A Literary Rubik's Cube

Remember the Rubik's Cube? On the surface, it looks pretty simple - a cube with a different color on each side, made up of 9 segments. But give that cube a twist or two in different directions, and suddenly the colors are all mixed and it's a head-scratcher of a task to solve the puzzle and get back to the original configuration.

I finished Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days yesterday, and while it's not a perfect metaphor, the Rubik's Cube is a decent way to describe my experience with the book. The "cube" that holds the story together is the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving railroad builder who "died with a hammer in his hand, O Lord." The book also has some "solid colors" that seem to be the main storylines - a small town in West Virginia is using the release of a commemorative John Henry stamp to kick off a new John Henry Days festival; a group of PR "junketeers" is in town to cover the event for various media outlets; one of the junketeers, J. Sutter, is the closest thing to a main character in the story. There are also several chapters that give John Henry's perspective leading up to the famous contest in which he beat a steam drill (then died with his hammer in his hand).

But Whitehead keeps twisting the cube and coming up with different combinations of colors that don't, on the surface, have anything to do with the main storylines. One chapter is about a little girl who discovers the sheet music for the John Henry song but is told by her mother not to play such trash when she could be practicing her "better" piano music. Another is about a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who is trying to recall the words of the song he heard a stranger sing, so he can put it down in writing and maybe have a hit that will support his family. There are two chapters about the wife of the motel owner in the smaller of the John Henry Days towns and her superstitious obsession with ghosts. And those are only a few of the side stories in the book.

Like the Rubik's Cube and its myriad of color combinations, this story structure can be a little frustrating until you stop fighting it. It's not really that hard to keep the thread of the main storyline, since Whitehead presents chronological events leading up to the ceremony. He does, however, keep a reader sort of unsettled by revealing in the second chapter that there is a shooting at the ceremony that kills two people. I spent the rest of the book being fearful that the characters I was coming to care about (J. Sutter and Pamela Street) were going to be the two. I guess I'm a little cynical about modern authors and how they like to set up readers and avoid traditional cliches, so killing off the nicest characters in the story seemed like the kind of thing a modern author would do. 

SPOILER ALERT!!! Whitehead didn't do it - at least I don't think he did. That's another similarity to the Rubik's Cube - sometimes you can never get back to the original six colors. After setting us up in the second chapter to know a shooting is going to happen, the actual shooting happens off-screen. The only way we know anything about what happened is through a conversation between two postal workers. And frustratingly, we never find out who the two specific people who were killed are, only that they were two journalists. The story ends with J. weighing an invitation to skip the ceremony and go back to New York City early with Pamela. The book ends without telling us what his final decision is. My first response after reading the final line was "WHAT? THAT'S IT?" - the literary equivalent of throwing the Rubik's Cube against the wall, ha ha.

For all its (minor) frustrations, I did enjoy the book. Once I got into the groove of the shifting stories, I liked the little vignettes of random characters interacting with the John Henry legend or song. And two of the chapters were incredibly poignant. MORE SPOILER ALERTS!!! Pamela has been struggling throughout the story with the impact of her father's obsession with John Henry, and she asks J. to come with her to bury her father's ashes in the hidden graveyard of the black workers who died building the railroad. It's a life-changing experience for her and for J., and it's very satisfying to see them moving toward a different path that is (hopefully) going to bring some meaning and richness to their lives. That's followed up immediately by a chapter in which Whitehead portrays Pamela's father as a lonely old man who has lost his family because of his obsession and who built what sounds like a pretty good museum to John Henry in his apartment - that no one comes to see. He spends his days waiting to share John Henry with people who just don't care. Sad.

The Literary Equivalent of a "Junk Drawer"

Normally, I like to wait until I'm completely finished with a book before doing a blog post about it, but something struck me about a chapter and a half into Bill Bryson's At Home, and I just had to say something.

The subtitle of the book is A Short History of Private Life, and the premise is that Bryson has written "a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted" (from the description on Amazon). Sounds pretty straightforward, right? It is anything but!

Every home has a "junk" drawer, in which all kinds of miscellaneous items accumulate. Sometimes the items center around a theme, like a kitchen drawer that has anything from bread twist ties to the instruction manuals for various appliances to cheesecloth scraps to pills for lactose intolerance. Other times it is just random stuff that has somehow ended up in one place. When you finally get around to decluttering, you may find something fascinating.

Bryson's book is kind of like that. In chapter 1, he lays out the idea for the book - a tour of his home with background and history of how each feature came to be part of a modern house. He then proceeds to talk about: 1) the Crystal Palace in 1851 London; 2) the history of glass; 3) vicars and rectors in the Anglican church and their various side hobbies; 4) Skara Brae in Scotland's Orkney Islands; 5) the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture; 6) the development of maize/corn and potatoes from wild plants to their domesticated, modern version; 7) the discovery of Catalhoyuk in Turkey; 8) an early influential archeologist and his mysterious death; 9) the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. I've just started chapter 3 and he has yet to say anything about the house!

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining. It's all really interesting, and Bryson has a flow to his writing that makes all these disparate threads make sense together. It's like listening to a wonderful conversationalist who knows something about everything and who also just happens to have the world's worst case of distractibility. I'm sure he will eventually get around to talking about modern homes. And the trip to get there is going to be filled with all sorts of treasures from the "junk drawer"!

Update 2-20-25:

I finished At Home today, and just as so often happens in the decluttering process, I am left feeling both overwhelmed and relieved. You start the process with so much energy, and then as the items keep coming out of the drawer, you begin to get almost numb to the process. But you have to keep going - you have to. 

I am overwhelmed - and impressed - by how much Bryson managed to fit into this drawer. Architecture, landscaping, the Vanderbilts, death statistics, nineteenth-century social gossip, the ins and out of powdered wigs...oh, my goodness, SO MUCH! I'm really glad no one is giving me a paper-and-pencil test over the book, ha ha. But let me repeat what I said above - I'm not complaining. I collected a lot of very interesting information to pack into the "junk drawer" of my brain.

Unpopular Opinion - History Is History, and Fiction Should Reflect That

Many years ago, I did something I've regretted ever since. I posted a review of a book by a self-published author that was kind of mean. The book wasn't all that good, but I shouldn't have been as snarky as I was in writing the review. I've tried to remember since then that there is a person behind the author's name on the book and to be a little less unkind, even if I didn't like their work.

I may break that rule for this book - Girl in a Cage by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris.

Actually, I'm not even going to talk that much about the book; there are some things about it I didn't care for,  but nothing worth breaking my rule. But the thing that just burns my butter is how the authors play fast and loose with history. 

The "girl in the cage" is 12-year-old Marjorie Bruce, the daughter of Robert the Bruce, who staged a rebellion in the early 14th century against Edward I of England to gain Scottish independence and defend his right to be king of Scotland. I don't have any problem with the history that Yolen and Harris present about the war between Robert and Edward. They keep the historical events of Robert's defeat at Methven and the desperate attempt by the women in Robert's family to escape to Tain, where they could catch a boat to Norway and safety. Unfortunately, Edward's army caught up to them and they were eventually betrayed by a fellow Scotsman as they sought sanctuary in a religious shrine. I learned a lot about this episode of Scottish history.

But where things go wrong is in Yolen and Harris' portrayal of what happened after the women were captured. In the book, Marjorie is taken to Lanercost in the north of England and put in an iron cage, where she remains, exposed to the elements and public ridicule, for three weeks before being sent to a convent as a prisoner. Yes, some of the women who were captured - Mary Bruce (Marjorie's aunt) and Isabella MacDuff Comyn (a supporter of Robert) - were imprisoned in cages (for years, not weeks). However, most sources agree that although Edward ordered a cage to be built for Marjorie at the Tower of London, she was never put in the cage, but was instead sent to a convent at Wotton for the next eight years. The authors made up the whole premise of their book and falsified history.

The authors acknowledge in a note at the end of the book ("What is True About This Story") that while Edward ordered a cage, "Marjorie was never sent to London but was instead made a prisoner at the Gilbertine nunnery...." They go on to say, "We speculate that as the other two ladies were caged on the Scottish borders, that Edward may well have subjected Marjorie to a similar fate at Lanercost, where he lay sick" (emphasis mine).

You may say, "Oh, come on - this is fiction! Of course there are going to be some made-up parts." Sure, even with historical fiction, there have to be made-up parts; for example, the dramatization of the scene at the shrine when the women's capture is imminent. I have no problem with putting words in their mouths and thoughts in their heads as they go through that historical event. But to make up historical events just to serve your fiction is....WRONG. In my opinion, anyway.

Why? Because who in the 21st century has heard of Marjorie Bruce? (Maybe they teach about her in Scotland, I don't know.) We don't have any historical information about her going into Girl in a Cage to provide context. The first thing in the book is an accurate timeline of the history of Robert's life up to the point when the story takes place, so we assume we are going to be reading history - fictionalized, yes, in the way mentioned above, that historical figures are "brought to life," so to speak. We go through the entire book believing we are reading about something that really happened, only to find out in the author's note at the end that it didn't happen. It's a mental jolt. It's misrepresentation. It's a lie. What makes it worse is that this is a book for children, who may not catch the fine distinction between "we speculate" and "we know." They probably won't take the time to go back and look up the historical record the way I did. As a result, they may go through life with a wrong set of historical facts in their heads.

I guess I'm just super-sensitive to misrepresentation of the historical record and of lies being presented as truth at this point in society. And yes, I know there is a whole genre of "alternative history" fiction. But I feel strongly that writers of historical fiction owe it to their readers to stick with the facts and not to bend them or make up entirely new facts just because it makes for a "better" story, especially for young readers. If you want to make up history, say so at the beginning of the book, not the end. Let your readers go into the story knowing they are reading something that is not factual. Respect the history!

Rant over.

 

A Different Sort of Fever

 

My husband has had the flu for the last couple of days, and don't tell him, but that's kind of fortunate. Because I have been totally engrossed with Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I read - no, devoured - it in less than 48 hours.

What a read. I'd heard of the book, vaguely, and my main impression was from a Reddit post that said something to the effect of, "It was so dark, I cried on every page." So, the world being what it is right now, I wasn't especially eager for a downer of a book. But while sitting in the parking lot waiting for my husband to see the doctor (I didn't want to risk sitting in a waiting room full of sick people), I checked on the Libby app for my next read after The Last of the Mohicans. Maybe Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, I thought. But in the list on Libby, every Kingsolver book had a hold - except this one. I thought, 'What the heck? If it's too much of a downer, I can always drop it and move on to something else.' So I checked it out and started reading in the parking lot. I was hooked from the first line, and in fact, kept my poor husband waiting for nearly 30 minutes before it registered that the message he had sent meant he was done with his appointment, not just his flu test.

No doubt about it, this book deals with dark issues - drug addiction, incompetent foster care, loss and death. But it's not a downer, really. Demon is a character you root for, and even in his worst moments, he doesn't let you down. He makes some terrible choices, but you can see the logic of them, even while your brain is saying, no! Don't do that! Ugh....you did it. Despite his background and the impediments that drag him down, he keeps striving, and you believe up to the end (and beyond) that he's going to make it out of the obstacles and traps that life has laid in his path.

But this is not just Demon's story, and maybe that's where the downer part comes in. Kingsolver addresses head-on things like the tragic impact of opioid over-prescription on the lives of individuals and communities, the lack of funds and oversight and just basic attention to the welfare of children in the foster care system, the current of racism, and let's face it, just bad parenting. This book is also a love letter to Appalachia and a condemnation of the forces that have stereotyped the people and communities of that region. I don't live in Appalachia, but some of the same things could be said about the Ozarks. After all, many of the people who settled here came from the mountains of Tennessee, etc. As I read the book, I could see many elements in the story here around me - the worship of the high school football team, a job at Walmart as maybe the best economic opportunity in a town, children being raised by grandparents. And there are also always the stereotypes that we are ignorant and backward. I remember when my husband and I went to graduate school in Kansas, one of the first things one of his fellow students said when learning we were from Arkansas was, "How do you compliment a girl from Arkansas? Nice tooth." Meant entirely in fun, of course.

Anyway, I'm really glad Libby forced me into reading this book!

Mohicans: Endgame

About halfway through reading The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, I realized I was reading the nineteenth-century version of the Marvel Comic Universe.

Ok, I'll admit, I've not delved too deeply into the Marvel Universe (I think I watched Iron Man and Endgame?), but I know the basic narrative. And a lot of elements from the Marvel movies line up pretty neatly with elements from Cooper's novel:

• A group of disparate characters who face adversity together and by the end of the story have formed a bond;

A really nasty villain who seems to become more and more unreasonably obsessed by the end of the story and who also has a gift for persuasion to sort of miraculously sway public opinion;

A goofy character who comes around in the end to play an important role;

Female characters who represent the dichotomy of roles for women - the sweet, beautiful damsel in distress and the calm, courageous (but also beautiful) sacrificial heroine;

A sequence of action scenes with setbacks and small victories, leading up to an ultimate battle in a dramatic setting, with the loss of key team members and a dramatic defeat for the villain; and

A scene of mourning in which the other team members say goodbye to their fallen comrade.

It makes me wonder - did Cooper establish the pattern for the action genre that has been followed in the 200 years since he published his novels, or am I imposing a 21st-century pattern on his work? I'm going to dig out my American literature textbook from those long-ago college years and see what insight I can gain there.

Anyway, I'm now going to watch the 1992 film adaptation with Daniel Day Lewis. As I was reading, I could visualize how I thought Hollywood would portray these scenes. I'm eager to see if I was right. 

As The Kids Say, It's Been a Minute.....

Since my last post was in the midst of the Covid pandemic, with nothing since, readers may think I succumbed to the "plague" those nearly five years ago. Fortunately, that's not the case - I've had Covid twice during that interval, but thanks to the vaccine, both times my case was nothing more than a mild inconvenience. 

However, I have suffered from a malady of sorts. I lost any motivation to write on the blog. I didn't stop reading (more on that later), and I sometimes had thoughts about what I read that could have made a blog post. But I didn't see the point of putting it out into the world. Who really cares what I think about Jane Eyre or my take on the myths of Latin America? It just seemed trivial and not worth the time at the computer.

Yet, I didn't forget about the blog, either. Lately I've actually missed writing out my musings about what I read. Even if no one cares, even if it's trivial, it's part of my enjoyment of reading to process the ideas through writing. And it's a way of "collecting" and remembering and reliving the pleasure of reading.

So, I'm back to try again. I'll start by briefly remembering/reliving the highlights since the last post in 2020.

2021 Flashback - Jeff and I had a trip planned to Ireland and Great Britain, so I read several books about Ireland or by Irish authors. Two highlights - Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (finally! after a couple of attempts over the years) and Last Night's Fun by Ciaran Carson.

2022: The Year of Reading about Food and Farms - I started with In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and worked my way through several farm-related books, such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball (probably my favorite read of the year).

2023 My Last Year as a Professor - The book that most influenced my thinking this year was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I've taken to writing down meaningful (to me) quotes as I read, and I have more than a page of them from Kimmerer's book. I also enjoyed So Much to Be Done, a collection of excerpts from writing by women in the nineteenth-century American West.

2024  I hit my reading stride! I read more books this year than I have in a very long time, probably because I bought a Kindle Scribe for my birthday. Some favorites: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (I picked this up from a windowsill at a bed and breakfast in Thurles, Ireland, and read in the evenings until we left and I had to leave it behind. I was able to check it out from the library a couple of months later and finish.); A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird (I have a hard time believing this woman rode a horse hundreds of miles around Colorado - alone!); and The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck.

I'll close with one of the quotes from a little book I tucked in during the last few days of 2024, The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli:

"Fret not, my son. None of us is perfect. It is better to have crooked legs than a crooked spirit. We can only do the best we can with what we have. That, after all, is the measure of success: what we do with what we have."

It's Been a Bad Year - For Reading

 I don't know what has been wrong with me this year. You would think that with so much stay-at-home time, I would have had plenty of time to indulge myself in reading. The reality is that I read one book all the way through - ONE BOOK. And that was a children's book (The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis). 

I had started A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley at the beginning of the year, but returned it to the library when the pandemic struck, since there was no guarantee of when I would be able to get it back. And I've been picking at Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser for the past couple of months, but I recently decided I'm going to put it in "hibernation," as a Facebook acquaintance said she does. And that's it. Unfortunately, I haven't even felt like I wanted to read, which is kind of odd - you might think I would want to escape to some fictional world with problems that could be resolved at the end of the plot, unlike the real-world problems we were all facing.

That's not to say I've been an intellectual blob these months. I decided to get serious about studying Spanish. I've been doing lessons on Duolingo for 329 consecutive days. I still have trouble understanding spoken Spanish, but I'm steadily getting better at reading, and I've tried to write some.

I've also become a faithful reader of the Facebook posts by Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor who is writing what she calls "Letters from an American" that summarize the day's events in politics and place them in a historical context. Her speciality is Civil War history, and it is fascinating to see the links between what was going on just prior to the beginning of the war and today's events.

Anyway, I'm going to put Sister Carrie aside (who needs to read about those characters' miserable lives??) and get a fresh start tomorrow. Maybe 2021 will be better, all the way around.