Wednesday, December 17, 2025
Read a bit more than last year, but still not a lot.
The last one was James, it won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and I like it. In Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there's a runaway slave, Jim, who shared some time with Huck on his adventures. James the novel told the point of view of Jim or James (as he chose his name to be), how he got to be with Huck on some parts of that "adventure", as well as his contemplation of self, being a slave, being black, white people and slavery. Now, I didn't really know much about the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though most probably I had watched his story with Tom Sawyer here and there on TV growing up. When I think about Huckleberry Finn and a river, I would think about the song Moon River, imagining him and Jim on the river with the moon. Google told me the song is actually not really about Huckleberry Finn at all. So anyway I had to read Wikipedia first to get a baseline of what happened to Huck during his adventures.
Off the bat with the book, we learn how the slaves code-switched and they taught this skill to their kids. The dialogue when they spoke to white people took some time for me to understand as I read them and after awhile I got it. James was actually a very knowledgeable person, very well-read, but in his role as a slave he had to play dumb because as the slaves pointed out this would make white people comfortable and comfortable white people were safer for them. Not just how to speak, but also how to act, how to convey information to a white person without directly addressing them. Another theme that plays a key in the novel is the idea of passing - mixed race people appearing white enough that they pass as white people. I had watched a movie about this, but I had difficulty picturing these people in my mind when I read the novel. There's one key revelation that got me saying, hold up, wait, what!?!? It was actually already hinted in earlier chapter, but I didn't catch it until it was explicitly said. I was as stunned as Huck when we're told about it. That got me googling the legality of creating such radical backstory for characters from a published work, but before I did that, I remember that most probably the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is in public domain. Google told me yes indeed, so I guess you can go ahead adapt the work as you like. My additional unrelated thought was this was also how Wicked could happen; the original work it's based on is in the public domain. Anyways, one can argue James' ending was a good one, but there's a lot of tragedies along the way. I could dwell on the bad things, but a slave getting his freedom in his own terms, that's like the ultimate, right. Though somehow I feel James himself would continue to feel the weight of those tragedies for the rest of his life. If there's one thing that I'm disappointed about was that the last we see of James and Huck together was not enough for me, especially considering what we learn about them - that kinda made me worried about Huck, but this book is really not about him.
So for now, I am reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It's a thinner book compared to James; normal people will finish it in one week or maybe even 3 days and yet I don't think I can finish it before this year's end. It tells the stories of astronauts in a space station and so far I like it because of the way it makes me learn and picture new things in my head. The astronauts need to keep the same 24-hour day in the space station even though they don't have the same daylight markers as us on earth. In their 24-hour day they would see the earth having 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets - time moves fast for them and yet they have to ground themselves to Earth time. I don't know if it's because I am reading this book but I got to thinking of the markers of my days. My day-to-day is governed by 2 terms. There's a feeling of winding down in December where I feel like I could relax a little, breathe a little, and yet my anxiety and melancholy are already filling dread in me thinking of when January comes, we need to again spin fast for a new term to begin. I think of the life before this and I think maybe before without the distinct terms governing my days, I was perhaps not as depressed (though still in general depressed) and fearful about facing January *sigh* For the past few years I have ended the year thinking how I don't think I could do another year and here we are staring the end of this year and it's kinda amazing that it seems like I could actually make it - praise be to God. Apology for being this dark, I do hope that's not what you experience. Happy holidays everyone, may the new year be great for you all.
:) eKa @ 5:25:00 PM •
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