The Giver Quartet

I am of the opinion that not much useful information came out of NPR's list of the top 100 best young adult books, which was released this summer. For me, the fact that they excluded Ender's Game  from consideration because it is "too violent" is reason enough to think that the entire list must be crap. First of all, I don't think that Ender's Game is too violent for young adult readers, especially not those at the higher end of the age range they mention (12-18 years old). In fact, I believe that Ender is perhaps at his most powerful right in the middle of this range, for the 15- and 16-year-olds of this world, and I would recommend that book without reservation for any interested high school reader, and mature middle schoolers as well. Of course, the real absurdity is excluding Ender's Game for violence from a list that leaves behind The Hunger Games (and ranks it #2). But really, all this is another blog post. My central complaints are: (1) the list is a pure popularity contest (2) some of what I would consider the true classics of young adult literature were excluded from consideration (3) imagining that 12-18 year old kids represent a single reading population is frankly insane.

All that aside, I did get one piece of information that interested me out of the whole thing: Lois Lowry had returned to the world of The Giver for subsequent books. In fact, Lowry had returned to that world even more than the list gave her credit for, as the fourth and final book in The Giver Quartet was released just after the booklist came out.

Let there be no question that The Giver is one of the greats of children's/young adult literature. It is a beautiful, powerful story that is one of the only books that I can specifically remember the experience of reading as a child. (While I am not 100% sure, I believe that I read it shortly after it won the 1994 Newbury Medal, which would have made me about 12 at the time).

So I was curious, so I went back to The Giver and read on through the rest of the series over about a month this fall. What follows are my notes on this experience.

The Giver
By Lois Lowry
1993
Laurel Leaf
192 pages
ISBN: 0-440-23768-8
Cincinnati Public Library

I'll repeat myself, because this is important: The Giver is a giant among books targeted to a younger audience. Adults that have not read it should go get a copy and look forward to a wonderful afternoon. All parents should be anticipating to the compelling and challenging experience of reading it together with their middle-grade-ish child. Every serious child reader needs to spend some time with this one.

I was just such a serious child reader, and I remember reading The Giver  as a child because the premise made me deeply uncomfortable, and then the ending even more so. I remember really thinking about the larger implications of this book, the way that my world fit with the world that it was set in. I remember being uncomfortable in a way that I don't think I really had before. I remember thinking the ending could have been "better," which in my mind at the time most likely translated to "more explicit." I remember wondering for weeks and weeks "what happened" to Jonas and Gabriel. I remember adults telling me that I was free to imagine what had happened, and finding that unsatisfying.

We're talking about something that happened close to 20 years ago now, I've read probably thousands of books since I first picked this one up, yet I still think of The Giver as something that mattered in my development as a bookworm, as the first book with an adult-like impact on my thinking about the experience of being a reader. It's important to me.

And really, it has lost almost nothing over the years. I have revisited it several times, including as the topic for a philosophy paper my freshman year at Boston College. I have found the story lovely, moving, troubling, and powerful each and every time. This reading was no exception. Sure, the story seems a little short now, but overall, still something wonderful, truly exceptional. A tough, perhaps impossible act to follow.

Gathering Blue
By Lois Lowry
2000
Houghton Mifflin Company
215 pages
ISBN: 0-618-05581-9
Cincinnati Public Library

The "tough act to follow" nature of The Giver is perhaps why Lowry waited so long to do so. Gathering Blue, the second book in the series, appeared in 2000. That's seven years after The Giver, and well after I was no longer aware of the newest middle-grade books.

And it's fine, good even, but it's nothing compared to The Giver. The world is just weaker.

That being said, the characters are a particular strength. Kira rendered with a gentle touch, and Matty is a revelation and a delight. The story felt a little predictable for me, but I imagine it would be far less so for readers in the target age range. Even when I clearly saw some of the "twists" coming, I still found myself compelled to read on and learn what happened. In the end, I was moved by Kira's final choice.

The "sequelness" of this book is quite subtle. Indeed, looking at some young adult book review websites, the connection appears to be lost on many readers. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing.

Overall, I thought that Gathering Blue was entertaining, but The Giver is in an entirely different league.

Messenger
By Lois Lowry
2004
Houghton Mifflin Company
169 pages
ISBN: 0-618-40441-4
Cincinnati Public Library

I admit that I was delighted when I realized in the first few pages that Messenger focuses on Matty, by far the most enjoyable, well-crafted character from Gathering Blue. Unlike the connections between Gathering Blue  and The Giver  the connections between Gathering Blue and Messenger are clear from the first. The two middle books together represent a more classic series, you would miss a lot reading them out of order, and you gain something by reading them back to back. Here too, the connections to The Giver become overt.

Overall, I thought that Messenger was better than Gathering Blue: the world was more finely rendered and more foreboding. The nature of the conflict was more elegant and more challenging, and the plot was faster-paced and more compelling. I think that this is a better book for young readers than Gathering Blue and has some of the same elements that make The Giver such a powerful read for individuals in the target age group: the presence of significant and uncomfortable moral challenges, and an ending that, while far less ambiguous, will leave them wishing for something different.

Better, but still not as good as The Giver.

Son
By Lois Lowry
2012
Houghton Mifflin
393 pages
ISBN: 978-0-547-88720-3
Cincinnati Public Library

There is another long publication gap between Messenger and the final volume in the quartet, Son, which was published earlier this year. I wonder again if Lowry thought she might be done before deciding to return to the world for a final visit.

Son is significantly different in structure than the previous three books. It is split into three distinct sections. In the first, we return to the community of The Giver and see events occurring about the same time as Jonas's story, but through different eyes. These eyes belong to Claire, the birthmother who gave birth to Gabriel. Unlike other birthmothers in the community, who never see or know the children they carry, an unusual turn of events allow Claire to build an attachment to her son. This first section ends with the same events that lead to the conclusion of The Giver, and Claire also leaves the community in the chaos that accompanies Jonas's departure. This section was the strongest, and I enjoyed seeing some of the familiar events and characters from a different perspective. In the second section, we see Claire in her new community, a small, close-knit, and profoundly isolated seaside village, and watch as she trains and attempts the grueling journey out to find Gabriel and learn what happened to him. This section is lovely, especially watching Claire learn to live in the world outside the rigid boundaries and controlled environment of the community she knew.  In the third, and in my opinion, weakest section, we see the outcome of her search, and I am going to go into no more detail than that, for reasons I will explain below.


While I was excited to discover that there was more from the world of The Giver to read, I also had significant hesitance about the fact that these sequels existed. The ambiguity of the ending, the wondering about what happened to Jonas and Gabriel, was one of the most powerful and challenging components of my early experience of reading The Giver. I wasn't sure that I wanted "to really know what happened."

And in the end, I think that maybe I didn't. Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son are all fine, well-developed works of children's literature, and in another situation, I would be recommending them to kids as good, thought-provoking reads for late elementary and middle schoolers. But I don't recommend them, because The Giver is an impossible act to follow.

In fact, I think that The Giver is an act that shouldn't have been followed. Young readers may very much enjoy the opportunity to spend more time in this world. They almost certainly will find it satisfying to learn how things "turned out" for Jonas and Gabriel after they headed down that snowy hill on their little red sled. Yet, I think that they are losing something for having that answer spelled out for them. The Giver is as glorious, beautiful, and compelling as it is in no small part due to the ambiguous ending. Taking away that ambiguity and giving an answer in its place takes something away. I think detracts from the potential of the story as a important moment in the life of a young reader.

I make no claims that this opinion isn't entirely shaped by my strong memory of my experience of reading The Giver as a child. It is. That experience was valuable to me, and I think that it would have been less powerful and less important if I had just been able to read on and find the answers that I wanted. Even now, there is a part of me that wishes that I didn't have those answers, that I had left well enough alone.

So there it is. It's not often that I say this, but the advice that comes from my heart and my gut is that you avoid reading these books. Or at least that you avoid reading them until wondering what happens to Jonas and Gabriel no longer holds mystery and value for you. I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of awareness of these books that is mentioned in several of the child-written reviews that I read is part of a plot on the part of children's librarians to keep that mystery alive.

If you haven't read The Giver you should. If you have children, you should read it with them. And when you are done, under no circumstances should you mention that these sequels even exist. Leave them to ponder, leave them to wonder, leave them with the challenge and the catalyst of that delicious uncertainty. I believe it will help shape them as readers, and I think in time, make them love reading more. All these years later, I can say that it did that for me.

Broken Harbor

Broken Harbor
By Tana French
2012
Viking
450 pages
ISBN: 978-0-670-02365-3
Cincinnati Public Library

Tana French's "Dublin Murder Squad" series isn't a true series in the typical sense of the word. While all the books are murder mysteries set in Dublin and the surrounding area and investigated by members of the same police detective unit, each book is really a self-contained narrative. Throughout the series, French has taken one of the squad member characters from the previous book (some more minor than others) and made them the focal point (and the first person narrator) of the next mystery. While the largest connections are between the first two books, In the Woods and The Likeness, really any of the books in this "series" can be read on it's own without missing much in the way of background, and missing nothing at all in the way of critical information for the plot at hand. This is why I have continued reading these books as they come out rather than "waiting for the series to be finished" as I so often declare I must.

French is a great mystery writer, all her books match more traditional police procedural with psychological thriller to some degree, and Broken Harbor is no exception. There are certainly some flaws in this book, but none of them serious enough to even consider putting it down... I found myself arranging my days around having time to read this one.

In Broken Harbor, we are faced with the gruesome murder of almost an entire family in a creepy half-finished housing development that tanked halfway through construction in the economic collapse. The father and 2 children are dead, and the mother lies in critical condition.Oh, one more thing... The housing development just happens to be located on the spot where our narrator, Detective Mick Kennedy, spent his summer vacations as a child. And where his mother killed herself.

The mystery is a good one, with layers upon layers of deeply creepy and troubling complexity. It does suffer from the Law and Order syndrome: "That person that gets arrested halfway through the hour can't possibly be the murderer, or at least not the whole story, because there's still 30 minutes left." When a deeply creepy suspect is arrested fairly early in the book, you know that he's involved somehow, but also that he can't be the whole story, because there are a couple hundred pages left to solve the thing. Still, even knowing there must be one, I didn't see the final twist coming, and I really enjoyed getting there. I did think that a portion of the complexities of Detective Kennedy's family interactions were a distraction, but not so much that they took away from the central narrative. Nobody's perfect.

French however, has been closer to perfect in the past. While I do recommend this book to her fans and other mystery lovers, if you haven't already read her other books, I liked The Likeness far better than this one.

In Search of Memory

In Search of Memory
The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
By Eric Kandel
2006
W.W. Norton & Company
510 pages
ISBN: 978-0-393-32937-7

Eric Kandel entered the field of Neuroscience research in 1955 as part of  medical school elective. In 2000, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries relating to signal transduction in the nervous system." Basically, his work was the first to establish how memory works at the cellular level, through alterations in the strength of individual connections between neurons. Today, at 82 years old, he maintains an active research lab at the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. He's kind of a big deal.

And on October 3, he came to the University of Cincinnati to give a talk. So I read this book, which I already owned, but moved up the "to read" list in honor of the occasion.

The cool thing about this book is that Kandel's career as a neuroscientist parallels the development of the field. He began do research when Neuroscience was just beginning as a science separate from biology/physiology, and has continued to work in the field as it has developed over the last 60ish years. Kandel does a wonderful job in this autobiography of weaving in his personal story with the emergence and progress of the field as a whole.

But you don't need to be working on a PhD in Neuroscience to understand and enjoy this book.  Kandel's writing style is approachable, and he does a rather elegant job of explaining some very complicated experiments in clear and accessible language.  Anyone with the most basic biology background should be able to follow his descriptions and learn about some of the very cool discoveries that are the foundations of cellular and molecular neuroscience.

I however, am working on a PhD in Neuroscience, so the part of the book that were most interesting to me involved Kandel delving into his personal career development and describing his scientific thinking. Everyone beginning a career in biological science should probably read this book.  Although there are some things that maybe don't apply any more (Kandel did not have to worry at all about funding), there's a lot of rich material here. I was especially struck by his decision to leave clinical practice and focus exclusively on research (something I personally do not plan to do, but it was good to read his rationale). I also found inspiring his willingness to learn new techniques and dive into new subfields as his career progressed, and the moments he describes when thinking about research in other areas of science led to inspiration and progress in his own work. I know that I am not the only graduate student who tends toward laser beam focus on her one little area (at least at this stage of my career), but some stories in this book served as a powerful reminder of the reasons that I want to stay aware of creative and groundbreaking work in other areas of science. And of the joy of thinking about science, which I admit sometimes gets lost in the nitty gritty of trying to make it from student to scientist.

Because I'm in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, I had the opportunity to attend a special question and answer session, just for the students and faculty in the department. Kandel in real life is awesome. He's sharp, thoughtful, honest, and incredibly excited about science. This sounds condescending, but with the combination of his clear joy talking about neuroscience and his bow tie, he's completely adorable.I really enjoyed the conversation that morning and his interesting talk on the potential for the use of his more cellular and molecular approaches to research in psychiatry. We have a long way to go, but if I learned anything from reading this book, it's how far our field can move in a relatively short time. If the next 50 years or neuroscience are as exciting as the last 50 years, I have an amazing career to look forward to.

It

It
By Stephen King
1980
Signet Books
1093 pages
ISBN: 978-0-451-16951-8

Since I got my iPhone this past spring, I have been listening to books from the Cincinnati Public Library using the Overdrive app. I freaking LOVE the fact that I can do this. Especially because listening to an audiobook makes my commute more pleasant, whether I am walking or taking the shuttle. My main complaint about the system is that I have found the selection of books a little limited (not only because there actually aren't too many books available, but also because there are limits on the number of people that can be using a file at any given moment, so things that I want to listen to are often "checked out.") But overall, I love the system, and I totally recommend it to anyone that (like me) wants to be reading during times that they really need to be doing activities other than reading.

This book popped up in the Overdrive list one day when I was browsing, looking for the next thing to "read" and I thought that it would be fun. And so I downloaded it and started listening.

Stephen King, like myself, is a purist about these things, and therefore doesn't allow abridgments of his work for audiobooks. I love that about him, indeed, I don't listen to abridgments, but it was a problem in this case. When I decided to listen to this through the overdrive program, I didn't really think about the fact that this book is huge. The audio is 44 hours long. Unfortunately, I only had two weeks. You can theoretically renew audiobook files, but you can't ACTUALLY review audiobook files, because there is pretty much always someone that has the book that you are reading on hold. I got through about half of the story in those two weeks, and I was VERY sad to see the files expire. But I was hooked enough that I decided that reading the rest of the book was the best course of action, because there was no way that I was going to wait for the file to be "returned" by the person after me. So I went and got the paperback version and read the rest in the more traditional way.

So first, some comments on the audiobook. The reading is apparently performed by Steven Weber, although he was not specifically credited anywhere in the file that I could find. He does an AMAZING job. This is a wonderful performance. He gives life and personality to the stutter of Bill Denbrook, a deeply creepy rasping Pennywise, all the various voices of Richie Tozier, and all the Maine accents a girl could ask for. If you are a fan of audiobooks, and have some time on your hands, I actually think that the experience of listening to this was better than the experience of reading it. I usually don't specifically recommend the audio version of a book, but in this case, I think that it deserves a plug. To be honest, I probably even enjoyed the second half of the book more for having listened to the first half, because I was able to carry on the characterizations Weber created in my own mind as I moved forward.

In short, the audio is great. Make sure that you have access to it for as long as it will take you to listen to 44 hours worth of story.

And what a story. King is great here in a style that particularly becomes him, weaving action in the present with flashbacks to the past. This weaving style reminded me in many ways of Dreamcatcher, but King is FAR more successful in It. Both the present and the past action are deeply compelling, and even though you know that these adults must have gotten away from the monster as children, indeed defeated it somehow, that someHOW? is a roaring question as burning as how it will turn out the second time. Pennywise, It, is a deeply scary monster, perhaps King's scariest, and the bulk of the novel comes from rich detail and beautiful complicated characterizations that allow you to care deeply for a larger cast of characters than most narratives can support.

 There is a reason this novel is famous. There is a reason the vision of the creepy clown on the cover was a picture that stuck in my mind even before I read this book. If you are a fan, this is up there with The Stand. Epic long, and epicly worth it.  

Indian Killer

Indian Killer
By Sherman Alexie
1996
Warner Books
420 pages
ISBN: 0-446-673-70-6
Read: 9/4/12-9/8/12

I was looking forward to reading this book. I have been very impressed with Sherman Alexie, and his collection War Dances is one of the best things I read last year. In particular, I was deeply moved by the short story "Salt" from that collection, so much so that I wrote about it in my (rarely updated) other blog. To be honest though, I was also a little unsure what to expect. Alexie generally writes very lyrical fiction laced with dark humor and deep issues of identity. Many of his short pieces seem to dance along the narrow line between poetry and prose without ever coming down on one side or the other. Because of that, "murder mystery" seemed a break from type. And while sometimes such breaks lead to amazing things, I would be lying if I said that I wasn't a little wary.

But the term "murder mystery" has very little to do with the contents of this novel, and frankly I think that the people that wrote the blurbs do it a significant disservice when they suggest that it is a thriller, even a "literary thriller," whatever that means. Certainly, this novel is "about" a series of murders committed in Seattle by a serial killer known as the Indian Killer, but the actual plot of this novel is only the frame on which beautifully complex characterizations hang sharply cutting commentary on issues of identity, community, and some of the weaknesses of the human condition. While this is certainly darker than what I have read of Alexie's other work, it was hardly a true break from type: beautiful, lyrical fiction with a bit of a bite.

Interestingly, several of the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the story, or at least what I took from it. I hate when people do that.

Shadow of Night

Shadow of Night
By Deborah Harkness
2012
Viking
584 pages
ISBN: 978-0-670-02348-6
Cincinnati Public Library
Read 8/28/12-9/2/12

I read A Discovery of Witches, the first book in Harkness's All Souls Trilogy (this is the second) quite by accident. No, I did not trip over my own feet and stumble through 500 some odd pages, what I mean is, when I picked up A Discovery of Witches, I was completely unaware that it was the first in a series. As a rule, I try to avoid reading any books in a series until the series is complete. There are several reasons for this: (1) I am very impatient, and I have decided that fiction-reading is not the area though which I want to work on this character flaw. (2) As a fiction reader, I am very forgetful, I tend to forget details of characters and events in novels (even as minor details, phrases, and emotions reactions remain vivid in my mind). Therefore, for me, the best experience of reading a series with any continuity that benefits from a memory for details is to start with volume 1, and read book by book straight through to volume N as if the whole thing is one big narrative. (3) I am very compulsive, and in order to achieve my optimal experience, I have, several times in the past, ended up rereading all of the prior volumes in a series when a new one comes out. (I did this recently when a (surprise!) 8th book in The Dark Tower series came out, and you have a very long blog post on the entirety of The Wheel of Time to look forward to in 2013, sometime after the final volume comes out in January.)

I enjoyed, but didn't love, A Discovery of Witches. It's a good story, with a tight plot that kept me involved despite some flaws (including a not terribly likable female lead, and a not very well developed male lead). I was reading happily along, entertained and excited to know what happened, when I came to a sudden, sinking, realization: there simply weren't enough pages left to wrap up the story. Not even enough to do it badly. I was unhappy. Multiple "damnit"s were uttered. Worst of all, my impression at the end of A Discovery of Witches was that this was going to be exactly the worst kind of series to be in this position. The first book was (1) exciting (I really wanted to know what happened) (2) complicated (no way that I am going to remember all the characters and the details of this world) and (3) just not good enough to want to read again. So I decided to do an experiment. I decided just to read the books as they came out, no rereads, and see how that was. You know, like a normal person.

And reading book 2 about 10 months later... Not so bad. There are definitely details that I have forgotten, so I can see where it might have been better to read straight through, but I had only one or two places where I felt really lost, so it wouldn't have been worth it to read the first book again. I find myself curious about what will happen next, although this volume ended on much less of a cliffhanger, at least for me, than the last one did. (This is good, because the author's website currently has no information, at all, whatsoever, on the third book, so I imagine I am going to be waiting quite a while). So yeah, maybe I could read a series as the books come out... maybe. I'm still not sure that I would choose to do it again on purpose.

As for the book itself. I enjoyed it, and it was a great book to have on hand far a very rainy Labor Day weekend, keeping me completely entertained as my husband and brother-in-law killed aliens on Playstation3. Harkness does better with her character development in this book, making Diana more likable, Matthew more fully formed, and introducing us to Philippe, Matthew's father, and one of the more compelling characters we've seen thus far. In Shadow of Night, Harkness takes her characters out of the present day and  into a world she, as a historian, is familiar with, Elizabethan London. I believe that as a novelist, she did well to take things into her intellectual wheelhouse, and her writing thrived in a world that provided some historical constraints to her imaginings.

In short, Shadow of Night is not perfect, but the movement of the plot drives things forward and kept me involved. It's a good read. But not one that will stand alone, if you want to get something out of it, you probably have to read A Discovery of Witches first. That being the case, take my advice... wait until the series is finished.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon
By Gideon Defoe
2008
Pantheon Books
177 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-42398-7
Cincinnati Public Library
Read 8/27/12-8/28/12

I've been reading Gideon Defoe's hilarious The Pirates! books since my husband first found them, shortly after we saw the movie based on the series, the also-hilarious The Pirates! Band of Misfits. We've both found all four volumes highly entertaining, which is particularly wonderful because there is generally not much overlap in our reading lives.The series is riotously funny, and as all of the volumes are equally slight and slim, won't take up a huge amount of your time.

Here, Pirate Captain, to the dismay of his crew, decides to give up pirating for beekeeping, and thanks to some scheming on the part of his nemesis Black Bellamy, ends up doing so on the tiny island of St. Helena. He is enjoying his time as the island's "most famous resident" until the arrival of none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two just don't get along.

The books in the series succeed by maintaining a delicate balance of humor that is alternately smart and frankly silly, and this offering is no exception. All four The Pirates! books are all well worth your time, and to get the most out of the running gags, your best bet is to start at the beginning, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.

Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher
by Stephen King
2001
Pocket Books
882 pages
ISBN: 0-7434-6752-3
Read 8/24/12 - 8/27/12

We spent the last week of our summer vacation in southern Maine, so it seemed fitting to bring a little Stephen King along. The book I was reading before this took a bit longer to get though than I expected, so I didn't get started until the end of the vacation, but I was at least in Maine when I started this one.

I generally enjoy Stephen King's books, and frankly. Dreamcatcher was no exception. It's a fast-paced, plot-driven book that perfectly served its purpose of being a relaxing but riveting escapist vacation read. I had fun with it.

Example conversation with my husband:
Him: Are you OK? You're squirming.
Me: Yeahhhh. A guy's getting eaten by a monster.
Him: Is he alive?
Me: He was when it started. Now shush!

King, as usual pulled me in and scared me good. I admit to staying up reading well after bedtime to finish the story. There were certainly some weaknesses; in particular, I think that King failed to outline the rules of the supernatural world as well as he usually does. I found myself a little confused about what was happening towards the end of the book. So not King's best, but overall a pleasurable read.

I do have to say that after reading it, I am surprised by the fact that they attempted to make it into a movie, and perhaps not surprised that the reviews are bad. I can see where the weaknesses, particularly not-perfectly-defined magic, would just make a movie either confusing and hard to follow or seem to come out of nowhere. So yeah, I think that I'll skip that one and let this story be as it was in the book. Entertaining but not exceptional.