Mischling

 

Mischling by Affinity Konar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If a Danse Macabre could be written in words, this would be it. Telling the story of twin children and other genetic anomalies (dwarfism, albinism) that were sorted from concentration camps and used as experiments, this is far from an easy book to read. However, Konar uses such beautiful language and arresting images to portray these horrifics that at times you almost forget what she is describing. The tortures described are sometimes fantastic, and you can't help but wonder if they are based on fact--and then you realize that of course they are. The reunions and miracles that occur seem almost as fantastic, and easier to discount. But rather than discredit them, I chose to believe that if such atrocities could be real, so could these moments of hope. This story ends not with the liberation of Auschwitz, but goes on to describe the many months these refugees endured trying to find loved ones, and make their way to somewhere safe--a part that many stories leave out. Books of the holocaust are not easy to read, but I think we can learn from the strength of the sufferers and gain a determination to stop such cruelty wherever we find it.

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My letters were growing angry and their lack of signature was erasing me.  No one was counting bits of me in the laboratory anymore.  No one was totting up pieces of me.  I did not know if this was because the doctor told people not to or because the best part of me was gone.

Because I had it still, that wild hope; it was as steady as a spines and so pronounced I marveled. that the nurses and technicians did not take note of this development within me and mark it on their charts.

isn't evil a form of stupidity?

Those stars, they knew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire.

the burden saved you, he finally said, until you had a moment to examine it, to feel, for once, its full weight.

dust

 Dust that fuzzes the edges

A great detritus fog

Made up of hair & skin & dandruff & powdered sweat & nubs from blue sweaters & sloughed mud from trainers worn when it rained & pollen from a mountain hike to Looking Glass Falls where ox-eyed daises rigidly rocked as if uprooting themselves to stalk after you--

Pieces of you attract and collect to your abandoned surfaces

As if it could proliferate thick enough to claim the matter as its own

As if you wanted to stay all along.

Those precocious motes dance

dizzy in the sun

like echos of your soul and 

trace the erratic trajectory of your 

travels in the shadows.

Let the dust nest in my brain

Let it choke my lungs

Let it mold its exoskeleton around me

Let all your pieces become my peace.

Long Bright River

 

Long Bright River by Liz Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sold as a mystery, this is more of a study of sisterhood, one sister who happens to be drawn into a mystery because she is a patrol cop and is worried her missing sister may be the next serial killer's victim. The Philadelphia neighborhood where Mickey patrols and grew up in becomes the most important character. It is a study of how the working poor, beaten down and suspicious of those who keep them down, develop a pride of their own and can shame anyone trying to get out. Interestingly, it is more socially acceptable to "get out" by developing a drug habit than by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. When drugs are so prevalent, there develops a new sort of equilibrium where the law tolerates some behaviors to concentrate on others. Where is that line? When drugs becomes so prevalent and accepted, how do you not get drawn in? How do you get out? Who's fault is it when you succumb? When does the law no longer become responsible for socially accepted behavior? what about family? Do you cut them off, take away rights, or just make sure they get clean needles? Obviously it raises a lot of interesting questions but I did not like the physical formatting of the book. I thought the lack of quotation marks added to the interiority of the novel (Is she speaking or thinking). But I'm still trying to figure out the reason for the breaks that follow every third paragraph or so. Wasn't a change of perspective, passing of time, or even new thought sometimes. Made the novel a bit choppy for me.

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This was the secret I learned that day: None of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping.  There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.

When, at bedtime, he falls asleep on me, I keep holding him.  Like I'm applying pressure to a wound.  Keeping the blood inside him.

Nicholas Nickleby

 

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished a Dickens novel! Up to this pointed I have started several, but never finished one (not including A Christmas Carol ). Don't ask me why it would be Nickleby, which I found out afterwards is not one of his better novels. However, I did know it was written in serial form and I imagined what it would be like to wait in anticipation for the continuation of a story. Like the precursor of soap operas, I could see the draw in finding what happened to Nicholas, his sister, and the monstrous villain Uncle Ralph. Yes, it is sentimental, melodramatic, melancholic, and romantic but so are soap operas. It has a passable plot and some biting criticism on materialism and capitalism, but what really saves the day for me is Noggs, Ralph's s poorly used secretary, who quietly and sneakily unravels all of Ralph's nefarious plots against Nicholas. It possess the themes and motifs of Dickens from class disparity to child neglect and abuse, and comical characters.

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Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual.

not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

for gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal—

Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.

A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure.

and in letters afflicted with every possible variation of spinal deformity,

Is selfishness a necessary ingredient in the composition of that passion called love, or does it deserve all the fine things which poets, in the exercise of their undoubted vocation, have said of it?

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope.

He knew himself well, and choosing to imagine that all mankind were cast in the same mould, hated them; for, though no man hates himself, the coldest among us having too much self-love for that, yet most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

When men are about to commit, or to sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.

Modern Warriors

 

Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes by Pete Hegseth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While the media and pop culture would have you believe that it is traumatizing at best, and devestating most likely, to be a modern soldier, this is the other side of the coin. These are the soldiers (mostly officers) who were able to turn their experiences into ultimately positive outcomes. Granted, most of these perspectives are several years after retiring, but even those with significant loss (double amputees, loss of an eye, death of comrades) were able to find a successful way forward. They credit the discipline and drive they learned in the military, and their stories are inspiring, and their insight is motivating. It is well to honor and learn from these soldiers, without forgetting that for others the struggle to cope and carry on is real too.

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And that word "can't: is one of the most debilitating words that these guys, including myself, will ever have to deal with, whether you can't go downrange anymore, you can't avenge this guy's death, or you can't do this or that.  It's a heck of a psychological disability, really.

Fear has become an addiction.

Fear operates best in an environment of uncertainty.

Once I saw the effect and Knew that I'd killed someone, I'd get this metallic cast in my mouth, it was like a piece of my soul.

I tried not to think about how shocked a lot of the people I shot looked.  That would make me think about what if it was going to happen to me.

Every Day Is for the Thief

 

Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully written novel with no real plot. A Nigerian raised in Lagos, now living in New York, goes back to Lagos after fifteen years. Most chapters tell vinaigrettes of ways that the people of Lagos steal, or are stolen from, both from systemic corruption, brutal poverty, ineptitude, governmental abuse, lethargic economy, etc. Pictures are sprinkled without which gives the novel a memoir-like fee, though I'm not sure I really liked the protagonist (angry and self-righteous). The observations and descriptions are eloquent and thought-provoking though, and makes it a must-read.

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Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.

Power comes back at 4: 00 A.M. or later. The fan resumes its spinning like a broken conversation continued in mid-sentence.

There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge.

What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?

This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it.

But it is as yet a borrowed progress and it is happening in the absence of the ideological commitments that can make it real.

in Nigeria, there is tremendous cultural pressure to claim that one is happy, even when one is not. Especially when one is not. Unhappy people, such as grieving mothers at a protest march, are swept aside. It is wrong to be unhappy. But it is not necessary to get bogged down in details when all we need is the general idea.

The idea that saying makes it so, that the laws of the imagination matter more than all others.

afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory, what is meant only for a sidelong glance followed by forgetting.

Yes Please!

Yes Please by Amy Poehler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars. Poehler starts out shaky, complaining again and again that writing a book "is very hard". It is hard knowing that what you are writing most certainly WILL be published and WILL be read by a very lot of people. Which is not the same "hard" as trying to get a book published and maybe getting read by a few people. You can almost hear her questioning herself on how she can be entertaining but not embarrassing, truthful but not offensive. Then, as she goes along, she gets more comfortable and by the end, some of her best writing is almost transcendent. "Gimme that Pudding" starts it out by talking about the backstory of those hilarious bits she and other comedians did at awards ceremonies, and "My Boys" is a brilliant essay about helping in Haiti while having to coordinate the details of hosting the Oscars. The trouble with many comedians books are that their strengths--Poheler's is playing off of others and improvisation--don't always translate well into books, and we as fans don't allow for different personas. Once Poehler stops bemoaning this fact and just writes she becomes quite the writer.

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The strange thing is that the moment people start looking at you less is when you start being able to see through people more.