book club

Nothing to Envy

/ Brienna / 2 Comments

Before reading Nothing to Envy, I knew very little about North and South Korea.

The book does a wonderful job of telling the story of North Korea by weaving together the threads of several lives of average people living in North Korea before seeking asylum in South Korea.

It’s amazing what these people suffered under the rule of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il. They were forced into submission, oppressed, starved, and cut-off from the rest of the world. With no TV, radio, or internet, the North Koreans knew very little of what was going on in the outside world. Bypassing the controls on the TV or radio to get information from South Korea was taboo and strictly forbidden.

I can’t imagine living like that, and it’s hard to understand how many people did, and how many were willing to live that way. Repressed and taught from an early age to revere Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il as supreme beings, many people were recruited to spy and report on their neighbors and families.

People were starving, dying, imprisoned for something as simple as wanting a better life. Food was scarce, growing and selling your own yet another item on the list of forbidden things. Many people did this anyway, and often were arrested or punished for these crimes, when all they really wanted was enough food to live.

Why didn’t the rest of the world do anything about what was happening to these people? How many people knew the truth of the collapse while it was happening? Foreign visitors were shown a very precise view of North Korea, basically staged and very controlled. Much of the support for the country was coming from communist influence, like Russia. The US withdrew aid when North Korea refused to end its nuclear weapons program.

Many people were eventually able to escape North Korea, and many have sought refuge in South Korea. Unfortunately, many were unable or unwilling to escape, and many fleeing left loved ones behind.

Read the book and find out what happens!  It’s good, I promise! This is one of the best books I’ve read in 2014, and for those who know me, you know that’s about 60 books so far…

5 out of 5 stars.

The Giver (Quartet)

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This was selected as the monthly selection for my book club, and has been described as “the quintessential dystopian novel.”

Jonas lives in a world where there are no choices. No one knows passion or pain. Everything is determined by the committee, including who shall marry and when, and who will be assigned children.

There is ultimate unity, with no one having a birthday, and all the children celebrating year 1, year 2, year 3, etc at the same time.  Each child has a number within their year (1-50, so only 50 children per year), and at the annual ceremony, they all turn a year older.

Each year has a significance, from losing ribbons on braids, to getting a bicycle, or getting a job assignment at 12. After 12, age does not seem to be tracked or celebrated in any meaningful way.

When Jonas reaches his 12 year ceremony, his number is skipped over during the announcement of assignments. This causes quite a stir, and at the end of the ceremony, it’s announced that he has been selected to become “the receiver.”

In his job information packet, he gets unexpected instructions. He is told he can ask anyone, anything, and that he is allowed to lie, something that has been strictly forbidden in their society and ingrained since birth.

The Giver follows Jonas on his path as the “the receiver” where he learns that there are many memories of before, and it is the giver who is the keeper of these memories. Jonas will receive them from the giver, and then become the giver when the time comes.

What Jonas learns from the giver is reality changing for Jonas, and he must come to terms with this new knowledge, which leads into the climactic ending.

A grade 3-7 book, this is a very easy read. As such, it also lacks some depth, but still kept my attention. At the end, I wasn’t sure if I loved it, yet I was intrigued enough to keep reading the remaining books in the quartet.

The second book, Gathering Blue, tells the story of a parallel society, where things are much different.  Kira is a young girl who has just been orphaned. With her crippled leg, she has always been somewhat of an outcast, and without her mother to defend her, the other women in the society want her gone.

Fortunately for Kira, the counsel (another committee!) deems her talent as a seamstress worthy, and she is suddenly moved into a private room, where her meals are brought to her, and she has a private bathroom with running water (something she had never even known existed).

Like Jonas, Kira uncovers some unsettling information about her society and must make a decision as to what to do with this information.  I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to spoil the ending.

The third book, The Messenger, brings the return of some familiar characters, and shows us that these societies are co-existing!  The final book, The Son, brings the stories to a conclusion.  Personally, I enjoyed these more and more as I progressed through each one.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

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I recently read this as a non-fiction selection for a book club that I organize. Being the first thing I’ve read by Michael Pollan, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

It’s divided up into 3 sections, Industrial Corn, Pastoral Grass, and Personal The Forest.

Each of this book’s three parts follows one of the principal human food chains from beginning to end: from a plant, or group of plants, photosynthesizing calories in the sun, all the way to a meal at the dinner end of that food chain.

The first section, Industrial Corn, was probably the most interesting. There are a lot of facts about the American corn industry (and agriculture in general) that was quite enlightening. For example, did you know that science can detect the isotopes of carbon in human tissue and calculate how much corn a person has in their diet? Or that corn in American costs more to grow than it does to buy, and the difference is hidden by government subsidies to farmers?

Pastoral Grass, section 2, takes a look at Polyface Farm in Virginia. Unlike most of American farming that’s focused on monoculture or packing as many animals as possible into a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), the folks at Polyface rotate crops, and animals, in the same face. They produce beef, chicken, eggs, and other things, all using the same land. They also do not sell their products for shipment, and everything stays mostly local (within a day’s drive). I found this chapter pretty interesting too, but the chicken slaughtering part was tough to read. I think it’s good to see an example of farming the way farming was meant to be, in stark contract to the American factory farming that seems to be almost ubiquitous at this point.

The final, Personal, section is my least favorite. Here, Pollan decides he must be vegetarian in order to be objective about evaluating the morals of eating meat. However, from this point on, the book takes on a less journalistic tone, and becomes mostly Pollan’s rationalization back to eating meat.

…there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we owe them moral consideration, how do we justify killing and eating them?

Based just on the first two sections, I think this is an amazing book, and is very insightful. It’s too bad that Pollan had to make it more about himself at the end.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real…

At least, that’s what the marketing language over on Amazon.com would like you to believe. Don’t believe the hype! Our narrator is 47, and he recalls his youth, 40 years earlier, when he was 7. I think this is where my problem with this novel starts. It reads like a 7 year-old is telling the story. It’s mostly “I went here and did this. I went there and did that. Oh, and I saw that over there.” There is a huge lack of detail, of descriptions, and the novel is very bereft of emotions as well. The only reason I finished this book is because it was a very simple, easy read, and I was hoping the end would justify the time I spent getting there. It didn’t.

This novel is part fantasy and part reality. The reader is left to choose whether to believe the fantasy part actually happened or to interpret it as a child’s coping mechanism for what happens in the reality parts of the story. In the end, I was left with a feeling of bewilderment, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to believe, and to be honest, the fantasy part of the novel was not that great. In my best attempt to avoid spoilers, the novel contains supernatural creatures (both good and bad), evil, ignorance, violence, and I guess, in the end, apathy. This was a book club selection, and we were very divided. A few really loved it and a few (like me) thought it was rubbish.

2 out of 5 stars.