Rugby

First game this Sunday! I think I’m ready–I’ve learned a lot in the past couple weeks. I’m also definitely in better shape now. I’m no longer screaming in pain after every practice, limping to school the next day and whining every time I have to use my quad muscles. I like feeling the stretch in my legs when we do a warm-up run. I am a little scared about the roughness and injuries–J was like, “Yeah, I’ve gotten so many concussions because I forgot to protect the back of my head! But no biggie.” Um.

Coach B said “Don’t put your arm out when you fall, ’cause your wrist’ll just snap right off.” I have a hard time with this one. It’s so instinctive to shoot out an arm to break your fall, it’s hard to just allow your shoulder and body to take it.

Both The Other Boleyn Girl and Penelope look really great and fun.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rating: 6 out of 10
Summary: A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It’s also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means–and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel’s more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy’s patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. (From amazon.com; edited for length/relevancy by moi).

My Thoughts: Didn’t much enjoy this “great American novel”. Well written but disturbed me for some reason.

Reminded me of The Stranger by Albert Camus, which I read in like the 5th grade. Same slowly seeping feeling of depression. Can’t do anything. No point in life.

Jovah’s Angel by Sharon Shinn

Rating: 8 out of 10
Summary: Great storms are sweeping the land, the deserts flood, and the skies rain down death and destruction. As they have always, the people turn to the angels for help.  Yet even their splendid voices, raised in supplication, cannot seem to reach the god Jovah… Then the proud and beautiful Archangel Delilah falls victim to the rage of the wind, as she is torn from the sky, her wing broken. She can no longer soar in the heavens, guiding and guarding those below. She can no longer be first among the angels. Though Jovah’s anger blows all about them, the oracles must still consult him to choose a new Archangel. His choice – Alleluia, a solitary scholar. Her fate, in turn, may well depend on the mortal Caleb, a man who believes only in science – and himself. (from back cover).

My thoughts: Semi-sequel to Angelica. The movement into the Industrial Age and science was a nice plotline. The bad parts reminded me of the factories and pollution during the industrial ages of Europe and America–kids working 16 hour days in smoke and dirt.

The relevation to Alleluia and Caleb that their “God” is, in reality, a machine floating above the surface of their planet, controlling weather and dispensing food/medicine, was also interesting. Sort of an analogy for the fact that as science advances, more and more people have lost faith in a Higher Power–Darwinism and evolution and all that. Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame has also done this, although I’m not sure which author came first. Either way, both their works are significantly different enough from each other that it’s not such a huge deal.

Enjoyable. The romance was giddy and cute; characters well done. I just keep thinking that it’s such a good idea. I wonder what would happen if somebody actually tried an experiment like this–isolated a group of people, maybe from a young age, teaching them to worship a machine that they don’t know is a machine, etc. etc. Create a whole religion out of it. Let the population evolve and advance. What happens when they find out their God is just a construct of science?

Cool Podcast

Recently, I have been listening to episodes of EscapePod, a podcast of short science fiction stories. So far I’ve listened to Episode 113: Ishmael in Love, Episode 114: Cloud Dragon Skies, and Episode 115: Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush. All three of these were fabulous–Ishmael was quirky and a cool idea; Cloud was lovely and sad–the reader had a fabulous voice and read it so well (I’m not so sure I would have liked the story so much if I’d read it in text form first); and Conversations had me laughing out loud.

The Sweet Sad Love Song of Fred and Wilma I didn’t enjoy very much.

Currently in the middle of Episode 116: Ej-Es.

In the next few days I should get up reviews on The Great Gatsby, and Jovah’s Angel. In the middle of reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and then it’s on to Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida.

Gardens of Water by Alan Drew

Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: In a small town outside Istanbul, Sinan Basioglu, a devout Muslim, and his wife, Nilüfer, are preparing for their nine-year-old son’s coming-of-age ceremony. Their headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter, İrem, resents the attention her brother, Ismail, receives from their parents. For her, there was no such festive observance–only the wrapping of her head in a dark scarf and strict rules that keep her hidden away from boys and her friends. But even before the night of the celebration, İrem has started to change, to the dismay of her Kurdish father. What Sinan doesn’t know is that much of her transformation is due to her secret relationship with their neighbor, Dylan, the seventeen-year-old American son of expatriate teachers.

İrem sees Dylan as the gateway to a new life, one that will free her from the confines of conservative Islam. Yet the young man’s presence and Sinan’s growing awareness of their relationship affirms Sinan’s wish to move his family to the safety of his old village, a place where his children would be sheltered from the cosmopolitan temptations of Istanbul, and where, as the civil war in the south wanes, he hopes to raise his children in the Kurdish tradition.

But when a massive earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the Basioglu family is faced with greater challenges. Losing everything, they are forced to forage for themselves, living as refugees in their own country. Their survival becomes dependent on their American neighbors, to whom they are unnervingly indebted. As love develops between İrem and Dylan, Sinan makes a series of increasingly dangerous decisions that push him toward a betrayal that will change everyone’s lives forever.
The deep bonds among father, son, and daughter; the tension between honoring tradition and embracing personal freedom; the conflict between cultures and faiths; the regrets of age and the passions of youth–these are the timeless themes Alan Drew weaves into a brilliant fiction debut. (synopsis from barnesandnoble.com; slightly edited for length by moi).

Commentary: The most important (relevatory?) part of this novel was the relationship between the American boy Dylan and the Muslim Kurdish girl Irem–it proceeded quite realistically. I’ve been in Irem’s place before and I can understand a lot of the turmoil and thoughts running through her head, agreeing totally with her actions, while at the same time I could take an outsider’s view and try to reach through and yank her back from her accelerating path to the end. Alan Drew did a good job of portraying just what teenage infatuation is. I had a general disdain for Dylan and his stereotypical teenage-emo-angst, but if I were put in Irem’s place, I would not have known exactly what to do either. Her’s was an actual, real dilemma.

The cultural and societal information about the Turkish-Kurdish conflict was very informative–my only previous knowledge about the Kurds was that they were part of a holocaust-esque gas attack directed by the now deposed Saddam Hussein. My reading of Gardens of Water actually coincided with the current news that the Turkish government is moving against Kurds in Northern Iraq… and offered me some insight into that whole background.

The plot, characters, and overall historical and cultural background of the book was great, but at times, Drew’s style got a little overwrought and angsty, as if trying to wring emotion from every single last pronoun and adjective.

Good insight into Turkish and Kurdish history as well as Muslim culture–not so much for the emotional overtones.

Currently Reading and etc.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Also recently purchased/borrowed, soon to arrive and be read:

• Gardens of Water by Alan Drew
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Harris
• more of Sharon Shinn’s works
• some nice picture books about princesses

Also I recently watched:

• Stardust, which I loved and watched again last night.
• Doctor Zhivago, which I liked.
• A marathon of Joss Whedon’s Firefly which was pretty entertaining.
• A marthon of Heidi Klum’s Project Runway, also fairly entertaining.

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: In Iranian-American Amirrezvani’s lushly orchestrated debut, a comet signals misfortune to the remote 17th-century Persian village where the nameless narrator lives modestly but happily with her parents, both of whom expect to see the 14-year-old married within the year. Her fascination with rug making is a pastime they indulge only for the interim, but her father’s untimely death prompts the girl to travel with her mother to the city of Isfahan, where the two live as servants in the opulent home of an uncle—a wealthy rug maker to the Shah. The only marriage proposal now in the offing is a three-month renewable contract with the son of a horse trader. Teetering on poverty and shame, the girl weaves fantasies for her temporary husband’s pleasure and exchanges tales with her beleaguered mother until, having mastered the art of making and selling carpets under her uncle’s tutelage, she undertakes to free her mother and herself. With journalistic clarity, Amirrezvani describes how to make a carpet knot by knot, and then sell it negotiation by negotiation, guiding readers through workshops and bazaars.

Commentary: I’ve read so many novels recently about Muslim women fighting to make their way in the world. This is probably the third I’ve read of the like in the past few months or so–the first being A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, and the second being The Moonlit Cage by Linda Holeman. All three dealt with difficult situations brought upon the women by their fathers, whether it’s because the father has died, or refuses to acknowledge the girl as his (illegitimate) child.

The Blood of Flowers was an entertaining novel. I quite liked the main character–she was very realistic, hardworking yet prone to make bad decisions at times, like any normal teenager.

The most interesting thing I learned was the existence of the practice of sigheh in Muslim culture. A sigheh is a temporary marriage. The participants (and any legal guardians if the woman is a virgin) decide how long this marriage will last and at the end of this predetermined time period, the marriage automatically dissolves. I did a little research later and found that in Shi’a Islam (which is what majority of Iran is) practice this as a legal form of marriage–in Sunni Islam, it’s illegal. More information about sigheh here.

In the novel, the protagonist enters into a sigheh because of the dire financial situation she and her mother are in. She’s paid to have sex with her “husband,” turning the marriage into a thinly veiled form of prostitution. She must please Feyerdoon, her husband, in order to have him agree to renew the contract again after three months, and continue to provide money for her and her mother. The nameless narrator grows desperate after awhile when she notices that Feyerdoon is losing interest to her–this culminates in an interesting trip to a healer, the giving out of advice, and in the end, a more interesting sex life.

However, the marriage is only about sex–Feyerdoon eventually gets married to a “legitimate wife”, and our protagonist is tossed to the side, “used” and completely unmarriageable now that she is no longer a virgin. Eventually she and her mother are tossed out of her uncle’s house into the streets, and this is where the novel gets a little more interesting.

The history and details about traditional carpet-making in old Iranian Persia was pretty cool. The brief little stories from the narrator’s mother were fun as well and served as nice allegories for whatever was going on in her life right then.

Nothing extraordinary, but pretty good novel.