In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 20/52

Just the one book over Christmas - 24th December to 30th.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Perfect By Now is a collection of blog posts annotating and snarking the Sweet Valley High series.  I read a couple of them as a teenager, and I enjoyed reading similar posts on livejournal.  The collection's a little disappointing as an actual book, so I'm glad it was free from the Kindle store.  The blog posts haven't been edited at all, so they refer to covers that aren't included and they're written in a very casual way.  They've been arranged in the order of the Sweet Valley High books which is not the order they were written in, so some of the posts refer to others which have not appeared in the volume yet.  Not a terribly professional effort, but somehow compelling.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 19/52

I'm surprised I read so much this week - 17th December to 23rd December.  That said, the three Sophie Hannah's are all audiobooks.  I listened to Pictures or It Didn't Happen - a three hour quick read - again before buying a few more credits for the next few books, that is, The Other Half Lives and A Room Swept White.

The Other Half Lives is the first Sophie Hannah book I ever read.  Happily, it's been long enough that I'd forgotten the finer details of the intricate plot.  I'd also forgotten one of the more disturbing details of A Room Swept White - that Hannah implies the scientific community were picking on Andrew Wakefield for disagreeing with them.  That's dangerously inaccurate; Wakefield's claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism was not properly tested or validated.

Memoriam is a graphic novel that I spotted in the library, about a girl who wakes up with no memory.  It was pretty interesting.  Introduction by the author of the Fables series, which tells you something about it.

I read The Dark Half as part of my Stephen King project.  I wrote a longer post about it here.

Finally, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? was the inspiration for the title of a Gilmore girls episode.  I read a bit about the book and it seemed interesting so I picked it up on Kindle.  It's set in the depression and focuses on a dance marathon, in which young couples danced for an hour and fifty minutes at a time with ten minute breaks, the longest lasting pair winning a prize.  It's bleak and miserable, but in a very interesting way.  We know it ends with the main character shooting his partner because the entire story takes place in a flashback as the verdict at his trial is being delivered.  It was great, I enjoyed it.

In Which We Discuss Public Shaming

Last week I listened to So You've Been Publicly Shamed on audible.  I don't recommend the audiobook, by the way; it's read by the author, whose skills do not lie in reading out loud and who uses the word 'said' far too much, something only accentuated by the choppy, staccato reading style.

The book focuses on examples of recent public shamings, which I won't go into detail about because one thing it did convince me of is that public shaming is bad and I don't want to bring something back up google if it's been successfully buried and I don't feel a pressing need to emote on it.

The specific incident I had the most feelings about involved a tech conference.  A woman of colour attended the conference and was offended to hear two male programmers behind her making what she felt were sexist jokes.  She felt threatened and was reminded of various misogynistic attidues which she worried would prevent future female programmers.  Please note that the women in question had made a similarly sexual joke only a few days earlier in her twitter feed.

She stood up, took two pictures of them and shared them online.  She also texted the conference organisers, who were known to her, to speak to the two men about the subject.

The organisers spoke to all parties and the two men apologised.  That really should have been the end of it.

The women in question wrote a blog post a few days later, explaining what had happened and sharing the photo she had taken.  This lead to a public shaming and one of the men in question lost his job. Then the internet turned on her.  She was publicly shamed and lost her job.

What really annoyed me, reading this book, was that the women in question never showed any regret or contrition.  Maybe she genuinely thinks she did the right thing.  I don't.  Or, maybe she just wasn't ready to express contrition publicly.  Hard to say.

I can understand her viewpoint.  I grind my teeth when I hear offensive comments and I can't bear not to say something.  I get that sometimes it's quite intimidating to bring up the fact that you're offended, so you discuss it with a third party, like the conference organisers.  However; you do not share photos of total strangers online.  That's where I think she went wrong, in taking someone's photo without consent, sharing it without consent and attempting to call down the power of the crowd upon that someone.

The man who lost his job now has another.  He's quoted as saying he is worried about speaking to female programmers but that isn't an issue because there aren't any where he works now.  The lady in question had not been offered another job at the time the book was published.

Another person mentioned was further vilified after his initial public shaming when he did not appear appropriately contrite during his apology (which I guess means people had the same sort of feelings that I do about the female programmer).  The issue of looking contrite interests me.

Drowning victims don't flail, or panic, or shout for help.  If you're drowning your body won't do any of those things.  It won't be able to.

From this article;

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

In short, drowning victims don't look like we expect.

Rape and rape victims don't either.  A lot of people picture rape as being a stranger in a dark alley, perhaps attracted by clothing.  I cannot express strongly enough quite how ridiculous this concept is.  The person most likely to rape another is someone close to them - a relative, friend or partner.  And it's not because one day the victim decided to dress so sexily that the rapist couldn't control themselves.

I feel very  strongly about this because, when I was raped, the police treated called me a liar.  I find that more traumatic than the actual attack; I still have panic attacks about it.

I just went and wrote a review for that health centre (Small Heath Health Centre), which I am going to share here because I feel that they do deserve to be publicly shamed.

I was first assigned to this healthcare centre following suicidal thoughts and feelings of depression.  I made an appointment with a member of staff for 2:30pm.  He called me in at 4pm, and when I brought up the time difference he said "I'm sorry if that happened".  There was no acknowledgement that he had scheduled an appointment for himself that he had failed to keep - just a fake apology.

When I finally saw a psychiatrist - months later, after they sent me several unsuitable appointments with no flexibility - we discussed that fact that I am a rape victim.  I described a stranger - a "friend of a friend" - who crawled into my bed and attacked me, despite my saying no.  I am very precise in my use of language, and there was no ambiguity in my description.

I was sent a summary report which repeatedly referred to me by the wrong name and described my rapist as "a boyfriend you did not want to sleep with but willingly had sex with".

I don't know what kind of evil, incompetent, sadistic monster could have thought such a thing was acceptable.  Being sent such comments increased my depression, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts, which you might notice is the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do.

I raised a complaint, and was not advised in any way that this would affect my treatment - I expected to be transferred to a competent psychiatrist or to another centre.

My complaint was never fully addressed.  In a phone call, the director of the centre could only bleat, pathetically "no one else has ever had this problem!".  As if that was in any way relevant or helpful.

The director of the centre also insisted that my records were correct, but failed to show me these records as requested.  This further begs the question of how someone could make such an appalling "mistake" as they kept insisting that it was.

Happily, I have now moved out of the area and will never be subject to the incompetence and brutality of this centre again.  I have also been advised that the psychiatrist and the trainee who wrote the summary no longer work at the centre; however, it was never clarified whether they were fired for incompetence - as they should have been - or sent off to spread their poison elsewhere.  I asked that my experience would be taken into account in future training and would be reported on both women's files, but received no confirmation that this had been done.

If you value your mental health and want to live, do not go to this centre.  They make it very clear that they do not care about their patients and are not capable of doing their jobs.  They also do not respond to complaints effectively, instead making pathetic excuses.

I would share the names of the evil bitches in question (I do try not to use sexist language, but come on), but I've hidden away the summary somewhere because looking at it upset me so much.

The centre has published my review, but edited it without notifying me that they had done so.

Anyway, point I was making.  Drowning victims don't look like we expect.  Rape victims don't look like we expect.  Maybe contrition doesn't look like we expect.

In Which We Discuss the Dark Half

First an update on where I am with my project to read all of Stephen King's novels in published order. As before, the red and blue are books I've now read, with red indicating books I had read previously. Below that, the bolded titles are those I'd read previously.  You'll notice that Stephen King has added another two book to the end of the list so far this year, with another to be published in 2016.

- 15/6/13

Carrie - 1974 -  June 15th 2013
'Salem's Lot - 1975 - June 30th 2013
The Shining - 1977 - July 28th 2013
Rage - 1977 - July 31st 2013
Night Shift - 1978 - August 28th 2013
The Stand - 1978 - March 20th 2014
The Long Walk - 1979 - March 23rd 2014
The Dead Zone - 1979 - June 2014
Firestarter - 1980 - August 16th 2014


- 15/6/13 to 17/8/14 - 9

Roadwork - 1981 - 23rd August 2014
Danse Macabre - 1981 - 7th September 2014
- BONUS: Small World (Tabitha King) - 10th September 2014
Cujo - 1981 - 20th September 2014
The Running Man - 1982- 22nd September 2014
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 1982 - 30th September 2014
Creepshow - 1982 - 1st October 2014
Different Seasons - 1982  - 24th October 2014

- 17/8/14 to 25/10/14 - 8 (17)

Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983
The Talisman - 1984
Thinner - 1984 

- 25/10/14/14 to 14/07/2015 - 5 (22)

Skeleton Crew - 1985
It - 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1987
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - 1987
Misery - 1987 

- 14/7/15 to 18/10/2015 - 5 (27)

The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky  - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989 

- 18/10/2015 to 22/12/2015 (30)

Four Past Midnight - 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands - 1991 
Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992

Nightmares and Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996

The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997
Dark Tower: Little Sisters of Eluria (Legend) - 1998
Bag of Bones - 1998

Storm of the Century - 1998
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999
The New Lieutenant's Rap - 1999
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999
Blood and Smoke - 1999

"Riding the Bullet" - 2000  
On Writing - 2000 
Secret Windows - 2000 
The Plant - 2000      
Dreamcatcher - 2001

Black House (with Peter Straub) -2001
Everything's Eventual - 2002
From a Buick 8 - 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - 2003  
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah - 2004

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower - 2004
Faithful - 2004
- BONUS: 20th Century Ghosts (Joe Hill) - Jan 2005
- BONUS: Josie and Jack (Kelly Braffet)  - Feb 2005
- BONUS: We're All in This Together (Owen King) - 2005

The Colorado Kid - 2005
Cell - 2006
Lisey's Story - 2006
Blaze - 2007
Duma Key - 2008

Just After Sunset - 2008 
Stephen King Goes to the Movies - 2009
Ur - 2009     
Under the Dome - 2009
Blockade Billy - 2010

Full Dark, No Stars - 2010
Mile 81 - 2011    
11/22/63 - 2011
American Vampire (with Scott Snyder) - 2011
"Throttle" (with Joe Hill) - 2012

The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole - 2012 
A Face in the Crowd (with Stewart O'Nan) - 2012
"In the Tall Grass"  (with Joe Hill) - 2012
"GUNS" - 2013
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County - 2013

Joyland - 2013
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem - 2013
Doctor Sleep - 2013
Mr. Mercedes - 2014      
Revival - November 2014

Finders Keepers - 2015
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams - 2015
End of Watch - 2016

I've just finished reading The Dark Half, which came out when I was about a year old.  It came out after the Richard Bachman psuedonym had been revealed, and draws its plot heavily from that.  In other words, it's about an author whose pseudonym comes to life after it is revealed and symbolically buried.

Thad Beaumont is the writer while George Stark is the pseudonym.  George is also Thad's twin brother, who was consumed in the womb - something that may happen in as many as one out of ten pregnancies.  When Thad starts writing, at the age of twelve, the tissue of George Stark begins to grow again in Thad's brain and is removed as a brain tumour.

Later, George Stark raises an excellent point.  Why shouldn't he survive?  Why does he have to die?

Happily, he's not a very nice guy so we don't need to delve too deeply into that.

When I write, I worry a lot about being misinterpreted or offending people, to the point where it hinders whatever story I'm trying to tell.  In Stephen King's position, I'd have been worried about implying I'd like to murder the person who discovered my pseudonym.  I think that's a small part of why he's a better writer than me; that he's not overly concerned about that, and doesn't let it get in the way of a good plot.

This is the first book to be published after Tabitha King's ultimatum over Stephen King's drinking and drugs problems (not including his essay in Nightmares in the Sky), and you can see some of that in Thad's relationship to George.  George is a part of him, and not a part he completely rejects.  He can see that it's a part of him that threatens his family, his friends and his well-being, as well as something that keeps him from his best work; however, it is still a part of him.  It's still his twin.

Despite that, George Stark has to go because he's not a very nice guy.  Because he threatens everything Thad Beaumont holds dear.

Sheriff Alan Pangborn later shows up in Bag of Bones, another book that I've read previously.  You can read James Smythe's article here.

The next book is Four Past Midnight.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 18/52 and I Go Off on a Rant about the Gilmore Girls

Only three books last week; a library book, an audio book and a book I bought from a charity shop on the way back from Lorna Doone country last March.

I love Lorna Doone.  It's one of my favourite books, and I love Lorna and John as a couple.  They're so cute!  Like when John tries to copy a feel of Lorna's arse, but pretends he was 'reaching for a flower'.  And the dirty joke about cucumbers in chapter 58, which no one ever believes until I show it to them.

Anyway, I bought The More You Ignore Me from a charity shop we stopped after spending a day traipsing round Exeter.  I didn't realise Jo Brand was a writer as well as a comedian.  I quite enjoyed the book; it's about a girl growing up in the 80s with a mother struggling with severe mental illness and a love of The Smiths.  The ending chapter is quite weak, but the journey there was fun.

I quite want to have a rant about So You've Been Publicly Shamed, because it gave me feelings.  I don't so much recommend the audiobook.  The author did the narration, and he's not great at different voices which, to be fair, isn't really his job.  However, that and his constant use of 'said' makes the many, many quoted conversations a terrible, direful drone.

Finally, You Remember Me was the sequel to Grinny which I read last week.  I might not have bothered, but the library had the two books bound in one edition, so I had it handy and it's a very quick read.

I've read very little this week, and that's due to to things.  My new (not really) hobby this week has been watching all seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls in preparation for the new episodes on Netflix.  I can't stand the Gilmore girls, and that's not bolded because I mean the characters, not the show.

I'm up to season 7, and Rory's snobby side is really coming out.  It's something Logan brings out in her more.  Their relationship begins when she takes offensive at his talking to her friend Marty "like a servant".  Logan debates his right to treat to people like servants and Rory inexplicably finds it charming.

Later, when Logan's family reject her as not good enough, Rory's upset because "I'm a Gilmore!".  Not because the whole question of her being "good enough" is the wrong one, because what does that even mean?  If we take it as meaning "suitable for this relationship" or "right for this relationship" then I don't see how that question is anyone's business other than the two people in it.  But Rory doesn't see it that way; she never expresses any problem with the Huntzbergers judging people in general, she just thinks they've not evaluated her correctly. 

While writing this, Rory and Logan tried to steal food from the Yale cafeteria just because they can.  That's classy.

Rory - and Luke - also expressed similar snobbery regarding Jess' other girlfriend Shane, who never did a single thing wrong on screen apart from express affection publicly towards someone Rory assumed she had a right to.  Luke refers to her as having a petri dish rather than a family, for instance.  What a bunch of arseholes.

Maybe Rory gets it from her father, Christopher.In season 7, Lorelei arranges a 'man date' between him and Jackson, which Christopher refers to as "having a drink with a farmer" which he clearly means in a derogatory way, using the phrase to imply that the meeting is unimportant.  Never mind that Jackson is Lorelei's best friend's husband and someone she works with regularly; his opinion can't possibly matter because he grows vegetables. for a living.

I think I only watch the show for Paris.

The other thing is that I bought myself a copy of RPGMaker 2K3 and I've been turning one of my novel ideas into a videogame.  It's great fun; like a cross between the sims, programming and playing with dolls.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 17/52 and my Unread Pile

10 books this week - 3rd to the 9th of December.  I didn't think I'd read that many!

I vaguely recalled having seen the move of Watership Down as a child, though perhaps I only saw the trailer, or the opening.  I didn't recall anything about the plot though I did recall that it was fucking horrifying.

Reading the book as an adult was no less horrifying, though admittedly it was comforting to be able to tell myself that it was only a tractor and not, in fact, the end of the world.

I'm being facetious there; the events of Watership Down do include the end of some worlds, and clearly came from a time when British children were much hardier, not like soft modern folk.

Girls in Tears is the final book of Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series.  Ellie and her friends are all a little older and now they're having boy trouble and pets are dying and so on.  I cried a little too; not just because my hamster died a few weeks ago, but at the image of Ellie's dad, when she finally confronts him.

I'm sure that if you're interested you'd know this already, but there was a TV series made of the Girls series which you can view here.  It takes several liberties, mostly with Ellie's height, weight and frizziness of hair, the features she dwelled on most.  I didn't actually watch the series because it began around the time I stopped owning a TV, but I'm now watching it in a sidebar and completely failing to recognise the books in it.

Free Speeches was a pamphlet created by various comic writers and artists protesting against restrictions about what can be discussed in comics.  They appear to have won.  The essays made some great points.

I very much enjoyed The Vampire's Mail Order Bride.  It's very silly; it's about a vampire, living semi-openly in a town his family owns, whose mother wants grandbabies so badly that she signs him up to 'Eternadate', a company which sets up month-long dates with wannabe-spouses.

Meanwhile, Delany, who dreams of opening her own sweetshop, accidentally witnesses a mob-hit. She runs straight into the offices of Eternadate where she steals a profile and decides to pretend to be Hugh's blind date so she can hang around in another state for a month or so.

While the book is clichéd in good ways it manages to avoid being clichéd in bad ways.  Delany reveals herself fairly early on, and she and Hugh have an open discussion about it.  At one point, when they're starting to fall for one another, Delany feels jealous, but openly admits to this while acknowledging that she has no claim on Hugh and they have an open and healthy discussion about that.   It's still very silly and romantic, but it's also self aware and firmly tongue-in-cheek, and portrays a pretty healtyh (though very rapid romance).  I read it in the bath with a glass of wine.

A Game for all the Family is a book I actually read (listened to) earlier, back in August.  I'm on a Sophie Hannah kick at the moment, and since I've only listened to it once before the plot had faded from my memory enough for me to want to hear it again.  I quite like Justine, the main character.  She's very forthright.

I wrote a longer post about Only Ever Yours here.

The Age of Miracles is a book that's been on my kindle for quite a while, so I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.  It's set in a universe where the spin of the earth begins to slow.  In tone, it's very like the film Melancholia - the people are more important than the physics.

Speaking of getting around to reading, I had a clear-out recently and removed a lot of books from my unread pile, mostly those which were on last year's list and which I hadn't touched.  My unread pile now stands at 54, which isn't quite my goal of 30 by the end of 2015 but it's pretty close.

Remember, the gold surroundings are books I bought since my birthday, the black crosses are books I've given away without reading them, and the blue crosses are books I've read.

Grinny is a library book.  I read a little about it on TV Tropes - though I can't reveal what without spoilers - and that made me interested enough to reserve it.  It's a children's book, 112 pages, and I read it on the bus.  It was a fun interlude.

The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter is set in a steampunk world where the patent office outlaws any inventions they don't like.  A 'bullet-catcher' is an illusionist or stage magician, and his daughter, in this case, is Elizabeth Barnabas.  Due to the semi-Victorian mores of the society, Elizabeth also poses as her non-existent twin brother, which enables her to work as the equivalent of a private detective.  It's the first in the Gas-Lit Empire series and I'm pretty tempted to pick up the sequels.

Finally, The Bees.  I have been raving over this book.  It's a fictionalisation of the life of a bee, but what's really interesting about it is that none of the actual events are inventions.  Bees really do behave like that.  They don't have an internal narrative about it, as far as we know, and the story's been filtered through a human understanding, but it's still very much just the normal life of a bee.  I'd love to do a full annotation of it, once I've learned more about bees .

In Which We Discuss Only Ever Yours

Only Ever Yours is a book by Louise O'Neill, released last year.  The cover describes it as 'Mean Girls meets The Handmaid's Tale', and I can see what they mean.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Do you remember the flashback sequences in The Handmaid's Tale, back to the centre where Offred and the others were taught to be Handmaids?  One of the aunts tell them that they are pioneers; life will be easier for the women who come after them because they won't know any different.

That kind of sums up the environment of Only Ever Yours.  In a world where no women are born - because women are so undervalued and so many female foetuses were aborted that they can no longer be carried to term - eves have taken their place.  Eves are women created from certain specifications, raised to live as companions or concubines to the young men of their society.  Others will be chastitys - the 'aunts' of this world - and are given the names of saints.

Personally, I don't believe it.  I don't believe the eves are gestated in a lab.  I don't believe women died off either, naturally selected out by the choices of humanity, quite apart from the fact that natural selection wouldn't work that way.  How does aborting female foetuses result in less men creating x-chromosomes?  Perhaps the couples who ended up with more children were those who naturally conceived more sons?  But that would take thousands of years surely, and there'd still be lots of women left when the problem began to be strongly felt.

I suspect a larger conspiracy and women in cages somewhere, being forcefully impregnated with designer embryos.


Returning to the book; freida - no women's names are capitalised, in a stylistic choice reminiscent of e e cummings and 'Offred' - is an eve.  She's in her sixteenth year, the year in which some women will be chosen as companions while others are designated as concubines.


Something I'd like to comment on here - the eves receive regular 'Organised Recreation' sessions in order to combat 'female hysteria'. "Any hysterical, overemotional girl behaviour is deliberately induced in a controlled environment until the urges dissipate".

Here's what wikipedia has to say on female hysteria;

Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. ^[1] Typical treatment was massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician and, later, by vibrators or water sprays to cause orgasm.

The eves are designed to look like famous, beautiful women and are given the same names.  There's megan, agyness, liu, tyra, and those are just the ones I've been able to place.  We can assume that freida herself resemble Freida Pinto.

freida is expected to maintain a weight of between 115-118 lbs and forced to run on a treadmill while being taunted if she goes above this.  For comparison, the pictures inset above are me at 125lbs and 140lbs.  I'm 5'6.

freida comments on how alike all the girls look.  Through some are designed to look more 'exotic', their features are whitewashed.  Like barbie-dolls; the only change is skintone and hair/eye colour.  Liu, for instance, is designed to look Japanese, according to freida, but her features are essentially European; see But Not Too Black.

In this world where every women/'eve' is designed to be a natural ten, there are still subdivisions.  The difference between a 10.1 and a 10.2 becomes much larger and more important.  What I'm trying to say is that in a world where all women are beautiful, there are still many who do not feel beautiful enough.

freida feels fat and ugly.  freida is rejected by a snobbish potential father-in-law based on her skin-tone, despite this literally being a palette swap.  She's not a specific race and nor does she have a different heritage from the other eves; she literally just has slightly darker skin. freida is bullied.  freida feels like any teenager girl with a tendency towards eating disorders, despite all of the factors that you think might change that.

The author mentions, in the acknowledgements, that this is what she wanted to capture.  She wanted to express the feeling of inadequacy in being a teenage girl.  That's where the Mean Girls part of the comparison comes in.

There are other things that haven't changed.  The eves are fans of a show called Keeping up with the Carmichaels.  One of the Carmichaels, cassie, has a black eye given to her by her husband.  The eves comment on this;

'He's yummy,' jessie sighs.  "He could hit me any day he wanted.'

'I'd let him make shit of me,' megan says, the three of them now laughing hysterically.

It's barely even a parody.  More a set of quotes.

...and here's a few more.

When freida meets the Inheritants - the young man she and the other eves were bred to please - she falls for one of them, the son of the aforementioned judge.  He's the best of a bad lot; he doesn't try to rape her and then call her a slut.  He doesn't talk down to her.  He tries to connect as equals.  But that isn't possible, because he simply has no idea what her life is like.  He is incapable of understanding, and he is ill-equipped to try.  He is a sixteen-year-old boy who has never stepped outside the bounds of conventional society.  Darwin cannot save freida (in a rather nice stealth pun, Darwin, or at least, natural evolution, is cited as the reason freida is in this situation in the first place).  Darwin will be one of the most powerful men in their society in a few years, but will he be a better man?

Darwin took me back to my teenage years too.  As a teenage girl life wasn't any fun without a crush.  That's actually still the case today.  So, in the absence of anyone truly crush-worthy men (or boys) you pick out the best of a bad lot, just to have one.  Darwin's fulfils that role; freida has been told that the entire purpose of her life is to please men, so she latches on to the first man who isn't utterly crap.

frieda's best friend, isabel, cannot save her.  Formerly the #1 eve, isabel spends the year struggling with her own demons.  As her weight swings up to 150lbs (about 5lbs less than I weigh now) she is mocked for being lazy, for being obese, for being fat and greedy.  As we find out at the end, she has been chosen as the third wife of the Father - the leader of this world.  As the book ends, we find that she has committed suicide.

No one can save freida.  freida ends the book being sent 'underground' - put into a vat and used for experiments.  In a world where no one is sufficient to save freida, no one does.  I spent the book believing this would not be the case, but I honestly cannot think of an alternate ending that would be true to what had been built up so far.

I can see a sequel in this.  One which explores the wider world of the eves.  One in which Darwin repents and matures, growing and becoming a better man, one who might save freida.  One in which isabel, the strongest character, is able to use her power for the greater good, in order to save freida.  One in which freida - drugged and ineffective as she is - is able to save herself.  I'd quite like to find out what happens next in this world.

In Which We Discuss My Unread Pile

Since my birthday - in August - I've purchased 61 new books.  According to my Goodread shelf, in 2015, I've purchased 122 books.

...I have a problem.

My unread pile currently stands at 98 books.  I started the year with 104 and the goal of getting it under 15 books by the end of 2015.  Which is in three and a half weeks.

Fuck it.

In Which We Discuss Viral

Recently, my feminist group was offered the opportunity to read a preview copy of Helen Fitzgerald's latest novel, Viral.

Though the name seemed familiar, it wasn't until I looked back through my goodreads archive that I realised I'd actually read two of her books before - The Donor in 2013 and The Exit earlier this year.  That wasn't intentional; I just liked the blurbs and didn't twig that The Exit was by the same author as The Donor.

While I enjoyed reading The Donor I wouldn't have gone out of my way to pick up another book by the same author.  The plot hinged on the main characters all being completely oblivious of the fact that two blue or green-eyed parents are extremely unlikely to have brown-eyed children, and it just doesn't ring true to me that someone would remain ignorant of that for their entire adult life, let alone three people.  I may be biased though, since I am in the process of applying to study genetics.

I did quite like The Exit.  One of the characters is a young girl, who begins as selfie-obsessed and lazy, but rapidly matures under the circumstances.  There's a twist near the end that made me feel quite ill, but it was a good twist nonetheless - interesting and compelling.

Helen Fitzgerald is the author of a dozen other novels, and I am quite tempted to read those, especially after reading Viral.

Viral opens with the line "I sucked twelve cocks in Magaluf".  It then goes on to explain - as the blurb says - that this was filmed and has now gone viral.

This is another element that doesn't quite ring true to me.  Though the video is dramatic for the subject (Su), it's not particularly amazing compared to pornography in general.  Plus, the fact that it is pornography means it can't be shared openly, like on Facebook or Twitter.

I did actually assume that pornography couldn't be shared on Youtube, but I've just searched and there's loads on there.  So maybe it is believable and I'm just quite naive.

Anyway, the video goes viral and this allows the novel to explore several different conflicts.  Firstly, the sort of person who would pressure someone into a non-consensual (due to inebriation) sex act, film it, and put it online.  They're fairly closely related to the sort of people who cheer someone on to commit a sex act while also despising them as a 'slut'. 

This explains why the book was offered to feminist reading groups.  Our society has a terrible attitude towards sex.  Have you heard that terrible lock and key joke?  The one about why a woman is called a slut when a man would be called a stud?  And the reply is that a key that opens a lot of locks is a master key but a lock that opens for anything is a shitty lock?

I hate and despise that stupid joke with all of my being.  It's circular logic; the "explanation" only works if you've already subscribed to the idea that men should be having sex with as many women as possible while women should be keeping themselves pure; it doesn't actually offer any rationale or explanation for that concept.

The sort of characters who share this video are the sort of people who would find that "joke" hilarious.  And it's worse because they're not fictitious in the way that Tess Gerritsen's serial killers or Stephen King's demons are - they're walking around, posting on twitter and facebook and youtube, sharing their sexist and victim-blaming views with the world.  Some of them are fairly influential.

In short, this book made me feel very angry because it reflected a part of our population that I wish did not exist.

Su, the victim and heroine of the piece, is a Good Girl.  Still a virgin, rarely drinks, works hard at school.  She is hated by her younger sister Leah, partly because Leah is not so good and partly because of their specific family dynamics.

Su was adopted from Korea at a time when her (white, Scottish) parents believed they were not able to have children.  As in so many cases, as soon as they stopped being concerned about it, they conceived, resulting in Leah.  This is something with which I can sympathise; my sister and I are both mixed race, and as young children I looked more Indian while she looked more white.  I can remember how very pissed off my mother was when people asked her if we have the same father and I remember being confused on the issue myself for a while, when I was three or four.  It's odd, not looking like your family.  It tells people a lot more than you'd like to share with strangers.

Ruth, their mother, has also felt that she had more to prove to Su than to Leah, which results in Leah feeling left out.  Which results in Leah taking her frustrations out on Su.

This also resulted in Leah cheering Su on, and I quite like the way Ruth calls her out on this.  It is important to look out for your friends and make sure they're okay with what's happening, rather than just letting it go on.  I also like the way that Ruth is a Ms, for the same reason I am.  If it were so important for people to know your martial status on introduction then men would signal it too.

I like Ruth.  I like that she's an angry feminist.  I like that she fights.

I like Su, too.  I like that while she regrets the sex act and the video she is also open to her own sexuality.  Many women are aroused by submission, even by rape fantasies.  I like that she's able to acknowledge that and still enjoy being a sexual being despite what she comes to think of as "The Event".  It adds a bit of nuance to the situation.

I am less happy about the fact that Su is a Good Girl.  The back cover describes her as a "dutiful, virginal daughter".  Would the sex act have been portrayed as so terrible if it had happened to Leah, who was less dutiful, drank more, took more drugs and had had sex before?

At rape trials and in the press questions are often asked about the victims previous sex life, as if it's relevant.  There's an idea that 'slutty' women can't be raped, as if saying yes 'too many' times degrades your right to say no.   I don't like that Fitzgerald has pandered to this.  It is an important part of the characterisation, and I can see that it would be impossible to write a unique character who wasn't a stereotype, who didn't have any kind of unfortunate implications when applied to a wider audience.  Sometimes people do match stereotypes or say and do problematic things; you can't avoid all of them.  Writing is a fine art between describing one specific series of events and making a point or describing a person that speaks to a wide audience.  It's forgiveable.

The book raises some important issues about how our society treats women and sexuality.  However, I felt let down by the ending.  I can see why it ended that way, and why the characters made those decisions.  I can also see that the ending doesn't actually resolve the situation.  There are a lot of questions left unanswered at the end of this book, and the ending almost feels like a cop-out.

The book's a short read; it's less than 250 pages, which I finished in one evening.  I'd give it three out of five stars, and, as mentioned above, I am very tempted to check out the author's other works.  I'll let you know.

In Which We Discuss Nightmares in the Sky

Nightmares in the Sky is a collection of photographs of gargoyles by F.Stop Fitzgerald (sic) (not the photographs on this post - those are mine).  The only text in the volume is a long essay by Stephen King on the subject of gargoyles - "nightmares in the sky".  Stephen King talks about how he was astonished to learn that there were a number of gargoyles on buildings in New York City which he'd never noticed.  He didn't believe it until he went and looked for himself and found that there were dozens on streets where he would have sworn there wasn't one.

He also observed that gargoyles are always looking down.

I did go on a little hunt of my own, hoping to have a similar revelation.  I didn't find quite as many and most were on the buildings you'd expect - churchs.  The ones on the costa coffee surprised me.

It's actually quite a fun hobby, looking for gargoyles and I intend to continue with it.

Stephen King also mentions a horror movie which scared Joe Hill as a child.  He let him watch it again with the idea that another viewing would show the strings and Joe Hill wouldn't build it up in his mind.  It worked.  A sweet story.  In 1988, when this book was released and I was born, Joe Hill was sixteen.  Owen King was eleven, and their elder sister, Naomi, was eighteen.  Stephen King himself was the same age as my grandmother - thirty-nine, going on forty.  Naomi King is actually the same age as my mother.

During this entire period, since the death of his mother in 1979, Stephen King was depressed, suicidal, and drunk.  It was in when Owen King was ten, in 1987, that Tabitha King threatened to leave him and he began to sober up.  According to another article I've read, Stephen King's depression was made worse by the savaging the critics gave Tommyknockers, which was the catalyst for Stephen King finally cutting back.  One of the stories I've heard most often about this period was that Stephen King cannot recall writing Cujo (1981) at all.

It's interesting that Stephen King has such a healthy relationship with his family when his issues with addiction and depression would have covered such a large part of their childhoods.  As far as I know he was never abusive towards his family, which is the trait that typically marks the child of an alcoholic, so I guess it's that that made the difference.  In the article I've linked to it's claimed that Stephen King believed whatever he wrote about wouldn't happen - hence The Shining.  I suppose that also explains Pet Semetary.

I've just started reading The Dark Half again, which I've read before.  It's one that I find quite interesting because the main character is a chimera; he contains cells and DNA from his dead twin.

It's theorized that as many as one in ten pregnancies begin as twins, with the weaker one being absorbed.  Sometimes their cells stick around, like in the case of Lydia Fairchild who gave birth to her dead sister's children. 

That's one of the things that makes me want to study genetics.  How often does it happen?  Why?  There are lots of creatures that are able to absorb foetuses when a pregnancy would not be welcome, such as rabbits, and having the little bit of competition amongst two embryos might give us a better chance of stronger descendants, so that might be a good theory to start from.  There are also strains of yeast which make use of chimerism as an alternative to mutation - so maybe humans get a similar benefit?

I'll write more about that one after this read through.  I'm excited to get on with the Dark Tower series after the second one finally hooked me.  After The Dark Half I'll need to reread Four After Midnight and then I can finally read The Dark Tower III: The Wasteland.

After that, there's a string of seven books I've read before.  Although I'd read maybe one third to one half of Stephen King's bibliography before starting this project that's the longest string.  I wonder why those appealed to me?  It wasn't intentional.  Looking over the list of the seven it looks like three of them are about women, which might be the linking factor.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 16/52

Twelve books last week - 25 November to 2 December.  That might be a personal record!  I'd have to check my spreadsheet (that's not a joke).  I did say in an earlier post that I was reading a lot of books at once and they'd all be finished at the same time, didn't I?

I quite enjoyed Nightmares in the Sky.  It's a book of photos of gargoyles and it inspired me to go looking for a few in Birmingham.  I need to write a longer post about that as it's part of my Stephen King project.

The Point of Rescue/The Wrong Mother is the third in Sophie Hannah's Spilling CID series.  I've been listening to them on Audible, but I've stopped for a bit because I ran out of credits.

Because the Spilling CID books are mysteries, my enjoyment on re-reading (actually, listening) tends to depend on how well I remember the exact plot and whether the narrator - each book includes a personal document from one of the non-recurring characters - is unreliable.  This one is not and I remembered it pretty well so it took me a little while to get into it on this read through.   It's a great book, and there's definitely value in a reread - I listened to the last four hours in a big 3x speed rush - but this was probably a bit soon.  I am looking forward to rereading The Other Half Lives which was the first Sophie Hannah book I ever picked up.

I spent my last three audio credits on  the first three books in Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series.  I first read these at thirteen or fourteen, so around Ellie's age.  In the first book Ellie comments that she and her friends are the same as age as Juliet of Romeo and Juliet.  I remember realising that Juliet's birthday was somewhere in the fortnight before mine, setting up a pleasing parallel when I realised that I was almost exactly the right age, so I must have been twelve going on thirteen at the time.

I listened to all three this week; they're only about three hours long and I typically listen on 3x speed because I'm impatient.  They were very comforting.  I'm now listening to the last one in the series, so I'll talk about that next week.

Biology Essentials for Dummies is a book I picked up before I started college.  I like the For Dummies books.  I am happier reading them on Kindle than holding them up for everyone to see, but that's very much more on me than them.  They're good for a thorough overview.  Before I started college I was studying it properly; reading each chapter and making notes. Kind of as practice for studying, so I could test out a couple of new things.  I think I've found a system that works; I scribble down everything in class then write it up neatly, while rephrasing and looking up anything I'm not totally sure of.

Zombie Felties is a little craft book.  I wrote a longer post on it here.

Sweeney Todd is a collection of short pieces and a vanity project from Gaiman's other daughter.  Part of that Humble Bundle I picked up aaaaaaages ago.  I've nearly read every book in it!

Speaking of the humble bundle, I picked up Bratpack based on Gaiman's introduction, which I read in Adventures in the Dream Trade which was included.  I've not finished that one yet, because I keep wanting to read the things he's introducing!

Bratpack is about sacrificing sidekicks.  It's a palette-swap parody, and I'm concerned that it's a little homophobic - there is exactly one openly gay character and he's a psychotic rapist and paedophile.  There's one female character, but she gets away with being exactly the same sort of violent and unreasonable as the men, only in straw-feminist style.  It didn't bug me as much as the gay man for some reason.  Possibly because I spoke incorrectly, and there are actually two other women, in the form of her sidekicks.  They provide a little context, to show that not all women are like that, and this isn't simply what the author thinks of women.  There's no such context for the openly gay character.

I enjoyed Bratpack; I read it over the course of a day, between classes and on the bus.  It's fairly short - a single 150 page volume.  I felt like it ended without really resolving the issues it brought up.  I felt the same way about Viral, but that's also waiting for a longer post.

Modern Short Stories is a book of short stories by writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and William Faulkner.  It also includes notes about each story.  I borrowed it from the college library, so it's aimed at someone who's studying literature.  I quite enjoyed it.

Finally, The Last Unicorn.  I first watched the movie as a child and read the book for the first time about ten years ago.  I can't think of any other book that's managed to do the same thing; an anachronistic fairytale, populated by archetypes that still manage to be unique.  As I grow older I am more and more interested in Molly Grue.  I understand more of what she meant when she told the unicorn off, asking where the unicorn was when Molly was young, and new, and "one of those young girls you always come to".