The Book Blog - Learning Resources at St. Johns River State College

At the end of August, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier released a new album titled Unreal Unearth, which features numerous cultural, historical, and literary references, the most prevalent of which is the Inferno section of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, originally written in the early part of the 14^th century. Last month, on September 11, I posted the first half of my song-by-song analysis of this album, in which I pointed out most (I’m sure there are a few I’ve missed) of the literary and historical references and some of the highlights of each song. This post examines the second half of the album in the same way.

SIXTH

“Son of Nyx”

Synopsis: This song represents Dante and Virgil’s further journey through hell and their first steps towards the light which they will see when they finally make their ascent at the end. It is also about Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and her son, Charon, the ferryman who helps the souls of the recently deceased find their way across the River Styx. In Dante’s story, Charon is a demon on the River Archeron who fulfills the same role.
Highlights: This is an instrumental track; it is also the first instrumental track Hozier has released as part of an album.

“All Things End”

Synopsis: This song takes us deeper into the sixth circle of hell, home to heretics. Hozier’s take on heresy in this song is, interestingly, not a religious one; instead, he takes a heretical view on love. In the West, love is viewed as an eternal thing, something that never ends regardless of whether or not two people in love remain together. In this song, however, Hozier posits a different theory: that love does, in fact, end, just like everything else in the universe.
Highlights: Despite the message of the song, it is full of contradictions. Themes of reincarnation and the cyclical nature of life and love seep into the lyrics throughout, and a feeling of hope for a second chance prevails, making the narrator come off as unreliable and perhaps not someone whose convictions should be believed.
Recommended: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (these plays are not directly referenced, but this song reminds me of them because each of these plays also feature two people in the midst of something that seems to end and never end all the time, and perhaps never will, even in death).

SEVENTH

“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”

Synopsis: With this song, Hozier takes us into the seventh circle of hell, reserved for those who committed acts of extreme violence. This song is written from the perspective of someone from a cold climate describing to a friend from a warm climate the kinds of things they must do to keep warm in the harsh winters where they live, from hiding under blankets and falling unconscious from lack of good oxygen to drinking or doing drugs to create a false sense of warmth and calm, or sharing a bed with a stranger. Throughout, he likens warming oneself against the cold to desperate physical attraction.
Highlights: This song is based around the Irish word uiscefhuaraithe, which is repeated throughout and even listed as the alternate title to the song (in parentheses). This word is used to describe something made cold by water; literally it means “water cooled.”

“Butchered Tongue”

Synopsis: This song, also representative of the seventh circle of hell, speaks of the violence committed by British colonizers in Ireland in an attempt to Anglicize the population. Hozier likens the violence and destruction in Ireland and the attempted erasure of the Irish language to similar violence enacted against the native populations of Australia and North America.
Recommended: Translations by Brian Friel (a play about the Anglicization of Ireland and the violence of British colonization in Ireland); The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer; Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to Reservation by Sean P. Harvey; Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonization by Felicity Meakins

EIGHTH

“Anything But”

Synopsis: This song is used to represent the eighth circle of hell, where frauds are punished. On the surface, it sounds like a love song, but really, the narrator is actually saying they want nothing to do with the person he’s singing to.
Highlights: The song is about reincarnation in a traditional sense: when someone dies, they may come back as anything, not just another human. The narrator describes his desire to die and return to Earth as some kind of act of violence or natural disaster—something thrilling. He wishes to be a riptide or a stampede, but promises if he were these things, he would do no harm to the person he’s addressing. In one verse, he even goes so far as to say that if he were death itself, the subject of his song would live forever. It sounds like a beautiful love song and a romantic promise of kindness and gentleness, but really, he’s telling them he doesn’t want to be anything to them, and he even tells them to “go look another way” numerous times throughout the song.
Recommended: Graceland (album) by Paul Simon. This song shares similar sounds and some similar themes to Simon’s Graceland, which was written shortly after his second divorce, from actress Carrie Fisher, and reflects to some degree upon both his first and second marriages and subsequent divorces.

“Abstract (Psychopomp)”

Synopsis: Still in the eighth circle of hell, this song is told from the perspective of a guardian of the afterlife, a psychopomp, whose job is to guide souls to the realm of the dead.
Highlights: The psychopomp is guiding a person through their life’s memories and, specifically, their experiences with death, including finding a dead sheep as a child, seeing an animal get hit by a car, and, interestingly, the memory of being in love (this is perhaps a callback to “First Time,” in which Hozier likens falling in love to choosing to die).
Recommended: Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Caciola

NINTH

“Unknown/Nth”

Synopsis: The narrator is traveling through the final circle of hell, where the most traitorous souls are punished, and is also home to Satan. Having made his way through all the other circles of hell up to this point for his beloved, the narrator is coming to realize that, perhaps, his perception of his beloved was misguided, and their love was not as he believed, but a fantasy he created about them.
Highlights: He speaks of the “true colors” of his beloved shining through “in darkness and in secrecy.” He also speaks of seeing pieces of his own heart in their teeth when they smile at him and call him an angel, a sign of the treachery that he never recognized in them until now. He also admits to still loving this person despite the betrayal they enacted against him, giving further evidence to the idea of “All Things End” being told by an unreliable narrator, if these songs are believed to be narrated by the same person.

ASCENT

“First Light”

Synopsis: The narrator has reached the end of his journey through the nine circles of hell and returns, without his beloved. He holds the memories of them still, but he is changed by the experience, and he knows he can never go back to the way he was before, or back into the depths of the inferno to retrieve them again.
Highlights: The song makes reference in its first line to the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” by Albert Brumley, which has been covered by numerous artists over the last hundred years and is commonly sung at funerals in the American South.
Recommended: “I’ll Fly Away,” covered by Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss for the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; Burton Raffel (Translator); Paul J. Contino (Introduction by)

ISBN: 9780810126725

Publication Date: 2010-09-30

At the midpoint of his life, during Holy Week in 1300, Dante awakes to himself in the middle of a forest so dark that the sun's light cannot penetrate its gloom. of the wildness and brutality of the woods, Dante cries out for help, and thus begins one of Western literature's greatest epic journeys. The Divine Comedy follows Dante the pilgrim--guided by the great Roman poet Virgil, then by the love of his life, Beatrice--as he travels downward through Hell, then upward through Purgatory in order to reach Paradise and witness the love that moves the sun and the stars. Raffel's translation vividly captures the divine contrapasso, the ultimate case of the punishment the crime, in the Inferno, while fathoming the complexity of the Purgatorio and the ecstasy of the Paradiso. One of the world's greatest works of literature, Dante's Commedia revolutionized poetry and the Italian language. This epic poem was the to be written in the vernacular of the Italian people rather than in Latin. In it, Dante weaves the best of classical literature from Virgil, Statius, Aristotle, and Ovid with staples from the Christian tradition (including the Scriptures, Augustine, and Aquinas), into a colorful medieval tapestry that depicts at once the vividly checkered history of church and empire.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Translator)

ISBN: 9780394172040

Publication Date: 1954-01-01

A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation . . . suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain".--The London Times.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Call Number: PR6069.T6 R6 1967

Publication Date: 1967

The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue by Patricia Palmer

ISBN: 9781107041844

Publication Date: 2013-11-11

Severed heads emblemise the vexed relationship between the aesthetic and the atrocious. During the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, colonisers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir John Harington and Sir George Carew wrote or translated epic romances replete with beheadings even as they countenanced - or conducted - similar deeds on the battlefield. This study juxtaposes the archival record of actual violence with literary depictions of decapitation to explore how violence gets transcribed into art. Patricia Palmer brings the colonial world of Renaissance England face to face with Irish literary culture. She surveys a broad linguistic and geographical range of texts, from translations of Virgil's Aeneid to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Ercilla and makes Irish-language responses to conquest and colonisation available in readable translations. In doing so, she offers literary and political historians access not only to colonial brutality but also to its ethical reservations, while providing access to the all-too-rarely heard voices of the dispossessed.

Native Tongues by Sean P. Harvey

ISBN: 9780674735798

Publication Date: 2015-01-05

Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites' beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its "manifest destiny" of westward expansion. Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was a key marker of racial ancestry, inspiring conjectures about the structure of Native American vocal organs and the grammatical organization and inheritability of their languages. A racially inflected discourse of "savage languages" entered the American mainstream and shaped attitudes toward Native Americans, fatefully so when it came to questions of Indian sovereignty and justifications of their forcible removal and confinement to reservations. By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific efforts were under way to record the sounds and translate the concepts of Native American languages and to classify them into families. New discoveries by ethnologists and philologists revealed a degree of cultural divergence among speakers of related languages that was incompatible with prevailing notions of race. It became clear that language and race were not essentially connected. Yet theories of a linguistically shaped "Indian mind" continued to inform the U.S. government's efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.

Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonisation by Felicity Meakins

Publication Date: 2016

Afterlives by Nancy Mandeville Caciola

ISBN: 9781501702617

Publication Date: 2016-03-31

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings?from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe?brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Recent Posts

Jimi Hendrix-Room Full of Mirrors

Hello everyone, I hope you are all heading into the holiday season well!This week I would like to discuss a book I have not finished yet, but it is good enough to recommend. One of my many personal interests is reading about music. One of the areas I like to study most is Seattle's music. Known most recently in our minds for the 1990s scene of grunge/rock and roll music, Seattle is also the birthplace of other musical legends like Quincy Jones, and the person I would like to speak about today, Jimi Hendrix.The book I am reading, Room Full of Mirrors, is a biography about the life of Jimi Hendrix. When I begin a rock biography, I like to imagine how the musician or artist began. I ask myself questions like “Did this person sit in their room and play all day?” Or maybe “Did they have a teacher or a parent that showed them initially how to play and they ran with it?” In the case of Jimi Hendrix, it was mostly his pure desire to express himself through a guitar that made him want to be great.Jimi grew up poor in Seattle. It is mentioned he first began playing a broom and mimicking the broom like a guitar to songs on the radio. Like it seems in many cases of great artists, his parents divorced when he was a younger boy. Jimi eventually obtained a beat-up acoustic guitar with one string, which he played while walking around the neighborhood. When he got to high school, Jimi finally obtained an electric guitar. Jimi was left-handed, but his father, a demanding alcoholic insisted he play right-handed. To get around this, Jimi would flip the guitar over and become proficient in playing it upside down to fool his father. When Al Hendrix, his father would walk out of the room, Jimi would flip it again back to his correct, left-hand playing side.This is just one brief insight into the life of Jimi. I don’t want to ruin what happens next so I will say check it out for yourself! You will learn of tales from his Army experience, playing circuits around the southern United States and sharpening skills!I do fear though, getting to the end of Jimi’s brief story. I say this only because I feel that I know what may happen next even if I haven’t gotten there yet. Many artists get to a level of fame where the talent they possess becomes big business. It makes a lot of money for many people. I think that artists who are young and have this vision get taken advantage of. Everyone wants a piece and there is money and careers on the line. Almost like a rocket that just cannot stop. Something like this I fear happened to Jimi, sadly, as well. ...

My reading selections for National Native American Heritage Month

As November is National Native American Heritage Month, and as I haven’t had much time lately to read as much as I normally would (this semester has been a busy one!), I thought this time I would tell you all about two books I intend to read this month rather than books I have read.Bridging the gap between spooky season and the rest of autumn, I’ve decided to read Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s edited volume Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. This book, first published in September 2023, is a collection of twenty-six short horror stories by Native American and Canadian First Nations authors. Its title refers to an Indigenous belief spanning the continent and transcending cultures that if one whistles after dark, they could risk inviting something sinister into their lives, one example being the Navajo skinwalker, a witch or spirit that can disguise itself as an animal for nefarious purposes. This book was a national bestseller and was nominated for multiple literary awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Anthology, the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology, and the Locus Award.The other book I’m hoping to read this month is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. I just saw the film based on this book a few weeks ago (I’m a little behind the times, I know), and I thought it was a cinematic masterpiece. Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie Kyle in the film, is a fantastic actress, and it was wonderful to see her bring Kyle’s story into the spotlight. While the subtitle seems to imply that a primary focus of the book is the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Investigation, the film places the focus on Kyle and allows her, through Gladstone, to tell her story as the daughter and sister of a family destroyed by the greed and violence of the white men who sought to take everything from them, and as a survivor of this same greed and violence herself, as her husband and his family tried and ultimately failed to kill her the same way they killed her family. I’m very interested to see what details from the book might not have made it into the (three-and-a-half-hour!!!) movie, and to learn more about this moment in American history.Killers of the Flower Moon by David GrannCall Number: E99.O8 G675 2016ISBN: 9780385534246Publication Date: 2017-04-18Presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. In this last remnant of the Wild West--where oilmen like J.P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes like Al Spencer, the "Phantom Terror," roamed--many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history....

It's Spooky Season!

Spooky season is upon us! Now, while I am not a huge fan of scary stories, I do try to read something Halloween-esque this time of year. I typically read more suspense than straight up horror fiction, but it never hurts to broaden your horizons a bit. I was searching through our catalog to try and find something new to read (I’ve also been in a bit of a readers’ slump) and I thought I would share what I found. So here is a list of some of the library’s spooky reads to get you ready for this Halloween! H.P. Lovecraft's The haunter of the dark and other grotesque visions by Howard Phillips Lovecraft; Alan Moore; John CoulthartISBN: 9781902197234Publication Date: 2014-03-01 Out There Screaming : an anthology of new Black horror by Tananarive Due (Contribution by); Nnedi Okorafor (Contribution by); Jordan Peele (Editor, Introduction by); John Joseph Adams (Editor); N.k. Jemisin (Contribution by); Rebecca Roanhorse (Contribution by)ISBN: 9780593243794Publication Date: 2023-10-03NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The visionary writer and director of Get Out, Us, and Nope, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions, curates this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation. "Every piece is strong and memorable, making this not only likely to be the best anthology of the year, but one for the ages."--The Guardian A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Chicago Public Library, CrimeReads A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele's anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and--like his spine-chilling films--its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid. Featuring stories by: Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham JonesISBN: 9781982136468Publication Date: 2021-01-26A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From USA TODAY bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a "masterpiece" (Locus Magazine) of a novel about revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition. Labeled "one of 2020's buzziest horror novels" (Entertainment Weekly), this is a remarkable horror story that "will give you nightmares--the good kind of course" (BuzzFeed). From New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way. Bram Stoker's DraculaCall Number: PN1997 Dracula 1992 DVDISBN: B000TGJ80SFrom Academy Award®-winning director Francis Ford Coppola, comes the classic and chilling tale about the devastatingly seductive Transylvanian prince (Gary Oldman) who travels from Easter Europe to 19th-century London in search of human love. When the charismatic Dracula meets Mina (Winona Ryder), a young woman who appears as the reincarnation of his lost love, the two embark on a journey of romantic passion and horror. Now presented in full 4k resolution, experience this sensual gothic spectacle like never before. Haunted by Leo BraudyCall Number: PN56.S8 B73 2016ISBN: 9780300203806Publication Date: 2016-10-25this book explores how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity. From the Protestant Reformation to contemporary horror films and fiction, he explores four major types: the monster from nature (King Kong), the created monster (Frankenstein), the monster from within (Mr. Hyde), and the monster from the past (Dracula). Drawing upon deep historical and literary research, Braudy discusses the lasting presence of fearful imaginings in an age of scientific progress, viewing the detective genre as a rational riposte to the irrational world of the monstrous. Haunted is a compelling and incisive work by a writer at the height of his powers" The Twisted Ones by T. KingfisherISBN: 9781534429574Publication Date: 2019-10-01 The Haunting of Leigh Harker by Darcy CoatesISBN: 9781728220222Publication Date: 2021-09-07From bestselling gothic horror author Darcy Coates comes a chilling story of a quiet house on a forgotten suburban lane that hides a deadly secret... Leigh Harker's quiet suburban home was her sanctuary for more than a decade, until things abruptly changed. Curtains open by themselves. Radios turn off and on. And a dark figure looms in the shadows of her bedroom door at night, watching her, waiting for her to finally let down her guard enough to fall asleep. Pushed to her limits but unwilling to abandon her home, Leigh struggles to find answers. But each step forces her towards something more terrifying than she ever imagined. A poisonous shadow seeps from the locked door beneath the stairs. The handle rattles through the night and fingernails scratch at the wood. Her home harbours dangerous secrets, and now that Leigh is trapped within its walls, she fears she may never escape. Do you think you're safe? You're wrong. Also By Darcy Coates: The Haunting of Ashburn House The Haunting of Blackwood House Craven Manor The House Next Door Voices in the Snow The Whispering Dead Dead Silence by S. A. BarnesISBN: 9781250819994Publication Date: 2022-02-08A Most-Anticipated Title in Bustle, i09, LitHub, PopSugar, CrimeReads, BookRiot, GoodReads and more. STARRED Review in BookPage! Titanic meets The Shining in this SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn't yet ended. Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed--made obsolete--when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate. What they find is shocking: the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick search of the ship reveals something isn't right. Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Messages scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate. "Truly un-put-downable in its purest sense." Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights Imaginary Friend by Stephen ChboskyCall Number: St. Johns River/Palatka Popular Fiction -- PS3553.H3469 I43 2019ISBN: 9781538731345Publication Date: 2019-10-01Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with Christopher at her side. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out. At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six awful days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again. Soon Kate and Christopher find themselves in the fight of their lives, caught in the middle of a war playing out between good and evil, with their small town as the battleground. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth WareCall Number: PR6123.A745 I5 2016ISBN: 9781501112331Publication Date: 2016-04-19When reclusive writer Leonora is invited to the English countryside for a weekend away, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. But as the first night falls, revelations unfold among friends old and new, an unnerving memory shatters Leonora’s reserve, and a haunting realization creeps in: the party is not alone in the woods.-- Amazon summary....

Questions With No Answers by Mohamed Chawki Mhadhab and A cat, a monster, and a cheerleader walk into a bar… by Brenda Hoffman

Good day, blog readers! In addition to my (Brenda) blog, I've invited Mohamed Chawki Mhadhab to write as well. Chawki is a book club member on the St. Augustine campus, and a student worker in the testing center. Enjoy! Questions With No AnswersWhile I mostly agree with Emerson’s “I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten, even though they have made me,” I cannot deny that some literary works linger in my mind for years while others escape it the moment I turn to the back cover. I contemplate the reasons that make words on pages an experience I carry with me through life like an indelible ghost scar. Is it the number of dog-eared pages? Is it the fact it was read under mediterranean august heat (a random feature my favorite books surprisingly share)? Is it the new words and mind-bending metaphors? Is it the vehement hollowness and grief that ensue from the last page? Despite having all the above, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous has led me to believe that a ghost scar is a question with no answer, for a book lingers by haunting the reader with the unearthed inquiry and the unreached truth. This book lingers. “This book is a cosmic moment.” My experience with a novel transcends the act of reading within the pages to how I got the book and when or where I read it. My aimless downtown stroll turned into a grueling digging at a bookstore. My friend recommended a book a few months before this trip, and I failed to remember the title just as she failed to pick up her phone at that moment. With no specific agenda/book list in mind, I picked up “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” in frustration. When we crossed paths again, I asked her about the book she urgently wanted me to read. We screamed in unison when I explained it was the same book I picked up the day she didn’t answer her phone. She said, “This book is a cosmic moment.” Before, it felt so random; then, it felt so destined. Do we pick the book or does the book pick us? In essence, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is Vuong's letter to his mom in a language she doesn’t understand. This barrier frees him: The narrator’s lived experiences and true feelings come out. Little dog’s story is one of love and pain; one feeding off the other. Relics of war and motherhood, queerness and hopefulness, drug abuse and first love are the contrasting colors used to paint this tragic yet uplifting picture. The reader is taken back and forth between little dog’s memories with his mom (sometimes grandmother) and Trevor, between sweetness and heartache with the people who love him the most and somehow hurt him the most. Is it gorgeous if it is painful? In libraries, this book sits in the fiction section, but for me it tears down the contrived wall separating fiction and nonfiction. Unapologetic, it sits right in between, for Vuong “wanted to start with truth and end with art.” He relies on his life story for the former, and his brilliance with words and language for the latter. The subliminal poetry is embedded throughout the book, but it is mostly shrouded in storytelling. However, there are pages where its mask is taken off: the rhythmic words and poetic structure stand there, naked, as if daring the reader to turn to the next page untouched, unbroken. This poetic prose and fictive nonfiction beg the question: What is a genre? “A page, turning, is a wing lifted, with no twin, and therefore no flight, and yet we are moved,” Ocean Vuong claims. The plot of this novel can be summarized in a few words because its piercing effect is not in the events and jolting plot twists, it is in the metaphors. The author employs them chiefly in two ways. He conveys his feelings and explains his experiences through these universal and impersonal analogies such as his conflicting relationship with his mom and the migration of a colony of monarchs. Thus, he helps his readers empathize, for a moving metaphor is a testimony for an author’s genuineness. On the other hand, he gives the reader a glimpse of his present perspective on these past events. The time he goes from the fact that only children return after the migration of monarchs to the generalization that “only the future revisits the past” is one of the numerous instances I was caught off guard by perspective shifts. I stop to peruse and admire them. Like an archaeologist in a field, Ocean Vuong looks through this metaphoric lens, dissects the details of his stories, zooms in and then out for a clearer, bigger picture. Destruction happens; time passes; ruins remain. Is it the same way, or can art exist without pain? Dear reader, these questions are still unanswered. I hope when you pick up, or are picked up by, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, it lingers, which is to say you’re left scarred by questions with no answers. A cat, a monster, and a cheerleader walk into a bar… The cat sips his cognac before heading home to his wife and six kids; the monster, a raconteur, tells three stories to a sad boy; and the cheerleader blabs a secret about a dead U.S. National Guardsman. I read and/or listened to three books in as many weeks. Kathryn Hughes’ Catland, Siobhan Dowd and Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls, and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. I devised the three-pronged opening to this week’s blog as Pyewacket’s (my orange tabby) daily routine of waking me every morning at 5:30 commenced, so blame him. He’s watching me click the keyboard now as I compose the Catland portion. That’s a lie: he’s ignoring me, awaiting the daylight when he and his sister, Galka (also an orange tabby) can enter the lanai to skulk birds and squirrels. Catland by Kathryn Hughes Hughes' well-researched Catland (which I purchased from Amazon with points) deep dives into our feline friends with competing chapters of the British artist Louis Wain’s cats, and a history of how cats allow (yes, allow) one-third of households in the U.S. to live with them. Chances are you’ve seen Wain’s drawings somewhere. If not, Google his name. If you see cats in clothes, they’re probably drawn by Wain. His early cats feature moms burdened by too many children, while dads are annoyed by wife and the babes. In Wain’s own life, his alcoholic father visited the bars too often avoiding the burden of his six children and nagging wife. This drunk, top-hatted cat returns home to a frightened mama kitty, an event Wain’s mother experienced many times. “I had a terrible fear” Wain’s anthropomorphic cats had good times, too. Catching a play, these well-dressed theatergoers are enthralled by the actors. Warning: kitties weren’t always treated with love, tenderness, and respect. Hughes doesn’t whitewash the disgusting way cats were treated in the mid-late 1800s, so if you’re like some readers who closed the book after a couple of chapters, this self-proclaimed “childless cat lady” suggests you crack open A Monster Calls. A Monster Calls by Siobhan Dowd and Patrick NessBegun by Dowd and finished by Ness after the former’s death from breast cancer, A Monster Calls is a must read for anyone who has lost a loved one. When an anthropomorphic (there’s that word again) yew tree in Connor’s backyard becomes a monster and tells Connor three tales, he comes to accept (through the telling of his own truth) conflicting feelings surrounding his mom’s impending death. Dowd and Ness are children’s authors, and while this book is short and written for children, I had an aha moment concerning my own feelings about my mom who died of cancer in 1991. The catharsis I felt reading Connor’s struggles was palpable, even after all these years. Difficult to put into words, so just read it. You’ll see. The illustrations by Jim Kay fit the theme, too. The Monster Calls on Connor. Don’t want to read the book, watch the movie on Netflix. Liam Neeson voices the Monster. I read this book on Libby’s app. You can borrow the movie from the Palatka and Orange Park campuses. Dare Me by Megan AbbottPrime Video picked up Dare Me as a 10-episode series that you can purchase for $16.99. I’ve not watched the series, and I won’t because the series can’t duplicate the narration of Megan Abbott’s story about ambitious cheerleaders, their bored-with-her-life coach, and a national guardsman who picked the wrong school to recruit future national guards' people. I put Dare Me on my “want to read” list in Goodreads because I mistakenly thought my sister, Suzy also wanted to read the book. I’m glad I made that mistake. Books about cheerleaders and their problems aren’t typically my cup of tea, but this book dared me to get caught up in lives I normally couldn’t care less about. Abbott’s novel is a whodunnit with chameleon characters who surprised me with their depth and/or shallowness. As cliched as it sounds, people are not who they seem to be in this well-paced thriller. That cheerleaders starve themselves to fit into their uniforms, that coaches want said cheerleaders to win tournaments, that supposed happy couples are deeply sad aren’t surprising ideas. However, Abbott turns these ideas on their heads, and before this reader knew it, I was desperate to find out if these athletes would successfully toss a 90-pound, perfectly pony-tailed gal into the air, while her gal pals wait to catch her in their muscled, fake-tanned arms. Also, I didn’t predict who murdered our man in uniform. Remember: I said I won’t watch the series. How can I with these gems (and I’m being serious here)? After a game, it takes a half hour under the showerhead to get all the hairspray out. To peel off all the sequins. To dig out that last bobby pin nestled deep in your hair. Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales. No way a second-rate director can capture these lines in a shot without focusing on the cheerleader’s body, ignoring the serious thoughts in her brain. Listen to this book on Spotify. A cat, a monster, and cheerleader are not in a bar. These larger-than-life characters are at the heart of three worth-reading, memorable, and exciting books. Although my money is on the cat stopping at the bar before heading home to his doting flat mates. A Monster CallsCall Number: PN1997 Monster 2017 DVDTwelve-year-old Conor, dealing with his mother’s illness, a less-than-sympathetic grandmother, and bullying classmates, finds a most unlikely ally when a monster appears at his bedroom window. Ancient, wild, and relentless, the monster guides Conor on a journey of courage, faith, and truth...

A Promise Softly Sung of Somewhere Else: A Journey Through History and Classic Literature in Hozier's 'Unreal Unearth' (Part 2 of 2)

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