This post was originally published on Quora on December 28, 2017
At the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester, three friends and I formed a book club on a late night whim. We used the initials of three out of the four members to make the name PALS, which also conveniently describes our relationship with each other.
We have weekly meetings on Tuesday nights where we discuss the book and snack on (usually Andy’s) food. We talk about major themes, make predictions, and make connections to our lives. Normally we don’t get caught up in the nitty gritty English stuff like doing close readings of passages, analyzing the author’s word choice, although that does occasionally happen, and when it does, the IB educated part of my mind glows briefly like embers blasted with air from a bellows.
We read a book a month on average, and as this year is coming to a close, I thought it would be nice to review the books we’ve read this year.
September: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10
This book, set in the WWII era, follows the lives of Werner Pfennig, a German boy with passion for all things electronic, and Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind, curious French girl who loves reading and solving puzzles. These two separate lives are mashed together by the war, and we get to see how their lives transform. The two stories are told anachronously — and at times it is confusing, but Doerr does a good job setting the scene and helping us understand the context switch, and the end result is satisfying. There is a “present” timeline which progresses slowly, and a “past” timeline that quickly advances until it merges with the present. This nonlinear chronology was jarring; a good fit for the chaotic nature of war and the disruption of the characters’ once peaceful lives. In our PALS meetings, we discussed whether or not people were simply victims to circumstance, nature versus nurture, whether people were born good or born evil or something in between. **SPOILER ALERT** In the book, Werner’s ability to fix radios and understand electronics secures him a spot in the Hitler Youth, although he is an innocent kid. He does not want to join the regime, but it is the only way he escapes his otherwise doomed life in the mines. He is a victim of circumstance, but it seems as if we are too. All the choices we make are in response to the current circumstances; the paths we choose are the paths we think will be best in our own interest. So does that really mean we have free will? We definitely have some illusion of free will because our circumstance is not as stark and harrowing as Werner’s, but we might really be pigeonholed into a few viable choices for our lives.
October: Room by Emma Donoghue
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10
Emma Donoghue’s book, which was made into an award-winning movie, was a sad yet uplifting story of willpower, of love, of discovery. Jack has spent all of his five years in Room with Ma. Only the things in Room — Toothbrush, Meltedy Spoon, Sink, Toilet — are real to Jack, because that’s all he’s known. Ma has been held captive in Room for 19 years by Old Nick, and Jack is a product of rape. I guess the next part is a spoiler, but it’s shown in the movie trailers so I don’t really count it as a spoiler: the story follows Jack’s heroic escape, and their integration back into society. Donoghue writes from the perspective of Jack, and it’s amazing. He can only understand so much, so we can decipher meaning from Jack’s simple observations. For example, Jack describes a game him and Ma play where they stand up to the skylight and yell as loud as they can. To Jack, it is simply a game, but to us, it is obvious that Ma is trying to catch the attention of a passerby in hopes of rescue. PALS talked about integrating into society, stunted growth, life in captivity, the moral conflict Ma might feel about keeping a child that was a product of rape, and tried to imagine what it would be like in their shoes. As you can imagine, however, trying to understand what it’d be like living in a single room for 19 years is a little tricky. While in the Outside, Jack is longing to go back, because everything in the world is new and scary and he wants the comfort of the few things in Room. My favorite part was the ending, **SPOILER ALERT**, where Jack returns to Room after living in the real world, and realizes that it was actually tiny and filthy, and he feels no desire to every go back. :’)
November: The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10
This collection of short stories explores a sundry of topics from technology to story-telling to culture. Since I’m writing this blog post from home and I left the book at school, I will mention a few of the stories that stood out the most to me. Obviously, I’ll talk about Paper Menagerie first, the namesake short story. It’s about a Wasian (half-white, half-Asian) boy whose father is white but whose mother was bought from a small village in China out of a catalog. As a young child, the child loves his mom: she makes origami animals with which they play together. When he goes to middle school, he meets other American kids and he becomes ashamed of his mother. She can barely speak English. She folds up used paper for him to play with, instead of giving him action figures of Obi-Wan Kenobi. She cooks Chinese food, not hamburgers. They are in America, but she is not American. He tries to be as “American” as possible, and to do that, he shuts out his mother. After a while, he does not talk to her at all, and even when she is in the hospital, his mind is elsewhere. Years later, he goes in the attic to retrieve the origami animals she made him. He notices that the tiger has writing on the inside, unfolds the tiger, and reads. It’s a letter from his mother, written in Chinese. With the help of young Chinese woman, he reads it. Here’s just a snippet of her letter:
“Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.”
I cried a LOT when I read this story — like I was bawling hard. When I read it, I said that no story has ever resonated with me like Paper Menagerie had, and it is still true. It illustrates a part of growing up I feel every Asian-American kid has experienced.
Now I have no more room for the other stories. YikEs…
December: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (still in progress)
Still reading this American classic. It’s probably the most important literary work we’ve read in PALS, but as of now, it’s also the driest. But no pain no gain, right?
Thanks Liz and Andy and Jack for being in the book club with me! We’re thinking of expanding our extremely exclusive book club and renaming it Club Reading so that it qualifies as a sport and we can get funding. If you want to join, send your resumé to me along with a cover letter and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
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