Books 4 and 5

Book 4: The Giver by Lois Lowry : I've read The Giver before, but not since...sometime in college maybe? I can't remember. I read it again because Ari's reading it right now. Apparently, I've decided to count such books in the Lots Of Books project; I can't remember if I'd already decided that before. But it seems only fair, since I need to read the books anyway, and it takes time that I could be spending doing other reading. Also, it's not like there's a prize. Maybe I should give myself a prize if I hit, say, 50 books. Maybe a Nook color! Anyway. The Giver was a very quick, enjoyable read. Ari's liking it a lot so far, and I think it's a great introduction to Fahrenheit 451/1984-esque themes for the younger set. It was interesting reading it immediately after the North Korea book. While I was reading it, I was really looking forward to revisiting the chapter on it in Deconstructing Penguins. I remembered that DP pretty much trashed it, but I couldn't remember why (and when I was reading DP a couple of years ago, I couldn't remember The Giver well enough to tell whether I agreed with them or not). So I finished The Giver and immediately turned to DP....and had my opinion that the authors of DP are often full of crap reconfirmed. I won't get into it in much detail here, since it would take forever and be a spoiler-rama, but they basically argue that Lowry plays dirty pool--that her story lacks logical consistency and falls apart under scrutiny. But I think it's actually their critique that falls apart under scrutiny. One example that I don't think will give anything away: a very big part of their argument is that people don't lie unless they know they've done something wrong. And this simply isn't true. Again with the North Korea parallels....I could immediately call to mind several examples of people in a collectivist, totalitarian society lying because they firmly believe it's the right and necessary thing to do. I do think The Giver occasionally requires more suspension of disbelief than is easy to muster (at least for adult readers), but not to the fatal flaw levels the DP people claim.

Book 5: After This by Alice McDermott: I think the first Alice McDermott I read was Charming Billy, picked up at a thrift store somewhere. I was impressed, so I moved on to At Weddings and Wakes and liked it even better. I think all of McDermott's books are, to some degree or another, elegant meditations on the nature of mortality. The story follows the Keane family of Long Island from the late 40's when the parents marry through the 70's when the children are all more or less grown. It's more a series of vignettes than a continuous story--a child is born, there's a storm, a new church here, a wedding over here. The characters are relentlessly, aggressively ordinary--nothing remarkable, nothing to make you love them--and that's one of the things McDermott meditates on here: what is it that makes us reach out and forge connections? For the characters here at least, it is much more the need for connection itself than anything appealing or lovable about the person being reached out to. There's a lot more here--about the past and the future, about mothers and sons, about spirituality, about, as always, life and death. The prose is unfailingly lovely--this is one of the things I didn't like about listening to it as an audiobook--not being able to slow down and savor some of the sentences and passages.

Next up: I'm reading Gathering Blue, a not-quite a sequel, but a companion book, I guess, to The Giver. And I just put Ender's Game on my Nook. I'm going to read it and decide when and if to give it to Ari--probably not this year.