Author: Angelique

A book I recently read for my independent reading was The Stolen Heir by Holly Black. I am an avid reader of her work and her books, so I figured this to be a nice choice. This book was the latest instalment in her Folk of the Air series, that follows a faerie prince named Oak, and runaway queen of the Court of Teeth. Suren lived as a child queen, and ran away to inhabit the human world as a child in a human family. After few years, she fled to live feral in the woods, before she was recaptured. Before she was recaptured by the Court of Teeth, she would often try to sneak peeks at her former household, from the woods.

Bex leaves the milk for a neighbourhood cat, but I like to pretend it’s me she’s leaving it for. Her forgotten sister.

She stands there for a few minutes while moths flit above her head and mosquitoes buzz. Only when she goes back inside do I slink closer to the house, peering through the window to watch my unmother knit in front of the television. Watching my unfather in the breakfast nook with his laptop, answering emails. He put a hand to his eyes, as though tired.

In the Court of teeth, I was punished if I called the humans who raised me my mother and father. Humans are animals, Lord Jarel would say, the admonishment coming with a breathtakingly hard blow. Filthy animals. You share no blood with them. (p. 10)

I chose this quotation because the simplicity of the humans’ actions, and Suren’s yearning for said actions, have a large impact on her. She convinces herself that they still believe in her, and perhaps, love her. Throughout the rest of the book, there is little to no more moments with her human family, so I chose this. It leaves an impact on the reader, early in the book.

A book that I constantly go back to and reread is The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Published in 2013, the book follows a 13 year old boy named Theodore Decker, whose mother recently died in a museum bombing. Living with the family of his wealthy friend. He latches to the one thing he has left of his mother and of the accident, a small painting of a goldfinch, propelling him into the art underworld.  At this point in the book, Theo’s estranged father has suddenly reappeared back into his life, with his new girlfriend. They immediately claim ownership of Theo, and force him to move from New York, to a dusty outskirt of Las Vegas. In this excerpt, Theo watches him and his mothers’ apartment get taken apart by movers.

At eight o’clock that Monday morning, movers showed up at Sutton Place and began to dismantle the apartment and pack it in boxes. A used-book dealer came to look at my mother’s art books, and somebody else came in to look at her furniture- and, almost before I knew it, my home began to vanish before my eyes with sickening speed. Watching the curtains disappear and the pictures taken down and the carpets rolled up and carried away, I was reminded of an animated film I’d once seen where a cartoon character with an eraser rubbed out his desk and his lamp and his chair and his window with a scenic view and the whole of his comfortably appointed office until- at last- the eraser hung suspended in a disturbing sea of white. (p. 249)

While the entirety of the book can by quite depressing, I really enjoy the passages like these in this book. They truly lament Theo’s grief, and how silent he remains throughout the movie. During the entire passage, Theo is with his father, yet he doesn’t say much to him, only watches, and packs up the things he needs for Las Vegas. Watching all of his and his mothers’ belongings get stuffed away and donated only rubs salt in his (already very deep) wound. The second half of the book shows Theo as an adult, which portray how his grief caused him to spiral later in his life.

For my Independent Reading Journal, I have chosen a quotation from the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing , written by Madeline Thien. This book follows a ten year-old Chinese-Canadian girl named Marie. The story initially takes place in 1990, but the time varies as her family invites a guest into their home. Ai-Ming is young woman who has fled China, following the Tiananmen massacre. Marie befriends her guest, and together they recount the history of their families, following many different eras from Mao Zedong’s reign in the 1940s, to the very event that caused Ai-Ming to flee in the first place. One particular focus in the book is the power of music, and the emotions it can invoke. This particular quotation is from Ai-Ming recounting the story of a young man named Sparrow, who is living in 1949, nearing the end of the Chinese civil war.

      She gave him a single pear syrup candy. “This will keep your voice sweet,” she whispered. “Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.

Sparrow knew what loneliness was. It was his cousin’s small corpse wrapped in a white sheet. It was the man on the sidewalk who was so old he couldn’t run away when the reds came, it was the boy soldier whose decapitated head sat on the city gates, deforming and softening in the sun. (p. 30)

I really enjoy this quotation, because it shows how much music affects Sparrow. It displays what images come to his mind, in a world of loneliness, without music. Another reason I enjoy this excerpt, is because of how it can also be interpreted as inspirational. The first, minimal piece of dialogue by Big Mother Knife has the power to give some purpose to Sparrow, during such a difficult time, which also spurs his passion for music, which develops further as the story continues.

My current read is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczyk. This Polish book was published in 2009, and it is a novel about an ageing woman in a reclusive village, who has a reputation to villagers as a crank. Janina is an avid believer in astrology and spends much of her time translating the poems of William Blake and conversing with animals. Soon, she inserts herself into an investigation of dead bodies turning up around her. While she is (somewhat) trying to help, she isn’t taken as seriously by many, as her unapologetically odd tendencies vex the readers, and even her closest friends.  

Obtaining a date of birth is relatively easy. All it takes is an identity card, or just about any other document, and sometimes, by chance, it turns up on the Internet. Dizzy has access to all sorts of lists and tables, though I won’t elaborate here. But what really matters is the time of birth. That’s not recorded in the documents, and yet it’s the time that’s the real key to a Person. A horoscope without the time is fairly worthless- we know WHAT, but we don’t know HOW and WHERE. (p. 116) 

I find this quotation extremely entertaining, mostly because of how strange it is. It truly shows Janina’s strange nature, and her thought process. Throughout much of the novel, Janina lets her thoughts and imagination run heedlessly. Her prattling on is rather entertaining, and somewhat concerning. It makes you wonder, why is she collecting horoscopes in the first place, and why she feels the need to look so deeply into other people’s lives? Personally, I find that looking into horoscopes this deeply is quite comical. Many would believe that a horoscope with or without time is quite worthless anyways.  

A book that I am currently reading is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This book takes place in the mid-1600s Puritan Massachusetts. The novel takes place around the husband of Hester Prynne who returned to Salem to find that his wife gave birth to a bastard baby. Hester is cast out socially, and punished to wear an embroidered red “A” on her chest, for adultery. However, the father of the child is unrevealed, due to his high standing in their community. The book begins with Hester’s punishment of standing on the scaffold in the market place for three hours. During this time, she endures much shame and debasement.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain.” remarked one of her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips,  what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”

“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “If we stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!”

“Oh, peace , neighbours – peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do not let her hear you! Not a stich in that embroidered letter but she has felt it in her heart.” (p. 51)

I really enjoy this piece of dialogue, as it really sets the tone of the book, and it displays how Hester Prynne was perceived by the public. This quote shows you how the gossips in the community viewed Hester compared to the magistrates and the ministry. In the book, the gossips are often described as ugly or old, and it is quite obvious that the much of their gibes toward the woman come from jealousy of Hester’s good looks. I am excited to continue this book, and as of right now, I find it very interesting.

The one of my recent IR books is Death in Her Hands, by Otessa Moshfegh. This book is narrated by an elderly widow, who tends to over-speculate. While walking her dog in the woods near her cabin, she finds an ominous note that indicates a dead body named Magda, and that whoever wrote the note did not do it, and that no one will ever know who did. The main issue is that there is no body, and the note leaves much to the imagination. This starts our narrator on an investigation, guided largely by speculation and presumption.

“Whoever had written the note understood that by masking one’s peculiarities, one invokes authority. There is nothing is imposing as anonymity. But the words themselves, when I spoke them aloud, seemed witty, a rare quality in Levant, where most people were blue-collar and dull. I read the note again and almost chuckled over that penultimate line, It wasn’t me. Of course it wasn’t.” p.3

I really enjoy this quote because it gives an interesting look into the narrator’s mind, showing quickly how she thinks. There is rarely any dialogue in the book, as majority of it is our narrator’s thoughts, but it never felt long-winded or tedious, which I really enjoyed.