Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

My sad books only book club (go, Debbie Downers!) recently read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005), the second Ishiguro book I've read (after The Remains of the Day).

I'm going to go with the idea that most people have either read this book or seen the movie, but if you haven't and you care about spoilers, there are some spoilers ahead.

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are childhood friends at an exclusive boarding school in the English countryside called Hailsham. We see their spats and friendships and growth through the eyes of our narrator, the grown up Kathy. While much seems just like you would expect it to be, little things start sticking out as strange, and Kathy's adult perspective hints that this isn't a normal boarding school. No one has any parents, they learn that none of them can have children, and from rumors and things the Guardians have said, everyone becomes aware that they need to stay very healthy because when they grow up their organs will be harvested for transplants. They spend a lot of their time making artwork and writing poetry that is sometimes collected up and taken away. No one ever leaves the grounds of the school. Ruth and Tommy become a couple, and Kathy and Ruth stay close friends (even though Ruth seems very hard to be friends with), but nothing is ever as relaxed as it could be, especially since adulthood is a kind of mysterious obligation.

When the children become teenagers they follow the footsteps of other Hailsham residents and move into The Cottages where they have a little more freedom and mix with other people their age that didn't grow up in a boarding house. The love triangle relationship between the three friends continues to complicate, with the added pressure of really living into their reality as clones (because that, we learn, is what they are). All the residents of The Cottages ultimately seem to voluntarily isolate themselves and then slide into their training as Carers (who shepherd around other clones through the surgery and healing process), and donors, who have 3 or maybe 4 operations before "completing."

As adults, all three try to be Carers, but only Kathy really has the disposition for it. And she is very good at it. So good, in fact, that she is sometimes allowed to choose her own patients. This allows her to get back in touch with Ruth and Tommy, both of whom have had multiple operations. The love and friendship between the three of them reblooms and things come to a head when Kathy and Tommy try to find a loophole in the life of a clone so that they can be together. Since we read this for the sad book book club, I guess you can imagine how things end up.

I saw the movie before reading the book, so I was already in on the conceit from the beginning. That let me pick up on a lot of things that I might have missed if I was reading it with fresh eyes, but I'd be interested to see how it reads for someone who wasn't familiar with the plot going in.

A quick Google search shows me that I've read Ishiguro's two most popular books, but I'd really like to check out some of his other, less hyped, books as well. In both this book and The Remains of the Day we have a solitary narrator looking back at their life with studied and controlled regret. We can't believe everything they say and, for Kathy especially, they don't even know if they are remembering things right themselves. That distance and doubt makes for a very compelling narration. There is something cool and studied about Ishiguro that really draws me in as a reader, and I'm wondering if that holds true in his other, less single-character novels.

Managing Copyright in Higher Education: A Guidebook by Donna L. Ferullo (2014)

I read a copy of Managing Copyright in Higher Education: A Guidebook by Donna L. Ferullo (2014), since I do a lot of the copyright management at my work.

Ferullo's book is useful in that it covers aspects of copyright management outside of library / classroom use, which is unusual for this kind of book. Ultimately, however, I didn't find it to be very readable or easy to access as a reference text.

The book is divided into sections by area of administration (students, faculty, staff, etc.), and while there is an index, the large chunks of text without many section dividers or bullet points, makes the content a little hard to digest or refer back to later.

I was particularly confused about the author's choice to include an illustration of the three branches of the federal government (something that didn't really need to be illustrated anyway) with a figure taken from kids.gov. For a book with hardly any illustrations, graphs, or figures at all, this particular illustration seemed random and ill-suited to the audience.

Someone without much of a background in copyright would likely find some helpful tips in this book, but as someone who has done a lot of reading and taken some classes on the topic, I didn't find much here that I could use.

Rick Steves' Pocket Amsterdam by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw (2014)

As part of our first-ever European travel and extremely exciting trip to Belgium this summer, we are going to do a quick one overnight trip to Amsterdam with our friends. In preparation for something like 36 hours in Amsterdam, I thought I'd get a guidebook, but one that matched the amount of time we'd be spending in that fair city. Rick Steves' Pocket Amsterdam by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw (2014) fit the bill perfectly.

Although you really could fit this guidebook in your pocket if you really wanted to, Steves manages to cram it full of a lot of information and not make anything seem too skimpy. Generous with maps and color photographs, the guide gives an overview of attractions, walking tours through various neighborhoods, and a pretty helpful seeming set of tips and recommendations.

Amsterdam seems lovely, and while I'm sure I could happily spend much more than 36 hours there, this guidebook should help me make the most of the hours I've got. [And, because I'm a nerd, I'm going to spend at least part of one of those hours here.]

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)

Our latest DAFFODILS selection is the uncharacteristically classic novel The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860), and I'm not sad about that at all since I really liked Adam Bede and Silas Marner and I wrote a paper on George Eliot's life when I was in college.

The Mill on the Floss follows the tragic saga of the Tulliver family, with a focus on the daughter, Maggie. Mr. Tulliver owns a mill that has been in his family for generations. He married well to the mildest of the regionally respected Dodson sisters, and they have two children, Tom and Maggie. He is reasonably successful, but for a unclear reason that seems to be a mixture of pride and foolishness, he recklessly pursues legal action against his neighbors and a combination of his recklessness and the determination of a local lawyer, Mr. Wakem, he ends up losing the mill, his health, and nearly all his pride. Maggie and Tom had, up to this point, had a pretty idyllic childhood. Maggie is curious and clever (really too clever for a girl) and adores her older brother, who is more practical and less imaginative than his sister. They spat and make up and get in various kinds of trouble, generally stemming from Maggie's wild emotions and creative ideas. There is more than a little Anne of Green Gables going on with young Maggie. Prior to losing the mill, Mr. Tulliver pays to send Tom to study with a nearby churchman, at whose house Mr. Wakem's hunchbacked and sensitive son, Philip, also studies. The two very different boys fight a bit, but Maggie is fascinated by the gentle and bookish Philip. All that ends when the mill is lost and Tom must seek his fortune to pay his father's debts and save the family name.

Maggie devotes herself to a life of isolation and denial, but her passionate and headstrong nature doesn't keep her there for very long. Ultimately she finds herself grown up and very beautiful, though inexperienced. Her lovely and wealthy cousin Lucy invites her to stay with her for a summer and there she meets Lucy's suitor Stephen, and they unexpectedly fall in love. The last third of the book hinges on Maggie's tug of war between the head and the heart, although her ultimate decision after an ill-fated boat ride with Stephen turns the respectable people of the town, as well as her brother, staunchly against her. The ending of the book is shocking and pretty brutal. At first I felt cheated and didn't like it at all, but the more I think about it, the more perfect it becomes.

This isn't necessarily an easy read, like much Victorian literature the plot turns on an unfamiliar moral code and the level of description (particularly of natural features and houses) is a little off-putting. Still, the lovingly drawn (and sometimes hilarious characters) and the rush of the plot in the last third make up for any difficulty in getting into the book. Maggie's aunts, in particular, are a perfect balance of hilariously provincial and sometimes unexpectedly sweet. Much has been written about how this novel in particular draws from Eliot's life, as a dark haired, isolated, too smart for her own good woman in Victorian England who carried on a long relationship with a married man. There is a lot going on in this book and I find myself teasing back through it even now, weeks after I finished it. That sounds like a perfect recipe for a meaty book club discussion...