Mirror, Mirror - Gregory Maguire

I think I've been putting off writing this review because I didn’t particularly like the book, but I didn’t dislike it either. It was just ok. Gregory Maguire is best known for his novel “Wicked,” which tells the origins of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s story “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” That Maguire novel was pretty cool, as it tells the back story of a legendary evil character. In the telling, however, you learn that evil and good are not so black and white, and that both sides can have a little of the other in them. Perhaps I find “Mirror, Mirror” less interesting because it is a pretty straightforward retelling of the Snow White fairy tale, with some adjustments.

The story is set in 16th century Italy, where Don Vicente de Nevada is raising his only daughter Bianca after his wife’s death. There is no stepmother in this story. Instead, Maguire introduces Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, two members of a Valencian-Italian noble family and children of Pope Alexander VI (Maguire based these characters on real people, which is very neat because I would have never heard of this crazy family otherwise). Lucrezia fulfills the role of the evil stepmother in the original story and, instead of being jealous of Bianca’s beauty alone, she is jealous because her brother is attracted to the girl (incest is heavily implied but never stated outright). Also, instead of a mirror that talks and knows who is the most beautiful, the story has a mirror that acts like a window, allowing the viewer to look into other places (it only comes into play when Lucrezia is able to see that Bianca is alive and living with the dwarves, instead of being dead with her heart cut out as intended).

And the dwarves are another matter altogether. These are not the Disney variety. They aren’t even regular people with a medical condition. They are some strange rock-like beings that originate from the earth or something, and they have a collective consciousness that sounds very Borg-like to me, and their features are constantly shifting, and sometimes they are shapeless, and other times they look like dogs, and they can walk through walls. The whole thing sounded pretty stupid to me.

Other than that, it is pretty much the story you expect, down to the evil woman asking a hunter to cut out Bianca’s heart, and the hunter letting the girl go instead, and the girl meeting up with the dwarves, and the poisoned apple, and the sleeping that looks like death, and being revived with a kiss (no Prince Charming though, but I guess the kisser is supposed to be a plot twist so I won’t say who it is).

The most interesting character was Lucrezia. This aspect is similar to what Maguire did for “Wicked” (and, I’ve heard, for “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister”), and that is to explore the concept of good and evil as I mentioned above. Lucrezia is pretty twisted, allegedly not opposed to sleeping with her brother, definitely not opposed to killing her own children, or other people’s children. But her life was not always her own and she was constantly married off to people by her father and brother to advance their political careers (and her many husbands killed to make way for the next one). She had a cushioned life but not a carefree life, and rather than being all-out evil, she’s actually pretty conflicted. I also like what he did with Bianca who is actually the least developed character in the novel. She just stands for innocence, in contrast to Lucrezia. As such, Maguire didn’t write “Snow White” (his story isn’t about her); he wrote a story about greed and jealousy and revenge.

I find that I also have a hard time liking the way Maguire writes. His style sounds very forced to me, like he’s trying too hard to make things sound important and poetic and deep. He has a couple of writing devices that I liked, like some chapters told from different first-person perspectives (told by Lucrezia, or Bianca, or the dwarves) while other chapters are told from the third-person. He also inserts poem verses in between some of the chapters, which develop the personalities of different characters.

I picked this book up because “Wicked” was interesting (and because it made for a good Broadway show). But after reading this one, I doubt I’ll pick up another Maguire book. Not great, not terrible, just all right.

52 Great Books to Read

This is not my list. It is a deck of cards that my friend Villar dared me to pick up. I post it here at the request of my friend Figgy. It also allows me to procrastinate for a couple more days while I write up my next book review (the book was done a week ago...the review has not been started).

I've split it into categories according to what I've read and haven't (for anyone that cares). Feel free to post your own lists in the comments section if you like.

Books I have read:
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Books I read for class, which means I probably just skimmed heavily, and will most likely have to read again
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books I know the plot to but have never actually read (and by "know the plot" I mean "probably watched the movie," so that's not necessarily saying much)
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
Hamlet, William Shakespeare (recently finished)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

Books I have never read
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Ten Little Indians, Agatha Christie
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Potrait of a Lady, Henry James
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Native Son, Richard Wright
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Which, if I didn't leave anything out or lose a card, adds up to 52. Phew...



TV/Music/Book: DJ Shadow, The Private Press (for about 7 days straight now...)

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

This is a weird one to just pick up out of the blue. In fact, it was picked out of a deck of cards. See, many, many years ago (odd how I’m old enough to say many, many years and realize that it has actually been about ten years…eesh) my best friend Villar gave me “52 Great Books to Read” (actually a misleading title cause it includes plays and short stories). She wrote an inscription on the box: “let’s see if it’s true that you’ll read them.” Well the dare was set ages ago and, in my customary speediness, I am now taking up that dare. I’ve had a bit of a head start over the years and have already read 14 of those listed (some read many, many, many years ago, such that I don’t necessarily remember the plot, but it’s having read them that counts). So, I took out the 14 I had read, shuffled the rest, and picked out a card at random. That was Hamlet. Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for being awesome and having ebooks available. Check them out, they’re free and legal (all books with expired copyrights).

First off, a disclaimer. Shakespeare is seriously hard to read sometimes. Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of school too long. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had an English lit class since, well…actually…I don’t think I did take a class in the English Department at college ever…hmm…I remember I read stuff…but maybe it was philosophy or some such. Or maybe it’s because I am really quite illiterate. Regardless, it was a tad rough getting through this thing. So, many thanks also go out to Spark Notes.

I think the general gist of the play is well known (and there have been several stage and screen adaptations, some including Shakespearian-trained actors like Kenneth Branagh, some including unlikely megastars like Mel Gibson, some including guys like Ethan Hawke): Hamlet’s father, recently deceased, appears to Hamlet as a ghost to inform him that his wife-stealing, poison-dripping, murdering brother stole his wife, dripped poison down his ear, and effectively murdered him (the father, not Hamlet). The ghost wants Hamlet to get his full revenge on and Hamlet agrees. The rest of the play is filled with Hamlet dallying back and forth about whether to kill his uncle and how to do it, all the while pretending to be insane so that people don’t think he’s up to something (or, at least, so that people think he’s up to something like being crazy but not up to something like planning the perfect crime). Somewhere in there we get hints that Hamlet and Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius who is the King’s advisor, had a thing going on but now that Hamlet is pretending to be crazy, he’s also pretending he never liked Ophelia at all. According to SparkNotes this has much to do with Hamlet now being a misogynist because his mother, the Queen, has wedded his uncle so shortly after his dad’s death.

After Hamlet goes through some soul-searching and accidentally kills Polonius, and after the King ships Hamlet off to England, and after the ship gets attacked by pirates and Hamlet is sent back to Denmark, and after Ophelia goes crazy and kills herself, and after the King and Laertes (Ophelia’s brother) devise a plan to murder Hamlet, the play comes to it’s renowned grisly end: Laertes stabs Hamlet with a poisoned sword, Hamlet stabs Laertes with a poisoned sword, Hamlet stabs the King and forces poison down his throat, and the Queen accidentally drinks poison, and everyone dies. The end.

The story was not a surprise to me and I have no strong feelings for it except it’s a good revenge story. What I didn’t realize till I read it is what a complex character Hamlet really is. We want to think of him as a hero and victim (the play is about him after all, and his father, whom he loved very much, was taken away from him by his very own uncle). But he is also one screwed up guy. In pretending to be crazy, there is a fine line he’s crossing where he really does seem to be going crazy. He has no qualms about killing Polonius or about violently confronting his mother or about telling Ophelia that he never loved her at all or about sending two of his friends to be executed. In one scene, the King is by himself and it is Hamlet’s opportunity to kill him. However, the King is praying so Hamlet decides to wait because what’s the point of killing someone that just finished confessing when that would send him to Heaven instead of Hell? Better to wait until he’s sinning and condemn him to Hell that way. I mean, the guy is seriously a jerk and a badass at the same time.

Here’s what he says to his mother when he confronts her about marrying his uncle so quickly:

Queen.
O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

Ham.
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty,--

In case you’re wondering, enseamed bed does mean what it kinda sounds like it means. Here’s what he says when the King asks him what he did with Polonius' corpse:

King.
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Ham.
At supper.

King.
At supper! where?

Ham.
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
[some lines have been cut here]

King.
Where is Polonius?

Ham.
In heaven: send thither to see: if your messenger find him not
there, seek him i' the other place yourself. But, indeed, if you
find him not within this month, you shall nose (smell) him as you go up
the stairs into the lobby.

I think now I see why they cast Mel Gibson as Hamlet. It kinda makes me want to watch that movie version. And it kinda makes me want to watch Reinassance Man, too. And I have to mention this somewhere because for some reason I always remember that scene from Clueless where Josh’s girlfriend is saying “to thine own self be true, Hamlet himself said that” and Cher says “no, Hamlet didn’t say that” and the girlfriend says “I think I remember Hamlet accurately” in a snooty tone and Cher scoffs and says “well I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn’t say that, that Polonius guy did” and Josh laughs cause it’s true. It always makes me think of that, go figure.

This is the only Shakespeare play in that deck of cards, so my days of poring over centuries-old english is over for a while. But that is not to say that I won't be picking up another of his plays at some point. I hear Othello is a badass, too.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So begins Vonnegut’s book, a story that takes place in Germany during World War II. Billy Pilgrim and several other American soldiers are captured by the Germans and taken to Dresden where they witness, and survive, the February 1945 bombing of the city. This part of the story is based on Vonnegut’s real life experiences as a POW, where he really did witness the bombing of Dresden and survived along with the other POWs and their German guards inside an underground slaughterhouse meatlocker (Slaughterhouse Five is what the real German guards called the detention facility). Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, meaning that he travels through time to different events in his life, including his childhood, his service during the war and time spent as a POW, his marriage, his old-age as a widower, and his murder. He also visits events in his life that occurred when he was abducted by aliens and put on display in a zoo in the planet of Tralfamadore, where he was wedded to Montana Wildhack, a porn movie star that is also abducted. A reason is never given as to why Billy has come unstuck in time.

I interpreted this unusual plot in two ways (if either is correct, or if none of them are, I don’t know and it probably doesn’t matter): 1) Billy really does become unstuck in time and is able to time travel to different events throughout his life, including a time where he was abducted by real aliens; or, 2) Billy’s experiences during the war, and his repressed memories of those experiences, are turning him insane. I’d say either device is pretty cool.

I enjoyed this book more than I expected to given the subject matter and unusual plot. It is very graphic in its description of war and imprisonment, which is very significant given the source material. As Vonnegut himself says in the prelude (which is really the first chapter), the novel is “short and jumbled and jangled,” with events jumping throughout the book to different moment’s of Billy’s life. During the war, Billy grapples with his ineptness and horror at witnessing a massacre. After the war he grapples with depression. As such, it is a sad and grave book…but in a good way. It is an anti-war book but not in a preachy way. It says: “Look, these are the horrible things that happen during a war. Look.”

Also, for some reason, I liked the descriptions of the science fiction books that the Kilgore Trout character writes (Trout is a science fiction writer that also appears in many other Vonnegut books). Also, it is the sixty-ninth entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Just thought I’d put that out there.

Code Monkey

Some of the past weekend was spent helping Rock re-design the back-end code of NobodyComesHere.com. Well, "helping re-design" is too strong a phrase. It might be more accurate to say that first I watched movies while Rock spent hours coding, then I tried very hard to understand as he explained the basics of object oriented programming and PHP, and then I copy/pasted a lot of his original code, deleted certain words, and wrote other words in their place.

I can't say I'm any nearer to writing SQL queries or figuring out what classes to write or how to write a DAO from scratch, but I do know what these things are. And I have some vague concept about the general design of NobodyComesHere.com: there's a database, and data access objects, and a controller...and I think I'm forgetting something. In any case, I found the experience not too unpleasant and, even though I'm not planning to become a programmer any time soon (I still have not forgotten that my only C in college was from the one computer science class I elected to take), I am looking forward to my next coding assignment.

Mood: accomplished
TV/Music/Book: Bridget Jones's Diary. Oh Colin Firth, how do I love thee, let me count the ways...

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Despite my realization that I really need to stop re-reading books and actually find something new, I picked up Catch-22 for the third time. It was the audiobook’s fault, really. It seemed to be the type of book that would lend itself to a good audiobook rendition, so I picked it up.

Reading Catch-22 the first time was a bit frustrating. I had never picked up a book that had that much stream-of-consciousness to it, so it felt very messy and disjointed. Plus, everyone in it, and everything that happens, is absolutely crazy. Well, yeah, that’s the point, I know, but it was too crazy. But I still enjoyed it because it had a very good mix of comedy and tragedy, and also what do they call it when you get both those things at the same time? It had that too.

I read it the second time for no real good reason except that it was there. Having read it the first time, it was much easier to follow along. Everything made perfect sense, everyone was very crazy and very sane at the same time. Now, I’ve read it (heard it) for the third time. One thing never changes: it’s still one crazy book.

The story is about an Air Force Squadron stationed on a fictional island off the coast of Italy during the last stages of World War II. It mostly follows Yossarian, a bombardier who thinks everyone is trying to kill him, particularly the enemy, which is why he refuses to fly more combat missions. However, the story has a huge cast of characters, each with well developed storylines. The story is told in a non-chronological, stream-of-consciousness style from multiple points of view (though all in the third person). No wonder I was lost the first time. Events are told out of order and described from the point of view of different characters, so that the reader learns more about a particular event each time it is re-described.

I certainly appreciate the writing style of the book much more than I did the first time. It seems to be a chaotic book, where many things happen at once and the storylines make no sense the first time they’re introduced, but Heller is very good at weaving events together and fleshing everything out. He relies on paradox, repetition, and circular logic, and is very good at combining comedy and tragedy.

The audiobook format was not as good as I expected. Jay O. Sanders is the narrator. Generally, he does a good job but he can sound a bit morose and sort of like that monotonous teacher that just drones on and on. I didn’t like his voice for Yossarian, who sounded whiny and like a jerk. It’s also my fault for having read it twice already, because certain memorable moments did not sound the way I had imagined them in my head. The narrator is very good in scenes that have several characters, and there are moments where his delivery makes a moment even funnier. But for a book that has many funny moments, it did not sound that funny because of the narrator’s delivery.