If you’re like me, you may have spent your younger years sharing surveys on your Xanga site. As a callback to those times, Jamie at The Perpetual Page Turner created a fun A to Z survey all about books and reading!
Author you’ve read the most books from:
Probably Ann M. Martin, the author of The Babysitter’s Club books. What what!
Looking for these pictures kind of made me want to read one of them again, just for the memories!
Water. I’m boring like that. I don’t drink much other than water.
E-reader or Physical Book?
I definitely like having a physical book, but e-readers make things easier, and you can get great deals on the e-books sometimes, so it just depends.
Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:
With the disclaimer that the only guy I dated in high school was my husband, and he was the exception to my self-inflicted “no dating in high school because it’s a waste of time right now” rule, there is a small chance I would have given Peeta a shot.
Reading The Hunger Games in 2011 reignited my love for reading, my interest in dystopia, and my interest in young adult, all in one swoop. Impressive, Suzanne Collins.
We have four in the house that actually have books, but we have others used for other storage purposes.
One Book You Have Read Multiple Times:
Finding Alice.
Preferred Place To Read:
At the beach or by the pool. Or outside in general.
My husband and mine’s beach reads last year. Sadly no beach this year.
Quote that inspires you/gives you all the feels from a book you’ve read:
I want to tell him he’s not being fair. That we were strangers. That I did what it took to stay alive, to keep us both alive in that arena. That I can’t explain how things are with Gale because I don’t know myself. That it’s no good loving me because I’m never going to get married anyway and he’d just end up hating me later instead of sooner. That if I do have feelings for him, it doesn’t matter because I’ll never be able to afford the kind of love that leads to a family, to children. And how can he? How can he after what we’ve just been through?
I also want to tell him how much I already miss him. But that wouldn’t be fair on my part.
… Out of the corner of my eye, I see Peeta extend his hand. I look at him, unsure. “One more time?” For the audience?” he says. His voice isn’t angry. It’s hollow, which is worse. Already the boy with the bread is slipping away from me.
I take his hand, holding on tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.
From The Hunger Games. Totally killed me when I read it.
Reading Regret:
Not having read Harry Potter when I was younger, and now I still haven’t gotten to the series…
Series You Started And Need To Finish(all books are out in series):
I recently read 1984 for the first time, and the first two-thirds of the book did very little for me. In the third part of the book, however, when Winston was arrested and tortured to become indoctrinated to the ways of the Party, I was much more intrigued. And what especially intrigued me was there were some similarities to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I remembered in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard was being tortured and interrogated by a Cardassian. In case you’re wondering what a Cardassian is…
Just so we’re clear…
The Number Four
I think you’ll soon see the similarities as well. Here’s a conversation from the Star Trek episode Chain of Command, Part II:
“How many lights do you see there?”
“I see four lights.”
“No, there are five.”
“I see four lights.”
And from 1984:
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the Party says that there is not four but five – then how many?”
“Four.”
But of course, it doesn’t stop there for either Picard or Winston. And just so you can understand the full context of these conversations, both men are starved, naked or near naked, have been beaten or degraded, and both experience pain when they give the “incorrect” answer…
“I know nothing about Minos Korva.”
“But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.”
“There are four lights.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The needle went up to sixty.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The Psychology of an Interrogation
In the 21 hours of psychology classes I took in college, I learned a few things about how we as people are influenced, for better or for worse. When it comes to this sort of situation, where someone is trying to bring something out of a person who may be very strong and unwilling to provide such information, certain tactics are used. The idea is to transform you from who you are to someone else.
The Stanford prison experiment was a study conducted by Phillip Zimbardo that took place in 1971, where the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard proved shocking to all involved. In this experiment, normal college students who volunteered to take part in the study for some money were assigned to either be a prisoner or a prison guard, and to play out their roles in a “jail” that was at Stanford University. Just how quickly the students truly seemed to transform into their roles prisoners and prison guards, and how Zimbardo even got sucked into it himself, was shocking to me personally as a college student when I studied the incident.
Just by playing the role of a prison guard, college students grew power-hungry and beat the prisoners. Just by playing the role of a prisoner, college students grew depressed and rebellious. Things got so bad so quickly that the experiment had to be cut short… after only five days. Tactics that were used included: shock (prisoners were blindfolded and taken to their cells), humiliation (prisoners were stripped naked), and a transfer of identity (they wore prisoner uniforms, shackles on their feet, they were assigned a prisoner number, and their heads were shaved). Some of these elements can be seen in 1984 and Chain of Command. In the latter, Picard is stripped naked and is left suspended by his wrists. He is told:
“From this point on, you will enjoy no privilege of rank, no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as Human. You have no other identity!”
I saw this pattern when reading Unbroken as well, the true story of a WWII pilot who was taken to several Japanese POW camps. Prisoners were degraded from human to less-than-human, to the status of an animal or even worse. The Japanese culture is high on honor, and to lose one’s honor and dignity is the greatest insult, and that is what they did to their enemies during the war. Laura Hillenbrand wrote:
The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended to knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn’t understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness.
A True Change in Nature
Captain Picard is offered the chance to go… but is told if he does so, his chief medical officer Beverly Crusher will be interrogated. Picard cares for Beverly very much and refuses to let this happen, so he stays. Winston does not immediately say anything to betray his lover Julia, but when he is about to be inflicted with the worst torture he can imagine, he exclaims:
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her! Tear her face off, strip her to the bones! Not me! Julia! Not me!”
This is what we are led to believe is the end of Winston’s indoctrination, at least until the very end of the book, which I won’t give away. But his ending is not happy. In fact, at one point after he is released, he finds himself writing:
2 + 2 = 5
…one of the things that his interrogator was trying to tell him was true if the party said so. Picard, on the other hand, as he is being released from his interrogation (as his ship the Enterprise has come to save the day) he shouts out in defiance to his interrogator:
“There… are… FOUR LIGHTS!”
Though Picard’s ending is happier, and I do believe in the end he was a much more noble man, the two are not as different as it might seem. Winston had this experience:
“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”
“Yes.”
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity.
And at the end of Chain of Command, Picard has this conversation with the Enterprise’s counselor:
“What I didn’t put in the report was that at the end he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights when, in fact, there were only four.”
“You didn’t say it?”
“No! No. But I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all! But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.”
It Doesn’t Just Happen in Fiction
It’s easy to chalk all this up to these stories being fictional, that this would not happen in real life. But the Stanford prison experiment suggests otherwise. The identity of those college students were truly lost in five days’ time. It’s been seen elsewhere as well. Patty Hearst, daughter of publishing giant William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a guerrilla group and ended up aiding them in theft, not seemingly out of fear of what they would do to her otherwise, but from a conversion to their side. Afterwards she seemed to have a change of heart again and was fully pardoned by President Clinton.
Here’s a brief interview with one of the students involved with the Stanford prison experiment:
Needless to say, I think both 1984 and this particular episode of Star Trek did a great job of portraying how convicted men can become desperate, and how a good interrogator wears them down. It’s not fun to think about but I do find it fascinating. And it again, it makes me think of Unbroken, particularly the title. Louis Zamperini was broken, not just once but many times. But after a time, after it was all over, he was able to overcome the torture and heartache he went through, able to forgive a particular Japanese commander he had hated and had wanted to kill. From Unbroken:
On an October afternoon, Louie stepped out of an army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years. “This little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”
To ease the load of this post a bit, here’s a cute picture of hugging kitties:
I have no idea what question to ask, but I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject! I’m also curious as to how you feel about more posts where I incorporate Star Trek and/or psychology into a discussion about a book.
Awesome Adaptations is hosted by Picture Me Reading, and is a focus on book-to-movie adaptations that we think are awesome! Today’s topic is an awesome coming-of-age adaptation. I think Little Women is all about coming of age. It focuses mostly on Jo, but also on her three sisters, from their youth to their early adult years as they go through separation from their father, simple Christmases, sickness, suitors, adventures, and tragedy. Through it all, I think Louisa May Alcott really captured the spirit of growing up quite well. I love that in the end, Jo writes her and her sisters’ story after a tragedy stirs her heart of Professor Bhaer’s words to write from her heart. I think it’s important advice for all writers to heed.
Here’s a scene from the movie that breaks my heart every time I watch it or read it in the book, but I think is a critical turning point for Jo in the story:
What scene from Little Women (book or movie) stands out to you? Or what do you think is an awesome coming-of-age adaptation?
I mentioned recently that my husband and I have been watching the TV show Fringe on DVD. I have noticed that in the last couple of weeks, I have found myself growing more fond of the names Peter and Olivia, both of which are names of main characters on the show. I never really disliked these names before, but I didn’t particularly love them either. They were just fine for me. But now I find myself liking them more as I come to like the characters.
But I think I have to be predisposed to like the name somewhat first in order for this phenomena to happen. When I read The Hunger Games, I found myself liking the name Peeta as I liked the character. I have never known a Peeta in my life, but of course it does resemble Peter. But on the other hand, I didn’t find myself growing to like the name Katniss. I think it’s the right fit for Katniss and I went from thinking it was a stupid name at first to an appropriate name for a character, but let’s just say it didn’t hold quite the same charm for me. And it wasn’t like I was going to name a baby Peeta but… let’s just say there was a period of time where if someone else decided to do it, I wouldn’t have judged them too harshly for it.
It’s interesting to me how our perceptions of names can change due to fictional characters with these names. There are some names that seem type-casted to fit a certain kind of character. I remember my senior year of high school when my yearbook/journalism teacher, whose first name was Chip, lamented that characters named Chip are always some lame sidekick. I have found with my name, Amy, the character is generally pretty self-centered and weak-willed, which makes me sad.
I’m going to throw your writing in the fire and then steal the guy you should have ended up with… (OK, I don’t actually hate Amy in Little Women, but she’s no Jo.)
As someone who is constantly creating new characters in my head, I think about names fairly frequently. Sometimes the idea of a story hits me first, and then I seek out the characters and the names of the characters that seem to fit best. But sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, a character name just pops into my head that won’t go away and I know I have to write out that character. Their name is sometimes something I might have considered strange just yesterday, but today it is perfect for my character. Sometimes I think of traditional names (Catherine), trendier names (Harper), and sometimes names that I just have no idea where they came from (Noa, for a girl, like Noah without a H… this one happened recently). When I think of the name of a character first, it always feels like a perfect fit when I base everything else around that, even if it’s something I would never name a real-life baby. But I also can’t help but wonder how people reading the story will respond to it. I know I have read books where I felt the character never fit their name. But I suppose we all look at names differently… there’s no way to really control how someone feels about a name.
All this to say… what’s in a name? Does your perception of a name change if you read/watch about a fictional character with that name? Has a fictional character made you like a name more or less than you did before?
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) focuses on favorite book beginnings and endings, and I’m focusing specifically on my favorite beginning and ending lines. Let me warn you though, I think the lines for a couple of the endings are kind of spoilery if you haven’t read the book. This week’s list is in no particular order:
1. Beginning: The Book Thief
A startling opening line from our narrator from The Book Thief, Death.
2. Ending: Crime and Punishment
This was such a hard, and often times depressing, book to read, so I was quite thrilled when it had a very hopeful ending where, while Raskolinkov is paying for his crime, the woman he loves has promised to wait for him and he is a better man.
3. Beginning: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
Nearly steps on Sherlock Holmes while reading? Definitely an intriguing start!
4. Ending: The Hunger Games
If I could have, I would have shared that entire thought process Katniss goes through as Peeta hands her flowers and makes it clear he wants them to be an item in real life. “I want to tell him he’s not being fair. That we were strangers. That I did what it took to stay alive, to keep us both alive in that arena…” Man this ending broke my heart in so many ways as I was so rooting for Peeta, and it made me want to pick up Catching Fire right away!
5. Beginning: The Scorpio Races
This is next on my TBR, but I read the first little bit as a preview before buying the book, and this opening line definitely caught my attention.
6. Ending: Catching Fire
This was a bit shocking… and again, made me ready to start Mockingjay! (So glad I didn’t read these books until all three were out…)
7. Beginning: The Giver
I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I first started The Giver, and for some reason this beginning stood out to me. Why was Jonas afraid now? Why had the aircraft from the year before frightened him so much? I was instantly interested in Jonas’ world and his story.
8. Ending: Mockingjay
I’m not counting the epilogue, which while I don’t actively dislike it, I just felt like was really out of place. But the last page of Mockingjay (before the epilogue) literally made everything in the the entire series worth it for me. After everything, Katniss finally found some security.
9. Beginning: Rebecca
Instantly intriguing. What is Manderley?
10. Ending: The Book Thief
The Book Thief begins strong and ends strong, while remaining intriguing throughout most of the book. Basically, you need to read it.
What are your favorite beginning and ending lines from a book?
