The Bridge of Beyond, Simone Schwartz-Bart

6 stars

First Sentence: A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart.

Thoughts: The Lougandour women of Guadaloupe were always poor, but they were always strong. This is the story of three generations. Well, five if you count all of them. Really only two, but now we’re getting technical.

It began with Toussine, the daughter of Minerva, a freed slave. Toussine was beautiful and capable, even as a child. She made everyone happy, especially the fisherman Jeremiah. As soon as she was old enough, they got married and moved into a nice house in L’Abandoneé village. It was just a shack like all the other houses, but Toussine made it into something special. They had good luck twin daughters, and a garden full of flowers and vegetables. Then tragedy struck. The house burned down and one of the twins was badly burned. She died a few days later, in agonizing pain.

Toussine and Jeremiah moved into an abandoned manor house with their remaining daughter. No one saw them for years. Then Toussine came back out into the sun and started cleaning up the property. A few years later she had another daughter, Victory, and a new title, Queen Without a Name.

Victory grew up. She stayed in L’Abandoneé after Jeremiah’s death when Toussine moved to another village, Fond-Zombi. Victory had two daughters, Regina and Telumee. She never married, but had a string of lover. Angebert, Telumee’s father, was the best of the lot, but after he was killed in a bar fight, Victory sent Regina to live with her father and Telumee to live with her grandmother so she could gallivant off with her new man.

Toussine taught Telumee many things, but mostly how to be a strong woman. She introduced her to Ma Cia, the local witch who taught Telumee how to look beneath the surface. She sent Telumee to school to learn how to read and write. She taught her how to be “a woman with two hearts.”

Telumee, meanwhile, was more interested in Elie, the son of the local barkeeper. They fell in love in school, but couldn’t get married for a while. Elie had to earn enough money to build them a house so he went to work with local mystery man Amboise as a sawyer, cutting boards in the forest. Toussine didn’t want Telumee to work in the cane fields where any overseer might get hold of her, so Telumee went to work as a maid for the Desaragnes, the descendants of the White of Whites who once owned all this land. She endured mockery, insults, and a handsy master until Elie serenaded her one night to let her know their house was finished.

Telumee left the Desaragnes and went back to Fond-Zombi. She and Elie moved into their new house where they were very happy until one day they weren’t. Elie began to drink more and beat her when he came home. Toussine tried to help, but she was old and her life was almost over. Then the worst happened. Telumee left Fond-Zombi for the Mountain of Lost People where she made a new life. She found love and lost it. She found a child and lost her. She found another man and he lost himself.

By the end, Telumee is an old woman looking back at her life. It was a hard life filled with joy and sorrow, peaks and valleys, but it was a life well lived.

As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead. I have already washed and ironed the clothes I want to feel on my corpse. Sun risen, sun set, the days slip past and the sand blown by the wind will engulf my boat. But I shall die here, where I am, standing in my little garden. What happiness!

The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday

6 stars

First Sentence: The journey began one day long ago on the edge of the northern Plains.

Thoughts: I have a history with this book. I first read it when I was somewhere in the vicinity of eight or nine because one of my sisters had it on her bookshelf. Years later I ended up appropriating it as I did with most of their fiction books. I was too young to understand all the nuances and tragedy of the history in the book; all I knew is that the stories were great and it was different from anything else I had ever read.

Sadly, the original hardcover I swiped was lost in a Kitten Incident when I was in college, but fortunately it’s never gone out of print so it wasn’t hard to find a good paperback edition. A paperback edition with a confusing cover because my brain refuses to see that as a shield with a cow skull and three feathers hanging down. I keep wanting to see it as a round cow with three legs. Brain, we need to have a talk.

Anyway. This is a collection of Kiowa legends interspersed with snippets from their history. Each section is told in three parts: the story/history, a commentary on the previous, and Momaday’s own impressions of his people’s ancestral land and his own family. It’s beautifully written, verging on poetry with vivid images of the landscape of the Great Plains. The illustrations, by Momday’s father Al, are also beautiful in their simplicity. My favorite is the cricket in the moon:

I’m also fond of the picture of Grandmother Spider the Tarantula:

I can’t be impartial or coherent about The Way to Rainy Mountain because it’s become part of me. I cannot have a bookshelf without this book on it. It’s a desert island essential. If you’re wanting to introduce a child to American Indian history, give them this book. It will grow with them.

As an added bonus, it will ensure they won’t be afraid of spiders. I don’t mind spiders because deep down I see them as Grandmother Spider. They eat the bugs and I leave them alone to do so. I greet my annual Bathroom Spider because I know she’s a friend. I’ll still stomp black widows, though. I don’t mess with venom that causes gangrene.

And now, because I’ve inflicted enough arachnids on you, have a picture of the Storm Horse:

Circe, Madeline Miller

6 stars

First Sentence: When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.

Thoughts: Circe was the oldest daughter of the Titan Helios and the nymph Perse but everyone thought she was the least. She wasn’t as perfectly beautiful as the rest of the nymphs and her voice was too “thin” for the rest of her family. Her younger siblings Pasiphaë and Perses tormented her every time she crossed their paths, but her youngest brother Aeëtes would sit on the beach and talk to her like a sensible person. Mostly Circe was left alone to explore her father’s domain and listen to the rest of the nymphs and Titans gossip.

When Zeus decided to punish the Titan Prometheus for giving fire to humans, he ordered all the Titans to gather to watch the punishment to remind them who was in charge now. Circe was with them to witness the Furies whip Prometheus for hours. When the rest of the Titans left, Circe stayed behind and talked to the wounded Titan. Prometheus told Circe he didn’t regret what he did; the humans were worth it. She thought about what he said long after he was taken away to have vultures eat his liver on a mountain top.

Centuries later Pasiphaë was married to Minos, the king of Crete. Circe and her siblings went to the wedding. It was the first time Circe had seen real humans. She was fascinated by them, but Aeëtes told her she was being stupid. Then he told her he was leaving to be king of Colchis. Her dismay at losing the only sibling who halfway liked her was only slightly mitigated when she heard Perses was also leaving to see what the demon-raisers were up to in the east.

Then she met Glaucus and fell in love. She didn’t want him to die, the fate of all mortals, so she gave him the sap of an enchanted flower while he slept. He turned into a sea-god. Instead of being grateful to Circe for making him immortal, he fell in love with another nymph, Scylla. Circe used the magical sap on her and she became a monster.

Scylla’s transformation wasn’t the kind of thing that could be hidden, and Circe’s role was discovered. The other Titans and nymphs were horrified because she used forbidden witchcraft. Further investigation revealed that all of Helios and Perse’s children were witches: Pasiphaë was dabbling in poisons, Perses was raising demons himself, and Aeëtes was playing with dragons and humans’ free will. But it was Circe who was punished. She was exiled to live by herself on the island of Aiaia.

Exile was the best thing that ever happened to her. She honed her skills in potions by experimenting with all the plants on the island. She befriended the animals. The god Hermes came to visit her for gossip and occasional sex. The only time she left was to assist Pasiphaë at the birth of the Minotaur. She became friends with Daedalus there and helped him create a cage to keep the Minotaur contained before going back to her island.

People began visiting Circe. The first visitors were Jason and Medea who had just defied Aeëtes by stealing the Golden Fleece. A group of sailors arrived and raped her. She responded by turning them into pigs. She liked the feeling of power, so she began to encourage more sailors to visit her pigsties. And then Odysseus came and everything changed.

This is the best retold myth I’ve read in a very, very long time. Probably the best ever as far as Greek myths are concerned. (Poul Anderson holds the crown for the Norse myths). Circe is a wonderful heroine and I’m glad I met her. It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?

Also Odysseus is a jerk, but you knew that already from The Odyssey.

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, Winfred Rembert

6 stars

First Sentence: The railroad goes so far—just as far as you can see.

Thoughts: I never heard of Winfred Rembert before I read this book. It ended up on Mt. ToBeRead because it won the Pulitzer for biography in 2022. Believe me, it totally deserved to win. Not just because Rembert’s story is fascinating (and told in his own voice—he narrated it to Erin Kelly) but because his art is truly wonderful. He worked his pictures into pieces of leather and then dyed them. Just look at them!

He didn’t become an artist until late in life. Rembert grew up in rural Cuthbert, Georgia in the 1950s and 1960s when it was socially acceptable to be openly and hostilely racist. Rembert states right at the beginning that he will be dropping n-bombs all over the book because that’s how people talked to him back then. It’s an ugly word, he says, but it’s necessary to understand the ugliness he grew up with: a place where there was a laughing barrel in the town square, where police thought nothing of beating Black people because the knew there would be no consequences, where the freaking governor of the state sold ax handles in his restaurant for his White customers to hit civil rights protesters with. This all happened.

Rembert joined the Civil Rights Movement in the mid 1960s. He went to a march in Americus, Georgia and that’s where it all went downhill. The police came out with attack dogs and sticks and used both on the marchers. Rembert got away by stealing a getaway car. He was caught and thrown in jail. The deputy came in one day to beat him up for fun, but Rembert got his keys and locked the deputy in the cell instead. He was caught and beaten up again. Then a group of racists took him off to a remote location and straight-up lynched him.

Fortunately he didn’t die, although he certainly didn’t feel lucky at the time or for a long time after.

He was sent to the state prison where he was on a work gang and a chain gang. That’s where, surprisingly, things started to look up. He learned how to work leather from another inmate. He met his wife Patsy when he was on a work gang. She wasn’t an inmate, just a girl he saw when he was out working one day. He met her in person and they kept up their relationship through letters until he was released from prison. They got married and moved up north as fast as they could.

Patsy was Rembert’s anchor and he knew it. His love for her shines through the whole book. When things got bad, there was Patsy and the kids. Everything he did after getting out of prison was for them. When he couldn’t work on the shipyards anymore, he did what he could to put food on the table for his children. In the 1980s he started selling drugs because he couldn’t find work doing anything else. He made a lot of money, but the stress of it almost tore his family apart. Not because he was using, he was smart enough not to do that, but because of the criminality of it and all the women trying to sweet-talk Rembert for their next hit.

There’s one chapter in the book told by Patsy and it’s about this time in their lives. She was not happy with all the women trying to mess with her husband. One memorable encounter led to her taking the other woman’s clothes and car, and then slashing up the car and breaking all the pieces she could. When little chickadee snidely informed Patsy that her husband could fix the car, Patsy lit it on fire. Patsy Rembert: Mama Bear Extraordinaire.

As you’d expect, Rembert got caught selling drugs and was again sent to jail. Patsy got him out by convincing the judge to commute his sentence so he could take care of his family. He came home and never sold drugs again, no matter how poor they got. It wasn’t worth the risk of losing his family again. So he started leatherworking again and began to draw pictures from his life. Patsy told him he should combine the two. He began to copy his drawings onto the leather, tool them in, and then dye them. There are a couple of chapters where he talks about his technique. Physically it wasn’t too difficult, but since he was drawing scenes from his own life, some of the pictures began to take a mental toll on him. One triptych about a lynching triggered his PTSD and he finally got some therapy and medication to help him. And the world of American Art will forever be grateful.

You seriously need to read this book and look at his pictures. My favorite is Black Masterson. What’s yours?

Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum

6 stars

First Sentence: The hall porter was a little white about the gills as he came out of the No. 7 phone booth.

Thoughts: I recently watched Grand Hotel, the movie from 1932. You should all do that. It’s a great movie with a fantastic cast (not one but two Barrymores!*). Later I was scrolling through Goodreads and saw that someone on my friends list had shelved Grand Hotel, the novel from 1929. “Wait, it’s a book?” I thought and immediately jumped on the library catalog. Whaddaya know, my local library had it. Soon I had it as well, for three weeks at least.

Just like Metropolis, the novel is just as good as the movie. It’s the classic story of intertwining lives in a hotel**, both guests and employees. The hall porter, Senf, who we meet in the first sentence, is trying desperately not to be distracted from his work throughout the story. His wife’s in the hospital having their first child, you see. It’s not an easy labor since it takes up the entire book which covers a few days, so he’s well within his rights to be anxious.

Hanging out in the lobby is Dr. Otternshlag who is living a life of quiet desperation after being physically and psychologically scarred in WWI. He takes a liking to the new guest at the hotel, Herr Kringelein, because he senses a similar longing for death in him. Kringelien’s longing is different, though. He was recently diagnosed with A Terminal Illness+ and has decided to spend his last few months living it up. He deserves it. He’s spent his whole life being browbeaten both at work where he was an accountant at a textile mill, and at home where his wife was bitter and hateful. Otternshlag helps Kringelein get a really nice room at the hotel and then takes him out to see the sights of 1920s Berlin.

Meanwhile, Grusinskaya, the celebrated Russian ballerina, is having a crisis of her own. She used to fill the house when she danced, but now most of the seats are empty and the only applause is arbitrary. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees an old woman. (My god, she’s forty!) She looks around her and sees only sycophants and servants. She has no friends. She has no one who cares about her as a person. She only has her famous pearls.

Those pearls have caught the eye of Baron Gaigern, one of the broke nobility that drifted around Europe in the early twentieth century living off their faded titles. He’s taken to cat burglary to fill his slim wallet and his current job is to get those pearls. He breaks into Grusinskaya’s room one night while she’s at the theater, but is caught behind the drapes when she comes back early. She finds him there and they immediately fall in love. She wants him to come with her to Vienna, but he wants to get the money to pay his own way because masculine pride and all that. Since he can’t take her pearls now, he has to find another source of easy money.

While all this is going on, Herr Preysing is trying to save his textile business. His stock has been falling while a rival firm’s has been rising, and he’s hoping to negotiate a merger between the companies. He has another scheme in the works, a deal with a Manchester cotton mill, that he hopes will make his struggling business look more desirable to the other firm. The Manchester deal falls through, though, so for the first time in his life he has to bend his morals to benefit his business. The new angle in his usually rigid morality helps him reconcile himself to initiating an affair with his stenographer, Flammchen. She goes along with it because she’s a single woman in the 1920s and she has to do what she has to do to get by.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the main plot points (and vice versa). The book, though, goes into more detail about things they couldn’t show on screen in the 1930s. The sex that was implied in the film is actual on the page. Also everyone wanders around naked at least once during the course of the novel because it’s Germany. What I don’t understand is why they change the gender of Baby Senf. Why did they do that? It has no bearing on anything, it’s just a weird choice to make.

*I have a game I play when I watch a John Barrymore movie. It’s called “How many times do they show his profile.” The man (or his directors) knew what he had and made sure to show it off as often as possible. I forgot the number for Grand Hotel but it was a lot.

**The origin of the trope, in fact.

+I think it was tuberculosis. It usually is in pre-antibiotic novels before switching to cancer, then AIDS, then cancer again. If you want to be really tragic, get all three at the same time.

Taran Wanderer, Lloyd Alexander

6 stars

First Sentence: It was full springtime, with promise of the richest summer the farm had ever seen.

Thoughts: And so we have come to my favorite Prydain Chronicle. Why is it my favorite? There are no big adventures like in the previous books. It’s just Taran traveling the country visiting the common folk. That’s why. A lot of fantasy series just hang around the elite, so it’s nice to visit the ordinary folk to see how they get along in a magical world.

Taran has finally admitted the fact that he’s in love with Eilonwy…and that they have no future together because she’s a princess and he’s just a foundling from who knows where. So who does know where? Not Dallben. Not Coll, either. Maybe the Three Weird Sisters in the Marshes of Morva know. So Taran saddles up his horse and sets out on the long journey to the marshes, along with Gurgi who refuses to be left behind.

The witches can’t or won’t (won’t) tell him anything about his parentage. What they do tell him is that there’s another oracle he can consult, the Mirror of Llunet. But they won’t tell him where it is. He has to learn to scratch for his own worms, the dear little chicken. Off Taran and Gurgi go to find the Mirror.

Instead they find a couple of minor lords in King Smoit’s realm feuding over cattle, along with Fflewddur Fflam and Llyan who are visiting. Taran finds a way to settle the long-running feud without starting another war between the lordlings. Smoit is so impressed he offers to adopt Taran, but Taran refuses. He wants to find out the truth about his parentage before he accepts another parent. Taran, Gurgi, Fflewddur, and Llyan continue their quest for the Mirror.

Along they way they run into some obnoxious bandits and an evil wizard who is holding the clue to part of Eilonwy’s past. Then they save a lamb for a poor shepherd. The shepherd is suspicious of them at first, but when he hears about Taran’s quest, he has to go outside for a few minutes to collect himself. When he returns, he has shocking news: he is Taran’s father. His wife died in childbirth and the shepherd wasn’t able to care for his son by himself. So when a passing wizard stopped by, he gave the baby to him and…well, you know the rest. Fflewddur and Gurgi are thrilled, but Taran isn’t so sure. He was really hoping for a more prestigious background. Still, he stays with the shepherd to help him rebuild the farm.

Then the shepherd is mortally injured in a fall off a cliff. Before he dies he tells Taran he lied—his baby died shortly after its mother. Taran collapses from the shock and the chill he caught rescuing his purported father. When he recovers, he decides to keep wandering. This time, though, he doesn’t care about the Mirror. He just wants to learn how to make his own way in the world.

What follows is the best part of the book. Taran and Gurgi meet up with various farmers and craftsmen, learning new ways to see life from various points of view. The farmer sees life as a net, the smith sees it as a forge, the weaver says it’s a loom, and the potter thinks it’s clay to be shaped. Taran apprentices himself to the craftsmen to see if there’s anything he would like to devote his life to.

And then, the obnoxious bandits return and attack a small village. As he pursues them, Taran stumbles upon the Mirror of Llunet, so now he can find out the truth about himself. So maybe life is a mirror as well.

Dune, Frank Herbert

6 stars

First Sentence: In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final worrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old woman came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

Thoughts: And so begins the greatest science fiction of all times. I judge people by this series. If you like it, we are of the same tribe. If you don’t, I’m sorry for your loss. And if you appreciate the Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson books as well we’re buddies. If you’re a pretentious jerk who doesn’t like them, well I think I just made my opinion of you known.

Anyway. In the beginning House Atreides lived on Caladan, an ocean world. Due to political machinations, they were given control of the desert planet Arrakis, aka Dune, the source of the spice melange which was the greatest source of wealth in the known universe. It enabled people to live longer and healthier than they would have naturally and the Spacing Guild used it to fold space. There were other uses as well, but those were mostly kept secret for various reasons.

Paul, the scion of House Atreides, was known to have special powers. For example, he’s been having prophetic dreams lately. The Bene Gesserit sent one of their Reverend Mothers to test Paul to see how special he was and if his mother Jessica’s manipulations had screwed up their breeding program. (She was supposed to have a girl instead of a boy.) And so Paul faces the gom jabbar, a poisoned needle held to his neck as he keeps his hand in a box of pain.* He passes with flying colors and is declared Human.

When they reach Arrakis, Paul’s abilities take a new dimension. He knows things before he knows them, like the proper way to put on a Fremen stillsuit. It doesn’t help that the locals think he might be the promised one of legend. (OR DOES IT?) Jessica uncovers messages left from the previous Bene Gesserit representative that there is a traitor in their midst. Meanwhile Duke Leto, knowing that his enemies in House Harkonnen have left nasty surprises for him on their new planet, sends his best men out to uncover them and make alliances with the Fremen natives.

And then the Harkonnens strike. Leto is killed, but Paul and Jessica escape. Paul, overwhelmed by prescience, foresees a terrible future where he leads a jihad across the inhabited planets. They meet up with Liet Kynes, leader of the Fremen, who sends them into the desert to take refuge with the “wild” Fremen tribes. They meet up with Stilgar’s tribe. To prove their worth to their captors/saviors, Jessica undergoes the ordeal of the Water of Life, which awakens her fetal daughter’s awareness long before it should have appeared. But it works out thanks to the assistance of the tribe’s Reverend Mother who helps Jessica calm her daughter’s mind and take over as the new Sayyadina.

After defeating a Fremen in a knife fight, Paul fuses Imperial and Fremen fighting styles to help the Fremen attack the Harkonnens, who have retaken the planet. But his visions of the coming jihad are becoming more disturbing. He tries desperately to find a way to avert the war, until the only way out is to overdose on spice so he can open his mind to its fullest extent. And so Paul Muad-dib Atreides, Usul to his tribe, becomes the Kwisatz Haderach.

Dune is a dense novel covering environmentalism, conservation, the rule of law, corruption, honor, native rights, drug use and abuse, and fate. You can find something new every time you read it (I do). There are plots within plots, which I think qualifies it as Literature. It will outlive us all.

*Both Gom Jabbar and Box of Pain would be great names for metal bands.

Metropolis, Thea von Harbou

6 stars

First Sentence: Now the rumbling of the great organ swelled to a roar, pressing, like a rising giant, against the vaulted ceiling to burst through it.

Thoughts: One day I was flipping through the Dover Publications catalog I noticed a book called Metropolis. “I wonder if this has anything to do with the movie,” I wondered. Why yes, it does. It’s the novelization of my favorite movie of all time so of course I had to put down my hard-earned money to buy it.

To be honest, I was fully prepared for this to suck, even if it was written by one of the people who wrote the screenplay. Movie novelizations are not known to be the highest form of literature. Sure, I liked the novelization of Willow back in the day, but that was mostly because it had pictures of Val Kilmer as Madmartigan inside and he was smokin’ hot in that movie.

Metropolis: The Book did not suck. It added depth and dimension to a film already layered with it.

It’s not an exact retelling of the movie, and I didn’t really expect it to be. As we’ve discussed many times before, what works on film doesn’t always work on the page and vice versa. Big explosive scenes are great on film. Introspection is great on the page. The movie gave us big explosive scenes and the book gave us the introspection behind it, as well as more backstory than can be visually expressed.

For example: the cathedral. In the movie it was just a set piece for Freder to have nightmares about until the big dramatic final fight scene on the roof. In the book, though, it’s one of the only remnants of the old city before it was modernized into Metropolis, preserved only through the determination (and mild insanity) of an old monk who lives inside. The only other link to the old city is Rotwang’s house, but it’s a symbol of the darkness of the past expressed through the medium of the Sorcerer with Red Shoes who disappeared into the catacombs.

The novel has a lot of symbolism. A lot. Most everything in it is a symbol, mainly Christian. I never realized the significance of Maria’s name in the movie. Duh, of course, she’s the Roman Catholic version of the Virgin Mary interceding between the sinners (the workers) and God (Joh Frederson) by appealing to the Son (Freder). The fact that Freder’s mother’s name was Hel also fits into this somehow, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.

Certain scenes have also been changed, deleted, or added. Josaphat’s reaction to his firing is different, there’s a whole sequence where he flies out of Metropolis and crashes into a field that isn’t in the movie, and the dramatic scene where Freder, Josaphat, and Maria escort the children out of the flooding Lower City has been changed to Maria saving the children on her own while Josaphat and Freder fight their way through all the cars and planes that crashed when the Heart Machine went offline.

The ending and main point of the story is the same in both versions, though: The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.

Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Alex Haley

6 stars

First Sentence: Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

Thoughts: Never have I read such an intense book. I kept having to put it down because I kept getting angry and/or depressed. I can see why Roots was such a phenomenon when it was published.

As the title indicates, this is the story of an American family starting with the first ancestor to arrive in North America. Specifically Alex Haley’s family and by “arrive in North America” I mean “dragged here against his will” because said ancestor was from Africa and brought here as a slave. That man was Kunta Kinte, a nice young man from Juffure who didn’t deserve all the bad things that happened to him.

The first 150 pages are about Kunta Kinte growing up in Juffure. He proceeds through early childhood to little boyhood where he got his first outfit of clothes, learned to read and write, and got his first responsibility herding his father’s goats. Then he’s ready to Become a Man which begins with him having a sack thrown over his head and ends with him learning hunting skills and getting circumcised. Ouch. Now he’s a young man with a hut of his own and his own (small) goat herd. He gets more responsibilities, including guarding the village at night.

And then, right around page 150, he’s captured by slavers and crosses the Atlantic. This is the most difficult section of the book, reading-wise. That ship is horrible. It is the stuff of nightmares. I fully believe the legend that sharks still swim the old slave ship routes because those things were awful, blood-soaked nightmares. I want to go back and slap my ancestors. HARD.

The ship lands in Virginia and Kunte Kinte is immediately sold, He keeps trying to run away until some trashy rednecks catch him and cut half his foot off. He’s then sold to a kindly (for a slave owner) doctor who treats Kunta’s severed foot and then gives him work tending the garden and driving the carriage. Kunta marries Bell, the cook, and they have a daughter they name Kizzy. Kunta tells her stories about his life in Juffure as she grows up. Then, just when you’ve settled in, more horror. The doctor discovers that Kizzy can read and write (illegal for slaves at the time) and sells her. Her screams as she’s separated from her parents are only slightly less terrible than the slave ship.

It doesn’t get better. Kizzy’s new owner rapes her, eventually “fathering” (loosely defined) a son that he names George. Kizzy tells George the stories her father told her when she was growing up. George grows up and befriends the slave who tends the master’s fighting chickens, eventually becoming Chicken George, the best cockfighter in all of North Carolina.

They’re in North Carolina now, by the way. Up north of Greensboro near the Virginia border. My desire to slap my ancestors has intensified accordingly. Now it’s personal.

George marries and has children, making sure they all know the stories of Kunta Kinte. The Civil War breaks out, which only makes the racist Southerners even more insufferable. Then the war ends and the slaves are free. Chicken George leads his family to Tennessee with some other freed slaves where they build a new town and begin their free lives. George’s most responsible son, Tom, starts a rolling blacksmith service and does all right for himself. His son ends up running the local lumber mill and also does all right for himself. His daughter goes to college, meets and marries a Nice Young Man, and brings him home along with their baby to meet the family. That baby was Alex Haley.

From then on the story is about how Roots came into being. Haley heard the stories that had been passed down from his original ancestor, now known only as “The African,” and became interested in tracing his family history. It took a long time, but he was finally able to identify which language the African words in the stories had come from and from there which part of Africa his ancestor came from. More research narrowed it down to the country and then, finally, the exact village. When Haley visited Juffure, the griot recited the history of the village and Haley finally learned the name of “The African.” He was able to fill in the blank spaces in the griot’s history with his own family story, and everyone in the village welcomed him as a long-lost son. Meanwhile the reader gets up to find the tissue box because the words on the page have gotten blurry.

I don’t as a rule recommend Weighty Tomes to all and sundry, but this is a book that everyone needs to read. But, as the man said, you don’t have to take my word for it.

The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander

6 stars

First Sentence: Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.

Thoughts: Here we enter the Chronicles of Prydain, one of the most classic of all classic fantasy series. If you were raised right, you know Taran & Co. as old friends and welcome any chance to visit with them.

If you weren’t raised right, let me introduce you. Taran is a young boy living at Caer Dallben with Dallben the wizard and Coll the man-of-all work. Tarn dreams of adventure despite repeated warnings from this guardians that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Taran doesn’t care; he’s bored with farm work and wants to go out into the wide world and Do Stuff. He gets his chance when Hen Wen, the oracular pig, gets scared and runs away.

Taran chases after her into the woods where he’s immediately lost. He runs into a gray-haired wolfish-looking man who is also looking for Hen Wen. At the farm, though, he didn’t know she ran off until he runs into our stalwart Assistant Pig-Keeper. Taran gets cocky with him until he learns the man is actually Prince Gwydion, the son of King Math of Prydain. Gwydion’s interest in Hen Wen is simple: he needed an oracle from her. Seems that a new war lord known only as the Horned King (because he wears a horned skull on his head) has been raising armies all over Prydain and Gwydion wants to know how to stop this. He suspects that the Horned King is in league with Arawn, ruler of the dark lands of Annuvin. He joins Taran’s search, along with a strange furry who-knows-what named Gurgi who appears shortly after.

The first thing they do is run into one of the Horned King’s scouting parties and get captured. They’re carried off to the Spiral Castle, home of Queen Achren who is definitely in league with Arawn. She separates Taran and Gwydion, throws Taran in the dungeon and does who-knows-what with Gwydion. Taran escapes with the help of a girl named Eilonwy. She’s been sent to Achren to learn how to be an enchantress, but she hates her guardian and would love the chance to stick a few thorns in her side. Rescuing Taran and the man in the other cell would be a great way to do that. Taran, thinking that the other man is Gwydion, encourages her. When they meet in the woods outside the castle, Taran discovers that the other man is actually a bard named Fflewddur Fflam and yells at Eilonwy, hurting her feelings. Fflewddur tells him to stop being a jerk, so Taran apologizes and all is well again.

Except that when they escaped, the Spiral Castle collapsed, killing everyone inside. Including, as they all believe, Gwydion. Now Taran has a new quest: finish what Gwydion started. He has to put aside the Search for Hen Wen and go to Caer Dathyl instead to warn King Math about the Horned King. Adventure ensues. Taran discovers some of the secrets of Prydain, finding his pig along the way, and basically gets in way over his head until Gwydion steps out of the woods to save the day.

In the end we’ve all learned a valuable lesson: Dallben and Coll knew what they were talking about when they warned Taran about adventures. It still doesn’t make much difference, though, because there are more adventures ahead for the Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends. Glee!