Fahrenheit 451

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury is a classic tale that I hate to admit I have only just now read.  I also hate to admit that I saw the HBO movie before reading the book.  While Michael B. Johnson is a fantastic actor and the movie had an important message, the actor is not Montag and the movie is definitely not the book.  For those of you who have not read the book, READ THE BOOK!

I usually compare plots to bread and language to butter, but in this case I think the main character is the bread and the language of the supporting characters the butter that eventually builds the character into who and what he becomes and so the butter actually forms the bread.  This seemed like a very mysterious bread, so I googled “mysterious bread” thinking I might find some interesting matcha tea bread or some equally exotic flavors, but instead I found the lyrics to a Methodist Hymn that I am very familiar with:

O Thou who this mysterious bread
didst in Emmaus break,
return, herewith our souls to feed
and to thy followers speak. (Hymnsite)

While this is actually a Holy week hymn about taking communion and allowing our “hearts to see the Lord,” it seems relevant to Montag’s journey in self discovery and understanding as he began to see the light, as he began to hear and see the other side to a story he had never questioned he found something to follow and in turn found followers. 

He set out as a “fireman” burning all books and the ideas they represented that his captain, Beatty, and society deemed evil, the source of all unhappiness. Beatty said, “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.” This very quote defines Beatty himself – unhappy, questioning, with no way to solve his discontent – almost like pushing his false ideals onto others relieves him slightly of his own dichotomous nature. 

And yet I think it is important to note that without dichotomy, we would not fully understand an idea without its counterpart.  While there seems to be a push today to limit speech on subjects that society has deemed offensive or subjects that make us uncomfortable or even subjects that we just don’t agree with, how can we know they are offensive or that we disagree if we never have the chance to hear the argument in the first place?  

This is just a small piece of Montag’s story, the real bread and so the butter too of his story is actually about time.  “The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned!”  This revelation of the cycle of life, the cycle of death was an important turning point of understanding how small his part in all of it really is.

And yet his friend says, ““Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”  So even though we all have such small parts in the world, they are all important in some way and I think this is what pushes us all forward, giving us hope that we are and can make a difference.  

His friend also said, ““Grandfather’s been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said, earlier, he was a sculptor. ‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal…”

I can’t connect this bread and butter any further without giving the entire story away, so please “stuff your eyes with wonder” and read this book to maybe see the world in a different way.

The Little Paris Bookshop

"The Little Paris Bookshop" by Nina George was a delicious book.  Every sentence was like taking a small bite of a buttery croissant. The outside flaky, shards of crust spiking the tongue, a dare to continue eating, a dare to continue reading, to continue searching and reaching for the soft center of understanding.  The main character, Perdu, was a broken man at the beginning of the story, the flaky shards and fallen crumbs of a stale pastry, but not irreparable.

Perdu himself is the story, the croissant.  That soft center of understanding was there for others, but not himself.  He “reflected that it was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books.  They look after people.”  He considered himself (as did others) a “literary apothecary” and prescribed books as medication to heal the heart, revive the soul.

Then one day he realized that his soul needed reviving and he parted on what can only be called an epic journey filled with adventures and misadventures (is there a difference?) where he sought his soul as well as the true author of his favorite soul saving book. 

This book deals with loss on a number of different levels, including the loss of love, the loss of self, death of loved ones, and death of inspiration.  It offers hope and comfort via literature and friendships formed over literature and over common ground.  “It was the season for truffles and literature.”  What could be more hopeful than that?

This is a bread and butter book because the bread is the butter, the butter is the bread.  The rich croissant of the story is the very butteryness of the language and vice versa.   You can taste each word and find meaning in each stage of discovery that Perdu experiences. 

“…tasted of honey and pale fruit, of a tender sigh before sliding into sleep. A vibrant, contradictory wine, a wine brimming with love.”

Who wouldn’t want to taste that?  Read the book to find out what this really means and to experience butteryness for yourself.

When Breath Becomes Air

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi does not need my review. It is a bread and butter book whether I say it is or not.  I don’t normally read biographies or autobiographies, because I have a difficult time connecting with a plot – the bread, the foundation of the story is somehow too squishy and moist to be substantial enough to hold any butter, any intricate language.  Kalanithi has made me reconsider that statement and made me wonder why I never considered life itself a plot.

Kalanithi’s story made me feel small, insignificant but only in a way that forced me to see that no matter how hard we try, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter our intentions for humanity,  death is a reality out of our control.  Cancer can and has beaten the best of us.  However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight it and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t live our lives to the fullest, do the things that make us want to live.   If a man dying with cancer can still operate as a neurosurgeon,

those of us without a debilitating chronic disease have no excuse to not live the life we want to live. 

Kalanithi said, “The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out.  It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget.”  I think it is important for us all to consider this, whether ill or healthy, discover what matters, and then focus on it, do something about it, whether it is trying to make a change or encourage growth – if we don’t find what matters – it may die, we may die.

Kalanithi spent his life searching for meaning – the meaning of life, the meaning of death, and the meaning of the human mind – and how they all intersect.  I don’t know if he ever came to any concrete conclusions, but he led me to the conclusion that each of us matters, that we each have meaning of our own, and our personal meaning can give meaning to others. 

Kalanithi’s life is the plot of this book.  It is captivating to read about his experiences as a neurosurgeon and equally heart warming and heart breaking to read about his struggle with cancer.  The language was butter, but it was the kind of butter that may have been in the refrigerator too long – salty, but slightly off with the flavor of other items left in the refrigerator too long – bitter and wanting, but fully knowing what it was.  He wrote, “Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I am dying, until I actually die, I am still living” and later “The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

What, indeed.  What are any of us supposed to do?  I don’t have the courage to face the answer to that question.  I don’t know how he did and I certainly don’t know how he lived knowing that “The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death’s approach.” And yet somehow the fear of death didn’t overtake him.  Instead, his desire to live prompted him to carry on, to share his thoughts with us in this book, and to simply be. 

And that is why the story made me feel small.  It made me question this very thing – are any of us living life fully?  Maybe we can’t until we realize that life could disappear from us at any moment, without warning, without care, simply without.  I recommend reading this book as a prompt to help us realize how precious life really is and start or perhaps continue our individual searches for meaning and what truly matters to us.

The Girl on the Train

"The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins is a mystery: the characters are all mysterious in their own ways, the events/plot are depicted in a mysterious format, and the reader just might become mysterious too in trying to predict the inevitable twist that is a requirement of all mysteries.  Because of the mysterious format the author chose, the book is anything but formulaic.  The entire story is told in first person, switching points of view from the female main characters involved in the story. 

Because I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who have not read this book yet, I am not going to discuss the plot and I am not going to discuss the characters.  I will simply say that the foundation, the plot of the story was shaky, crumbly, like a piece of bread that you know is too soft to butter, but you try to spread it on there anyway – a story that you can’t put down, a story that gets under your skin, a story that forces you to understand it.

The plot gradually unfolds through its reading and so the language is not especially flowing.  The story is mainly delivered in dialog, observation, and short descriptions – chunky cold butter on a slice of too soft bread.  This may sound harsh, but it works for a mystery book.   As with most mysteries, the answers, the plot, the language all makes sense in the end – put that cold bread and butter in a hot skillet and the butter will melt into a delicious toast.

My favorite quote from the book is actually inspired by a poem written by e.e. cummings, “Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis." I think is an excellent phrase that defines each of the characters.  Life can’t be confined to simply one paragraph and death between parenthesis is simply a date.  No, life is the dash between the date of birth and the date of the death; it is the unstated, it is the experience, it is what only the person who lived knows.  If that sounds interesting, then you should read "The Girl on the Train" to find out what each of the characters knows.

Botany of Desire

“Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World” by Michael Pollan is the first non-fiction book to make my Bread and Butter Books list.  As a reminder, books that make this personal list must have an excellent foundation or plot (bread) and language and writing style (butter) to reinforce that plot.  I never thought that a non-fiction book could have a plot, a purpose maybe, but not really a plot to drive the reader to find out what happens next, to find out more about a subject instead of a character.  Pollan has done a remarkable job creating this, somehow making real plants into a character that the reader can care about.

“Botany of Desire” tells a dramatic story of intrigue and the mystery surrounding botany.  He begins with a discussion and history of how the apple became an American staple, then researches the beauty and the economics of the tulip, then discusses the controversy surrounding cannabis, and finally debates the farming methods of the potato.  The story isn’t just about these plants; it’s about people trying to control these plants for their own survival whether that be for communication with others as in the case with Johnny Appleseed and his magnificent stories, appreciating and capitalizing on the beauty of the tulip, reaching a higher state of consciousness to better understand the world and our place in it, or simply growing crops for food.  This is a book that weaves these themes in and out of the discussion of plants while tying them all to the idea of human control: Apollo (logic) vs. Dionysus (chaos) in the Greek world of gods. 

Pollan says, “Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject.  That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”  Humans may be at the top of the food chain, but is it possible that this was a manipulation, that humans are only there because plants want them to be?  Maybe the world is even more complicated than we thought.  Maybe even humans are both subject and object.

Pollan develops these ideas with rich imagery and questions providing a smooth and buttery experience for the reader.  For example, he asks “How astonishing is it that we happen to inhabit a universe in which this quality of vanilla-ness-this bean! happens also to reside?  How easily it could have been otherwise, and just where would we be (where would chocolate be?) without that singular irreplaceable note, that middle C on the Scale of Archetypal Flavors?...” I can practically taste the vanilla-ness as he mentions it and then just as easily contrast it with chocolate-ness all the while picturing it on a great piano keyboard and realizing that without this flavor, this note, we wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.  I never realized how important one flavor might be and how it might determine how we experience other flavors.  This also left me wondering and desiring to taste those other Archetypal Flavors.  What might they be and where might I find them?

While it is non-fiction, “Botany of Desire” is definitely a bread and butter read.  It is a nontraditional story of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the plant world.  If you don’t believe, me you should read it to find out how.

Gone Girl

"Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn is an amazingly written story about a husband and wife, their relationship, their struggles with self-discovery both individually and as a couple, and a missing person case.  I’m afraid to mention much more about the plot because it’s a mystery and I don’t want to give anything away.

The writing, the butter, is what makes this story, the bread, captivating.  Even though the bread is moldy and leaves a bad, rotten taste in your mouth at times, the butter makes it worth continuing.  And yet you know if you continue eating you will be sick, continue reading and you won’t trust humanity. Flynn writes from both Nick’s point of view and Amy’s point of view, so that the reader feels that there is a complete picture, two sides of the same story.  I was skeptical at how this would work for a mystery book, but because of that skepticism, I think that it strengthened the mystery and my longing to understand each character and their parts in the events that transpired.

From Amy’s journal about her parents - “They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish-expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.”

From Amy’s journal about her husband – “Nick responds to adoration.  I just wish it felt more equal. My brain is so busy with Nick thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head Nicknicknicknicknick! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides.  I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.”

The imagery that each of Amy’s journal entries create is brilliant.  The reader can picture the events the setting and the people exactly as Amy pictured them.  This can create an alliance between the reader and Amy until the next chapter when the author presents Nick’s thoughts.

From Nick’s thoughts – “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head.”

Also from Nick’s thoughts “Go's voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone—his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there.”

The description presented in Nick’s thoughts much like the imagery in Amy’s journal provide facts, at least facts as seen by Nick, describing what the reader is lead to believe is the same story.  These facts appear slowly in Nick’s chapters of thoughts and experiences as the story unfolds a depiction of two very lost people.

While the book is disturbing at best, it is still a bread and butter book as both the story and the language are intriguing and captivating.   I recommend reading it over watching the movie.  While the movie is equally if not more disturbing because of the visual component, the imagery and the description are not as vivid and easily captured on screen.  Word of warning – the movie is not a date movie not matter what you might hear, but it shouldn’t be watched alone either. On that dire note – happy reading!

The Book Thief

"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak is a beautiful and dark story about human nature.  In my opinion it is a bread and butter book or maybe it is a butter and bread book.  What would you expect from a story told by Death?  It is not your typical story.  Death in this case is quite poetic, telling us the color of the sky and the weight of the souls he carried into it and how that weight grew in the 1940’s throughout Nazi Germany.  He swirls this language on top of a thick, crusty, somewhat stale yet entirely welcome foundation of a bready story of a pre-teen girl named Liesel Meminger. And yet the story itself isn't stale because of Death’s poetic approach.

Through direct foreshadowing, Death lets the reader know what to expect throughout the story’s entirety.  It reminds me of Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers,” as the reader knows from the very beginning that its characters will not have a happy ending; however, The Book Thief points out that life itself is a “star-crossed” love story: all of us are dying; it’s just a matter of when and how and perhaps the color of the sky.  No matter how many stories are told about the Titanic, the giant ship still sinks at the end and so it is with Nazi Germany: it still sinks and it pulls many people down with it, not necessarily innocent people – just people.

This book makes us question humanity: what is good, what is evil, and what is true.  The story, the bread of this book makes the reader struggle along with its characters, but it is a struggle well worth the effort.  Its powerful message reminded me of three things:

1.                   Milgram’s social psychology experiment

Three volunteers were involved in the experiment: an experimenter who was the authority figure, a teacher who carried out the experimenter's directions, and a subject who was acting as the test figure. The experimenter commanded the teacher to shock the subject every time the subject (keep in mind the subject was acting and not actually being shocked) got an answer incorrectly. A surprising 65% of teachers used the highest voltage at the experimenter’s command.  Milgram stated that “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” (For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.)  I think that statement describes the situation of the characters in The Book Thief perfectly.  “Heil Hitler” was a part of life for them whether or not they believed in what it stood for or not.  It was a means of survival.  I think that the innate desire to survive supersedes all philosophical discussions about the nature of humanity, its need to obey authority, and its inevitable pull between good and evil.

S. Farley’s Ferret

I remember sitting on the floor in Miss McDowell’s 3^rd grade class.  This was the first time I had heard the term “Nazi”.  I was wearing a dress and my knees were skinned, yet I sat cross legged on the floor just like the other students.  S. Farley had brought his pet ferret to class that day with permission from the teacher.  It darted around our legs; its fuzzy body pushing against us playfully.  Miss McDowell taught us about the Holocaust and told us how Hitler and the Nazis were trying to create a superior race of people with only blonde hair and blue eyes.  Stephen Farley and I looked directly at each other, our blonde hair unmistakable, our blue eyes questioning if we were somehow better than the tanned faces and dark hair and eyes of the other children in the room.   The question only lasted a split second before all of those other faces turned their stares back and forth between the two of us as if we were responsible for the deaths of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany.  No, we were certainly not better than anyone else.  As I began to feel this weight, which was very heavy on the shoulders of an 8 year old, I felt the fuzzy ferret dart up my dress and rest on my outer thigh.  I’m sure the judgmental and accusatory stares continued, but I chose to focus on the fuzzy ferret and refused to believe that the color of my skin, hair, and eyes made me a monster.  Just as it is wrong for people to persecute those who are different from themselves because of those differences; it is wrong to accuse and assume that those who have the same physical features of monsters also have the same beliefs.  Not all Germans were Nazis and not all Nazis believed in Hitler; they all believed in survival and fought to live.

The Power of the Word

Words are extremely powerful in the labels that we give one another that essentially define our roles in the world: Experimenter, Teacher, Subject, Nazi, Jew, or even Blonde and in the stories of our lives that push us to keep learning from each other and to keep living for each other.  Words have the power to destruct, the power to save, and according to The Book Thief even the power to inspire Death.

Any book that has the ability to push the reader to reflect on  their own beliefs and fully consider its story and its characters is as essential as bread and butter.