Day 227: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

Some of the characters (I won't say who or why to avoid spoilers) visit the "suburb of the dead."  In this world, people can see their deaths and consider them companions.  They like having them close and always knowing that they are there.  This is obviously a strange and nearly abhorrent idea for most people in our world, since we spend so much of our lives not wanting to die.  But I think people like me can understand it.

For those of you who don't know, I suffer from a mild case of depression which gets kicked up to a less than mild case of depression during times of extreme stress (like being unemployed) or difficult times of the year (such as the anniversary of my room mate's death).  The truth is, I find a great deal of comfort in knowing that my death is nearby.  I also find comfort in knowing that I could easily reach out and grab its hand and just be done with it.  In fact, having that comfort is the only thing that keeps me going some days.  On particularly bad days I will say to myself, "Today is a bad day, and if tomorrow is a bad day and the day after that and the day after that is a bad day, I can have no more days."

Some of you who are shaking your head and saying the ever-so-popular "suicide is a permanent solution" line, I have something to say about that.  Sometimes death is the only solution and the only reason you say that line is because you do not fully understand what people with truly debilitating mental illness are going through.  Even as a mild sufferer there is always a looming worry that I will once again be caught up in a bout of depression, and there is always a fear that it will be deeper and darker and last longer than the one before it.

People who are unfortunate enough to have much more severe cases of depression than mine also have to worry about when their medical cocktails don't work anymore.  I am not talking about people who are on a small dose of Zoloft for their postpartum or because Dad passed away, I am talking about people who have to be medicated and have been medicated ever since they were diagnosed.  I think it is more difficult for them because, sure, they feel good now, but what about next year?  They know bad times are coming again and sometimes there's that urge to go out when you're on top of your game, when you feel good, knowing that you will at least die happy.

These are obviously things that I have thought about at my most depressed.  I don't regret continuing to live, but on some level I do wonder if maybe it would have been the right thing to do.  There are certainly people who care about me in this world, and I would feel bad about leaving them behind, but if it came to a point where I was in so much emotional anguish and pain that I could not stand it anymore and could not conceive a way out for myself, even with the support of my family and friends and doctors and medicine, I would hope that the people closest to me would have the compassion to forgive me and realize that it really was the only way out for me.

I am happy to say that I am not currently depressed.  My life is going pretty well and I'm doing creative things while job hunting.  In fact I try not to think about the job hunting part at all if I can help it, because not thinking about does help to some degree.  If you are concerned about me, please don't be, I have no intention of committing suicide and I doubt that I would be able to go through with it even if I did.  I am not currently medicated and I am about 95% sure that I am afflicted enough for it to actually be helpful.

I'm not advocating suicide.  Not at.  But I do think it is and should be recognized as a last option for people who have long term illnesses, and mental illness in most cases is a lifelong illness.  I think if we openly recognize it as an option, it will remove the stigma of saying, "I want to die and I need help so that I don't want to die."  Telling people that they are weak and taking the coward's way out for wanting to die, does the exact opposite of preventing deaths and does absolutely nothing to relieve the anguish associated with the disease. 

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.

Day 226: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

I love this book for so many reasons.  In fact, I think this is probably the strongest in the series, although a lot of people disagree with me about that.  But this has an incredible amount of world building, and one world in particular made my little nerd heart beat with joy.

That world was the world of the mulefas, which are sentient creatures with strange physiology and a penchant for riding around on giant seedpods.  I won't say much more than that, but Pullman really developed these people in a way that made me want to go out and read as much sci-fi as possible again.  I recognize that this particular work is closer to fantasy, but in this case it was everything that I absolutely love about science fiction, it is what originally drew me to the genre, and what made me start avoiding it as sci-fi writers stopped writing about it so much.  In the cases where sci-fi writers did focus on really truly creating aliens, they often did so only to point out the differences so that the reader would cheer the hero on through the xenomorphic slaughter.

Perhaps this is a little "girly," but I am interested in both the difference and the similarities.  I want to be able to learn about the cultures and the histories of the alien races I'm reading about, and it is incredibly difficult to do that when some human schmuck is busy torching their libraries and stealing all the artifacts from their museums and eating/buggering their zoo animals.  I think it takes a lot more imagination to create a culture for alien peoples than it does to destroy them, and what's more is it's usually more interesting as it forces human characters to look at their own culture, history, and identities in a different way.  If this is something that appeals to you, The Amber Spyglass, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Speaker for the Dead are good places to start.

Can anyone else help a librarian out and recommend good Xeno-centric books?  I'd love to get back into reading sci-fi, but not if I have to keep reading the same old war stories.

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.

Day 225: The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846731.

Those of you who remember your Western European (i.e. "world" history) will be familiar with the concept of Indulgences.  These were basically Get Out of Hell Free cards from the Catholic Church, that you could purchase during the Middle Ages.  Ah, apparently someone in the Catholic Church forgot that whole scripture about the camel and the needle and the rich guy not getting into heaven.*  Well, in The Amber Spyglass, apparently you can have your sins forgiven by doing penance in advance through scourging and self-flagellation.  As a side note I love that word because it comes from flagella, which is the tail of a sperm, among other things.  How's that for an image?  Priests whipping themselves with sperm tails, oh yeah, I'm not irreverent at all.

So enough with the potty humor (never!), I hate the idea that any kind of penance can account for the bad things a person has done.  I don't think you can or necessarily should be forgiven for your sins, because that might give you the brilliant idea to go out and do more.  What is the point of stopping if you can just pop into the local Papal Palace of Penance and come out with a supposedly shiny and pine scented soul?  And let's be honest here: giving up some money, even a large portion of it, or hitting yourself (because you damn well know you'll go easy on yourself), is in no way equal to inflicting suffering on someone else, and the very idea that you can erase it is entirely misguided and kind of disgusting.

I am not saying that you should live forever in shame and guilt for the major screw ups you had when you slept with your sister's boyfriend or stole candy from a baby, but you should feel bad about it and it should be on your permanent record.  The more serious the crime, the worse you should feel about it and the longer you should feel bad about it, but having a church absolve a murderer or a rapist or an arsonist or other violent criminal of their sins seems like perpetuation and perhaps even acceptance that people just do these things and we should move on with our lives.

Well, no, that's not right.  Wouldn't the better thing be to say, "If you do this really bad thing you cannot get into heaven, never ever ever ever, no matter how much you wish you hadn't done it."  Maybe it's harsh, but if evil is as black and white as God versus Satan, shouldn't the rules for getting into heaven be as black and white?  Shouldn't it be just as wrong to kill someone drunk driving as it is to kill someone through premeditated murder as it is to kill someone for invading your home as it is to kill someone for defending yourself?** 

It just seems a little too calculated to be able to go and buy or store up your penance, or even in some ways to go to confessional and have someone wave away all the bad things and say, "there, there, do better next time and remember to give to the church."  I do think that confessionals are very useful for people who have done things that they truly regret and want to talk about, but taking the burden from them is like telling a teenager they have a curfew and then saying it's okay when they break it as long as they don't do it again (after they've done it for the fifth time in a row).

If religions are about making us into better people, I cannot see how this is possibly a good thing for our moral and/or spiritual health.  I am sure the Catholic Church is not the only one religion that is guilty of this behavior, but it has such a long history that it's easy for the finger to get pointed that way.

*Matthew 19:23-24 and Mark 10:24-25 (they say it twice, bitches).
**Those last two are merely for the sake of argument; if someone is invading your home (and refuses to leave/is threatening you) or attacking you, by all means kill them.
***Believe it or not, I am not anti-religion, but I do think that logic ought to be applied equally across all aspects of our lives.

A fabulous summary of the book is over at Book Dweeb and a micro-review over at Books for Breakfast.

Day 202: The Subtle Knife

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846724.

In the first book, Lyra learned not to trust adults, even those who should have protected her.  In the second book, Lyra finds out that even people her own age can be harmful.  I think most people learn this lesson in reverse, but they're both difficult lessons in their own way.  It's a terrible thing to learn that anyone would want harm to come to you, or even simply let it happen, but human nature almost seems to require harm in one form or another.  It's why the people who are willing to protect us are so special.

I really do admire the bravery that is required in publishing and writing something like this.  It is not a popular idea that adults are unreliable and may harm children.  It is especially unpopular that children are capable of hurting each other (sometimes fatally); just look at the books that tend to be banned or cause outrage: Lord of the Flies, The Chocolate War, and many others.  We may not like it, but children do hurt each other.  They are capable of atrocities, and this is terrifying because children aren't supposed to behave that way.  But maybe they see so much cruelty in their own lives that they are influenced by it and feel that it is normal.

I've certainly seen a lot of indifference in my life regarding cruelty by children to other children.  My father happens to be an unreasonably sarcastic and bitter person.  Rather than protecting me from my brother, there were days when he encouraged my brother to hit me, and when I didn't fight back my father proceeded to call me names and encourage to return blows.  These were probably lessons I could have done without, at least from my own family, but they did make me more prepared to deal with the world around me.  I would prefer not to need those lessons, but that would require more change in human nature than the species has made in the last 400+ years.

I hope that things change, but the only thing I can do is to try to be a little kinder and ask others to do the same, and if you have the chance to apologize to someone from the past that you may have tormented, please do so.  It's not the easiest thing to do, for either party, but it is the right thing, and as someone who had a hard time, it would mean a lot to me to have those people tell me they regretted treating me the way they did.

To anyone I may have harmed in the past, I am sorry.  I sometimes get distracted from being the person I want to be by the situations I've had to face.  It isn't fair to you, but I have always regretted treating people poorly.

A good review can be found at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, which is not the "list of hot underwear model lineups in a fight to the death" that it sounds like.

Day 201: The Subtle Knife

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375846724.

"Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?"  Page 213-14.

I like the idea of having a soul or consciousness or conscience manifest as an animal.  I'm sure I'm not alone in talking with friends about what animals we would be.  I love even more the idea of being able to talk, out loud, to the manifestation.  How many of us talk to ourselves or go around and around in our heads when we're dealing with a particularly difficult problem?  It would be so much easier to have an actual dialog and agreement with something outside of yourself.  It would certainly give people a lot more confidence in their final decisions and how they conduct their daily lives.  Plus, having a constant companion, even if that companion is a part of yourself, would make life much more enjoyable.

What kind of animal do I think I would have for a daemon?  I'm not sure that's a question I can actually answer for myself, not honestly anyway.  I would want my daemon to be something grand and elegant, which is probably not the reality.  If I had to guess anyway, I would probably go with a ferret.  I do not particularly like ferrets.  Unless you have copious amounts of time and a high tolerance for bad smells and deviltry I don't think they make very good pets.  But they do seem to have characteristics that I share (not that bad smells...most days).

They are extremely clever.  I would not say that they are smart, because I don't think that they are, but they are definitely problem solvers and that's something I can very much identify with.  They have moments of hyper, frantic activity, followed by long periods of sleeping and leisure.  I have an extremely short attention span and need to be able to switch from activity to activity in order to really be stimulated.  I sometimes need to distract myself from one project with another in order to finish either of them.  I have hoarder tendencies, which I control by adding books to my list on Goodreads and borrowing library books rather than buying, among other methods.  I also have a bit of a mean streak which tends to show itself as mischievousness more than outright malevolence.

Perhaps someone else has a better idea of what animal spirit I really have.  I'd be interested to see what my readers think, considering you are the people who probably know me best.

A good review can be found at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, which is not the "list of hot underwear model lineups in a fight to the death" that it sounds like.

Day 184: The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375838309.

I'm actually kind of surprised that the supernatural element of this book wasn't taken up more during the banning.  Nowhere did I see any objections to the presence of the daemon.  Then again, since they were presented as being human souls, I guess it wouldn't make much sense to object to their presence, even in "daemonic" form.

What should be upsetting is the supposed ability of people to live on without their souls and their connection to original sin.  I apologize if the following is news, but I assume that since this book is more than 10 years old, most people have read it or at least watched the movie.  I'll try to be vague enough that there won't be too many spoilers, but I have to be able to talk freely about the intellectual content here.  So basically souls and Dust (which we later find is "original sin") are connected, and of course the Church wants to free children and future generations from original sin, but in doing so it means separating them from their daemons (i.e. SOULS).

I like the idea that souls and original sin are connected.  I am a firm believer that knowledge not only gives us more power and control over our lives, but that it actively enriches our lives.  Without the original sin, we would still be as innocent and unaware as children.  Maybe that appeals to some people, but it makes sense to me that we would have to have that awareness in order to even have souls to begin with.  Why do you need a soul if you are God's perfect creation and incapable of sin?  The soul is theoretically what gets us to Heaven and as long as it follows the will of God it is good.

But then I've always had a problem with the idea of blind faith.  God threw challenges at just about everyone in the Bible, including his own son.  Jesus was allowed and even provoked into questioning his faith in God, so why wouldn't that be considered a good thing in your search for truth and meaning?  If you return to God, doesn't it mean that your faith is that much stronger than someone who has never asked why?  Or someone who has never even thought about what it might like not to have the love and strength of God, or at the very least explore other ideas about God/other Gods?  Regardless of your belief system, I don't understand the desire to limit knowledge when knowing about other cultures and beliefs can only help you in relating to your fellow human.  Jesus had to navigate dozens of different cultures, the Middle East being central to trade during that time.  If the goal of being a Christian is to be more Christlike...why attempt to isolate yourself and everyone else from different view points rather than learn to live with each other in respect and peace?

Banned for negative representation of Catholic Church/Christian organizations, use of alcohol by minors, and because the author is a declared and unabashed atheist.

Day 183: The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.  ISBN: 9780375838309.

Oh, I do believe I might get my ass chewed out for this one.  Lucky for me, I have very little ass, so people should get bored with it pretty quickly and maybe find some fat to chew elsewhere.  The thing that pisses me off most about banning books for religious reasons is that it completely denies any of the good things about the book.  The religious zealots get so fixated on the "THEY KILLED JESUS" aspect that they completely blind themselves to any other (possibly) positive message, or the fact that maybe the "killing God" is meant as a symbol of something else and not actually, ya know, killing God per se.

But some of that comes up later in the series and I haven't read that far.  So let me share with some of you what our precious, precious children who must have their souls protected at every cost, might be missing out on.  The major thing this book teaches to our children, the main thing that I think adults should be terrified and upset about, is not the religious debate, it's the message that sometimes adults do not have the best interests of children in mind, and that they are willing to manipulate and use and even harm children to get what they want, and therefore sometimes it is up to the child to protect herself and her friends.

Oh Shit.  How did you miss that one?  It's because Pullman pulled one over on you and blinded you with your Kryptonite, which also happens to be your self-proclaimed Spinach.  Popeye the Superman...I just made myself die a little there.

I'm not even implying that you should be pissed off that Pullman wrote it.  If you were reasonable people you would be pissed off that it needed to be written.  If you're pissed off that Pullman presented the Catholic Church (which, to begin with, is in an alternate universe anyway) as an organization that has done terrible things to children and is trying to hide it...uh, maybe you should be less pissed off about that happening in fiction and more pissed off about the real occurrences?  It would be hard for Pullman's work to be so inflammatory if there wasn't some grain of truth. Otherwise it would be easy enough to just read it and say, "Meh, that's not true, but this is an alternate universe and therefore he must be talking about some other Catholic Church."

I don't see what the problem is with this novel.  I really don't.  A novelist can't kill God.  Or rather, he can kill God as many times as he wants: God is first and foremost and idea and the only way you can kill ideas is to stop thinking.  So if you want God dead, please keep banning books, because that is surely a good way to get people to stop thinking.

You know, I think there was a group of people who did that back in the Dark Ages.  They only allowed the clergy to be able to read and only held services in Latin so that the masses had to rely solely on the word of their priests.  Hmm...which group was that again...?

I just find it incredibly ironic and sad that Pullman is promoting self-preservation in children against adults wanting to do them harm, and all the book banners can see is the negative message against the Church.  (Note, I say the Church because I have yet to actually see anything about about Christians or Christianity as a belief system.  I am willing to believe that it shows up in the sequels, but I have yet to see it in The Golden Compass.)

Banned for negative representation of Catholic Church/Christian organizations, use of alcohol by minors, and because the author is a declared and unabashed atheist.