on to Kings 2.

Summary: There have been a lot of kings of Israel and Judah and most of them have been sinful. Most of the sins, however, have had to do with allowing the worship of idols rather than regarding their tendencies towards killing one another.

Moral: There’s a lot of sinning going on here, but punishments for those sins is largely hit or miss.

* Chapter 3 contains the famous story of Solomon’s wisdom in which two mothers are claiming an infant child is theirs. King Solomon orders the baby to be cut in half so that they can each have half. The woman who protests that decision is identified as the actual mother. Given Solomon’s recent history, it’s no surprise that the two women involved absolutely believed that King Solomon would be more than willing to cut a baby in half.

** 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep and goats were sacrificed at the temple over the course of 14 days. This comes to a bit more than 7 animals killed every minute for 14 days. Oof.

*** The people of Israel asked King Rehoboam to be a kinder taskmaster than his father, to which he responded along the lines of: you only thought you had it bad under Solomon. I’ll work you to the bone and whip you till you bleed. They decided not to accept him as their king after all.

**** King Jeroboam didn’t want his people going to Jerusalem to worship since King Rehoboam remained king of Jerusalem even after Jeroboam took over the remaining ten tribes. Thus, Jeroboam made a bunch of local temples with local priests for his people to worship at and thus horribly offended God. For a while, Jeroboam is the benchmark for the sinfulness of all other kings.

***** King Ahab was so wicked that he gets chapters 17 thru 22 to recount some of his evil deeds which include marrying Jezebel and worshiping Baal. The prophet Elijah comes in here to, first, announce the coming of a drought and, second, to demonstrate the non-existence of Baal. He also arranges the slaughter all 450 of the prophets of Baal, who had been under Jezebel’s protection. Eventually, Ahab was so terrified of a prophesy Elijah made that he rent his clothing, fasted, and wore sackcloth, such that God decided to punish Ahab’s children instead of him.

Next up: Kings 2

Twitter links

Mar15 by Anna

I’m currently reading a couple of Kinsey’s recommendations, so in the meantime, I thought I’d pass along a couple literature-related twitter feeds for recommendation:

Guy In Your MFA (@GuyInYourMFA)

Profile summary: “Two re-writes away from finishing the Great American Novel. Maybe about a 20-something in Brooklyn?”

Laugh at this guy, so that you don’t kill the actual guy in your MFA (or writing group).* Also, at www.guyinyourmfa.com, if you aren’t into Twitter. He has a buzzfeed quiz on how many books by white men have you read, and for the first time, I was proud to have read as few as I had.

The Worst Muse (@WorstMuse)

Profile summary: “No, seriously, go for it. It’ll be a bestseller.”

A long and hilarious list of what not to do in your writing.

—Anna

*Or the guy just this morning holding up the line at Starbucks while he explained to the baristas that he is a Writer (emphasis his) and so really pays attention to people and conversations and cultural transitions, and used that as an excuse to inquire into all of their ethnic backgrounds in a really uncomfortable way.

The Bible: Samuel 2

Mar9 by Rebecca

It’s been a while since my last Bible post, but I am determined to get through the whole thing, even if there is no way I’ll manage my original finish-it-in-a-year goal. (It seemed so easy at the time!) Anyway:

Apparently the reason why there are two-part books in the bible sometimes (Samuel 1, Samuel 2; with Kings 1, Kings 2 and Chronicles 1, Chronicles 2 to come) is because these books were too long to be written on individual scrolls as they originally were. These books are literally scroll 1 of the text and scroll 2 of the text, separated into two parts for practical convenience rather than from narrative intent. This explanation helps a lot with understanding the naming conventions because by the time we get to Samuel 2, the character Samuel is dead some chapters back.

In Samuel 1, we are introduced to David as the plucky rebel who is gets quite the reputation for defeating enemies and surviving assassination attempts by King Saul, and being generally much beloved by the populace.

In Samuel 2, David is now king and it’s maybe a lesson that plucky rebel types do not necessarily make the best kings. In particular, the king in these circumstances (intermittent civil war and periodic invasions) needs to be fairly ruthless (according to his advisers.) If he’s not willing to kill potentially traitorous friends and family, then his advisers are more than willing to do so in his stead and against his wishes.

At this point we’ve got an emotional king who will dance lasciviously in the streets when he’s happy (chapter 6), rend his clothes and refuse to eat when sad (chapter 12), and willing to send a soldier on a suicide mission so as to marry the widow (chapter 11). He’s supported by Joab, a politically practical and ruthless adviser more than willing to kill people with whom the king has already promised peace. The neighboring kingdoms are understandably wary.

Also, King David’s son Absalom tries to take over, and part of this is sleeping with all of his father’s wives. Urg. There is much conspiring by various individuals on both sides. King David, however, manages to send out his army to fight Absalom’s army while also instructing his army to be gentle with his son.

So King David’s army manages to defeat Absalom’s army and find Absalom* but then sort of wander around wondering what to do about the guy who just lead an unsuccessful rebellion but who their king wants treated gentle. Joab pulls out his daggers and kills Absalom where he hangs (chapter 18). Then Joab rides back to Jerusalem, where King David is in deep mourning for his son Absalom. Joab tells him that David is going to stop that mourning, get up and start celebrating with the returning troops or Joab is going to be leading the next rebellion. King David hops to it (chapter 19).

Anyway, civil unrest and external warfare continues, and King David sings a song of praise for the lord that is particularly questionable given the juxtaposition with actual events.

Plus, in chapter 24, David decides to hold a census, Joab argues that counting the population is an insult to God, and God is so incensed by David’s decision to go ahead that he sends a plague to kill 70, 000 men over the course of three days. David builds a special alter to the Lord and the plague finally stops.

Summary: David makes for a wishy-washy king and there is a bunch of civil unrest.

Moral: I don’t even know.

* Absalom managed to ride his mule under a tree, get his neck caught on a branch, and have his mule wander off without him. He’s just sort of swinging there trying to get down while his father’s army wonders what to do about him. Hahahaha!

Next up: Kings 1

Fresh Off The Boat

Mar4 by Anna

By Eddie Huang

Eddie Huang is funny and smart and has a really interesting story and perspective on life, but he’s also kind of an asshole.

He wrote his memoirs a couple years ago, which inspired a new sitcom just this season. Reading a review of the sitcom, I figured the book would be an interesting account of a first generation American’s experience. And it is. What it doesn’t really seem to be is material for a sitcom. As I got further in the book, I was more and more confused about how on earth they were going to make this family-friendly. Like, Huang’s family is all sorts of crazy, with some serious abuse problems to boot, and Huang has more than a few thug tendencies.

A lot of the story has been left out of the sitcom, naturally, but some has just been cleaned up. In one episode, the grandma teaches Eddie’s little brothers to play poker and promptly fleeces them of all their toys. It is a cute scene (my favorite part is when they appeal to their mom to get their toys back, she solemnly tells them that their grandma won them fair and square), but the reality is that Huang’s grandma had a gambling addiction that impoverished her husband and son.

Huang talks a lot about how meaningful he finds hip hop and the hip hop culture. I hadn’t ever thought about it like this, but he says that growing up in a chaotic and abusive household (his parents went far past the point of just being traditionalist; the children’s school reported the family to child protective services), the rhetoric used in hip hop about hard living on the streets gave him a frame of reference for his abuse at home. So, I found that to be a very interesting perspective, if not one that I could always understand.

Sports, basketball in particular, are also an important part of his life, and he discusses that at length, as well. Again, interesting, but not much relevance to my own experience.

What I could really relate to, though, was when he starts talking about food. He describes wanting to make a traditional American Thanksgiving (amusingly, his mother turned her nose up at most American food, but became a fan of green bean casserole), and watching a bunch of Food Network for research before settling on a combination of brining and infused herb butter under the turkey skin, which almost exactly replicates one of my first Thanksgivings on my own.

It is also through cooking that he was able to create his own identity and find a place in society that he was comfortable with, after many, many years of acting out. Similar to other memoires I’ve read by people in their 30s, relating their road to eventual success, the vast majority of the book is spent on the early struggles, with the success sort of just coming together at the end. I guess I’d prefer a somewhat later memoir that gives a little more attention to maintaining the point of success once it has been achieved.

—Anna

Mortal Heart

Feb28 by Rebecca

Mortal Heart
by Robin LaFevers
2014

I started reading the His Fair Assassin trilogy after Kinsey reviewed the first book, and since Anna reviewed the second book, it seems fitting that I review the third book.

This is a fun series and I enjoyed all the books, each of which focuses on a different main character. However, of the three main characters, Annith, the focus of Mortal Heart is the one I find the most annoying. For all her capabilities, she’s really extremely naïve, especially given her history. I continually reminded myself that she was just 17 and a lot of people are gullible at that age. As the book progresses and there are plots and reveals, I would routinely see the issue significantly before the main character even though we’re seeing the same evidence. I also felt a bit of a letdown at the end because I saw a potential way for one of the plot arcs to be resolved in a really fabulous way and instead it was sort of semi-resolved in an okay way.

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was the look it gave into what the other eight gods of the old religion have been up to and how their chosen people are marked and what they do with them.

While the grand political conflict seems to have mostly worked itself out over the course of the three books, what happens next regarding the actual convent of assassin nuns is left so very open-ended that it makes me wonder if there might be a fourth book in the planning stages. I haven’t been able to find any mention of one though.

It was an okay book, but I did like the previous ones in the series a lot more. If there is a fourth book, though, I’ll definitely read it to see what happens.

Thug Notes

Feb21 by Rebecca

Like Anna, I’m a bit embarrassed to make this next recommendation during Black History Month because while this is awesome and by black creators and celebrating black culture, it shouldn’t be restricted to just the one month. This isn’t just awesome within the context of black culture, it’s just plain awesome.

Thug Notes is a YouTube series of videos and it is AWESOME! And I really wish it had been available when I was in high school. These videos take classic books and, in about 5 minutes each, summarizes the plot and talks about the main literary analysis.

Great Expectations, which I slogged through in high school and just got entirely bogged down in the details, laid out nice and neat in 5 minutes.
Lord of the Flies, which I never managed to get past the first page of, broken down for me and presented.
Pride & Prejudice, which I have read way too many times and absolutely love, getting shown in a new light that I hadn’t noticed before.

What makes them particularly funny is that they’re all narrated by Sparky Sweets, PhD, coming at you from the Houston Rap subculture and he is keeping it real about what these homeboys of literature are up to, from a set straight out of Master Piece theater with all of its proper British overtones.

The implied culture clash is hilarious mostly because no clash is ever actually realized. As Jared Bauer, one of the creators, says:

“The idea behind Thug Notes was always that ‘the joke is that there is no joke…’ because the analysis is just so accurate and so smart.”

There are 64 of them (so far) and they are just brilliant. Go check them out!

How To Be Black

Feb14 by Anna

By Baratunde Thurston

Clearly I’m not so much the intended audience for this book, though author Baratunde Thurston was very kind of include a welcome to non-black readers in his introduction:

If you are not black, there is probably even more to be gained from the words that follow. They may help answer the questions that you’d rather not ask aloud or they may introduce a concept you never considered. You will get an insider perspective, not only on “how to be black” but also on “how to be American,” and, most important, how to be yourself. This book is yours as well.

He does provide a caveat though:

If you purchased the book with the intention of changing your race, I thank you for your money, but there will be no refunds. None.

This made me laugh and also feel better about reading about it, though not enough to read it in public. (In fact, Rebecca told me that it made a list of poorly-chosen books to read in public.) Then, I felt worse when I realized when I was reading it. Another excerpt:

Now, more to the heart of the matter, the odds are high that you acquired this book during the nationally sanctioned season for purchasing black cultural objects, also known as Black History Month. That’s part of the reason I chose February as the publication date. If you’re like most people, you buy one piece of black culture per year during this month, and I’m banking on this book jumping out at you from the bookshelf or screen. Even if you’re reading this book years after its original publication, it’s probably February-ish on your calendar.

And so I am. Sigh. I actually heard about the book through Samantha Irby on her blog bitches gotta eat, (which I’m slowly reading all entries backwards in order to catch up) in which she talks about getting to open for Thurston at his Chicago show.

Anyway, the book is a combination of his personal memoirs, thoughts on the black culture in the United States, and interviews with a group of other writers and artists. It is just really funny (as it should be—Thurston works for The Onion), and really informative.

This is making me very uncomfortable to write, but I think it is important. It is very easy to fall into the liberal trap of ‘black people aren’t scary, just culturally different’ while still keeping them very much grouped as one solid entity and separate from yourself. I was continually surprised at how many similarities there were between my childhood and Thurston’s.

First off, my mom and his mom would have gotten along like gangbusters, both outspoken and often radical feminist professionals in large urban areas (Boston and DC, respectively) with long-standing hippy tendencies. We were both the first ones in our peer group to know what tofu was and to have eaten, if not enjoyed, it regularly for dinner. Both of our parents struggled with the idea of sending us to underfunded public schools, before deciding to send us to the local private Quaker schools (of course, his turned out to be Sidwell, so he won this round).

The funny thing is that some real disconnect for me happened around college, when Thurston describes going to Harvard, and while he mentions certainly having to deal with entrenched racism, the experience was overwhelmingly positive and his main take-away was that anything was possible for him and his fellow Harvard grads. At which point, the grubby little communist in me rose up to bitch about how these rich college boys think they can just have whatever they want whenever they want, which was certainly not a response I thought I would have to this book.

Honestly, though, the biggest take-away for me, the thing that was the most important lesson and revealed some hidden racism on my part, was just how funny I found the book to be. Because a lot of humor is shared experiences and personality, and I guess I’d figured that Irby and I are both women, so I relate to her humor in that way, but I just hadn’t expected to relate to Thurston so much. I’m glad I did, of course, and more than a little ashamed that I assumed I wouldn’t.

—Anna

Station Eleven

Feb6 by Kinsey

It’s still early in 2015, but I feel pretty confident saying that Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel will be on my list of the year’s best. I just loved this book. And I think that almost everyone could love this book, because it is so cleverly structured and covers so many kinds of stories without being too dense or 1000 pages long.

The short plot summary is that at some point much like today a pandemic swept the planet and killed 99.9% of the population. Twenty years later, a traveling symphony/theater company tours around the Great Lakes, playing music and performing Shakespeare for small settlements of survivors. This makes it sound very grim and futuristic, but it isn’t. The story jumps around in time and from character to character, so there are bits of stories happening long before the pandemic hits, and then during it, and at different points in the years afterwards. Which means that part of the book is “what you do when the world is falling apart” and part is “how we live in the new normal,” but another big piece of the story is about actors and artists trying to balance fame and creation and marriage in current-day Hollywood. The brilliant Swistle called the shifts in time and characters a relief, and that’s the perfect word–just when I would start to think I couldn’t handle what was happening in a particular story, the narrative would move forward or back and let me take a deep breath and keep reading.

In general, I appreciated that the story wasn’t unbearably dark. While the pandemic certainly doesn’t sound like any fun, Mandel focuses mainly on the very beginning as people are realizing what is happening, and then on life years later as people have adapted to to world post-pandemic. Maybe some people want the realism of The Road, but I am a delicate flower who can’t handle reading that sort of thing. And I was much more interested in hearing about how even with all the losses, there is still beauty in the world (painted on the side of the traveling symphony’s caravans is the motto “Because survival is insufficient”). I also loved the question that came up over and over of whether it was better/easier to remember what once was, or to have been raised only knowing what is possible now.

I always joke that my plan for the zombie apocalypse is to die in the first wave and not have to try to survive, and I stand by that. But this is one of the first books I’ve read that managed to make me incredibly grateful for air travel and refrigerator lights and antibiotics, while also making me feel like the World After might have some hope after all.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Graceful, sad, and hopeful.

You might also like: This book has the DNA of about 12 different books–it reminds me of everything. If you like the world-falling-apart bits, I’d recommend reading the Susan Beth Pfeffer Life As We Knew It trilogy, the The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, or How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (one of my favorite books of all time, although it’s so sad I’ve never been able to reread it). For more of the how-society-rebuilds pieces, try The Passage by Justin Cronin (actually mentioned by Mandel in Station Eleven). But if you like the traveling band of actors/Shakespeare parts the most, you might try The Great Night by Chris Adrian or the Canadian TV show Slings and Arrows. And while Could Atlas is a hard book to recommend–long and dense and people tend to love it or hate it–it has a similar “a bit of everything” feeling to it.

Rebecca

Jan31 by Anna

By Daphne du Maurier

I’d tried reading Rebecca years ago, but it starts off with a lengthy dream sequence that is just a description of a decaying estate, and that is a lot to get through right off the bat. I was inspired to try again by the “Rebecca” chapter in Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre. (I received two copies of this for Christmas, which was good, because it meant that my cousin’s wife didn’t have to steal my copy. This is also the second classic it has inspired me to read.)

The thing is, Rebecca makes me feel old. Perhaps if I’d read it when I was 22, the age of the unnamed second wife and narrator, I’d have been full of righteous indignation about what an awkward situation she’s in and how much more difficult everyone around her is making it. But, instead, I find myself sympathizing with the disdainful and bullying housekeeper, who loved and respected Rebecca, the first wife, and now has to deal with this shrinking child who can’t seem to do anything but apologize for her existence.

As soon as her much older husband starts showing exasperation, though, I’m all in her corner, and she gets somewhat less cringing as the book goes on and she even starts to show some personal agency. Also, du Maurier has a real skill at building a suspenseful atmosphere, so I was still invested in the scenes when not totally invested in the characters.

It took me a few chapters to realize something, but once I did, I was able to enjoy the book even more: I’d had a vague sense that this was a ghost story, either literal or metaphorical, but it is in fact a mystery, and unnamed second wife is not unlike Nancy Drew (in that she behaves like an exceptionally naïve teenager). Rebecca died under mysterious circumstances, and there are hints that she was not exactly as people thought she was. Reading the unfolding of that is actually quite satisfying, and I was even surprised by the series of big reveals at the end, which is always nice.

I wish I’d thought to live blog this one because just every scene is so full of craziness: the costume ball that goes predictably but still agonizingly wrong! The demonic housekeeper trying to hypnotize our narrator into suicide! The shipwreck unearthing secrets of the deep! (Another horrifying reveal that is too spoilery for me to discuss here, but that all the characters took in much better stride than I did!) It is not unlike The Shining, really, with an unbelievably passive woman feeling oppressed by a building and her emotionally distant husband, and would have been fun to go through chapter by chapter, but I was also able to read the book in under a week, which makes a bit of a rush job out of live blogging.

—Anna