Semiquincentennial
Currently reading:
Slasher Summer by E. L. Chen
Insatiable by Meg Cabot
Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele
An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice [audiobook]
Books finished this week: 1
★★★★☆
Where this book came from: Purchased in a panic from Bookshop.org after trying to buy a copy at the Center for Fiction.
Why this book: I’ve meant to read Octavia Butler for a long time, but never quite knew where to start. Or maybe I just never felt pushed or called to start with any title in particular. So when a reading group popped up about Parable of the Sower, it felt like the right time. (Spoiler alert: I’m both very glad I read this book and also sad to report that I actually ended up skipping the group——I’m sure I would’ve gotten a lot out of it, but I just needed a break.)
Thoughts: It’s incredible to me that this book was written in the early 1990s. The concerns of climate crises, authoritarian government, and violence, while taken to what I’m sure felt like an extreme then, feel only perhaps a decade away now. I would say Butler has an excellent imagination, to create Lauren and her world and populate it with both the fear and the wonder she finds there, but I think perhaps she was just paying attention the way others should have been. The prose was easy to absorb and digest and the sci-fi/dystopian elements were light, for those who might otherwise be put off by moe speculative elements, though a massive trigger warning for mentions of sexual assault, rape, and a wide variety of awful violence inflicted on people of all ages. Still, if you’re able to read that kind of material safely, I do recommend everyone read this book. It’s a classic for a reason, and I deeply regret missing the reading group and not hearing what those smart folks would’ve had to say about it.
(I am knocking off a full star mostly for a relationship that pops up later, between an eighteen-year-old girl and a nearly-sixty-year-old man. I understand it’s the end times, but having a much older man tell a teenager that she “seems older” just feels disgusting and wrong no matter what the circumstances. That’s one plot line I very much could’ve done without.)
Library updates:
I ended up being out and about for over twelve hours yesterday (and outside in the heat for the majority of those hours), so I’m really wishing I had drafted something intelligent for this week’s missive ahead of time. Alas, you will instead get only as many words as I can force my sunburnt, dehydrated, shriveled brain and body to produce before I conk out again in front of my AC. But I haven’t missed a Sunday in a bit, and I don’t want to slip now! That wouldn’t be very American of me.
Ah, America. My fucked-up global superpower of a home. Yesterday was the Fourth of July, marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which birthed the United States of America. And we’ve really been fucking it all up and dropping the ball since the beginning, huh?
I was at my parents’ a couple weeks ago and my mom was talking about her memories of the Bicentennial back in 1976. It sounded like a properly momentous occasion, even amidst the chaos of the ’70s. Despite the flyovers and the tall ships parading down the Hudson, yesterday felt fairly . . . anticlimactic. Obviously, our country is genuinely fucked right now——fractured and violent and damaged and angry. We’ve been that way before and I don’t think those divisions will ever go away, especially when white supremacists parade through our nation’s capital and so many others are perhaps quieter about but no less vehement in their hatred and bigotry.
It’s a little sad, to be alive for such a milestone and feel nothing. Or, worse, to feel anger and shame. It’s been 250 years and we’ve learned nothing. Colonizers stole native land, and then those colonists enslaved others to do their work for them, and we’ve never been able to appropriately face that history or learn from it. Someone sang the National Anthem yesterday before the planes and ships went by on the Hudson, and it just felt . . . bad. I understand that America has always been fucked, that we’ve always done shitty things, that we’ve treated our own people and people in other parts of the world like they were less-than, or just statistics to be imprisoned or murdered and then shunted aside. I understand that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is bullshit to most, just a nice line of propaganda in a song. But, goddamn, can’t we make it better?
Whoops, that’s more words than I thought I had in me.
Closing thoughts:
Do better.
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 214
(Total books added to the Moratorium Library: 460)
I used my free will to spend most of last Sunday wandering Ridgewood with Melissa——hi, Melissa!——and we popped into both Topos Too and Kosti’s Last Sunday Bookstore. Excited to read these beauties while I still have the right to do so!
