Book Review: The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams

Speaking of books that hit uncomfortably close to home, The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams had a much stronger effect on me than I had anticipated. I didn't think that I would have much in common with a thirteen-year-old character who is born into a repressive polygamous sect in the middle of nowhere, but it seems that some aspects of being indoctrinated into the notion that women are inferior to men because god said so are universal. The Chosen One left me shaken, moved, and very, very thankful that books were there to set me free, as well.

The Chosen One revolves around Kyra, the thirteen-year-old almost-eldest (her older sister appears to have Down's Syndrome) daughter in a polygamist family. Her father has three wives, and since the sect doesn't believe in birth control, Kyra has over twenty siblings (with a few more on the way). She manages to stay sane through playing the piano, carrying on a secret, forbidden relationship with Joshua, a boy her own age, and covertly visiting the Bookmobile and reading secular books. Her secret world begins to collapse when Kyra learns that she has been Chosen to wed her sixty-year-old uncle, who already has six wives. She is thoroughly disgusted by the idea, and begins to break away from her family and community. As her rebellious acts escalate, the abuse that the Prophet and the all-male Elders inflict upon the community becomes increasingly clear. Kyra finds herself torn between her loyalty to and her need to protect her family and her desperate desire to flee her repugnant uncle and everything that a life with him would entail.

Williams deftly explores the psychology of someone who has been raised in a truly dysfunctional environment; Kyra's struggles are both realistic and deeply compelling, inspiring both frustration and compassion in the reader. It's clear that Williams has done a lot of research to explore the nuances of fundamentalist polygamist groups, and it shows throughout the narrative. As someone who was raised in a conservative christian environment (I thank my lucky stars most days that it wasn't worse), the way that the leaders used religion and the threat of eternal damnation to browbeat their followers into obedience rang true, as did the multitude of things they did to repress and control the women of the community. Needless to say, I found myself with a glass of wine and some knitting not long after I finished it.

Outstanding. 5 out of 5 stars.

Why I Tell People Majoring in English is an Incredibly Bad Idea

I've briefly touched on this subject in the FAQ section:

Seriously. Don't major in English unless:

• you really want to teach middle/high school literature, 

• or you are 100% sure you're going to post-secondary in something that's actually lucrative [hint: this does not include master's or doctoral programs in English, or anything else in the humanities], 

• or you are independently wealthy and won't, you know, need to support yourself later, 

• or you really, really like waiting tables, folding shirts, or other similarly demeaning career paths.

If you like to read, get a library card. If you like to talk about books, start or join a book club. I don't consider my lit degree a waste of time, but it was definitely a waste of money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. To paraphrase Good Will Hunting: all of the books I read were in the library.

but the arrival of a survey from Vanderbilt's English department inquiring as to how my course of study has impacted my life has inspired me to expound a bit. I'm not going to lie; I was irked by the leading questions about the benefits of a liberal arts education that were obviously trolling for viewbook/website fodder in light of the things that I and many of my fellow English/humanities majors have experienced since graduating.

While I'm on board with the ideas behind a liberal arts education as well as the underlying principle that education and learning are ends in themselves, not means to an end, I simply cannot, in good conscience, recommend pursuing one to the vast majority of students. At the end of the day, college costs money and we all have to eat, so future earnings potential should be a primary consideration when selecting a course of study, not a secondary. It's one thing if you're wealthy, and someone else is footing the bill for your education, and you know that you have a job waiting for you the moment you cross the stage (or that it's no big deal if you never hold an actual job). It's quite another to be middle class or lower, having to take out a minimum of $20,000 in loans (that's roughly the maximum that schools are allowed to require you to take out as part of aid packages; however, many students find themselves borrowing considerably more than that from private companies), only to discover upon graduation that your fancy-pants degree has effectively priced you out of the regular job market and you don't have the option of mom's lawyer's cousin's golf buddy hiring you straight out, and simply not working was never on the table in the first place.

Four years and countless resumes later, you're still working in jobs that require you to wear a nametag, your student loans are in forbearance (accumulating capitalized interest all the way!), and there's still no sign of a way out of the pit higher education dug, except for, you guessed it, more school. And, of course more loan debt.

That's what will really kill you if you get an undergraduate degree in the humanities. With a few exceptions, you're going to have to get some kind of advanced degree to be employable, and said degree (unless you're becoming a teacher or college professor, which, frankly, is a terrible idea in its own right given the massive surplus of people who decided to go that route) will often have very little to do with what you originally studied, and may require supplemental undergraduate coursework for admission. While some post-secondary programs are undergraduate-major-neutral (mainly, law school, but again: a terrible idea in its own right), a great many aren't, and require coursework not generally pursued by the average humanities major (pretty much everything in the health and human services fields, the sciences, technology...maybe I should have said everything except for law school).

My situation is hardly uncommon. The majority of my friends who graduated at or around the same time as I did with degrees in the humanities (and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences) who didn't go to law school are in more or less the same position that I'm in: stuck under varying amounts of student loan debt, unable to find a job befitting our educational level, and continually fending off donation requests from the old alma mater. (A number of the friends who went to law school are similarly screwed, but for different reasons.) As a result, I'm not going to extol the virtues of a student loans-funded liberal arts education to anyone who may have to work for a living one day, and I find it incredibly unethical that many universities are still selling the old "critical thinking will get you a job four years from now!" line. It might, perhaps, if you're a philosophically-inclined engineering major, but trust me, it'll be the engineering part that lands you the job, not the philosophical inclinations.

Further evidence? My boyfriend, who dropped out of a four-year program and subsequently came close to not bothering to finish his associate's degree from a community college, makes about three times what I do, and doesn't have to wear a nametag to work.

At the end of the day, I would have been much better off acquiring a library card and majoring in something useful. This probably applies to the majority of people who major in English.

Clooooooose.

Almost finished with the first Idiot-Proof Sideways Scarf. After this row, I'll have six rows plus the bind-off left. I should be able to block it tomorrow or the next day.

Finally finally finally. I'm so tired of this awful yarn!

Book Review: Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern

I don't generally read a lot of memoirs. I find them tedious, often unsatisfactorily dishonest, and generally prefer my own navel-gazing to that of others. However, I made an exception for Denial: Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern, as it seemed like it would be more complex and interesting than the usual topics of living wackily for a year, cooking a whole bunch, adopting a new quirky behavior to compensate for a bad breakup, or, my personal favorite, better living through pseudophilosophical poverty tourism (it seems that the best selling personal journey memoirs involve all of the above). Denial's source material was a little different.

Sterns, a renowned terrorism expert, was contacted by a detective from the police department in her hometown out of the blue one day. He had reopened her and her sister's rape case, and was attempting to connect it to a series of assaults that had taken place in nearby towns over the years. He asked for her help. Sterns agreed, and decided to document the process, believing that it would provide her with clues as to why she was capable of interacting with terrorists who had few, if any, qualms about murdering Americans without being afraid, yet was totally crippled by fear when attempting everyday activities and was unable to have a normal relationship with other people. Over the course of the narrative, Stern's research takes her back to her hometown, to the childhood home of her rapist, and eventually to the seaside town of a fellow victim. All the while, she attempts to unravel long-suppressed, complicated feelings concerning the attack and its aftermath, along with the chaos of a childhood that, quite frankly, would have been traumatic even if she hadn't been raped.

This, of course, leads me to what bothered me about Denial. While I found Stern's exploration of her assault and the life of her rapist illuminating, along with her frank discussion of how it came to negatively (and positively, if in a perverse way) affect her adult life most illumination, I was often frustrated by her unwillingness to honestly investigate the full implications of her relationship with her dysfunctional family. Throughout the narrative, she continually hints at having been molested by her grandfather, but never seems to make the connection between that and her present difficulties. The same, for the most part, applies to her emotionally distant father (who basically foisted her and her sister off on a series of stepmothers following her mother's early death) and her possibly-abusive stepmothers. Her insistence on hashing out one traumatic instance in her life in hopes of improving herself while refusing to engage in a number of others simply didn't make any sense to me. It caused what would have been an otherwise engaging, honest read to bellyflop into the pit of navel-gazey denial.

That's memoirs for you.

Intriguing, but still more navel-gazing and dishonest than I care for. 3 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

When I was in high school, the English department seemed to delight in forcing us to read books about dysfunctional prep school students. I expect Skippy Dies to make an appearance in the curriculum any day now, as it's the literary offspring of an unholy union of JD Salinger, John Irving, Pat Conroy, and John Knowles. Don't get me wrong; I really enjoyed reading it, but I couldn't help flashing back to my freshman year of high school, in which I contemplated my deep contempt for Holden Caulfield and each and every one of my classmates who identified with him (note: I was one of the smart, poor kids the school brought in to up the test score average, so my reaction to The Catcher in the Rye consisted of rolling my eyes and making the "world's tiniest violin" gesture repeatedly). Despite my best intentions towards being a good person, I tend to have pretty epic failures of empathy when people (real and fictional) who have lived thoroughly charmed lives start whining about their self-inflicted First World problems.

As such, I wasn't expecting to really enjoy Skippy Dies for the first fifty or so pages. While Skippy dies (during a donut eating contest!) in the first few pages, the subsequent chapters revert to a period of time several months prior to his death, introducing the reader to his whiny, milquetoast history teacher and his motley crew of outsider friends, neither of which inspired much enthusiasm on my part. The writing was very good, though, and the characters were just interesting enough to keep me reading. I'm very glad I did, because while the book starts out sort of slow, it ultimately develops into an amazing, multifaceted look at Skippy's sad, dysfunctional world that is nevertheless uplifting. Murray did an excellent job of keeping my curiosity about how and why Skippy dies piqued throughout the quite convoluted narrative. Despite their unfortunate resemblance to some of my more annoying high school classmates, I grew to care a great deal about many of the characters-- a true testament to how great a writer Murray is.

Very enjoyable. I'll probably read Murray's next novel. 4 out of 5 stars.