18 - The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Random House, 2002
304 pages
Date completed: December 14, 2009


This was an interesting read! It was for my botany class last term, and I have to say I didn't mind reading it at all! Pollan's writing is engaging, and it's full of anecdotes as well as historical notes, so it doesn't get boring. It's actually great to know what exactly is going into certain foods.

For instance...ever hear of a NewLeaf potato? It's a genetically modified potato in which every single cell contains herbicidal DNA to combat a specific beetle. Therefore, the potatoes wouldn't need to be sprayed with herbicides. This potato was never tested by the FDA, nor was it labeled as a GMO so that the public could be aware of it. Luckily it was discontinued, because it literally wasn't even tested on lab rats or anything. Gross.

So there were a lot of useful things in this book, focusing on four different plants and how they correspond to human desires: apples/sweetness, tulips/beauty, marijuana/intoxication, and potatoes/control. Really interesting stuff.

17 - The Magician's Nephew

The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
HarperCollins, 1955
96 pages
Date completed: December 10, 2009

So the Narnia series always bored me to death in elementary school, which is when I should have been reading it. Around the holiday season in 2005 I found a collection of the entire Chronicles of Narnia on sale at the bookstore for about $10, so I bought it because I feel like these books are a staple I missed out on. In fourth grade, my teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud and I remember loving it, but then I read The Horse and His Boy and loathed it and could never even make it all the way through The Magician's Nephew or Prince Caspian.

Which brings me to 2009. The week before finals. Stressed as hell. But I need something to read before bed. So I look at my bookshelf, which is half full of school books and half full of more complicated/longer novels, and my eyes rest on The Chronicles of Narnia. Bingo. The stories are about 100 pages apiece, so I can easily read them in a night (or a night and 30 minutes of a morning, which is how I read The Magician's Nephew). Also, they don't require much thought.

So The Magician's Nephew was still a little hard to get into for me, but since every 10 pages I could be like "only 90 left, only 80 left, only 70 left" et cetera, it wasn't bad at all. And once I got farther into the story, I actually really liked it. Especially the part about Aslan creating Narnia, and the lamppost/toffee tree growing, and the description of the scenery while Digory and Polly were flying to the tree of life.

Religious allegory aside, I liked it. Religious allegory included, it was cool to relate aspects of the story to Biblical stories. Really really blatantly obvious connections to the Garden of Eden and Jesus and evil temptation, but it's a children's story so I'll let that slide.

I probably won't be blogging about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe unless my opinion of it drastically changes or something, since I've already read it. So you'll probably see me in a few days with The Horse and His Boy. Since the copy I just read is part of one giant book (pictured in the "currently reading" section), I've used an image of the copy of The Magician's Nephew I have at home and received as a child.

16 - Le Morte D'Arthur

Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
Oxford University Press, 1971
811 pages
Date completed: November 15, 2009

So I finished this a long time ago and just forgot to write it down! So technically I should have blogged about it a few weeks ago but oh well. Here we have Malory's Works, which is just a fancy name for Le Morte D'Arthur, which is all he wrote. It is comprised of the following books:

The Tale of King Arthur
The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself through Dignity of his Hands
A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake
The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney that was Called Bewmaynes
The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones and Iseult the Fair
The Tale of the Sankgreal (the Holy Grail)
The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur

I loved basically every minute of this hulking tale of adventure, knights errant, scandal, and, ultimately, destruction. Although some of the tournament and battle chapters were a little dull because they just describe who fought with who, even those weren't bad!

Having finished this entire work, I find it strange that King Arthur and the Round Table are so glorified everywhere. The first time I read some of the tales of King Arthur (in modern English, of course) was in third grade, because I was absolutely enthralled with the idea of Camelot already, at the age of eight! So somehow the legend of Arthur embeds itself into us at a very young age, and from then on (for me, at least), I romanticized the idea and thought Arthur was this great fictional king who did all sorts of amazing things.

In reality, there's a lot of seediness under the surface in Camelot. Right now I'm writing a paper about how withdrawn Arthur was from Britain throughout the last 650ish pages of the book, and how that caused the destruction of the Round Table. Because yes, my friends, the Round Table/Camelot/Arthur all meet their end in this book. It's prophecized by Merlin within the first 15 pages or so, so I don't think that spoils the book for anyone. But again, this is an idea that doesn't really come into pop culture along with the lauding. I think people need to know. Arthur was a great king at first, but he was never, ever the greatest. He was a great warrior and leader, but he was always overshadowed by his knights on the battlefield. He eventually stops taking part in domesticating the kingdom and exploring, preferring to let his knights do all the dirty work while he sits in Camelot on his ass.

Then there's the scandalous affair of Launcelot and Guinevere, the corruption of Gawain and his brothers, and the fact that basically none of the knights of the Round Table (barring Launcelot and a few others) really follow the code of chivalry that has been set before them.

So rather than this mythical, fantasy-esque book about magic and this amazing king and his amazing knights, the real Morte D'Arthur is even better! There is actual human vulnerability exposed all the time! There are conflicts that run much deeper than a clash of swords or lances. There are subplots full of treachery, love stories, kidnappings, the quest for the frickin Holy Grail (which is achieved by Galahad the Boring as well as Bors and Percival), and a ton of humor! Knights wearing dresses over their armor, Lady Hallews with her "poisoned lip gloss" (as my professor calls it), a song written by Dynaden about how crappy King Mark of Cornwall is (Mark = the king from the Tristram and Iseult story who is Tristram's uncle and Iseult's husband. He's probably the seediest, most disgusting character in the whole book), the time Launcelot is sleeping and a knight comes in thinking Launce is his paramour and starts making out with Launce...oh man. I could go on forever.

What I'm trying to say is that this story has it all. It was really written under the pretense of relaying a religious lesson, and in the last 7 pages or so everyone gives up the world and enters nunneries/monasteries and goes to heaven, but the book itself isn't like that at all. It's about the journey: adventurous, thrilling, funny, interesting, and full of characters who are dimensional, vulnerable, and likeable. It's literally a classic (hehe, from the fourteenth century), and reading it in the original early English was a real treat.

And so "he drewe his swerd Excalibur, but it was so bryght in his enemyes eyen that it gaf light lyke thirty torchys, and therwith he put hem on bak and slewe moche people." The epitome of medieval badass right there.

15 - Harry Potter Should Have Died

Harry Potter Should Have Died by Emerson Spartz and Ben Schoen
Ulysses Press, 2009
205 pages
Date completed: November 22, 2009


So someone got this for me as a fun thing, because I have been so into rereading Harry Potter this term (often foregoing sleep and homework to do so). And while it was definitely a fun and interesting little read, several things about it bothered me.

The format of the book was that it addressed specific questions about the series. Some were serious, some were funny. For example: "Which character is most surprising?" Underneath the question, different opinions were addressed in long format (possible choices: Barty Crouch, Jr., Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy, Narcissa Malfoy, Dudley Dursley) and at the end there was a verdict (Barty Crouch, Jr.).

So it seemed, like I said above, like a fun, light read for pure entertainment. For the most part, it fulfilled my expectations in that respect. However, a lot bothered me in terms of the book's approach to the arguments.

It was often hard for me to choose one argument over another because of the way the authors formulated the arguments. In almost every single instance, defending one opinion meant completely dissing and putting down the opposing opinion, which I totally disagree with! The point of these questions seemed to be that it was very difficult to choose between answers, and the authors often paid absolutely no respect to any other side of the argument in their defense of one side. This often resulted in sentences that made absolutely no sense and were completely incorrect.

One aspect that bothered me was probably when the authors discussed whether the Harry Potter books should be considered among the classics of literature. The opposing argument was ok (though I don't really buy the statement that "Harry is an orphan, which is a cliche of children's stories. That proves that there are no new plots in the world, but tugging at the heartstrings is a great way to sell books" (Spartz & Schoen, 2009). Uh, okay? So just because some books have orphans in them means that there is no originality in the rest of the book?). But the argument that said the HP books should be classics made me want to claw my eyes out. Instead of proving valid points, it went on for two and a half pages attempting to relate Harry Potter to any classic it could possibly think of. It's a coming-of-age story? Oh, so it MUST be just like Tom Sawyer and Anne of Green Gables! Tom Riddle was raised in an orphanage? Must be David Copperfield all over again! Snape somehow resembles The Little Prince?! Purebloods "arrange" marriages (though there is no evidence of this, just that they CHOOSE to marry into other pureblood families), so they must be like the families in Pride and Prejudice! Honestly? I mean, seriously? A classic doesn't become a classic because it has elements of other classics embedded within. And all of those things listed above could have been found in about a million other books that AREN'T "classics" as well.

As an avid HP fan, I really don't think this book did the issues within the series any justice. There were no gray areas; the authors merely tried to sort the issues into black and white, which is not always possible. It didn't work for them. I'm sure it would have satisfied little teeny-boppers who don't delve deeper into these issues, but I was a little disappointed. Yeah, it was ok. Yeah, it was pretty entertaining at times. No, I don't really think it was successful. Especially when the authors made the arguments sound like little kids on a playground. "You're wrong because I'm right!" "No, YOU'RE wrong!" Ugh.

14 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Vintage, 2003
226 pages
Date completed: November 21, 2009


So much of this book made me feel for the narrator. Christopher is an autistic boy who strikes out to write a mystery novel about a dog who was killed in his neighborhood. However, in the process, his world just becomes more and more complex and saddening; often Christopher himself finds it overwhelming.

This was such a good insight into the mind of an autistic child. When I did fieldwork in a first-grade classroom there was a child similar to Christopher, though obviously much younger. But that was another reason I felt drawn to the story.

At first, it took awhile for me to really get into this book. I thought the beginning was all right, but I wasn't captivated until a bit farther on, when the plot starts to pick up. Though Christopher's insights were truly interesting, I needed something else to keep me into it. But this is one of the few books that actually caused me to gasp out loud-- more than once!-- and also was one of the few lately that I got so lost in that I was honestly surprised to see that it two hours had passed by the time I finished it.

So overall...an insightful, captivating book that drew me in and became a very, very quick read. It probably took me three hours total. But like I said, it made me react physically, which I don't usually do. Occasionally I giggle at things in books, and I've cried once or twice, but I usually keep the story confined in my head and don't outwardly react. Read it.

13 - The Blithedale Romance

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Norton, 1978
418 pages (228)
Date completed: November 18, 2009


So this wasn't one of my favorite books, but it had its redeeming qualities. Basically my favorite part was that there's a very strong female character, Zenobia. Besides that...well, there's a lot that bothers me.

First of all, the narrator, Coverdale, is an absolute creeper. He practically wets himself at the opportunity to hide and observe other people. He has this special tree in the woods that he calls his "hermitage" and he hangs out in it and watches the other people who live on Blithedale farm, and they have no idea that he's watching. At another point, he hides in his hotel room and stares out the window at his friends in another room; then he hides behind a tree in the forest outside where other characters are having a bonfire so he can watch them. Creepiest of all, though, is when at one point he wishes he could just arrive at the farm unbeknownst to everyone else and watch them through the windows from outside.

So yeah. The narrator is, among other things, basically a sneaky stalker. He doesn't ever form real relationships with other characters because he's always judging them and imposing his own idea of their personality on them.

The other character who bothered me a great deal was Priscilla, Zenobia's long-lost sister who is always likened to a "leaf" or an "airy breeze" or something. Basically, she shows up at Blithedale and throws herself prostrate at her sister's feet, gazing up at her in admiration until it makes everyone else sick. She won't talk, she won't defend herself, she just worships everyone and acts like a little mouse. If she does anything at all, it's always something domestic-- particularly sitting off in a corner and making little purses. And of course, Coverdale the idiot makes stupid observations, the most insane being that he believes that Priscilla will grow up to be a fine young woman because she is so capable of sublimating herself. Uh, ack.

So there isn't much to redeem this novel for me...I think Hawthorne is mocking the idea of a bunch of upper-class people getting together and starting a utopian society for fun. It's impossible t0 be utopian--everyone on the farm is pushing his or her own agenda. Therefore it's satirizing the transcendentalist movement. Also, Zenobia is supposed to represent Margaret Fuller, which I thought was pretty cool. Fuller was also a strong female. Creepy though that Hawthorne has Zenobia meet the same watery end as Fuller did in real life.

Overall, I'm pretty glad to be done with this one.

12 - The Tales of Beedle the Bard

The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
Arthur A. Levine, 2008
111 pages
Date completed: November 17, 2009


I could hardly dislike anything from the Harry Potter series, so therefore, it's safe to assume that I enjoyed this little collection of wizarding tales. Much like fairy tales in the "Muggle" world, these stories are the ones told to children before bedtime in the wizarding world.

Because I just finished rereading the entire Harry Potter series, this was a great way to end it. One of these tales plays a huge role in Deathly Hallows, so it was nice to be able to reread it and also read commentary from the perspective of Albus Dumbledore.

It's kind of a sad moment for me, though. I am now completely done with the Harry Potter books, which I first started reading at the age of 11 (the very same age at which Harry Potter receives his letter from Hogwarts). It's been such an amazing experience growing up with Harry, and now I've finally closed the final final book. I never read Beedle when it was first published because I had already basically forgotten the plot of the Deathly Hallows by the time of Beedle's release, so I wanted to wait to reread it. So it's been sitting on my bookshelf for eleven lonely months, but at last it's finished. Not to be melodramatic. I'll never get too old for Harry Potter.

11 - Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Norton, 1982
171 pages

Date completed: November 16, 2009


What really spoke to me about this book was that it addressed something that I was aware of, but hadn't really given much thought to: the concept of unhomeliness. Rather than try to explain it, I'll relate it to the book: the narrator, Antoinette, was born and raised in Jamaica. She is white, and therefore she and her family have never been accepted by the indigenous people of Jamaica because whites on the island have always dominated the native people. On the other hand, Antoinette is also not accepted in British culture because of her humble beginnings and the fact that her ideas and culture are so different. Therefore, she has no true home and is suspended instead between two worlds, which is fascinating and heartbreaking.

This reimagining of the story of Antoinette (also known as Bertha, the "mad woman in the attic" from Jane Eyre) is very powerful. It's so interesting to see an explanation for why Antoinette might have gone mad, rather than just distancing her and seeing her as that crazy woman who is locked away. It also made me want to reread Jane Eyre through a new lens. There is a great emphasis upon cultural relativism and the fact that to the English in the early 19th century, people of other cultures were considered "savage." Despite the fact that Antoinette looks just like the English, her background is still capable of tainting her in the eyes of the British.

It was also interesting that not only is Antoinette suspended between two cultures, but she is also suspended between two different personas in Rochester's perspective. He is lustfully drawn to her beauty, but at the same time he hates her and is repulsed by her connotations with "barbaric" raw nature. The oppositions set up throughout the novel were excellent.

Overall, it was a really quick read that I enjoyed delving into. Parts of it didn't make a lot of sense to me at first, but I think upon a second reading (which I'll have to do before I write a paper about it), I'll be able to smooth out my misunderstanding.

10 - The Fall of the House of Usher

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
Book Sales, 2004
842 pages (14)
Date completed: November 7, 2009


I won't write too much about this, because technically it's a short story. But the 1001 books to read before you die list counts it as a book, and so do I! haha.

This is one of the less creepy Poe stories I've read. The narrator seems pretty reliable, too, compared to other Poe narrators. It was packed with the usual creepy elements-- the house with windows that looked like vacant eyes, the stormy nights, the tortured souls within, and of course the fact that the Usher woman is buried alive and then comes out of the crypt to die on top of her brother.

So yeah. Creepy. The house is alive, the brother and sister are incestuous (as depicted by the way they die), and the title is both literal and figurative. There is a very quick sketch of what I got out of it.

9 - Written on the Body

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Vintage, 1992
190 pages
Date completed: November 5, 2009

Wow, this novel was absolutely captivating. Every single page was chocked full of lines and passages that I'd love to underline (except that then the whole novel would be underlined). So much insight and passion packed into so few pages.

So the narrator of this novel is androgynous and bisexual. How interesting. At times I felt myself needing to categorize the narrator: I often read her as female, although the text itself is careful never to give ANY indication of the narrator's sex. What does that say about me and the way I've been taught to read? Why do I feel the need to categorize the narrator? In life things aren't certain. A person's sex can be fluid in a way. But this narrator spoke to me, and he or she definitely seemed female when I was reading. Maybe that's because I'm female. Maybe it's because I know that Jeanette Winterson is a lesbian. Maybe it's because the language was so subtle that it used more feminine word choice and I didn't even notice. So forgive me if I accidentally refer to the narrator as a female...I'll try to stick with "he or she" although it pains me to do so. I just finished the novel and I'm feeling really attached to the narrator at the moment.

So here we have a novel of the deepest love and the deepest loss. A lot of the novel feels like one long love letter (but not in a corny way at all-- in the most genuine way I've ever seen in a text). This passage about death tugged at my heartstrings the most, though. It's about letting a mortician prepare your loved one's body for burial:

"What would you do? Pass the body into the hands of strangers? The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers."

Winterson is a fabulous author. This is the second book I've read by her, and it's just as powerful as the first. When this challenge is over I'll definitely be seeking out more of her novels. Wow.