News of the World by Paulette Jiles

News of the World feels like a book I've read before, even though I'm sure I haven't. It has a classic odd-ball pairing: a grizzled, road-weary old man befriending a young, outcast girl. It touches all the right heartbreaking notes without being overly sentimental.

The story follows Captain Jefferson Kidd as he travels through Texas, where he makes a living by reading newspapers from around the country and world to small towns. He agrees to transport 10-year-old Johanna, who had been taken captive by the Kiowa, back to her relatives. Johanna's parents were killed in the Kiowa raid, and after living with the Kiowa people for several years, Johanna sees herself as one of them: she neither speaks English nor remembers her birth family. Not surprisingly, the book's primary focus is the growing friendship and respect between the Captain and Johanna. Existing somewhat outside of society himself after the death of his wife, the Captain understands Johanna's position in a way few other white characters do.

Traveling through Texas during Reconstruction, the Captain and Johanna must face lawlessness and constant threats. The dramatic dime-fueled shoot out is especially intense. But most of the novel is more languid, as the Captain considers his purpose and drive at this point in his life. Ultimately, the book suggests, life is about relationships and knowing what drives you. 

"Parable of the Talents" by Octavia Butler

I was ambivalent about Parable of the Sower, though I found it compelling despite myself. In many ways, Parable of the Talents is a better book, despite some the rush at the end. While both Sower and Talents are comprised of Olamina's journal entries, the entries in Talents are interspersed with reflections from Olamina's adult daughter, Larkin, who was born in the Earthseed community Olamina founds at the end of Sower. Larkin's perspective gives some needed balance to Olamina's single-minded devotion to Earthseed. Larkin rightly calls her mother a cult leader and is aware of the collateral damage of her mother's cause. Larkin's perspective doesn't make Olamina a villain--and she certainly shouldn't be viewed as such--but she does raise needed questions. Olamina's choice to build a self-sustaining community based on respect and loyalty is inherently good, but she insists on that community existing to promote her religion of Earthseed. It's that leap that's hard to swallow, even for people (and readers) sympathetic to her cause. Plenty of religions embrace change--the Christian "Serenity Prayer" comes to mind--but Olamina adds to her religion a goal of achieving the "Destiny": humankind's future belongs (literally) in the stars through space travel and human population of other planets.

There's an argument to be made (though it's not made convincingly in the novel) for such travel, but framing a religion around that travel seems doomed. Heaven, as a concept, works because it can't be proven/disproven and can't be achieved while alive. It's never-ending. Space travel, on the other hand, is finite and fallible. Olamina believes in the Destiny because she believes humankind needs a grand purpose--if not eternity in heaven, then a genealogical eternity on other planets. But what happens when they reach and populate another planet? Does Earthseed end? We don't find out, though Parable (improbably, given the apocalypse in Sower) ends with the first humans heading out to the stars.

But I'm quibbling with points that aren't particularly important to the novel. Instead, the bulk of the novel follows Olamina as Acorn, her Earthseed community, is founded and then later destroyed and turned into a Christian Reeducation Camp. The camp is run by fanatical followers of President Jarrett (who really does have the slogan "Make American Great Again"). The camp guards steal Larkin, kill Olamina's husband Bankole, and enslave the remaining community members. Olamina's time in the camp, filled with brutal violence and rape, is the hardest to read. The violence is important to establish the regime they're living under, though the didactic criticisms of fundamental Christianity are tedious, even if wholly deserved.

Given the detail given to Acorn's founding and later destruction, the ending of the novel rushes by, with Olamina almost immediately finding success and financial support for Earthseed. Again, given the apocalypse in Sower, it's hard to believe so many people are well-off and eager to support a single-woman cause. If nothing else, it speaks to the strength of Olamina's character, something that was clearly established in Sower. She's a young Black woman, but no one doubts her leadership or competence. There's enough strength of will to almost make the reader want to believe in Earthseed.

I've mentioned two of the novel's perspectives--Olamina and Larkin. The third comes from Marc, Olamina's younger brother who was sold as a sex slave. After being freed by Olamina, he becomes a preacher in the Christian church that enslaved Olamina, and he chooses to hide Larkin's existence from Olamina for years. Marc should be a villain, but he never quite goes there, a testament to Butler's writing. Like Olamina, he finds certainty and solace in a belief system that provides him with purpose.

Talents probably should have been two books (perhaps would be two books today), but it's no less forgettable than Sower and definitely more thoughtful.

Miscellany:

• In my review of Sower, I noted my confusion with Olamina's hyper-empathy syndrome, which seemed unimportant to the novel and inconsistent. It's even less important in Talents, and no additional information is provided, so I'm fully flummoxed by its use in the books.

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

I've done it. I've conquered the "white whale," the endlessly-metaphor-ready novel of English literature. And like Ahab (of course, because we're all Ahab), the path was long and treacherous, with high hopes, fits and starts, and (okay, the simile's not particularly apt) an entirely benign conclusion.

I started Moby Dick a few years ago, inspired by an educator's event at the Contemporary Arts Center on an exhibit inspired by the novel. One artist had drawn an illustration over each page of the book. "I'll read a page each day!" I had decided. I think I imagined I'd write some sort of response too. Though I did occasionally make annotations, the page-a-day petered out almost immediately. Still, I made some progress over the years, picking it up here and there. This year, realizing I had perhaps 100 pages left, I decided it was time to resolvedly confront the Leviathan.

It's funny how hard the book is. It shouldn't be. I've read significantly longer books. The prose is archaic by today's standards, but it's not more challenging than the prose of Melville's contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose The Scarlet Letter I teach), and it's certainly easier than the more opaque post-modernist writers. It's simplest to blame the challenge of reading on the novel's structure, its frequent departures from the primary narrative. After all, Melville dedicates more pages to arguing that whales are fish than he does on the final chase of Moby Dick--but, then again, I love non-traditional books. Or perhaps it's the awareness that there's meaning that's just above your head, a sense that the teacher would laugh at you the next day when you innocently asserted the novel was "about a whale." But I'm an English teacher!

Probably it's a combination of all of the above, in conjunction with Moby Dick's vaunted position in the English canon. It's a book I found frustrating, boring, and tedious but also fascinating, funny, and compelling. I'm glad I read it.

Reading what I've written so far, it's clear that reading Moby Dick is more about the reader's journey (oh, the metaphors!) than the novel itself. Still, Moby Dick is, nominally, about the monomaniacal Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, Moby Dick, who cost Ahab his leg. It's narrated by Ishmael, whose character frames the opening of the novel before dropping out completely. In fact, though Ishmael continues to narrate and is present during the final chase, he doesn't insert himself back in until the epilogue, after everyone else on the whaling ship Pequod has met their watery doom. The linear narrative plays only a minor role in the novel, however. Instead, the reader learns a lot about whale anatomy. About the heavenly feel of spermaceti. About Biblical references to whales. About other ships the Pequod encounters. About how easy it is to weave the word "unctuous" into prose. 

And we also learn about human purpose and fate, about our drive even in the face of insurmountable odds. I just finished teaching The Road to my juniors, and a student remarked that McCarthy's message seems similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's closing line of The Great Gatsby (which we studied in the fall): "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It's the same final message we get in Moby Dick, maybe the American message, or maybe simply the message of humanity. 

Come for the spermaceti. Stay for the message about us all.

"The Liar's Dictionary" by Eley Williams

The Liar's Dictionary has the appearances of a fluffy novel, or at least what "book people" would consider a fluffy novel. It's full of wordplay and obscure vocabulary; it treats lexicographers and dictionaries ambivalently, befitting both the seriousness and absurdity of their work. On a straightforward level, the novel is about a Victorian lexicographer who enters his own made-up words into the dictionary--and a modern assistant who discovers them. Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the recognition in these invented words, the sense of "ah, yes, that should be a word," or even just the sense that, despite the expansiveness of the English language, our words can only say so much. 

But Liar's Dictionary is a quirky book that doesn't quite meet expectations. By the end it's also a mystery or maybe a spy thriller or... I'm not sure? I was more baffled by the ending than I expected, leaving me to wonder if I'd missed something all along.

The novel alternates chapters. First, there's Winceworth, our sad-sack Victorian lexicographer, working on the "S" section of Swansby's Encyclopedic Dictionary. A hundred years later, there's Mallory, the sole intern for the never-finished Swansby's Dictionary, who mostly answers phone calls from a mysterious caller threatening attacks on the building.

Winceworth's chapters focus primarily on his relationship with Sophia, the fiancé of Winceworth's pompous colleague Fransby. What appears to be a story about a burgeoning romance between the two suddenly takes a turn when Winceworth ends up in an exploding train (for real) and Sophia turns out to be a Russian spy (?). The primary message, then, from Winceworth's story is his attempt at immorality through the invented words he sneaks in the dictionary. He realizes his actual person will leave no legacy, but his words can.

Mallory's chapters attend to her dry work at the dictionary, where she's assigned to find the mysterious invented words littered through the dictionary. She also has to contend with the threatening caller, who's presumably angry at the dictionary changing the definition of marriage to include the queer community. Mallory has an enthusiastic girlfriend, Pip, but is not quite out as a lesbian. Mallory and Pip's relationship is more satisfactorily concluded, though her section ends with an exploding building and insurance fraud (?) that I also found largely inexplicable.

Endings and overall cohesiveness aside, The Liar's Dictionary is still largely a fun book. Plus it reminded me of fantastic real words (such as "apricity," the warmth of sun in winter) and contrived ones (such as "agrupt," the irritation caused by having a denouement ruined," which I probably should have understood as a sign of the book's ending).

"The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" by Mariana Enriquez

It's easy to remember many of the classic campfire scary stories told in my youth: the woman driving alone on a rainy night, unaware of the killer in her backseat; the babysitter who calls caller ID after receiving crank calls, only to learn the calls were coming from inside the house! Last summer, I kept a group of kids enthralled as I recounted the "tale of the bloody finger" over a crackling fire. We love scary stories, ghost stories, stories that end unsettled, as if the lack of equilibrium in the world could catch us too. But there's also a sense that these are stories for children. Adult scares come in the form of medical tragedies, unexpected expenses, or the inevitable ennui of middle age.

It's a surprise, then, to read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which I'd call--with no criticism intended--a collection of scary stories. Sure, they're literary scary stories, but they're campfire tales all the same, full of ghosts and possessions and creepy children. Shortened and simplified for an oral audience, the stories--particularly ones like "The Lookout," about a vengeful ghost--would be ideal for a group gathered around the fire on a dark fall night.

Because the stories have so much in common with traditional ghost stories--a normal world, slowly going askew; characters succumbing to the terror that lurks--it was almost hard for me to read them as literature. Traditional ghost stories often have a vaguely moralistic lesson (don't ignore the man at the gas station because he looks creepy! he's warning you about the murderer in the backseat!), but Enriquez has no such didactic purposes. Her characters are rarely at fault themselves. Instead, they're victims of family history and choices or the society in which they live. Few stories are overtly political, though the final one, "Back When We Talked to the Dead," where a teenage girl suffers because she's the only one in a group not to personally know someone who's been "disappeared" (presumably by the government), suggests there's plenty of evil that comes from non-supernatural causes.

Perhaps part of the stories' appeal, at least for an American reader, is the Argentinian setting, itself similar but just slightly "askew" from America. Smoking, as in the title, is present in many stories, an ashy haze that seems appropriate for the subject matter. But because smoking is far more common in Argentina (as it also is in Europe) than in America, this too feels slightly off, another element that situates the stories of the precipice of unreal. 

Several stories include variations of vicious female masturbation, done for obsessiveness or other macabre ends, but never for pleasure. This appears most grotesquely in "Where Are You, Dear Heart?" about a woman with a heartbeat fetish--or maybe in "Meat," about teenage girls who consume their rock star idol. In fact, so many stories revolve around teenage girls or female sexuality that we're reminded how easily these two things can be turned to horror in our society, something to be feared.

Ultimately, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is literary ghost stories for adults. And that's not a bad thing.

"A Children's Bible" by Lydia Millet

I finished A Children's Bible before Ready Player Two, but busyness pushed writing the review aside, and I also found I wasn't quite sure what to say about Millet's novel. It's a weird little book, unsettling but without a didactic message.

The novel begins with an assortment of jaded teenagers at a summer house with their parents. They're hugely disdainful of their embarrassing and drunk parents, so much so that they make a game of identifying whose parents are whose. The last person to have a parent correctly identified as theirs wins. Then a terrifying hurricane ushers in the apocalypse. The kids are left largely on their own, working for survival against the elements and human threats. The book's title comes from the children's Bible that Jack, the younger brother of narrator Eve, carries around. It's a clear nod that much of the book is allegorical (from Eve's name to the great flood to the "plagues" they face), though I'll confess I'm not clear on the allegory's meaning. 

For instance, Jack works to save the animals a la Noah, but there's little indication the animals need saving. In fact, Jack has to be told to let them go when another sees they're suffering. There's a baby born in a barn, but the baby has no real effect other than bringing out the parental care of his sister. Millet isn't trying to make any religious message, a point emphasized when Jack announces he's "decoded" the message in the Bible. God is nature, and Jesus is science. Believing in Jesus thus means believing in science.

I read that Millet works in environmental policy, so it would be easy to see this as a direct warning about climate change and the like. But I don't think Millet is being so un-subtle. Jack's announcement has no effect on the other characters or the plot. It's not a grand revelation that changes the world.

Instead, the book focuses more on how we make our way in the world, the choices we make to exist in or escape the reality around us. The most withering criticism seems to be for the kids' parents, who exist in a boozy and drug-filled haze, barely able to eek out concern for their children. Their lives are vapid and meaningless. It's hard at first to see their privileged children's lives as significantly better, despite their disdain for their parents and their Peter Pan-like desire to avoid growing up. Nonetheless, the children do ultimately take charge and live with what they're given. They accept the environmental truth around them, and instead of resisting the inevitable, work with it. Perhaps that's Millet's environmental message after all.

"Ready Player Two" by Ernest Cline

It's embarrassing to admit now, but I loved Ready Player One. I even ranked it my favorite book of 2011! I acknowledged some of its weaknesses in my review, but overall I found it entertaining. In the following years, after reading some thoughtful critiques, I came to have a more balanced perspective toward the novel, particularly Wade's egotistic behavior (especially towards his crush) and the novel's narrow, white-centric view of culture. Still, I wanted to read Ready Player Two. I'd read some of the harsh critiques of Cline's sequel before picking up the book, so I felt prepared going in.

Ultimately, all the critiques are appropriate and justified. RP2 is not a great book. And I'm still embarrassed to say I enjoyed it anyway. 

In my review for RP1, I argued that one of the reasons I liked the book was because it was fun, a contrast to the Deep and Meaningful literature I'd like to think I typically read. That's undoubtedly true of RP2 as well. I wanted a silly romp with dumb characters and expected endings. And I got it!

So what to say about RP2? RP1 ends with its hero--Parzival/Wade-- winning Halliday's contest and gaining control of the OASIS, the virtual-reality world most of the world spends their days in. RP2 begins shortly after, but Cline thoughtfully realized that his book-one underdog hero is not nearly as fun when he's the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Wade was a whiner in book one, but at least he was a poor whiner. Now he's just an entitled brat who spies on his friends and uses his unlimited power to destroy people who oppose him. To address that, Cline almost immediately hits "reset." Rather than explore his hero's newfound power and the complicated issues around what it means to be human in a digital space, Cline has crafted a plot almost identical to RP1: there's a new puzzle challenge with a new series of obstacles that Wade and his band of friends must solve by relying on their encyclopedic knowledge of '80s culture! And this time, Wade will literally be saving the world!

Now, this challenge should be nonsense. Did I say that Wade is the richest and most powerful man on the planet? That he has a giant corporate team at his beck and call? That it makes no sense whatsoever that he and his three friends would essentially go it alone to solve a puzzle necessary to save the lives of half a billion people? But, of course, reading about a CEO navigating personnel is boring. It's more fun if Wade and his merry band have to use their pluck, courage, and friendship to save the world.

Like in RP1, Wade, Shoto, Aech, and Art3mis must pass through '80s nostalgia to solve the puzzle. And, like before, this premise is easier to accept if you hand wave... a lot. Because the reader now knows Aech is a Black woman (she concealed her identity, playing as a white male avatar in RP1), she can occasionally pipe in on the fact that all of this nostalgia is white (and every other normative). But beyond Aech's comments, RP1 rarely acknowledges any culture beyond the white suburban "mainstream." Instead, RP1 and RP2 exist in a world where everyone has dedicated their lives to '80s pop culture. Which, again, makes no sense, even if you accept the insane popularity of Halliday. Sure, plenty of people are John Hughes fans (I guess? Are there still huge John Hughes fans?). But enough to painstakingly recreate every detail of his movies into a virtual world?

In fact, the whole RP1/2 universe suggests that everyone devotes their lives and days to recreating nostalgia from the past. I can understand why the OASIS is insanely popular. But why wouldn't people create new worlds? New adventure? New game forms? Why, instead, make intricate versions of Middle-earth or Prince-worship planets? Aren't there new forms of entertainment? Why do people spend their days completing insanely difficult quests in these worlds? Plenty of people don't do that in video games today!

But I'm getting sidetracked. Wade's quest is made all the more challenging because Art3mis/Samantha, the "love of his life" from book one, broke up with him a week after the first book's end. She's worried about the OASIS' stranglehold on people's lives. Wade's super mopey about this. But, don't worry, in comes Quest to Save Humanity and, uh, their relationship is fixed? I've written about a lot of nonsense, but Wade and Sam's relationship takes the cake. She's furious at him and has legitimate concerns about the power of the OASIS and their new neural hardware (the ONI), but once the quest starts, she appears to forgive him immediately. At the end of the book, they're back together, despite nothing changing. In my review of RP1, I noted that "the problematic nature of most of the world spending all their time online is only slightly addressed." In RP2, the problematic nature is addressed via Sam's concerns. And then completely dropped. 

I'm not even going to go into the bizarre "let's live forever" ending. 

Still, though I've wasted far too much of my and my imaginary audience's time complaining, I liked it. I know! I read it quickly. It was stupid and fun and the jokes were bad and the relationships terrible and the world underdeveloped and real issues unaddressed and still whatever. I liked it.

Side notes:

• Is Cline planning a book about L0hengrin, the woman who comes to Wade's assistance twice in the book? She's set up as an important character only to disappear and then deus ex machina the end. She has an entire side quest we hear nothing about! Is there a companion novel?
• Cline implies that everyone is pansexual now because the ONI allows people to experience sex in various forms and with different partners. It could be a cool idea... if actually explored.