CBR 12 #4 - Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

I read a review of this book somewhere on the internet, a long time ago.  Maybe on Pajiba, maybe on Cannonball read, I don't really remember.  But I did write the title and the author down in my little notebook, along with the dozens (maybe hundreds) of other books I plan on reading,  and movies and TV shows that I plan on seeing.  This year, before the world changed forever, a few friends came over to hang out and one of them brought the book and said that he feels like I might want to borrow it.  I had not told him that it was on my list, in fact, it totally escaped my mind until he handed me the book.  He just thought that I was the kind of person who would like Willful Creatures and he is not wrong.  So I read it during the first month of quarantine (we are already on our 5th month, the longest quarantine in the world, i think) when I could still focus and mull over and revel in the little morsels of weird that are Aimee Bender's short stories.

This book is a collection of 15 short stories.  Her stories are inhabited by willful creatures, some more melancholy, some more malevolent.  Her world is one in which the surreal just is.  Fantastical elements are not acknowledged as such and the narration is so matter of fact that you don't question it.  The world is just that way in her stories.  It is a world where somebody can purchase a tiny human as a pet, where a family of pumpkin heads can have a son with an iron head, or a boy can have fingers shaped like keys.  Some stories are more fantastical than others, but they are all written in way that makes them feel like fables or fairy tales, or myths.  There is a sort of detachment in the storytelling but at the same time, they feel very real.  Some stories are disturbing and violent which shocked me a little because she often tells the story from the "perpetrators" point of view but imbuing them with familiar emotions just taken to a grotesque level.  I don't know, they're better read than described, I think. 

So yes, my friend was not wrong.  I did want to read this book.  Some of the stories revealed themselves to me, like I get what it was trying to say beyond the weirdness.  Some stories, their meaning eludes me.  Either way, the stories stuck with me, bubbling up in my brain at random times.  I don't think I'll be returning this book.  

# 7 - I Am Legend (And Other Short Stories) by Richard MAtheson

That is an one ugly book cover. More so considering how much i was enraged, ENRAGED!, I tell you, when I realized how much they changed the ending of the film. It was, however, the cheapest copy I could find and I was really impatient to find out what the difference between the book and the movie was. So, I had to make do with Will Smith.

I saw the movie before I read the book and I actually quite enjoyed the movie. But that was before I knew that the book was really quite awesome. I mean, the movie was ok and all, but why didn't they just make another movie completely not based on the book? Changing the ending and even some details (like there are dead vampires and alive vampires, and that hello! they are sentient!) completely change the essence of the book.

Enough ranting about the adaptation and on to the book itself. It was good. Neville is the last man left on earth. All the other have been infected by a horrible disease that turns them into bloodsucking monsters. The first part was basically just about how Neville lived his daily life, in the face of vampire apocalypse. Surviving and protecting himself. It also tells his past, which is heartbreaking, through flashbacks. We stay with Neville as he goes through depression and excessive drinking (who wouldn't be driven to drink when faced with a nightly onslaught of scary-ass vampires) and eventually just deals. He tries to learn all he can about the origin of the plague and tries to find a cure. In the day, when the vampires are helpless, he goes out and systematically kills all that he can find.

All the "action" happens at the last third of the book when he finds a seemingly uninfected woman and takes her in. Eventually, he starts to suspect that she is infected, and that part for me was really thrilling. Like Neville, I constantly wavered between believing she was normal and thinking she was infected. And this propels the story until the end when Neville, in the final seconds of his life, realizes that he is legend.

The book, in making the vampires sentient creatures, elevated the book from being just a regular zombie apocalypse movie (like the movie version) and presents some thought provoking ideas on how human beings evolve and adopt. In having Neville as a SOLE survivor of the human race, it presents a compelling portrait of loneliness. Being truly alone.

So I gathered from research (wiki. shush.) that this book was the first time that vampirism was "explained" through science. That is, that it had a scientific, instead of a supernatural cause. It is also, I guess because of the whole wiping out humans stuff, the inspiration for modern zombie films. However, I think it is totally different from most zombie films, as I already mentioned. The fact that the monsters were sentient and are trying to build a new society is totally different from the zombies who just want to eat everybody.

Oh, there were other short stories included in this book, thus making it elegible for the cannonball read. The stories were ok, some twisty and scary, some were forgettable. Ultimately, none reached the depth Matheson reached in I Am Legend.

#4 - Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenburger

It was raining and I had a huge ass fight with the hubby. I was just feeling so angry and down and wanted to get away. So at 11PM, with the babies sleeping soundly, I grabbed the first book I found, put on my hoodie and walked and walked til my feet got tired and I got to a Mcdonalds around 3 km from my place. And I read.

This was my state of mind and emotions when I read this book, and as it turns out, the accidental book choice was very apt. Lucky Girls is five stories about girls, (except that one, or maybe two stories aren't really about the girl) living in India and Southeast Asia, or whose lives have been affected by the area. They are Americans, expatriates and tourists who have been seduced by our awesomeness (SEA reprezent! hah).

The stories and the characters are seemingly different. An American woman living in India to be with her married Indian lover who recently died. A couple in the process of divorcing visiting their daughter in Bangkok who has fallen under the spell of her no good Thai boyfriend. An author with depressive tendencies going back to the land of her childhood, India, to be with her failing father, and maybe to learn more about her depressed mother. A girl being tutored for the SATs by an American educated Indian. A letter about a girls relationship with an author who famously writes about Vietnam.

What ties these stories together is its melancholy. These women are at the cusp of great change in their lives. Most, concerning love. A divorce, her first time, a death of a lover, a pregnancy scare. There are no plot twists. Just these girls, living life at the most exotic of places. Not really belonging but so affected and influenced by the places. Oh and the places! I can just feel the humidity of the South East Asian jungle, the lush foliage, the noisy markets. Well, maybe because I live here. It was exotic to me, yet also so very familiar.

I was mesmerized by the book. It perfectly matched my mood when I was reading it and it was good to read about girls like me. Just living life in a crazy place. Though I'm a local and they're foreigners, the feelings of being lost and falling in and out of love, is universal. And then I went home. And I am lucky.

*finished never let me go and the killer's cousin

*currently reading i am legend + short stories

*working on that the corrections review