Memoirs

          When I first read a memoir, it was a book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and I was fourteen years old.  I just remember thinking that nothing really happened in the book, yet I was enraptured all the same.  I couldn’t put it down.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me hope.  This confused me.  I was in a stage of life where all I wanted to read was books that had lots of fighting and action and dragons and there I was, reading a book with seemingly no plot whatsoever, and completely falling in love with it.  What I slowly realized was that the reason I was drawn in so strongly is because the power of experience.  The power of listening to someone’s story.

Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, which is an excellent book and movie, said that bad memoirs are narcissistic.  They are only for the author.  Good memoirs are for all of us.  This statement perfectly captures what makes a good memoir so enticing and relatable.  Memoirs, good ones, have the uncanny ability to take someone’s experience and making it everyone’s experience.  We, as readers, get to share in someone else’s story.  Some memoirs are about small, trivial things told with whit and charm, while others still are about unbelievable and unforgettable things that seem impossible.  Either way, the best writers are able to tell their story in such a way that reminds all of us of the agency that we have in our own lives.  Whether it is in the small, mundane moments or in the massive, life changing ones, each person has a story.  It is up to us to listen to the stories of others just as much as it is our responsibility to make our story the best that it can be.  Here are some of my favorite memoirs that remind me why life is worth living, and worth living well:

1. Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss One Song at a Time, by Rob Sheffield

            Rob Sheffield is a writer who is most known for his work in Rolling Stone magazine, but this is the memoir about his relationship with his wife and music.  Each chapter begins with a different mixtape that he made for his wife at various times in their relationship, which he uses as a springboard to discuss love in all its various forms.  Sheffield writes with compassion and conviction as he forces you to fall in love with his wife and music alongside him.  If you find yourself jaded and cynical, that will disappear as you read this delightful tale that will equally crush your soul and compel you to laughter, smiles, and joy.  This book is driven by a perceptive spirit, a hopeful disposition, and an incredible knowledge of music through the generations.

 

2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

            This small book is one of the most powerful narratives that I have ever read.  It is the tale of Maya Angelou’s childhood told in such a way that only Angelou is capable of.  If you have never read anything by her before, stop whatever you are doing and go get this book.  Utterly dripping with poetry, this story describes one of the more singular lives of the last century.  Angelou travels from the south to San Francisco and beyond as she catalogues both joys and horrors with a voice that is impossible to forget.  She takes her readers on a visionary journey through the most important parts of her life; all of the good, all of the bad, radiantly connecting the two so as to remind us how love, joy, and hope can ultimately overcome some of the most overwhelming situations.

 

3. Night, by Elie Wiesel

            In the most haunting 100 pages ever written, Wiesel wrote the seminal memoir about life under the Nazi regime and in concentration camps.  Young Elie traces his life from the beginning of the Nazi occupation, being corralled into ghettos, and finally being shipped off to the concentration camps.  Filled with brutal truth and darkness, this is one of those works that you read and never forget because, as disturbing as these details are, we must remember them collectively so that we can keep this sort of violence and insanity from ever happening again.  This is one of the most important books from the 20^th century.

 

4. Through Painted Deserts, by Donald Miller

            Donald Miller is most famous for his book Blue Like Jazz, which is also great and you should read that too, but personally, I liked this one more.  It is, on the surface, a memoir of him driving around the country in a broken down van, but below the surface it is a beautiful look at solitude, solidarity, spirituality, and life in general.  With Miller’s accessible prose and irreverent yet compassionate tone, this book takes you on a journey through the deserts of the American southwest and beyond.  The scenery and the landscape dance off the page, as do numerous life lessons that we’ve all thought before, but never really had the words to describe.

 

5. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

            This novella isn’t specifically a memoir in the fact that the title character, Esperanza, is fictional.  However, the stories that she tells are steeped in memory and imbued with experience.  Told through a series of disparate vignettes that seem, at times, more like poetry than prose, this tiny book tells the story of a young girl growing up in inner-city Chicago.  It tells stories about youth, love, family, race, gender, and so much more.  Some are hilarious, some are tragic, some are both, but all of them are beautiful.  Sort of like the mind of a child, this book seems to happen all at once and it is that much more insightful because of how the stories are spun.  Drawing upon her mastery of poetry, Cisneros tells a myriad of stories that all speak the same compassion and hope.  This book is a quick read and a delight, but it will also challenge any reader that picks it up.

 

Race

           Race is, has been, and most likely always will be a hot topic in society.  What I find to be the problem with most “hot topics” is that people spend way too much time talking about them and less time listening to others who are more knowledgeable and educating themselves about the subject.  Worse than that, the spend even less time actually doing something about the problems at hand.  What this leads to is rampant naivety mixed with arrogance, a crippling lack of helpful dialogue, and a scarcity of positive action.  Now, race is an incredibly complex concept that covers a wide range of people groups.  That being said, this particular blog is focused expressly on hearing voices from the black community and is aimed at the white community.  I do not claim to be an expert on race in any way and am, in fact, less informed than any person of a minority people group our there for the simple fact that they live this problem every day and I do not, which is the definition of white privilege and informs why I am writing this blog in the first place.  Allow me to elaborate…

So many people (specifically those perceived as white) in this day and age are obsessed with clearing their name of racism that they turn a blind eye to the unbelievable systemic issues that are still undeniably prevalent in our society.  People everywhere are so quick to say, “I’m not racist!,” that they shift the focus to themselves rather than fixing the problems at hand.  Racism is alive and well, and the cultural trends in most educational, economic, and political spheres demonstrate that every day.  There are definitely bigots who are still explicitly racist and that is a huge, obvious problem, but a more extensive and subversive problem are the people like me who grew up with white privilege without ever knowing it.  Once again, ignorance and closed-mindedness cause all the problems.

            Race is a funny thing.  What it comes down to are social constructions more than anything.  For example, I’m not even predominantly white.  I’m Spanish and Mexican, but I look white and am therefore perceived as white; and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.  Growing up, I didn’t understand how or why people could be racist.  I mean, people are people, regardless of how they look, right?  So when people generalized about the white community being racist, I would get immediately defensive.  “Me?  No way!  I mean, I have a black friend!”  Oh young Luke, you stupid ignorant fool.  The problem at hand is that through my immediate defensiveness, I neglected to recognize the problem.  And as any twelve-step program will tell you, the first step is recognizing that you have a problem.  The problem to me became fear; fear of being labeled as racist and bigoted.  God forbid some one judge me because I seem white!  Come on!  Just because of the way I look you are going to label me as racist when you don’t even know me??  Oh, wait… I see now.

            This small, tiny, insignificant affront against my race calling us out for being what we actually are, which is racist (or simply uninformed) is the most minuscule example of prejudice possible.  It’s not even prejudice, it’s just truth.  The truth that we become so self-justifying that we are blind to the real problem which is that society, in and of itself, is imbued with undeniable biases and prejudices.  Therefore, if you are a member of society, you should be constantly checking these biases, which are sometimes painfully obvious, yet overlooked.

            One tangible example is something called the achievement gap.  This gap is an educational concept that people of racial minorities are less likely to succeed in school and it is mathematically and empirically proven every single year in the form of graduation and dropout rates across the country.  The amount of factors that contribute to the gap are staggering, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to mention the one that pisses me off the most.  The majority of government funding allotted to any given school is determined by the property taxes of houses in the district.  What this means is, schools that are in areas with higher property values will receive that much more money just because of the affluent nature of the area.  Therefore, schools in poorer areas receive less money, and schools in nicer areas receive more.  This creates a defined economic gap that only gets worse and worse, and we have yet to change the laws of funding for schools.

            I went to a nice school in a nice area.  I was completely unaware of the achievement gap until I went to graduate school.  Through my perspective, everything was hunky-dory and some people were just unlucky.  Luck has nothing to do with it.  Race, as much as you may want to fight against it, plays a major role in society and the blind cry of “But I’m not racist” is not helping anyone.  If you are a person who is perceived as white like me, there is nothing that we can do on our own to “fix” racism.  We are the oppressors and we have been for centuries.  The first step is recognizing that, accepting it, and then going to people from racial minorities with contrite hearts, willing spirits, and open minds ready to shut up for a moment and listen to someone else’s experience.  We will never fully understand persecution of this nature.  We will never truly experience what it is like to, day in and day out, be a member of a racial minority with all of the prejudices and persecutions that go with that.  We simply won’t be able to solve this problem alone because we caused it.  All we do is perpetuate it with our apologetics and impotent attempts at being the savior.  We need to stop talking and start listening.  Here are some of the amazing voices that have taught me how blind I was and still am in certain ways.  Stop being defensive and open your eyes to this issue, which is the root of so much violence and hate.  Then, maybe we can become a part of the solution instead of just worrying about ourselves and how people see us.

1. Race Matters, by Cornell West

It is important to note that the title of this book is double entendre.  West means that race really does matter as much as this work is about racial matters.  This book was written right after the Rodney King riots of the early nineties, but it is just as insightful and transcendent now as it was back then.  Cornell West is one of the most amazing thinkers of our time and more people need to hear his voice.  Race Matters elaborates on the racial issues in society, how they are perceived by different sides of the political spectrum, and how we as a whole need to recognize how our own skewed perceptions get in the way of us constructing a beneficial solution.  West tears apart these problems and offers remedies that are founded in love and respect, which he argues are the main ways that any person can commit to racial reconciliation.  He also brings up the vacuum that has resulted with a lack of leaders such as Malcom X or Martin Luther King Jr. and the need for a central rallying cry in this post-modern civil rights movement.  Lastly, he highlights the need for simple education.  An academic himself, West acknowledges the fact that misinformation and obliviousness are driving catalysts behind the racial dilemma.  With incredible compassion and unabashed truth, West created one of the most important works on race from the turn of the century. 

 

2. The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

            Ta-Nehisi Coates is an amazing contemporary voice in not only racial issues, but also literature in general.  I featured his other book, Between the World and Me, in my blog about diversifying my reading list and you should read that one too because it is incredible and also about these racial issues in our culture.  The Beautiful Struggle, however, is different in the fact that it is a memoir about his life growing up in the crack-age of inner city Baltimore.  With beautiful poetry and lyricism, we as readers see the world through young Ta-Nehisi’s eyes complete with his complex relationship with his parents, his brothers and sisters, and the world at large.  Tracing his life from childhood to college, we see what it was like for him growing up young and black during a pivotal time for his city.  Steeped in musicality, this book is so much more than just informative: it is inspired, visionary, and eye-opening.  This book helped me to realize that I know nothing.  I am simply an uneducated part of the problem and I need to change my tune and listen.

 

3. Native Son, by Richard Wright

            There are certain books that are so visceral, so powerful, and so vivid that you will never forget them.  This is one of them.  When I read Native Son, it easily jumped to the top of the list of my favorite books of all time.  Bigger Thomas is a young, twenty-year-old black man living with his family in a dilapidated, one-bedroom apartment on the South-Side of 1940s Chicago.  The lines between the white world and the black world are painfully obvious to Bigger and the anger and fear that this causes in his consciousness are palpable.  When he commits a vicious crime, we as readers are thrown into a tumultuous and unforgettable storm filled with racism, panic, and violence.  Wright wrote a masterpiece when he wrote Native Son.  Word of caution, this book is disturbing and haunting in a way that is hard to describe, but it is ineradicably important.  This is a must read.

 

4. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

            In this fearless novel, Morrison plunges courageously into the depths of slavery, shedding a lyrical light on an excruciatingly violent time in our nation’s past.  Sethe is a recently escaped slave living with her daughter whom she gave birth to while on the run.  Her sons have left because the house that they now occupy, which is simply called by it’s address, 124, is haunted by the memory and ghost of the daughter that didn’t survive named Beloved.  The address itself echoes the fact that her third child is missing and memories that are too disturbing bubble beneath the surface as Sethe tries to adjust to a life of freedom.  Identity, remembrance, and the supernatural play an authoritative role in this outstanding novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in literature.  Widely heralded as the greatest American novel of the late 1900s, this book exudes evocative poetry and engulfs its readers in a haunting, ominous, yet hopeful look at one of the bleakest times in American history.  Few people command the English language with as much mastery as Morrison.  She is one of the true artists.

 

5. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

            Wilkerson is an award winning journalist who has dazzling powers with the non-fiction genre.  In this, her masterwork, she weaves the true story of America’s Great Migration.  In the century between emancipation and the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies, black people left the South in droves and headed North and West to escape Jim Crow, segregation, oppression, and violence.  Since then, it became one of the most overlooked and misrepresented movements in American history.  Through painstaking research and endless interviews, Wilkerson gives us the first comprehensive look at this Migration that affected and continues to alter so much of our country.  What is most amazing is how she utilizes people’s stories as a lens to analyze this seminal time in our country.  Driven by compassionate narrative, this book shows the reader how non-fiction is anything but dry and mundane, but instead is filled with heart, soul, and necessity.  This book taught me so much that it would be impossible to put it into words.  Just read it, and listen to the true stories of these millions of lives.

 

As usual, happy reading everyone!  See you next month.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

           The genre that first interested me the most in reading was, without a doubt, sci-fi/fantasy.  As a kid, I ate it up with a silver spoon and continue that obsession to this day.  The wonderful thing about fantasy books is that they allow the authors to generate entire worlds.  We as readers can simply dive in and be immersed by something new, something exciting, and yet nostalgic and real at the same time.  I don’t mean real in the sense that Daenerys Targaryen is real and we should all be on the lookout for dragons.  I mean real in the sense that the characters can become so visceral, so well-developed that their emotions and reactions to circumstances remind us of everyday life.  We have shared experiences, even though we will never actually have a ring of power or ride a hippogriff, as much as we may want to.

I think that this is the thing about fantasy or science fiction that is so enticing: it is still reality, still humanity, that we are dealing with, it’s just an altered reality that takes us outside of ourselves.  In this way, it is an escape from reality, but not one that we use as a way to completely avoid our lives (although it can seem that way at times).  Instead, these worlds teach us things about our existence that we wouldn’t normally want to think about or engage in a way that generates strong, tangible memories.  These memories become the intercession between fantasy and reality.  I still vividly remember the first time I read Lord of the Rings, especially the battle of the Pelennor Fields (I think the copy of that book still has my grip marks on it).  I remember being amazed at the fact that four humble hobbits saved the entire world, which was an incredible revelation for a chubby middle school kid who used to get food thrown at him.  When I re-read Harry Potter, I still hear all the voices that my dad used when he read the first four out loud to us (he had the best Dobby, and and even better Hagrid).  I also remember being super bummed when I turned eleven and didn’t get my letter to Hogwarts.  Now that I’m older, I realize that I did go to Hogwarts!  And I can go back whenever I want!  All I need to do is curl up with the book and let the words take me away to a world that is so fantastical and so magical, yet at the same time so familiar because it is indelibly a part of all of our lives.  So here are some new memories from different authors that I really enjoy:

1. The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wrecker

            Two immigrants arrive in New York in 1899 who couldn’t have more different backgrounds.  One is a golem, a being straight out of Jewish folklore, brought to life by a twisted master of Kabbalah to be the husband of a lonely immigrant.  The other is a Jinni, trapped in a flask thousands of years ago by a wizard, unknowingly released by an Arab metal worker.  The two find that they need to hide their true nature from everyone for fear that people would either try to exploit them or kill them.  However, when they meet, they find an unlikely bond in the fact that neither of them are truly human.  Wrecker places this narrative directly in history, shedding light on a pivotal time in America, all the while spinning a delightful tale of fantastical beings.

 

2. The Alchemy Wars, by Ian Tregillis

            So far there are only two books out of this trilogy, The Mechanical and The Uprising, and I am stuck here waiting for the third with bated breath.  This is a brilliant example of speculative fiction where Tregillis re-writes history by asking the question: what if alchemy were real?  Jax is mechanical being brought to life by the mysterious powers of alchemy.  His life and his soul are bound to humans, whom he is forced to serve along with the rest of his mechanical kin.  He lives in an alternate world where the Dutch rule through their ownership of alchemy and the French are gripping for control of what is, in our world, America.  In this world, a war that has been on hiatus starts to bubble again through a few catalytic clandestine operations, one of which somehow gives Jax’s soul freedom, changing everything.  Tregillis manages to weave a wonderfully suspenseful story all the while asking the question: what is a soul without free will?

 

3. A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E Schwab

            This is the first book in Schwab’s trilogy, Shades of Magic.  I really need to stop reading trilogies that aren’t completely published yet because I’m practically living on pins and needles at this point and it’s killing me.  In this series, there are four alternate worlds grounded by the fact that they all have London.  There is Grey London, which forgot magic a long time ago, Red London, which is flourishing though the use of magic, White London, a desolate world in which magic is based on power, hierarchy, and tyranny, and Black London, which was obliterated and sealed off years ago.  No one goes there now.  A select few beings are able to cross over between worlds, and they are responsible for carrying information from one world to the next.  Kell is one of these “Travelers,” with the illegal side hobby of smuggling artifacts from the differing worlds.  When he receives an artifact from Black London, a dark magic that was forgotten long ago leaks out into each world.  Complete with magic, wonder, and a total badass female lead named Delilah, this book has it all.  Give it a read, and then wait with me for the others to come out.

 

4. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

            Bradbury is one of the original sci-fi kings.  You may have read his book Fahrenheit-451 in high school, which is also amazing, but this is one of his collections of short stories and it is absolutely dazzling.  Every story is told by a moving tattoo on “The Illustrated Man” and each is as disturbing as it is wonderful.  A planet where men are driven insane by constant rain, a room made to entertain children becomes all too real, a world in which dying authors try to fight off humanity using the monsters in their stories, even orbs of light with the secrets of God, life, and happiness.  All this and more color the pages of this singular collection from one of the most memorable voices from the genre.  You’ll come for the exciting science fiction and leave with more realizations and truths than you know what to do with.

 

5. The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut

            So, Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors.  He is as hilarious as he is insightful.  You can read any of his books and be amazed.  Slaughterhouse Five is his most famous book and you should definitely read that too, but I put The Sirens of Titan on here because it doesn’t get as much notoriety but is just as good.  In this story, Malachi Constant is the richest man in America.  Haughty and naïve, he doesn’t care much for others and Mrs. Rumfoord knows it.  When her husband, Winston, selects Constant to join him on a series of adventures through time and space, she has no idea why, but complies due to the fact that her husband is caught in a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula and only materializes on Earth once every fifty-nine days.  While materialized, he informs his wife that he knows Constant and met him on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn and needs to meet him on Earth during his next materialization.  What follows is a bizarre series of escapades in which time and space become irrational, but morality and humanity are laid bare.  With characteristic whit, Vonnegut asks some of life’s biggest questions, all the while bringing his readers on an unbelievably believable journey.

 

As usual, happy reading everyone!  See you next month.

Gender Studies

            Gender is one of the most complex concepts in human development.  The reason that it can be so convoluted is that it is tied up in so many aspects of a person’s life.  It affects their style, their relationships, their orientation, their job, and the way that they live their life.  A person’s identity is, for better or for worse, inseparably linked to their gender identity.  Now, because of these complexities, it can be a divisive issue with a wide range of arguments that go along with it, running the gamut from parenting to social constructionism to if pink and blue really relate to girls and boys.  I am not here to argue any of these points.  If you’ve ever been to a bar with me, odds are you’ve heard my opinion on all of that stuff (sorry).  The reason that I am writing this is because I know that my perception of gender used to be very myopic.  It wasn’t necessarily that I was ultra-conservative and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that boys would be boys and girls would be girls and that was that.  It was more the fact that I hadn’t even engaged the topic of gender enough to even formulate that opinion.  I was, for all intensive purposes, uneducated.  I hadn’t taken the time to think critically about a concept that directly affects me and everyone around me day in and day out.  Because of that, I lived a blissfully ignorant life that marginalized people and myself without me even knowing about it.  The problem with naivety is that it can be incredibly damaging and you wouldn’t even be aware of it.

            I believe what started my interest in gender studies was actually my relationship with my mom.  For those who don’t know my mom, she is a total badass.  I was a pastor’s kid growing up, with the notable difference that my mom, not my dad, was the pastor, which I didn’t understand was non-traditional until much later in life; I just accepted it as completely normal.  Nowadays, she runs an international faith-based women’s leadership organization called Lifesprings Ministries (check them out, it’s amazing).  Anyway, I went to college at a private Christian university, which had some good and some bad just like any collegiate experience.  While I was there I learned a lot more than just what I was studying.  Primarily, it wasn’t until college that I realized that I was liberal.  It wasn’t that I was conservative and then changed my opinions.  It was that I genuinely didn’t know that I leaned left politically.  The main catalyst behind this revelation was the fact that I met a lot of Christians who told me that my mom couldn’t have been a pastor because she was a woman.  Upon meeting these people, confused is much too weak of a word to describe my emotions.  Flabbergasted?  Dumbfounded?  Definitely.  But also unbelievably livid.  What do you mean my mom can’t be a pastor?  Like, seriously?  People believe this?  It was at that time that I knew I needed to deconstruct my concepts of gender and figure out how to prove to everyone in the world that my mom is absolutely amazing and the fact that she is a woman is nothing but more empowering for her profession and life.  Naturally, I didn’t know what deconstruction was at that point.  And I thought that I knew what gender was as well, but little did I know how wrong I was.

            The following five books are a select few that really helped me understand what gender is and how it manifests itself in each individual person and in society as a whole.  These are genuinely some of my favorite books in the world simply because they shifted my entire paradigm of what I thought I knew.  Whatever your political persuasion, it is important to analyze concepts and constructs of gender.  Find what you agree with, what you disagree with, but more than anything just be aware.  Be aware that of the weight that gender can hold, and the freedom that it can offer if we all just learn a little bit more.

1. The Purity Myth, by Jessica Valenti

            In The Purity Myth, Valenti breaks down our culture’s obsession with purity, specifically as it applies to young women.  For those who lean right, a fair word of caution, Valenti is very liberal and can be quite caustic (which is why I like her), but aside from this, she makes some incredibly important points about how we oftentimes teach girls to be obsessed with their purity as the end all be all of if they are good people or not.  Valenti posits that this develops a strong rhetoric that tells young girls that their only worth is in their sexuality and virginity.  Which begs the question, if that is your logic, once virginity is gone, what value do you have?  Valenti tackles everything from purity rings, to any analogy involving a lollipop or flower or tissue, to truly shocking things such as fathers virtually “owning” their daughters’ virginity until the day they pass it on to another man.  While Valenti is well known for being one of the most vocal feminists of this age, she is, at the same time, very considerate in her arguments.  She never says, “go be wild and who cares what happens.”  Instead, she redefines purity as it should be, which is a mentality of education, awareness, and putting value in women as people, not just objects of sexual desire.  A must read for anyone who has ever felt damaged by a hyper-sexualization of purity.

 

2. A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans

            First off, I LOVE Rachel Held Evans and every word that she has ever written.  I’d say that’s an unnecessary superlative if it weren’t completely true.  She has written several books and maintains an incredible blog that tackles some of the toughest issues in society today.  This is the book that she is most famous for.  In it, Held-Evans decided to live for an entire year exactly as the Bible says that women should live, including everything from learning how to cook to camping outside while she is on her period.  Initially, this book is absolutely hilarious.  We as readers are welcomed on this journey with Rachel as she narrates her experiences with her characteristic whit and accessibility.  I laughed out loud in public places and people thought I was weird.  Secondarily, and more importantly, Held-Evans manages to put archaic biblical conceptions of womanhood in a modern context.  In this, she denotes an ideology of what it means to be not only a woman, but a better person and Christian in the most empowering way possible: through the truth.

 

3. The Will to Change, by Bell Hooks

            I was first introduced to Hooks through her writings about education, a couple of which I had to read while going through teacher education and others which were given to me by friends.  I then delved into an entire world of Bell Hooks that was amazingly enlightening, and this one was my favorite.  The Will to Change is all about concepts of masculinity as they exist in society and how damaging it can be for men everywhere.  Hooks started off as a die-hard feminist who blamed men for most of the problems in society.  What she realized through her studies, however, was that the patriarchy controls men just as much as it does women.  Men are told to be emotionless, hardened, loveless, and callused, which leaves them with little to no idea as to how to love or emote.  In this book, Hooks tears apart what it means to be a man and offers a way for men to become fully themselves.

 

4. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, by Michael Kimmel

            If I could force the whole world to read one book, it would be this one.  Seriously, I have three copies and I am constantly lending them out because I want everyone to read it.  Michael Kimmel is essentially the leading scholar on masculinity.  This book analyzes young men from the ages of sixteen to twenty-six and how those formative years determine so much, yet it is also where so many boys get stuck between being a boy and being a man, leaving them in “Guyland.”  Kimmel deconstructs all sorts of social constructions of masculinity going from sports culture, to pornography, to father son relationships and beyond.  In that, he informs so much about horrific problems such as gay-bashing, bullying, abuse, and rape. This book is unbelievably well-researched, drawing upon years of studies, interviews, and analyses.  Somehow, Kimmel manages to be considerate yet relentless as he destroys false notions of masculinity and calls men everywhere not only to be better men, but also better people.  Everyone needs to read this book.

 

5. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

            Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and it was well-deserved.  This is the only book on this list that is fiction, but it is fiction that turns gender on its head.  It is a multi-generational story about the Stephanides family as they go from Asia-Minor to Detroit and beyond.  This narrative is made singularly unique by the fact that the narrator, Callie, is a hermaphrodite.  Due to the unique sexual and gender identity of the narrator, things that are normally mitigating factors in fiction become either ambiguous or obsolete.  This queering of gender in the narration allows the real meaning of this phenomenal novel to stand out.  Themes such love, loss, and family shine brilliantly with one of the most delightful voices of contemporary fiction.  Even if you aren’t interested in gender studies, this is still an amazing book with a beautiful story.

 

Romanticism Part Two: Poetry

As I mentioned in part one of this blog, it would be impossible to separate poetry from Romanticism.  It is as indelible to the genre as the genre itself is to literature as a whole.  Now, yes, this is a blog about books and poetry doesn’t necessarily count as a form of “novel,” however, I’m willing to blur the lines a bit if you are.  I also understand that poetry isn’t for everyone (something that my students remind me of every time I teach poetry in class), but hear me out for a second to at least listen to why it is so awesome.

            The main facet of Romantic poetry that I find enticing is its direct union with nature.  To put it simply, all the best Romantic poets moved to the Lake District (which is essentially the Yosemite of England) and walked around all day until inspiration struck them through a flower or a storm or a tree or what have you and they composed some brilliant piece and then they repeated the process until they died or committed suicide.  One major component of Romanticism was the autonomy of the Poet.  Nothing was more powerful than the imagination of an artist except for the sheer power of nature and the sublime.  As Friedrich Schlegel says in his Philosophical Fragments, “[Poetry] alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.  The romantic kind of poetry is the one on that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.”  So here are a few of my favorite Romantic poets, the most powerful people who ever lived (or so they thought):

Songs of Innocence and Experience, by William Blake

The great thing about William Blake is that he was literally crazy.  He was known to go into his backyard naked with his wife in order to have visions (aka: hallucinations) to fuel his next artistic expression.  The other great thing about Blake was that he was not only a poet, but he was also an artist!  His paintings were singularly unique because of his medium.  What he would do was take his poetry and write it down backwards so that he could inscribe it onto a copper plate and formulate it in a varnish and soak it in an acid bath.  Following that, he would use water color to complete the process.  In this way, no two of his poems were the same and each was as wild as it was a revelation.  I put one of his most famous paintings here, “The Ancient of Days,” for your viewing pleasure.  Feel free to google more if you’re curious.  Blake’s most famous collection of poetry is actually two collections of poetry which are each a direct response to the other.  It is called Songs of Innocence and Experience, respectively.  In these poems, Blake toys with the themes of childlike innocence and hope juxtaposed against the despair and cynicism of a jaded adulthood.  In this, his poetic voice shines as he forces you to question which side of this slightly schizophrenic argument is correct.  Both disturbing and hopeful, these poems will show you the darkness that is in the tunnel of existence, but also point towards the light that shines in the dark. 

 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

            Coleridge had a very sad life that had constant tragedy throughout, which provided us with one of the most famous poems ever written.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an elegiac tale that explores the evil and darkness that exist within all of us.  The basic plot is simple: the mariner is on a ship with his shipmates and an albatross appears, an omen of good luck and prosperity, to guide them through a particularly dangerous part of the ocean.  Following this, the mariner kills the albatross for, ostensibly, no reason whatsoever.  What follows is an exploration of good and evil, life and death, and the humanity that is caught in between those celestial battles.  Told with beautiful imagery and immaculate form, this poem is a must read for anyone who has ever wondered why evil exists in the world and, more disturbingly, why it exists in ourselves.

 

The Complete Poems, John Keats

            John Keats was a doctor out of necessity, but a poet out of passion.  Interestingly enough, out of all the most famous Romantic poets, Keats was born later, but died first at the young age of twenty-five.  In the short time that he lived, he gave us some of the best poetry of the age.  To Keats, the poet and the reader are indistinguishably linked and carry a shared imagination through the communal experience of nature.  This imagination is exactly the thing that he explores through his poetry.  Best known for his Odes, these songs walk the reader through a singular experience at the exact moment that it shoots outwards to the interconnectedness of all phenomena.  In other words, Keats will take something simple, like a nightingale, and use it as a conduit to explain the great truths of life, love, and loss.  His poetry is insightful, compassionate, but most of all, it is simply beautiful.  His words roll of the page and drip into your mind in such a tangible way that you can’t help but fall into the whatever experience he wrote about.  Keats was a true master of language.

 

Rimas y Leyendas, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

            Bécquer was the king of ghost stories.  Not only are his stories super creepy and wonderful, they are also filled with amazing themes of love, passion, vengeance, and, most of all, regret.  His Rimas y Leyendas is the collection of all of his poetry and most of his short stories.  My favorites include “El Monte de las Animas,” which is the original zombie story.  Complete with unrequited love that results in the dead coming back to life, this story will chill you to your core.  Also, in “Maese Pérez,” Spain’s greatest organist is murdered in a jealous rage, but that doesn’t stop him from playing his haunting tune in the decrepit, hollow cathedral.  In his poetry, he moves through a cycle of emotion that ranges from the highest passion of love, to disillusionment with love, all the way to utter despair and hopelessness.  Throughout all of this, he tells us how the only love worth having is unattainable, but we should go for it anyway.  The heights and depths that he throws his reader through are entirely relatable.  We’ve all felt love like this.  We’ve all hated love like this.  We’ve all felt misery like this.  Bécquer merely gives it the words that we never seem to have to describe it.

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” and “The Rights of Woman”

            One other component to Romanticism that often goes overlooked due to the Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s and other dead, white men is an outpouring of social justice that, previously, hadn’t really existed.  Romantics were among the first to become abolitionists and Mary Wollstonecraft is ubiquitously hailed as the mother of feminism!  Anna Laetita Barbauld came before Wollstonecraft and is best known for these two amazing compositions.  The first, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” came after Wilberforce (one of the most prominent abolitionists of the time) tried, and failed, to bring about abolition in the House of Commons.  His motion was rejected at the time, which resulted in this response by Barbauld to encourage and reignite the cause.  Beautifully written and caustically critical, this poem exhorts the efforts of Wilberforce and reminds him as well as others to keep fighting for what they knew to be right.  On the other hand, it is a harsh indictment of slavery as it existed in England in the 1700s.  Secondly, Barbauld wrote “The Rights of Woman,” which was one of the first overt works of feminism ever published.  Wollstonecraft came after Barbauld and had some valid criticisms of her ideology, however it is clear that Barbauld was one of her inspirations and a precursor to feminism as a movement.  In this poem, hails, “Yes, injured woman, rise, assert thy right!” (ll. 1).  In an age where patriarchy and oppression were even more prominent than they are today, Barbauld had the courage to speak up and fight for the rights of minorities.

 

Romanticism Part One: Novels and Plays

             Romanticism is easily my favorite literary period. I feel that I need to say I mean Romanticism, the period from about the late 1700s spanning through the late 1800s (loosely speaking), and not romance literature.  Big difference.  Romance literature has the sexy men on the covers with titles like A Passionate Cowboy or The Licentious Scuba Diver or whatever.  Now, if you want to listen to me ramble about Romanticism for a little bit to gain some context, please read on.  If you want to skip ahead to the books, move past this next part.

            What struck me about Romanticism at first was how ridiculous it was.  In essence, it was a direct reaction against the Enlightenment.  To me, it seemed as though bunch of repressed artists decided they were through with logical thinking and came to the conclusion that the most logical thing that they could do was get rid of logic entirely and listen only to their emotions.  What was incredibly interesting was how it seemed as though the movement went through different phases as it progressed through Europe.  In Germany, people like Goethe or Friedrich Schlegel took what logic they had and used it to ironically defeat logic, God, and the Devil all at once.  This sentiment carried to the repressed aristocracies of England where visionaries like William Blake, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and so many others toiled in the tumultuous despotism of their society, reaching and fighting for true love, sorrow, and passion.  Romanticism culminated to the extreme as its latecomer, Spain, grabbed hold of the genre and relinquished any semblance of withholding.  Here, we as readers were given José Zorilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, Gustav Adolfo Bécquer’s haunted organ player, and the ever elusive green-eyed woman, all bursting at the seams with desire and entirely unbridled passion.

            Romanticism is the movement that told poets, authors, and artists everywhere that that they didn’t need to listen to anyone but themselves, and in that their emotions reigned supreme.  The pinnacle of all these emotions climaxed when the people of the time redefined “the sublime.”  To them, sublime was so much more than just something pleasant or a great ska band; it was a blend of beauty, love, and, most importantly, fear, all heightened to their most masochistic.  This sentiment developed so much that in the end, it seemed that the most romantic thing one could to was to commit suicide (which A LOT of these people ended up doing).

            Now, as ridiculous as this all is, I found myself caught up in it.  All of the crazy emotions that these brilliant authors splayed onto their pages were unbelievably relatable!  I found myself nodding to the concept of true love only being possible in death.  I was surprised to find myself agreeing that love and beauty are inevitably tied up in fear and the only thing one can do about that is to stand in awe and write about it.  I loved the ideal that nature was inseparable from the human condition and in order to really understand our emotions, we must look towards the beauty of the world.  I really connected with the fact that in order to write something truly wonderful, one must stumble drunk and aimlessly through the castle-like streets of Toledo, as was obligatory for any great Spanish romantic author.

            Now, rest assured, I recognized the insanity (sometimes literally [cough*, William Blake]) with which these people lived their lives.  I was never suicidal as a result of my obsession with their works.  I never gave logic over to uninhibited passion.  And (unfortunately) I never stumbled aimlessly through the streets of Toledo (although I did have a mighty fine sangria while I was there).  While I never did these things, I think the reason that this literary period in particular affected (affects*) me so much is because I am, by nature, a particularly reserved and guarded person.  Reading breathtaking art from these people who let go any reticence that they may have ever had and just truly feeling was and is delightfully cathartic.  Their extremes help me to meet them somewhere in the middle and take the valuable lessons and morals that exist in the craziness that is Romantic Literature.  Romanticism helps me to feel.

            A quick managerial note, Romanticism is inextricably linked to poetry, so while there are incredible novels and plays, there is an abundance of poetry as well.  In light of that, this blog will be a two-parter, the first being about novels and plays, the second dealing strictly with poetry.  And without further ado, here are five works from Romanticism that everyone should read:

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

            People oftentimes say that you have to pick sides between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  If you force me to choose, I will pick Wuthering Heights every time.  This is Gothic Romanticism at its finest.  The narrative is framed by a man named Lockwood as he makes his stay at Thrushcross Grange, one of the properties on the gloomy moors owned by the mysterious Mr. Heathcliff.  While he is staying there a woman named Nelly Dean, who has lived and served on the property for years, tells Lockwood the sorrowful tale of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.  As Nelly weaves this story, we as readers are helpless while tragedy after tragedy unfolds.  They are painfully in love with each other, but this love is adulterated by jealousy, rage, aggression, and fear which only gets worse as the story moves from the past to the present with a new generation of characters in the mix.  Bronte brilliantly tells a classic romantic story, while at the same time poking fun at the genre and transcending it altogether.  This book will make your heart break, and then it will make you think, a lot, about why your heart broke and if it’s possible to put the pieces back together. 

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

            This is my favorite Jane Austen novel.  All of the others are wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but none of them were as singular as this one for me.  Incidentally, this was the first novel that Austen wrote, but was the last to be published shortly after her death in 1817.  As a result of this, it is experimental and innocent by nature.  The story unfolds around the young and impressionable Catherine Morland as she makes her debut into society at Bath, one of England’s resort cities.  As she meets more and more people, she is taken by the slightly older Isabella Thorpe, who shows her the enchanting world of Gothic literature.  Catherine is so enchanted by these stories that when she is invited to stay at Northager Abbey with the Tilney’s, a well-to-do family, she begins to invent all sorts of ghost and murder stories in her mind.  The father, General Tilney takes on the character of a brooding man with a bloody past while his son, Henry Tilney is ascribed the trope of the handsome hero troubled by his family’s ghosts.  As we learn about life and love through Catherine’s eyes, the lines between stories and reality are fantastically blurred and we are left wondering what is true, and what is not.

 

Don Juan Tenorio, by José Zorrilla

            The character “Don Juan” has been reproduced time and time again throughout literature.  He is a shameless hedonist who lives his life with the main goals of conquering as many women as he can and defeating as many other men as he can.  Zorrilla’s Don Juan was the premiere representation of the infamous character from the Romantic period.  Another noteworthy Romantic Don Juan is Lord Byron’s, definitely worth reading, but Zorrilla’s captures Romanticism to the extreme.  The play opens up with Don Juan and another man, Don Luis, conversing in a wine shop in Seville, Spain.  Their conversation is about how many women they have bagged and men that they have killed.  Don Juan wins unquestionably.  At this point, Don Luis makes the observation that Don Juan has never conquered a novice who is on the verge of taking her holy vows.  Don Juan steps up to the challenge, and at that point a flurry of passion, anger, and uncontrolled emotions ensues.  Through Zorrilla’s play, we see that Don Juan is the ultimate Romantic trope; a man with no concern but his immediate gratification and no fear of death except for that it will be yet another adventure.  Filled with masculine bravado of a despicable quantity, this play screams how passion is everything, but then, softly, whispers how fear and humility may be the crucial differences between faceless passion and true love.

 

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

            Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a result of a contest with her brother, Percy Bysshe Shelley, as to who could write the best ghost story.  While Percy definitely has some incredible poetry, Mary Shelley utterly destroyed him in the ghost story competition.  Everyone has heard of the tale of Frankenstein—man makes monster, monster gets out of control, terror ensues— but few people actually take the time to read the masterpiece that is the novel itself.  Using nature and setting as a guide for the major themes of human nature and how it can be tainted to evil, Mary Shelley brilliantly redefines what “sublime” really means and dictates how fear is the underlying emotion behind all of our decisions, not matter how logical we think we are.  Told with bittersweet humanity and chilling prose, the story is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein for a time, and later recounted by the monster himself, who is much more articulate than any Hollywood rendition will lead you to believe.  As readers watch the tale unfold, they will find themselves helpless before tragedy and horror that is spurred by none other than imprudent human ambition.  This will lead them to ask the difference between good and evil, beauty and fear, love and loss, and will guide them to the notion that these dichotomies are not as polarized as we often believe that they are.

 

Faust, by Goethe

            Dr. Faustus is an age old literary character, much like Don Juan.  One of his most famous representations was by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe.  Until Goethe got his hands on it, the tale was simple: Dr. Faustus desires knowledge above all else.  In his quest for knowledge, he makes a deal with the devil, in the form of Mephistopheles, who ultimately drags him to hell for being too curious.  A classic, Elizabethan finish.  Goethe takes this character and adds the charm of quintessential German Romanticism, which was all about using logic as a conduit to true expression, an impossible blend of rhetoric and emotion.  Ultimately, Goethe’s Faust makes the same deal with Mephistopheles, but with the caveat that his soul can be taken once he has stopped advancing.  In other words, he relies on his passion for new experiences to stave of his death and damnation for an indefinite eternity.  In this, he dictates who God and the Devil are, he determines how he will carry on, and the fountainhead to all of this is his insatiable desire to learn. Faust explores all sorts of knowledge, unending concepts of relationships (including trying to understand true love), and a vast discovery of what it really means to live.  Composed with unbelievable virtuoso, this is an unforgettable play about the true potential of the human spirit.