Gmorning, Gnight! Little Pep Talks for Me & You (CBR11 #13)

Those of you who have been reading my reviews for the past several years know that I have both depression and anxiety, and while I’m taking meds and seeing a therapist it doesn’t always mean that I’m necessarily feeling well. Often, I feel like shit. Like many, many people I use certain rituals to keep my head on straight and one of them when I’m feeling poorly is to go see what Lin-Manuel Miranda had tweeted for his Gmorning/Gnight tweets of the day. Other times I came across them in the wild, lurking in my feed waiting to pick me up, putting a little pep in my step, a little reassurance from my pocket that I was not alone in this big scary thing called life.

When it was announced last year that Miranda and Sun had teamed up to produce a curated collection of the “best” pairs from the past several years (seriously, he’s been tweeting these since at least 2014) I knew I needed to get my hands on it. Then, as life goes, I let it slip my mind vaguely knowing that there was an escape valve of Miranda’s Gmorning/Gnight tweets waiting for me when I needed them.

Well, I needed them.

NTE’s review was perfectly timed for me. Ah, yes, this is what I need right now.

It might feel simplistic, what can possible be conveyed in 140 (or 280) characters that is going to matter this much to people, to me? So much. Miranda writes these for himself as much as for those of us who read them (and Sun does a commendable job catching their essence in his illustrations) and they are little nuggets waiting to reassure, inspire, uplift, and keep you from feeling alone and defeated.

This one is my favorite, the one that makes me cry spontaneously every time:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (CBR9 #48)

*Note: These reviews were completed in 2017 before the author’s hateful views towards our trans siblings was widely known. My reading experience was what it was and these reviews will remain up, but it should be noted that I find her TERF values abhorrent and will no longer be supporting her through further readings or reviews. 

I’ve been sitting on this review for several days, trying to let the experience of rereading The Half-Blood Prince settle in my mind so I could look at it from a larger angle. The plot of the story is crucial; it shows how the war could so easily fall to the side of Voldemort, and sets up the game plan for defeating him. But it isn’t the only crucial aspect of the narrative, this is also a story of being on the cusp of adulthood, and finding the balance between our childhood selves and who we’ll be. Finally, it is perhaps Rowling’s most definitive work on love as an action.

I have been thinking about this Mister Rogers quote in relation to Dumbledore. I think the men share a certain sameness that is incredibly important to the world of Harry Potter.

Harry’s strength (and the combined strength of the Trio and Dumbledore’s Army) is love. It is one of the many large concepts swimming around in Half-Blood Prince. Loyalty, obligation, and choice are also star players here as well as grief and betrayal, but we’ll get there. The book opens with the concept that magic doesn’t make a more evolved society. It doesn’t prevent the world’s problems, and it in fact introduces a whole new set of them. We are gently instructed of this as the Minister of Magic meets with the Prime Minister and Snape meets with Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange.

Half-Blood Prince is the culmination of the HP books before it, even more so than The Deathly Hallows. It’s a different kind of adventure: one of the intellects. The series’ strength lies in its emotional payoffs. Harry embraces being the chosen one and begins planning for his seemingly inevitable future. The cornerstone of this book is Dumbledore fulfilling his word to Harry from Order of the Phoenix – he will teach him what he can to prepare him to fulfill his role in the war with Voldemort.  Dumbledore trains Harry, in a sort of apprenticeship, and prepares him to find the Horcruxes by laying out Voldemort’s obsession with his own history and that of the founders of Hogwarts, his first true home (another in a long line of similarities between Harry and Voldemort).

But first we must get the Chosen One to school. Dumbledore does a quick infodump for Harry and the readers, informing him that has inherited 12 Grimmauld Place, as well as Kreacher, from Sirius. But Dumbledore is not done table setting, the pair next  set out to meet Horace Slughorn, the former head of Slytherin house, who Dumbledore plans to recruit to return to Hogwarts with Harry’s help (because Slughorn collects exceptional students like trophies, including Harry’s mother). With that accomplished they are off to the Burrow and the newly engaged Bill and Fleur. Why recap all of this? Because each piece laid out is important for this book and the next. We are learning who our big players will be from the beginning, and as Rowling continues to expertly craft her books, there is no fat here, and Half-Blood Prince is particularly crisp.

With Slughorn’ taking over the Potions classes Harry can continue to the N.E.W.T. level, and Snape moves into the cursed Defense Against the Dark Arts position (cursed, we find out much later, by Voldemort himself when he was denied it by Dumbledore). The last minute addition to the course means Harry didn’t pick up his required text during their trip to Diagon Alley (hi Weasley Twins! Glad business is booming and you are dabbling in love potions, which surely won’t be a harm to anyone later! Ron should just go ahead and sit at this place at the table) so he picks up a used book from the cupboard, and we and he are introduced to the titular Half-Blood Prince, who wrote all over his textbook making notes and improvements along the way. Harry uses this new source of information to best Hermione in an academic subject for the first time since perhaps the Lupin year of Defense Against the Dark Arts, and earn himself a very important vial of Felix Felicis. One more setting on the dining table is ready.

As I alluded to above, the main thrust of the book is Harry’s lessons with Dumbledore, where Dumbledore shares memories he has collected over the years via the pensieve. But, he is missing a crucial piece of memory – Slughorn had a conversation with Voldemort that he has changed the memory of and it is the final piece to solving the puzzle. It is up to Harry to retrieve this memory.

But Harry’s focus is split. He continues his obsession with Malfoy, and what he was arranging in Borkin and Burke’s shop. Harry chases his tail a bit here and his dogged focus on Draco (who isn’t hiding his nefarious designs all that well) and Snape (who is also not hiding well that he is helping Draco in some manner, thanks we know to the Unbreakable Vow) but because Harry has cried wolf before about these two everyone is a bit dismissive. Add in to all of this Quidditch, Katie Bell’s run-in with a cursed necklace, Ron’s poisoning and being saved by a bezoar (just shove a bezoar down their throats – another lesson from the Half-blood Prince, twice), Ron and Lavender, Hermione’s reactions to all of it, and Harry’s growing affection for Ginny and no wonder our boy finds himself failing to get the memory.

Following another trip to the hospital wing (where some of my favorite scenes in the entire series occur), Harry decides to use his elf connections to investigate Malfoy. Kreacher and Dobby, two characters greatly cut from the movie adaptations to their detriment, are assigned the task. We witness Harry’s growth and he thinks of all the restrictions he needs to put on Kreacher to keep his secret mission of spying actually secret.

As we jump ahead Ron, Hermione, and Harry discuss how to get the memory from Slughorn. Finally, Ron (yes, my boy Ron) suggests that Harry use the Felix Felicis that he won in Slughorn’s class on their first day (which he had not used to help Ron succeed at Quidditch earlier in the book, that bit of rule breaking goes to our girl Hermione who confounds the unctous McClaggen). Harry is reluctant, Hermione pushes, and he agrees she’s right. MORAL OF THE STORY ALWAYS LISTEN TO HERMIONE (and Ron).

I had actually forgotten how great the chapters surrounding Harry’s retrieval of Slughorn’s memory were. The Rube Goldbergian series of events following Harry’s taking of the Felix Felicis are exquisitely delivered (very close with the time turner save in Prisoner of Azkaban) and, though the movie adaptation got so much wrong (it really, really did), it perfectly translated Rowling’s description of Harry “high” on Felix.

With “Felix” in charge, Harry is ultimately successful. Slughorn’s memory proves to be the final piece in the puzzle: specifically what a horcrux is and the quantity of them Voldemort made. Dumbledore explains to Harry that they have already destroyed two: Riddle’s diary and Marvolo’s ring. But those weren’t his only horcruxes. Dumbledore guesses, based on Slughorn’s memory that Voldemort meant to split his soul seven ways. As one piece of his soul still resides in his body, Dumbledore deduces the others based on memories they have seen, and the last will be something belonging to either Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, but he is unsure what exactly. With this information Harry is properly ready to go on the hunt, not the lost and underprepared version we get in the movies.

The novel could have finished at this point in the narrative, but Rowling is not telling that sort of simplistic story. Instead we yet have lessons to learn and losses to suffer.

As anyone facing such a task, Harry has concerns. Dumbledore is able to reassure a skeptical Harry that he is equal to the task of destroying Voldemort, chiefly because of his ability to love, which brings us back to my initial argument – being capable of Love as an action, not a state of being is, the engine that drives the heroes in this series. Harry’s soul is still pure and whole, making him capable of the love that drives heroes (look for the helpers). Because Harry lives and fights with a sense of honor and righteousness at his very core, he is in possession of all that he will need to do this, once he decides to do it.

Dumbledore stresses that prophecy be damned, Harry has a choice in whether he fights or not. He explains that even without this prophecy, even if Voldemort hadn’t killed his parents, Harry would still want to defeat Voldemort simply because he hates everything Voldemort stands for. It’s this choice, Harry realizes, that will make the rest of his journey a bit easier. It’s such a small thing, realizing that we have the choice to stand and fight for what is right, or to turn and run and live to fight another day. Harry knows at the core of his being that he would never run, something we already know of him and our other heroes – it is something we learned long ago, and something we will learn again.

Besides the hunt for the horcrux, we also reach the climax of Malfoy’s arc. He repaired a vanishing cabinet, the same one we saw Fred and George shove Graham Montague in during The Order of the Phoenix which caused it to be moved to the room of requirement (Rowling wastes nothing) creating a passage between the cabinet and its match in Borkin and Burke. Malfoy deploys the Dark Mark to lure the returning, and unbeknownst to him weakened, Dumbledore to the tower where he planned to kill him. But Draco gets caught up talking to Dumbledore, revealing more than he means to (in concert with the crying Malfoy we see and hear about earlier in the story) and we see his conflicted emotions about following through with an order he cannot see a way out of. It is important that Harry doesn’t believe Malfoy would have followed through with killing Dumbledore, he remembers and values the fact that when it came down to it, Malfoy had lowered his wand, and Snape was the one who killed an unarmed Dumbledore. We as the reader know that there was an unbreakable vow in place, but I don’t imagine that would have swayed Harry’s feelings about Snape’s actions.

Here is where Rowling communicates with her readers about betrayal and grief. We have grieved losses in the past two books, with the deaths of Cedric Diggory and Sirius Black, but the murder of Dumbledore is so much larger, so much more impactful to the endgame of the narrative. Everyone blames themselves: McGonagall, who blames herself for fetching Snape when she heard the Death Eaters had gotten into Hogwarts. Ron, Neville, and Ginny who had been standing guard outside the Room of Requirement. Hermione and Luna had been outside Snape’s office when Flitwick ran to tell Snape the news. It is in this that Snape’s betrayal rings most poignantly, that no one thought they couldn’t trust him, and the anger wells up in the reader. How could he possibly come back from this? Do we want him to?

The other side of the coin of Dumbledore’s death is the great grief it brings. Death is natural and inevitable. It’s what we lose that’s sad: it is the knowledge that you’ll never create new experiences with the person who is gone, that your relationship will now be entirely one-sided.  In the world of Harry Potter everyone must come to terms with the fact that their greatest source or support, their own talisman in human form, is no longer with them. It is one more enormous loss for Harry, who has now lost both of his parents, his godfather, and his mentor.

While I feel this novel is a treatise on love as an engine for acting in a heroic manner, it does not preclude the fact that this is a book about a bunch of young adults. Romantic love shows up in a big way. Ron and Lavender, Bill and Fleur, Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, Lupin (who is definitely a grownup) and Tonks. Your heart breaks when reluctant-to-be-loved Lupin says that Tonks deserves someone whole (something that must affect Harry’s decision to walk away from Ginny) and that now is not the time to be discussing this anyway, with Dumbledore dead. McGonagall disagrees, and delivers the line that started my tear-flow this time around.

“Dumbledore would have been happier than anybody to think that there was a little more love in the world.”

The book wraps up with Hermione’s news about the Half-Blood Prince. As is always the case, Hermione had been right all along – Eileen Prince was Snape’s mother, and he was proud of being half a Prince, the pure-blood side of this family. Harry still doesn’t understand why Dumbledore trusted him.

Our final event is Dumbledore’s funeral. Having attended more funerals than I care to think about, I thought Rowling handled the truth of the formality well. You go to have gone, but there is little comfort found in the ceremony.

Harry tells Ron and Hermione that even if they reopen Hogwarts, he won’t be coming back. Informing them that there are at least four more horcruxes, and that he has to destroy them if he has any hope of killing Voldemort. Ron says they’re coming with him, obviously, and Hermione agrees. Harry is shocked – and I don’t know if it’s because he was so wrapped up in his grief and anger, or how easily Ginny accepted that he could not stay in their relationship as it would put her in untold danger (which, still rubs me the wrong way more than a decade later if I’m honest. She’s in just as much danger by being a Weasley) or simply because he really did underestimate the depths of Ron and Hermione’s loyalty. I think he probably knew that if he asked them, they’d help him, but he didn’t think they would volunteer for this. Dumbledore knew the truth of these three when he instructed Harry to confide in them, and only them, at the beginning of their lessons together.

“You said to us once before,” said Hermione quietly, “that there was time to turn back if we wanted to. We’ve had time, haven’t we?”

Harry has to go back to the Dursleys one last time, because it is where he will be safest until his birthday, but then he’s off. Ron points out that he also has to go to the Burrow for Bill and Fleur’s wedding. Harry had almost forgotten, but the thought of it calms him, and us.

“…there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione.”

We’ll see how long that last golden day lasts soon enough.

As part of my series reread in the 20^th anniversary year of the publication of The Sorcerer’s Stone, this review is preceded by The Order of the Phoenix and followed by The Deathly Hallows in October.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read, where we read what we want, review it how we see fit (with a few guidelines), and raise money in the name of a fallen friend for the American Cancer Society

All About Love: New Visions (CBR8 #26 – Half Cannonball!)

I came to All About Love: New Visions via The Shared Shelf group over on Goodreads (its Emma Watson’s Feminist book club). I didn’t read the February selection, but I thought this one, the March selection, sounded like a good idea. Written in 1999, All About Love is a series of interconnected non-fiction essays by bell hooks where she endeavors to explain how our everyday understandings of giving and receiving love often fail us.

I’ll admit, I was left cold in the first few chapters. I feel that’s probably because I’ve already done a lot of work (not that there isn’t always more to do) about not accepting that which is not love, and choosing to live my life in the act of providing love to others, which hooks covers in her first three chapters. Hooks also writes about how the ideals surrounding what love is, and what we accept as love, are established in early childhood. For many, this might be the single most important take away from the book:  that abuse and love cannot coexist. It’s simultaneously a beautiful and heartbreaking statement, and the crux of much that comes after.

The chapters which most affected me most personally were in the middle of the book Chapters 8-10 provided the most moments for me to chew on. Whether it be how research is indicating that small, nuclear, patriarchal family units are unhealthy (I would love to find some follow up research to that idea 15 years out), or how so-called self-help texts of the era really just normalized a certain amount of sexism, I couldn’t help but feel that hooks was continuing to unpack big ideas, but sometimes her authorial voice wavered. When she was on, her voice felt like a revelation. But when her authorial voice is off, when she’s perhaps leaning too heavily on the works of others that have influenced her path of self-actualization, that’s when the book can feel sermon-like, and occasionally hard to swallow.

What I found really profound, and perhaps reaffirming of my own life, is that hooks challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t cover romantic love, there are a couple chapters which deal with it head on, but this work is about more than partnered love. However, her insights on that topic are also worth having a look at.

 “Few of us enter romantic relationships able to receive love.” (169)

“Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” (172)

“Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love.” (187)

Being that hooks set up her work to follow love through the process of life, it is natural that her book ends with chapters about loss and destiny. I have suffered the loss of many people in my life, including my father, so the chapters at the end of the book dealing with loss and healing were areas that didn’t resonate as strongly for me, since I was past or had gone through much of what hooks was discussing.

This book was read and reviewed as a part of the charitable Cannonball Read. 

Catching Fire (CBR5 #28)

You probably already know the plot of the book. By now, with the movie out, it’s well-known.

What I think I’d like to talk about in my review is the theme of love. I wrote a blog post almost two years ago about what I like to think of as pure love, and I think Katniss and her various relationships can explore that quite easily. Most, if not all, of her decisions are based on love.

One of my chief complaints about the movies (although I enjoyed the second so much more than the first) is that they don’t really get into Katniss’s difficulty with emotions.  They do a great job dealing with her fears for everyone’s safety, and that is evident on Jennifer Lawrence’s face every time her character has to think about those who are in peril thanks to her actions in the Games. But JLaw’s Katniss is not the emotionally unavailable Katniss I read in the books.

So let’s talk about the conversation that my group of friends of having, and I’m sure lots of groups are having right now too: Is this really a love triangle? I vote no.

I’ve always been firmly in the camp that Katniss does love Peeta from somewhere in Book 1 (sometime between training camp and finding him in the arena), but that it scares her. Because she had already decided that she would never marry and never have kids and Peeta is the kind of guy who is all about the marrying and the kids. I also agree that while she loves Gale it’s more like the love she has for her family. Katniss is fiercely loyal and loving of her family, as seen by the extent that she loves Prim. And even though their relationship is strained from her mother’s weakness following her father’s death that is still an incredibly strong bond of love. This is where her love for Gale fits, she loves him the way she loves her family. But because Katniss does not have the language to sort out these emotional differences, she sees it as a conflict to the love she feels for Peeta, which is the love that dominates most of her actions.

And because she is so unused to her own emotions she doesn’t know how to process them even as they are influencing every choice she makes. So, she makes herself content to put Peeta off to the side because 1) they share terrible memories and 2) she doesn’t want to hurt him any more than she already has. She goes back to Gale for reassurance and to ‘run’ because he’s the partner she knows in her normal life. But it’s all very complicated because Gale has the feels for her. It’s predominately one-sided.

So, not really a triangle, just a brilliantly complex layered look at love.

Moving on from that, my other complaints about the movie adaptation of the book include that there is no plant book interlude with Peeta, and that really robes some great character development from both of them. And, it’s criminal that the movies cut Madge, because that storyline, and the layers it adds to Haymitch, are some of my favorite stuff in the book.

Also, a growing part of me wishes these books were from Peeta’s POV.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read.

on pure love

Last weekend I had a bit of a movie kick. Really, it’s been all month-long. February tends to bring out the melancholy in me. I lost my dad over eight years ago, and the day of the year that I miss him the most is Valentine’s Day.                                                                                 

In my gloomy state I decided to rent a few of the movies that I couldn’t wait to watch on cable, and since I don’t have a Netflix account I hit up the Red Box. In the course of three nights I watched Crazy Stupid Love, 50/50, and Midnight in Paris. These movies have quite a bit in common, and perhaps even more that’s dissonant, but the overall theme that rang true for me, and which I was apparently looking for, was pure love.

Pure love is different from romantic love which was also present in all of these movies. Pure love, as I use the term, reflects the way we open our hearts to the people around us. It is my belief, and the way I live my life, that we are meant to open our hearts to each other. This may not be the first thing you think about when you think about the movie where Ryan Gosling’s abs look photo shopped, that cancer movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the one where Owen Wilson wanders his way into 1920s Paris. But it is what I think of when I reflect on them.

Crazy Stupid Love focuses on the unraveling life of Cal Weaver. The crux of this move is the love, perhaps the crazy, stupid love he feels for his family and the lengths he will go to in order to protect that family. The audience can also see the effects of his love in the actions undertaken by his children. Yes, there is a romantic love story here as well, several actually, but what stood out to me was the selflessness of the love Cal had for his family and the lengths he was willing to go for them. In 50/50 a similar dynamic is enacted, but in a very different arena.

When we meet Adam he is in a relationship that is already in decline, and by the end of the movie he is starting a new romantic relationship with Katherine, his former therapist-in-training.  But the most important arc in the story of Adam’s battle against cancer is perhaps that of Adam and Kyle his best friend, played by Seth Rogan with the insight which only having lived through a similar situation can provide. Kyle is loyal to Adam in ways that not many friends would be given the situation, and even though he doesn’t always show it, he loves Adam as if he was himself, and does what he can to protect him and care for him through the course of the cancer treatment. This is what true friendship based on a pure love for another looks like, even when it doesn’t always look pretty.

So how does Midnight in Paris line up with these other two? Midnight in Paris is the story of an American writer, Gil, disillusioned by the formulaic writing he has been producing for the movie industry and wants to write a novel, to create true art. It is his love affair with Paris, especially in the rain, and the mystic journey he takes back in time to his idea of the best time inParis’ history, the 1920s, that the audience witnesses the pure love he has for the artists of the day and the inspiration he draws from the exchanges he is allowed each night. Again, there is a romantic love arc, where Owen Wilson’s Gil falls head over heels for Marion Cotillard’s Adriana, but her infatuation with the grand epoch shows Gil that his own fascination with the roaring twenties and the ex-pat community cannot last, and that he must return to his own life, and go back to loving these artists from afar.

So what does it all mean? I don’t know. I know that depictions of pure love: love of family, the love of true friends, the love of art and culture and the desire to create are all great things and their value should not be overlooked. Especially in a world which is overly focused on romantic love.