Chicken with Plums

Marjane Satrapi is best known for her Persepolis books, which are amazing. So when I saw that she had another graphic novel out, I quickly snatched it from the library shelf.

Chicken with Plums is about Satrapi's great-uncle, a musician who looses his will to live after his instrument is broken. The novel chronicles his last eight days as he slowly starves to death in his own home. We get glimpses of the past and of the future for his family. Soon it becomes clear how a man like him could give up on life.

This is a beautifully done story. I am remain enchanted by Satrapi. The art is detailed and well done and the story flows very well. This was a very quick read, perfect for a lazy afternoon.

I've been on a graphic novel kick lately and am enjoying it immensely.

Biting the Sun

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee was suggested to me by my cousin's husband. He raved about it and I had a bit of trouble tracking it down. I special ordered it through work and it took forever to get in. From the first line, I knew this would be interesting:

"My friend Hergal had killed himself again..."

This is a futuristic society, Four BEE, where pleasure is everything. The world is run with the help of a lot of robots who are there to make sure the humans are as happy as can be. There is a lot of slang used in the book, which has a helpful glossary at the beginning. Young people, or Jang, are encouraged to steal and get married as many times as they wish. They can change their body after a certain period of time to whatever they wish - guy, girl, and look however they want. And if they don't want to wait for the prescribed time period, they can always kill themselves and get a new body that way.

Our main character (who remains unnamed) steals, takes drugs, kills herself, returns to life in a new body she has designed to be incredibly beautiful, eats exotic food, has sex with pretty much everyone she knows and yet is unfulfilled. She's mostly female, but does spend a few stints as a guy.

"I can hardley remeber the laughing and the running now and the playing an dthe dancing but I remember the happiness, the happiness like a wound, that bleeds the life spark."

The narrator (who I called Ooma - or darling) tries her best to make herself happy. She tries to be an adult and get a job, tries to have a child, but remains hopelessly unhappy. Ooma has a great connection with a pet she steals; he is wild and mean but she cannot help but cart him everywhere she goes. She eventually takes an expedition out to Four BAA and then to the wilds of the desert, which turn out to be too domestic for her. Ooma continues to push boundaries until the government finally cannot take anymore.

"Do not bite the sun, traveller, you will burn your mouth."

This book was fascinating. The characters kept changing in appearance over and over and even the other characters had a hard time telling who people were at times. There was humor and heartache. Two characters have a hard time because one loves the other for her essence and the other remains transfixed on outward appearances.

I was so surprised that this book isn't talked about more. As far as dystopias go, this was a really good book. The slang was a lot easier to get around than A Clockwork Orange, so I didn't have much of a problem with that.

Note: this book was originally published as two works, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, but has since been combined in this volume.

rocks is an acquired taste

I haven't posted in a long time and I'm sorry for that. I've started graduate school and a new job so my life has been a little hectic lately. But I want to be sure I'm making time for this! With all of my text books, I wanted to read something light and fun so I immediately turned to Pratchett.

Wyrd Sisters is another Discworld book, a fantasy that will make you laugh until you think you might pee your pants. This one parodies Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet. We start out with the murder of the king and his transition into being a ghost. Three witches, including Granny Weatherwax who was a big part of Equal Rites, are given his son to hide away so that the new king, the Duke, doesn't kill him. They give him to a travelling band of actors to raise until the time is right.

"She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it."

The witches try their best not to interfere with politics, but somehow get pulled into it. The Duke is suffering from some major Lady-Macbeth-itis and his wife is hellbent on killing anyone who doesn't get with her program.

"The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo."

These books are nothing but fun and the characters are what make them that way. They each are so realized and delightful. Even the cook, who has no speaking lines, has a personality that comes across clearly.

I'm hooked on this man's books. Thankfully there are about a million of them.


As I said above, I've been super busy with school and it has cut into my reading time. However, I am working on a few things at the moment (slowly but surely), such as Oblomov by Goncharov, The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan and the Fatal Eggs by Mikail Bulgakov (which I hope, hope to finish by the weekend).

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

This is a book I see on a lot of book lists but didn't really know anything about. I found a cheap paperback the other day and decided to give it a whirl. I was hooked on this thing like no body's business. I couldn't read it fast enough.

"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say."

The little lady narrator of this tale is not named (a trend lately in the books I'm reading) but she meets and married a man named Maxim de Winter and goes off to live at his estate, Manderly. Our narrator is obsessed with the image of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who died at sea nearby.

Our narrator's stress is so high you can't help but feel it yourself. She is constantly second guessing herself and is never sure how to act around the staff that is supposed to be catering to her. Added in is Mrs. Danvers, who runs Manderly and was Rebecca's personal maid. She does not make things any easier for the new Mrs. de Winters.

"I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again."

Mrs. de Winters does her best to fit in to her new surroundings, even though she was not raised in such a high social class. She loves her new husband but does not always know how to be the wife he needs.

There is a huge twist in this book that blew me away. In conclusion, this book is on reading lists for a reason. Highly recommend.

he is a man and not a piano-key

As I have made clear before, Russian lit holds a special place in my heart. Now, I'm usually more of a Tolstoy gal than Dostoevsky, but you can't deny that this guy was a genius.

"I am a sick man...I am a wicked man."

Thus begins Notes From the Underground, a tale told to us by an unnamed man who attempts to explain how he could go from a seemingly normal and stable citizen to the depraved creature he is now. The first half is his ranting at us, explaining his philosophy.

"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.
That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind."

His issues with society and with human nature really make you think. A lot. About conformity, logic, imagination, intellect, and so many other issues. Every page has big idea that really challenged me.

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."

The second half of the book recounts an incident with the narrator and several of his old classmates that end up having dinner together. Our narrator makes a pretty big fool of himself and ends up bearing his soul to a whore. That incident reminded me a lot of the scene in the Catcher in the Rye where Holden has the prostitute over in his hotel room.

The writing style and the characters were familiar and fit right in with Dostoevsky's other works. This is a short piece but it packs a powerful punch. Read it.

Apparently, you've developed a soul

"When man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom."

We was written before 1984 and Brave New World and influenced both works. This is a futuristic society where people are referred to as numbers and where they work in unison for the One State, ruled by the Benefactor. In this society, the sum of all parts is greater than the individual; a single person is nothing without the whole. Personal freedoms are extremely limited and all must sing the praises of the One State. Guardians are among them, watching over them in case any should defy the laws. One State. D-503 is our narrator, he is writing notes to be put upon the Intergal, a space ship he is building to bring the One State's ways to other worlds.

In this society, everyone has the right to have sex with anyone else, all one need do is register for that person and receive a pink ticket to lower their blinds. This is one of the only instances of privacy they have, as the buildings are made of glass. The society is encased in a dome, the Green Wall keeping the outside world apart since the 200 Year War.

D-503 meets a woman, I-330, with whom he falls in love with. She is part of a group called Mephi, which is trying to organize an uprising against the One State. D-503 struggles to justify his actions with I-330 with the ideals that have been instilled in him. She challenges the rules and ideals of the One State, and while D-503 claims that he hates her, he cannot but do what she tells him to do.

"You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."

What interested me a lot about the beginning of this book was D-503's interest in mathematics, and his fixation upon the square root of negative one. As an imaginary number in a very cut and dry world, D-503 cannot wrap his mind around this concept and even recalls throwing a fit in school when he learned of it. Imagination is not desirable in this society, and there is talk of an operation to remove it from the brain.

"Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one."

The appearance of math in dystopian literature is really interesting to me. I just finished reading Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground (I'll try to blog my thoughts on that soon) and one thing that stuck out there was the notion that 2+2=5 (this notion is not exclusive to Dostoevsky, but also connects to Tolstoy, Orwell, and Turgenev, among others - interesting wikipedia entry here). In Dostoevsky, he uses the equation to assert his free will over logic.

We has some great imagery in it. According to the Table of Hours, every number wakes at exactly the same moment, chews the same number of times in precision and marches down the streets in time with each other. The great Benefactor's machine deals with those who rebel by vaporizing them in front of a placid crowd. He is able to describe the women in the story almost exclusively by describing their mouths.

Obviously this novel has some deep allusions to communism, an issue that Zamyatin was dealing with in Russia. In the novel, private property isn't an option anymore, even children are considered property of the state. Nothing is private, even voting is done out in the open, in front of everyone.

To me, a dystopian novel can have but one ending, and that is not a happy one. This one is no different; and even though I could see where the book was heading, what fate lay in store for I-330 and for D-503, it did not lessen the impact.

And that will heal you?

I consider myself well-read, but I think I dropped the ball by not picking this one up sooner. I've had it sitting on my self for a year or so. Once I started reading, I could not put this book down.

The book is based on Eggers's real life, when both of his parents died from cancer and he was placed in charge of his younger brother. Eggers (21) and Toph (8) move from Chicago to California and Eggers does his best to be a parent/brother and juggle a new career and find a sense of community with his friends. Also, he auditions for MTV's the Real World.

I think that Eggers does a beautiful job of capturing the joy and fear of being responsible for another human being. The conversations and interactions between him and Toph are ones I can easily imagine my brothers having.

"Then, at the moment that I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing - it happens every time I leave him anywhere - that Toph will be killed. "

That fear is something I can identify with, if to a lesser degree. I have two siblings much younger than myself, who I am babysitting at the moment, and am fiercely protective of them. I worry about them a lot and when I am watching them I feel much like an auxiliary parent as opposed to just a sister like I feel around my older-younger brothers.

I did have a bit of trouble getting through the introduction the first time I picked this book up. Eggers' style is very different from the type of book I usually enjoy (old Russian novels) but I think that reading his short story collection, How We Are Hungry, helped a lot. His writing is different, very different, but very real. He breaks the fourth wall, his characters yell at him for using them as plot devices and the copyright page is unexpectedly hilarious.

I loved this book and highly, highly recommend it to anyone. I'm sure I have mentioned before that Eggers founded McSweeny's, which I also suggest checking out.


"Please sound normal, Toph, you are normal, we are normal so just sound normal please can't you? Don't sound like I've been beating your, like you're in the bathroom hiding from me, because I have been there, have hidden from parents before, have been on the other side of a door being stuck with all conceivable parental force, have searched the bathroom for places to hide, have found a place in the closet where the bath toys are kept, under the lowest shelf, and I have hidden there, and have seen, darkening the white slit of light under the door to this closet, his shoes, and then the white light everywhere as the door is opened..."