THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH by Carrie Ryan

ISBN: 978-0385736817 (UK)

I received Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth for Christmas. I had been really excited to read it ever since I read a recommendation for it online. It's got a great premise—several generations after the zombie apocalypse, Mary lives in a small village surrounded by a chain-link fence. Outside the fence is a forest teeming with the undead, eternally hungry for human flesh—the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Inside the fence is a world ruled by the Sisterhood, a mysterious religious organization that controls the marriage, breeding, and education of the villagers. Protecting everyone from the Unconsecrated living dead are the Guardians, who patrol the forest killing the zombies and repairing the fences. There is a fenced-in path that leads away from the settlement, but it is off-limits and no one seems to remember where it leads. As far as the village inhabitants are concerned, they are they only survivors of the human race.


I read the first few chapters eagerly, happy to explore this strange other world. Orphaned and cast away from her family home, which now belongs to her brother, Mary is forced to live a sort of convent lifestyle as a ward of the Sisterhood, the head of whom is the stern and watchful Sister Tabitha. Here I think it would have been interesting for Mary to learn much more about the ominous, somewhat sinister organization that is the Sisterhood. And while she does do some snooping and learns a few things—many which are never fully explored—the narrative focuses much more on Mary's emotional turmoil as she becomes involved in a sort of love-square with three of her best friends.


One thing I really like about the book was that it has a bold, proactive heroine, which is a nice change from the feeble damsels in distress that populate many other contemporary young adult books. Many passages in The Forest of Hands and Teeth are beautifully written, and the story kept me reading to the end. In fact, I'm curious enough about the unanswered questions to read the sequel when it comes out a couple of months from now. 

If a body catch a body, comin' through the rye...

The great American author JD Salinger passed away on Wednesday. The author who gave us Holden Caulfield, a character with whom generation after generation of angsty teenage headcases could relate, was 91.

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in high school, and I loved it. Even though it was about a teenage boy from a different generation in a different part of the country, I felt like it was about me. A kid struggling with growing up, horrified by the superficiality of the adult world.

It was later, in college, that I discovered Franny and Zooey, and Nine Stories. But it was Catcher that always held my imagination. It was one of the books that made me want to be a writer. I wanted to be able to describe experiences with that same authenticity.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

- Holden, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22

Rest in peace, Mr. Salinger. Thanks for writing. 

iPad is Here!

Today Apple announced its latest creation, a tablet device called the iPad. At 9.7 inches and starting at $499 it's about the same size and price as the larger Kindle, but it can do way cooler stuff. And due to a deal with several major publishers, users will be able to download books directly to their iPads from the iBook store (my ancient Apple laptop is also called an iBook. Sadly it's not as fun or cutting edge as these new iBooks sound -- it shuts off if it's not plugged into the wall).

What else can you do on an iPad? According to the website you can browse the Internet, play games, watch films, find maps, write notes, and download all the same apps you can get for the iPhone.

Sounds neat, and it's something else to play with when I visit the Apple store in the mall to drool over the MacBook Pros.

edit: I've just noticed a pretty big flaw in the iPad -- no ports to connect it to your computer or USB drive, etc. That's really kind of sucky.

Writing Competition: Writer's Digest

I noticed on the Writer's Digest website today that they are currently accepting entries for the Writer's Digest 79th Annual Writing Competition. The deadline is May 14th, 2010. There are ten different categories under which you can submit, and the grand prize is $3,000 and a trip to New York City to meet with agents and editors. They specify however that only airfare within the US is covered. I guess if you live in the UK like I do you have to pay your own way to NYC if you win.

Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling

This cartoon from The Oatmeal has been going around Facebook lately. Unfortunately people are paying little heed and continue to use the wrong to/too, there/their/they're, and your/you're in their status updates. My personal pet peeve is when people misspell "definitely." I think they get it confused with defiantly, and think that it needs an "a"? I started a Facebook group to campaign against the butchering of the word "definitely," but people weren't really interested. I guess it's just me then.

ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy

ISBN: 978-1853262715

 

"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

It took me a good few months to get through Anna Karenina. It's one of those books that becomes part of your daily routine simply because it takes so long to read. Or at least it did for me.

I initially picked up Anna Karenina because it had been on my reading list for a long time, along with other classic books I haven't gotten around to reading yet, like Madame Bovary and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Decameron (soon! I will read them soon!). I had also managed not to hear about the novel's famously tragic ending, and I thought I should read it before someone spoiled the surprise (it seems like whenever anyone saw me reading the book, they would say "You how it ends, don't you?").

The novel follows two main plot lines, with various interweaving subplots. One main story is the romance between Anna Karenina, a beautiful, charming, and married Society woman, and Count Vronsky, a charismatic soldier who is not her husband. The other is the romance between Kitty (Anna's brother Steve's wife's sister) and Constantine Levin, a shy, earnest man who lives in the country.

To be honest, as much as I empathize with Anna Karenina, she annoys me. She is intelligent enough to foresee the trouble that getting involved with Count Vronsky will bring her, but she does it anyway. She also seems not to care much for her children. At one point Tolstoy writes that Anna cannot love her daughter the way that she loves her son, whom she has abandoned. Both of Anna's children are left in the care of others while she battles her own demons -- jealousy, morphine dependency, and most of all the fear that Vronsky will stop loving her. Vronsky reacts to her alternating stormy moods and extreme neediness by spending more time in Society, the elite circle in which Anna is no longer welcome, which fuels her delusions even more.

I found that the novel does a good job of highlighting the gender inequalities of 19th century Russian society. Anna's brother Steven Oblonsky, for example, merrily sleeps with as many beautiful women as he can, much to the continuing despair of his wife. And while Oblonsky's behavior has no effect on his place in Society, when Anna falls in love with Vronsky and leaves her husband, Society shuns her. It leaves Anna in an impossible place. Karenin, her husband, will not grant her a divorce; among other things he thinks it will ruin her. Yet the way she is living, ostracized from her social circle and without legitimacy in society, is unbearable. It is a testimony to the rigid social structure of the society in which Anna lives, which only allows survival within the framework of propriety. It made me think of our own modern society, in which this attachment to propriety still exists, although to a much lesser degree (unwed teenage mothers, for example, are looked down upon).

I preferred the less-depressing story of Levin, his farm, his relationship with the peasants, and his pursuit of Kitty Scherbatskya (I have read that Tolstoy modeled Levin after himself, and Kitty after his wife). Kitty is the daughter of Prince and Princess Scherbatsky, and the youngest sister of Steven Oblonsky's wife, Dolly. She is being courted by Vronsky when she refuses Levin's first offer of marriage early on in the novel. This drives Levin to focus on his other great passion, writing a book about how to improve Russian agriculture, focusing on the needs of the laborers. I found this interesting because Levin's concern with class issues and his preoccupation with the laboring class seems to anticipate the rise of the Bolsheviks in the following century. Throughout the narrative Levin struggles with his own place in society, especially in relation to the peasants who work his land.

The descriptions of Levin's land are some of the most beautiful in the whole book. The way Tolstoy illustrates the sights, sounds, and smells of the changing seasons; the harmony the peasants have with nature, and the virtue of their demanding physical labor is something that really stayed with me after I finished reading.

Another thing that struck me was the very realistic way in which Tolstoy describes uncertainty, in all characters but especially in Levin. Thought processes that lead to changes in opinion and changes of heart are delineated in detail. In this way Anna Karenina reminds me of novels by Dostoevsky, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

I think one of the great things about this story is that it has such a wide appeal. Topics explored include romance, marriage, family, politics, religion, philosophy, education, women's rights, and class issues. There is also just a great mixture of love, betrayal, vengeance, tragedy, and hope.

I read the Wordsworth Classics edition, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. I found it very easy to read, although in places there were some awkwardly phrased sentences. Not enough to detract from my enjoyment of the novel though. I appreciated the realism, although there were a few sections that I thought could be shorter, especially those that related politics and elections in minute detail. All in all I found it a good, solid, and complex novel, and definitely worth a read.

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy

ISBN: 978-0330447546 (UK)  978-0307476302 (USA)

"The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions... A dull rose glow in the window-glass."

I had wanted to read this book for a while, so I was delighted to receive it for Christmas last month. It seemed a strange choice to begin reading among the tinsel and fairy lights of holiday cheer, but the book drew me in both with its post-apocalyptic premise and the immediate tension in the opening pages.

The main characters are never named, they are simply the man and the boy. Also unnamed is the catastrophic even that brought about the apocalypse some years earlier, forcing them to travel south on the road -- a relic of the living world, an ash covered highway -- after the death of the boy's mother. They are heading for the coast, trying to escape the cold northern winter while constantly seeking food which has all but disappeared. Plants and animals alike have died out, and savage gangs roam the road, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing anyone who strays into their paths.

The narrative is bleak and episodic, and the language terse. There are many missing apostrophes and no quotation marks, and occasionally there are words that run together. It's like the degeneration of society is reflected within the prose. As the rules of law and society have fallen, the rules of language are following suit and crumbling.

The world of The Road is a world of stress: the constant hunger, the bitter cold, and the marauding gangs all threaten to destroy the fragile thread of life to which man and boy cling. Yet even in this ash-gray, sunless landscape there glimmers the smallest shred of hope, enough to persuade the reader to continue the brutal, unforgiving journey with man and boy. "You have to carry the fire," the man tells the boy. The fire is their fragile humanity. It is this that endears the two characters to the reader.

Against the grayness of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, a few moments of joy stand out. The man finds the boy an ancient but intact can of Coca Cola. "It's bubbly," the boy says in surprise. In another scene they have found a flare gun, which the man agrees to fire into the sky. "It could be like a celebration," the boy says.

I really enjoyed this book, if "enjoyed" is the right word for something so bleak. I went into an empty room to read the last few pages; I wanted to be somewhere quiet where I could absorb the ending properly, and then think about it for a few minutes. I think that's the sign of a great book. A great book will stay with you for a few days after you finish it, and this one did.  

About a week after reading this novel I went to see the film version. It was much as I had imagined it in the book: colorless landscapes of gray and white, with occasional bright splashes of blood. The film followed the original narrative closely, with only a few scenes changed. Overall the movie seemed much more hopeful than the book, as it seemed to suggest a possible recovery of nature -- in one scene the boy finds a live beetle -- but without losing the intensity and suspense of the novel. 

It isn't surprising that Cormac McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road. It's a powerful tale about the fire within us that makes us human, and what can happen when that fire goes out.

Welcome, readers and writers!

Hi! Welcome to the blog. I'm glad you're here. My name is Jessie and I'll be posting my thoughts about books, authors, writing, movies based on books, education, and anything else literature-related that comes to mind. I studied English and creative writing in college and grad school, and I started this blog out of respect to my Facebook friends, who are probably tired of me clogging up their news feeds with my random thoughts about random books.


The mascot of the blog is Bili the bonobo, pictured below flashing his passport at the airport. Bili was rejected by his mother at the Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire, England, in late 2008. In January 2009 he was flown to Germany to live with a bonobo foster mother at the Frankfurt Zoo.

Bonobos are closely related to chimpanzees, and used to be called pygmy chimps. They are a species of great ape, and they are absolutely, positively, not monkeys.