Review – The Silenced by James DeVita

The Silenced is a plausible dystopian YA novel set in the not-so-distant future, where dissenters are “disappeared”, there is no due process, children are sent to training camps instead of school, and people live in a closed compounds.  It’s fast-paced and exciting, but it is not the best dystopian novel I have read.  What it does have going for it are two things: 1) the White Rose, the covert group in the novel, was based off of an actual group of young people who called themselves the White Rose in Nazi Germany and 2) it’s much more plausible than some other dystopian novels.

You will see the modern world in this novel.  DeVita did an excellent job drawing from real life, both in the United States and abroad.  I wish I had known more about the White Rose before reading the novel because I think that would have enhanced reading the novel.  The book is over 500 pages, but the ending manages to feel forced and rushed.  The first half of the novel was great, but there were just some things that frustrated me.  There were times when the sentence structure completely confused me and there were a lot of acronyms that I had difficulty keeping straight.  There were also some things that were never explained and confusing.  I recommend other novels over this one, but it is a well-crafted world and I think this would be a good one to teach in schools for its historical connection.

So go read this!: So go read this!: now | tomorrow |next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR pile

Also read and reviewed by: Did you read and review The Silenced?  Leave a comment and I will link to your review here!

Poetry Wednesday – Philip Larkin

I discovered Philip Larkin while searching for an aubade.  I was editor-in-chief of my university’s literary magazine known as Aubade and we did a poetry reading.  I wanted to read an aubade, which is a poem written about daybreak, usually about two lovers parting.  Philip Larkin has a beautiful poem entitled “Aubade” that is just amazing.  Larkin is not really known for his cheer, but there is always something hopeful about his negativity.  It seems completely incongruous, but it’s there.  I was only going to post “I Have Started to Say” because it resonated with the way I have been feeling lately, but then I decided I couldn’t pass up posting “Aubade” also, which for me is a more technically well-done poem.

“I Have Started to Say”

I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

All that’s left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt.

I like this poem because it is simple.  It takes a concept that you begin to understand, I suppose around my age because I’ve never thought it before.  That time is moving so fast and I can’t believe sometimes just how fast.  “Like falling and recovering/in huge gesturing loops/through an empty sky” is a particularly thoughtful line that I relate to.  I remember when I first realized that there will never be an October 28, 2009 ever again.  Once a minute has passed, it has passed forever.  That was earth-shattering to my little brain.  How did I know that I lived that moment as well as I could?

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

What is so unique and fascinating about this poem is the fact that it takes a known form, the aubade, and turns it on its head.  Instead of being about the parting of two lovers at dawn, this is about a man parting from life.  He is pondering his own death as dawn rises.  I like these two poems together because they are connected, both by what they say that is similar and the way they are different.  The first poem is not overtly concerned with the speaker’s own death and it seems that it is only after some thinking about it that they reach the conclusion of “Aubade”.  I am not well-versed enough in Larkin’s poetry to know for sure which was published first, but I like what these two poems say to each other.  Favorite lines: “Most things may never happen: this one will” and “And realisation of it rages out/in furnace-fear”.

What do you think of Larkin’s take on life and death?  What do you think of the conversation between these two poems?

Review – Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

I have been a huge fan o f Marjane Satrapi since reading  Persepolis a year or so ago.  Her unique, deceptively simplistic drawing style is so moving and her topic of writing, life in Iran, is something that we so rarely get such an intimate glimpse of.  Embroideries is a smaller collection that is simply a conversation between women, talking about sex, marriage, love and men.  If you are a woman, you will find yourself in these pages.  It never fails to amaze me how we are all connected, that though our experiences are so extremely different, being a human being, or being a woman, is an experience that you can share across all boundaries.

Marjane’s grandmother, who we got to know in Persepolis, is leading this conversation and it is filled with aunts, mothers, friends and sisters.  These images and stories will make you laugh, but they will also touch your heart and make you cry.  Highly recommended!

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR pile

Also reviewed by: The Zen Leaf, In Spring it is the Dawn, Books of Mee, things mean a lot, Biblio File, The Written World

Did you read and review Embroideries?  Leave a comment letting me know and I’ll link to your review.

Review – So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld

“Mrrf,” I said in alarm.  (102)

TSS – Read-A-Thon and Luray Caverns and Pablo Neruda

Good morning, Sunday Saloners!  I’m sure some of you are still sleeping off that read-a-thon, so it might be a good afternoon .  Yesterday my roommates and I went to Luray Caverns in Luray, Virginia, so She and I did the read-a-thon a day early.  I’m so glad we did because it was totally worth it!  We got up at 5 am and you can see our horrendous morning faces here.  We managed to stay up until 1:00 am, but it was still a good run!  Then early yesterday afternoon it was off to Luray, fulfilling one of She’s lifelong dreams.  The caverns were awesome and fortunately we have some pictures to prove we were there.  The drive itself was an adventure because the trees were beautiful and we stopped at a little cafe for dinner on the way home that had amazing deserts and amazing corn chowder.  Then I came home and worked on a paper for my Introduction to the Study of Literature class on “Entrada a la madera/Entrance to wood” by Pablo Neruda.  It’s one of the best poems I’ve read of Neruda’s and I think my paper went well.

Read-A-Thon

I read 6 books for read-a-thon!  I could not have been happier with my book and page number count.  Reading graphic novels really helped the eyes between longer books.

Books read: So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld, The Silenced by James DeVila, Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi, The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness, Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez and Disquiet by Julia Leigh, 100 pages of The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Pages read: 1734

I thought all of my books were good choices for read-a-thon.  They were mostly fast-paced, mostly fairly large typeface (VERY important in the wee hours of the morning and night!) and interesting, too.

Yesterday, after getting back from the caverns, I did some cheerleading!  I’m sorry if I didn’t get to your blog, I was thinking about you and cheering you on in my mind, I promise!

Luray Caverns

For those of you who don’t know about Luray Caverns, it’s one of the largest and most beautiful cave formations in the United States that has lots of cool formations like gorgeous stalactites and stalagmites, fried eggs, a pipe organ that plays using rock formations, and the mirror lake also known as the Lake of Dreams.   The whole place was seriously amazing: GO THERE.  You’ll love it, really!

My roommate, me and She

I added a bat and an owl to this one for effect.  ACTUALLY, there aren’t any bats in Luray Caverns.  And there probably aren’t any owls.  I also might have been singing a song in this picture.

Draperies!

Pablo Neruda: The poem I wrote my paper about!

Entrance into wood

With scarce my reason, with my fingers,
with slow waters slow flooded,
I fall into the realm of forget-me-nots,
to a mourning air that clings,
to a forgotten room in ruins,
to a cluster of bitter clover.

I fall into shadow, the midst
of things broken down,
and I see spiders, and graze on forests
of secret inconclusive wood,
and I pass among damp uprooted fibers
to the live heart of matter and silence.

Smooth substance, oh drywinged rose,
in my collapse I climb your petals,
my feet weighed down with a red fatigue,
and I kneel in your everlasting cathedral
bruising my lips on an angel.

Here I am before your color of the world,
with your pale dead swords,
with your united hearts,
with your silent multitude.

Here I am with your wave of dying fragrances
wrapped in autumn and resistance:
it is I embarking on a funerary journey
among your yellow scars:
it is I with my sourceless laments,
unnourished, wakeful, alone,
entering darkened corridors,
reaching your mysterious matter.

I see your dry currents moving,
broken-off hands i see growing,
I hear your oceanic plants
creaking, by night and fury shaken,
and I feel leaves dying inwards,
amassing green materials
to your desolate stillness.

Pores, veins, circles of smoothness,
weight, silent temperature,
arrows cleaving to your fallen soul,
beings asleep in your thick mouth,
dust of sweet pulp consumed,
ash full of snuffed-out souls,
come to me, to my measureless dream,
fall into my room where night falls
and falls like broken water,
and root me to your life, to your death,
to your crushed materials,
to your dead neutral doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn and be silent and bells.

Have a great week everyone!  Thanks for a wonderful Read-A-Thon!

Read-A-Thon: Final post

We’ve done it!  She and I have decided to call it quits for the evening.  We’re both exhausted and laughitng inappropriately at our novels.  Good  night everyone and thanks for cheering us on!  I’ll be around for at least part of the day tomorrow night to cheer.

Read-A-Thon: Relevant cat picture

Read-A-Thon: Disquiet by Julia Leigh

Honestly I’m not quite sure what went on in this one, but I can’t tell if that’s just because I’m so loopy from lack of sleep or because the writing is oh so sparse!

No lie, kids, I might not make it another hour!  I am going to try and throw in another book here, but no promises

Read-A-Thon: SLOTH by Gilbert Hernandez

MIND TRIP.  That’s all I have to say about this one.

Read-A-Thon Post 9? 10? I don’t remember!

I’m not going to lie, things got a little slow there in the middle of The Ask and the Answer, but I ran through the last 200 pages in about an hour.

Total book count: 4!
Total pages: 1, 386!
Total calories: bahahahaha, like I’d tell you that!

I think it’s definitely time for a graphic novel “break”.  My eyes!  I must save them for the wee hours of the morning.  She and I will absolutely be taking a Wawa break around 1amish to get some coffee.

Special thanks to everyone who has commented today!  I love you: Amanda, Eva, Nymeth, Emily, Trish, gnoegnoe, lena, tuulenhaiven, Vasilly, Aarti, Lauren and Gavin!