A LOT to Process Here....

 Once in a while, I will read a description of a book on a blog or something, think it sounds like something that might stretch my reading experience, and add it to my ever-growing list of books to read. That's what happened with The Words in My Hands by Asphysia. I added it to the list for three reasons: 1) I thought it was a graphic novel, and I've never read a graphic novel; 2) it's contemporary young adult, which is a genre I don't really frequent; and 3) it's about a Deaf girl, and I thought it would be interesting to learn something about the experiences and perspectives of the Deaf. I got more than I bargained for! 1) Yes, there are some illustrations because the main character is an artist, but this is not a graphic novel. 2) Yes, it's contemporary young adult, with all the romance, friendship and coming-of-age struggles that are typical of the genre, but that's not all there is. 3) I learned a LOT about the experiences of Deaf people, including that trying to appear "normal" by lip-reading and learning to speak is stressful and exhausting. I also learned that the word is capitalized when referring to the community of people who are deaf, and (at the risk of sounding kind of dumb) that there is not a universal sign language; sign language, just like spoken language, comes in different variations depending on geography (ASL is AMERICAN Sign Language, duh....).

Beyond those three things, there was a lot of interesting content to think about. The book is set in Australia in the somewhat near future, when food and fuel are scarce. A giant corporation called Organicore has created a food supplement that people receive through a subscription, and people have come to fear "wild" (meaning natural and non-processed) food because the official word from the government (which is controlled by Organicore) is that "wild" food gives you food poisoning. Besides, Organicore's food supplements have been enhanced with agents that prevent cancer and cure the common cold! Never mind that as the story begins, there are some side effects emerging, such as Energy Deficiency Syndrome in young people. It's also illegal to grow your own food on public land (I guess you can still grow food on your own land), so most people have become dependent on the rations supplied by Organicore. Their apartments don't even have kitchens, because who needs one when Organicore ships you a box with everything for a ready-made meal?

Piper McBride is the daughter of a top scientist with Organicore. She's also deaf, and is struggling to fit in at her school and to understand what people are saying, even though she has hearing aids. When the story begins, Piper's mother has just been fired from Organicore as the scapegoat for the side effects, which upends everything in Piper's life. She and her mom go from being financially comfortable to renting out their home and living in the guesthouse with only one small Organicore meal per day. While looking for some form of transportation to get to school (they can't buy fuel for their car), Piper meets Marley, a hunky guy who works in a bicycle shop. Marley just happens to be the son of a Deaf woman. He introduces his mother  (Robbie) to Piper, which sets off a chain of events that completely changes Piper's thinking about her life. For one thing, Robbie grows her own food, which is magical to Piper, who by this point is starving trying to survive on one small preprocessed meal per day. For another, Robbie is comfortable with being deaf and doesn't try to fit in with "normal" people; she uses sign language as her primary means of communication and is not at all apologetic about it.

Another person Piper meets through Marley is Kelsey, an activist who is organizing a movement to allow people to grow their own food as a means to address the food and fuel shortages the country faces. Piper becomes more and more drawn into the movement, starting with starting a community garden on her street, eventually being arrested for her activities but ultimately having a triumphant moment when she is a featured speaker at a rally.

What I thought was going to be a fluffy little teen romance about a girl who was different from other YA heroines because she was deaf ended up having a lot of depth. Here are some things the story made me think about:

1. Our food system - The pandemic a few years ago showed some of the vulnerabilities of the food chain in the U.S. (and maybe around the world). I've also read articles that talk about the small number of large corporations that control agriculture and food production in this country. The majority of what we eat in the U.S. comes from six crops - corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, potatoes and sugar beets (all carbohydrates). Plus, there's Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food that points out how much of what we eat is ultraprocessed - engineered in food labs to contain the "right" nutrients, along with other ingredients to make them tastier and, Pollan contends, more addictive. Yet, he argues, with all of this nutritionally-"perfect" food, rates of conditions like heart disease are higher than they've ever been. His solution? "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." We need to turn away from the convenience of an Organicore-style system to eating more "wild" food.
   
2. Government corruption - In this semi-dystopian story, the one large corporation influences key aspects of society through their "ownership" of the prime minister. I guess Organicore was instrumental in getting the woman into her position, so she favors policies that will benefit Organicore, even if they aren't good for the people. Organicore also has control of the communication system (Quest Tool, which everyone in the book, even Piper's corporate-employee mother, calls Cesspool); only stories that favor Organicore's perspective make it to the news feed that everyone gets on their personal wrist device. When Kelsey and Piper are trying to spread the word about their rally in favor of growing food, any message they submit, whether to the general public or to each other, is deleted. Sound familiar?
3. Piper's identity crisis - At one point, Piper thinks of herself as split into halves. One half is the one who pleases her mom and wears her hearing aids and speaks with her voice; the other half is the one who doesn't use her voice, who doesn't wear her hearing aids, and who uses sign language or other means (like mime or writing) to communicate with people. She is struggling with which half is the "real" Piper. She doesn't want to disappoint her mother, who has spent so much money and effort to try to help her daughter be "normal." But what is "normal" for her mother is oppressive and uncomfortable for Piper. A key part of the book is her journey to decide who she is and wants to be. 
   
4. Deafness - As I said above, I learned a lot about the Deaf community from the book. At the end, there is an additional note from the author that talks about how hearing people can interact with the Deaf in respectful ways. Very informative.

There's probably more I could pull out of this, but this post is already long enough, and I have a social event to get to. I'll just wrap it up by saying this book vaulted from pretty low expectations to being one of the contenders for "best thing I read this year."

I Did It!

One of my post-retirement activities has been to join the community band that my husband directs. It meets in a town about an hour and a half away, where he also teaches private music lessons at the public school. In the past, I've driven up in the afternoon for the once-a-week rehearsals, but this year I decided to just ride along with him, saving gas money - and making it so I don't have to drive back after dark (the real reason).

But what's a girl to do all day with no car in town? Fortunately for me, this town has an outstanding public library, so I've been bringing my laptop and spending the day catching up on things like my digital scrapbooking and organizing my list of things I'd like to read.

One of the things that has been on my list for a long time is Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer. I've had a hard time finding it, though. Fortunately (again), this library has it! Since today is the last day until January that I will be coming for rehearsal, I decided to take the book off the shelf and see if I could finish reading it during the time I'm at the library while my husband is at lessons.

And I did! I actually would have finished in the morning hours, but he got away early for lunch, so I had to finish the last bit after coming back. It wasn't a little easy-reader chapter book, either; this is a young-adult novel with 265 pages (ok, ok, young-adult books are not difficult, but hey, I still feel accomplished).

The book tells the story of Anne Hathaway, who married William Shakespeare when she was 26 and he was 18. It's about the sort of miserable life Anne had growing up after her mother died of the Black Death when Anne was only 8 and after her father remarried. In the tradition of the wicked stepmother, Anne and her stepmother clash over just about everything. Anne has a few romances that give her a hope of escaping that miserable life - one with a migrant farm hand, one with a reserved schoolmaster, one with her stepmother's nephew (which the stepmother pushed on Anne; Anne didn't choose that one), and finally, the one with Will Shakespeare that had simmered below the surface of all the others. Sadly for Anne, once she did end up married to Will, she didn't get the dream marriage she had hoped for - after only a couple of years, Will was off to London to become the Shakespeare we all know, returning home for only an occasional week or two. I couldn't help thinking how much happier Anne would have been if she had been able to marry the schoolmaster, who was "safe" and "boring," but a genuinely nice guy (he died in another epidemic), instead of the passionate and romantic Will.

One thing that struck me as I read was the limitations women faced during that time period. There's this statement from Anne's best friend:

“I pray God that you will soon find such a man,” Emma said kindly, “for a woman without a husband is no woman at all.”

 And Anne's schoolmaster, when she asks him to help her learn to write, responds:

“Reading can be useful as well as pleasurable, ‘tis true,” Ned allowed. “But what use has a woman for writing?” 

Really glad I wasn't born in the 1500's!

So now my library days are over for a while. I will miss them.

 

A Simple Story with Philosophical Underpinnings

 

I picked this book off our home bookshelves for a couple of reasons: 1) I wanted something that would be a quick read to fill the gap until I was able to get to the library; 2) I used to offer it as an extra-credit assignment in my Persuasion Theory class, and I figured it was time I actually read it. As it turned out, it wasn't quite the quick read I expected because the switch on my bedside lamp gave out, and so I wasn't able to read at bedtime (one disadvantage of physical books). And I will say that although the point related to persuasion was made quickly in the book, I guess it was appropriate for extra credit.

What I was hoping students would take from the book is an understanding of the arbitrary nature of symbols (like words) and the social mechanisms that lead to a symbol becoming an accepted tool for communication. In the book, Nick, a 5th-grader, is inspired by what his teacher, Mrs. Granger, said about the dictionary. After pointing out that the animal we call a "dog" is called by other words in other languages, she said,

"...if all of us in this room decided to call that creature something else, and if everyone else did, too, then that's what it would be called, and one day it would be written in the dictionary that way. We decide what goes in that book." (p. 31)

Nick, ever the practical joker, decides to test her statement by coming up with the word "frindle" to use instead of the word "pen." The rest of the story traces how "frindle" gains acceptance as a symbol, first among the other fifth-graders, then the whole school system, then across the country.

Since this is a children's book (grade level = 5.4), it doesn't go deeply into the philosophy of symbol creation and use. It's kind of neat that this concept is introduced in a kids' book at all. I spent quite a bit of thought in my Ph.D. program and in the college classes I taught talking about the same issue.   

The Odd Couple (of Books)

 I just finished reading a couple of books that, on the surface, have nothing in common. The first is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, the sprawling epic based on the Cain and Abel story. The second is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a parody of conventions in British literature. But as I think about them, it seems to me Cold Comfort Farm could be seen as poking fun of East of Eden - if Gibbons hadn't written her book 20 years before Steinbeck wrote his.

            

First, there is the way each book handles its "source material." Both of them stick pretty closely to the work they are following. Steinbeck's story of the twin brothers is a very close replica of the biblical story; at one point, Cal (Cain) basically says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" just as Cain did. The elements are all there - the rejection of Cal's gift, the "murder" of Aron, the follow-up conversation between Cal and his father that determines Cal's future. SPOILER ALERT! Fortunately for Cal, Adam (his father) gives him a chance at a brighter future than Cain got (but maybe that's because Cal had an advocate, Lee, pushing hard for it).

In Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons takes on a lot of the conventions of books like Wuthering Heights (I don't know that's one of the books she had in mind, but I can see how her book uses elements that are in Wuthering Heights). There's the gloomy, brooding physical environment. There's the irrational group of characters - part of a big family - who respond melodramatically and hysterically to circumstances. There's a big mystery and a character who is hidden away in a room in the huge, decaying farmhouse. There is the male character who oozes sexual energy and the innocent, sweet maiden.

The difference, as I see it, is that Steinbeck was taking his source material very seriously. He spends a significant section of the book having Lee explain his study of the Hebrew word timshel, which Lee (and through him, Steinbeck) sees as the key to understanding the Cain and Abel story. It's very scholarly. Gibbons, on the other hand, is laughing at her sources. Early in the story, the main character (Flora) and one of her friends are speculating what the farm will be like, and they agree there will probably be an oversexed guy named Seth. When we get our first introduction to the farm, we meet the brothers who run the farm - Reuben and...Seth. Here's the opening description of Seth:

"...a tall young man whose riding boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge....His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man."

Within a few paragraphs, Seth is undoing another of his buttons. It's pretty funny - you know the type, or at least the stereotype.

A second similarity between the books is the "character haunted by trauma." In East of Eden, Adam Trask is debilitated by the cruel betrayal of his beloved wife. He spends more than a year in a stupor, ignoring his farm and his newborn sons. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Aunt Ada Doom who isolates herself in an upstairs room, only coming down to be with the rest of the family two times a year. For 20 years, she's constantly reminded everyone that she saw "a nasty thing in the woodshed" as a child. Steinbeck's Adam is pathetic; Gibbons' Aunt Ada is ridiculous. 

In each case, there is someone who pulls the character out of their funk. In East of Eden, it is Samuel Hamilton, the good-hearted, philosophical, sort of bumbling Irishman who literally knocks some sense into Adam. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Flora, the sophisticated, calm, pretty much perfect young Englishwoman who sees through Aunt Ada's hysterics and persuades her flying to Paris is much better than sitting around in a bedroom. Everything Flora puts her hand to succeeds - everything.

I could go on, but you probably get the point. The main difference, I think, is that Steinbeck took it all so seriously. East of Eden is epic, in every sense of the word. Gibbons turns "epic" on its ear and shows us literature doesn't have to take itself so seriously, after all. Which side of the debate do I take? I'll have to get back to you on that....

SPOILER ALERT! One of the ways Gibbons flaunts literary convention is that she refused to give us all the answers to the mysteries in the book. What was the "nasty thing" Aunt Ada saw? We never find out!