The Book-Burning Review

So. I read Fahrenheit 451 in bits and pieces this time around, which would seem to let me bitch about how I hate when books aren’t divided into smaller chapters within larger sections, but it was really just bad reading planning on my part. I tried to read it while at the FRC Championship last weekend, between bouts of puking last week, and in my campus’s radio station yesterday. Don’t try any of those, especially while with other people because you WILL get frustrated, stalk off by yourself, and have to re-read everything later anyway.

But about this book.

It’s way more plot than character development, which took me a bit to get use to but only because I’ve been sucking up literary fiction and little else for the past five years. Guy Montag is your standard hero who starts out cluelessly following orders to burn books but finds out quickly that they contain the musings of a society that wasn’t dependent on giant TVs and really fast cars for life fulfillment. After talking with Clarisse, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the old more personal ways, he realized there’s more to life and most of it’s stored in the books he’s been so blindly burning so he saves some of those, hatches a knowledge-saving plan with Faber, an old professor he once met, gets in trouble with the law because his vacant wife Mildred calls the firefighters on his literary ass, and runs away with a hobo camp of intellectuals who have been scorned and useless. At the end, a bomb goes off, the city is destroyed, and the hobo intellectuals with their mental maps of books are the only things left. That, and hope for the re-building of the human race, we presume.

This all happens within the space of about three days, story line time-wise. It’s intense, bleak, and fairly interesting around all the descriptions of operatic emotions.

Personal reactions:

• I liked that Ray Bradbury makes it clear that the knowledge inside the books is what’s the most important and that books are just the current handiest way to carry that knowledge. Before teh Internetz and all. But I do think people get all caught up on the actual physical media when it’s the message that counts.
• I know the Walls are suppose to be irredeemably crass and empty-headed distraction, and the Relatives sound screechy enough to kill on first word, but while I was reading about this intense TV I kind of wanted something exactly like that to just zone the fuck out. Not to replace thinking like in this book, but to put it aside and let it chill for an hour or two a day. Maybe that’s why I watch Monday Night Raw with my boyfriend every week.
• The Mechanical Hound was in the book much less than I remember. That fucker was scary  and made a huge impression–in ninth grade honors English, before I had seen American Psycho.
• Oh, PS: American Psycho as the ultimate office-dystopia novel? Maybe.

The Mail Call

I got a depressing-ish email a couple days ago from the book distributor who sold me 1984 through Amazon. My order was lost, shredded, eaten by ravenous moths, confiscated by The Man, or otherwise fucked up, so I’ll have to get my Orwell fix elsewhere.

Oh, God. However shall I find a copy of a book that is a staple of summer reading lists around the country? It’s not like Barnes and Noble starts unloading cases of them every April, jacking the prices up until the August procrastinators have to sell a kidney to pass English. [/end sarcasm. For now.] Oddly enough, though, my university campus bookstore doesn’t carry them. Shall have to venture off campus. I think I might get a copy with the eyeball cover. Those are creepy.  And in paperback.

But! In the snail mail, I found something appetizing:

A giant piece of cardboard ravioli with a literary center. A lot better than actual ravioli.

I’ve been wondering whether to actually call Slaughterhouse-Five a dystopian novel. It’s not about a made-up society constructed on its own to be dystopian; it’s a version of a real event from Vonnegut’s world that he satirized  into a dystopia.

But it’s still about a broken society, and more importantly it’s suppose to be damn good. That’s plenty enough excuse for me to use it.

I wasn’t going to start this blog until classes ended for me April 26, because I’ll have a good two weeks of a relaxed schedule before I start my summer work, but the first book I ordered came like a day and a half after I order it and it got me excited. Books or things that come for me in the mail make me smile, so when it’s both at the same time I feel the urge to celebrate. Writing nerds celebrate by starting a blog like it’s 2005, yo.

Peace out and word to that mother of yours. No. I refuse to steal from Vanilla Ice for my outro. I’ll just steal something my next door neighbor said a few minutes ago when she found her room locked: “Damn people and their hormones.”

The Cubicle Life Gets Boring

Apparently, most people hate their jobs.

That’s as deep an impression as I usually get from office-as-dystopia books, where the protagonist’s, like, essence, man, gets ground down by every hour spent as a peon to a soulless corporation. Because I have yet to work in an office and don’t know if I ever will, I start reading Soulless Office Novels (SONs, if you will. Hey, that acronym works out well.) with the great curiosity I have about everything I don’t experience firsthand.

But the last two SONs I’ve started, I’ve put down before finishing and haven’t missed them since. Here’s why:

• The office descriptions are exactly the same. Grey-felt cubicles with fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look sick and old and wonky furniture everyone fights over covers every office ever. Surely there are funny/interesting/soulless details that vary and make their own special kind of hell? …No? …Please?
• The coworkers blend into a quirky nosy bitchy nervous blur. If I can’t keep straight who writes a novel on company time with a cover window on their computer screen or who secretly takes tap dancing lessons every third Tuesday, I don’t care about what happens to them.
• What the fuck is up with the collective “we”? I know it’s used to signify a collective mindset, but it just ends up sounding like a dispassionate narrator condescending to the readers and making fun of the characters’ hard-fought individuality.

Also, get off my lawn. *waves cane*

I just want more than clichés warmed over by a shared microwave of real but uninteresting discontent. Give me something that will make me scared of more than boredom!

For that, I DO in fact recommend reading Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes. Its touch of magical realism gives a really great absurdity payoff.

DON’T read Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. An unexpected veer into a manager’s mind and personal life changes the tone way too much to stay with it.

The Failed Credit Hours Grab

Dystopian realization of the day: The only way I can make my summer internship count as a three-hour credit for next semester is if I pay $1200 to enroll in summer school, effectively making the internship a three-hour class. Paying the university $1200 for something I don’t really need (extra credit hours) for something I’ll be doing anyway (a job). As my dad eloquently put it, “Um. Hell no.”

Eutopian side to this: The credit hope was just icing. No–sprinkles on icing. Nice and colorful but in no way necessary for an already delicious cake.

That metaphor and a recent call to set up an interview with the most famous sandwich shop on campus (much more productive than one more goddamn behavioral science credit, right? Yes. I’ll get paid to make sandwiches.) are making me hungry.

The First Review

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The author as Google Image Search sees her.

Click on the author name ^up there^ and go read the bit of Wikipedia where Atwood explains her take on the science fiction-ness of her own writing. I’ll wait.

Science fiction versus speculative fiction is an important distinction in dystopian writing, says the blogger who just designated it as such. Dystopian writing can be either or both; they complement each other well but don’t have to blend for each to exist. Or be any good.

This book’s on the speculative end, laced with science that makes a synthetic-evolutionary sense (to someone who’s not actually taking any science this semester) and doesn’t call attention to itself except as building layers of a future society.

About that future society: everything’s a couple notches more paranoid (identities become tangible things to lose and buy and reconstruct, and not just on cards), skeezy (don’t ask what’s in the SecretBurgers. Just…don’t), and vain (implants and invasive care treatments are treated a lot more casually), which the God’s Gardeners religious group wants to help one vegetarian meal at a time, but a plague gets there first and wipes out a fuckton of the entire world’s population.

It also took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that they call toilets “violet biolets.” I’m making that a sign for wherever I end up hanging my TP this summer.

Ren left the group when she was young and became a trapeze artist at an adult entertainment place (it sounds classier than a strip club but definitely is there to sell sex); Toby ducked out of the group to run from a bad dude from her past. Both women survive the plague, or the Waterless Flood as the Gardeners call it, find each other, and move into the future without any plans. What plans could they make? All they can do is survive.

The narrative does get confusing at times; it’s mostly back story but interspersed with post-apocalyptic updates. Ren was left locked in a sealed disease chamber when the plague hit, and Toby was hunkered down at the AnooYoo day spa where she was working. I liked how the perspective switched between them and how their stories drifted together and apart, but I still don’t understand why Ren was the only character told in first person.

I liked a lot more than I disliked, though. I liked how the focus was mainly on the characters and how effortlessly human they felt; I liked how there was barely any description of the plague. Until the last ten pages or so, the symptoms weren’t mentioned (and even then they were generic), which I appreciated as the art of showing piles of dead people rather than telling all about their blood and pus. I liked how the God’s Gardeners religion felt just familiar and radical enough to completely believe people would get into it. I also liked how religion wasn’t depicted as either the secret cause or the complete solution to the Flood; it was just a way to cope, and it fared about as well as every other way. (Spoiler: not great.)

So:

• How was the reading experience? Good. Fairly fast; it flowed well.
• How did it affect your reality? Not all that much, although the constant reviling of meat-eating made me vaguely wonder about becoming a vegetarian until I ate squash and zucchini pizza tonight at dining hall.
• Would you recommend this? Yes. Yes I would.

The Mail

Look what came in my mailbox today:

In matching manila envelopes with matching sketchy handwritten address labels!

The Books!

This list is in no order and is constantly growing. Green means I’m currently reading, red means I’m done, black means I haven’t gotten there yet.

1. The Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood

I didn’t plan on including this one even as I walked out of the campus library stuffing it into my backpack next to the four other novels I checked out this afternoon. It was originally just part of my monthly(ish) haul. But every one of the 168 pages I’ve read so far is perfectly qualified.

2. Brave New World: Aldous Huxley

I’m curious about the sex in this one. And the dystopia. But mostly the sex. I’ve heard interesting things.

3. 1984: George Orwell

I never had to read this for English class like 75% of my high school did (uh, yay AP?), so I’ve always wondered what I missed out on. The whole outdated future aspect of the title intrigues me the most; pretty sure that’s the least important aspect of the story.

4. Running Man: Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

5. The Long Walk: Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

When he wants to be, Stephen King is a badass writer. I’m really looking forward to reading his exploration of worlds that don’t have pop culture references he can clumsily shoehorn into his otherwise-awesome narratives.

6. Farenheit 451: Ray Bradbury

I read this in ninth grade (hi, Mrs. Heath!) and remember liking it so much I did my Required Epic Research Paper on Nazi book burning. We used a class set of the novel, though, so I couldn’t (legally) take it home and keep it.

I’ll add books to this list through new posts so they’ll be right out in the open. Transparency and whatnot.

The Plan

Come explore a word with me this summer.

dystopia (n.): 1. A hypothetical place, society, or situation in which conditions and the quality of life are dreadful. 2. A novel or other work depicting a dystopian society or place.

My actual life should be great, or at least worth it. In theory, this will be the best summer I’ve had so far. That’s why I’ve stocked my reading list with books about societal ruin, human suffering, and radical bloody revolutions–I want contrast. I want perspective. I want some damn good stories.

So this summer, between an internship and a part-time job and hanging out with my boyfriend and e-mailing my parents and finally learning how to parallel park, I’m going to read. You’ll hear about all of it, in book reviews and chunks of original prose and personal spats and essays that combine everything.

Let me know what you think!