It’s no accident my reading centers around tyranny lately. Reading is how I understand the world, and there’s a lot to try and understand. This is no accident, either, as artists of all kinds process through the creation of their work: see this interview with Tony Gilroy about making Andor. Three books have stood out in my reading so far this year. Each has something different to teach about tyranny, and each uses a different type of narrative timeline to do so, so I had to share them with you.

Narrowing Options in Heir by Sabaa Tahir

I just realized I’ve never written here about An Ember in the Ashes or All My Rage, two projects that cemented Sabaa Tahir as one of my favorite living authors. Heir sits beside the Ember tetralogy, continuing the rich world in which deeply imagined characters fight across kingdoms that could easily be modern countries. The political strife is exacting and yet the fierceness with which Tahir imagines the humanity that cuts across it all makes these books both deeply engaging and must-reads for right now. I haven’t done a good job of explaining any of them because I don’t want to spoil the unfolding, but one person who read these books described them to me as “The first thing I’ve read in a very long time that made me care about the characters.” They are fast-paced and you can read them for pleasure, but they are also exquisitely crafted…

What flipped my writer brain on while reading Heir was a timeline shift about halfway through. The book is told in alternating points of view between Aiz, Sirsha, and Quil—characters from different backgrounds and different lands whose narratives intersect in explosive ways. I assumed as I was reading that the timelines were concurrent. I think we are meant to assume this, because the narrative is driving so hard forward and we are pulled into that momentum.

So it’s a shock when it’s revealed that one of these narrators (I won’t tell you who) is actually speaking from a past timeline. What this did for me as a reader was immediately start to explore the limits for that character’s storyline. They became backstory for the other two characters and I mourned for the futures I’d imagined for that character. What had once been an infinite sea of options now felt truncated, hemmed in. Like the walls of fate had closed in.

What this did for me as a writer is remind me that we all come to books with assumptions about what is normal. Things we expect and hope for unless we are told otherwise. Many of these are pretty human assumptions and can be assigned to most readers: the action moves forward, we want good things for the characters we are told are good, etc. By carefully playing with these expectations, we can build friction and power in our stories. We can create the unexpected.

Don’t worry, Tahir is an artful writer, and the way she works out of the limitations I then assumed for her character are magic and also feel inherently like part of the world she has created.

There are lessons to be learned here for life, too, where we are can subvert expectations. Step outside of the roles we are being assigned. Stand up when it is assumed we’ll be cowed.

Revealing Our Roles in Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

Speaking of roles and expectations, Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River feels like a documentary of a small town in Germany starting near the end of World War I through the end of World War II. It’s filled with an entire town of characters who play against each other in the way that we do with our neighbors. Everyday things happen as the country’s descent into fascism plays out in the background. In fact, the first time I tried to read this book I found it so quotidian I had to put it down. This time I realized quotidian is the point.

The quote that circulates during every cultural moment where we have the chance to move forward or backward is something like “What you are doing now is what you would have done in Nazi Germany.” This book allows the reader to see what actions a myriad of people take and why. It demonstrates the aftermath.

The timeline plods forward mercilessly forward as people report their neighbors. They cuddle up to power to get a little for themselves. They leave the country. They stay. They help their neighbors openly. They help their neighbors clandestinely. They are arrested. They are released. They are disappeared. They lose their minds. They move forward as though nothing has changed.

I had the chance to talk with someone I love this week about this book and our now. It can feel so difficult to know how to make a difference, but I urge you, if you feel like what is happening is wrong, to do something to change it. Even if you simply start by saying, “This is not okay.” Then keep doing more until you’ve realized how strong you can be.

Stones from the River feels like a personal excavation for an author who was born in Germany after the war, but you have the chance to make a different narrative now. It can feel dangerous, but if you are doing nothing, then what exactly are you preserving?

Documenting the Atrocities in Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

On the subject of atrocities that go on too long, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is the most effective history of slavery I’ve ever read. This novel begins with the story of two half sisters born in Ghana in the eighteenth century. Through the parallel tracks for their descendants, Gyasi shares vignettes from each generation that highlight moments of cultural import. We experience the trajectories of colonialism in Ghana and slavery and racism in the U.S. Ghanaians wrestle with colonizers and tribal strife, people are enslaved, escape, get kidnapped, and work in indentured servitude. Families endure and are severed.

This could feel like a history tome where important moments are thrown at a narrative. But because Gyasi so beautifully inhabits each of the characters and moments, we feel the deepest pain and highest joy along with the characters. She is able to document some of the worst of our history while also keeping the book focused at a human level, which makes it all the more effective.

From a craft standpoint, the fractured timelines of the vignettes allows the reader to feel the disjointedness of the family histories. We see how these stories relate and we have (some of) the cultural context to see where it started and how it’s going, but there are characters here who will never know their family histories and, fresh back from a family reunion where every story has three wonderfully different angles, I ached at the gaps that creates in a person’s understanding of themselves and their culture.

This book is very much in the zeitgeist around me, and I feel like I am late to read it. If you haven’t yet, it’s time.

If any of these books piqued your interest, order Heir, Stones from the River, or Homegoing from Bookshop.org. If you use that link to purchase anything, you’re keeping indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

I’ve been sitting on a review copy of Steph Catudal’s Radicle, or When the World Lived Inside Us for ages. I think I was afraid of reading the book, which explores motherhood and losing a parent, because of what it would open for me. I was right about the feelings. I was wrong to wait to read it, because the sensory detail and her gentle attention to the experience of being human make this book worth returning to again and again.

The Exquisite Beauty, Pain, and Hope of Watching a Child Grow

Parenting, especially in our modern isolation, is an on-all-the-time kind of thing. Which means it’s hard to slow down and see what’s happening as you go. Various apps send me snapshots of what we did on this day so many years ago, but I don’t slow down often enough to exist in and remember the moments as and when they are. Catudal perfectly captures this and the heartbreak of bringing a being that is perfect into an imperfect world in “The Starting Line.”

I thought I’d always remember
how precious it is
to breathe, to walk,
to wake with eyes wide open
but here I am now, unable to recall
the sweet desperation
reckoning with impermanence
can bring.
– from “The Starting Line” by Steph Catudal from Radicle

Later in the poem, Catudal brings us tight into one of these moments with a simple image that captures everything:

And then she reaches for the monarch
perched on milkweed,
her small hand yearning to hold
the brittleness of life.
– from “The Starting Line” by Steph Catudal from Radicle

Throughout the book, Catudal’s language is clean and clear with just the right amount of detail. She lets us see what is happening and feel alongside her as she parents her child and herself.

The Lessons We Don’t Want to Impart

In “New Moon,” Catudal writes of what we pass on to our children:

I give you my love and
I give you this anger,
embers of an untamed inheritance.

How will it forge you?
– from “New Moon” by Steph Catudal from Radicle

It’s a gorgeous testament to that thing so many of us experience when we become parents despite not being fully forged ourselves (because we are human), the feeling of trying to heal for ourselves and more so for our children, for whom we want better, only and always. I thought of these words while stroking my 10-year-old’s forehead this morning. He still wants to be near me (when I let him), and that’s everything. And I see the ways I wish already that I could have been different for him.

What of my stuntedness will you carry?
What of my brokenness will break you, too?
– from “New Moon” by Steph Catudal from Radicle

Letting Our Elders Go

One of the quandaries of the sandwich generation is parenting yourself and your children while also offering care for your elders. While I am no longer the primary caretaker for my mother, and haven’t been for a long time, I still wrestle with how I am needed where and how much I can give to those who need me (including myself) at any time.

In Radicle, Catudal is very expressly present with her father at the end of his life. In “It’s Beautiful, It Hurts,” she writes of being “too young to know / how to comfort a giant / stripped bare.” This reveals so poignantly the ways that we are always the children of our parents. How difficult it is to shift the roles, even when it becomes necessary.

The poem that broke me, though, was “Some Things Are Not Meant to Be Fixed” as Catudal writes of falling through a board on a tree house, her father scooping her up, and all the feelings they both carried forever after. The poem captures in a few spare lines one moment that encapsulates a whole relationship, and it left me asking what it is I remember. I have not lost a parent, if I’m lucky that may be decades away, but I’ve been having to prepare to lose one for the last 35 years.

Catudal opened a door for me this morning, asking me to check in with my own memory. Which got me writing again, for the first time in weeks. And I am grateful.

If you want to check in with your own exquisite joy or pain, order Radicle, or When the World Lived Inside Us from Bookshop.org. If you use that link to purchase anything, you’re keeping indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

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.