We're taking a break from book-themed posts this week, because I have very little energy and my brain does not feel capable of making logical commentary on the books I've read this week. Consequently, today's post is also likely to be quite short.
Exhaustion is a funny thing, because there are some days when you should be exhausted and you are, some days you should be exhausted and you aren't, and some days when you shouldn't be exhausted but you are anyway. Today is one of the latter for me. I think part of it may be because I'm crashing after about a month of high stress all the time. With grad school application issues (thankfully they've all been resolved), a last minute conference, preparing for Purim at work, preparing for and hosting a Purim Extravaganza Shabbat, and calling in to my Colorado book club, it's been a long stretch of late (for me) nights and high adrenaline levels. Of course, what this means for me is that when all those tasks are complete, my adrenaline crashes and I'm actually aware of how tired I am. So really, today I just want to take a nap. That being said, I can't take a nap because that messes with my sleep cycle and just makes the exhaustion of tomorrow worse...And with another conference coming up this week I'm not willing to risk that. It does, however, remind me of a book I read on the recommendation of a co-worker, "The Age of Miracles" by Karen Thompson Walker. While it was not one of my favorite reads last year, it did have some beautiful language and does comment on the importance of the circadian rhythm (though that is most definitely not the main point of the story). The book is about something going wrong with the rotation of the Earth which results in days getting longer. While I forget what number of hours the days eventually stopped at, it was enough that the normal circadian rhythms of organisms all over the planet were getting screwed up. While the book is primarily a coming of age story framed around this disaster, it mentions two factions: those who simply get black-out blinds and continue to work with a 24-hour day schedule regardless of whether there is sunlight outside or not, and those who attempt to reset their sleeping rhythms by staying awake when it is light and going to sleep when it is dark. There's no real resolution between these two factions in the book (again, that wasn't the point of the story), but neither one really worked that well. And while I don't know whether one or the other would actually be better for human beings should such a strange thing happen, I do know that maintaining sleep rhythms in everyday life is pretty important. It's why I've read multiple blog articles in the past about how you shouldn't change your sleep/wake cycle on the weekends. It's also why people invest in products that help them sleep when they need to (e.g., sleep-masks, ear-plugs, blackout blinds, etc.) even if nature isn't cooperating. It's also why Daylight Savings tends to make everyone grumpy at some point. And because I believe in the importance of sleep, it means that as much as I want to nap today I'm going to keep pushing through the day so that I can sleep tonight without worrying about tossing and turning until midnight. Thankfully, reading isn't too strenuous and I have leftover food from my Shabbat dinner for lunches this week. ;) Happy Reading!
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Spoiler Warning: For those of you haven't watched the movie or read the book but want to do so, please be aware that there are spoilers in this blog post. Do not read if you do not want spoilers. Thank you.And with that lovely comparison picture I'm just going to jump right into the first, but hopefully not last, post of the category "Book Vs. Movie!" When you read that, you should hear a deep announcer voice in your head that then echoes off into the distance after the last syllable. Please tell me I'm not the only one who hears that every time I type out "Book Vs. Movie!"
Internal experiences of my psyche aside, I tend to have a love-hate relationship with books that are turned into movies or TV shows, mainly because I'm also a fandom girl, which means that I tend to get bogged down by the little details that "just aren't right" in the movie and angry at the gigantic changes that often happen (moral of the story, you probably don't want to ask me what I thought of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians movies). Moving on. I think that modern society, most especially in the Western capitalist world, has done a great disservice to men and women when it comes to conceptions of beauty. I'm sure you all probably have thoughts of your own on that topic, and a quick Google search will show you a plethora of other opinions too, but the point of this post isn't to debate the consequences and origins of body-shaming. Today, I'm going to be giving my take on the Young Adult novel turned Netflix film book celebrating fat-positivity and the rise of a teen beauty pageant contestant. Three Big Differences: It's been a few weeks since I read the book, and because of Netflix it is super popular right now and therefore I had to return it to the library and do not have it in front of me to remind myself of small details, so I'll just discuss three big ones. #1 Where's the love triangle? For those of you who haven't read the book, I'm sure that's a major spoiler, sorry but I did warn you at the top there would be spoilers. One of the huge differences between the book and the movie was the lack of Willowdean's love life, and El's as well to some extent. There was a definite love triangle going on, and it started during the summer when Bo and Willowdean started going out (the timeline of the movie is completely different from the book, though I give the movie some leeway because they do have to condense things a lot), then Willowdean found out Bo didn't tell her he was going to be attending her school (another huge difference that I'm giving some leeway for, see above) and they sort of broke up, and Willowdean went to the dance with a different boy from the football team who is super sweet but the spark isn't there, and she still likes Bo and Bo still likes her, and this new boy likes her too, and it's like every other teen love triangle: a mess. But this was missing from the movie. Potentially because of time constraints. Potentially because of how confusing it was. Potentially a bit of both. I'm both glad the movie didn't try to fit it all into the movie, but sad as well. Because the movie shares and overall uplifting message, but the book is able to add greater depth to what fat girls and boys go through, especially in high school. Now as for El's love life with her boyfriend, who we see at the very beginning of the movie and then hear is puking in the bathroom at the end of the movie but otherwise know nothing about, is also more detailed in the book. And it actually causes some added tension between Willowdean and El which increases the intensity of their "break" during the pageant. And that's a perfect segue into the next gigantic difference. #2 Willowdean and El break up I fully acknowledge that time cannot truly be compared in movies and books, because while both tend to skip days/weeks/months as the plot needs, books can add it tons of little details to the days whereas movies...can't. There is no way a movie is going to be able to do what a book can do because people start leaving at 2 hours. Most of the time, anyway. So I understand why the movie may have chosen to have El and Willowdean's fight work out the way it did. But in the book? El wasn't even supposed to sign up. That's when the fight started. And cracks were already showing before that when Callie (El's friend from where she worked) dropped a line to Willowdean that El might have confided more about her first time to Cali than she did to Willowdean. That, coupled with a lot of the other stuff, pushed the breaking point much earlier in the book, which means it lasted longer too. The main basis for the fight was the same, however, so I accept the slight changes the film made for time. #3 Missing characters!!!! So, there are at least two relatively main characters from the book that never made it into the movie. And unfortunately I can't remember their names (which is really bad and I'm sorry) and since they aren't in the movie, they aren't mentioned anywhere but in the book! And I don't have the book right in front of me. However, these two characters were relatively important to the plot of the novel. One, is Millie's very good friend who enters the pageant with Millie, Hannah, and Willowdean. The second, is the third leg of the love triangle mentioned above. Obviously, the movie was still able to tell the story without these characters, but it's difficult for me as a reader to fully love a film that cuts characters, even if it is for a good reason. Conclusion: Read the book. And watch the film. As far as book-to-movie films go, Dumplin' did pretty well. There were some large differences, and probably a whole lot more small ones than I caught, but the overall message was the same. Conventional forms of pretty? They should mean less than we think they do; and while it can be incredibly difficult to do so, ignore those conventions and just be yourself. Also, Dolly Parton is queen. ;) This has been another long post, so I'll leave it at that for now. Definitely reach out or leave a comment if you want more detail though. I'm always willing to talk books. Happy Reading! This past weekend I read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. A popular YA novel in its own right, it is also now a major motion picture. But before you decide to write it off as just another dystopian novel that got turned into a movie, I suggest you actually read the story (heck, I'll accept reading the synopsis on Amazon.com or listening to a family member or friend describe the plot to you).
First of all, this book is only as dystopian as our current society here in the United States of America. Now, for those of you who still think our country is the absolute greatest in the world, we're still living in a pretty dang dystopian society. And from my perspective, it's been getting worse for a number of years. But back to the novel. The gist of the novel, for those of you who didn't go and read the synopsis, is that it is the story of a black, teenage girl who witnessed one of her best friends getting shot by a police officer at a traffic stop. The boy who was shot was black. He was unarmed. He was not making any threatening moves to the police officer. That isn't a spoiler, by the way, because it all happens in the first few chapters. The rest of the book details the weeks that follow. Starr, the main character, has to navigate talking to the police after the "incident", dealing with gang activity in her neighborhood, trying to stay afloat in a private school where she is one of three black students, and deciding whether she should talk to the media about her, and her deceased friend's, side of the story. It is a commentary on racial tensions in the U.S.A. and the unacknowledged racism that is shoved down our throats every single day until it seems natural rather than learned. It is depressing, rage-inducing, and a book I think everyone should read (but especially white people, because we need to get our ish together). What I want to focus on today, though, is not how well-written and timely this book is. I'm not going to discuss anything related to a reference interview; sometimes I will, but not today. Today, I want to talk about a very specific sub-plot in the book between Starr and a classmate she used to think was a good friend, Hailey. Hailey has...issues. Hailey is, I think, what many white people are when they think they are being "good" but missing the point entirely. Now, Hailey says some very racist things throughout the course of the book. But when she's called out on it by Starr and others, she responds with an outraged, "I can't believe you're calling me racist!" Do you see the problem? It's not just in books. See, racism is systemic violence, and it is pretty much baked into every single day of our lives. Unfortunately, racism is framed as a personal failing of the individuals of our society. So rather than white people recognizing that something they said/did was racist and taking the necessary steps to stop saying/doing that racist thing, white people respond defensively and try to use logic to worm their way out of responsibility. This actually makes the whole situation worse, because the person who was the object of the words/act now has additional violence heaped on them because they are being told that their feelings do not matter, only white people's feelings matter. This is a subtle violence against minorities in some ways. It isn't something that is easily called out. After all, if all a white person has to do is say "But I'm not racist" to get out of taking responsibility, then what is the point of a minority even saying something? We even saw this issue in the recent congressional testimony of Michael Cohen (Lind, 2019), where a mention of a racist act by President Trump was conflated to be an accusation of racism. Regardless of your opinions about whether President Trump is or isn't racist (we're not going to get into it here), the pattern is the same. Rather than a discussion about how a white person could take responsibility for doing something racist and then make efforts to not do it again, it became a back and forth argument about how you shouldn't call someone racist. First, if someone is racist you should call them out on it. Second, that ignores the fact that racism is not a personal failing but a systemic problem. The Hate U Give gives us white people insight into how anyone can say/do something racist. It isn't the main point of the book, and is in fact a very small subplot, but I think it is just as important and ties into the broader theme. For example, characters in the book say that the cop who shot the black teenager wasn't racist, he was a nice guy, his life has been torn apart by this too. But why did he stop the kids in the first place? They weren't speeding. All that was wrong was a broken tail-light. How can that turn into a shooting? Because we are all trained to be racist by our society. And it is an active fight not to be. And even when you're fighting it, you can still do something racist. You can still say something racist. But what needs to happen then is not to get defensive about being a good person and not being racist. It is to accept that what you did was wrong and then take steps to make it better. And once you've done that, don't do it again. It isn't something you can say sorry for and then repeat. This is a longer post then I meant it to be, but I think that's what is so great about the book. The Hate U Give made me think, and it made me focus on things that I do and that I see others doing. It has given me a better awareness of my own prejudices, and I hope it has given me even greater motivation to watch what I say and do. The Hate U Give shows us some of the issues in our society in a well-written and accessible novel. I encourage everyone to read it and find their own lessons in its pages (it's also on audiobook *wink*). Happy Reading! References: Lind D. (2019).This Cohen hearing fight was everything wrong with how America talks about “racism”: An argument about whether Trump is “a racist” became a heated fight between House Democrats and Republicans. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/27/18243173/cohen-hearing-trump-racist-comments Thomas, A. (2017). The hate u give. |
AuthorThe author is a librarian who reads "too much" (is there such a thing?) and talks just as much. As an aspiring author she gets bogged down by grammar rules when she just wants to forget them to make a sentence flow, but never seems to be able to. She appreciates thoughtful comments and constructive criticism, but internet trolls beware, she's read enough fantasy novels to know how to defeat the monsters. Archives
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