The Book Blog

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 Answers

While 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 Ness

Begun 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 Abbott

Prime 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.