A Word Aptly Spoken

Have you ever read a book that was so extremely well written that you couldn’t finish it?  Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?  But it has happened to me several times now.

The first time it happened was with Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. I was a high school English teacher.  We had buried a student not long before I started this book.  One of the things they don’t tell you when you are studying to be a teacher is how many children’s funerals you will have to attend.  How often your heart would break.  I couldn’t finish this book because I just couldn’t deal with the death of another child – especially by murder.

It didn’t happen again for a long time, and then this year it happened twice.  I was reading The Underground Railroad by one of our best living writers, Colson Whitehead.  I expected there to be disturbing content because of the subject matter.  What I didn’t expect was just how disturbing some of the images were to me and how I couldn’t get them out of my head.  Just seeing this book or its title brings them back and makes me relive them.  Yes, I understand that there are people who actually suffered in the ways described.  That’s what made it so very disturbing!  I read over half of the book and stopped.  I’ll never forget the portion of the book that I read, and that is more than enough for me.

This week I finally decided it was time to read Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale.  I’ve put it off because I just knew enough about the story to know that the society depicted in it was going to piss me off.  Well, I was right.  I should have sucked it up sooner and read it before our country was moving closer and closer to the society depicted in it.  It didn’t just piss me off.  It made me beyond angry and scared me.  I’m sure it wouldn’t have been a good idea to take my blood pressure as I was listening to Claire Danes read the audiobook. (She does a fantastic job – which didn’t help.)  I was thinking of the Thomas Jefferson quote, “The government you elect is the government you deserve” and thinking of what we as a nation have been electing – people who are facing criminal charges, facing expulsion from the Congress for a completely made up biography in addition to charges, people who scream from the floor of Congress as a speech is given, who espouse violence, who get thrown out of public places for not behaving civily…and the list goes on.  But most importantly, we’ve elected people who are taking away our first amendment rights.  They are voting to take away free speech, freedom of the press.  One presidential candidate has said emphatically that, if elected, he would arrest anyone gathering peaceably to protest him or to redress grievances.  What he is proposing would destroy the Constitutional rights in the 1^st, 14^th, and 20^th amendments (he actually tried to overturn the 20^th in the past.). 

A year or so ago I read the introduction or maybe the first chapter to a graphic nonfiction/biography of Dietrich Bonhonhoeffer called The Faithful Spy.  It was a book I was considering gifting to a boy who loves history and espcially WWII history.  John Hendrix’s writing did the same thing to me that Atwood’s writing in the novel did.  It scared the living daylights out of me.  He was describing how Germany came to be what it was when the war started.  He might just as well have been describing The United States in the 21^st century!  I didn’t finish the book because, as I said, it was purchased as a gift.  Those opening pages of the book have not left since, and I wonder if that is another book that will be too disturbing to finish or if it was just the immediacy of those pages and the the parallels between Germany then and us now.  

These are four excellent books.  They are also examples of why I don’t read horror novels, books with extreme violence, or other books that will devastate me.  When I read the words of a masterful writier especially, I am in their world and I take in the characters, events, and words too deeply to continue.  Usually it is disgust for the horror, but now I know that it can be the horrors in a book that isn’t in that genre but is horrific nonetheless.  I look forward to reading more from these authors.  They are extremely talented, but I know I have to go into them cautiously.