OS Book Club Pt II

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe

"But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?"

Follow up to Things Fall Apart, second in the African Trilogy. I actually ended up liking it even more than Things Fall Apart. Again beautifully written and full of Nigerian proverbs, but in this one they're used as foreshadowing and a few play into the overall plot in clever ways. I think going forward in time, to the grandson of the TFA main character, was a good decision. There was conflict in the first book between the main character and his son, and it was cool how they showed the way that continued as the old ways were even more moved away from. The grandfather believed in the nature based religion of the tribe, the son was a Christian, the grandson didn't care for religion at all. I'm pretty eager to read the last one given how much I liked this. I'll get to it in the next couple of weeks.

Random but the phrase "beasts of no nation" popped up and I'm wondering where that phrase was first used. The movie title is based on the book which is based on a Nigerian album from the 80's, I wonder if that's originally from Achebe or if it had been used before. I like Achebe a lot, I might get into some of his other stuff outside of this trilogy. His stuff really makes me want to venture off into more literature from other countries.

Spoiler

"Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden."

"If one didn’t laugh, one would have to cry. It seemed that was the way Nigeria was built."

"Beyond death there are no ideals and no humbug, only reality. The impatient idealist says: “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.” But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace."

On to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. After this, gonna go into The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes and then follow that up with The Souls of Black Folks by Du Bois.

Actually, WoWF is checked out at my library, and my hold doesn't run out for 2 weeks. So I'm swapping that out with Not Without Laughter, also by Langston Hughes, and I'll get back to it when the hold comes up.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I am an addict to Goodreads giveaways. Thankfully most of the new books I want to read have contests. Unfortunately I haven't won anything yet.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'd say at this point I'm intrigued. If I win one, then I'll be addicted. I'm glad they do them though, it's awesome. In gaming, the companies send early copies to reviewers and streamers to build hype but I haven't heard of them just giving them out to randoms. It's cool to think you could have a book before it hits shelves.

The funny thing is if I won one, I'm honestly not sure I'd bother starting to read the book until the ebook version comes out anyway. Only physical books I can stand right now are textbooks, and that's out of necessity.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'd probably still buy a copy, but give it away to somebody.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Given that this is the supplemental texts in one of my classes, I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy this or not. Having now gone through it, I am very glad that it was brought to my attention. As a slave narrative, there are a lot of similarities to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in a general sense, but coming from a woman changes things in a major way. As unfathomably bleak as the life of any slave would be, the frequency and brutality of the acts committed against females in particular just takes it to a whole new level.

The issues of trying to gain the freedom of her children, and how the most optimistic outcome at many points seems to be maybe they can all gain freedom but never see each other again is heartbreaking. I kept thinking of Beloved throughout, and how the emotions of the book were so true to the sheer agony Harriet describes her life as being. I was glad to know there was mostly a happy ending. Having not been familiar with her story, I really was figuring it was going to have a terrible ending, it was just pure despair at points. She was stuck in what essentially had the dimensions of a coffin for the better parts of 7 years with small opportunities to get out every once in a while, right above her kids while they had no idea she was there. Just an incredibly strong woman.

At one point, she mentions a swamp, and says "It wasn't called the Dismal Swamp, but seeing it made me very dismal" or something like that. After she escaped her masters tried to get her back and wanted to take her to Norfolk. Not the ways you want to hear about your area when you're reading.

Spoiler

"But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother’s agonies."

"Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fastened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard her heartrending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy; could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable!"

"Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery."

"Not far from this time Nat Turner’s insurrection broke out; and the news threw our town into great commotion. Strange that they should be alarmed, when their slaves were so “contented and happy”! But so it was."

"In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them, and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection." Planting evidence even back then!

So that was fantastic. I already planned to get Frederick Douglass's full autobio in this month as my big nonfiction, but I'm probably going to add Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington to it as well. For now, on to Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

You need to go back to reading tomes, man. Your reading speed and rate of books is incredible. I thought I was doing good with my one book a week average this year.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
This is so close to being a seminal work that I feel the need to revisit this again within the year. There's many intricacies and nuances reflected amongst characters, relationships, and the main narrative, but the pacing is never hindered or obstructed in anyway. Narrative and character histories are intertwined seamlessly and each chapter feels like an investigative portrait uncovering more character motives and perspective. The intricacies are woven with purpose, but their individual threads aren't difficult to follow as they connect from point to point. The book is a fascinating read featuring character portraits of two families living on opposite ends of the suburban town of Shaker Heights, Ohio in the late 90s.

The narrative itself is wonderful and deceptively compelling. Any attempt at a synopsis is selling this book short because it's characters drive the events and the reader forward. It begins with a family displaced after their daughter sets fire to their home and traces their steps over the previous year back to the beginning. Ng's style is also deceptive in it's simplisticity and straightforwardness. To an astute reader her reliance on simile may be noticeable, especially for one coming fresh from a Bradbury novel, but she hits enough out of the park to forgive the notice.

To me this feels like the book before Ng's seminal work that puts in her conversation with other great writers. Still, this would be a book many authors would be proud to have at their pinnacle. An interestingly woven story of mothers, daughters, and the small fires that light our passions and sense of rights and wrongs. Celeste Ng is definitely an author I will gladly continue to follow.

Spoiler

He disliked high school groups: teens didn't listen. Teens could only pay attention to nothing but the sexuality billowing off each other like steam.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

He felt as if he'd dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you'd expected.

The next morning, at school, everything seemed back to normal, but she knew something had changed, and she held this knowledge inside her like a splinter, something she was careful not to touch.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I swear Infinite Jest was like running 5 marathons back to back and now small books are like walking to the fridge. I am now a Super Saiyan reader.

Agree on everything you said about Little Fires. I really enjoyed it and think about it now even, but like you, there was just something there that prevented me from giving it 5 stars. Not even that the book was missing anything, maybe it's just a 4 star premise and then she executed it to the fullest extent but there's just something that stops me from putting it on that top level with other fiction. Doesn't take anything away from how great it was though.

Spoiler

I thought it was incredible the way she sets up the conflict over the adopted baby. I really didn't "pick a side" so to speak, there was just no winner to a degree. Obviously, you sympathize with the mother, but that doesn't take away from the pain of the family who had been raising the kid already. I think there were some things she threw in to intentionally show the cracks in their logic (how when the judge asked how they would raise the kid in Asian culture she said they would eat chinese food) but I don't know. Its just like, is it the fault of the white family that they aren't well versed in Chinese culture already? Does that invalidate their claim on the baby they've been raising and showering with love already? I honestly don't know. And then how it all ended up, I still didn't know. It's like, I guess everyone is happy. They got their next kid, moved on. I just found it really thought provoking."

Found this from 3 decades ago, a Toni Morrison tribute to Baldwin:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/2...-morrison.html

"You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wilderness for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me?"

Awesome.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Agree on everything you said about Little Fires. I really enjoyed it and think about it now even, but like you, there was just something there that prevented me from giving it 5 stars. Not even that the book was missing anything, maybe it's just a 4 star premise and then she executed it to the fullest extent but there's just something that stops me from putting it on that top level with other fiction. Doesn't take anything away from how great it was though.

Spoiler

I thought it was incredible the way she sets up the conflict over the adopted baby. I really didn't "pick a side" so to speak, there was just no winner to a degree. Obviously, you sympathize with the mother, but that doesn't take away from the pain of the family who had been raising the kid already. I think there were some things she threw in to intentionally show the cracks in their logic (how when the judge asked how they would raise the kid in Asian culture she said they would eat chinese food) but I don't know. Its just like, is it the fault of the white family that they aren't well versed in Chinese culture already? Does that invalidate their claim on the baby they've been raising and showering with love already? I honestly don't know. And then how it all ended up, I still didn't know. It's like, I guess everyone is happy. They got their next kid, moved on. I just found it really thought provoking."

Spoiler

Honestly, I didn't bat at an eye at that passage, but now that you mention it I wouldn't expect a judge IRL to ask that question. Then again I've never been in a custody battle so who knows exactly what is asked for the criteria.

Still, I think it's a valid question in the context of the book. Considering how much Ng reiterates that Shaker Heights is such a "planned and organized" town it makes sense to me to stretch that to the judge wondering how May Ling-Mirabelle would cope with her differences and a culture she would have no contact with other than her appearance.

Even without that question, though, I think the book does enough to portray the two sides inexplicably through Mia and her relationship with Pearl. To counter-balance that relationship with Mia and Izzy's is one that would align more with the McCulloughs side. Like you said there were no clear cut winners or right and wrong on that case or in the book as whole really.

Most of the narratives were given so much perspective on each side I really couldn't pick a single side apart from despising Mrs. Richardson. Ng goes to great lengths to establish each person's motivations and how they came to them which I was thought was remarkable and provoking. The book never came off as judgemental; considering how "controversial" a lot of the topics were, I thought was an exceptional feat on her part.

All in all a great book and lends itself to discussion and analysis very easily. Like you said there's nothing inherently wrong with the book or feels lacking in anyway - it's just missing that "something" to propels the best books to that upper shelf. Supposedly a movie is in development which doesn't surprise me.

I have Beloved, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Soul of Black Folks coming today. If I can finish them up by the end of February I want to pick up Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The first page of the prologue is seared into my mind after reading it last weekend at BAM.

Hopefully in March I can focus on some new releases and finish up LOTR.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I would love a movie or even a miniseries (episodes following different characters for perspective change would be cool) for Little Fires.

My (hopefully) final BHM slate:

Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
Ruling over Monarchs, Bob Motley (autobiography of a Negro League umpire)
The Ways of White Folks, Langston Hughes
Playing in The Dark, Toni Morrison
Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

I've gotta prioritize finding fiction, it's just much easier for me to find nonfiction. March I already know I've got Altered Carbon, Enlightenment Now, This Will Be My Undoing, and whatever books releasing this year that'll be out by then.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I think you've mentioned Altered Carbon to me before, but I keep forgetting about it. Sounds like it would be right up my alley.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Netflix show is out today, but I want to read the book first.

[Chip Douglass]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Bill Gates has a new favorite book of all time, Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, comes out at the end of February.

I've got one of my March nonfictions picked out already!

If it's anything like The Better Angels of Our Nature, it should be great.

I actually just finished The Better Angels of Our Nature. One of the most profound (and well-researched) books I've ever read. The amount of evidence he marshals to support his thesis that violence is declining is remarkable. Good pretty sanity check against the narrative that things are getting worse, even if we do live in weird and uncertain times.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

Finished this one today. Pretty straight forward narrative, about a young kid growing up in the early 20th century midwest. Raised by his grandma, who had 2 other daughters outside of his mom, the book is kind of about how all of them go in different directions and how that affects the main character. Him dealing with his place in the world as it relates to race, how high the expectations are on him because of what his grandma thinks he's capable of, the difference in just one generation in priorities between his grandmother who was born in slavery and his mother and aunts who didn't see it, and the way all of the characters acted given the way their paths diverged was great. Obviously, as a poet, the prose is flowery, but I love that, great descriptions of just midwestern days, and nature.

Spoiler

"Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checker-board."

"He had discovered already, though, that so-called jokes are often not really jokes at all, but rather unpleasant realities that hurt unless you can think of something equally funny and unpleasant to say in return."

"To those who lived on the other side of the railroad and never realized the utter stupidity of the word “sin,” the Bottoms was vile and wicked. But to the girls who lived there, and the boys who pimped and fought and sold licker there, “sin” was a silly word that did not enter their heads. They had never looked at life through the spectacles of the Sunday-School. The glasses good people wore wouldn’t have fitted their eyes, for they hung no curtain of words between themselves and reality. To them, things were—what they were."

"He understood then why many old Negroes said: “Take all this world and give me Jesus!” It was because they couldn’t get this world anyway—it belonged to the white folks."

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is an incredible book and story. It is absolutely dense with allegory, symbolism, and themes that run throughout, but the prose itself progresses in a light, poetical flow. It's style transfers the reader into the minds of its characters into the red-lit haunting of their past, self-doubt, and the burdens those emotions create in a manner of ease. It took me a chapter or two before I really clicked with Morrison's flow, but I found it fairly straightforward to follow. Some passages are less linear, but they're all incredible.

The book lives and operates in a gray area of interpretation and perspective some may find off-putting. The expanse of space it affords the reader to interpret the story through many of it's lenses is flawless to me. Each character has their own beloved. Each with a mark of some kind around their neck - a scratch, necklace, or iron-collar. Each with a past birthed by violence and escaping by pure will and forceful vengeance. Burying their burdens in a tin boxed heart - outwardly exhibiting a false-sense of pride as they turn in to themselves rather than seek the help they know they need from others. Yet, there's never a sense of not understanding what's happening or going on. Even in the more daunting, allegorical passages there's a stream that flows - the reader needs only to allow themselves to float along with Morrison's style rather than anchor themselves. Beloved is a prime example of a book worth taking notes and following each thread closely and astutely like a student.

Spoiler

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

"A man ain't nothing but a man," said Baby Suggs. "But a son? Well now, that's somebody."

I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dusk holding hands.

Beloved looked at the sweet bread in Denver's hands and Denver held it out to her. She smiled then and Denver's heart stopped bouncing and sat down - relieved and easeful like a traveler who had made it home.

"Today is always here," said Sethe. "Tomorrow, never."

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

Any planning in a bottle is short, thought Stamp, but he knew from personal experience the pointlessness of telling a drinking man not to.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a ******* ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every ******* minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

You are your best thing.

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm looking for some recommendations. I really enjoyed Smart Baseball by Keith Law, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend similar books, especially if it's about football or even basketball instead. I like looking deeper into the numbers side of the game, and I enjoy reading about the new stats that come out for each sport.