#678 The Banks of the Vistula- Rebecca Lee

#678 The Banks of the Vistula- Rebecca Lee

How far would you take a lie to protect yourself from a mistake? Margaret is only a few weeks into her college career and she has gotten herself into a jam. She loves her classes, especially her linguistics class. While researching her first paper, she came across an essay written fifty years ago in the frosty beginnings of the cold war. The paper was stunning, bold, and intoxicating to a young mind. She cribbed the essay and handed it in as her own.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to write anything better, and since the book was out of print, and hadn’t been checked out for decades, the risk of being caught was slim. What she didn’t anticipate was that the subject of the matter went far beyond the beauty she perceived. A young student might see value without understanding the political delicacies that can exist in linguistic analysis. Straight out, the paper was fascist propaganda. 

What follows is a brilliant story about language, oppression, and cold war politics. It’s all wrapped up in a very real stage of campus debate, full of stubborn arrogance and youthful naivte. How much should we be punished for the ideas we espouse in our youth? What about the decisions we make while our lives (or reputations) are at risk?

The symbolism here is strong and powerful, and not very subtle. This passage of Margaret burning the book that would act as evidence against her I found particularly striking:

Notable Passage: “As the flame approached my hand, I arched the book into the murky water. It looked spectacular, a high wing of flame rising from it. Inside, in one of its luminous chapters, I had read that the ability to use language and the ability to tame fire arose from the same warm, shimmering pool of genes, since in nature they did not appear one without the other.”

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#641 Persons and Places- John Keene

#641 Persons and Places- John Keene

This is a very creative idea for a story about two students—one black and one Ibernian—both highly intelligent, accomplished, and yet isolated Harvard men that quietly cross paths near campus. The year is 1890. Each one is in his head and in a very contemplative mood, thinking hard about their studies, their situation and the other as they pass without physical acknowledgment. 

This story is written as complementary journal entries, presented side by side, a counter-narrative I suppose. Being people of color at a very conservative institution in the late nineteenth century, they are understandably standoff-ish and careful with whom they associate. They recognize that being on a social one-man island is something they could appreciate about each other. Maybe next time they will cross paths they will strike up a conversation.

Notable Passage: “He observes me as if he has already examined the catalogue of ideas and impressions which I shall tell him when we eventually speak, of the gulf between the true-self and the world outside and how the mind, through its exercises, bridges it…”

Rating: 8-9-8-8 Total= 33

#540 Malaria- Michael Byers

#540 Malaria- Michael Byers

Orlando was living an OK life in college. He had a girlfriend that he could not imagine living without. “I wasn’t headed anywhere on any fast track, that was plain even then, and I didn’t have any kind of natural flair, but I had Nora, and it felt to me like a fair exchange.”

When he went to visit her parents he met Nora’s brother, George. After playing tennis together, George told Orlando that he had Malaria. It was an obvious lie and it stuck in Orlando’s head. He didn’t tell Nora and life went on. Later that year George began showing signs of mental instability. He felt guilty about not mentioning the Malaria lie, thinking it might have been an early warning sign. It wasn’t, it had nothing to do with him or what lie he was told.

As Orlando and Nora broke up, and things went forward, he learned about creating or finding his own identity. “I think this summer was also the period when I first struck on the idea of ambition, that I could be something in particular, rather than just myself in general.”

All this time, however, he couldn’t stop thinking about George. This one person, with one moment taking up an unfair amount of importance to Orlando, trying to find meaning where none existed.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#527 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere- ZZ Packer

#527 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere- ZZ Packer

This is a story about alienation. Dina is an outcast at Yale. Being a black woman in this environment made her automatically different, but her isolation—mostly caused by herself—led to a very lonely college experience.

Another girl, an outsider herself, reaches out to her, and Dina reluctantly allows her into her world. “The girl turned to face me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in that fact that she was able to at all when she was accustomed to crying.”

Heidi is gay, and Dina is inexperienced in any sexual or romantic way so she is confused. She is hiding, figuratively behind a strong, gruff personality and hiding literally in her dorm room she rarely leaves. Heidi may seem meek but she is self-aware and honest about who she is. Dina pretends.  She won't let a boy walk her home, because she is afraid he’ll see her poor neighborhood; she is ashamed of being week, so she tells her mother she lost the food stamps; she watches the coming out rally from her window.

Dina denies all opportunities to become less isolated, becoming more and more selfish with each rejection.

Notable Passage: “Constantly saying what one doesn’t mean accustoms the mouth to meaningless phrases.”

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

It’s Zeta Delta pledge week and as is tradition, the fraternity brothers all get dressed in ZD t-shirts, goes to a taping of the Price is Right and—of course—eats tabs of Hello Kitty blotter acid.

One of them gets selected as a contestant and wins his way on stage. Just when the acid kicks in, he has to try and make sense of what exactly is going on:

“They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess which can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.”

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Price is Right—and like this kid, most people of my generation know it from days we are home sick from school—knows that too many details of the game are off. That’s ok though, lets just say this is a satire on all televised TV game shows. In any case, this college kid, nearly spinning off the planet on acid, makes it all the way to the Showcase Showdown (trademarked I’m sure).

“It’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sport-utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor length fur coat.”

“And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.” Nope, sure as shootin’ it don’t.

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#318 The Package- Kurt Vonnegut

#318 The Package- Kurt Vonnegut

Earl Fenton just sold the plant he spent his life building and after spending months traveling the world, he comes home to his brand new state of the art home, the whole package.

He wasn’t always rich however, he was the poorest of his college fraternity brothers. He wasn’t “exactly behind the door when they passed out looks and brains.”

“No—but when they passed out money, they handed me a waiter’s jacket and a mop.”

So, he has got a bit of a chip on his shoulders. When he gets a call suddenly from one of his wealthier Frat brothers, he sees it as a great opportunity for a little bragging. But as he starts showing off the opulence and grandness of his life, he doesn’t get the satisfying jealousy and envy he wished for…and that deepens the resentment he has unfairly held for Charley the last forty years.

It turns out that Charley isn’t exactly the person Earl thinks he is, but that chip on his shoulder is hard to remove after all these years.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#193 A Taste of Honey- Jabari Asim

#193 A Taste of Honey- Jabari Asim

We get to the title story of this great collection. Although not a novel, these stories are all connected through its cast of characters, mostly the youngest boy of the family, Crispus. This story is about the oldest son in the family, Ed. Ed is a high school senior and the most socially evolved of the family. He has taken an interest with everything involving the revolution and black power movements, although like most young people finding sudden identity in a cause, it was a hard road to navigate at first.

“All his life Ed has been taught that black folks had to be twice as good to be considered half as good. Now some people—well, a lot of people—were saying that we shouldn’t measure ourselves by white folks’ low standards. They were saying that folks who use dogs and fire-hoses and billy-clubs and broomsticks wrapped in barbed wire and homemade bombs to hurt defenseless little children don’t know the first thing about good. As comforting and wonderful as this new blackness was, it was also confusing.”

Ed is meditating on these important issues, and whether to go to Harvard or a Historically Black College while still focusing on what’s most important to a teenage boy:

“Ed had every intention of continuing to live. For him living had been concentrated and distilled, in essence reduced to an all-encompassing desire that warmed the air, rippled his sheets, and lightly grazed the dark beauty stretched out on his bed.”

Notable Passage: “Isn’t a touch of class worth a taste of honey?”

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total=35