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The Graveyard Book

By Neil Gaiman

I cannot remember what English teacher of mine told me that creativity is taking other people’s ideas (because it’s assumed that every idea has already been thought of) and turn it into your own, and that’s exactly what Neil Gaiman was able to do with The Graveyard Book. Taking inspiration from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Neil Gaiman created an amazing story (a bildungsroman to be precise) where the setting is obvious based on the title, a graveyard. The reader follows the life of Nobody Owens, an innocent boy who is being hunted down by a man named Jack. Nobody goes on several trips that even involve going into the world of ghouls. 

I am sad to say that this is the first book of Neil Gaiman that I have ever read because the story captivated so much that I finished the novel in less than a day.

Experience: Imaginative and wonderful

Recommended: certainly

#neil gaiman #bookclub #fiction

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Purity Myth

By Jessica Valenti

By providing shocking statistics and examples of how the concept of virginity significantly damages American women, Valenti proves that purity is nonsense. The most shocking examples include purity balls which are federally funded events where daughters swear to be “pure” until marriage; the argument that giving women vaccines against STI’s will lead them to be promiscuous; and the argument that giving contraceptives to women will lead them to be sex workers. Valenti debunks all of these with rudimentary logic and even quotes Bill Maher to further prove her point: “I like what Bill Maher said. ‘Just because you give kids tetanus shots does not mean that they’re gonna go around getting cut by rusty nails.’” And to prove that the virginity movement is based on myth, she brings forth an example that presumably brings the following thought: if they have such a problem with women having access to contraceptives, why is there not an issue with older men getting viagra? Women can’t get birth control pills but older men can get an erection even after this supposed God they follow doesn’t want them to anymore?

Out of this incredible book, the detail I loved the most was her voice. She always made satirical comments and wrote as if it were a conversation. Because of this, it allows her to further prove her argument by using wild comparisons that are meant to sound wild but once thought of don’t sound so wild but rather realistic.

Interesting Quotes:

“In the eyes of the virginity movement, feminism promotes the idea that women should be exactly like men.”

“In the world of the virginity movement, ‘femininity’ is synonymous with submissiveness and girlishness.”

“Let’s face it -- the beauty queens and young girls touting virginity pledges are simply purity porn stars. Whether it’s actual porn or mythologized purity, the end goal is to be deisrable to men, and what women may actually want for themselves, sexually or otherwise, is lost.”

Experience: positive

Recommended: absolutely 

#feminism #bookclub

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Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

This is a wake-up call for all feminists out there! 

In this book, Ariel explains how the feminist movement took a wrong turn. One of the major incentives for the feminist movement was to show that women are people, not objects that can be taken advantage of. However, in recent years, women have begun to embrace the philosophy they themselves tried to remove which she refers to as Raunch Culture. A lot of her arguments are based on interviews or her own anecdotes, but a lot of them can be related to. For instance, in the second to last chapter, Pigs in Training, she explains how female adolescents are embracing this culture and how it has become pervasive throughout the country. I can relate to that because I have seen many teenage girls dressing precociously, but when asked about their incentive, the majority of them are either offended or insulted. An issue that I did find in this book was the fact that it imposed a double standard on women’s sexuality: a woman can either be promiscuous and raunch or embarrassed an introvert. I do believe that there is a middle ground rather than just two choices. Now she does attempt to make it clear (although not all the way) that being on the promiscuous side of the spectrum is not wrong, but that is not an excuse to embrace the notion that women are just objects. 

Experience: Positive

Recommended: Yes

Interesting Quotes:

“Between 1992 and 2004, breast augmentation procedures in this country went from 32,607 a year to 264,041 a year -- that’s an increase of more than 700 percent.”

“Throwing a party where women grind against each other in their underwear while fully-clothed men watch them is suddenly part of the same project [feminist movement] as marching on Washington for reproductive rights.”

“The proposition that having the most simplistic, plastic stereotypes of females sexuality constantly reiterated throughout our culture somehow proves that we are sexually liberated and personally empowered has been offered to us [women], and we have accepted it.” 

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god is not Great

by Christopher Hitchens

In this book, Christopher Hitchens debunks nearly every aspect of religion and proves why it is man-made rather than divine. He mainly touches upon Christianity, but he does cover other religions by using anecdotes and historical evidence. Now, of course, this topic is not something everyone is comfortable talking about, but anyone could look up the evidence he uses online and it pops up easily. Thus, his arguments are even stronger. For instance, he speaks about how the Vatican once said that condoms and other contraceptives can spread AIDS. If one were to look it up, the video of Cardinal Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo saying that instantly appears. Out of all the arguments he debunked that argue that religion should be believed, my favorite one was the fact that many believers use the designer argument. He proves that argument wrong ardently and then gives the reader a much better explanation with a lot of witty jokes and intellectual humor.  

Recommended: Yes, ardently.

Experience: Eye-opening

Interesting Quotes: 

“We [atheists] do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way).”

“But within the ‘Judeo-Christian’ world also, there are those who like to fantasize about a final conflict and embellish the vision with mushroom-shaped clouds. It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.” 

“How can it be proven in one paragraph that this book was written by ignorant men and not by any god? Because man is given “dominion” over all beasts, fowl, and fish. But no dinosaurs or plesiosaurs or pterodactyls are specified, because the authors did not know of their existence, let alone of their supposedly special and immediate creation... most important, in Genesis man is not awarded dominion over germs and bacteria because the existence of these necessary yet dangerous fellows creatures was not known or understood.” 

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12 Rules for Life

If anyone likes to be given contradictory advice while occasionally being insulted and having to dig through a lot of jargon, this book is for you. This self-help book is (evidently as the title says) composed of 12 rules that the author recommends you follow in order to live a more serene life. However, his arguments always tend to go off tangent (in the first chapter he talks about lobsters when the rule is Stand up Straight With Your Shoulders Back) and at the end of every chapter, he attempts to loosely connect a thread through all topics he discussed in this said chapter in order to conclude with a logical and original idea. Although a lot of his views are leaning to the conservative side of politics, there are some ideas that many people can agree with rather than just his intended audience.          Furthermore, he does provide endnotes to make his arguments more compelling, but he does so at the wrong time: for instance, he provides a lot of endnotes when he talks about lobsters but not when he is assuming something about overall society as he does in the last few rules. It is in those cases that empirical or statistical evidence is needed to prove his argument.

Recommended: only to specific people but not everyone indubitably

Experience: ambivalent and occasionally irritating

Interesting quotes:

“Even when the modern atheists opposed to Christianity belittle fundamentalists for insisting, for example, that the creation account in Genesis is objectively true, they are using their sense of truth, highly developed over the centuries of Christian culture, to engage in such argumentation.” - Rule 7 (12 Rules for Life)

“Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.” - Rule 9  (12 Rules for Life)

“In many households, in recent decades, the traditional household division of labor has been demolished not in the least in the name of liberation and freedom. That demolition, however, has not left so much glorious lack of restriction in its wake as chaos, conflict, and indeterminacy.” - Rule 11  (12 Rules for Life)

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No one wants advice, only corroboration.

John Steinbeck