Friday Reads: Normal People

Happy Friday, Griffins and friends! Interim Director Adam Pellman is reading a once-buzzy and once-new novel, Normal People by Sally Rooney. Read on for his thoughts!

I'm in an online book club that's themed around movies and TV. We alternate each month between nonfiction books that are about movies and TV, and fiction books that have been adapted into movies and/or TV series. This month, the selection was Sally Rooney's Normal People, a novel that received a lot of buzz when it was published, and was made into a limited series a few years back. This is the perfect time for me to read it, as I have a tendency to read buzzy new novels years after they've stopped being buzzy or new.

The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.

Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.

Friday Reads: Midnight Sun

 Happy Friday, Griffins! As Friday Reads fans know, Kelly's literary tastes are quite highbrow, and this week's selection is no exception. Read on for sparkly vampire drama as she tells us about Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer. 

I was a bit busy when Twilight came out in the fall of 2006; I had just started working here at Seton Hill! Since I was a few years older than the target audience, it took me a while to get around to picking up a copy. When I did, I liked it enough to drag my then-boyfriend/now-husband to watch the film in the theater alongside a lot of squealing teenage girls. (He spent the whole movie slouched in his seat with his hat pulled low, apparently in pain, and would occasionally mumble "Bite her neck!")

Midnight Sun is the same story, but as seen and experienced by Edward. It turns out that he is every bit the tortured drama queen we always thought he was. It's a feature, not a bug, folks. 

I read an electronic copy, but the print edition runs 832 pages, compared to Twilight's 544. I guess when you are immortal and are awake 24 out of every 24 hours, you don't feel the need to be concise to save time or space. Edward's account of every event runs longer than Bella's because he spends even more time in self-loathing than she does. 

Edward also intersperses a lot more backstory, which is fun; we learn more about the Cullen family and how its members all found each other and embarked on their "vegetarian" lifestyle. Now I want a Twilight retelling from Carlisle's perspective... or Emmett's. I bet Emmett's version would be pamphlet-length. 

J-Term Hours

 

Library hours for J-Term (January 3rd - January15th) will be Monday-Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m., except for Thursday, January 11th (closed for the SHU employee winter workshop) and Monday, January 15th (closed for MLK Jr. Day).

Winter Break Closure

 

Happy holidays! The Library will be closed from December 21st through January 2nd and will reopen on January 3rd. Have a safe and happy break. 

Friday Reads: The Woman in Me

 This week's Friday Reads is a bit predictable; Kelly tells us about her recent audiobook listen, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. 

As a woman who was born in America in the 1980s, I am legally obligated to read Britney Spears' just-released memoir, The Woman in Me, and to give you my opinion about it. 

I grew up in the woods listening to country music, so I missed a lot of the Britney hype at its zenith, but I do have fond memories of bopping to "One More Time" in my Girl Scout leader's minivan. Even I, however, knew that Britney was a phenomenon; there was Britney Spears, and then there were all of the other female singers. Many of them would even make caustic references in their own songs and interviews about the impossibility of being held to her standard. 

Britney's memoir reveals that a lot of that image was smoke and mirrors, and that all of the pop-princess success came at an impossibly steep price. The book's juicy "reveals" that have made headlines are shocking and heartbreaking, but I was most saddened by the way she described her day-to-day life under her father's conservatorship. The monotony and degradation of that existence sounds unbearable, and I have so much respect for what she endured to maintain the "privilege" of time with her children. 

I don't have any formal psychology training, but it doesn't take any to recognize that she has been though a lot of trauma, beginning in her early childhood. While I believe that Britney is telling her truth, I'm not sure that all of it is the truth. And honestly, I'm not sure how much that matters. What is clear from public record is that, over and over again, the people closest to her viewed her as a meal ticket rather than as a person deserving of love and respect. I truly hope that she is getting the therapy, love, and support that she needs as she tries to pick up where she left off in her late teens and works on becoming her own woman.

Friday Reads: Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Happy Friday! Interim Library Director Adam Pellman's book this week, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer, is about the real-life monsters who have been the creators of some of our most-loved works, and how we as fans struggle between our love of the art and our repulsion by the creators' other actions. 

Particularly since the advent of the #MeToo movement, and the rise of so-called "cancel culture," I think that many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we've learned that an artist (actor, singer, writer, director, painter, etc.) whose work we love has been accused, or even proven, to have committed some terrible act, and we've had to suddenly ask ourselves difficult questions about our relationship to that artist's work. Is it still okay for me to like this art, even if I now despise the artist? If I do still like it, does that make me a bad person? Is it truly possible to "separate the art from the artist," or is that just wishful thinking?

This book, by critic and memoirist Claire Dederer, dives deep into all of these questions, and more, embracing all of the complexity and nuance of this dilemma that many fans must face. At its core, the book addresses one question: How do you balance the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed? Dederer is clear right from the start that her goal is not to offer a definitive answer (as she notes, there's no magical calculator that lets you plug in one value for artistic greatness and another for deed heinousness, and then tells you which one trumps the other). Rather, her goal is to explore in depth what it's like, and what it means, to grapple with this dilemma. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of this issue, allowing Dederer to explore all the sticky elements that make this such a complex topic. Does our conception of what it means to be a "genius" lead us to be more forgiving of bad behavior among those artists who have earned that descriptor? How does gender play into this dilemma? Does a monstrous act later in an artist's career retroactively stain all of their earlier work? Dederer is a brilliant writer, and it's a real pleasure reading her insightful, funny, and sometimes self-critical examination of these questions.

Friday Reads: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

 Happy Friday! This week, Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever wants to tell us about the audiobook she's been listening to recently: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.

This book sat on my Audible wishlist for a year or so before I finally decided to give it a listen. I don't remember howI first heard of it, but I do remember that the title made me laugh. In 2004, a group of libertarian-minded people identified the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire, as the perfect location for a libertarian society. They spread word of their plan through websites and message boards, and soon liberty-lovers from around the nation began moving there with the intent to vote out the existing local government and to install no government at all in its place. 

Unfortunately for the libertarian colonizers, however, Grafton was already home to an impressive population of particularly bold black bears. The bear situation was not improved by the sudden influx of people living in the woods and disposing of their garbage in any manner they chose. 

The book is filled with memorable characters, both human and ursine. In the audio version, the narrator's deadpan delivery adds to the drama and hilarity. We meet a woman known as Doughnut Lady who began feeding doughnuts to the bears several times a day. We learn about an eccentric preacher from decades gone by who built a towering outdoor pulpit to preach above the treetops. My personal favorite anecdote so far is about an old farmer and her guard-llama, who gave one cow-hunting black bear the butt-kicking of its life. 

I expect this book would be enjoyable for people from any political orientation who appreciate oddball history and dry humor. And bears.