The Books of David Mitchell

Last month, I posted a series of my favorite quotes from David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, connecting his words to my recent set of six acrylic paintings. In that post, I mentioned that I was in the process of reading through all his novels in chronological order by publication date, and that I would write another post when I was finished, compiling some of my favorite ideas and quotes from his oeuvre. Today is that post.

After months of reading and rereading (many of his books I had read before, but not all of them), I finally finished Slade House a few weeks ago. And now I'm finally getting around to reflecting on his "David Mitchell universe" as a whole.

My favorite Mitchell book is, obviously, Cloud Atlas. Not only do I find his characters in that book particularly compelling/relatable; I also prefer the explanation given in that book for how souls can connect throughout time. This connection is mystical/spiritual in nature, not overt, and rather inexplicable. It creeps up in moments of deja vu, or in the process of living a creative life. Some characters feel connected to each other intuitively, or even seem to remember things that didn't happen to them - things that might have happened in a past life, but not in the one they are living. Some recognize these moments of deja vu and interpret them as reincarnation - not "proof" of its existence, per se, but enough to warrant contemplation of the possibility. Still other characters do not explicitly feel like they are a reincarnation; they have no specific memories. And yet, they too are connected to other characters, even though they may never realize it. They read their diaries, listen to their compositions, read their manuscripts, watch their movies, or learn of them in history books, revering what they do not understand and worshipping them as gods.

I don't know if "souls" are truly reincarnated or not, and in any case there is hardly a way to prove definitively either way. But humans are able to feel inexplicable kinship with one another, and we do pass down bits of ourselves (our feelings, our experiences, our ideas) in creative works we produce and the legacy we leave behind. (Of course I want to believe that is true. I am an artist and a writer; I make things in the hopes that the things I make will connect with people, both now and in the future. I want to leave a "mark" on the world that will outlive my mortal body.)

And it is precisely this idea of intuitive connection and passing down creative works to future generations that Cloud Atlas embodies so well - which is why I love it so much. It feels real. It is something that I could buy happening to our world.

In contrast, Mitchell's other books that deal with the idea of a soul take a more "science fiction" approach (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bone Clocks, and Slade House). Without giving too much away, these books create a world in which (some) people are perfectly aware of their souls and the souls living in other people, and steps are made to try to ensure immortality by using this soul-knowledge to their advantage. There is a behind the scenes "war" in which people nurture themselves at the expense of others, and others do their damnedest to stop them.

It's an exciting story, to be sure - and certainly seems to be the way Mitchell is going for future books, given that his last three books all deal, at least partly, with this idea. But it is decidedly different than the more believable, more relatable, more mystical, and - I think - more fascinating way that souls and people interact in Cloud Atlas.

That said, there is something to be gotten out of each of his books - even the ones that don't seem to touch on the idea of a soul/reincarnation. Here are some of my favorite quotes from each of his books:

[WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.]

---

Ghostwritten (1999)

"We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilization."

"All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel...You have to make your place inside your head."

"It's better to fight and lose than not fight and suffer, because even if you fight and lose your spirit emerges intact."

"The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me."

"For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing."

"I wonder if computers ever dream of humans."

"She didn't come in the dramatic way they do in movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelled out with fridge magnet letters. Nothing like Poltergeist or The Exorcist. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late."

"I'm sorry, but I don't have any spare time to give you."

"I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too."

"Now that I'm dying again I recognize the signs."

"The Holy Mountain didn't care about the stupid world of men."

"'The world's gone mad,' I said. 'Again.' 'And it will right itself,' said my Tree. 'Again.'"

"Kindness always make me weep. I don't know why."

"I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up."

"With the intuition of an old dying woman, I know she isn't telling the whole truth. With the certainty of an old dying woman, I know it's not the truth that much matters."

"It is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create."

"I have only one fear: to be inhabiting a human at the moment of death."

"There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums."

"I am my mind - do I have a mind I don't know about within my mind, like humans?...How do I know that there aren't noncorpa living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know. But that's exactly what humans think."

"Everything is about wanting."

"It's a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind."

"But what if the rats happened to like being in the maze?"

"Does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way."

"The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting."

"We're all ghostwriters, my boy. And it's not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us."

"Anyone can predict effects from a given cause."

"Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present."

"Even time is not immune to time."

"In five hundred years we are going to be either extinct, or...something better."

"The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed."

"Disbelieving the reality under your feet gives you a license to print your own."

"History is made of arbitrary choices."

"Information is control."

"Will my soul find a path out of these tunnels?"

---

Number9Dream (2003)

"A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."

"Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are."

"Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it."

"Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality."

"Human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most."

"The body is the outermost layer of the mind."

"I forget that other people in the world have broken parts, too."

"During those nine pouched-up months, what do babies imagine? Gills, swamps, battlefields? To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same."

"People prefer loneliness to harmony."

---

Cloud Atlas (2004)

(For quotes from Cloud Atlas see my previous post.)

---

Black Swan Green (2006)

"Adults can't be expected to understand."

"Games and sports're really about humiliating your enemies."

"It's not that I'll die that bothers me. It's that I'll be the last one."

"Dead things show you what you'll be too one day."

"Mentioning my stammer makes it realler."

"Try to will it out of existence, it'll just will itself back stronger."

"Identify a demand, handle its supply, make your customers grateful, kill off the opposition."

"Human beings needs to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice."

"The earth's a door, if you press your ear against it."

"War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins."

"How can the world just go on, as if none of this is happening?"

"War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery."

"Wars do not simply appear from nowhere. Wars come, over a long period of time, and believe me, there is always plenty of blame to be shared out between all those who failed to prevents its bloody arrival."

"I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."

"Prettiness often papers over nastiness."

"Often I think boys don't become men. Boys just get papier-mached inside a man's mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there."

"Isn't no god better than one who does that to people?"

"The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it."

"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready.'"

"Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue."

"Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has not made the beauty. Only an object where beauty resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase."

"If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falseness."

"Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television."

"Music's a wood you walk through."

"Speaking one language only is prison."

"Magnets don't need to understand magnetism."

"Will I be some kid's dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?"

"People're a nestful of needs."

"Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty."

"Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice."

"Questions aren't questions. Questions're bullets."

"The boy could preach till he's purple. They'd not believe him. They'd not want to believe him."

"Courage is being scared shitless but doing it anyway."

"Is a secret a secret if it isn't true?...A secret needs a human agency to know it, or at least write it down. A holder. A keeper."

"You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you? S'pose lunatics mold their doctors more than doctors mold their lunatics?"

"Dancing's like walking down a busy high street or millions of other things. You're absolutely fine as long as you don't think about it."

"Dancers think they're in charge but they're obeying ancient orders."

"But once a lemon meringue's cut, no amount of tears can make it whole."

"If consequences of consequences of consequences of what you do're your fault too, you'd never leave your house."

---

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

"A sailor's heart's the sea's plaything, eh?"

"The world is composed of people who are convinced of it."

"Immortality comes at a steep price."

"Respect, he thinks, cannot be commanded from on high."

"Your own descendants yet unborn beg you to make the correct choice at this hour."

"Every seat of power in the empire is divided, and thereby neutered."

"Jacob finds himself as little able to evade the man's gaze as a book can, of its own volition, evade the scrutiny of a reader."

"Mortification...requires at least a little pride."

"What if people make bad choice and president is bad man?"

"The fairer sex can show as much resilience as the uglier one."

"When shaving, a man rereads his truest memoir."

"What sort of gift is it that the giver doesn't offer until he wants something from the intended recipient?"

"Power has an unpleasant taste."

"We must guard ourselves against our protectors."

"To doubt the soul would strike me as peculiar."

"But mine is the true faith...Whilst yours is idolatry."

"This is longest bridge you ever cross, because this bridge go between two worlds."

"To not say 'no' is to half say 'yes.'"

"High office, as you shall one day discover, distances one from one's men."

"It's a man's conduct that God is interested in, not the circumstances of his birth."

"What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?...'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's."

"A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right."

"The ladybird believes she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere."

"I wish spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket."

"Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it 'love.'"

"To list and name people is to subjugate them."

"Slavery may be an injustice to some...but no one can deny that all empires are founded upon the institution."

"The soul is a verb. Not a noun."

"A carelessly tossed stone can sometimes results in a rock fall."

"Details beget facts, and facts, judiciously sent forth, become assassins."

"Expensive habit is honesty. Loyalty ain't a simple matter."

"The scarcity of facts leaves holes where rumors breed."

"The present is a battleground...where rival what-ifs compete to become the future 'what is.'"

"For what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is 'belief.'... Power is informed by belief that this path, and not another, must be followed."

"Self-pity is a noose dangling from a rafter."

"The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories."

"Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom, he values."

"Isolation, ingenuity, power...fear. These achieve most ends."

"It is not superstition but reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities."

"Your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgeable to understand."

"The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be."

"My true name I tell nobody, so nobody can steal my name."

"Why must all things go around in stupid circles?"

"If only human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders."

"Admission of weakness is a weakness."

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love."

"The easiest way to control others is to give them the illusion of free will."

"The truth of a myth...is not its words but its patterns."

"One must be wary of understanding one's enemy, lest one becomes him."

"Nobody ever died for a flag, only what the flag symbolizes."

"This world contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself."

"The purest believers are the truest monsters."

"A great teacher attains immortality in his students."

---

The Bone Clocks (2014)

"Promise me you'll memorize the path through it, so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. Please."

"The brain could be an illogical place."

"People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can't."

"Pity is a form of abuse."

"What if...what if heave is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or...S'pose heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging their forever, but more like...like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snitches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or...upstairs windows when you're lost..."

"Psychologists say there's a second umbilical cord, an invisible one, an emotional one, which ties you to your parents for the whole time you're a kid. Then, one day, you have a row with your mum if you're a girl, or your dad if you're a boy, and that argument cuts your second cord. Then, and only then, are you ready to go off into the big wide world and be an adult on your own terms."

"Perhaps daymares are like cancer, which goes away and comes back when you think you're all clear."

"Capitalism eats itself. When it can't feed the millions it spits out, no amount of lies or brutality will save it."

"Being born's a hell of a lottery."

"Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going."

"When you know your memory's been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again?"

"You make a list, see. It's called 'All the Things I'll Never, Ever Do to Get By.' The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to 'All the Things I've Had to Do to Get By.'"

"I think about pinball, and how being a kid's like being shot up the firing lane and there's no veering left or right; you're just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you're sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there's a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed'll totally alter what happens to you later..."

"Victims aren't cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on."

"Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn't, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would."

"Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul."

"Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you're not ill?"

"When civilization shuts up shop, a gun'll be worth any number of university degrees."

"You'd think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we're all heading to."

"Whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I'll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man."

"Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce."

"Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it."

"Perhaps this will just be one of life's dangly plot lines that one never revisits."

"Human beings are walking bundles of cravings. Cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of those cravings. But love's not just the drug; it's also the dealer. Love wants love in return."

"We're all of different things at different times."

"Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator."

"People are superb at not thinking about awkward truths."

"You only value something if you know it'll end."

"You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn't come with flowcharts."

"If an atrocity isn't written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die."

"When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it."

"Wrong turns teach us the right way."

"God is willing to trust us with the small print."

"It's not just that you get old and your kids leave; it's that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in."

"However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan."

"We all of us have less time than we think."

"Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither."

"Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don't work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself."

"Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed."

"The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you're over forty."

"Modesty is Vanity's craftier stepbrother."

"When I remember my mother, am I remembering her, or just memories of her?"

"For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap."

"Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what's already there."

"Writers don't write in a void."

"A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and yes, to a degree, your sanity."

"Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? O are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us?"

"Some truths are inadmissible in the court of the sane."

"Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions."

"One cannot cross the same river twice."

"Each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography."

"Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn."

"If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others."

"The Script loves foreshadow."

"The future looks a lot like the past."

"All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know."

"I'd rather trust my memory than my eyes."

"We live on, as long as there are people to live on in."

"If you could reason with religious people, there wouldn't be any religious people."

"There is no God but the one we dream up."

"If you can't trust your mind anymore, you're mentally homeless."

"Change is sort of hardwired into the world."

"If life didn't change, it wouldn't be life."

"The 'natural order of things' is entirely man-made."

"Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies."

---

Slade House (2015)

"My question falls down a deep well with no bottom, and I forget what I've forgotten."

"Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes 'I woke up and it was all a dream' at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream."

"Dream-people always say they're real, so pardon me for not believing you."

"It can't hold forever and it won't."

"People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go."

"Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed."

"Once you've been a psychiatric patient, no one ever gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating."

"Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don't you find?"

"Death's life's only guarantee, yes?"

"In war, ends justify means. War is ends justifying means."

"Memory's a slippery eel at the best of times."

"One percent is still...too many."

Why on earth should that mean that it isn't real?

This post is going to be a continuation of yesterday's post about mind-body dualism, so you may want to start there if you haven't read it yet.

As I said yesterday, though part of me is swayed by the scientific proof of monism - the idea that everything is built out of one category of substance (atoms, molecules, chemicals, cells) - I am ultimately too enamored with the idea of dualism to suspend belief that there is a second, incorporeal substance also at play in nature. We are not just bodies, but bodies and minds (or souls, depending on how you want to label it).

I acknowledge that I am, to some extent, governed by my chemicals and hormones and neurons and all of the other building blocks that create and multiply and manipulate my cells, or communicate between them. I even understand that when I dream at night I am in actuality at the mercy of coincidences and firing neurons; that what I choose to interpret as a story, with colors and faces and emotions and conflict and resolution, is not created or influenced by a separate substance (my mind, my soul, my intuition, creativity, inspiration, a collective unconscious I'm tapping into, or anything spiritual like that) but by the same category that maintains my blood circulation and digestive tract: Atoms. Molecules. Things that science can observe and quantify and explain (or are working toward observing, quantifying, and explaining).

But I care about those stories I dream, or the stories I come up with in the daytime and attempt to put to paper, or the subjects I want to draw or paint - and to write or create art the way I want to, I feel like it diminishes it to think of it through the lens of monism.

Sure, I am able to see color because of the way my eyes work and the cells that make up my eyes; I am able to hold a paintbrush because of the cells in my hand; I am able to retain muscle memory and things I've practiced and learned in school for the best techniques to use because of the cells in my brain. And to some people - the scientifically minded, the monists - this is more than enough, and they can find excitement and inspiration in the idea that everything comes down to essentially one thing, or that everything is born from essentially one thing, and that any differences we see - at the molecular or macro level - are just different rearrangements of the same basic substance.

Good for them! I'm not knocking monism. It's just not how I think of things, and I don't see the value (and in fact see negative consequences) in retraining myself to think of the world that way. I could persuade myself if I really wanted to. I definitely see the reasoning and the merits. But I don't think it matters to my life, and because it is not my gut reaction, I fear that it would take away something of who I am to try to dissuade myself of my belief in dualism.

I am an artist, and a writer. I like looking at art, and reading books. I like writing poetry. I like listening to music. I like being creative. I like thinking of myself as a body and a soul, and other people as a body and a soul. I like imagining that there is this creativity or inspiration that ebbs and flows and visits us and abandons us and takes us on journeys and sets our hearts on fire. I like dreaming; I like trying to influence my dreams in the moment of the dreaming, and I like interpreting them after the fact. I like sitting around and thinking and philosophizing. I like asking 'what ifs'.

I like thinking of my emotions, my mood, my intuition, my dreams, my creativity, my art, my writing, as a separate entity. Something to conquer or challenge or accept or adore or avoid or manipulate or mold or cherish or abhor. Something that is unique to me, but also something that is similar to what everyone else has and experiences - a collective pool that we all dip our toes into once and awhile, and dive into even rarer still. Something that is sometimes out of our control - which is frustrating at times but beneficial at other times. Something that is separate from my physical body and will exist in some form after my body dies.

I don't think my soul will go to heaven or hell because I don't think those are actual places. But I am open the idea of reincarnation. I like the idea of the ancient goddess, where we are all birthed from the same womb, live physical lives, and then are returned to that sacred womb to be reborn into another life (with or without knowledge of previous lives). That doesn't mean I believe in a goddess, or a specific womb that exists. I just like the imagery of it. The Neo-Platonists had a similar idea - this Oneness that we all come from and return to. It's actually almost monist sounding, right? We are all essentially the same thing, born from the same substance, made of the same substance, and return to that substance when we return. But I think of it in a dualist way.

There's this spiritual substance (spirit, soul, mind, unconsciousness, etc.) - let's just call it Substance 1 for the sake of simplicity. And this substance is unquantifiable and unidentifiable and really hard to understand or know or label - because that's kind of the point of it. We can only feel it - in our guts, in our hearts, in our minds. We can't touch it with our hands, or see it or hear it or taste it or smell it or observe it in any way. It's extrasensory.

I like to imagine that we are that substance, at our cores. If our bodies ever ceased to exist, or if we were in a transition state between bodies, we would still be Substance 1. It's our emotions, our collective unconscious, the stuff of dreams, our creativity, our childish sense of wonder, our pleasure, our pain, etc. When we are on earth it is encased in a body, which is a different substance (Substance 2). It has to be a different entity, because it can be observed with our physical senses. We can see and feel and taste it. We can study it under a microscope. It gets hurt or sick, and we watch it heal (or not heal). It is observable, in a real, quantifiable way. It can be categorized and labeled. It can (more or less) be understood.

So we start as Substance 1 and end as Substance 1 (if we do indeed end). We still have access to Substance 1 while we are encased in Substance 2 (our bodies), because we are always Substance 1, whether or not we are at the moment connected to Substance 2.

Of course, at any given moment we can understand, we are connected to Substance 2, because that's the only way we can understand or acknowledge or interpret or observe things at all. I have no proof that Substance 1 exists before/after/outside Substance 2 at all. Perhaps it doesn't. I like to think it does, but it hardly matters (to me) if it actually does or not. I would not act differently in this life if I knew for certain that my soul would or would not extend past by body's life, so it makes no difference.

The point is, that I am drawn to thinking of myself this way, for better or worse. It is so engrained in me to believe that there is some essence to me that is more than just the sum of my bodily parts that I have to think it is a belief I would hold dear regardless of whether or not I had been brought up Christian and taught to believe that we all have souls and which go to Heaven or Hell when our bodies die. I was drawn to color and art from a young age. I loved stories and reading. I have always been drawn to fantasy. I have always put more significance on my mind than my body. It didn't matter what was happening in "the real world" if I had another world I could escape to in my mind.

And I think that, is essentially, why I would really have to talk myself into monism. Because I like Substance 1 better; I could never discard it in favor of Substance 2. And it doesn't make sense to me believe there isn't a Substance 2 - indeed, I would be way too scared to pretend Substance 1 is the only substance. While I like Substance 1, I also often keep my distance from it. It's unreliable. It's mysterious. To believe only in Substance 1 (and thus ignore the "real" physical world) would be to lose all control, lose anything tangible to grab onto, and, essentially, to go insane.

So Substance 2 must exist - it is the rock in the flowing stream of Substance 1, the tangible, sturdy, steady thing to grab onto. And I want Substance 1 to exist - because it's the flowing stream, and more interesting. And so I am a dualist.

But I also call myself an "atheist."

Being an "atheist" doesn't mean I'm not spiritual, in my own way. It doesn't mean I don't like sitting around philosophizing. It doesn't mean I don't believe in something by faith alone. The "something" that I believe in through faith alone, however, is not capital-G God, nor any other god or gods of any organized religion on this planet. There is no Creator. There is no Destiny. There is the Human Experience, and the Soul, and the Collective Unconscious, or something along those lines - but I vacillate between whether or not I think this other Force, whatever it is, has any sort of semblance of control over me and my actions, or even any understanding of me, or anyone else, or itself. Perhaps it is just Nature, going through its cycles as it does; and I am just a part of it, a cog in its incognizant machine.

I even (as you can see with these last two blog posts), debate with myself on the issue of my dualism. Do I actually believe there are two substances - mind and body - or do I just really want there to be two substances, because it's a more interesting story, and one that I am immediately drawn to?

So I call myself an atheist because I do not align with any modern religion or its beliefs, and I do not one anyone to get the impression that I do, or that I could be persuaded to. Calling myself an agnostic, I think, is not strong enough to get this point across. But really I would identify myself more as an apatheist - because not only do I not believe in god, but it really doesn't matter to my daily life if god does or does not exist - or even if there are one or two categories of substances in the world.

From the Wikipedia article, Apatheism

I like thinking about such things in the abstract, but have no real motivation to come to any sort of concrete conclusion. I'm fine with sitting in the corner and imagining the world I want to imagine, with its mind and body separation. It suits me. It doesn't really matter if it's "real" or "true" or not, because it's true to me. And even if someone could prove to me that God exists (or doesn't exist), or that everything I hold dear about my "essence" is really just nothing more than neurons firing in my brain or the chemicals and hormones in my body fluctuating their levels to influence my emotions or mood - it wouldn't matter. I would still make art. I would still feel things. I would still write. I would still go on pretending that what is in my mind is important and real - because that's what makes me feel like me, and I think it's what makes me good at the art and writing I do.

I've rambled on about all this long enough. I'll end here with a favorite quote by J.K. Rowling:

Mind & Body

I'm not an expert on philosophy by any means.

I took one "Intro to Philosophy" course in college, which built on the pretty solid foundation I acquired with my high school humanities classes. I also took a course that was cross-listed between the Women and Gender's Studies department and the Philosophy department; it focused primarily on philosophical manifestos written by second-wave feminists (with the occasional first- and third-waver thrown in) on the topics of privilege and oppression, as they relate to gender. Since college, I've read a few books on philosophy - both as research for the novel(s) I've been writing and as a sort of general interest project. These have been mostly compilations of Major Points philosophers have made (as explained by contemporary philosophers or humanities professors who know how to write clearly and concisely), and not the actual, historical texts that, while I'm sure offer more insight and nuance, also require a lot more brain power to parsing and comprehending than I have time to devote.

So in bringing up one of the Big Topics philosophers have debated for today's post, I'm not trying to convince you, or persuade you, or educate you - if you want to know what the Famous Philosophers have said on such things, you're best doing the research and reading yourself. I'm only explaining what I believe - because it "feels right" to me.

From Wikipedia

The debate is this - are there two types of substances in the world (body and mind, or body and soul, depending on how you want to phrase it), or is there only one substance?

The "body" would be anything we can see or understand in this physical world that we live in. Our physical bodies, with its hands and feet and brain, made up of atoms and molecules. The physical building blocks of life, and the things that we interact with everyday.

The "mind" or "soul" would be something unscientific and incorporeal.

Christianity defines this as our "soul" - the spirit that lives inside everyone, which persists before the body and after the body's demise. This is why murder is a sin - because you're not just killing cells, but cells that are (or were) attached (at least temporarily) to a unique, God-created soul. Christians also believe that this soul continues after the body dies - and goes either to hell or heaven (or purgatory), depending on deeds and misdeeds, what or who you believe in, and what sect of Christianity you're looking at.

Other religions and spiritual ways of thinking define this substance in other ways. Souls can be thought of as being reincarnated - inhabiting one body until that body dies, and then inhabiting another body in another life.

Some say that animals or plants also have such "souls" - and therefore certain animals (or all animals) are off-limits to farm, slaughter, and consume. Many vegetarians or vegans who choose their diets on moral grounds make such arguments.

Others might think of this incorporeal substance as something less connected to an individual person or animal, but something that just kind of floats around and inhabits each of us at different times. Intuition. Fate. Destiny. The ability to communicate in extrasensory ways (mind reading, ESP, etc). Creativity.

In her book "Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear," Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about creativity and inspiration as kind of this mythical, spiritual thing. It gives us ideas and sometimes a passion to see that idea through, but it is up to us to take that opportunity when it comes, pursue other opportunities if an idea is not actively knocking on our door, and learn how to be creative without relying on inspiration to guide us every step of the way. Similar to an athlete or musician "being in the zone," artists and writers are capable of creating things they didn't think possible, things that sort of momentarily seize them and take them on a journey over which they have little or no control. But you don't find that "zone" without putting in lots of effort and practice and opening yourself up to such experiences, and you can't rely on that creative spark to always be around.

The ancient Romans thought of this as a "genius." A person was not a genius, he had a genius - a little elf or sprite or guide or fairy or however you want to think of it - who came around and helped occasionally. (Females didn't get geniuses... there was another word for their helper friends; but I don't remember it at the moment.) This would also fit under the idea of this "mind" or "soul" - some otherworldly spark that we can't see or ever fully understand, but that is there and occasionally able to be tapped into a bit, or connected to us.

Whether we have the ability to connect with such incorporeal things or whether we have to wait for those substances to hook up with us is a matter of belief - and would get into another question of Free Will vs. Determinism.

I would also like to point out that many (most) people who believe in some sort of incorporeal substance don't believe in all of those examples that I listed above (or others). Many would find the idea of creativity as a gremlin that gifts inspiration as sort of hokey. Many Christians can easily believe that they have a soul but that animals and plants do not (and are thus perfectly willing to eat all sorts of meat). Historically, there were many groups who even believed that not all humans had souls, or that not all humans had equal souls - that men were inherently created by God to be better than women, or for whites to be inherently smarter or more powerful than blacks or other races. Now, we think such things are ridiculous (racist, sexist, elitist, horrible), but that wasn't always the case. The idea of what this non-body substance might be vary vastly from culture to culture and person to person, as well as throughout time.

But a lot of people believe in something. They believe there is something out there - whether God or gods, Fate or Destiny or Fortune, a person's individual soul, or occasional creativity, or just some other underlying thing that connects all of us mystically/spiritually, like the Human Experience, or the Collective Unconscious, or whatever.

Then there are others who don't believe there is anything besides the body. That any emotions or moods we feel, any ideas we come up with or feel like we've been gifted, any extrasensory understanding we think we may possess, any uncontrollable Force that guides us or hurts us, whether indiscriminately or consciously and deliberately - all of these things are still the same substance. Dreams are just neurons firing in the brain. Religions are just systems based on stories we've created to explain we don't (yet) understand. Everything comes down to chemicals and molecules - how those atoms interact with one another to form plants, and animals, and humans, and human emotions and moods and inspiration and dreams. Pure science.

That is not to say that all scientists cast out all spirituality and believe that there is only one substance - the body. Some scientists are religious. Many undoubtedly believe in souls. Several even say that studying science has brought them to the conclusion that there must be something more - some Divine Creator who designed all of the intricate systems of cells and chemicals that are increasingly observable with the advent of new and better technology.

But pure science is, by definition, based only on that which can be observed or experimented with. Even if individual scientists may yet believe in another substance - mind, souls, spirits - the discipline as a whole does not give that idea much (if any) credence.

From Wikipedia

With the continued new technology that is being invented and perfected, I think this belief in only one substance (monism) is gaining steam. There is observable proof that drugs and medicines can alter the chemicals in our body and change our emotional state. Or give us purpose and direction and inspiration where depression or chronic pain or some other illness took it away. Or help us see an "alternate reality" or a "different plane of existence." Or increase our likelihood of nightmares and vivid dreams, just by increasing or decreasing the way our cells communicate in our brains or altering hormone imbalances. (I am not a scientist, so my terms/explanations may be off. But you catch my drift.)

Indeed, what proof is there (what proof can there be?) that another substance exists? The only thing that can be cited is that many humans feel like more than just a body - they feel like a soul, too. Many humans want or need to believe that part of themselves will transcend their bodily deaths, or that some things are out of their control and cannot be explained. And science can account for this, too - I'm sure some explanation can be crafted for while so many of us feel this to be true, something about neurons and chemicals and other things that I haven't studied and don't understand. Maybe we believe we're more than firing neurons because our firing neurons fire in such a way and light up the parts of our brains that have us believe that.

But I'm not a scientist. I'm an artist and a writer. I grew up Christian. And though I can shake the idea of God, and deny organized religion, I cannot shake the idea of a soul. I have to be more than just molecules. There has to be something about me that is unique and special that molecules could not recreate somewhere else, in someone else. It's perhaps egotistical to think, and very likely wrong. But the idea of dualism - two substances, the mind and the body, which work (or don't work) together in harmony and which are ruled (or rule) slightly different sets of laws - is too important to me, as a creative person, to give up.

Science may scoff, but many philosophers would agree with my assessment. There is a mind and a body. It is (to me) the more exciting and fun and desirable explanation, and it is (for now at least) the one I'm sticking with.

2015 Media Roundup - Books

This list of my favorite books of 2015 is not necessary books that were published this year; some were from previous years that I only this year got around to reading. In any case, I had a Goodreads challenge of reading 85 books in 2015 - and succeeding in that goal - and of those 85 books, these were my absolute favorites.

Some of these reviews are reposts from my previous "Feminist Books" entry.

In alphabetical order by author's last name:

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 
by Jesse Andrews [YA]

My husband and I read this book and watched the movie this year; both were fantastic and the movie stayed very true to the book. I don't often laugh out loud when I'm reading, but this one totally had me laughing. It doesn't seem like a topic that would be funny - and the topic itself is not - but the voice is so authentic, refusing to shy away from teenage emotion and awkwardness, and the teenage boy narrater is often funny in an attempt to deal with the tragedy of a cancer-stricken friend.

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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking 
by Susan Cain [Non-fiction]

This was a really interesting read, not least because I am incredibly introverted (as are most of my family, friends, and people I know and love). I especially appreciated Cain's acknowledgment that modern America is made for extroverts, and that being introverted can often be difficult and harrowing - in relationships, in business, in careers, in society - not because it reflects a deficiency in character but only because our society values extroversion more. Indeed, introverts have a lot to offer, and this book makes the case for why.

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My Education 
by Susan Choi [Fiction]

Here's the review of this book I wrote for Goodreads:

I loved this book. I didn't always love it when I was in the thick of it, and it wasn't an particularly fast or easy read, but both the language and the story itself have stayed with me long since returning it to the library - indeed, my ability to identify and sympathize with the protagonist, Regina, seems only to increase with added distance. She represents all young intellectuals, all self-assured college students, all those who have felt passionate about something or someone, all those who've fallen in love. The basic plot of the novel is a common one - Regina has fallen for a married professor, and soon the two embark on a lustful, life-changing affair. What's new is (view spoiler) Now, as for the writing itself - My first clue that I might simultaneously love and ridicule the prose came upon reading this beautiful and accurate blurb on the back cover: "She (Choi) has written lines that could be framed and displayed at a sentence festival." As expected, the language often walked a fine line between lovely linguistic calisthenics and ostentatious rhetoric. I especially laughed at the odd, formal descriptions of graphic sex scenes - but then when I read aloud some choice paragraphs to my husband to share its absurdity, I found myself defending her pretentious prose. "It makes sense, though," I said, suddenly believing every word, "because of who the characters are. They're professors and English majors." Regina is twenty-one, barely out of adolescence, yet desperate to be seen as older and wiser; of course she's going to adopt an attitude of self-righteousness, of course she's going to choose flowery narration in a misguided attempt to project worldliness. As soon as I interpreted the language through that lens - that it was the language of the character(s), not necessarily Choi herself, I loved it all. So what if there were days when I didn't read a word because I wasn't in the right mind set, wasn't awake enough or engaged enough to adequately slog through the page-long paragraphs? It was brilliant. Let it take readers longer to read. I didn't mind.

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The Circle 
by Dave Eggers [Dystopian/Satire]

This book was satire at its finest. If you think any part of our contemporary social-media-loving, surveillance-accepting, terms-and-conditions-ignoring, "like"-obsessed world is amusing, absurd, or potentially dangerous, this book is for you. It isn't hard to imagine Eggers's America, because we're practically already living it. Are there any downsides to a lack of privacy? Will social media go to far? Are people entitled to know everything? 

What I thought was most interesting, actually, is that a "lack of privacy" is really nothing new - it's just compounded by the Internet, making even privileged people feel its effects. I feel like women, and people of color, and other minorities or disadvantaged groups throughout history often are refused privacy because people with privilege feel entitled to taking it. How many pregnant women have been asked by a stranger how far along she is, what the baby's gender is, if the stranger can touch her stomach? How many black people with natural hair have had their hair touched by strangers without even asking for permission, just because white people are amused by their "exoticness" and want to fetishize it? How many people with visible physical handicaps or birthmarks or skin conditions have been asked "what happened?" How many transgender individuals have been asked what genitals they have or don't have? How many gay people have been asked how they have sex, and what position they use, and "who wears the pants" in their relationship? How many women accusing a man of rape have been questioned about their own sexual history, and what clothes they were wearing, and how much they'd had to drink? How many women are asked if they have children or are planning to have children soon or how they balance families and careers? 

Sure, some of those questions might fall into the category of "small talk" - but the fact is that for oppressed groups of people, "small talk" is often more intrusive than it is for privileged groups. Perhaps the better question is - how many white cisgendered heterosexual men have been asked such questions or similar ones? The answer is - not many, at least not until the Internet and social media became what it is. The Internet is "the Great Equalizer" because it gives everyone the same access to information and communication (assuming one has the Internet connection) regardless of location, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so many other factors. But with that, more and more people feel entitled to all of that information, from anyone they might connect with. When we're all equal (or more equal anyway - let's not pretend Internet bullying doesn't happen), we all start to demand transparency from everyone, and not just the underprivileged. 

This book is sort of a case-study for what might happen if everyone (white cisgendered heterosexual men included) were treated as if their lives were available for monetizing, objectifying, and reclaiming by strangers and cooperations. Guess what happens? Some people put up with it and try to adapt; some make it work to their advantage as best as possible; and some fucking hate it - especially the white cisgendered heterosexual men unused to such treatment. (I'm thinking of one character in particular, who would rather commit suicide than be forced to adopt the social media platforms in this book.) A fascinating read, to be sure.

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Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear 
by Elizabeth Gilbert [Non-fiction/Advice]

There is so much I could say about this book. In fact, if I have the time some day I plan to write a longer post about this book specifically - so I won't get into all of the goodies it has now. Suffice it to say, if you ever find yourself struggling with following a passion, investing in a hobby, indulging your creativity, or taking on a big project that you're excited about but anxious about attempt, you'll find some good advice in this book.

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The Girl on the Train 
by Paula Hawkins [Psychological Thriller]

The review I posted on Goodreads:

"The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps."

"You can't step directly into a cold shower of water, it's too shocking, too brutal, but if you get there gradually, you hardly notice it; it's like boiling a frog in reverse."

Told from the point of view of three women - Rachel, the scorned ex-wife; Anna, the new wife; and Megan, the neighbor - "The Girl on the Train" raises familiar questions about the lives we live behind closed doors and the destructiveness of secrets. Rachel rides the train past her old house every day - the house where her husband now lives with his new wife and their child. She doesn't look at her old house; instead, she focuses all her attention on Megan, whom she imagines is named "Jess," and the seemingly loving relationship she has with the man Rachel silently names "Jason," because she wants what they have.

Of course, as readers we know that not all is what it seems. We see each of these women struggling with their lives and flailing in their relationships - some more than others. And then Megan goes missing, her face shown on every television set, her name in every newspaper. Rachel wants to figure out what happened, but she doesn't know who she can turn to, who she can trust. She's not even sure if she can trust herself. As readers, we are caught up in the same mystery, reading the different women's points of view for hints of the truth - the real truth - underneath their lies and secrets and doubts. 

I don't often read "psychological thrillers" - or thrillers of any kind, really - so my endorsement might not mean much to true connoisseurs of the genre, but I present it here nonetheless. "The Girl on the Train" has everything you would expect from this type of book - intrigue, mystery, misdirection, characters that are simultaneously sympathetic and distasteful, and a fast-paced plot that keeps you turning the pages - and it does all of these things very well. I particularly liked the complex character of Rachel, a struggling depressive alcoholic who wants exactly what all of us want in life - to love and be loved in return, and to have a secure home and family.

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When We Wake & While We Run 
by Karen Healey [YA, Dystopian]

These books have diversity, and the second book was even better than the first. I expected to relate most to Tegan (the white Australian female), but often found myself drawn to the staunch atheism, insightful mind, and deep empathy of Abdi (the African male). The first book is Tegan's POV; the second one is Abdi's. Watching Abdi's reaction to Tegan being appropriated for the mouthpiece of a rebel group was like getting to see The Hunger Game's Mockingjay installment from Peeta's POV - except that Katniss disagrees with how she is being used in The Hunger Games but lets them get away with it, and Tegan doesn't let anybody push her around. There is also a rape story line in the second book that was NOT used as a ploy to develop the female character, which was an interesting subversion of how it's typically utilized. 

The general premise is a little out there (like any dystopian book), but the character's dialogue and reactions felt very authentic. I liked that they cared about religion and had existential discussions/arguments with each other, and weren't just stuck in love triangles and doing their makeup and other typical "teenage" fare. Kids are people too, and they're just as prone to existential crises as the rest of us.

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The Buried Giant 
by Kazuo Ishiguro [Adult Fairy Tale]

My Goodreads review of this book:

I am frankly astonished that this doesn't have more 5-star ratings on here. This story captivated me. The plot was entertaining, the characters a pleasant band of familiar fairy tale stereotypes, and the premise thought-provoking. I finished this book at midnight - and I was still wide awake at 1:30 AM, internally debating profound questions.

- Can true love only exist long-term when couples learn to forget past quarrels? Or is a relationship without a remembered, shared past inherently dishonest and not "real" love at all?

- Are there times when memories are better forgotten?

- Is peace won by magical trickery and deceit unstable, undeserved, and intrinsically temporary? (Do the ends justify the means?)

- How do we rationalize hating an entire race of people even while acknowledging exceptions in those we've come to intimately know as friends, even while acknowledging that every race has blameless innocents?

- Is it possible to completely bridge the gap between those with different customs? Or do cultural differences and a history of antagonism prevent the possibility of harmony?

- Is vengeance ever an acceptable course of action, or is forgiveness always the better choice?

I was reminded at times of Harry Potter. (Just because something is in your head doesn't mean it's not real. It can be comforting to stay ignorant of the wrongs of the past or present, but near impossible to maintain this ignorance long-term and remain a good person. The world is not divided into good people and Death Eaters. Death is not something to be feared but something that welcomes us and reunites us with those we've already lost when it is our time to go.) 

It also reminded me of The Hunger Games. (Particularly Katniss's decision to reinstate the Games with the children of the Capital, to make the Capital atone for their mistakes, to perpetuate the cycle.)

(And I don't compare The Buried Giant to these two series lightly; they are perhaps my favorite two book series of all time.)

This might just be the best thing I've yet read in 2015; it's certainly a book I want to own, so that I can read it again and again.

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The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks 
by E. Lockhart [YA]

In this fun Young Adult novel, sixteen-year-old boarding school student Frankie is absolutely unwilling to act "appropriately" for her gender. She hates being excluded from her boyfriend's all-male secret society - especially when she knows she's smarter than any of them - and uses both her intellect/creativity and the boy's utter dismissal of her to her advantage to plan a series of pranks with socio-political commentary right under their noses.

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A Tale for the Time Being 
by Ruth Ozeki [Historical Fiction/Contemporary/Philosophical]

This book is about strong women spanning generations: an elderly Buddhist Japanese nun, her Japanese-American granddaughter Nao, and a Japanese-Canadian novelist named Ruth (very meta) who finds Nao's diary washed up on the shore of her Vancouver island residence and believes it's an artifact carried across the Pacific by the 2004 tsunami. But what really makes it feminist is the struggles Nao goes through at her Japanese high school, where she is mercilessly bullied.

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe 
by Benjamin Alire Saenz [YA]

From my Goodreads review:

What this book does well: - Demonstrates healthy family dynamics and stresses the importance of familial physical affection. (I still can't get over how Dante's father actually kissed his son's cheek on the regular. We need more dads like that in the world.) - Demonstrates how family and friends can help you figure out who you are/who you want to be. I feel like so many YA books, especially those that are LGBT, treat LGBT teens like they're in some kind of vacuum, where they have to figure out who they are (and who they are attracted to) and come to terms with it all on their own, or with their closest friend/significant other and that's it. This book, on the other hand, shows how family relationships can play an important and POSITIVE role in helping adolescents figure out who they are. It can be so hard to understand ourselves from the inside; getting outside perspectives from a strong support system is so crucial - both for adolescents AND adults. - Demonstrates how the real significance of discovering one's sexuality is not the "coming out" to OTHER PEOPLE but the "coming out" to YOURSELF. It's about being true to yourself and comfortable with yourself. If you have that, it doesn't matter if you're an outcast at school or in your family or wherever (well, it does matter, of course it matters, but it's easier, I think, to deal with if you know that this stage of your life is temporary and you'll have further chances in life to make meaningful connections and friendships with those who accept you). What I'm trying to say is that it's called SELF-discovery. And I think a lot of books either focus on that too much (and leave off the important relationships that the kid DOES have, like relationships with family and friends, as discussed above), or not focus on that ENOUGH, and make the story more about how the kid fits into his world, instead of how his world fits in with HIM. This book strikes the perfect balance between those two extremes, succeeding where many stories fall short. - Demonstrates how to be the best possible parent Seriously, I think every adult should read this book and strive to act like Aristotle's parents and Dante's parents. Dante's parents seem to be the "better" set - but perhaps only because Aristotle is our narrator, and so he can't see all of what goes on in Dante's home when he's not around. And any faults that Aristotle's parents have are mitigated by the fact that when they become aware of these faults, they do their darndest to try to CHANGE and grow as people. So many adults/parents forget to be open-minded, forget that all relationships are two-way streets, including those with their children. Of course parents influence children, actively molding them, trying to make them good people, good human beings. But kids do that, too, or try to, and parents should listen to their kids, should accept that their kid might have some useful opinions and advice of their own that could help the PARENT be a better person. - And it does all this with a genuine, heartfelt voice. I realize that a lot of the reasons that I loved this book are from an adult's perspective - and I guess that means I'm actually an adult now, if it's the parents I am most influenced by and enamored with and relate to, rather than the kids - but there is so much good that can be said about this book from a teenager's point of view, as well, I am sure. This book was recommended to me by a friend who is a high school teacher, and she knows teenagers who have read and loved this book just as much as I do (and she does). It's all about the voice. Aristotle's voice is, as I said, completely genuine. My heart broke for him when he was feeling down; my heart leapt for him when he was happy. He read like a genuine teenager struggling with life and love and self-discovery.

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Station Eleven 
by Emily St. John Mandel [Dystopian]

From my Goodreads review of this book:

There is a lot that could be said about this book. In this review, I will stick to how it made me feel, because that's what has stayed with me most in the week or so since I finished it. "Survival is insufficient." For a book about the end of the world, there's a lot of hope to be found in these pages. It's apparent right from the book flap description - in a world whose population is drastically reduced by pandemic and roving bands of murderers and looters, there are still those who devote their lives to art, to theatre, to music, to entertainment, and to the preservation of the best accomplishments of the human mind. It's a romantic notion not unlike that presented by Robin Williams in "Dead Poet's Society": "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." Because this is the crux of the book, it reads differently than most post-apocalyptic tales. I found that even in moments of true danger - moments of separation from the company of others, moments of attack, moments of near-death - I never felt afraid or upset or lost, for myself or for the characters I'd grown to know. I felt reassured. Not that everything would "work out" for our protagonist, or that everyone whose names we'd learned might survive, but that it wouldn't really matter one way or the other. Humanity would continue. Humanity would persevere. Shakespeare would be read or recited or heard; music would be played and appreciated. Life would go on. "Hell is the absence of the people you long for." In a world like the one portrayed in this book, everyone has lost someone. Everyone has been displaced from their families or their homes (or both) and has to make a new life. Some succeed where others do not, but an overwhelming majority of them at least try. Humanity is resilient. It does not give up easily. In part, this book is about the way humans fail each other; the way humans fall and break and die. But more than that, it's about the way humans survive and thrive, the way humans overcome adversity, the way we love and care for each other, the way we look fondly back on our past, and the way we hope, always hope, even in the bleakest circumstances, for a better future.

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Golden Boy 
by Abigail Tarttelin [YA]

From my Goodreads review:

Max is a fifteen (soon to be sixteen) year old intersex kid growing up in an English suburb. He has a penis and a vagina. He identifies as male. His parents (lawyers both, and a father who's considering running for political office) don't like to talk to him about his intersexuality. **Trigger Warning: This book has a very graphic, heartbreaking rape scene. (This is not a spoiler. It happens in the first twenty pages or so.) There is a lot of fallout from this sexual assault. Because Max doesn't know much about his body. Because he has so little experience with sex. Because he doesn't know what to think about it, and himself, in the aftermath. He has to make a lot of important, adult decisions (not least of which is: Do I report my rapist to the police even though he's a family friend?) that no kid (and hell, no adults) should have to make. This book is told from many different perspectives. Max was my favorite voice. Daniel, his ten-year-old brother, was another great one. There's also a doctor (whose sections allow for important expositions), a girl Max likes, Max's mother, and (only toward the end of the book,) Max's father. Seeing what his parents are thinking is crucial to our full understanding of Max, but his mother's voice also creates some of the most aggravating chapters in the book. Do I understand why she does what she does? Yes. Does that mean I can forgive her? Well... Maybe not. I've been reading a lot of GREAT books recently, but this one stands out even among these great books as my current 2015 frontrunner. Here's why: First of all, I think the subject matter is Very Important. (Think Middlesex but more personal and less "sweeping family epic." Instead of decades upon decades of story to mine, there's just a single school year of Max's life.) There should be more books that raise these kinds of questions about identity and gender and trauma and love and society. Secondly, it made me sob. It reminded me of The Language of Flowers in this regard; both books have some beautiful, real moments about families and the way they communicate with each other and love each other that broke me (in the best way). There's a quote on the book jacket that describes this as a "read in one sitting" book. This is a lie. If you are anything like me, it is actually a book that you pick up and read in several smaller spurts. I did finish it in 24 hours. But I took breaks. I slept. I ate. I stepped away from it for an hour or two or three. I couldn't stay away long - the story haunted me until I picked the book up again - but I did need those breaks as I read, because it was too much to read straight through without taking the time to process, to distance myself, to breathe, and yes, to cry. I don't care who you are and what you normally like to read - if you're looking for your next book, pick this one. It's important.

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All My Puny Sorrows 
by Miriam Toews [Fiction]

From my Goodreads review:

"She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other."

This book is about sisters. The older one, a well-known concert pianist with a loving husband, is trapped in a cycle of failed suicide attempts. The younger one, a struggling author with two children from two different divorces, doesn't understand how the sister with the seemingly-perfect, easy life could be so intent to end it. And so begins this important book - a book that doesn't shy away from difficult questions, a book that proves mental illness can't be cured from will alone, a book that proves depression doesn't discriminate between the beautiful and plain, the talented and mediocre, the well-loved and the abandoned. 

The way it's written is almost as important as the subject matter. Like Etta and Otto and Russell and James (which is also from this year and also Canadian), the lack of quotation marks gives it a sort of lyrical, "stream of consciousness" feel and equalizes the dialogue and inner thoughts and action so that every part of the story is treated with the same weight and respect. Furthermore, for a book about a suicidal sister, there's a surprising amount of humor, of life in these pages. Life goes on, even around tragedies and heartbreak. 

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Dietland 
by Sarai Walker [Satire, Revenge Fantasy]

Plum Kettle has always believed her weight is an abomination - until she meets an underground community of women who live life on their own terms, and realizes she's been living the life others expect of her. Meanwhile, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" is terrorizing a world that mistreats women, slicing this fast-paced and often funny satire with delicious moments of revenge fantasy.

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My Sunshine Away 
by M.O. Walsh [Fiction]

From my Goodreads review:

I was concerned (both before starting this book, knowing what it was about, and while actually reading, worrying where it was going to go, worrying what we might find out about our narrator in the end) that this topic might be dealt with too insensitively or problematically. I was worried that a male author using a male narrator (a grown man, looking back on his years as a preteen/teen growing up in Louisiana) would not be able to discuss the rape of a teenage girl (the narrator's neighbor and childhood crush) without pissing me off. I am pleased to say that I needn't have worried. 

The rape was NOT used to sexualize violent sex or to simply give the female character flaws or an emotion-wrought backstory. She was a well-fleshed-out character despite (not because of) her rape; she was a person in the present, not just a woman with a trauma in her past. Furthermore, it was clear that the greatest suspects in the crime (for most of the book addresses the neighborhood trying to figure out who her rapist was, even as the girl herself tried to put it all behind her) were men who had forgotten how to be people in their desperation to be men, to fulfill the gender role they had been assigned, to use their privilege and power to manipulate and frighten - and maybe even attack - those with less privilege and power. That is to say, by showing just how many men living on their street could have feasibly committed the crime, the narrator (and author) demonstrates how much rape is perpetuated by our culture as a whole, how we are all - to different degrees, but all of us nonetheless - partly responsible, because this is a culture we have all created. There are those of us who see things or hear things but don't report what we've seen or heard; those of who don't even realize there was anything bad in what we'd seen or heard, because it's something that so many people do or say; those of us who believe our need to grieve the loss of innocence is more poignant than the girl's need to deal with the trauma in her own way, even if that means pretending that it never happened; those of us who gossip about rape victims, or blame them. Men are mostly the ones at fault here - in this book, and in the real world at large - partly just because they are the ones with the power, with the privilege, and so whatever they do, right or wrong, has greater consequence than what women do. But women aren't blameless either; there is woman-on-women hate and slut-shaming, and we perpetuate our own oppression. We see this in the book too, most notably when the rape survivor loses her popularity when the school finds out the truth.

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Looking forward to finding more great books to read in 2016! :) Bring on the New Year!