OS Book Club Pt II

[Fresh Tendrils]

A Gathering of Shadows by VE Schwab

This felt more like a collection of developments than any actual plotting. The first three quarters of the book is paced by the characters and their relationships while also preparing for a magic dueling tournament. There's also the evil brooding unseen and preparing a plan which doesn't come about until the last fifteen pages. As such this ends on a legitimate cliffhanger and feels like Part 1 rather than a standalone book.

With that said I enjoyed this just as much as first, but found it be a more rewarding and more developed read than the initial entry to the trilogy. More characters are introduced (Alucard Emery is amazing) and fleshed completely out while also exploring different parts of the world via the tournament that is being held in Red London. Delilah Bard is a complete BAMF in this and her character has been such a great thread to follow throughout the two books.

Not a whole bunch to say on this without diving into spoiler territory (which apparently is a touchy subject lately), but it's a highly enjoyable, entertaining read. Schwab builds and improves upon A Darker Shade of Magic by fleshing out her unique universe, developing a wider cast of characters, as well as continuing to develop Kell and Delilah in fascinating ways. Her writing itself continues to improve which has me even more hopeful for her other series, Villains. I would recommend to have A Conjuring of Light close by since you will want to jump into that immediately after finishing up A Gather of Shadows. Cliffhanger or not it is ultimately a satisfactory read and one I would easily recommend.

Spoiler

There was no clever retort, and she looked up from her glass and saw Alucard watching her, as he always did, searching her face the way thieves search pockets, trying to turn something out.

Magic is tangled, so you must be smooth. Magic is wild, so you must be tame. Magic is chaos, so you must be calm.

Maxim kept grudges like scars. They faded by degrees but always left a mark.

Kell would never understand the way these Grey-worlders sealed way their dead, trapping the discarded shells in gold and wood and stone as if some remnant of who they'd been in life remained. And if it did? What a cruel punishment.

I've seen people sin the name of god and in the name of magic. People misuse their higher powers, no matter what form they take.

Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.

"Strength and weakness are tangled things," the Aven Essen had said. "They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power."

A person chose their path. Or they made a new one.

Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it's some big scary thing, but it's the familiar that's always bothered me. It's heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it's walls and a ceiling and a cell.

I may have to revise my reading goal for the year since I'm already 4 books in. I want to start A Conjuring of Light, but I know I won't finish it by Friday. Instead I'll spend more time with James Baldwin (roughly 1/3 of the way through) before picking up Kindred by Octavia Butler.

Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf comes out next Tuesday and I'm excited for that since it is getting a lot of positive reviews. I need to pick up Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas as well as the Malcolm X autobiography to round out my February selections.

[DJ]

Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life In Rock - Stephen Pearcy autobiography.

As a still big fan of 80's hair metal, I had to pick this up for $2 when I saw it in the used book store. Man, this was a depressing read. Pearcy never really grew up/matured from 16. When a near 60-year-old is using "strange" and "trim" to describe female anatomy to a therapist, it's just sad to see a man stuck in a time warp.

It's not all bad, though. His determination to make himself and Ratt stars is admirable; you just wish he would've kept pushing to evolve as a person and his band.

The 80's were a crazy time and his stories are raunchy and detailed, so fans will get a kick out of them and hearing the tales of making the first few albums are worth reading. Unfortunately for Pearcy, sex and drugs became more important than the music, and his - and Ratt's- long-term careers suffered. Pearcy was still battling addiction in late 2018.

Some inspiring moments, but a cautionary tale overall.

[DieHardYankee26]

Finished these at the end of January...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

Spoiler

How much more left to say about the series at the end of the 5th book? The longest in the series by a pretty decent margin, the length isn't a problem in the way it could be. The actual plot of the books remains interesting. I love seeing the world being built, more time spent at Hogwarts, learning more about the history and the school, how classes operate, all that jazz. Tons of time spent in Hogwarts in this one, even though we miss out on a legit Quidditch match because Harry is suspended. Hermione is still the GOAT, Harry and Ron are both teenagers to the max. Their whole feud and Harry dealing with Cho was rough, but not because it's poorly done, more because you realize how easily things fall apart between kids too awkward to talk about their issues. It's whatever, I prefer books with adult characters for this reason but it's not a real hindrance to the narrative. Dumbledore is always good to come out of nowhere and totally change the tone of a chapter. It's like he's being written from a different book almost, he's basically God to these people lol. I legit cannot stand Snape. I'm not remotely interested in whatever redemption he's going to be going through in HBP. This is one of the most unlikable characters in book history to me.

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath

Spoiler

A short story, written while she was a student but just now released, this tale from Boston’s finest follows a girl on a train ride to somewhere, the destination of which she doesn’t know. She doesn’t realize how little she knows about the trip she is taking until she starts talking with a fellow passenger, who warns her how terrible it is in the Ninth Kingdom where she’s being sent, “Once you get to the ninth kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will. It has many names.” The story as a whole serves as an allegory that can be taken in any of a million different directions, mainly related to taking control of one’s life. I’ve seen people compare it to the journey of being born, having no control over that and being thrust into the world, compared to a sedentary life where one has no active control and is just coasting along the way, and oddly enough an abortion metaphor that I’m not really sure I understand.

I appreciate the vagueness of the story, reminds me of a James Joyce story, there’s something to be found for everyone. The prose is in her normal haunting, frighteningly detached style as the Bell Jar. It’s weird, I feel the same way reading her as I did getting through a lot of DFW’s stuff. It’s like, you’re so on the nose…you’re too on the nose. There are some feelings that cannot be described without living them, but living them means you’re too close to the edge. It’s a worthwile and important contribution to art, just I dunno, feels like some people live their art and some people die to tell it. These two were the latter.

Spoiler

“Arbitrary, that’s what it is. Arbitrary. But nobody seems to realize that nowadays. One little motion, one positive gesture, and the whole structure would collapse, fall quite apart.”

“You will be happier if you do not know,” the woman said gently. “It is really not too bad, once you get there. The trip is long down the tunnel, and the climate changes gradually. The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold. Look out the window. Ice has begun to form on the subway walls, and no one has even noticed or complained.”

My first two BHM month books (making Douglass his own post):

We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Spoiler

OK now this one was interesting. Previews I read compared it to The Sellout (which I haven’t read but want to) and Get Out (which I saw the first 45 minutes of before noping out of there) so I didn’t know what to expect other than it being satirical.*
It’s about a narrator, in the first person, who is Black, married to a White woman, and has a mixed son. The world he lives in is an exaggerated version of the one we live in, which has basically locked the Black population in a housing complex in the city and keeps adding to it so that they can live on their own and outside of “regular society’ pretty much, hard to describe. The tone is very Sorry to Bother You. Anyway, the kid has a dark, growing birthmark that the father is going out of his way to lighten, to stop his son from becoming Black and having to endure the oppression that he deals with. He’s a lawyer at a predominantly White firm, and there’s a great scene damn near ripped out of Sorry to Bother You where he has to perform for the partners, and he does an African tribal dance at a costume party, hilarious.

By the end of the book, it becomes clear how internalized the hate of dark skin is in the father, how his mind has been poisoned to hate his own by the society he lives in and how pernicious that belief can be when it comes to raising a kid. Obviously you’d do anything to protect your kid but what if what your kid needs protection from is you? There’s some really sad stuff in there, his wife passes after an argument, I have a hard time dealing with stuff like that, gets too real as you get older. The protection of the kid was a pretty singular focus even before the wife passes, but becomes his sole mission after her death. You find out later about how the wife felt about the obsession to lighten their son and how difficult it made their marriage. I would definitely recommend this to people, it’s like if Invisible Man was satirical. Some really moving passages, and the whole theme comes together well at the end. There’s a little part I didn’t love toward the end, but overall it’s a great read.*

Spoiler

“We lived, at that time, in a part of the City once inhabited by Mosopelea Indians who migrated to the marshlands to avoid the white man, then by immigrants from Continental Europe who, having left behind crowd, famine, and disease, fled the City to escape the black man, then inhabited by blacks who were vigorously reappropriated to the penitentiary at the parish line, and finally by the descendants of those earlier whites who returned when the coast was again clear.”

“I was a killer in court, a master of oratory, an unstoppable disciple of Cicero, Nelson Mandela, and Sukarma Kamenetz. But I hated going to court. Why? If you watched enough award-winning films or read a bunch of crime thrillers, as I did as a boy, you would get the distinct impression that courts of law, indeed, the entire system of codified expectations, was fueled by the search for truth. This was not so. Our courts were powered by two things and two things alone: fear and fear itself. In court, I was afraid of everyone: the client who relied on my competence and zeal; the armed bailiff, whose job it was to subdue zealots like me when we overstepped our bounds; my opposing counsel, whose raison d’être was to cut my limbs from my body until I was nothing but head and torso; and the judge, whose duty was to pound me into the floorboards like a railroad spike. My opponent feared their own client, the bailiff, and the judge as I did. And even the judge feared the appellate courts that could overturn any decision with impunity. And the appellates feared, presumably, God. But who did God fear?”

“After all, what was equality other than a typographical error in the Constitution? Yes, the Founders had meant that all men were created equal, but they failed to include an index of defined terms. Ever since they drafted that screed, no one wanted to admit that Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of those guys meant only to protect the rights of white, landowning men. Through sloppy copyediting, our illustrious forefathers set off the human rights skirmishes that would beset the nation all the way to the present. If any of the seventy-plus delegates at the Constitutional Convention could have bothered to bring along a gray-wigged man of letters or even a lowly print shop owner, the document would have been clearer, so generations of people wouldn’t have spent their lives dreaming of rights they were never meant to have, wrongheadedly attending protests, getting beaten or killed.”

“Like trying to choose between ten doors, all but one of which led to immediate death. It’s not a problem if you never have to choose.”
“Happiness is too rare a commodity not to count for something. Still, my happy is the caustic yellow of a safety vest.”

“You are an angel. Fate, in the guise of ordinary people, conspires to pull the wings from your body. To break your grasshopper limbs. To leave you crippled in loam. To maniacally adjust the shape of your skull. To bleed your life’s blood onto concrete. To destroy you, destroy your future, to destroy your children’s future. Other peoples could rely on our nation’s fundamental fairness as a starting point for any hopes or dreams they might have. But you, Black Boy, were born weak but breathing and tossed into an open grave. Three quarters of Fate’s work was done in our reaction to the world. In attempting to back away from hissing fauna, a rattler, or a jaguar, we find ourselves stepping off a mountaintop and falling to the jagged rocks below. Never bow to anyone, Sir would say, but don’t let fools bring you down. Respecting yourself means respecting even those who don’t deserve it.”

“I sought to arm my boy with magic potions and enchanted swords, or at the very least provide a sturdy wooden shield. I once believed my intent was to never harm him. But that’s not true. I meant to hurt my child from the first day I met him, when I was a giant and he was a papoose. I needed to hurt Nigel the way a physician introduces a junior varsity version of a virus so that the body knows what to do when the all-star team shows up.”

Magical Negro by Morgan Parker

Spoiler

This one’s a collection of poetry from the author of a collection I remember hearing about a few years ago, “There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce” which is just a great title for the current age lol. These poems range in subject from the unique dilemma of being the least respected opinion in any intersectional argument (Black women) to odes to classic Black heroes. It was weird adjusting to the structure of poems, especially on a Kindle, but I did appreciate what she was trying to do. I think poems are closer to short stories than novels in how they’re made vague enough to be interpreted in many ways, which is interesting as far as debate goes. I hone in on individual sentences even when I’m reading longer form works so I can still get something out of the way the words are used. It made me want to do a deeper dive into poetry for sure, and to read her other collection. The voice is strong, unapologetic, but also self-aware and not preachy. There’s a defiance in being told no one wants to hear your story and telling it anyway, and that is captured here.
*

Spoiler

“My body is an argument I did not start.”

“Privilege is asking other people to look at you.”

“Subtexts, then, underscoring this phrase are quite sinister in nature, varying from “Your usefulness, Negro, is married to your misfortune,” and “Time is linear,” the implications of which are that (1) value is time sensitive, (2) conditions of despair are temporary, and (3) anything at all can be new, belonging exclusively to “now,” and untethered to “ever,” (i.e., past, future, world history).”

“Pick what hurts best. The difference between drinking to disappear and drinking to remember. Be polite. Be gentle. Be a vessel. Be ashamed.”
“I am a black girl, I understand I am a costume. I know the rules. I like the pain because it makes me.”

“I can never ever stop thinking about Fred Hampton and youth, and how it ends. Grown-up is when the other you eats you, when what you allow is a monster.”

“No one can serve two masters like we can, be future and what they threatened to forget, be Richard Pryor Live on Sunset and be the sunset. Kiss the ground, burn it to the ground, slay dragon, speak dragon. Sometimes it feels like we invented America ourselves. The difference between worth and worthless without them is science: how it feels to not be able to see a person, and the number of instances when we believed we should die.”

“Hymns for the dead, hookahs for the almost-dead. Praise our half-lives. Our bodies break but we still sage them. We wrote the good book: instructions for building new worlds. Lead us not into white neighborhoods. Deliver us from microaggressions. Blessed are we who mourn, we who are a blood built on a hill of embers. We no mail-order hipster black wife. We just trying to text our moms. We are what we eat, leafy and anointed. We are who we serve: banquets and bouquets forever, foreverever, foreverever.”

[DieHardYankee26]

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Double disclaimer: #1 The only other book I've read that really compares directly to this as far as sheer comprehensiveness is the biography on FDR I read in late 2016, by the end of which I was pretty sure I knew everything about anyone he'd ever come into contact with. All this to say, it's insane how much stuff is being sifted through here to recreate these historical lives. Speeches and published works? Of course. Letters to other historical figures? Sure I guess. Letters to family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, enemies? Eh. Diary entries...It just makes you think the biography of the 50th president written 200 years from now (assuming we make it that long as humans) will have a passage like "He often liked to pass time in his youth by taking part in the classic pasttime of underage drinking. "Can't w8 to get hammered" was a frequent text found in his phone records." Obviously they're all long dead but you have to realize how much of our lives we chronicle already online and how that will affect the way research is done in the future. #2 is more a personal thing. Any interpretation of history is going to have influence of the writer even if it's only because of the facts they choose to add or omit, but I'm interested in how political views change the way historical figures are championed. There was a lot in here about how much of what Douglass said is taken out of context to push certain agendas, so I kinda want to read something from the other side just to see their take on my guy. Anyway...

Spoiler

More than teach me about Frederick Douglass, this book made me reexamine the way that I look at autobiographies as a whole. There is always going to be bias from the point of view of the author, and people will do their best to make themselves the hero of the story for sure, but I'm not sure I ever thought about how important that was not just for the audience but for the writer. Douglass had a lot of blanks to fill in his own personal story, and how he chose to answer the questions he'd had since a child would play a large role in how he tackled the issues of his time.

The word prophet has always been interesting to me. Even before my bible read last year I'd always kinda thought of things in general terms, like if a certain person told the story of MLK Jr., it could sound a lot like Jesus. Powerful orator, leader of his people, performed miracles (bringing together people in a time of ultimate division), killed for his beliefs, etc. which is really just to say that I definitely believe a voice can reach out above others and lead a generation. There is no doubt that Frederick Douglass was one of those figures. If there was a vote for greatest American, I think he has a solid case. This is a guy who had to rise out of the depths that he spoke against, he was a victim of the worst crime in human history, and used the language of his oppressors to ultimately show how barbaric the practice was as a whole. His eloquence and intelligence were unmatched. Talk about the American Dream.

For someone to whom words and language are so crucial, the author had to hold up his end of the bargain and he absolutely did. Even while reading about his family, the flow of the words and way events are told with Douglass quotes patched in for max effect ease the burden it could've been to make it through such a huge book. And it is absolutely huge, this could be the text for a 2 part class on Douglass's life. And there was a lot of family drama, some of it interesting, some less so. I definitely didn't know anything about his personal life, so it was something to read about how his sons respected hi, or his daughter felt she was not good enough and yearned for approval, or his trying to finance the lives of his grandkids. It's easy to forget while he's basically the leader of a movement, he's also leader of a household, and Blight does well to amek that clear, whether it be through giving Anna praise as the silent housewife or mentioning Douglass's other confidantes. It's hard not to be inspired reading through many of his speeches, and to take to heart a lot of the sentiments he made event 200 years ago that are still true today. He was a product of his era, for better or for worse. He found his cause to rally against, slavery, and went at it with everything he had until it was abolished. He kept working for the race and country after that but much of the fire he had earlier in his career was dulled by the emancipation, which pretty much bought his party loyalty and made him unable to criticize with the fervor necessary. That plus old age made him weary. There was definitely a lesson there: each generation has it's own battle to fight in the greater war. He fought his, and armed the next generation with the toosl they needed to fight theirs. It makes the world seem even smaller towards the end when he's becoming a mentor to the next generation, sending Ida B Wells to England to launch her anti-lynching crusade, or speaking to James Weldon Johnson as a teenager, or offering to mentor and sponsor Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet. He just got it. He was for the people. And he was just such a recognizable presence, with the mane. From being admonished by a slaveholder to admonishing the President of the US by invitation (arguably the greatest president, at that), unbelievably inspiring.

I'll just take some quotes from the intro to show how the author set the stage, pretty sure I broke my record for most highlights in a book:

Spoiler

"The orator and writer lived to see and interpret black emancipation, to work actively for women’s rights long before they were achieved, to realize the civil rights triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction, and to witness and contribute to America’s economic and international expansion in the Gilded Age. He lived to the age of lynching and Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the very victories and revolutions in race relations he had helped to win. He played a pivotal role in America’s Second Founding out of the apocalypse of the Civil War, and he very much wished to see himself as a founder and a defender of the Second American Republic."

"Above all, Douglass is remembered most for telling his personal story—the slave who willed his own freedom, mastered the master’s language, saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as perhaps no one else ever has in America."

"Douglass was a living prophet of an American destruction, exile, war for its existence, and redemption. Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as other prophets, were his guides; they gave him story, metaphor, resolve, and ancient wisdom in order to deliver his ferocious critique of slavery and his country before emancipation, and then his strained but hopeful narrative of its future after 1865."

"During the last quarter or so of the famous man’s life, this extended family, which came to include even some fictive kin and a variety of protégés, became financially and often emotionally dependent on the patriarch of a clan often in conflict with itself. Douglass sustained backbreaking and health-threatening lecture tours in his older years in part to support this extended family and a big house on a hill in Washington, DC, near the centers of Gilded Age power that he could only partially penetrate. This story is at once Douglass’s own unique saga and very modern."

"In roughly the last forty years Douglass has more and more been treated by scholars as a political philosopher, a constitutional and legal analyst, an author capable of prose poetry, a proponent of the natural-rights tradition, a self-conscious voice of and about the nature of memory, a religious and theological thinker, a journalist, and an advocate of broader public education."

This one took me forever so I've got a little BHM backlog to get through, just going to keep going through this month. Need to finish Source of Self Regard by Toni Morrison, then I'll figure the next few out. Probably American Spy, An Orchestra of Minorities, then Harry Potter 6, then Black Leopard Red Wolf. They all fit the theme of 2019 books anyway, outside of HP, so it works out. Might take a month off and read some super old stuff at one point though, like Enlightenment philosophy old. Getting that itch.

[Fresh Tendrils]

I completely died in February and didn't even get close to what I wanted to read. Malcolm's autobiography came in a couple days ago, but I 'm halfway done with Maya Angelou's third book from her memoir series which I've been "reading" for two weeks now.

Trying to juggle more than one hobby at a time is nearly impossible during the week. I've been reading/studying music theory and practicing guitar fairly heavily over the last 3-4 weeks and unfortunately that cuts into my reading time during the week.

Anyway, once I finish with Maya I'll do a combo post with Octavia Butler's Kindred which was amazing.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Quote: Originally Posted by DieHardYankee26

Finished these at the end of January... Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling Spoiler How much more left to say about the series at the end of the 5th book? The longest in the series by a pretty decent margin, the length isn't a problem in the way it could be. The actual plot of the books remains interesting. I love seeing the world being built, more time spent at Hogwarts, learning more about the history and the school, how classes operate, all that jazz. Tons of time spent in Hogwarts in this one, even though we miss out on a legit Quidditch match because Harry is suspended. Hermione is still the GOAT, Harry and Ron are both teenagers to the max. Their whole feud and Harry dealing with Cho was rough, but not because it's poorly done, more because you realize how easily things fall apart between kids too awkward to talk about their issues. It's whatever, I prefer books with adult characters for this reason but it's not a real hindrance to the narrative. Dumbledore is always good to come out of nowhere and totally change the tone of a chapter. It's like he's being written from a different book almost, he's basically God to these people lol. I legit cannot stand Snape. I'm not remotely interested in whatever redemption he's going to be going through in HBP. This is one of the most unlikable characters in book history to me.

If Rowling's intention was to set out and create an ultimately "good" character that is completely unlikable then Snape is surely a success. Personally, the character isn't aging well. He's a clear red herring throughout the series as he stands in for antagonists in each book. My problem with this is it's hard to pivot from that and redeem him in any significant way as a likable character. As such it's hard to feel any sympathy for his situation and much less when you factor in how horrible he is to all students that aren't Slytherin. Not to mention the unrequited pining for a woman who has been dead for 11+ years and is dead partly because of him always comes off as creepy to me. Dude is just a grade A asshat that is cornered into doing Dumbledore's work.

And yet, ****ing Umbridge. **** that bitch. The detention scene with Harry is still uncomfortable as hell to read for me.

Also, I can't really fault kids for not talking about their emotions. Adults refrain from doing the same thing and lack of or miscommunication is the crux of conflicts in most narratives.

Quote:

We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin Spoiler OK now this one was interesting. Previews I read compared it to The Sellout (which I haven’t read but want to) and Get Out (which I saw the first 45 minutes of before noping out of there) so I didn’t know what to expect other than it being satirical.* It’s about a narrator, in the first person, who is Black, married to a White woman, and has a mixed son. The world he lives in is an exaggerated version of the one we live in, which has basically locked the Black population in a housing complex in the city and keeps adding to it so that they can live on their own and outside of “regular society’ pretty much, hard to describe. The tone is very Sorry to Bother You. Anyway, the kid has a dark, growing birthmark that the father is going out of his way to lighten, to stop his son from becoming Black and having to endure the oppression that he deals with. He’s a lawyer at a predominantly White firm, and there’s a great scene damn near ripped out of Sorry to Bother You where he has to perform for the partners, and he does an African tribal dance at a costume party, hilarious. By the end of the book, it becomes clear how internalized the hate of dark skin is in the father, how his mind has been poisoned to hate his own by the society he lives in and how pernicious that belief can be when it comes to raising a kid. Obviously you’d do anything to protect your kid but what if what your kid needs protection from is you? There’s some really sad stuff in there, his wife passes after an argument, I have a hard time dealing with stuff like that, gets too real as you get older. The protection of the kid was a pretty singular focus even before the wife passes, but becomes his sole mission after her death. You find out later about how the wife felt about the obsession to lighten their son and how difficult it made their marriage. I would definitely recommend this to people, it’s like if Invisible Man was satirical. Some really moving passages, and the whole theme comes together well at the end. There’s a little part I didn’t love toward the end, but overall it’s a great read.* Spoiler “We lived, at that time, in a part of the City once inhabited by Mosopelea Indians who migrated to the marshlands to avoid the white man, then by immigrants from Continental Europe who, having left behind crowd, famine, and disease, fled the City to escape the black man, then inhabited by blacks who were vigorously reappropriated to the penitentiary at the parish line, and finally by the descendants of those earlier whites who returned when the coast was again clear.” “I was a killer in court, a master of oratory, an unstoppable disciple of Cicero, Nelson Mandela, and Sukarma Kamenetz. But I hated going to court. Why? If you watched enough award-winning films or read a bunch of crime thrillers, as I did as a boy, you would get the distinct impression that courts of law, indeed, the entire system of codified expectations, was fueled by the search for truth. This was not so. Our courts were powered by two things and two things alone: fear and fear itself. In court, I was afraid of everyone: the client who relied on my competence and zeal; the armed bailiff, whose job it was to subdue zealots like me when we overstepped our bounds; my opposing counsel, whose raison d’être was to cut my limbs from my body until I was nothing but head and torso; and the judge, whose duty was to pound me into the floorboards like a railroad spike. My opponent feared their own client, the bailiff, and the judge as I did. And even the judge feared the appellate courts that could overturn any decision with impunity. And the appellates feared, presumably, God. But who did God fear?” “After all, what was equality other than a typographical error in the Constitution? Yes, the Founders had meant that all men were created equal, but they failed to include an index of defined terms. Ever since they drafted that screed, no one wanted to admit that Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of those guys meant only to protect the rights of white, landowning men. Through sloppy copyediting, our illustrious forefathers set off the human rights skirmishes that would beset the nation all the way to the present. If any of the seventy-plus delegates at the Constitutional Convention could have bothered to bring along a gray-wigged man of letters or even a lowly print shop owner, the document would have been clearer, so generations of people wouldn’t have spent their lives dreaming of rights they were never meant to have, wrongheadedly attending protests, getting beaten or killed.” “Like trying to choose between ten doors, all but one of which led to immediate death. It’s not a problem if you never have to choose.” “Happiness is too rare a commodity not to count for something. Still, my happy is the caustic yellow of a safety vest.” “You are an angel. Fate, in the guise of ordinary people, conspires to pull the wings from your body. To break your grasshopper limbs. To leave you crippled in loam. To maniacally adjust the shape of your skull. To bleed your life’s blood onto concrete. To destroy you, destroy your future, to destroy your children’s future. Other peoples could rely on our nation’s fundamental fairness as a starting point for any hopes or dreams they might have. But you, Black Boy, were born weak but breathing and tossed into an open grave. Three quarters of Fate’s work was done in our reaction to the world. In attempting to back away from hissing fauna, a rattler, or a jaguar, we find ourselves stepping off a mountaintop and falling to the jagged rocks below. Never bow to anyone, Sir would say, but don’t let fools bring you down. Respecting yourself means respecting even those who don’t deserve it.” “I sought to arm my boy with magic potions and enchanted swords, or at the very least provide a sturdy wooden shield. I once believed my intent was to never harm him. But that’s not true. I meant to hurt my child from the first day I met him, when I was a giant and he was a papoose. I needed to hurt Nigel the way a physician introduces a junior varsity version of a virus so that the body knows what to do when the all-star team shows up.”

This sounds powerful. Thanks for the post.

[DieHardYankee26]

She just needed to turn his petty down from a 10 to like a 6 or 7. Taking your childhood bullying out on your bullys kid years later is so extra. Or just leave it out of his teaching, taking points away from other kids, ignoring Hermione, it's too much. He can still be an enemy in some sense without being a complete *******.

Uncomfortable is the word for Umbridge for sure. Even the way she's described as wearing bright clothes and constantly smiling is disconcerting. She's just creepy all around, her getting dragged into the forest was as close as I've come to actually yelling out in excitement reading a book lol.

Agreed on the kids thing, I don't fault them for it, it can just be painful to read. Adults I have more of a line, like watching TV, some shows can have a conversation and they're saying everything except the one thing you want to hear and it's still entertaining vs others just shrugging stuff off. That's more a quality issue though, bad books are generally gonna have bad dialogue.

We Cast A Shadow is worth it just for the way its written, such a compelling read. Being in the first person allows for a lot of self reflection. You already know how I feel about Invisible Man, so if I'm comparing it to that I'm not doing it lightly.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Kindred - Octavia Butler

The more I thought about it the more I realized this need it's own post because it's that good.

The premise is certainly outlandish. Dana, a black woman married to a white man in 1970s LA, travels back to a slave plantation around Maryland/NOVA in the 1820s. The book follows her as she involuntarily travels between both time-periods. Her purpose appears to be to act as protector to the son of the plantation's owner who is also her great, great, great, great... grandfather.

A fairly compelling premise to begin with, but Butler takes that compelling idea and drives it further by developing and exploring themes that are just as compelling. Lack of control over one's destiny and body. Reconciling past to present - both for the country and the characters involved. The ease and guilt of submission and dominance. Butler explores all of these themes (and more) deftly and subtly. She never directly addresses any of them, but builds them through her characters and their relationships.

The theme that stuck to me the most was the lack of control. Dana's ability to time-travel would come on like a dizzy spell. The room would spin, she would lose focus, and then be transported either to present day or at some point during her great-grandfather's life. Each dizzy spell an alarm for anxiety induced panic. What situation will she find herself in? What danger will greet her? Not only does she exhibit no control over this ability, but she exhibits no control over herself when back on the plantation which is almost suffocating in it's omnipresent, anxiously threatening danger clouding over the edges of each page. Each spell offers an array of possibilities and all of them are colored morbid at the thought of being put into harm's way. Despite her seemingly lack of control Dana survives as best as she can. As a slave she learns quickly for the sake of her health. She learns pride is a target for abuse and hurt and swallows it to survive.

To help her is a cast of characters that offers glimpses into a deeper part of Dana's character or as a looking glass to our bloody past and how it boils to the surface in our present day. As Rufus ages so too do the slaves on his plantation and Dana witnesses the cyclical nature of oppression. Children growing up accustomed to abuse, being dragged from their mothers, watching their fathers beaten or killed, and the children themselves growing up to either fill the roles they were born to fill or be sold away at the mercy of their master. Each slave waging a series of battles internal and external to survive and maintain some semblances of human dignity and pride.

At the center of it all is Rufus whom we first meet as a child unable to breath on the bank of a river. Early on there is the possibility of redemption in his age of innocence. Dana herself believes initially she can persuade him to be a more gentle, loving slave owner. As Rufus ages his innocence gives way for his true nature of being manipulative, selfish, greedy, abusive, and unrepentant unless it affected him directly.

Yet, Dana must reconcile this past to her present because without it she would not exist as she knows it today. How is one supposed to feel when their destiny and creation was (and is) controlled by outside forces that are often-times bloody and mentally degrading. It's a nature of complexity both in acknowledging the terrible past that made today possible, but also being grateful today's present.

All in all a fantastic read that is rich and offers plenty of depth for deep dives and analysis. The book that kept coming back to me while reading this was Beloved by Toni Morrison. That too deals with lack of control and how one tries to take control over themselves and their loved ones any way they can.

Spoiler

Maybe I'm just like a victim of robbery or rape or something - a victim who survives, but who doesn't feel safe any more.

It was nearly always mindless work, and as far as most employers were concerned, it was done by mindless people. Nonpeople rented for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It didn't matter.

Sometime during the early house of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

People don't learn everything about the times that came before them. Why should they?

The whip was heavy and at least six feet long, and I wouldn't have used it on anything living. It drew blood and screams at every blow. I watched and listened and longed to be away.

They don't have to understand. Even the games they play are preparing them for their future - and that future will come whether they understand it or not.

I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman - to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one.

It's like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.

My back had already begun to ache dully, and I felt dully ashamed. Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

I stared at it, then at the young man holding it. I kept thinking I knew him, and he kept proving to me that I didn't.

As I said previously I'm working through Maya Angelou's Singin', Swingin', and Getting Merry Like Christmas with Malcolm X's autobiography on deck. The Baldwin collection is still in rotation as well.