(Books) CWY Reads

I read four books during the program: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, The Coral Island, by R.M. Ballantyne, Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, and The Concubine's Children, by Denise Chong.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a biographic novel of Ken Kesey, writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. After reading it, my impression was that it only got famous because it's written by someone famous, and about someone famous. It only covers part of his life, that being his time with the Merry Pranksters, a group of people he travelled with for some time after writing his book. Basically, they roll around being dicks, and try to make it sound deep after-the-fact.

When writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, Kesey was taking the medication that the ward patients were taking. He'd write high, but edit sober. He said that most of what he wrote was garbage, but every once in a while he'd find something good. He collected the good bits and those are what comprised his book. Wolfe shows us what happens when you leave out the "sober editing" part. At one point, another writer gets involved, and Wolfe hands the reigns over to her for a few pages. She writes relatively normally, and it's like a breath of fresh air.

There's a part in Acid Test where they call literature an outdated and inadequate form of art, incapable of true expression. Kind of ironic that a book was written to try and express that perspective. They also call out reading as a self-indulgent act that benefits only the reader. Again... I'm reading this in a book.

There's a lot of examples where something profound has the possibility of an alternate interpretation. For example, they advertise the first Acid Test really publicly, then change the location at the last second, because the important people would just... know. But see, because the police showed up at the place it was advertised, everyone who wasn't in the know got busted, and then the "important people" were all Pranksters or close friends who would have known anyway, because they were in on the last-minute planning. So it wasn't a matter of finding out who were the "beautiful people", it was about throwing the police off their scent and managing to hold a party anyway, at the expense of anyone else who wanted to come.

The Coral Island was a pretty inappropriate book to bring along on this trip in retrospect, since much of it is about taming black savages. It wasn't such a hot read, either. The main characters are three teenage boys, while the author obviously forgot what it's like to be young. The main character, Ralph, from whose perspective it's written, is so bland that he has next to no involvement in the story whenever he's around his two friends. There's a scene where Jack separates from Ralph and Peterkin, and the story follows Jack, exactly as if Ralph is still telling it from his perspective. The author forgot that Ralph was narrating, he's so bland.

It feels like the book ends right in the middle of their adventure, too. The book is made of a series of coincidental events and, while they did resolve the little saga they were dealing with at the time, the book ends as they commence their journey back to England, which, as the reader should know by now, will be an adventure full of danger. Seems like there was an ending goal for the protagonists, and the author stops writing before meeting that goal because he was bored.

Coraline was a good story, as can be expected by Neil Gaiman. I was reading it at a really appropriate time, too. It was my last night with my host family, the night when I finished the book. Coraline was at the point where she only had to face her Other Mother to escape. The Other Mother's rage was destroying and distorting the dimension they were in, and her people were dying. In real life, Hurricane Irene struck, and one of the fish spontaneously died when my host mother was angered. Also, Coraline would barricade her door with her toybox at night, so that, even if it wouldn't stop her Other Mother, it would at least make enough noise and buy her enough time to do something about it. I did the same thing with my rocking chair every night.

I related to Coraline in a bunch of other ways, too, like how she would get into a psychological state that she termed as "feeling dislocated". I thought I was the only one who used that word like that. All-around, it was a good read and probably the best one during the trip.

The Concubine's Children was about the family history of a Chinese family that moved to Canada. I've made several blanket statements about authors that I've always been looking to disprove. One is that, all Canadian authors are boring, and the other is that, female writers are only adept at writing novels for young adults. This book challenged both claims, and based on what other people had said about it, I hoped it would deliver.

First half is really boring. You can't say that the family she's writing for is normal, but they're not really enticing, either. It's better to look at it as an example of a Chinese family integrating into Canada, than as a work where you're supposed to become involved with the individual characters.

It actually gets a lot more enticing around the second half though, I found. It happens when the book falls into the time and perspective of the writer. It moves from being a historic novel to something almost autobiographical, and it is an improvement.

She has a weird habit, though, where she won't use her own name when she plays a role in the actual story. She'll say her name if she's doing a bit told from her own perspective, but if it's in the third person, she'll say something like "Louise's sister" or "Their youngest daughter", even though everyone else is named. It's just kind of odd.

All in all, it was somewhat interesting, and I found it to be the second best of the four, after Coraline.