Book Rec: Juno and Juliet

I first heard of Julian Gough when Neil Gaiman tweeted about The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, which is freely available on the author's website. It's a short story which is the best, clearest, and funniest explanation I've seen of the recent financial collapse. As it happens, it's also a chapter taken out of a very hard to describe book entitled Jude In London (or sometimes Jude: Level 2). It's a sequel to another book, but don't worry: the second book won't make any more or less sense for not having read the first. It's a surrealistic stream of consciousness which somehow manages to get in some surprisingly astute observations about modern life, Western civilization, the arts, and many other things while at the same time unabashedly reveling in silliness and absurdity. (I posted a longer review in my LJ last year.)

I so enjoyed reading the story that I went and bought the book. And I so enjoyed that book that I went back and bought the author's first published novel, Juno & Juliet. I so enjoyed that book that I decided I needed to write a review of it.

Juno is beautiful, charismatic, sweet, empathetic, and basically perfect. She knows just what you need and she does it for you, without even really thinking about it, because she's just that nice. This is not her story.

This is the story, in her own words, of Juliet's first year in college and her first year away from the small town in Ireland where she grew up. Who is Juliet, you ask? It's good of you to ask. People tend not to notice her quite as much when Juno is around. Not that she minds, really. She's not nearly so social. In fact, she tends to be rather cynical about people. Which is probably why she does get so much less notice. Because, even though you'd never mistake one for the other, Juliet is Juno's identical twin sister.

I won't tell you what happens. I won't tell you what it's about. Instead, I'll tell you about my experience as a reader.

Reading this book is, I find, much like taking an inner tube ride down a river. It just sort of floats you gently along. Every once in a while, you look over and realize that, actually, there is some depth to the water below you, but then you get swept up in the flow again and leave that behind. Except that there's a distant yet ominous rumble from time to time. But, again, the river's flow pulls you lazily along to something else, and you relax and enjoy. Until suddenly you realize that the rumble is actually a waterfall. Your little raft speeds up and plunges over the edge and everything is chaos and you don't know what will happen and... You land, raft intact, and drift off into the sunset.

Not only is it a great way to unwind, it's organized into short chapters. Each one (ranging from half a page to maybe 20 pages on the outside) is almost a self-contained vignette, picking up a short time after the last. You can pick it up, get right back into the narrative, finish a chapter between stops on the train, and put it down without feeling like you're going to lose your place or stop at a dreadful cliffhanger.

Weightier reading: Brotherhood of Thieves

After Juno and Juliet I read something more substantive:

The Brotherhood of Thieves. I was interested in it because I love the restaurant named after it, but it has much more significance than that. The author was a speaker at a gathering of abolitionists which turned into a riot.

Foster wrote this pamphlet some time later, making a strong case against slavery in a time when that wasn't an easy or necessarily popular stance.

He makes a case for why a slave owner is, among other things, a thief, a murderer, and an adulterer. A slaver steals the fruits of slave labor, takes the whole of the slave's life, and takes on the power to dissolve a slave's marriage.

But he goes on to spread the blame, pointing out that the Southern slave trade could not have been successful without the support (implicitly as well as explicitly) of the North.

Then he moves to the churches, documenting their stances on the issue. How they supported slavery and fought against the abolitionists.

It's a look into our history, and well worth reading for that. But it also carries lessons we still need to learn today about how we, as individual citizens and group members, need to take responsibility for not just the wrongs we do but for those that we allow and enable around us.

(no subject)

Oh yes, as long as I'm posting up a storm (so to speak)...

We came through Sandy just fine. There was a lot of wind and some rain, but it never got too bad. We lost power for about 12 hours and cable (including internet and our primary phone line) for a bit longer than that, but everything was in working order by this afternoon.

Since I'm semi-nocturnal, I spent the night on the couch, reading by flashlight and comforting the dog. By the time I went up to bed in the wee hours, the storm had passed. (I did have trouble sleeping without power for my CPAP, but once the power did come back on at around 10am I hooked it up and managed to get 5 hours.)

There are a few trees down, but they didn't hit anything (other than the ground). All in all, we're pretty lucky.

I'm impressed with how quickly they got things working around here. On the other hand, if we'd invested the money in burying the power lines in the first place, millions of people would have power now.

It's funny how quickly and easily modern civilization can be torn away. A night without electricity or communications felt surreal and out of time. But, thanks to the infrastructure we have, it was also restored quickly.

Hope the rest of you are safe and well.