The Book Eaters

After I finished reading Ariadne yesterday, I picked up The Book Eaters.

It took me three weeks to read Ariadne. I was savoring it, and I didn't want it to end. I read it slowly and leisurely.

It took me less than a day to read The Book Eaters. I couldn't put it down, and I had to find out what happened next.

It was a fantastic fairy tale.

I particularly liked the beginning. The juxtaposition of nonsense with a no-nonsense attitude is fantastic.

"These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter."

Besides, I can totally relate to the need for all three of these things.

However, it seems she is not completely human. I cannot relate so much to that:

"There were so many things to remember when she was out and around humans. Feigning cold was one of them. Thinking of it, she drew her coat tight around her, as if bothered by the chill. Walking with sound was another. She scuffed her feet with deliberate heaviness, grinding gravel and dust beneath her heels. Big boots helped with the plodding tread, made her clunky and stompy like a toddler in adult wellies. 

Her vision in darkness was another awkward one. Having to remember to squint, and to picker her way across a detritus-littered pavement that she could see with perfect clarity; having to feign a fear she never felt, but which should have ruled her.Solitary human women walked with caution in the night. 

In short, Devon had always to act like prey, and not like the predator she had become."

I also love books:

"Biblichor," Uncle Aike liked to say, rolling the word in his mouth. "That is a word that means the smell of very old books. We love biblichor, here. And other old things."

This is the best the grass is always greener on the other side statement I have ever read:

"Maybe this was what is felt like to be human and normal, if such a thing as "normal" existed, even among humans. Was this a life she would have wanted? So impossible to judge. The world was a series of fenced-off fields, each patch of grass categorically greener than its neighbors."

This is a very deep look at how we cope with disaster and failure by largely ignoring our problems:

"But if Devon talked about any of that, then she'd have to talk about how you really could get used to anything, with enough time and motivation; how her crimes swiftly dwindled from horrific and extraordinary to a facet of her everyday reality. 

She had worked out at some point that this was how the Easterbrooks conducted their trafficking without breaking a sweat; how the patriarchs overlooked the suffering and servitude of the mother-brides they destroyed; how humans could continue to exist in an infrastructure of misery. Trauma became routine, and cruelty mundane. Just life, innit."

The History of Photogen and Nycteris reminds me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

"The concept of outside didn't exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her.

 The story's complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. 

Princesses like that couldn't be rescued.

Devon's last thought before falling asleep on the bus was to wonder if actually, she'd had it the wrong way around. Maybe everyone was living in a cave, and Nycteris was the only person smart enough to recognize it."

The ending of the book was satisfying, but it left plenty of room for a sequel. I hope there will be one.