Anthropodermic Bibliopegy

October, the month for spooky and spine tingly and all other kinds of awesome creepy goodness.  It is also a time for learning...so here is a new term for most of you - Anthropodermic bibliopegy which is essentially the practice of binding books in human skin...ew.  Yep apparently not only are there actually books bound in the epidermis of homo sapiens, but there is an official term for it.

Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame 

This is a book that is actually bound in human skin.  How do we know this isn't just some sick Halloween prank?  Well science has confirmed it.  Don't believe me, read this article all about it.  There are other instances of human skin bound books, but I think I have done my duty.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Editing Humanity

I have finally finished that last book in the Divergent series, Allegiant by Veronica Roth.  All of my fellow bookies have been dying for me to finish this series so that we could talk about it.  I love all the various reactions to this book and how other people thought I would react to the book.  Some people thought I would love the ending, others thought I would hate it...in the end, as with this whole series I have mixed feelings.  As always SPOILERS, SO MANY HUGE DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU WANT ANY SENSE OF SURPRISE TO THE ENDING OF THIS SERIES, SERIOUSLY SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Ok, here we go with my new and improved shortened synopsis of this book.  As before we pick up right were we left off.  The factionless are now in charge and they are hellbent on revenge for all of their suffering through out the years.  Tris gets put on trial and using her super Divergent powers is able to resist the truth serum enough to get her and her friends set free.  Tobias pretends to break up with her so his mom (the factionless leader Evelyn) will continue to trust him, but really they just sneak out for almost sexy fun time.  They, along with their friends get recruited into Allegiant, a group dedicated to following the precepts of their ancestors, which includes reinstating the factions and sending the Divergents out into the world.  Of course our intrepid band gets chosen to set out into the big bad world including Tris, Tobias, Cara, Will, Christina, Uriah and Caleb who gets rescued from certain execution by Tobias.  Off our group goes and once they are outside the fence are almost immediately picked up by some former faction members who had either dissapered or supposedly died.  They pretty quickly learn that the video they found was mostly a lie to get the Divergent to come out of the city.  They are told that back a while ago people started messing with their genes to try and eradicate the bad stuff, selfishness, violence, cowardice, untrustworthiness, and

ignorance...sound familiar.  This led to people also losing the opposite of whatever they cut out...so selfless people had no sense of self preservation, truthfulness at the cost of tact and so on so forth.  Because all good dystopia's need a war the people with damaged genes fought the people with the pure genes, causing what is called the Purity war.  This lasted long enough and caused enough damage that the government could blame all the bad stuff on the people with the damaged genes.  This led to groups of what they call Genetically Damaged or GD's being put in sealed cities and treated with serums and experiments to try and fix the genes and then get them passed down to other generations...yeah it's supposed to make sense but never does.  Anyways when people are born with fixed genes they become Divergent, come out to the real world...and yeah.  So anyways in the real world it is found by our group that the GD's are very oppressed by the GP's (Genetically Pure).  The experiments are a big reason for the prejudice as all of the countries resources are being used to fund these experiments instead of rebuilding the country.  All kinds of chaos, and yet a whole lot of nothing occurs.  Near the end they find out that the leaders of the experiment are going to use a memory serum to wipe the memories of the people left in Chicago and start again.  Tris and her gang come up with a plan to stop this, while at the same time modifying the memories of the experiment leaders for a better world where both GD's and GP's can live in peace. Tobias goes and makes peace with his mother, and comes to terms with his father, stopping a potential massacre. In the end Tris takes the most risk and dies for it...yep Tris, the heroine dies...for real...I told you spoilers.  The risk pays off and everything goes as planned.  The country looks like it is one the right track, Tobias comes to terms with Tris's death and becomes a leader and they all attempt to live happily ever after.

So...here we are...at the end of this series and I have to try and figure out how to explain my feelings on this book and the series as a whole.  Lets start with the good, shall we?  I have fallen hard for Tris, Christina and Cara.  Christina is just awesome, loud, adventurous, smart, funny and deals with life in a fairly realistic, yet healthy way. Cara is a super smart person who has had to come to terms with her own humanity and grows in leaps and bounds through out the books, especially this one.  She also proves herself to be a fantastic leader.  Tris is just awesome, I wasn't sure at the beginning, but by the end of this book, so much love.  I think this last book is where I finally picked up on what I love about her...she is not a push over.  At one point in the book Tobias pulls his stupid double standard paternal crap and Tris calls him on it so hard I just wanted to kiss her.  Another time Tobias does something really stupid, after Tris tried time and again to talk to him and in the end she pretty much broke up with him over it...in a totally mature, hey this is not cool and I am not kissing a guy who refuses to respect or listen to me.  Of course they get back together before the end, but still, I feel Tris can hold her own against him.  I also feel Tris is a good window into humanity in general, she has strong moments, weak moments, funny moments, serious moments, hard moments, and crazy moment I just really like her. Props to the author for writing a wide variety of positive females.  The other thing I liked in this book is the realistic way the author killed a couple of good characters.  I love it when an author realizes that when you have a violent book...people die.  Uriah's death was a sad, slow brain injury instead of the normal sudden violent death which is awesome because it gave the other characters time to reflect and respond in a totally different way then normal.  Tris's death was significant because, well, she was the main character and her death made sense and brought home the real cost of rebellions.  I loved it.

On to the bad.  I hate Tobias.  In this book the author had the narration go back and forth between Tris and Tobias and I hated hated hated it.  Tobias came across as a whiny petulant 14 year old girl with a bit of angry 15 year old wanna be gangster boy thrown in just to really annoy everybody. I liked nothing about him, at all, not even a little bit.  I was excited to finally find out about the whats and whys of the whole Divergent thingy, but the explanation just did not work for me...or anybody who has gotten past third grade science.  It probably seems super nit picky, and I know I drone on and and on about it every time I review a book in this series, but seriously, it goes against human nature, it goes against science and it goes against all reason and as before, it ruins the premise for me.  There was not a lot of world building outside of there was a war, stuff was destroyed now there are the haves and have nots...makes me miss the Dauntless areas.  I also hate when reveals make the first couple books irrelevant, which this book seems to do.  There seemed to be a disconnect through out this book, a kind of feeling like I should care more about certain things then I did.  There is so much more about the serums, and how they worked, and how does one tell a GD from a GP unless you are holding their genetic results in your hand, and how does the genetic damage and repair even work, and so much stuff that probably only bugs me so I will end this here.  Overall I felt about this book how I felt about the series, I enjoyed a lot of the characters, but the world building, the premise and the story just did not ring true for me.  I give this book a 5 out of 10 truth serum.

How did you feel about this book compared to the overall series?  Does the lack of any sensible science in this book bug you anywhere near as much as it does me?   Am I sick and twisted to be happy when an author actually kills off a character in a meaningful, adept, realistic way?

Serum City

Well the curse of the second book strikes again.  Just finished reading Insurgent the second book in the Divergent trilogy and I have to say right up front, it was mostly pointless.  So many of the issues I had with the first book were just made worse by this second one and a lot of what I enjoyed in the first one was completely missing in this book.  Oh well let's get on with this shall we?  As always so many SPOILERS AHEAD!

When we last left our main girl, the Divergent Tris, she was escaping a mind controlled Dauntless slaughter.  Tris along with fellow Divergent, and current eternal love Tobias (also known as Four), his abusive and squirlley father Marcus, her Abnegation turned Erudite turned whatever brother Caleb and a couple of others make it to the Amity compound.  There they are welcome with if not exactly open arms, they are at least fed and clothed and given a bed.  Turns out that Tris is suffering from a bit of post traumatic stress syndrome from killing her friend and watching her parents die, this manifests itself in an inability to use a gun and a bit of a suicidal bent. This of course sets Tobias off in some sort of anger pattern, instead of trying to understand and help his girlfriend, he spends most of his time giving her non-helpful ultimatums about bucking up and getting over it.  Stuff happens and Tris overhears a conversation about some sort of mysterious information that Abnegation was trying to get out to the general public, but along came Janine (the Erudite leader who orchestrated the whole violent overthrow) who decided that the information should not be given out.  After a bit of an altercation, Tris is "punished" by being given a serum that makes her super peaceful and it is

revealed that everybody in Amity (probably unkowingly) eats a bread that is infused with this peaceful serum.  Amity holds a meeting and decides that they depend to much on Erudite to piss them off so they refuse to take sides.  Dauntless/Erudite storm the Amity compound and the group makes a run for it. The group makes it back to the city and find themselves with a group of factionless led by non other then Tobias's mother...yep not dead...though her story is a little sketchy.  She either ran away and abandoned Tobias, or was exiled by Abnegation, or something.  They find out that there is a high percentage of Divergents within the factionless and that they are understandably unhappy with the way things are run.  They leave the factionless and end up with Candor where more serum is given, in the form of a truth serum where everybody has to spill their guts about stuff that has nothing to do with anything in order to partake of the safe haven within Candor.  Tris admits she killed Will (even though she had no choice) and Tobias admits his dad beat him on a regular basis. Tobias is pissed that Tris kept a secret from him, but refuses to own up when Tris calls him out on his own secret keeping.  Tris and Tobias hook up with some of their Dauntless buddies before once again the traitor Dauntless/Erudite once again storm a compound.  This time they only kill random Divergent, everybody else gets a dart that injects a transmitter into their system, once again turning the non-Divergent into potential mindless soldiers.  Somewhere in here Tris decides to turn herself in to Janine for further testing so that Janine will quit killing people.  During her captivity Tris discovers that her brother is a traitor and has always been on Janine's side.  Tobias tries to come to her rescue but it takes an old enemy Peter to actually get them to escape.  Tobias, Tori and some other guy are elected Dauntless leaders after all the other leaders are either killed, captured or turned traitor and decide to ally themselves with the factionless to storm the 

Erudite compound and destroy all of their computers and gathered knowledge in an attempt to stop what ever it is they are trying to do.  Tris agrees to go with Tobias, but secretly makes plans with Marcus and a few others to try and retrieve whatever information it is her parents died for.  More chaos, more angst, more shooting.  Tris ends up in the security portion of Janine's secret lab and runs into another simulation...kind of.  She makes it to the inner sanctum only to find Tori holding Janine at gunpoint.  Tris tries to make Tori understand that they can't kill Janine until they get the info from her computer, but Tori doesn't listen and kills Janine.  Tobias comes in and agrees with Tori that Tris is a traitor (that was a lot of T's in that sentence), but Tris again calls him out on his bull headedness, reminding him that he is the one who said he loved her for her, and that the first time it was tested he bailed.  Tris is taken captaive, but Tobias actually listened and got Caleb to help him get the info they were looking for.  Meanwhile the factionless showed just how dumb everybody else is by getting all of their weapons, meaning to take over.  Before...or during...or after this happens the screens flick on and a video plays, showing images of violence and death and then a women saying something about locking everybody in the city to refind their humanity...but the problem was human nature...but the solution was the Divergents who were the epitome of human nature...and the Divergents should be set loose on the rest of the world to help them.  And that my friends was the end of book two.

As you have probably guessed this was not my favorite book.  So very many issues, so very few answers, but lets start with the good stuff so you know I actually read it with an open mind :-)  I think my favorite parts were any time Christina was on the page, she is by far my favorite character and seems to be the one who has the most realistic head on her shoulders.  She was pissed at Tris when she found out about Will, she eventually forgave Tris, but it took some time and not all at once, when faced with facts she thinks about them and makes her own decisions about things, and she is pretty funny. I loved it when Tris called out Tobias on all his double standard stupidness, especially at the end, I wanted to jump up and cheer.  I also appreciated how Tris was affected by all the death, not only of her loved ones, but the ones that she killed.  It goes so against her upbringing and she has had so little time to adapt to the Dauntless way of life that this seemed an appropriate reaction. Also I love the tree on the cover of this book. See there was a little bit of good stuff.  Now on to my issues.  My biggest issue is the same one I had in the first book, how the heck am I supposed to believe that humans only display one trait.  How am I supposed to believe anything the author says when she contradicts herself on the basic premise of the books.  We are told that Divergent's are

Divergent because they display more then one trait...but we are shown over and over and over confirmed non-Divergent's who regularly display more then one trait.  On that same line of thinking, any transfer would have to be Divergent by definition because they were raised in a different trait, but nobody suspects truth telling Christina of being Divergent...but Tris is because she knows how to be selfless?!  Makes no sense.  Does this mean any time anybody tells the truth that isn't in Candor they are automatically Divergent?   How many times does one have to hold open the door for another person in a faction not belonging to Abnegation before they are hunted down?  How does one distinguish between peace loving Amity and selfless Abnegation as many of the defining features are similar?  The factionless pose another interesting angle to this whole Divergent business as it appears that most of them could be considered Divergent, now I will give the author some credit for saying that there is a high percentage of Dauntless in the factionless.  That leads me to the ending of this book, I was warned that this is not most peoples favorite book, but the bombshell at the end is worth it. I did not think the ending was all that spectacular, I had suspected from the beginning that their was a reason behind the locked fence with nobody knowing what was outside it, so not really a bombshell.  The idea that this little experiment was because humans were too violent...well...we already are.  I thought it was funny that as the images of violence were flashing on the screen all I could think about was that is exactly what was happening inside the city, so no progress there.  I did not get what the experiment was, or what it was supposed to do, I was 

feeling of the nonsensical frustration I got when I was reading The Maze Runner series where the premise was just because and did not serve any real purpose.  The video stated that the Divergent's were supposed to have flexible minds, which to me means the people who were part of the experiment were drugged or something into strict factions (which may be backed up by all the serums that were used in this book) and that when people developed a resistance and became normal then they were ready to...do what I don't know. If the whole reason that the world got uncontrollably violent was human nature...then why do they want people who have proven to be the definition of human nature to be their saviors?  I don't get it.  Ok enough kvetching, I obviously have problems with the premise and a lot of the cool world building and Tris's development that I made the first book readable and almost enjoyable were very much missing in this book. I have heard rumor that the next book is much better...I sure hope so. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.  I give this book 5 out of 10 serums.

What did you think of this book?  What type of serum do you think we need to use on a regular basis?  What is the deal with second books?  Does anybody know Candor's function in this society?

Explaining The Unexplainable

Read an interesting short story yesterday in the collection Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears.  The story is called The Fox Wife by Ellen Steiber.  What really caught my interest (besides it being a good little story) is that she says she was inspired by medical accounts in Japan in 1892.  She took these records and married them with the kitsune lore in Japanese culture.  The point of this being that before people knew about certain illnesses, especially of the mental variety, many times they were attributed to something magical.  Since I find the human body and mind fascinating, and I love reading I decided to do some digging around and see if I could find some other common threads in the illness/magic realm  (yeah that didn't quit make sense to me either).  As I was digging around, I found many instances where historians, doctors, researchers and bloggers with too much time on their hands have found lines linking folklore, fairy tales, and legends to real life diseases, illnesses and injuries.  Here are a few examples.

Changelings/Autism- It is amazing how closely the symptoms of autism (especially the more sever forms) match up with old descriptions of changelings.  Imagine that you have this lovely child that seems to be perfectly healthy, then one day you start to notice your once loving child refuses to be touched.  The child pulls away from it's family, has outbursts over the oddest things, seems to hyper-focus on seemingly pointless tasks.  With no frame of medical reference, it would make sense to feel that your child had been replaced by a strangers baby.  Other illnesses that tend to manifest in childhood may also have contributed to the changeling myth.  What I personally find so fascinating about these clear descriptions of autism (excuse me while I climb my up on my soap box for a moment) is that it seems to point towards autism being around for a lot longer then people think.  I know many a child that has not been immunized because somebody convinced them that autism wasn't around until we started immunizing our kids, or that autism is new and contingent on pollution and environmental factors.  While certain environmental factors may play a role (we still don't know a lot about autism) stories about changelings and their dead on descriptions show us that in all probability kids have been afflicted with autism for much longer then anybody realizes, and definitely long before immunizations (getting down of my soapbox now).

Epilepsy/Demonic Possession - Anybody who has had, or witnessed a seizure can tell you it is pretty terrifying.  As an EMT I have dealt with many many many seizures and every time it hits you how crazy it looks.  We know for the most part what causes seizures, but can you imagine back before we had a name and a cause for it, seeing a person just start contorting, flailing, uttering strange sounds, eyes rolling into the back of their heads.  It is no wonder that people were convinced an evil spirit had taken possession of a loved one.  It got even worse when a person had a disease like epilepsy that caused seizures on a regular basis.  It's one thing for a person to suffer one seizure (caused by a high fever or extreme illness), but then be "rid of the demon" and never have another episode.  It would be quit another back in the day to continue these seizures even after a ceremony to excise the demon.  This also lead to a lot of unnecessary incarcerations and even deaths.

Ergotism/Witchcraft-Who would have thought something as innocent as rye flour could be a possible cause for the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials?  Among the usual jealousy, over zealousness, and greed which is really all a group of people really need to persecute their fellow man, a theory that a crop of rye may have been infected with a fungus that when consumed produces some very interesting effects.  There is an LSD like hallucinogen affect for some people.  A person could suffer from debilitating stomach pains, akin to being stabbed in the belly (which many "victims" of the "witches" described during the trial"  There may be sores, neurological issues, and mania.  Any time a large number of people had unexplained pain or illness, they just attributed it to witchcraft, because really what else could it be.  The biggest problems came when there was no obvious cause for the pain, if I accidental cut myself and see it bleed and feel the pain, it is not witchcraft, if my stomach feels like somebody is stabbing it, but I don't see any marks or can find no cause, then it might be witchcraft. It is interesting to see in history how people can take even the most minor of things and blow them out of proportion.

Oh man there are so many more of these especially when you start dealing with things like schizophrenia, OCD, porgeria, just so many illnesses that we now if nothing else can name as a scientific disease.  This is why it is so important to keep writing stories and keep reading books, it gives us a glimpse into the past and shows us that we are dealing with some of the same things today as people did hundreds of years ago.  It will be int resting in 100 years for future humanity to read our books and stories and say "hey I think they were talking about (insert name of some undiscovered ailment here), can you believe this is what they thought it was?"  Humans have a need to have an explanation for everything, especially when things go wrong. Before we had science and wide spread education, people used magic to try and explain the unknown. Thinking over some of the more contemporary books I've read, I think this generation tends to write about more intangible illnesses, mostly of the mental variety.  Liar is a good example of a modern folk lore take on a potential mental illness.  It is written in the same feel and style as a way to explain something that may not yet be explainable.

What diseases/illnesses do you recognize in your favorite folk tale?  What diseases do you think future generations will look back at us and shake their heads over?  Do I read way to much into simple stories?