juushika

I fell beyond on Animorphs reviews while finishing Animorphs because I had so much to say about each book, and now I just don't want to talk about the series at all except maybe to cry. There is a void now in my life. How to process that? Anyway here's Wonderwall everything else I've been reading.

These long titles, though! Apologies to Lionni; something had to give.


Title: Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse
Author: Leo Lionni
Published: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006 / Dragonfly Books, 1987 (1969)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 35
Total Page Count: 306,090
Text Number: 1030
Read Because: childhood favorite; my hold on the hardback from the Wilsonville Public Library on the same day that I found my paperback while unpacking my library (it was in storage at home this whole time!), so I read it in both—FWIW the new imprint is larger & more vivid but the art feels stretched (maybe my imagination but I felt like I could see the DPI); my childhood copy feels dingier but the art resolution looks better
Review: This is the collage work that I prefer (over Lionni's stamp art), with lovely details like the torn vs cut edges of the real vs toy mice, and fantastic colors—the magical lizard and purple pebble are images that held with me since childhood, and they're still just as evocative. The message—about where we fit in, and how we're loved—is surprisingly nuanced, and the Suck Fairy has yet to pay it a visit. This was one of my favorite picture books as a kid, and I'm pleased to discover how well it lives up to my memories.


Title: My Sister, the Serial Killer
Author: Oyinkan Braithwaite
Narrator: Adepero Oduye
Published: Random House Audio, 2018
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 235
Total Page Count: 306,325
Text Number: 1031
Read Because: reviewed by tamaranth, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Beautiful Ayoola has now killed three of her boyfriends, leaving her practical sister Korede to clean up the mess. I came to this because I saw it compared to Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I agree. It lacks Jackson's charming language, and I'm not sold on the brutally short chapters and stylized one-word titles, although they make this already-short novel compulsively quick to read. But the combination of dark humor/crime thriller/domestic thriller is reminiscent of Castle, as is the compelling, uneasy, intimate dynamic between the sisters. Braithwaite nails some pivotal elements—the tension and palpable frustration of Korede's situation; Ayoola's slippery, seductive affect; Korede's slide into increasing unreliability—which is particularly impressive in a debut, and gives solid payoff to a fun premise. (I particularly love the stubborn lack of resolution in the ending.)


Title: My Favorite Thing is Monsters
Author: Emil Ferris
Published: Fantagraphics, 2017
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 415
Total Page Count: 306,740
Text Number: 1032
Read Because: reviewed by Possibly Literate, paperback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: A young monster growing up in 1960s Chicago investigates the death of her neighbor. There's elements here that I really admire, like the "monster" conceit and well-rounded protagonist, the living diversity of the world, and the frankly incredible art. Presented as a spiral-notebook diary with dimensional, crosshatched art in styles that shift to fit the inset narratives-within-narratives and copious, densely-written text, it's visually overwhelming and never grows easier to read. I kept waiting for the narrative to justify that effort, but it never does. There's plot elements that I'd've preferred to avoid for personal reasons had I known they were present (( spoiler )), but more the dozen subplots have minimal structure and no closure in what turns out to be the first volume in a series. This is ambitious and admirable and unsuccessful.

Title: Crash
Author: J.G. Ballard
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 (1973)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 284,220
Text Number: 920
Read Because: fan of the film, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:

Faced with this junction of the crashed car, the dismembered mannequins and Vaughan's exposed sexuality, I found myself moving through a terrain whose contours led inside my skull towards an ambiguous realm.

After being involved in a fatal car crash, a man finds his sexuality and inner landscape remapped by automotive accidents. It's an unexpectedly compelling, perversely logical connection: the violence of a car crash uniting human bodies with omnipresent metal and technology, and with each other; the way that desire wraps itself around trauma and injury. Being drawn into that logic, participating in that same interior remapping, made the film a remarkable experience for me when I first saw it. The book achieves the same work, and I'm glad it exists, but it's a lesser experience.

There's a plot here, but not a complex one, and the bulk of the length is instead profoundly, obnoxiously repetitive language. (Binnacle! "heavy" anatomy! mucus mucous mucosa mucilage! ~45 "chromium" alone!) The explicit sexual content made possible by text is innate to the themes, but likewise is deadened by the language and by the pervasive male gaze. Desensitization is one of the narrative's themes and, perhaps, goals, but it doesn't benefit the book; being familiar with the premise combines with the repetition to make the text a chore. My order of approach probably skews my opinions, but paring the book down in adaptation removes those flaws while maintaining the successful core concept; the original text wants badly for brevity.


Title: The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrator: George Guidall
Published: Recorded Books, 2016 (1969)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 284,515
Text Number: 921
Read Because: continuing the series, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An ambassador comes to Winter, a cold planet inhabited by the only humans known to experience estrus, in the attempt to bring them in to the Ekumen union. This rivals The Dispossessed in depth but not in breadth—it has similar gradual but complicated character growth, but the worldbuilding is frontloaded and the plot less dense. It manages to be both reductionist and insightful in its examination of gender, overlooking gender nonconformity in both societies (nonconformity that absolutely existed in 1969) and so maintaining a gender essentialism which violates its own theses, but it's also rigorous in is examination of gender, of culture, of communication—Le Guin's knack for ground-up worldbuilding, where speculative premises impact entire cultures and entire lived experiences is in full force here. So it reads unevenly, not all of it has aged well—but the second half and in particular that long winter cross-country trek is phenomenal, a quiet interpersonal study with incredible language; and I found this well worth my time.


Title: The Wolf Wilder
Author: Katherine Rundell
Published: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 275
Total Page Count: 284,790
Text Number: 922
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:

Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was a dark and stormy girl.

The girl was Russian, and although her hair and eyes and fingernails were dark all the time, she was stormy only when she thought it absolutely necessary. Which was fairly often.

A girl who returns semi-domesticated wolves to the wild is pulled into tumultuous events in wintery Russia. The use of language here is lovely—I expected flowery, but it's not that; it's powerful, empathetic—a great fit to middle grade. Combined with the premise, this has fantastic atmosphere and wish fulfillment, the punishing chill of Russian winter, of survival; an impetuous and sympathetic heroine who runs with wolves. (Never particularly realistic wolves, but they hug the line of idealized-but-wild, and that's all that really matters.) I don't love the plot as much, it can be too grim to sell the wish fulfillment, and has the predictable pacing expected from the genre. This isn't my favorite new MG novel, but it gave me what I wanted, and I'm glad I waited to read it until midwinter.

Title: Bad Boy
Author: Elliot Wake
Published: Atria, 2016
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 229,165
Text Number: 731
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A trans guy begins to doubt his place in Black Iris, a feminist vigilante group, when a figure from his past returns. This has much of Wake's style—the heady atmosphere and toxic, powerful relationships—but simplified and condensed. The plot is straightforward, aside from contrivances in premise and communication; one of the central events is a false rape accusation, which is in poor taste, especially within an overtly queer and feminist and social justice-y narrative. I want to champion this book, and the protagonist deserves it; the complicated way that internalized misogyny acts within his transmasculine experience, how his doubt and self-actualization coexist, is nuanced and deeply personal. But the plethora of buzzwords and commentary on social justice subculture, combined with the underwhelming plot and use of transcript-style flashbacks, saps some of the authenticity, the immediacy; makes it feel more like studied rant than lived experience. I love and admire Wake's Black Iris and Cam Girl, which feel messier and less contrived; this has so much potential, but disappoints me, especially in comparison.


Title: Of Sorrow and Such
Author: Angela Slatter
Published: Tor, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 150
Total Page Count: 229,315
Text Number: 732
Read Because: discussed here by calico_reaction, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A witch hides her magical abilities under the guise of herbalism in order to protect her fellows and family. This has an engaging premise and fulfills it entirely: herbalism, magic, familiars, grimoires; strong-willed crones, willful girls, complex and varied relationships between women; women's magic as a feminist lens to women's social roles, historical and otherwise. It's that concept which is more effective than the voice (adequate, but some sentence structure/punctuation feels off) and plot (it's backloaded with predictable action), but I still adored this. It's such a good premise and atmosphere, and Slatter fulfills it without tending towards hokey or idealistic, or too grim.


Title: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
Author: Colin Dickey
Published: Viking, 2016
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 229,635
Text Number: 733
Read Because: recommended by Caitlin Doughty, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A tour of America's hauntings, nonexhaustive but diverse, from private homes to entire cities, focusing less on whether ghosts are real and more on their cultural and social function. This isn't as titillating as the premise may imply; Dickey establishes evocative atmospheres (although few nonfiction books so badly want an appendix of images), but the histories and ghosts have short narratives—as it turns out, there's not much to substantiate most hauntings. Dickey instead makes various arguments for the social function of ghosts: as a means of exploring society's secrets while upholding the dominant paradigms; giving voice to anxieties about death and social change. The number of subsections and frequency of closing arguments tends towards the repetitive and facile—I almost wish this were less structured, more organic, and that some sections had more depth. But Dickey strikes a good balance in his skepticism: he's sympathetic to the experience of haunting, to the idea of it, and so is invested in conclusions regarding its origin and purpose.

The formatting for footnotes in the ebook version (primarily using highlighted passages instead of tiny, hard-to-click asterisks) is lovely and I wish it were more common.


ETA: Things referenced in Ghostland which caught my attention, probably because of subject matter, maybe because of the way the content was described (or because of section quoted), & which I may seek out someday:

? The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne (fiction)
Winchester trilogy, Jeremy Blake (short films based on the Winchester House)
Barton Fink, dir. Coen Brothers (film)
Captive of the Labyrinth, Mary Jo Ignoffo (definitive biograph of Sarah Winchester)
Modern Spiritualism: A History and Criticism (especially volume 2), Frank Podmore (Fox sisters)
The History and Haunting of Lemp Mansion, Rebecca F. Pittman (Lemp family)
The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives: The Greenbrier Ghost and The Famous Murder Mystery of 1879, Katie Letcher Lyle (Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue)
? For a Critique of a Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard (philosophy)


( A quote from Ghostland and thoughts on asylumpunk. )


( Asylumpunk: a definition, for safekeeping. )

I encountered a discussion on why-animals-do-the-thing about bi/pan/trans/ace/aro animals, or rather, about the non-existence of cis/straight animals, and how gender identity and sexual orientation work in the animal world, and the relationship between biology, gendered pronouns, and anthropomorphization, and nothing has ever better articulated my gender identity.

I've discussed my pronoun use before with a tl;dr of "female pronouns are convenient and acceptable; non-gendered pronouns are equally accurate: because I'm a cat and cats don't have genders, and using these words isn't the same as embracing their connotations"—which has always been about as close as I can come to a gender identity. I present as cis female due to my body shape/the clothing that flatters in & in which I feel comfortable, but don't identify anywhere on any human gender spectrum. My spay/neuter status as a desexed cat has always been the defining factor of my identity—and that's not even a measurable real thing; it's complicated, it has no particular overlap with human gender identities or agender/genderqueer experiences, and more to do with the way gender (doesn't) work in animals, particularly desexed domestic animals.

I'm quoting that post here, for my own record keeping and future reference, with all credit to anon submitter and the parent blog. I just want to make sure I never lose it. It's such a good post! The personal connections I make to therianthropy/my gender are a smaller, secondary conversation, but it was elucidating to see these things laid out and they helped explain some of me to me.

( Read more... )

I just finished rereading this! I frequently start lists of media-mentioned-in books I love, and now that I'm making those lists on OneNote via my phone, it's remarkably easier to complete, edit, and publish them! Bless. So:


Media and pop culture mentioned in The Cipher by Kathe Koja
(In order of appearance, except where references reoccur; including just about all media, but probably not exhaustive.)

From the epigraph: “Mukade”, Shikatsube no Magao (poem); Rick Lieder (author)
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Conner (novel); later, “The Enduring Chill”, Flannery O'Conner (short story)
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (mentioned multiple times, including: the Rabbit Hole, the White Queen)
Artists: Paul Klee, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch; The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch (mentioned in specific later)
The Twilight Zone (television)
Weekly World News (tabloid)
Typhoid Mary
Xanadu
Tabu (perfume) (some aspects of this list are weirdly exhaustive)
Films: Streetgirls II, Dead Giveaway, Dogs Gone Wild (cursory searching and common sense indicate these are fictional); later, also fictional: Booby Prizes, Mommy’s Little Massacre
Faces of Death, dir. Conan LeCilaire (film)
Wild Kingdom (television)
Art Now (magazine)
Artists: Caldwell (can’t pin down who this is), Richard deVore (Malcom’s mask is compared to these)
“Borscht Belt (Jewish comedy) parody of Hamlet (Shakespeare) doing humble”
Pied Piper
The New Testament: Peter on the water; the Old Testament: Shadrach
Romper Room (television)
Author: Ben Hecht; in the final epigraph: “Love is a hole in the heart.”
Vulcan (Roman mythology)
Cinderella
(Obliquely) Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Phantom of the Opera(’s face and mask)
“Saints and idiots, angels and children.” (“It’s a quote, you dipshit.” From where? I don’t know! Enlighten me.)


I started recording media mentioned in books because I'm a dork because, as I may have said about 40 times, using narratives to create or explain your narrative is my modus operandi and thus my favorite thing to see in narratives. (Narrative-ception.) There's a danger of creating self-referential and -congratulatory recursive narratives that require googling rather than reading because without immediate knowledge of the referenced material you're in the dark. That's occasionally lampshaded, particularly in books where the references are fictional and their excess is intentional (the navelgazing of House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski; the aesthetic and plotty footnotes of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke).

But, more often, narratives about narratives do one or both of these things:

The references create a palate. I've described The Cipher's atmosphere and aesthetic as "thriftstore decadence" and the characters as "gritty dirty poor horror-kids," but what describes it better is the book's references: Alice's rabbithole as metaphor for the Funhole, the grotesque art prints cut from art magazines, Flannery O'Conner's heartless black humor and the parody-titled sensationalist films; the combination of sleazy and Weird is never meant to be pleasant, but it has as strong an atmosphere as the most stylized, idealized fiction.

and/or

The narrative not only extends itself to contain the referenced material, but builds a whole greater than the sum of the references. Reader, I adore this: texts played against each other, narratives that address the reader/writer/character meta-relationship. This was what made Fire and Hemlock, Dianna Wynne Jones, so exceptional. Polly spends most of the novel internalizing, creating herself around Tom Lynn, but he also challenges her when she merely regurgitates the influences he throws her way—Tom Lynn's creation of Polly extends so far that he demands that she create herself, a contradiction they must both confront in the denouement. Fire and Hemlock borrows structures and dynamics that Polly is unaware of (Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot; Cupid and Psyche); it's about the dozens of books that she reads and internalizes; it's about the story that she turns around and writes herself, and about the necessity and limitation of the inspiration she's taken from what she's read. And it's so good.

Most examples—often the best examples—do all of these things. In Catherynne M. Valente's engaging The Labyrinth, some references are in Latin; the fantastic The Game of Kings, Dorothy Dunnett, made me read it with google in one hand and book in the other. Both are exhausting, both are worthwhile. Caitlín R. Kiernan is (obviously) my favorite, because in this way her brain works like mine: her stories are a web of narrative influence, mentioned by name and date or casually misquoted; the way I process wolves/werewolves/black dogs is how her protagonists process their experiences, from their ancient failed romances to their trespasses into the bizarre: these external narratives have become their internal metaphors, necessary tools for interpreting the world. The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl in particular are stories about telling stories, by necessity, imperfectly.

(And all of that is who I am, and what I do.)

There's a negative review of A Tree of Bones which I quite like. It critiques the way Chess and his relationship with his mother change at the end of the series. Expect spoilers.

I don't think that the series takes an interesting, bad character and turns him into a boring, good one, but there is a certain charm to A Book of Tongues, a wanton grotesquerie, amoral and rude and indulgent, which is quite fun—but it, and Chess, stick in the mind because it's not simplistic, evil for the sake of evil or plot progression; Chess is emotionally motivated and complex. As the series progresses, he can't but mature. It makes the character more tempered, and the books as well—and while that's not the same thing as restrained, it is a bit less fun. But I appreciate it in the same way do any narrative that builds a complex antagonist.

I also appreciate the relationship between Chess and Ooona in A Tree of Bones. I believe it's important to portray abusive relationships as complex, and that abuse victims are entitled to complex feelings about their abusers, and that they have the right to feel forgiveness, or not feel forgiveness, or to feel both simultaneously. I also had a worried extra-narrative whisper in the back of my head: Chess isn't a real person, entitled to any feelings at all; is his forgiveness problematic on a larger scale, a faulty example of how to be a good abuse victim and a false example of the power of healing love?

I admire this review for calling that out; ultimately, Chess's forgiveness works for me because I don't see it as simplistically as that reviewer did, and I find his mixed reaction resonant. When I reread A Book of Tongues I talked about my formative mantra that loves is not enough; acknowledging that love still exists has been equally formative for me in these last few years. I am able to carry that contradiction within me: partial forgiveness, and shared love despite hurt. To see the same reflected in Chess validating and authentic.

It certainly continues to amaze me that I found this series so affecting.

Trying to find something distracting to consume hasn't been working overwell, so I reached for something comforting instead and am rereading Mossflower. The book was published in 1988; my copy was published in 1990, but I probably stole it from a Montessori library sometime around 1995. It looks like this, now:



If memory serves, the cover came to me with a small crease (it was in a school library), which developed into a second crease, which tore a couple of years ago; I still use a liberated corner of the cover as a bookmark. Again if memory serves, I think the book has gone with me to two nations, two states, two colleges, and about seven different residences.

And it isn't even that good.

It's comparable to comfort food both because food is a recurrent aspect of the Redwall series and because it doesn't have to be objectively good to be comforting. I actually don't much care for Redwall, the first book in the series: the plot is central to the world's history, but it's distinctly a first attempt and while it contains many of the aspects which would become cornerstone to the series—puzzles, food, dialects, multiple adventures running in parallel—the setting and tone is only half there. In Redwall we know there are humans somewhere, building barns and horsecarts, and suddenly an abbey full of talking mice is ridiculous.

Mossflower is the change into what the series would be. It discards the human world, and without making any more justifications or sense (badgers weigh twenty pounds, a mouse stands three inches tall) the setting becomes far more convincing: talking mice and weasels, get passed it; they're not even weasels, really--species function as a stand-in, problematically, for a group of people. It takes those cornerstones and reiterates them, defining what the series would be from here--but coming early enough in the series that it feels familiar rather than redundant (both in publishing order and upon reread). And it's less insular, showing Mossflower as a place entire rather than a central building, journeying as far as Salamandastron, in a way establishing so much more than Redwall did. Redwall was a practice run, but Mossflower determines the future: it builds the Abbey and the series. And I love that series, I read it while growing up and have almost the entire thing in handsome hardback, I celebrated every new release well into my college years, and Jacques's death in 2011 crushed me because that was the death of my childhood.

All the descriptions of food, the shallow puzzles, the existentialist and/or exaggerated characterization*, are rather glaring to me on this reread, but I find I don't mind them. It's almost nostalgic, to see as an adult what it was that made this book work for me as a child. The hardest books for me to review are those with which I have history, because how to separate that history from the book itself? Mossflower is perfectly competent, utterly decent, not awfully well-written, and I love it to literal pieces—the cover has come right off.

* Except Martin. Martin, man, whose one-word characterization may be "Warrior" but whose character arcs are almost always about the conflict between warring and living: fighting is necessary to protect what he loves, but it divides him from what he loves. That conflict is reiterated in all his stories, but it's so bittersweet and surprisingly gentle—quiet, powerful, lonesome Martin, so eager to accept the first hand extended to him in friendship even though he remembers exactly how that ended last time—that I don't much mind.

The closest analog I can find for Emilie Autumn's Fight Like A Girl tour is the film Sucker Punch; Sucker Punch meets burlesque. It's asylumpunk, if you will: the combined idealization and anxiety around mental illness in women, and the historical connection between women and mental illness—the trifecta of society creating it in women, and diagnosing it on the basis of non-normative/-socially acceptable behavior, and using it as a tool to control women's bodies and behavior. It's about the objectification and commodification of women, and reclaiming the female body—especially the sexualized female body—as a tool to gain personal power.

Sucker Punch rises and falls: on one hand, it's a powerful representation of dissociation as a result of trauma and sexual violence, and it's an attempt to attain agency using the sexualized female body—women gaining power via a tool used to take power from women; on the other, it gets swept up in its own aesthetic, is culturally appropriative, and objectifies conventionally attractive cis-gendered skinny young women in a way that doesn't defy the system in the least but instead buys into it.

'Punk movements and anything else that measures idealization against anxiety run the risk that the audience will see them for the former and not the latter, see: the problem with steampunk. Sucker Punch encounters a lot of this; Autumn's work, especially on the topic of mental illness, evades much of it by being a self-aware, ironic idealization combined with explicit statements about the problems surrounding such. Idealization is a tool used against and by the mentally ill: waif-like ill women, manic pixie dream girls, correlations between madness and creativity, and the sense that there's anything redeeming at all about mental illness, either for the sufferer or the individuals and society that surround them—which there's not, and insisting that there is denies the true experiences of sufferers; but the illness can so completely define its sufferers that idealizing it, and creating identity and community within it, is the only recourse. Like any reclaimed identity, this stems from within but attempts to fight against the oppressive system.

Because the worst of my mental illness is/was defined by total isolation, the group experience of Autumn's asylum and Crumpets is, for me, the least successful aspect of her work, although I realize what it achieves and how. But it's also dangerous: it's community, idealization, tragic beauty—sufficiently imperfect to be accessible rather than untouchable, but too easy to accept without viewing critically. And, as with any 'punk-like movement: when you fail to view it critically, with a focus on its anxieties, you end up supporting its roots in an oppressive system rather than its attempts to critique or controvert it. Autumn speaks explicitly about the anxiety; I feel as if the audience often doesn't hear her.

As an attempt to reclaim the female body, the FLAG show is even more problematic—because it, too, is about the objectification of conventionally attractive cis-gendered skinny white young women. It's the same problem of modern burlesque: it can be "male gaze"punk, reclaiming the same sexualized body that society creates and then punishes, engaging and subverting certain social standards—but too often it's viewed without an eye towards that anxiety, and the result is just more male gaze. In FLAG, it's a fan dance to "Dominant." It's also a hell of a lot of queer baiting: that two women kissing is presented as titillating, corrupting, or in any way worthy of a show, but only, of course!, just another skit.

There's an incredibly discomforting fanfiction skit that left our group divided. Autumn ends it with a faux-offended monologue about the masturbatory objectification about the "strong, proud women who you are supposed to respect," and the objectification is treated as a complicit joke—the artists using it to control and titillate the audience, but by doing so submitting precisely to the audience's script—which leaves the audience yelling out for "more!" Is this supposed to be as gross at it seems to be? Humor can be about tension, it can be the laugh that indicates discomfort, confusion, anxiety. The skit had a lot of that humor; the audience response had none.

I feel like Autumn knows her shit. I've been watching a good number of her interviews these last few days, and have the utmost respect for her. Her work is intentional; she couches explicit message within certain seductive tropes. I find it highly resonant, more as person with mental illness than as a woman but effective nonetheless. The live show was fantastic, but I can't say I was entirely content with the experience. There's some shows where half the audience leaves ten minutes early to beat traffic and you want to yell that they just don't get it; here, it was the front and center screaming crowd that seemed, to me, to miss the point. To take and change, to reclaim, the weapons of bodies and mind that are used against us is extremely powerful; it's a war I'm fighting, and Autumn's work can be a battlecry. But sometimes the show, and more often the audience, seem to lose track of their objective. It's not that there can be no sense of humor and fun, it's not that the corsets can't be pretty and the burlesque routines can't be attractive—but sometimes the truth of Autumn's experience screaming through in the lyrics feels shocking: like the surprise exception, rather than the show I'd come to see.

Ray Bradbury died this morning.

So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

—Fahrenheit 451, 58

I have, as we know, a strange relationship with death. I never know when I'll mourn, or how. But I mourn this.

Bradbury wrote a certain sort of nostalgia literature that never appealed to me—the golden midwestern summers of 8-year-old boys were not my own, and I can't wish to revisit them. He wrote short stories I adored, not always in collections I loved—Bradbury short fiction is always a delightful tossup: inspired, pulpy, emotionally resonant; in short form, the same nostalgia which never drew me to a lost childhood often drew me to the barren landscapes of post-colonial Mars. I can look back now on some of his most impassioned diatribes—in their stylistic repetition, their rhythmic restatements—and see a number of flaws.

But it doesn't matter. This man helped to make me who I am. I've reviewed Fahrenheit 451 before and I did a shit job of it—moreover, I now disagree with much of what I said about its message. Again, it doesn't matter. Bradbury wrote as someone who loved books, who saw them as magical and valuable and defining, who fought to save them from every fire, who could cast a man in the shape of a book and book in the skin of a man, and I had never encountered that before. When I read F451 as a high school freshman, I discovered for the first time the same sentiment and passion for books that I had; it was validated, and set alight. That changed everything.

This year I've been taking a break from reviewing books, given the casual exception; as such, I've primarily been rereading old favorites—a happier compromise than reading books and then angsting about my unwillingness or inability to discuss them. Some of these books I read every year, and it's never a waste. I want to internalize them, to hold them within myself, to become what they are. I haven't gotten there, yet; they're new every time. But it's a worthy effort.

Bradbury taught me to consume pages like fire, and he told me I was not the only one who thought doing so was important, essential, a vital part of society and self. Indeed, he told me, it is one of the most important things anyone can do.

And to do so is beautiful.

Against that, every specific is irrelevant.

"Would you like, someday, Montag, to read Plato's Republic?"

"Of course!"

"I am Plato's Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus."

"How do you do?" said Mr. Simmons.

"Hello," said Montag.

"I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philospher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. And we are Mark, Luke, and John."

—Fahrenheit 451, 151

My reviews of:

Fahrenheit 451
From the Dust Returned
The Illustrated Man
The Martian Chronicles
Something Wicked This Way Comes