I'm trying to rediscover my purpose for this blog. It wasn't actually to review books. It was to have a place to spill all of my immediate reactions and thoughts about what I was reading, as if this blog were the fellow reader I never have, a reader who was reading the same books at the same pace and who would know what I was talking about when I said it.
So I'm going to try to get back to that. It was easy and fun to write that blog.
Over the last couple of days, I took a break from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I am reading as part of the project I mentioned yesterday, which I am once again punting down the road) to rip through The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner. It's the final book for my teacher book club and a brilliant way to close out a year of really awesome books (list below, if I can remember it).
Number one, I think I'd like to just hang out with Jeff Zentner and talk books and music. The Secret History is name-checked in the first few pages of The Serpent King. And then a bunch of other books and bands that I love. I won't list them - just read the book. I wrote years ago about music in books and every time I read a book that's heavy on dropping names of musicians (it happens a lot in YA) or movies or books I think kind of similar thoughts. First, it usually comes off as trying to hard to prove the cred of your characters, and your own by extension (I think Zentner escapes this, but not by a lot). Second, I prefer less explanation to more explanation (this Zentner does really well). I want the music referenced to make me curious enough to look it up. Finally...well, a new paragraph for this finally.
In The Serpent King, Zentner mixes up some fictional artists with his real artists, both musicians and authors. I'm never sure how to feel about that. So, like, Lydia listens to lots of great real music, but when she interviews a pop star for her blog, it's the fictional Laydee (terrible name, BTW). And Travis is obsessed with an obvious George R.R. Martin ripoff* - so obvious that I found it a little distracting. Why not just have it be the man himself? Or, flipside, why not make up all fictional celebrities (Daniel Handler is great at this - I'm still crushed that Hawk Davies doesn't exist)?
Fictional books and music aside, mostly when my thoughts drifted from The Serpent King, they drifted to Greek mythology and politics (as my thoughts so often do since November - it's amazing how politically charged even innocuous things are now).
First, myths. The Serpent King as a name seems like it's straight out of ancient lore, and clearly the story of Dill's grandfather has a place in his town's mythology. But I was mostly thinking about Oedipus and everything the Oedipal trilogy has to say about fate. That it's inescapable. That the sins of the father will be visited on his children, whether or not they've done anything to deserve it. (I was trying to remember if there were snakes in the Oedipus story - aside from the snakes that played a part in Tiresias' blindness, I don't think so?)
Of course, we aren't quite as bound to the idea of fate as the Greeks. Probably a good thing.
So, politics. Or religion. Politics and religion? They seem inextricably linked for so many people and I myself can't separate fundamentalist Christianity from conservatism. Dill's parents trying to convince him that education wasn't necessary because he had religion? Ugh. That seems to be the thing Trump and his ilk want the unwashed masses to believe. They don't want the lower classes to strive, to dream of more. They want them to be satisfied with as little as possible, misled by the belief that to want more is to be prideful, something to avoid, and that their reward for that miserable, humble life is in heaven. My favorite thing about this book is that it shows just how toxic those beliefs are.
*By the by, this is the second YA book I've read in the last year with a fictional take on George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones. The other was Morgan Matson's The Unexpected Everything, which I unexpectedly enjoyed, although the fantasy novel excerpts were one of the things I liked least about it.
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