Henny B-F-R
December 06, 2013 5:48 PM
A festive book club by Henny B-F-R
Henny was excited for the final meeting of the Book Club before Midterm. She knew people got a bit frazzled towards the end of term but luckily it was a short one, and also rather festive. Admittedly, the festive cheer to a while to get going and for the most part the story was... atmospheric. But the ending message, she felt, was clear and hopeful, and one that spoke to basic human tendencies and universal human emotions. That was why she hoped it would appeal to everyone, in spite of its Muggle author and perhaps its subsequent unrealistic portrayal of the supernatural. She really hoped people weren't going to split hairs over that, or see it as the main thing to talk about. She felt Muggle interpretations of magical things could be interesting, but that it was one thing to discuss the impact of the author's perspective on something and another to snigger over or disregard a work entirely just because someone got something wrong when they couldn't possibly be expected to know any better.“Welcome, everyone,” she greeted the members. She had moved the meetings to the MARS rooms as, with the resource available, it seemed silly to invade Professor Skies' space. The Prairie Elves had kindly laid out some suitably festive snacks. Gingerbread Christmas trees sparkled with little charmed sprinkles and there was hot spiced apple juice.
“So, what did we all think of A Christmas Carol?” she asked.
Subthreads: From a certain point of view.... by Alicia Bauer
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Henny B-F-R
A festive book club
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Alicia Bauer
December 12, 2013 5:21 PM
From a certain point of view.... by Alicia Bauer
Book club, for Alicia, was almost always a delicate balancing act to attend, and as she picked up a few cookies and used her copy of the book as a table for them once she sat down, she thought it was going to take even more concentration than usual to manage today. Pretty much everything about A Christmas Carol had been alien to her (she thought her difficulty could probably be best summed up the difficulty she’d had with the idea of a human accountant; she’d kept picturing Scrooge as a half-goblin and so reading things into his interactions with others she was pretty sure Dickens had not meant to put there), but she had still reacted to the book to the point of, the first time she read the Christmas Past sequences, flinging it on the floor before she got a grip on herself, and she did not want to disclose that to the rest of the group any more than she wanted to disclose her ignorance of Muggle finance and the Christian religion. They weren’t subjects she had any reason to know much about, but she had never much cared for others knowing anything she didn’t.Accordingly, she had taken care to put some distance between herself and the material. She had read it several times over, written copious notes, done additional research – made it about the text and how it was consciously designed to be manipulative, rather than about how it had very nearly manipulated her. She made it safe again.
“I’m sure we can all agree it wasn’t very subtle,” she said, a little dryly, when Henny asked what everyone had thought of the book. “Though I’m guessing that wasn’t really the purpose,” she added with a smile, to take the sting out of the comment. “In light of that, though, it did bother me, the – intervention model, I guess you could call it? Especially the future ghost."
She took a sip of the really very good juice to quickly order her explanation of her meaning. The world, she was quite sure, would end in a day if that day began with a worldwide lack of hot beverages; even Dickens had mentioned the smells of tea and coffee in the mouth-watering bit where Christmas Present showed Scrooge a market. Good drinks were, she thought, one of the hallmarks of civilization, if only because they helped keep people simultaneously relaxed and awake enough to be civilized. "I mean," she continued, "he’s still going to die sooner or later, so if he’s just being nicer so everyone’s very sorry when he does, I’m not sure how that’s such a reformation. I'd think the desire for grief was a selfish emotion, and even Fred points out he'd just make himself more comfortable if he weren't so tight-fisted. I thought some of that kind of thing could...sort of detract from what I think Dickens' message was supposed to be.”
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From a certain point of view....
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Julian Umland
December 23, 2013 3:21 PM
...You'll speak no word that is not true? by Julian Umland
Technically speaking, Julian knew her analyses would never be as accomplished as some of the others in book club, but being the best wasn’t her objective. She just felt like knowing there was a book club on campus and not attending it was somehow a betrayal of her mother, and to a lesser extent the rest of her family as well; it was hard, she thought, not to think that way when she had grown up used to every available inch of wall or table being covered in bound paper. Her dad wasn’t as obvious about it as her mom, but they were all readers to one extent or another. If they hadn’t been, she was sure the rest of them would have abandoned Mom and John years ago, leaving them to their obsessions while they all sought less wordy pastures. Book club was not so much as pastime as a point for her.It was, though, a pretty good pastime as well, she reflected as she finished off her first cookie and wondered if she could slip another two or three into a napkin without anyone noticing as the meeting came to order. Nineteenth-century Brit Lit wasn’t her favorite thing, but it beat many by a long shot, and while she’d had to dig out the dictionary for a few words here and there, A Christmas Carol had been close enough to the version she’d seen at a community theater once that she’d had no trouble understanding it. Or at least, she thought not, and she guessed it would become apparent quickly enough in the meeting if she was wrong about that.
Henny asked what they thought of it, and Alicia Bauer promptly made Julian wonder if she had, in fact, been following less than she’d thought.
“I think that’s sort of…over-reading the text,” she protested mildly. “I thought the idea was just that Scrooge needed help to see that he wasn’t so bad to start with – that he’d just gotten a little off-track. Because – “ Julian felt herself beginning to blush, but forced herself to keep talking – “no one really sees himself how he is, so we all need some help sometimes. And Dickens is trying to get us to look at ourselves…I think.”
She was pretty sure, actually, but holding an opinion was one thing and telling it to a sixth-year Aladren was a bit of another. Especially about something as...sappy-sounding as reformation and the meaning of Christmas. They were important ideas, but it was just awkward, at least for her, to talk about them like that. If they had been blood relatives, she thought she might have sometimes almost resented her brothers for getting all the gifts of gab in the family.
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...You'll speak no word that is not true?
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Henny B-F-R
December 24, 2013 10:21 AM
It's all a matter of opinion by Henny B-F-R
Henny smiled to herself as Alicia took the floor. She wasn't entirely surprised to find herself disagreeing, and rapidly trying to order her thoughts to counter her friend's argument. And that made her rather happy. It was one of the aspects of the book club, and of their friendship, that enjoyed most; that one could heartily disagree, or even play devil's advocate, in the interests of having a good and stimulating debate, and that this was generally regarded as a good thing. She was quite sure Alicia would never be cross with her for disagreeing with her in book club and that they both rather enjoyed the thrill of the discussion.She was impressed with Julian (whom she had a certain soft spot for, seeing as the girl was Charlie's friend) for speaking up though. For all that she, Henny, knew it was all in good fun, and made it all the more interesting to take differing points of view, she wasn't sure she'd have had the nerve to speak up to someone three years her senior, especially not someone so confident and impressive as Alicia. She gave the girl an encouraging smile.
“I think his desire not to be spoken ill of is only a small part of his reformation,” she interjected. “It's only really the last ghost that puts that before him and he's already a long way to changing by then – after all, he willingly and humbly goes with it, talking about wanting to learn the lessons it has to teach him. When he's with the Ghost of Christmas Present, he takes genuine delight in the merriment of others, and feels compassion for Tiny Tim. He's chastened when the ghost repeats his own words back to him about the poor getting on with dying to decrease the surplus population. Those are all private feelings and are also reasons for him altering his attitude. The future ghost just gives him one final warning but he's already undergone a lot of change by that point."
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Henny B-F-R
It's all a matter of opinion
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Alicia Bauer
January 06, 2014 2:54 PM
Some are more optimistic than others. by Alicia Bauer
Alicia listened, half-exasperated and half-amused, as first Julian (odd, really, how often the Teppenpaw girl seemed to appear on the periphery of Alicia’s social circle these days; she was in the library, and a friend of Henny’s brother, and here, too) and then Henny tried to refute her point. Their observations, though distasteful to her given what she knew would be the implications of the kind of self-analysis and reform the book promoted if she engaged in them, were valid about the text itself, but not quite, she felt, getting at what she’d been getting at.“You’re right that Dickens’ purpose is, overall, carried out,” she agreed with them. “He gets his message across – like I said, he’s not very subtle. I’m just questioning whether some of his tactics – not all, but some, you had a really good point about Tim, Henny – could undermine that message. Or if he’s deliberately trying to sneak in a second meaning about everyone having mixed motives….”
She said it lightly, but it was what she would have done if she’d been the type to write fiction, at least partially to mess with her readers but also because she thought it was really true. Almost every emotion, she thought, was on some level selfish, self-indulgent, engaged in because it made one feel good, even to the points where she would include misery and much self-sacrificing love. Misery, after all, encouraged one to wallow rather than doing something productive about one’s situation and to indulge one’s whims in attempts at momentary relief, and self-sacrifice just meant one would rather have it over with oneself than to go on without the other, even though it would presumably cause the other the grief one hoped to avoid oneself – at least most of the time. There was an exception, at least for her, but it was not at all a conventional situation and she really didn’t like to think about it anyway. For normal people, she held that love and altruism, though they led to sacrifice and were celebrated for it, were still basically selfish emotions, as everything had a price and those who indulged in those feelings, or were swept away by them, either enjoyed paying it or at least saw it as preferable to the alternative. There was no free lunch, as her father might have said.
“Of course, we can’t really answer that without bringing Dickens back from the dead, but I found it interesting to speculate on,” she admitted with a laugh. She had gathered she did not have a typical, outside of Aladren, maybe, idea of fun, but book club was the sort of place where such deviations from the norm were generally viewed with tolerance, so she wasn’t too worried about departing from the script here. She would lie about a book if she had to, but it was somehow more distasteful to her than the idea of lying in general. Ideas were meaningless in real life, but this was about books.
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Alicia Bauer
Some are more optimistic than others.
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