Bookish Thoughts

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.

This book is brutal, even moreso than the first one. But it has more hope, too. It's the book that made me fall in love with Octavia Butler, the book I think everyone should read, the book I want to get tattooed on my body. Does that make it my favorite book? I suppose it's a strong contender. Although it isn't a comfort read the way so many of my favorites can be classified, so I can't re-read it quite as often. But it's a book that I know I'll continue to come back to and get more out of each time. I really appreciate that this book is told in more than Lauren's voice. Her daughter offers a strong counterpoint to her and really elevates everything. The tension between them hurts so much, especially as more of their history is revealed. I actually wish the book had a little bit more of Asha Vere, especially after she met her mother. I suppose that would have gone in the next book, though. The one Butler didn't have time to write.

I first read this book three or four years ago, and it has really stuck with me. My thoughts return to it again and again, especially with the current political climate, not to mention the actual climate. I've recommended it to more people than I can remember and loaned my copies out enough times that I have no idea what happened to them. So when they announced a re-issue with a new introduction by NK Jemisin, it was all the excuse I needed to buy new copies and re-read them. Having now re-read the first book, I'm seeing how much the two blurred together in my mind. And I think it was actually the second one that impacted me the most. This one started out a lot more slowly than I remembered. They weren't on the road for nearly as much of the book as I thought they were, and a lot of things that I thought were in this book weren't. But I think I actually liked it more this time around. I've lived and learned a lot in the past few years, and I have a greater appre...

Much like the other books in this series, Patternmaster  left me wanting more.  Butler has a lot of ideas that she just sort of hints at rather than expanding fully. And a lot of characters that could be interesting if they were ever developed beyond what was necessary for the plot. Teray was the only character I felt like I got to know properly. Even Coransee, the main antagonist, remained mostly a mystery. This was compounded by the plot that moved at the speed of light. Nothing ever got a chance to breathe before the next thing happened and relationships developed so quickly that I had a hard time believing they were real. I definitely prefer character-driven fiction to plot-driven. If I don't believe in the characters then I'm just never going to care about the story. And that's been my problem with this series. If we're going to be dealing with difficult moral choices, then I need people to be making those choices, not 2-dimensional archetypes.

This book was a bit of a slog. As much as I like Octavia Butler's books, she definitely has some issues. And this one puts them in sharp relief. Butler has great ideas, and she does a great job of using science fiction to comment on society. I usually come out of her books with a lot to think about. That's part of the problem, really. I want more from her. Her books have a tendency to resemble outlines more than stories. There's no connective tissue between the big events. Characters are introduced as plot points and discarded as soon as they're not useful anymore. At the end of Ming of My Mind , I was frustrated that Doro and Anyanwu both died. I had become invested in their relationship over the centuries and in their competing visions for the future. But Mary was interesting enough, and I was looking forward to seeing where her story went. It turns out that it went nowhere. This book deals with an entire different set of characters facing an entirely different ...

Sometimes Octavia Butler's books feel more like outlines than novels. She's all about big ideas, and she gets them across in a really succinct way. Her books are brief, but they haunt me for years afterward, as I continue to turn over the ideas in my head. But sometimes it feels like this comes at the expense of the characters and their relationships with one another. Butler tends to focus in on the major turning points in her characters' lives, filling in the intervening years with a few brief sentences, letting a single scene capture a decade of character growth. She does it well, but I came out of this book wanting more. There are so many characters that we meet so briefly. I wanted more from Jan and Ada, I wanted to know more about what happened to Clay (holy crap, is he the Clay in Clay's Ark?). But this book is about Doro and his protege, Mary. And it's really only about them. Even Emma, née Anwanyu, has been relegated to Doro's sounding board and cons...

I've read enough of Butler's work at this point that I can't help but compare this book to her others. Certain things keeps popping up - long timelines, characters who gradually compromise their morals, and, of course, supernatural powers. From the beginning, Anyanwu reminded me strongly of the Ooloi of the Oankali in Butler's Xenogenesis series. She has the same long life, the same ability to alter her own body which leads to incredible healing abilities. But Anyanwu differs from the Ooloi in that she can only heal herself, and in that she's comparatively reclusive. All she wants is a family. Enter Doro, who inhabits the other qualities of the Ooloi: a fascination with genetics and a tendency to disregard humans as nothing more than breeding stock - pawns in his millenia-long experiments. But what Doro really wants is someone like him, not for companionship so much as the knowledge that he isn't alone in the universe. The book follows the push and pull be...

What happens when an unstoppable force meets with an immovable object? Eventually, the force wins. It goes around the object, wears it down until there's nothing left. And so it went with the Oankali and Lilith. For all her pride and stubborness, her campaigning on behalf of the remaining humans and her willingness to sacrifice her own freedom that they might live on, the Oankali have won And the proof is in her children. The last book follows the latest of Lilith's children, who happens to be the first human-born ooloi. He is more alien than ought to be possible for a child with mostly human DNA. But it just drives home how quickly and inexorably the Oankali ultimately work, wiping out the human race in a single generation. It also goes to show that culture plays a much larger part in our development than the Oankali are willing to admit. Raised by Oankali, and an ooloi in particular, Jodahs has far more in common with them than with his human parents. This is the book whe...

Adulthood Rites  shifts the focus from fully human Lilith to her son, Akin. Akin is mostly human, though he has a bit of Oankali mixed in - the first generation in the slow process of the Oankali ultimately subsuming humanity. He's raised in Oankali tradition, which makes him almost more Oankali than human, a distinction that the Oankali don't really understand. And he's the first male child of this new generation, because the Oankali find human men more unpredictable and unstable than the women. This book got me thinking about the nature vs nurture debate. I believe pretty strongly that nurture has a greater effect on us that nature, and everything I read pushes me further in that direction. Sure, it's our DNA that makes us human rather than chimpanzee. And the two are probably more intricately entwined than we currently understand or that I'm crediting here. Still. Nurture plays a bigger role in our personalities and lives than I think most people credit, becaus...

When I'm reading a series, I try to review each book before I read the next one. It helps me keep them straight. But that didn't happen this time. As I'm writing this, I've already finished the entire trilogy. It's given me a lot to think about. This trilogy deals deeply with consent and oppression and appropriation, with reproductive freedom and the nature/nurture debate. Plus there are aliens. I'm going to do my best to just talk about the first book, but the fact is that I've been thinking about this for weeks now and I keep thinking about new things. Dawn  focuses on Lilith Iyapo, a human woman who survived an apocalyptic nuclear war - because aliens happened to be passing by and they abducted and healed her and are now holding her captive. The book starts slow, with Lilith waking in a cell and only gradually coming to understand what has happened and where she is. She is eventually released to live with an alien family, where she is coerced into helpi...

In Parable of the Talents , the sequel to Parable of the Sower , Octavia Butler continues her dystopian society, managing to make it both more horrifying and more optimistic than in the first book. The key to this optimism is the idea that God is Change. So long as people continuously work towards a better world, and setbacks can only be temporary. The collective goal of a more communal world, one that values education and kindness, brings out the best in the people Olamina recruits to her cause. Of course, her intensity and single-mindenedness also alienates some, most notably her own daughter and brother. The contradictory viewpoints are the main reason I enjoyed this book so much more than the first one. It's still largely a collection of Olamin'as journal entries, but this time it's been collected by her daughter, who provides her own commentary and also includes journals from Olamina's brother, Marc, and husband, Bankole. Olamina's words of unity and hope...

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is both rough and beautiful. It dredged up a lot of thoughts and feelings and had me balanced precariously between despair and hope for the entire story before finally weighing the scales in favor of hope at the very end. Butler creates a dystopian society in the not-to-distant future. And really, the dystopia isn't too far removed from the current state of things in the US, which made it hit all that much harder. he gap between the rich and poor has become even wider and the middle class, such as it is, is only a step above poverty. Lauren's family owns their own house and they live in a gated community. Between her father's job as a college professor, role as the community's minister, and more than a little gardening and gathering, her life seems fairly stable. But there's never an excess of food or money. There's a constant danger of drug-addicted arsonists or desperate homeless people getting over the wall and d...

I loved this book so much. I'm already biased in favor of anything about vampires, so that's probably not a huge shocker. But this was a fantastic story that made the vampires sympathetic. It also pulled a neat trick of dealing with racism by way of a metaphor, but keeping a black character at the front and center of it. The narrator of the story is a young vampire named Shori, who wakes up all alone and with no memory of who or what she is. Over the course of the book, more and more of her personal and cultural history are revealed, and I was hooked every step of the way. I found everything about this to be fascinating. My only gripe is the language, which was straightforward to the point that it distracted me. It makes sense for an amnesiac child to speak in short, direct sentences. And the language did eventually fade into the background of the gripping tale. But I've been reading so much beautiful prose lately that it was a bit of a shock to come acros...

It took me a little while to get into  Kindred . Not because it's slow - the plot kicks in immediately and refuses to let up. Nor because of the characters; Dana is an everywoman with whom it's very easy to identify. Rather, the language, which I found to be blunt and stilted, kept me distanced from the story for a while. That language proved to be an asset though. Once Dana is fully engaged with the slave plantation, witnessing and experiencing horrors, Butler's simple, straight-forward language melts away. It's not flowery or overly descriptive. It just presents horror after horror, refusing to sugar-coat them or pack them beneath allusions and metaphor. I went from struggling with the language to being nearly unable to put the book down without even realizing it. While I wish the book had been able to capture me from the beginning, I'm ultimately glad that the story is presented as it is.  Kindred  is a short novel, coming in at 265 pages, but there is so muc...