Room and My Best of 2013 List

Alright.  I'm slacking.  I promised I wouldn't in 2014.  Maybe I never said it on the blog, but I promised it to myself.

On that note, what is the point of me making New Year's resolutions?  They never pan out.  Every year I vow to fix my posture, get in shape, do my dishes as I use them instead of letting them pile up into a dish nightmare (*sigh), walk my dog more for both of our health benefits, floss every day, wear my retainer when I should and not just twice a month so that it hurts like my head is giving birth (that may be a slight exaggeration.  I've never given birth, so that's just what I imagine it might feel like.  haha), use my gym membership for something other than yoga...

And it never happens, although I have flossed every day this year so far! I did not make it a resolution though.  Just in case.

Anyway, I should really stop slacking off.  My ranting about resolutions was not some little greeting to get you nice and comfy to settle in, thinking how nice it is to read about a real, live person who has already given up the resolutions this early in the year and make you feel soooo good about keeping yours in line...  Uhh, no.  It is me procrastinating from writing about Room by Emma Donoghue.  Surprise!

Anyway... Let me first say that this book was bombin'!  In a previous post when I declared this to be our next read (Lord, that was a while ago), I explained that I was cleaning my bookshelves up and flipping through lots of books to decide the next read and how this one's short two-page glimpse that I had given all of the others became a 20 page glimpse at an alarming rate.  So I knew.

Room is unlike anything I have ever read.  And if you plan to read it and haven't yet, I suggest that you stop reading this post now.  Really.  Now.  I can't talk about even the premise of the book without posting spoilers.  But I'll post a little summary anyway.

This is the story of a little boy who has known nothing but dysfunction.  Really, nothing.  He is the product, essentially, of rape, but let's back up.  Room is about five year old Jack who lives with his Ma in a sound-proof garden shed.  He has never been outside of it.  He was born in it.  He was conceived in it.  Jack has never met another human being, apart from his Ma.  He has heard only one other person, Old Nick, his Ma's captor, who comes to the shed in his backyard regularly to provide basic necessities for Ma and Jack and to get his sexual fill from Ma. Jack is hidden away in Wardrobe each night as the only protection Ma can manage from Old Nick.  But it is apparent that she has all but given up on keeping away from Nick herself.  In her tv interview later in the book, I found sense in it when she said Jack was her absolute everything, that she felt saved when he was born because she mattered again and that this made her be polite and agreeable to her captor so that Jack would be kept safe.   

Room, as Jack calls it, is normal to him because it is all he has ever known.  They are provided with a tub, food and means of heating it, clothing, and a television.  Ma protects Jack by leading him to believe that everything (houses, news stories, dogs, trees, airplanes, etc.) on tv is make believe and basically that they alone are real in a little room floating through space.  Though escape seems impossible and Ma has tried many means of it throughout her years of imprisonment in Room, she still has small, hopeless rituals she clings to including flipping the light on and off at night so that it may be seen in the skylight, screaming as loudly as they can at the ceiling at certain times of the day, etc.  It's been a long, terrible imprisonment for Ma, but they do find a means of escape not too awfully far into the book (or at least it didn't seem far to me while I sped through it!)

I found the emotions of the book to be very raw and realistic.  I can't imagine how depressed and scared and lonely I would be if I were Ma.  It's amazing how much she loves Jack and the daughter she lost before him though the father of her children is a twisted villain kidnapper and rapist.  Jack is still her saving grace and her reason to live.  I totally understood her having "gone" days when she didn't even get out of bed, but most of the time she was lively, making the best of the horrible situation by playing with her son, exercising with him, teaching him, and practicing an enormous amount of patience.

I wouldn't say that I was annoyed by these bits or really disturbed either; I understood them, but I guess they made me uncomfortable.  And by these, I mean the breastfeeding and Jack keeping Ma's rotten tooth in his mouth.  Okay.  There was no need to stop breastfeeding, as Ma later explains to her own mother, I believe.  I get that.  It was a connection to her son who needed her and depended on her alone.  It was closeness and provision, protection.  But that does not mean I enjoyed reading about "the creamy left" a thousand times.  (But again, in the interview Ma does, she sheds light to me:  "In this whole story, that's the shocking detail?")  I get the tooth thing, too.  Jack saw his mother's rotting teeth as her falling apart.  If he lost that bit of her, that's just it, he would be losing her bit by bit.  And so he tried to protect her in this way.  But... gross.

Great job, Ms. Donoghue, on Ma's explanations and patience with Jack when she finally confesses that Room is not all there is, that Outside exists with grass and people and animals and cars and buildings and oceans...  In Jack's stagnant life, it is only natural that he would fear change.  I have no idea how I'd explain the world to someone who has never been outside of one tiny room, never looked out a window, let alone a child who already has a limited capacity and still needs basics explained to him.  It's insane.

I was so stressed out when Jack was running down the road during the escape.  I was so worried when the paper Ma wrote was ruined, that he would never see her again because he didn't know where she was.  I was afraid Nick would go back and kill her before they found her.  And when I found out about the daughter Ma had been carrying before Jack, it was devastating.

The return to Room was hard on me, too.  And again, I get it.  Jack needed it.  Ma, though she hated it, probably needed it, too.

I don't claim to know everything or anything about gender roles, but it was interesting to me to see Jack had so many feminine characteristics.  His long hair had him mistaken for a girl a few times after the escape.  He was obsessed with Dora the Explorer and didn't care that the backpack or whatever was pink/a girl's pack.  He just wanted it because Dora was someone he knew and loved.  He is sensitive and intuitive, which I consider to be more feminine traits as well.  Since he had no knowledge of the masculine, it was fitting.  The long hair was another part of him that, in their captivity, Ma saw no need to change.  She also may have been clinging to some memory of the daughter who perished by allowing Jack's hair to grow long.  However, Jack's favorite stories were not girly ones of princesses, but of Jack Jack the Giant Killer and other masculine rescue stories.  Interesting.

What did you think of the book?  I could not put it down.  I'm definitely going to read it again one day.  I'd probably give it a pretty high score like a 9 out of 10 even.  It was that interesting, gripping, different, and well done in my opinion.


And now, my best of 2013 list.  I don't want to put them in order of what was the best and what was the worst, so I shall award them in categories, like the Oscars.  haha  Here are some of my notable reads of 2013:

Book I am proudest to have read in 2013: The Stand by Stephen King.  Not only was I afraid to read it because STEPHEN KING, but it is supremely long.  I think my copy was close to 1130 pages.  SMALL PRINT.  But really, it was a magnificent read that I'll never forget.  Graphic, startling, upsetting, but magnificent.

Book Sale Best: Moloka'i by Alan Brennert.  I'd wager that nearly half of the books I own (and almost 100% of the books I've acquired since moving to SC) have come from book sales.  At this particular sale, a girl near me amid the crowded shelves handed me this book and told me I would not regret reading it; that it was her very favorite book.  It's not the best book I have ever read in my life, but it was a good, easy read.  It's about a little Hawaiian girl who contracts leprosy and is sent to the quarantined colony on the island of Moloka'i.  I might have liked it more for the Hawaii scenery than what was actually going on.  Gosh, I miss my family.

Page Turner of the Year: It's a tie.  Room by Emma Donoghue and The Help by Kathryn Stockett take the cake, but Honorable Mentions should go to The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin and White Oleander by Janet Fitch.

Smilemaker: Kyle bought me all of the Little House books in 2013.  I had never read them before!  When Laura got engaged, I could not stop smiling.

Tearjerker: Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper.  Trust Cooper and her cat stories (whether memoirs of fictitious) to get my waterworks going.  Good, bad, and ugly. 

I'm not including some of the books on the blog if they were rereads.  Therefore, I'm sad to say that Peter Pan and The Dogs of Babel are disqualified from awards.