Spotlight Read: The Book of Speculation - Erika Swyler

“Once you’ve held a book and really loved it, you forever remember the feel of it, its specific weight, the way it sits in your hand.” 

Every once in a while, I'll come across a book, get a few chapters into it, and realize that this was exactly the book that I was meant to read in the time I chose to pick it up. This is one of those books. Erika Swyler crafts her words so precisely, so delicately, it feels as though she is caring after a centuries-old tome, much like that of her protagonist.

The only reason I picked this up was when I asked a coworker about magical realism titles. As a library worker, I have to say I'm particular about the way certain library protocols are handled. Granted, I'm part of a larger library system spanning two counties, but still. There's not a lot of glorious spare time to go on genealogical goose chases. Which is why I'm glad certain plot points happened as they did. Like I've said before, my aim is to keep this blog spoiler free, so I am going to try my hardest not to get into the particulars.

I'm almost positive I was a fortune teller in a past life. 

Another thing I'm protective of is weird arcane things, like tarot. If someone dramatically flips over the Death card as lightning strikes, I'm going to pull a grumpy face and be all salty for the rest of the story. That is not the case here. Swyler did her research with hidden meanings and symbolism with tarot cards and readings, which I very much appreciate, although . Coupled with the mysterious Slavic woman who interprets the cards, mermaids, and you've got the makings of a classic tale. But that is just the part of the story that takes past in the centuries past. There's a contemporary story, one that surrounds a mysterious book arriving in the mail and a possible family curse. Intrigued yet?

“Something is very wrong. What began as a passing fascination with the book has turned into something darker.”

On the modern day side of the tale, we have Simon. He and his younger sister Enola are orphans and while Simon spends his days filling grant requests and curating the whaling history collection of his library, Enola is off reading tarot cards for a traveling carnival with her cephalopod-inked boyfriend. Simon himself is an interesting character. We don't see many hints into his personality outright, and to some readers he may come across as rather boring. I took a shine to him and his introverted, introspective self. Hmm, an introverted librarian living an a coastal town, why would I relate to that? (Hint: because it's me.) His relationship with his fiery younger sister is incredibly real and Enola is so interesting that I did find myself half-wishing that the book was from her perspective as the coincidental deaths in their family follow the women. But Simon as a protagonist is a quiet one, which adds a low-key energy as he begins to uncover the past and mysteries from his family's history.

“We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive.” 

I'm a huge sucker for dysfunctional family stories. While I wouldn't consider my own to be such, we are certainly not without our quirks. One things that makes this book truly special is the complex dynamics between the characters. We see Simon's interactions with his sisters boyfriend, as well as the weighty realization that his baby sibling is, gasp, having sex, something I'm sure no older brother would want to be aware of, my own included. In the sections taking place in the past, we see a much different type of family, one that people are capable of choosing of their own accord. We follow a mute young boy, Amos- a name given to him by the Russian fortune teller, Madam Ritzkova, through the course of his life from abandonment to finding his way into a traveling carnival, where he is adopted as a sideshow spectacle- "The Wild Boy", and further as he enters adulthood, falling in love with a woman whose sudden appearance changes everything for the troupe, setting into motion events that will ripple into the future. Being mute, Amos communicates mostly through the pictures and details hidden in the intricate hand-drawn tarot cards Madame Ritzkova uses in her trade.

One of the many interesting traits of Simon's family is that they are swimmers. Not "doing a few laps at The Y" swimmers; Simon himself can hold his breath upwards of ten minutes at a time, something his mother taught him. There's so much about symbolism and beautiful imagery that I want to get into about what that means for the family and their fates but I just cannot do that without breaking my "no spoilers" clause. If you'd like to go into it further, feel free to message me here or on Goodreads!

Now, the ending of this book doesn't have a huge shock reveal, at least not to me. It felt rather obvious that the direction it was taking was leading to it, but for others this may be a surprise. Others may be disappointed. But I feel that the point of the story follows the idiom "it's the journey that's important, not the destination" and family reminds us that we're more than just ourselves. And love is just as wild, unpredictable, and all encompassing as the ocean's waves.

"Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.” 

Update on the Challenge Thus Far

How I feel about my current To-Read list.

WHEW. It's already three weeks into March. According to Goodreads, I've read 21/100 books and I'm currently "1 book behind schedule". Well, Goodreads can stuff it. As far as I'M concerned, I'm perfectly on track and totally not crying over the amount of stuff left on my To Do list.

How I'm sure the books feel about their To-Read status.

While I definitely intend to branch out in terms of genre, so far this list has been dominated by sci-fi and graphic novels. I do apologize for that, but for the record, they've been really, really good books. You may (or may not) be wondering why so far I've had glaringly positive reviews on this blog. On Goodreads, it's a little bit of a different story. The truth is, I want this blog to have a nice, positive atmosphere, not a group of angry villagers with pitchforks. I don't like talking about all the reasons why I don't like something when I could put the energy into something more positive. I try to limit my negative reviews on Goodreads to less than a paragraph, unless it's so awful I just can't contain myself.

Anywho, this is just a small update so you all know I haven't given up on this blog. I'm still more than willing to accept recommendations for future reads!

In progress (in audiobook form):

Spotlight Read: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

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“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

Man. I don't even know where to being with this one. I knew absolutely nothing about the story going in. All I knew was that were "mildly post-apocalyptic" themes. That's it. I think that's what made this story such a thrill ride for me. I will try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, although with this story, the jumping back and forth with different timelines can offer hints into certain plot points.

“But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.” Before I talk about the storyline, let me take a moment to sing the praises of Mandel's writing. This is the only book of hers I read, and if her other titles are even a smidgen similar to this, I'm in love already.  One of my all-time favorite authors is Neil Gaiman. He has this profound gift to make the most mundane aspects of life and writes about them with such a flourish and natural knack for adding a touch of whimsy suddenly the dull and lifeless become somehow lyrical and fascinating. That's something Mandel nails as well. Most of the stand out scenes in this book is when characters are in complete solitude. One such moment is when Jeevan, who just had a life-altering moment, is walking alone through Chicago in snowstorm. It's such a simple premise, but the picture she paints of a man alone with his thoughts, surrounded by the silence of a winter snowfall. It's an oddly reflective moment in time, certainly not the most exciting in the book by far, but it was just so human. And that was just in the first thirty pages. There are multiple storylines that take place in different decades, but Mandel brilliantly weaves them in and out, tying the characters together in a profound tangle of missed connections and fleeting moments.

“Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.”

When the book begins, we are introduced to Jeevan, who is out for what we can assume is a lovely date night to a production of King Lear when tragedy strikes. Again, this is the first ten pages, but even then I don't want to spoil anything. Jeevan meets a small girl who was a bit player in the play named Kirsten, who's life is later documented after the blight as she herself is a traveling actor of a Shakespeare company. We are transported in time through the leading man of the play's life before that fateful night, Jeevan's sudden realization of the pending doom of the sickness running rampant through the city, and Kirsten's survival with rapidly fading memories of the world before. Usually, I'm not a fan of the whole jumping storylines and contrived plot details thing. I like to have a specific cast of characters with a concise arc to follow and track both the plot and development. I become very attached to fictional characters, you see. Something that has plagued me since childhood. (Still considering therapy for a few unreasonable deaths of some of my most beloved.) However, the cleverness that Mandel utilizes to entwine the lives of these briefly connected strangers is so seamless and coherent, the reader hardly notices the jumps.

But can you really have good post-apocalyptic stories without zombies or a sprawling desert landscape with vehicles with welded spikes and a guy with a guitar that blows fire?! Short answer, and possibly disappointing for some of you, yes, you very much can. I am a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic; the Fallout games, Mad Max, The Walking Dead, that episode of Twilight Zone where the guy's glasses break, anything. I love to see how humans adapt when their world is taken away from them and the new goal of the day-to-day is simply to survive. We will see the darkness of people becoming violent offenders and looters, but you will also see people band together, forming new societies and coming together with each other and making connections they may not have ever considered under different circumstances. I would say this book takes a more Book of Eli approach (a movie I consider to be grossly underrated and solidifies Gary Whitta's genius behind the lens). The "apocalypse" we see here happens after a flu turned pandemic wipes out most of the Earth's population. Kirsten, now in her twenties, and her acting troupe have a motto scrawled alongside their travelling caravan that Star Trek fans are sure to recognize: Survival is insufficient. The phrase fits as a theme for the entire book as well and directly relating to each character's narrative. Take Kirsten and her band of actors. Do we really need actors when there's a constant threat of starvation and death? Of course not. One could even argue that we technically don't even need them now. But we appreciate them. We appreciate them for what they offer us; An escape. An escape for our surroundings and troubles, however temporary that break might be. Survival is about more than just finding water and shelter. It's about living.

“First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

We see Jeevan, shortly after the genesis of the collapse of civilization, in a very unique situation with his brother, who he's been safely confined in his apartment with supplies and equipment, but of course, these resources are not infinite. Both know they'll eventually have to venture into the unknown to seek further aid. We see Arthur, the lead actor in the play on that fateful night, decades before the event, then a struggling actor, throughout his numerous failing marriages, and how a simple act can change not only the person's life, but those around them as well.

I'm an absolute sucker for looking below the surface and seeking out nuances connecting characters to each other. This book is so character driven and so carefully crafted it could've easily been 200 pages longer. But I think one of the main things this book really excels at is simplicity. The plot itself is full of intricacies, but none of them are unnecessary or cloud the plot. Survival as a human is a simple enough thing. We all have Maslow's Hierachy of Needs that gets us by every day. Living is something else entirely. We see characters with their various regrets, emotional hardships, interactions with those around them, all in vastly different circumstances. We can see ourselves, how we react to similar stimuli. We can even theoretically hypothesize how we would react with a sudden catastrophic downfall of the modern world. But the truth is, we simply do not know what tomorrow will bring, for ourselves, for our siblings, our loved ones, but we do know this: survival is insufficient.

An Introduction

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." 
Wait, hang on.

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
Nope, that's still not mine.

"Once upon a time..."

Okay, it's not completely original, but at least that's as close to an opening line for "me" as I'm likely to get. So here it goes.

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rhianna. She wasn't a particularly a remarkable girl, although some (e.g. mom) would argue otherwise. She achieved relatively high grades in school, but not high enough to be extraordinary. Making friends was not the easiest or the most pleasant of endeavors; something she would later attribute to the fact that she simply found her own imagination to be more entertaining than actual human beings. The process of self-deduction has come up with two possible reasons for this: 1) undiagnosed ADD or 2) the fervent early love of reading. 

I read everything growing up. I devoured series like The Babysitter's Club, Babysitter's Little Sister (which in hindsight sounds like it should be a rather lewd film franchise), The Boxcar Children, Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark (thank you, older brother); you know, the usual for a kid in an early 90's elementary school. Basically any series discovered at the Scholastic Book Fair was fair game and by the time that time rolled around, every chore would be done to the letter to insure maximum allowance funds. Buckingham Palace didn't have a more thorough worker than I come Book Fair.

I've never related to a tweet so much in my life.

I will never forget the Autumn of 1997. Ah yes, I remember it well. Of course, I couldn't tell you want I was wearing, what I had for breakfast, or the way the sun shone through the leaves from my view from my school bus window, but I can tell you this: This was the day I purchased, with my very own hard-earned money, my copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which was entirely new to me. I can say, in all honesty, that is when my life was forever changed. No, there was not a Horcrux hidden between the pages, ready to devour my soul, oh but there was magic; genuine, heartwarming, whimsical magic.  

Still have my original, beaten to hell but intact.

And that was basically it for me. I now live in a hovel, surrounded by towers of tomes and precariously stacked books yet to be read and no one has seen me in decades. I've even managed to grow a beard and Ian McKellan-esque eyebrows. 

Okay, not really. But I do live, quite literally, surrounded by books. I work in a library now, after three years of working in an independent bookstore (something that is nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds, but that's a story for another time). Not to mention the over-stuffed, poorly organized shelves I have throughout my house. This (finally) leads to the reason I'm creating this blog in the first place.

Actual photograph of my workplace. (No, seriously. I swear this is it.)

I've come to realize that while I am vehement about my opinions on the things I chose to read/watch/play, I very rarely share these thoughts in a constructive, actually organized manner. So, being the New Year, I've decided to not only up the number on my Goodreads challenge from 30 books to 100, but also actively document my reviews of the books I've chosen to read. I will likely not write out lengthy posts for each book (considering I'm already down three weeks out of our 52 week year), I'll at least write a sentence or two on my Goodreads account, and spotlight the ones on this blog that I feel need the extra attention. 

Now, these will not be professionally constructed theses on the themes and symbolism worthy of my AP Lit classes in high school; these will simply be my thoughts and feelings on the story as a whole and the experience while reading. I haven't blogged since my livejournal/Xanga days (does that even count as blogging?), so be prepared for some mess and continuity errors along the way. I, myself, am a work in progress and this blog will likely reflect that. The books themselves will have no specific genre or type, they will simply be books I haven't read before and I'll gladly accept recommendations during this journey of what to try out next.

Okay, assuming at least a few of you have stuck around, let's start this journey down the rabbit hole. (Alright, that's not mine either but come on.)