What would you do if you contracted a "disease" that forced you to seek out the uninfected and infect them?  We've had plenty of examples of this in popular culture lately to help us think about the issue-28 Days, 28 Days Later, and I Am Legend  have all dealt with the aftermath of an epidemic that forces us to lose our humanity in the mindless quest to propagate a disease over which we have no control.  I've always seen these stories as allegory for human creations gone awry, as apocryphal tales of what will happen in humans continue to change nature to meet our demands.

Trust Octavia E. Butler to have a different way of framing this idea.  In her novel Clay's Ark, part of the Patternist series, Butler shows us the beginning of an extraterrestrial epidemic that has the potential to completely wipe out the human race.  Not by turning humans into raving, bloody zombies intent on killing every living thing in sight, but by changing our very genetic make-up so that we are no longer human, but also not completely inhuman.  Clay's Ark is the story of Eli, a geologist and astronaut, who returns from a mission to the Alpha Centurion galaxy carrying an alien organism in his body.  The organism has changed him at a molecular level so that he is faster, stronger, and has sharper senses than before.  He also has the overwhelming compulsion to infect others with the alien life form.  After his ship crashes back on Earth, he comes upon a remote compound in the desert where a patriarch and his family live isolated from the rest of the world-a world that has become increasingly dangerous as people fight for resources that are becoming more and more scarce.  Eli has no choice but to infect the inhabitants.  Several years later, a man and his twin daughters are traveling the highway through the desert when Eli's band kidnaps them to add to their growing community.  What happens next determines the fate of all humankind.

While this may sound an awful lot like the other examples of this theme that I mentioned, what makes Butler's take different is the way that the infected try to hold on to their humanity.  The organism living inside each of them causes them to have compulsions that are immoral by human standards-incest, rape, murder. But Eli is convinced that if they can keep their settlement small, and only take new people as necessary to keep their compulsions at bay, then they can retain their humanity and contain the infection.  In Clay's Ark the literal infection is an alien life form, but Butler could be using that as a symbol for anything that causes us to act in ways that deny our humanity.  Rather than experiencing the invasion from the perspective of the "clean", we see this outbreak from the point of view of the infected.  Eli is basically struggling with the most basic existential questions.  What is it that makes us human, what is it that defines us as a human race?  And once the infected start having children who are very different than human children, what can be said for the future of the human race?  Are the children a new species of human, or something altogether different?  And does it matter, if they are taught how to act as humans?  Clay's Ark may be a pretty short novel, but Butler gives us a lot to think about.  The next book in the Patternist series takes us to the far future, and I find myself wondering whether I will like where this story comes to its natural conclusion.

A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub

If you were forced to distill the world down into it's essence, and the goal of humanity down to it's simplest form, I think that what you would have is the struggle for good over evil.  This theme is at the heart of almost everything we do as a people-the way we treat family and friends, the way we structure our society, the way we write our laws. It's the basis for most religions.  And it is the theme of an awful lot of literature.  Including A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub.

I first discovered Straub through his collaborations with Stephen King, and I have loved his work for much the same reason-good character development, intriguing supernatural plots, both of which have something to say about the world as we know it.  While he occasionally strays away from the horror genre, his best stuff, to me, are the scary, inexplicable stories.  I was very excited to find the latest Straub in the boxes of books my mother had for me on my last visit.  I think that I may have psyched myself up a little too much!

A Dark Matter is the story of five high school friends growing up in Madison, WI in the 1960s.  Four of them fall under the spell of a "guru" named Spencer Mallon, and follow him into a field one spring night to participate in an arcane ritual designed to change the world-for better or for worse is yet to be seen.  The ritual leaves one person dead, and sends another to a mental hospital.  Forty years later, the friend who didn't go, Lee Harwell, famous author, calls all of his former friends together (including his wife), and Roshamon style they tell the story of what happened to them in that clearing.

This sounds like exactly my cup of Oolong, but for some reason I had trouble sipping it down.  The story just did not hold my attention the way his books usually do.  I grew frustrated with the slow doling out of details, and I often found myself having to go back and re-read a page because my mind had drifted to other things-never a good sign for a book.  When we finally got to the big reveal, I was a little underwhelmed.   When we finally get to the last story, the final piece of the puzzle, I was surprised to find that all of the preceding pages were leading up to the idea that without evil, you cannot have good, therefore there are evil beings in the world.  Not exactly the most profound (or original, or creatively made) statement.  I was so disappointed!  I had obviously worked myself up into such a lather of excitement about a new Peter Straub that I was probably bound to be slightly disappointed regardless, but I really think that this is just not his best work.  If you've never read Straub before, start with Ghost Story, or Koko, or Mystery, or the Hellfire Club, and read his collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House.

The Law of Similars, by Chris Bohjelian

The first Chris Bohjelian book I ever read was Midwives, in 1997.  It's the story of a well-trained modern midwife who performs and emergency cesarean section on a woman she believes has died of a stroke during childbirth.  But what if the woman she thought was dead wasn't, and she herself caused the fatal injury?  The novel examines the debate over alternative medicine through a gripping personal account of tragedy.  I devoured this book, and developed an instant love for the author.  I would have read the phone book if he wrote it!

Fast forward a few years and I am thrilled to find a copy of Bohjelian's The Law of Similars on GoodReads.  By this point I've read several of Bohjelian's books, and loved each and every one.  The Law of Similars was sure to be another home run for Bohjelian, as far as I was concerned.  I didn't even know the plot line, but it didn't matter-I wanted it!

Well, here's what it's about.  The patient of a homeopath named Carissa Lake dies after eating a nut to which he knew he was allergic.  His wife believes that Carissa told him to do it, and she tries to get the District Attorney's office to file murder charges against Lake.  An assistant DA, Leland Fowler, widower and single father, is first assigned to hear the story from the dead man's wife, but there is a problem.  He's been seeing Carissa Lake-both as a homeopathy patient and as a date.  His feelings for her cause an ethical dilemma that will challenge everything.

Alternative medicine?  Patient dies?  Malpractice?  Sound familiar?

Apparently, there is a belief in homeopathy that taking a small amount of something that causes the same symptoms you have will actually make the symptoms stop by jump starting your body's own healing processes.  It's called the law of similars-and provided a very apt title for this book.  I was stunned that the story was so similar to Midwives.  I've read books by this author on transgenderism, foster parenting, gun control, and sexual assault.  Bohjelian is not a one trick pony, telling only one story over and over again.  What happened here?  And The Law of Similars, published in 1999, wasn't even written that long after Midwives.  If I thought the two stories were pretty much the same after 13 years, surely after only two years the author himself must have noticed what was happening. 

I will say, the book itself was interesting and well-written, as always.  Bohjelian's characters are always so well-written.  Even when I don't agree with their motives I find myself understanding their perspective.  I learned a lot about homeopathy from this novel, and while I'm still not sure how I feel about it at least I have some insight into the underlying philosophy.  Leland's character especially moved me-a single father who lost his wife to a car accident, the scenes with his daughter were so tender, and the fact that he was so obviously at a loss about how to move on from the tragedy made him imminently sympathetic.  I can't say that I dislike the book-I devoured it just like Bohjelian's other books-but why two books with such similar topics?  I suppose only he can answer that question.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well, another week (or two-I was on vacation last Monday), and more good books, well, in the books.  I was able to get quite a bit done, what with all of the porch sitting and beach sitting and boat sitting.  Frankly, this real world thing sort of sucks in comparison!  Here's what my view looked like last Monday...

Thanks to Sheila at One Person's Journey for hosting this meme.

Books finished since last we met:

  Shutter Island-Dennis Lehane

  Life As We Knew It-Susan Beth Pfeffer (reviewed on Second Childhood Reviews)

  In a Perfect World-Laura Kasischke
  The Mistress of the Art of Death-Ariana Franklin
  The Law of Similars-Chris Bohjelian (review coming soon!)
  A Dark Matter-Peter Straub (review coming soon!)

What's coming up next?  Who knows?  I have no required reading right now, so I'll choose whatever strikes my fancy when I'm standing in front of the bookshelves.  Plus, I just got two boxes of books from my mother, and I have not really examined them in detail.  Who knows what gems could be there?  I know for sure there's a Stephen King-you know how I love my Uncle Stevie!

Have a great week everyone!

The Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin

What do you get when you combine 12th century British history and CSI?  You get Ariana Franklin's series about Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar!  Mistress of the Art of Death is the first book in the series, though I read the second book, The Serpent's Tale first.  I'm just wacky like that sometimes!

The Mistress of the Art of Death is set in Henry II's England.  In Cambridge, four children have been murdered, and the Catholic majority have decided that it is the city's Jews that are the culprits.  Now, Henry may not really care about religion or tolerance, but he does like the money that he gets from his Jewish merchants, so he orders the Jews brought into the castle in Cambridge for their protection, and sends away to the King of Sicily and his famous medical college in Salerno for a "master of the art of death"-a doctor who understands how to get information from a corpse.  Instead, he gets Adelia and her Saracen manservant.  Forced to pretend that the Saracen is the doctor or be accused of witchcraft, Adelia makes it her mission to find the killer who tortured these children-and it was not anyone from the Jewish community.  She has a long list of suspects, but has trouble narrowing it down until an outbreak of cholera in Cambridge, when Adelia notices the clue that leads to the exciting conclusion.  Adelia isn't the only one that Henry has on the case-he also has his "fixer", Sir Rowly, undercover as a tax collector, investigating the murders, and together these unlikely partners bring justice to the killer.

I read a lot of mysteries.  For a while, when I was a young single mother, that's all I read, because I got them for free from my own mother.  As a result, it's pretty hard to find a plot twist that really surprises me.  Usually I have figured out the answer long before the end.  Not so with either of Franklin's books.  As with The Serpent's Tale, I was pleasantly in the dark about whodunit, and that made the reveal so much more exciting!

But, while I appreciate Franklin's ability to surprise me, what I love most about her books is the way she uses Adelia and her scientific skepticism to explore the state of the world during the Crusades.  Adelia finds 12th century England a barbarous place, where superstition rules over reason and the church uses fake miracles and old bones in reliquaries to control the population.  The Church definitely comes in for scrutiny in this novel, but Franklin makes sure to show that it is the hypocrisy, superstition, and intolerance that Adelia finds wrong, not religious faith itself.  Rowley's account of his time in the Holy Land brings a clarity to what it was like in that part of the world, with Jews and Christians and Muslims all vying for control of the same sacred location-and the resources available there!  Franklin even makes a connection between the treatment of the Muslims in the Crusades with the rise of something new, called Islam, which seems to mirror something of our own time.  This smart, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic mystery is also a smart, funny, tragic history lesson-and well worth the time to read it!

I Like Being Versatile!

 KT over at A Book Obsession was kind enough to give me the Versatile Blogger Award.  Thank you thank you thank you.  I think that "versatile" is a great thing to aspire to!

Here's how this award works:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 15 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason! (In no particular order...)
4. Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.

Here's my 7 things...

1.  My wife and I have been married for five years next today.
2.  I can't just sit and watch TV, which is why I took up cross stitch.
3.  I'm addicted to Lego Harry Potter on Wii.
4.  I preached a sermon on Dr. Seuss at my church this weekend-I love being a Unitarian Universalist!
5.  Sometimes I look at my 16 year old daughter and she takes my breath away.
6.  I'm actually looking forward to getting my room ready for the school year.
7.  I have my own coloring books-and I don't share!

Here are the bloggers I'm honoring...(there aren't 15 because I haven't had as much blog reading time as I would like this summer-but these are great!)

The Booksnob
Must Read Faster
The New Dork Review of Books
Desert Book Chick
Dead White Guys: An Irreverent Guide to Classical Literature
Our Year in Books

In a Perfect World, by Laura Kasischke

For some reason my book club chose two books about the end of civilzation as we know it for our August selections.  You'd think that during the glorious months of summer we would be reading hopeful books about love and family and fun, but not us!  We'd rather read about pandemics, natural disasters, food shortages and how to stay warm during what amounts to a nuclear winter!

Well, whatever the reason, we read Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer (soon to be reviewed by yours truly on Second Childhood Reviews) and In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke.  While reading both books in a row made me want to start stocking up on canned goods and bottled water, I'm pleased with the selections.  Even though the books were about different kinds of disasters leading to the destruction of our comfortable way of life, it was a little like reading the same story told from tw points of view-Life As We Knew It has a teenage girl for a narrator, while In a Perfect World is told from the perspective of a woman in her 30s.  But mood of both books was both heartwrenching and ultimately hopeful.

In a Perfect World is the story of Jiselle, a flight attendant, always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  When handsome, charming Capt. Mark Dorn starts to court her on their frequent transatlantic flights together, she is honored, and a little bewildered.  When he proposes to her just three months after they start dating, she is quick to say yes.  The catch-he wants her to quit her job and stay in Wisconsin to raise his three children-two teenage daughters and an eight year old son.  Despite her misgivings, and the hostility of the older children, she becomes a stay-at-home stepmom.  Looming on the horizon is a disaster with global implications-a new disease, called the Phoenix Flu, that starts as a small epidemic but soon becomes a worldwide threat.  When Mark and his plane are detained in Germany, Jiselle is left alone with the children to survive the best they can.

There are really layers of story going on in this novel.  First, there is the dubious "love" story between Mark and Jiselle.  As I was reading I was pretty sure I knew how it was going to turn out, but I also knew with the certainty of someone who has also convinced herself that a love is true that Jiselle as going to get sucked in.  Then there is the story of Jiselle's relationship with the children.  While I've never been a step-mother, I am married to one, and I know first-hand how difficult it can be to negotiate the unspoken rules that make each family function.  And, of course, at its essence this is a survival story, one that pits humans and their institutions against the vagaries of the natural world.  This as a theme is not uncommon in contemporary literature.  As we discover more about global warming and the impact that humans have on the planet more and more authors are exploring this idea of man against nature.  That theme has existed in literature for much longer than our current climate crisis, but unlike some of those earlier stories, in today's literature nature usually wins, forcing humans to adapt to the new reality of life without the conveniences we have come to rely on.

One of the most interesting things about the story, to me, is the fact that Kasischke chose America as the place where the pandemic begins, and created a world where it was Americans who were denied access to foreign countries, and American products being turned away from prots worldwide, and American flights that weren't allowed to land at the world's airports.  Though I don't know the author's intent, the sory felt like an allegory for the way that American culture is exported globally, and the idea that American commercialism and political dominance could be a disease spreading around the globe was inescapable for me.  If nothing else, that particular plot point turned the tables on the usual way of things, with America being the arbiter of who and what is worthy to enter our boundaries.  I can't believe that was completely accidental on Kasischke's part.  All in all, this was an enjoyable, thought-provoking way to spend a beautiful summer day-even if I've probably bought a few too many cans of tuna in the last week or so!