Maybe there are writers more adept than King at capturing the outrageous and outraged voice of teenagers, but it’s difficult to think of one. Scenes of reconciliation and revelation abound: the banal. Glory discovers her mother’s journals, triggering a quest to understand why her mother abandoned her before either really knew the other. They must also deal with lice and other parasites, including those of the sexual variety, and the commune dwellers squatting on the O’Brien land. Meanwhile the girls grapple with the typical problems: boys, parents, friendship, boredom.
A smart move, because otherwise Glory’s visions would come off as a strident, hyper-feministic screed. In the finest absurdist tradition, King stirs dark comedy into the mayhem. Kidnappings, murders, families ripped asunder. State-sanctioned misogyny on a terrifying scale. In the beginning, Glory seems a prime candidate for self-annihilation: depressed, hiding behind her camera and harboring a sardonic attitude that would be annoying if she wasn’t so damn funny. Glory, like her best friend, Ellie, who lives across the street in a commune that Glory’s parents helped found, has no real plan besides a vague desire to escape her Pennsylvania hometown - or perhaps merely to escape the burden of the uncomfortable fact that suicide runs in families. It’s the eve of her high school graduation. To which the teenager living inside my head (why won’t he go away already?) replies, “Yeah, welcome to my life.” Navigating through Glory O’Brien’s story is like running through a minefield while drones drop bombs and snipers take aim from every tree. King has written a genre-busting battlefield of a book, in which melodrama wars with magic realism and the banal duels with the Big Idea. So are suicide, male chauvinism, consumerism, parasitism, identity, war, betrayal, friendship, depression, codependency, and probably a few others that flew beneath this reader’s radar in his mad dash to reach the end. That’s one of the novel’s major themes, the meaning of existence. If only our high school history teachers had been this succinct. Kapow.” The entire history of the universe, all 13 billion years of it, in seven little words. King puts this into the mouth of her 17-year-old narrator: “We form. Please note that the room has a capacity limit of 7 people.Near the midway point of her wickedly clever new novel, “Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future,” A.
Sessions are drop-in, no registration required. Place: Room 8051 (across from the elevators), 8th floor, Robarts Library Drop in at any point during this time to learn about and practice the techniques. Use self-compassion meditation to build our confidence as readersĭate: Every Monday, from November 1 until December 6, 2021 Learn mindfulness strategies to increase our focus
Understand how our mindset influences how to read In Mindful Reading we apply mindfulness techniques to reading with the goal of training ourselves to read in a deeper way. Studies also show that mindful meditation can help slow down our minds and increase our ability to focus. Studies show that we read online materials faster and in a way that is more shallow than we read print. Ever finish reading an article and realize you can’t remember much of what you just read? You’re not alone, particularly if you spend a lot of time online.