User Profile

Here's another one I'm reading as part of the student extra credit assignment I offered. I haven't read a Stephen King book in a very long time. Here we go.

I offered students an extra credit assignment this semester after many reports of college students arriving on campus having not really read an entire book. They could choose any book and meet with me for an hour to discuss it. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to read all of the books, but only five students took me up on it. So, I'm going for it.

This was one of the books chosen, an interesting premise and an affecting book, but not really anything that grabs me too much. It's interesting to dip into what students in my class are reading.

The most interesting thing about this book is it's treatment of the ways language can direct attention away from horrific behavior. Cannibalism becomes normal once a society develops an entire vocabulary around it.

This book was a tough read in terms of the gore, and I didn't necessarily love the ending or some of the narrative choices. I would be interested to know how it reads in the original Spanish

Have to assume this book opened some eyes with an interracial queer relationship in 1964. The end of that relationship is heartbreaking and beautiful. The first section had me thinking of Dennis Johnson, but that was short-lived. The book feels like it flirts with Beat writers a bit but is kind of hard to categorize. A number of set pieces had me wondering what kind of research Carpenter did on prisons and orphanages.

The story is told across four decades, and it begins with an account of how a random set of circumstances launches a life. In some ways the novel continues to lay out how this randomness (often the randomness of violence) shapes a life.

When the protagonist describes the sudden death by heart attack of the head of the orphanage, we get a lesson in power. The boys were cheering the death of this man who had terrorized them, but the was easily replaced:

"Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was intangible; not a man, a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn't even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context

But, and this is what puzzled Jack now, once you grow out of this, once you learn that it is all nonsense, that what you thought as a child was nothing more than the excuses of self-pity, what did you replace it with? You had a life, and you were content with it; where did you aim it?" (114)

I had never read this, and I was surprised by a number of things: that we get a detailed account of the monster's learning process (which had me thinking of LLMs), that the Monster is smarter and more rhetorically savvy than Victor, and that the Monster's rhetorical skill is highlighted by Shelley (we hear of the monster's "sophistry" which then had me wondering: Is this where @sophist_monster comes from?

One last thought...this book is tale of what happens when science rejects aesthetics in the name of pure efficiency and function. If Victor had cared at all about what the monster looked like, then the entire story unfolds quite differently. The monster's hideous "countenance" (Shelley's favorite word by far, btw) is why he can't have a connection with person, regardless of how much he craves that connection.