30 Day Book Challenge: 6

Day 06 – A book that makes you sad

This is difficult, because I’m in my dorm room, and I only brought books that make me happy to college. Enough things make me sad for no real reason, I don’t need anything else. But oh god, A Separate Peace made me cry when I read it for the first time. I love that book, because it combines queer narrative with war narrative with boarding school bildungsroman, but what’s his face, the quiet guy Lester, who comes back from war, that was horrible and disturbing. I had no idea what the book was about, and I thought it was just a book about a boys' boarding school that just happened to take place during WWII. I did not realize that there would be actual war in it. (I was really not a good English major in high school.) So that was startling. I think - I'm not sure, but I think - A Separate Peace might have been the book where I realized how pervasive WWII was. There would never just be a book that took place during the late 1930's/early 1940's in the west, because war was everywhere, even if it wasn't at first. That was a sobering lesson in and of itself. Gene also depressed me, because he and Finny were so depressing together once he broke Finny's leg. I really wanted things to go back to the way they had been, but they never did. And just when I thought that everything was going to go well again, then it didn't, and it was all so pointless. I didn't handle the concept of pointlessness in a novel very well until after The Sun Also Rises, and I didn't read that until after A Separate Peace.

So this is also one of the few books that I really like, but haven't read more than twice because it was too depressing. (The other one that immediately comes to mind being Sethra Lavode, because Aerich and Tazendraaaaa.) And this is coming from someone who feeds off of depressing stories.

(Side note: I had to look up the last book in the Khaavren Romances because it's been ages since I read the last one ... except I didn't realize that I apparently worked through all five of those books. I only remember them as being three, but the covers are all familiar and so is the plot summary by Wikipedia. Go, me.)

30 Day Book Challenge: 7

Day 07 – Most underrated book

Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix, which is a series of seven books. Not enough people know about the Keys to the Kingdom series, in my opinion, and it's a really awesome deconstruction of the Chronicles of Narnia. I don't know if that was the intention of the author, but that's the way I interpret it. Kid is chosen by destiny to go to another world adjacent to this one. He goes to this dysfunctional, corrupt world, and he's supposed to save it, and time flows differently between the two worlds. But, see, this is not the fifties, and Nix isn't trying to write a Christian children's story, and he takes the fucking cake in terms of weirdness. Basically, the House runs on Rule of Cool, and things that don't quite make sense if you think about them too hard, like the Improbable Stair and the ships in the Border Sea. Also, steampunk is in fashion, and people wear paper wings, and there are bubble-worlds and starships and creepy skin-stealing monsters. The sheer, massive amount of inventiveness that went into this series is astonishing. I've never met anyone else who's read them, which is a shame. They're the sort of children's books that can easily be read and enjoyed by anyone.

But on to the deconstruction: (and please don't take this to mean that I am looking down on C.S. Lewis; I really, really like The Chronicles of Narnia in a totally non-nostalgic, unironic way. So this is comparing two different ways to go about the same story, one from a Christian point of view, and one from a surreal postmodern-ish view)
- Destiny means Arthur happened to fit the criteria of 'sickly child about to die on a Monday morning at some point in Earth's history.'
- The Aslan-correlate is ... morally ambiguous. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say it's a very flawed character.
- There is a frightening lack of order or stability, and there are things like Piper's Children and getting washed between the ears that are morally sticky.
- The Big Bad is more insidious and subtle than Jadis, and isn't immediately there.
- Arthur's humanity is not celebrated; he needs to be human to start off with, but no one is very keen on him staying that way.
- It's sort of Roald Dahl-ish in that there's a fair number of elements to the story that are not what some people would consider child-friendly (the Old One, and Arthur's personality problems later in the series, not to even touch on the ending of the last book), but it goes ahead with them anyway, and assumes that the readers are going to be able to handle it. Okay, I lied, there is one thing that bugs me about the Chronicles of Narnia, and that was the 'I am an adult, telling you children a story' part, so this is a point where I definitely favor Nix.

I also remember being thrilled when I first read Mister Monday because the main character had asthma, like me, and I've always known I was never going to be able to have adventures because I wear contact lenses and have asthma so I wouldn't be able to leave this world on the spur of the moment the way you have to do in a fantasy book.