If you’ve read my recent posts, you know I’m asking a lot of questions right now, trying to find the next steps in my path as I wonder about the world we’ve built. As I’ve been reading and touching base with other people these past few weeks, though, I’m realizing how essential questioning is to my worldview, how much respect I have for people who ask big questions, and how little patience I have for people who ask few. This week I’m reflecting on what that means in Fahrenheit 451, A Sorceress Comes to Call, A Burning, and The Bat-Poet.
Good and Evil in A Sorceress Comes to Call
I have no interest in dogging on books that make lots of people happy but just aren’t my bag. But am interested in learning from these books, as something can be learned from anything. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was one of those books for me. Loaned to me by a beloved relative, I read the book even after I figured out I was the wrong reader, because I was interested in why the book didn’t work for me.
I realized that my main rub was with the way the titular character and her daughter were portrayed, in that one was a perpetrator and the other a victim. Simply that. They were both effectively written as such and the pacing was solid, but I wanted more layers in each of them. More nuance to the story. I wanted to be able to ask why they were acting the way they were and to find interesting back stories therein.
Sometimes I worry I can dig too deep, look for too many reasons why people are the way they are, to the point that excuses can be made for anything. This is something I explore in my most recent book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard (working title as I’m looking for a publisher) as consider what it’s like to grow up in an environment where all ideas are weighed and accepted, and the hurts that can have. Like the fact that my husband asked me what it was like to grow up near the Aryan Nation in Hayden Lake, Idaho (he was watching The Order last night) and all I could say was, “We didn’t agree with them, but we respected their right to their own worldview.”
While I wanted to know more about the characters in A Sorceress Comes to Call and to see some nuance in their humanity, there was nothing that was going to make me excuse the actions of the sorceress. Or was there?
Archetypes in A Burning
Speaking of political violence, which is on a lot of our minds lately, I found a copy of A Burning by Megha Majumdar at the Little Free Library and dove right in. I’m not quite done with this one but it was interesting to feel how differently I related to the characters in this story of a young woman (Jivan) in India who is imprisoned for a terrorist act she did not commit.
I was particularly interested in how I accepted Majumdar’s portrayal of PT Sir, Jivan’s once PE teacher, as he finds meaning and power in a fringe political party. Where I questioned myself while reading this book was that these characters are as much archetypes as those in A Sorceress Comes to Call. But I think the difference is that Mamjudar uses this as a tool to shift the weight of the story from the individuals (who do have interesting reasons for what they do) to the society (which is richly detailed in the ways it fails its citizens, especially the non-Hindu ones).
I’m not sure yet that A Burning is asking a question. But it is definitely exploring the layers of why and how, and it’s a compelling read during this time of the rise of Modi.
Fahrenheit 451 and the Mirrors of Today
Some dystopias are fictional and I got the chance to revisit this classic by Ray Bradbury recently as my 10-year-old son picked it out as one of his birthday books. I can tell he’s exploring someone’s canon of great books because he checked Frankenstein out from the school library more than ten times last year (and it’s in our home again already this year—though I have offered to buy him a copy). He struggled in the beginning as he couldn’t tell what was metaphor and what was a mapping of an unfamiliar world (someday he’ll be the book reviewer, I tell ya), but I think we were both enriched by reading this book (and by watching the Simpson’s Treehouse of Terror takeoff, though picturing Montag as Homer did shift things a bit for me).
At first I was drawn in by the uncanniness of the “parlors” with their “families” of talking heads that fill the citizens’ brains with pablum only gently personalized with their names. I related to this both from an addiction to SimCity standpoint and also because I’m starting to work more with AI in my freelance life. Both of which make me think about how simultaneously engaging and shallow these digital worlds are.
“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.” – Faber in Fahrenheit 451
In all, there are so, so many things in this book that reflect on now. The one that sticks with me, because we can all feel it coming, can’t we? is the war. Like Granger says about the Phoenix:
“Every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”
Asking Questions Now
I was at a reading this week where poet and translator Jake Syersak was reflecting on the work of Moroccan poet Tahar Ben Jelloun who was imprisoned during the 1960s. Syersak said something about how the magazine that Ben Jelloun had made with friends, the one that the government hated so much that it outlawed the magazine and chased down all the contributors. Syersak spoke of the power of that and of the power of the uncertainty literature creates. He talked about people who want us to be certain and how they want to shape what we are certain about. I could only think of the “family” Bradbury described and how the noise of the questions in my head is one million times better than the noise they are creating trying to make the questions stop (Harrison Bergeron-style).
“When [my grandfather] died, I suddenly realized wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again…He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” – Granger in Fahrenheit 451
Essential Creativity in The Bat Poet
The book that rounds out the puzzle in my brain today is The Bat-Poet by Randall Jerrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. This simple story of a bat who is finding ways to himself through writing came to me by recommendation of Maya Jewell Zeller and I read the whole thing aloud to my family the day it arrived.
The lesson I carry from this book is the nascence of the bat’s voice and how he persists, even as the mockingbird tries to center himself in any attention and to fill the air with his own thoughts (much like the “family”). The bat goes on and on and gets better the more he creates.
“The trouble isn’t making poems, the trouble’s finding somebody that will listen to them.” – The Bat-Poet in The Bat-Poet
For now, like Montag in Fahrenheit 451, I’ll be looking for a glass of milk, an apple, a pear. “Some sign that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.” These questions and thoughts are the beginning of my work, the art I am creating. What will you build?
If you want to explore any of these books, pick up a copy of A Sorceress Comes to Call, A Burning, Fahrenheit 451, or The Bat-Poet from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.
I can’t recall where I read about Barkskins, but as the daughter of a forester, the idea of reading about how timber has shaped our nation appealed to me. The book follows two (entwined, at times) families, one Mi’kmaw and one French from 1693 until almost the present day (though I haven’t reached actual nationhood for either the U.S. or Canada) as settlers clear the newly “discovered” land, first for the value of the timber, then for the sake of clearing.
In Brooklyn, Eilis is an intelligent young woman in post-war Ireland with very few prospects. Jobs are scarce and most of the energy of the young women in her village centers around getting married. Eilis is given the chance to move to Brooklyn where she encounters a whole new booming world. She has a job with the potential to move up, she has an education, there isn’t even (in the beginning) a marriage market to speak of. And there are exciting new goods to be bought for herself and her loved ones back home. All of her waking hours go to working or going to school, to the extent that I wondered how she would have time to build friendships or romantic relationships at all (I really was exhausted at times reading about the hours she kept, but also she didn’t have kids and I forget what that’s like).
My son has a book called There Must Be More Than That! by Shinsuke Yoshitake that’s all about choices. At the end the mom offers the daughter two types of eggs and the girl blows up, “Not just boiled or fried! There are more ways to make an egg than that!” and then lists dozens of other options. I love this book with all my heart because it reminds me how much we narrow our lives by just choosing between what we’ve seen before. 
No one embraces and embodies the complexity better than Edan Lepucki, and Woman No. 17 delves deeper and with more nuance into the mother-child relationship than anything I’ve read in a long time. Motherhood is an obsession for Lepucki. From 
I first heard of Mary Louise Kelly’s It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs on the radio, duh, as NPR is often playing in my home and she is the much loved host of All Things Considered. I remember laughing at her anecdote about the school nurse calling her when she was on the tarmac in Iraq, insisting that she come and get her son. I remember also relating to the deep push-pull that inhabited her interview (and this book) between living for your children and living for yourself. That sounds selfish to me when I type it, and maybe that’s part of the problem as I’ve been trying for all these years to figure out how to be myself and a mother and an artist and a wife and sometimes Corporate Barbie. It’s a lot. It’s so much less, even, than Kelly is doing, and I loved having this insight into her world and her thought process.
I can’t remember if I bought Getting to Yes because I wanted to be better at salary negotiations or if I happened into it at a Little Free Library, but it called to me from the to-read shelf this week. It’s a simple book and effective in it’s framing. The writers even say at the end that the reader probably knows a lot of the things in the book instinctively, even if they haven’t put organized thought into it. I did learn a lot about my own tendencies with positional bargaining and how empathy may have saved me from the holes I dug with that over the years. What was most fascinating, though, was the “What If They Use Dirty Tricks?” chapter, which basically lays out all the ways someone could be negotiating with you in bad faith (and what to do about it).
Speaking of Booker and his 25-hour speech (of which I watched both too much and not enough), there has never been a better time to speak up than now. I think that’s why I’ve kept Small Things Like These beside me all these weeks. It’s a quiet story about one man’s simple life in an Irish town and how he discovers something horribly wrong that everyone seems to know about but no one is questioning. And no one wants him to question, either.