Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Father-Child Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Much like a month back when we looked at mother relationships for Mother's Day, now we're looking at father relationships for Father's Day. I broadened it out to general father-child relationships for this one because I immediately thought of books I wanted to include that had relationships with both genders as children. Some of these are good relationships, some bad, but all of them compelling (to me anyways). 

To Kill A Mockingbird: Can you make a list on this subject without highlighting Atticus and Scout? I haven't read Go Set a Watchman so I'm pretending it doesn't exist and that Atticus can go on being the A+ human I learned about in sophomore English.

The Descendants: I enjoyed the movie and decided to pick up the book, which I enjoyed even more. When his estranged wife ends up comatose after an accident, Matthew finds himself suddenly solely responsible for the two daughters he's been only partially involved with during their childhoods and the way the three begin to actually bond, with wariness and scars but also hope, is really lovely.

The Shining: The movie, while a favorite of mine, skimps on the complicated father-son dynamic between Jack and Danny. Raised by a brutal man, Jack struggles to bring up Danny with more tenderness without really knowing how to go about doing that, and his feelings about his alcoholism are much more explicitly tied to the injury he inflicted on his toddler in a drunken rage than they are in the movie.

The Cider House Rules: This is a surrogate rather than biological relationship, but the bond between Wilbur and Homer is beautifully drawn, and Homer's struggle to define himself against his paternal figure is one of the central narrative threads.

The Namesake: When an Indian immigrant to America names his son Gogol after his favorite author, it comes to symbolize all the conflicts and tension between a father and son who love each other but don't really understand each other.

The Other Boleyn Girl: A very different look at parenthood, Thomas Boleyn sees his daughters Mary and Anne as pawns in his power games rather than people with thoughts and feelings. Of the two, Anne takes most after his ruthlessness and we all know how things ended up for her.

Sabriel: The first book in this series focuses on the love between a father and his daughter, the titular heroine, whose search for him drives the action and leads her to her destiny.

A Feast For Crows: Tywin Lannister is a pretty awful parent to all of his children, really: marrying off Cersei to Drunken Lout Robert Baratheon despite her pleas to not, trying to manipulate son Jaime into giving up his chosen profession so he can come be the heir, and refusing to see that second son Tyrion is the smartest of all of his children. I picked this particular entry because the way Tywin goes out is AMAZING.

The Return of the King: Even though it's only a side story, Faramir's desire to prove himself to his father, and his father's idolization of the fallen Boromir and refusal to see the better man that Faramir is, is heartbreaking.

The Little House on the Prairie: Here's the thing about this whole series, really. Laura hero-worships the shit out of her dad, and so when you're reading them as a kid you just buy into that, but when you think about it as an adult, Pa was the WORST. Ma does like 1000% of the work and Pa gets all the glory and that is definitely a very real parental dynamic.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Father-Child Relationships In Books

Book 80: Lights Out In The Reptile House

"He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he'd been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him."

Rating: 4/10

Dates Read: August 20-22, 2016

Growing up, I loved dystopian stories. Nowadays, with the YA boom and the runaway popularity of The Hunger Games, you can't swing a stick without hitting a dystopian story written for teenagers. Back when I was that age, though, I lost myself in books like 1984 and A Brave New World. I still to this day reference 1984 what feels like at least once a month.

For the most part, though, the books I read focused on adults, even if they were on the younger end of adulthood. Childhood in a dystopian-esque environment wasn't really touched on in these classics of the genre, but Jim Shepard's Lights Out In The Reptile House puts young teenagers front and center. Set in an unnamed country, it's less of an active dystopia than a totalitarian state, but there are definite parallels with the world of 1984. There's a single Party that controls everything, there's a love story, there are sudden disappearances, there's a close relationship that springs up between the protagonist and a Party official. The protagonist in question is Karel Roeder, a shy loner who's about 14 or 15 years old. His mother has long since been gone, so he's being raised by his perpetually unemployed father. He works at the local zoo, at the reptile house, and nurses a desperate crush on his neighbor and classmate, Lina.

Karel wants nothing more than to be left alone, outside of politics and the machinations of the real world, to work with lizards and long for Lina. But the world won't let him be: his father disappears, he's there when a neighbor is dragged away by the secret police, both his crush and his boss at the reptile house are involved in the resistance, and then suddenly a mysterious party official, Kehr, takes over Karel's home. From there, it's a battle for Karel's metaphorical soul between Kehr and the resistance forces, and a destructive fire at the zoo pushes Karel towards his fate.

As difficult as I imagine it would be to exist as an adult in a highly-surveilled police state, I don't know that I'd ever thought of what it might be like to grow up like that. To know no other normal but the one where your neighbors or even your own family members vanish and don't return, where you're afraid almost in equal measure to inform or to not inform, knowing that if it were to be known that you didn't inform when you should have, there could be consequences for you and your loved ones. It's not hard to imagine that it would create teenagers like Karel, who keep their heads down and try to escape unnoticed. But it's also understandable that it would create teenagers like Lina, whose natural rebellious instinct and high spirits draw her inexorably towards the resistance movement. And who is right? Is it better to keep to yourself and try to stay safe or to fight back, potentially risking the lives of your loved ones as well as your own?

Despite the interesting thoughts and questions the book raises, though, it ultimately just wasn't anything special in and of itself. The prose and characterizations were adequate but nothing more than that, and the plot moved in fits and starts, with long periods of time waiting for something to happen, and then it would pick up, and then slow back down. This may apply especially for the squeamish, like me, but the graphic depiction of torture, especially at the end, was just stomach-turning. I didn't particularly enjoy the experience of reading it, and although I think it's supposed to be pitched to the YA market, I wouldn't recommend it to a teenager, either. Just not worth the time. Read 1984 instead.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your most-referenced book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Name of the Rose

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Book 80: Lights Out In The Reptile House

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Non-Fiction Books That I've Recently Added To My TBR List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're looking at books in a particular genre we've recently added to our TBR. Since I read fairly widely across genres, the best one I could think of to highlight is non-fiction, which I love. 




Prince Charles: The first of many "British royalty" titles in my list. I've actually gotten more and more interested in Charles, who will have to be one of the oldest guys ever to inherit the throne when he does, right? He's spent his whole life in waiting to be king.

Hitler Ascent: WWII, on the other hand, is not one of my preferred reading topics. It's just never especially drawn me in. But in an age of creeping authoritarianism, the life of one of the most ruthless dictators to ever come to power is something I find myself wanting to explore.

The King Who Had To Go: I wrote about this one last week because it's both a recent addition and coming out later this year! It's about the British abdication crisis in the early 20th century.

Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud: Ann Helen Peterson's work for Buzzfeed is amazing (as is her TinyLetter), so I can't wait to read her book about being a woman.

The Hospital Always Wins: This is a memoir from a man who developed mental illness and was committed to a mental institution, and then tried to get out. The way civil commitment works (and just as often, doesn't work) is totally fascinating as an intersection of law and psychology.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes: As a native Michigander, I love the Great Lakes with my whole heart. It's 1/5th of the fresh water in the entire world, so we should ALL love the Great Lakes. They're a delicate and vital ecosystem and need to be protected.

A Magnificent Obsession: More British royalty! This about the love affair between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and how she and the country were impacted by his death.

Word By Word: I'm an avowed word nerd...I love language, and dictionaries are fascinating. We treat them as gatekeepers and guardians of purity, but they're not really meant to be that at all. They're meant to be reflections of language as it is used, so this look inside how a dictionary functions looks amazing.

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: Analyzing data is a powerful tool, but I think sometimes gets treated too much like it's infallible. Data can be and often is manipulated to support predetermined conclusions (pay attention to the research methods portion of any study you read!). That being said, it can do some neat tricks, so this analytics take on literature sounds super interesting.

White Trash: Back into the Serious category, America prides itself on being a country of easy social movement (as opposed to the hereditary aristocracy of the Old World). But social class has a great deal of power and resonance here as well, even if we'd rather it didn't, and this book looks at how it's played out since the US started to exist.

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Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Non-Fiction Books That I've Recently Added To My TBR List

Book 79: Will Bill Donovan

 "Colorful stories about 'Wild Bill' became chitchat fare at Washington parties. To show off what his unit could do, he had agents steal secret documents from the office of an admiral he was having drinks with at one social event, then bring the papers to him to give them to the astounded officer before the party broke up."

Dates read: August 15-20, 2016

Rating: 3/10

One TV show I keep meaning to watch (but haven't gotten to yet) is The Americans. The story of Russian spies living undercover in the US during the days of the Cold War, it's supposed to be amazing. Spy stories have a natural appeal: the constant tension of trying to discover without being discovered is inherently compelling. Gadgets, cloak-and-dagger mechanations, disguises and false identities, double and triple crosses...it's ready made drama for screens big and small.

Reality, of course, is always less glamorous, and Douglas C. Waller's Wild Bill Donovan tells the story of America's first real spymaster. Bill Donovan headed up the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor body for the Central Intelligence Agency. The book bills itself as a biography, but that's not strictly true...it's as much a story about the OSS as it is about Donovan himself. A Medal of Honor and Purple Heart winner for his military service in World War I, the Republican Donovan was tapped by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Coordinator Of Information in the buildup to World War II to make sure that the various military intelligence services and the FBI were sharing information. Eventually Donovan expanded that role into his own agency, the OSS, that engaged in espionage and spy missions across Europe and Asia during the war years. It was briefly shuttered after the war, but a proposal Donovan had made beforehand to keep it running afterwards as the Cold War loomed eventually resulted in the CIA, which Donovan (much to his displeasure) was not chosen to run.

As you can tell by the low rating, I had significant issues with the book. I'm not all that into spy stories on the page (although I do enjoy them on the screen), and a large portion of the book deals with the spy missions that made up the early days of the OSS. It recounts these missions in what I found to be tedious detail, including agents and their code names and intricate ins-and-outs of how specific missions played out without there ever being much payoff for that kind of information dump. What I was interested in reading was a biography of a person, which only showed up at the beginning and the end. We get through Donovan's first 50 or so years (including a pretty scandalous social life that saw him marry a socialite above his class only to be relentlessly unfaithful...so much so he was accused of having an affair with his own daughter in law!) in about 60 pages. There are some intriguing tidbits about his longtime feud with J. Edgar Hoover, but it's never developed. Then there's the endless boring espionage stuff, and finally we get more insight into Donovan's actual life after the OSS is disbanded, which focused mainly on a final diplomatic posting and then decline into dementia. Through it all, I never got a sense of an actual person. He's constantly described as charismatic and dashing, and while there's definitely a sense of a dynamic person created, I don't feel like I know anything about who Bill Donovan was as a human being. If you have any interest in an actual biography of the man, this is a pass. If you're interested in espionage during World War II, though, you will probably enjoy this book more than I did.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite spy show or movie?

One year ago, I was reading: Spinster

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Book 79: Will Bill Donovan

A Month In The Life: May 2017

I had a good run there in the early part of session, but with the lengthening work days, my reading is starting to slow down (the first book listed below I mostly read last month but didn't finish until the first day of this one). I know most of the rest of y'all just enjoyed a nice Memorial Day long weekend, but with less than a week to go to wrap up the state's business for the next 18 months, there was no holiday here in Nevada's Legislative Building. Otherwise, we're in full glorious spring in northern Nevada and I'm looking forward to actually being able to enjoy being outdoors very soon.

In Books...

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: It's hard to evaluate this on its own merits because it's so deeply rooted in Dave Eggers' personal style of writing. If you're not into this ADHD-panic-attack kind of thing, you'll hate it. If you love it, you'll love it. For me, I'm okay with it in small doses but 400 pages was A LOT. 
• The Highest Tide: This coming-of-age story about an undersized 13 year-old boy, obsessed with the ocean, whose small seaside town starts seeing a lot of unusual marine life the summer before he goes to high school, was the book club pick for the month. It didn't do much for me, unfortunately. I got where it was trying to go, but I thought it tried to pack too many plotlines into 250 pages and ended up underdeveloping all of them.
• Friday Night Lights: I loved the TV show, but hadn't ever read the book. It wasn't the same, obviously, but it was a well-told tale of not just a football season, but the context around it in a hardscrabble oil town in the late 80s. 
• The Skies Belong To Us: I'd had no idea at all that during the 60s and early 70s, there were a TON of airplane hijackings, nearly all of which were resolved with no harm to the occupants of the planes in questions. This book talks about the broader trend, as well as a specific hijacking by an American couple who took the plane to Algeria, and it's incredibly interesting.
• If We Were Villains: This book is good, but suffers for being clearly inspired heavily by The Secret History. If you're going to go into extremely similar territory to a beloved novel, you better make sure you're doing it as well or better. And while it's enjoyable, it's not as good, so the inevitable comparison isn't especially flattering to this new release. 
• Migraine: I've had migraines since I started taking birth control in college, and have struggled to control them ever since (I've gotten a pretty good method down for now). So of course I'd read a book by one of my favorite authors focused solely on migraines! This text is definitely science-heavy, but if you're interested in this malady that's plagued people for thousands of years and which we still don't completely understand, it's fascinating reading. 
• The Panopticon: Not all books focused on a teenager protagonist are YA books, and this one illustrates that perfectly. The young protagonist of Jenni Fagan's debut fights, steals, screws, and does a ton of drugs. But over the course of the book, you come to feel for the life that made Anais that way and there's a hopeful ending even though the rest of the book is pretty bleak. 

In Life...

• Still in session, but in the home stretch! We're due to adjourn sine die on June 5, so less than a week and it will be none too soon. I can't even tell you how much I am looking forward to sleeping in later and walking to work and seeing my dog at lunchtime and getting off at 5 at night. Oh my god it's going to be amazing.

One Thing:

• Bryan Fuller, with his sense of visual storytelling, was the perfect person to take on Neil Gaiman's American Gods as a television show. Combine that rich symbolism with some incredible casting (Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday alone is fantastic) and it's something I'm eagerly looking forward to every Sunday!

Gratuitous Pug Picture: 

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A Month In The Life: May 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books For The Second Half of 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're looking at books coming out in the back half of 2017 that we're looking forward to. I know I've mentioned this before, but I'm not a big "looking forward" reader and don't pay an especially amount of attention to new releases. So these ones tend to be a little hard for me. But here are ten books coming out later this year that I really want to read.

The King Who Had To Go: I love the British royal family and all of their drama and the abdication crisis is really the height of that kind of upper class drama so I am HERE for a book about it. 

Our Little Racket: I always wonder how much the families (especially the spouses) of white-collar criminals actually know. This novel explores the impact of a Bernie Madoff-type's downfall on his family and it seems like something I'd just love.

Heather The Totality: This was on my most-anticipated-of-the-year list, because it's the guy who made Mad Men a thing and I loved Mad Men and I will read whatever he writes. 

See What I Have Done: Lizzie Borden was tried (and acquitted, although practically no one remembers that) of the brutal axe murders of her parents, and this book looks to tell her story.

Sing, Unburied, Sing: My three years in the South left me with an enduring fascination for a part of the country to which I have not returned since I graduated from law school. This tells the story of a black family in Mississippi and I really want to read Jesmyn Ward, I've heard such great things.

Shadow of the Lions: Twisty boarding school novels are like catnip for me (probably because I went to a deeply boring public school).

Worth Dying For: I'm always interested in the symbols humans adopt and cling to, and this nonfiction looks at a symbol loaded with meaning: flags.

The Goddesses: Intense female friendships are another insta-read category, and this seems Single White Female-y in a delightfully dark way. 

The River of Consciousness: Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite authors, and this is a book he was working on when he passed and I want to read some of the last words he left behind.

Hunger: I've got Bad Feminist on my shelf but haven't read it yet. Nevertheless, I've heard great things about Roxane Gay's writing (and she's an A+ Twitter follow, if you haven't already). This memoir about her relationship with her body has gotten amazing reviews so far. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books For The Second Half of 2017

Book 78: A Passage To India

 
"He longed for the good old days, when an Englishman could satisfy his own honor and no questions asked afterwards. Poor young Heaslop had taken a step in this direction, by refusing bail. but the Collector couldn't feel this was wise of poor young Heaslop. Not only would the Nawab Bahadur and other be angry, but the Government of India itself also watches- and behind it is that caucus of cranks and cravens, the British Parliament. He had constantly to remind himself that, in the eyes of the law, Aziz was not yet guilty, and the effort fatigued him."

Read: August 12-15, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: Time All-Time 100 Novels, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When I was in law school, I had a part-time job manning the circulation desk at the law library. I mostly worked evenings and weekends, which was great since it was almost always slow and I got a lot of homework done. Often the library would have been empty for hours by the time we closed up and I needed to go around and turn off all the lights and make sure everyone was out. There was always something unnerving about the library then...it was so quiet and still, and sometimes my imagination would get the better of me. I'd reach down to pick something up that had fallen from the shelf and be sure that I felt someone's eyes on my back as I rose. Or I'd swear I'd seen movement out of the corner of my eye. There was never anything there, of course, but imagination running wild can be a powerful thing.

It's just that, the power of the imagination to create an experience in the mind that may or may not have actually happened, that drives the central conflict in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Plain young schoolmistress Adela Quested ventures to India with her friend, Mrs. Moore, to possibly arrange an engagement to Mrs. Moore's son Ronny, a small-town official in the British administration. While there, Mrs. Moore comes across a young widowed Indian Muslim, Dr. Aziz, in a mosque and they strike up a quick and easy friendship. When she and Adela express a desire to the "the real India", Aziz arranges a trip for them to see some caves outside of town. The trip is supposed to be joined by a British school principal, Cyril Fielding (one of the few unprejudiced members of the white community and a friend of Aziz's), but he misses the train and Aziz takes the women out with just a few servants and a guide to accompany them. In the first cave, Mrs. Moore is shaken by the experience of the echo inside and opts out of further exploration. Aziz and Quested proceed, but become separated, each in a different cave. Aziz frantically searches for her, but emerges only to find that she's running away and getting in a car, going back to the city. When he arrives back in the city himself, he's arrested for assaulting her in the cave.

Since we see the story from his point of view during that section of the novel, we know he didn't touch her. He couldn't even find her! But what did happen in that cave that scared her so badly? And will he be convicted even though he's innocent? The Anglo-Indians, as the British administration expats refer to themselves, are deeply racist, and there's a great deal of consternation that there needs to be a trial at all. The incident stirs up a lot of enmity on the parts of both the British and the Indians, who come together despite their own religious divisions to support Aziz. The only Briton that supports Aziz is Fielding.

Racial divides and the inherent injustices of colonialism are the main themes, and there's nothing really new or interesting in how Forster presents them. In 1924, when the book was published, it was possibly pretty progressive (for context, the British didn't leave India until 1949), but in 2017, it's not going anywhere unexpected. What I found to be the most interesting angle on it from today's perspective is the relationship between Aziz and Fielding. It raises the question of what it means to be a good ally to an underprivileged group, and if there can ever be real friendship between people society holds as unequal. The book posits that as much as they like each other, the answer is ultimately no. Fielding stands by Aziz during the trial, but then seeks to keep him from suing for recompense from Quested...recompense he deserves, but will ruin her. Even though he's presented to us as a fair-minded and fundamentally decent person, Fielding can't help but let his own perspective as a member of the privileged group drive his thinking, and that undermines his ability to really understand where Aziz is coming from.

Honestly, though, I didn't find much to like here. Coming at it from the world of now, the themes are tired and have been done before and better. Forster doesn't have especially lovely prose, nor does he create particularly well-drawn or resonant characters. In its time, it was a major work, but I didn't find anything all that compelling about it. I read it really quickly not because I liked it, but because I wanted to get through it and go on to something more interesting.

Tell me, blog friends...what "groundbreaking" books don't hold up for you?

One year ago, I was reading: Devil in the White City

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Book 78: A Passage To India