Our Blog

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

We’ve all had that one class. You know the one. You drag your feet getting there because you just can’t stay awake. Maybe the teacher speaks in a monotone. Maybe the subject matter is really uninteresting. Maybe it’s a government-controlled test to determine your attention span. Who knows! But either way, if you’re looking for a way to combat sleepiness in that class, we have some tips for you, courtesy of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: College Edition.

Sarah Shotts is a blogger, vlogger, and “nerdlywed.” Recently married, she blogs about living a nerdy life as a newlywed on her blog. She also vlogs about all things geeky on the Swot Sisters Youtube channel she created with her sister Mary. When she’s not making stuff on the internet she’s busy teaching theatre classes and doing wedding photography and video.
 

(image via David Mitchell on Facebook)

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas completely floored me: the step-pyramid narrative structure, the inventiveness of each of the interwoven worlds, the neologisms and peculiarly delightful turns of phrase are all nothing short of fantastic, in every sense of the world. And while I’m as jazzed as anyone to crack open his latest novel The Bone Clocks, I’m also already dreading the day when it’s over. Feel the same way? Here are eight picks for us Mitchell fans to read next.

Photo via Visit Philly

Happy Friday, everyone! There is a most literalicious, booksquisite weekend and week ahead. Enjoy, and if you have any particularly pagesome and readiculous experiences (sipping cider with a great new novel, or laughing 'til you cry at a reading), tell us @apiarymagazine on Twitter. 

love, 

APIARY

I was probably 11 or 12 the first time I read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and ever since then I’ve read the book about every five years.  Why do I keep coming back to it?  There’s something I can’t shake in the story—the slow descent from order to chaos, the images it conjures of a society created entirely by boys, and of course the characters: the wise Ralph, the alluring and dangerous Jack, the annoying (but ultimately correct) Piggy.

Because I am who I am, I can’t help crossing Lord of the Flies in my mind with Shakespeare’s Tempest.  Both start with a wreck and take place on an island.  If Lord of the Flies had started with a shipwreck instead of a plane crash, one could imagine Prospero’s daughter Miranda looking on with fear:

Miranda: The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,

But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,

Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered

With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,

Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,

Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock

Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish'd.

Had I been any god of power, I would

Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere

It should the good ship so have swallow’d and

The fraughting souls within her.

In this version, Caliban goes around planting fear and unrest among the boys.  Ariel tries as hard as he can to undo Caliban’s work, but ultimate it’s too late: where Tempest moves from chaos to order and resolution, William Shakespeare’s Lord of the Flies turns from relative order to chaos and destruction.  Prospero’s efforts at pacification fail, and only a passing ship manages to restore order and rescue the boys.  This becomes the Anti-Tempest, the one where things don’t work out in the end.

And maybe that’s why I loved Lord of the Flies, even as a middle schooler.  Because sometimes things are messy, sometimes “happily ever after” isn’t a thing.  Sometimes everything goes to hell and all the adults can do is look away:

The tears began to flow and sobs shook him [Ralph]. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed.  He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is why I think The Catcher in the Rye is so damn important anyway.  Big deal, we all read it in high school.  Except I didn’t.

Well, I did.  But that wasn’t my first time slipping into Holden Caulfield’s shoes.

My dad’s a great guy for a lot of reasons, but a big one is his support of my reading habit.  When I was growing up, he and my mom all but shoveled books in my general direction, and I devoured them like a furnace.  They knew I had a big imagination, so they gave me things in kind: stories about epic battles, or shadowy mysteries, or an average boy enrolled in a very un-average school.

So when my dad dropped a library copy of Catcher into my lap and I asked what it was about, I was surprised when he said, “It’s about a kid who wanders around New York.”

I stared at the cover, with its yellow text and sketchy rendering of a red carousel horse.  Surely, robots or aliens would figure into his explanation any second.  When they didn’t, I said, “And…?”