Books of a Feather: Smart Kids

Since it's been a while, and I have a fair amount of ground to cover, I came up with a snappy way to combine a couple of books, and resurrect an old feature at the same time.

During one of my February posts, I mentioned about all of the fabulous books I got from the library. Two in particular had similar themes: "The Selected Works of T.S Spivet" by Reif Larson and "Gifted" by Nikita Lalwani.

Both deal with smart children, and the tension between their intellect and natural inclinations. T.S. Spivet's particular gift is cartography. He makes maps of everything, not just physical surroundings, but relationships of things to each other and actions. Rumika Vasi's gift is mathematics.

The two couldn't have grown up in more different environments, though. Young T.S. Spivet is the child of oddball parents. His father is a literal cowboy, owner of a working ranch in Montana. His mother, Dr. Clair, is a biologist who has spent her life trying to find an elusive species. His father is rather disdainful of intellectual pursuits (specifically him), and his mother is too wrapped up in herself to pay too much attention to him. He's been more or less left to his own devices, and has had a secretly flourishing career illustrating things for various print media. He's stunned to learn that he's won a prestigious fellowship from the Smithsonian, and decides to stow away on a train to go accept it.

Rumika's story, by contrast, will probably make you want to throw things. The PC way to put it would be that it's a case of culture clash, when Indian natives try to translate their way of life to Wales and to the rearing of a genius daughter. The un-PC way to put it would be that Rumika is the child of an overbearing control freak father and a spineless, submissive mother, and a child you can't help but feel immensely sorry for throughout her tale. From the moment her gift is detected, Rumika's life is math, math, math. Her father makes her study in summer clothes with the windows open so she concentrates better, denies her all outlets and chances for a social life, and then packs her off to Oxford at an early age, with...rather predictable results.

Based on these two books, it seems that genius and a harmonious home life are not compatible. "Gifted" totally plays to all stereotypes about genius children, and quite a few about Indian families, too. "T.S. Spivet" is a lot less claustrophobic and rage-inducing, but his family still did not quite know how to cope with him. In fact, the two books are the two most common narratives of genius children: "T.S. Spivet" deals a lot with ostracism, how his gift alienated him from most people he knew and prevented him from forming many close relationships; while "Gifted" is about the pressures believed to be placed on these children from society and their families.

There's no doubt about it: "T.S. Spivet" is the more creative work, featuring many of his drawings and several twists and turns. "Gifted" has a lot less joy, a lot less character development, and is much more straightforward, and less fun to read. Rumika is alienated from her gift to the point where she doesn't even like math at all anymore and doesn't succeed at Oxford. T.S. loves his maps the way a musician loves her instrument or an artist delights in drawing. No one makes T.S. do anything.

But I wonder which is closer to the more common experience of a genius child. Are there other narratives out there besides Rumika's and T.S.'s? Do any grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults from households that could integrate them into normal family life and society? I don't know. But it makes me wonder now.

Animal story

If you've ever taken any sort of communications class, you've probably heard confirmation of something you've already observed for yourself: people love animals. Stick one in your commercial, or on the front page of your paper or magazine, and people will gravitate towards what you're offering.

It works on me, definitely. I'm a total animal person. My county has managed to reach zero-kill countywide, partially through satellite cat adoption centers at the local malls. I stop in every time I'm there. I have two cats. I know all of the neighborhood dogs and cats, sometimes better than I know their people.

And I like animal books, too. For today's post, I thought I'd compare a few that stand out in my mind.

"My Dog Skip" by Willie Morris is sort of the classic American animal tale. It concerns a pet, and follows the arc of the pet's life, complete with the very sad end inherent in all stories about a bond between a human and one of the small, furry creatures with the short natural lifespans.

It's a wonderful book, though. It explores very well the actual bond between Willie and Skip. Growing up in a large Southern town in the 1940s, Willie and Skip did most things together. Skip could, and did, play football and baseball. They had a gag where Skip would drive a car, with Willie operating the pedals and controlling the steering wheel from the floor. They had near misses and adventures. Skip was a part of the community. He was known by everyone and was a regular customer of the butcher, when Willie would send him for bologna with money under his collar.

A series of animal books that breaks out of that mold was written by James Herriott, Yorkshire country vet. He tended to not just dogs and cats, but horses, sheep, pigs, cows and anything else found on farms. His stories are also delightful. He told his tale over several volumes, which take their titles from different lines of a hymn: "All things bright and beautiful," "All creatures great and small," "All things wise and wonderful" and "The Lord God made them all."

These books can't help but explore small-town country life, and the various characters and idisyncrasies of the owners of the animals. Herriott can't help but laugh at himself, and many of the stories involve him facedown in the mud, chasing after recalcitrant patients, or tangled in the nightmare red tape of tuberculin testing. They also can't help but be hopeful. One of my favorite tales involved a man whose calves were dying of a common but fatal virus. Herriott said that he wanted to try something, that he'd read of this new drug that could do wonderous things, and persuaded the farmer to allow him to give it a go. He returned the next day to find the calves much on the mend. The whole lot of them were saved. And penicillin had come to the Dales.

A darker, much less happy book is titled "Zoo Story: LIfe in the Garden of Captives" by Thomas French. Covering the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida, it's an enthralling, depressing, fascinating read. French goes behind the scenes at the zoo, as they attempt an incredibly ambitious renovation featuring an elephant exhibit as its crown jewel. But as humans attempt to subvert nature, bad things inevitably happen.

It's upsetting for anyone who likes animals, or is even just concerned about the direction things are going in, to contemplate the "Fifth Extinction" that is currently underway. Animal species are disappearing at a tremendous clip as their habitat is gobbled up to make way for fields of corn and soy, coltan mines, and other such things. That topic is discussed extensively in the book. At the beginning of the book, he talks about an elephant refuge in Africa that actually succeeded too much. Elephants were happy there, and multiplied, and soon began to strip out all of the vegetation at such a clip that the park was becoming a barren wasteland. If some elephants weren't put down or moved or something, none of them could survive. As four of them are airlifted to Tampa and Lowry Park, French notes that humans are the only animal that can modify their environment more, and leaves us to chew on that.

What are some other thought-provoking or heart-warming animal books that you've read?

Books of a Feather: Forces of Darkness

I came up with this one late last night, and decided to look at several series of books, rather than individual books. Forces of darkness are primarily the provenance of fantasy. Realistic books contain nasty bosses, catty rivals, or heinous ex-boyfriends, but not any real evil, generally. So the books I picked to discuss are the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, the Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

The oldest of these is the Prydain books. Written in the 1970s and 1980s, these are the most like classic fantasy. They tell the story of Taran, an orphan raised by an enchanter whose main duties involve the care and feeding of an oracular pig. In the first book, his charge wanders off and he chases it away from the enchanter's farmstead, far into the woods...and smack into the crown prince of the realm. He is able to prove his worth to this man and assist him on his journey. As Taran matures, he grows into a worthy fighter and adventurer and is aided by the companions he meets in the first book. With the exception of the peripatetic, introspective Taran Wanderer, all of their adventures come in thwarting one man: Arawn Death-Lord, King of Annuvin, who seeks to destroy and conquer Prydain.

The Harry Potter plotline also, of course, is a coming-of-age story. But by the time it was published, readers liked to understand their evil a little better. The Prydain books belong to the protagonists, to Taran and Gwydion and all the friends they meet on their journeys. It's not until the very end of the final book that we come face-to-face with Arawn, and then he's killed almost immediately. In Harry Potter, evil gets a bit more of a backstory. Voldemort can be understood in ordinary psychological terms as a sociopath. Anyone who's ever watched one of those A&E specials on serial killers will recognize Voldemort's background: raised in a cold and stark environment, has an utter lack of empathy for others, sees his fellow humans as tools rather than people, conceals all of this with a smooth charming facade. It's easier to understand how he gained so many followers this way. Dumbledore himself explains that he attracted those with a bent towards cruelty who wanted new outlets as well as the weak who sought protection and glory that they were unable to get on their own.

What remains obscure is Voldemort's point of view. We know only that he disliked "mudbloods" and Muggles. His insistence on racial purity can't help but evoke Hitler to a modern reader, but it's absent the ideology. It's easy for the reader to understand the psychological reasons for supporting Voldemort, but harder to understand the intellectual reasons. The Death Eaters clearly had wonderful group cohesion, but the goal towards which they were working always remained somewhat murky in my mind.

His Dark Materials probably portrays the forces of darkness most realistically. They aren't united, for one thing: sometimes they work together, but they remain distinct entities with their own viewpoints. They're also composed, mostly, of ordinary people. They also believe that they're right, and carry out the most monstrous deeds convinced that it's a means to an end. The gruesome research of severing the bonds between human children and their "daemons" (an external part of themselves) was done to help people, much like experiments on lab rats, except in this case, they had no choice but to use humans, as no other creature has a daemon. The head of these experiments is also the protagonist's mother, and is one scary lady when we first meet her. But, surprisingly, she winds up repenting before the books are over. Lyra's father, on the other hand, seems at first a positive figure, but the pendulum swings several times before his own end.

Lloyd Alexander also plays somewhat with the idea of good and evil being inherent in everyone, particularly in the second book. This is probably the main flaw of the Harry Potter series, though. None of Harry's friends are seriously tempted in any way by the Death Eaters, nor do any of the Slytherins ever express so much as a glimmer of desire to support the Order of the Phoenix. My friend Sophie wondered why they didn't just lock up everyone who was sorted into Slytherin as a precaution and be done with it. The worst Harry ever faces is the transference of Voldemort's soul as a result of the curse that failed, but it never serves as any sort of temptation.

I think the closer definition of the forces of evil is part of a trend twoards greater realism in fantasy. Most of the popular recent fantasy books have been set in the modern era. The protagonists drive cars and watch television. In The Amulet of Samarkand, even the secrecy of magic was gone, so that being a magician was rather like being a plumber or a doctor. It's a fine line, for going too far with that will make the fantasy cease to be compelling. But perhaps modern readers want to see themselves in what they read, rather than getting swept away into another world.

Books of a Feather: Feline Friends

Well, I said I had today's topic worked out and this is it. I didn't want to do it yesterday, because I'd just done the "Books of a Feather", and it's not an interesting feature if I do it constantly, every day.

I have been a cat lover literally since I was old enough to understand what a cat was. My first cat friend lived across the street from me and used to climb on the garage roof to look at me in my crib. Neither of my parents had ever had cats growing up, or had been much interested in having them as adults, but I wanted one so badly they decided to try it out. I definitely converted them, and they still have two cats that they got after my sister and I moved out. My sister has three cats, and she even fosters cats. I have two cats (whom you can visit on their Catster pages).

So, I've always been attracted to books about cats. I have three great ones for today: Cat Stories, by James Herriott; The Cat Who'll Live Forever by Peter Gethers; and My Cat Spit McGee, by Willie Morris.

James Herriott wrote a wonderful series of books about his experiences as a veterinarian in rural England. He started in medicine around the 1930s or 1940s, and retired fifty years after. It was an exciting time in medicine, and probably one of the most moving of his stories was about his first experience of the miracle of the antibiotic drugs, which were still experimental when he decided to try them as a last-ditch effort to save a flock of cattle. Herriott worked primarily with large animals, but was sometimes charged with the care of domestic cats and dogs. Cat Stories culled the best of the cat-related tales from his books and placed them in one volume.

The other two books are more biographical. In fact, I purchased My Cat Spit McGee from the biography section. It tells the tale of Morris's conversion from a lifelong cat-hater to a devoted cat person, after he marries the Cat Woman. Spit McGee was the sole survivor of his litter, born to a young cat mother who couldn't take care of her kittens properly and hid them under the foundation of the house. Spit McGee enjoyed the freedom of an outdoor life in Alabama, although he had some dangerous adventures, including a run-in with a possum and a motorcycle. Spit has a variety of feline companions that cycle through the story, cat ownership being more fluid in Morris's neck of the woods than I'm used to, I guess.

The saddest of all is The Cat Who'll Live Forever. This is the conclusion of a trilogy of books about Norton, the globe-trotting Scottish Fold. As you may have guessed from the foreboding title, Norton does not, in fact, live forever. This is the story of Norton's long illness and Gethers's dedicated effort to care for him, and ultimately, to let him go. This is not as happy a book as the other two I'm highlighting today, but it's beautiful in its own way. Gethers's dedication to Norton's comfort and happiness is inspirational, and it will help any pet owner who has been through the sad process of saying goodbye. I used to post frequently on the Craigslist pet forum and often quoted the advice from Gethers' vet: that when it's time to put your pet to sleep, you'll know.

If you think about it objectively, pet ownership is a strange thing. It's weird to take an animal into your home, when one of the original purposes of homes was to keep animals out. If it's a cat, you've most likely got a box full of excrement and what's basically expensive sand, somewhere right inside. Yet you come to care for them, and love them, and they seemingly love you back, and devote themselves to you more than any person ever would (if you go outside to take out the garbage, is your spouse waiting at the door when you come back in? if you leave your living room and go into the computer room, would your spouse wake up from a dead sleep to follow you in there and go back to sleep by you?). They also seemingly have personalities as distinct as humans (more distinct than some of them). And yet, you know right from the beginning that the pet is not going to survive you and that heartbreak is implicit in the deal. Each of these three books answers, in their own way, the question of why people do it, and what they get back.

Books of a Feather: Workin' 9 to 5

I couldn't think of anything at all to write about today, and in the car on the way to Wendy's, I asked my boyfriend for a "Books of a Feather" theme. He had two awesome ones: books written in or about the 1920s or books about bunnies (actually, he said children's books, but I turned it into bunny books after he cited The Velveteen Rabbit and Watership Down.) Unfortunately, I couldn't think of books for either, not ones that I was familiar with enough to write about that way.

So I came home, and stared at my shelves. I remembered hearing that Studs Terkel had died last week, and I thought of the first book I'd ever read by him, Working. Then I knew I had my theme.

So, I'll start with that one. The premise of the book is exceedingly simple. In the 1970s, Terkel interviewed people who held a wide variety of jobs, and wrote down what they told him. In each case, he opened the dialogue by simply asking them to explain what they did, and how they got into it. He got some very surprising answers, and the book remains a favorite of mine because of that. He met a nurse's aide who hates people. He met a grocery store clerk who loved her job so much that she didn't even like to take vacation time, and a dentist who couldn't wait to retire. His interview with a model made it seem like the least glamorous job on the planet (taking public transportation while carrying half the clothes you own? Aw, fun!). His interview with an industrial spy made that job sound more intriguing and stimulating than James Bond's work (the man's profession was to pretend to be an ordinary employee at places that suspected worker theft). Many of the jobs don't even exist anymore, although not many of the ones who saw ahead to their own obsolescence (like the bathroom attendants).

The other two books I picked for this theme deal with the transient nature of work today. The Working Stiff's Manifesto is by Iain Levison, a former English major who had held over 30 jobs by the time he was in his late 20s. Levison's odyssey in this book takes him from a high-end grocery store in New York City, to a job with a friend driving a moving van, to several commercial fishing establishments in Alaska. Every job he holds is basically a shit job. He talks about running across a water-filtration scam, and the other, more subtle 'scams' that lie in wait within many legitimate jobs. For example, he gets fired from the fish market two days short of when his health insurance would have kicked in, for no reason that he can determine. He also gets conned into a managerial position at a chain restaurant, where he's immediately put on salary and required to work almost 80 hours a week, averaging out to less than minimum wage.

Bitter is the New Black, by Jennifer Lancaster, is not such a tale. Lancaster had a great job as a vice-president, and was well-paid, well-liked and well-respected. The bottom dropped out for her the week of September 11th. She lost her job at the worst possible time and had to scrape for another one. Despite being educated, skilled and connected, she actually never did find another job in her field, and became a writer instead. She, too, was the victim of a couple of scams. She was up for a position at a start-up, where they asked her to put together a sample business plan and sales presentation as part of her interview. She dutifully did her homework, and as she was presenting it to the panel that interviewed her, it began to dawn on her that something was wrong, that they were all a little too interested in what she had to say...and predictably, she never heard from them again.

The prime difference between the two authors is that Lancaster seems to have much more knowlege of the way the world works, and much more drive and ambition than Levison, who makes the same mistakes over and over again. Sometimes, you want to shake him and scream: "You accepted a job moving furniture up and down the stairs and you're surprised it's shitty? Really?" Lancaster's tale shows that office jobs are far from idyllic (she's employed for approximately 1/3 of the book), but cutting fish, gutting fish, and moving sofas are not what anyone's dreams are made of, really. But what prevents either story from being mere complaining is the humor.

This seems to be a universal among work tales. Most people feel that work is sort of funny. Terkel's book was full of people's strange and humorous tales from their jobs. People loved describing their craziest co-worker or their nuttiest customer to him. But the main thing I took from Terkel's book is that job satisfaction seems to depend more upon the individual than the job. I often think of that grocery store clerk. She sounded happiest of everyone in the book, and he interviewed Stanley Cup winners, doctors, lawyers, writers, all kinds of people you would expect loved their jobs. Levison's biggest problem, it seemed to me, was that he was a malcontent. He always wanted more, and there was no way for him to get it.

Lancaster, in contrast to him, had it all. Her life story was particularly galling to the reader, because she didn't so much blow it as she had it taken away from her. And then, she was down the rabbit hole. Her experience kept her from getting lower-end jobs. When she went on interviews, she was up against hundreds like herself. Her former connections didn't want anything to do with her because they were afraid of it happening to them. It was a mystifying case of a bad thing happening to someone who didn't deserve it, subtitles to the contrary.

Terkel's book is more hopeful than either Lancaster's or Levison's. Both of theirs showcase individual negative experiences in the workplace. But Terkel also shows you the deeply satisfied grocery store clerk, industrial spy, and piano tuner (that was a neat one too). He also talks about people who got out of bad situations (the newspaper saleswoman) or people who managed to make something out of a bad situation (the suitcase felter, who was also the union president and newsletter-writer and considered her suitcase factory co-workers as good as family). His book will leave you feeling much more hopeful than the other two. However, in fairness to them, their books are much funnier.

A New Feature: Books of a Feather: College

I've had this idea for a while now, but I've kind of been saving it for NaBloPoMo, when I'd really need it. The idea is that I take a theme (hopefully, ultimately one a reader suggest, but for now one I've just made up) and I talk about a bunch of books or short stories related to that theme.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, my first theme is "college". The three books I picked are My Name is Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe; Everything Looks Impressive by Hugh Kennedy; and The Secret History by Donna Tarrt.

All three depict real colleges, but only one comes out and says so. Everything Looks Impressive is set at Yale, and tells the story of Alex, a young man from a lower-middle-class family who is living his dream there on a scholarship. Yet, he finds it pretty socially challenging. His roommates (they stuck him in a suite) are not so much living a dream as fulfilling a destiny. Alex faces many embarrassing financial moments, where he's expected to return the expensive favors his roommates do for him ("Hey, it's nothing," they say after paying a $500 tab, "you can get it next time!"). He's not as hip and trendy as most of the other students, either. The only person he truly manages to connect with is Jill, a senior and feminist who flirts aggressively with him, yet has a female lover. When she dies in an ugly gay-bashing incident that Alex suspects his roommate my have participated in, it messes up his already fragile grip on the social scene at Yale.

The Secret History and Charlotte, on the other hand, go out of their way to disguise their true setting. Hampden College, of The Secret History, is obviously Bennington College, with its rural Vermont locale, its liberal arts curriculum and its hefty price tag. The true locale of Charlotte was a bit more difficult to pin down, but I believe it to be Duke University, strong on academics, athletics, and Greek life, and founded by an heiress just as Charlotte's Dupont is, although Dupont is somewhere in the Northeast.

Of the three books, Charlotte and Everything Looks Impressive are the most similar, dealing with the disillusionment of a bright but poor young student. Both, too, are as much a chronicle of the times as of the lives of the people in the story. Alex's tale was set and published in the late 1980s, and there are ample references to 80s music and fashion, to the drugs and cars popular at the time. Charlotte's tale came out in 2004 and the references are even more amped up. Diesel Jeans, in particular, got such freqent mention that it started to seem like product placement. There are also some references to academic fashion, and fashion of belief. For Alex, the arbiters of cool on the campus dress in all black and throw cross-dressing balls or declare their lives art projects and invite the whole campus to come spy on them. For Charlotte, the arbiters of cool are the ultra-liberal editors of the school paper, who draw cartoons they believe to be edgy and see themselves as the only ones there to learn.

The Secret History, on the other hand, places academics at the center of the novel (imagine that). Richard signs up for Greek on a whim, and becomes part of an elite classics clique, who take all of their coursework from the same professor and generally hold themselves aloof from the rest of Hampden College. It is their immersion in their academics that leads to the explosive events of the novel, as they attempt to hold a Greek bacchanal. The attempt leads ultimately to the group murdering one of their own, and getting away with it in only the legal sense. Of the three, it's the strangest and the best. The characters are the most vividly drawn, the moral dilemmas they face the most thought-provoking.

What I find striking about all three books, though, is that they're clearly not written for people who are in college. In fact, it seems that of all the demographic groups out there, only the elderly are more devoid of a genre aimed at them. There are lots of books for young children, intermediate-grade children, junior high and high school students. They pick back up in the "chick lit" aimed at women in their twenties and early thirties (although I'm sure women of all ages read them too). For men of that age, there is some "dude lit" out there, books full of very technical explanations of things blowing up. And of course, there's also the stuff a cut above that either gender could enjoy, that would carry you for most of your life.

But the college books seem to be more for people who are out of college. Charlotte, to me, was particularly laughable. She was absolutely shocked, SHOCKED that her fellow unmarried students were having sex and drinking. Even after seeing it happen in front of her, repeatedly, she was still shocked. Didn't this girl ever watch a movie, or see a magazine? It wore off, although I did feel he got some details right. I, too, had "friends" like Bettina and Mimi, where the "friendship" was essentially based on having met during orientation and not knowing anyone else. They fell apart pretty rapidly, though, whereas Charlotte kept hers through most of the book. Maybe my college was different, but I have no memory of any sort of elite group that everyone wanted to be in like there was at Dupont.

In fact, of the three books, none of them squares with my own experience. All three were based on freshman alienation. At my school, I didn't meet many people who had a hard time adjusting, and I didn't myself. I found the social groups to be pretty fluid, although there were definite cliques. And most of the people worked at their classes. It wasn't "uncool" to go to the library. If you had to study, you said so, unlike the frat boys and b-ballers in Charlotte, who had to lie. I guess in a weird way, excpet for the murder, The Secret History was the closest to what I experienced in college: a vibrant, fluid party scene (there were no "right ones" at my school, the right one was whichever one had the most beer and the best music); intense, tight-knit friendships (again, without the murder: I want to emphasize this), and thought-provoking classes that we worked hard at. But none of them really captured it, and would probably be laughed at by most people who were in college. I look forward to a college novel for college students. If anyone knows one, I'd like to hear about it.