Favourite Title of a Book // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 28

Today is the twenty-eighth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite title of a book".

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to the second post in two consecutive days from this blog. It's a miracle which I would honour by going on about it some more, but I have a suspicion this post will be quite short and I don't want to use up half the wordcount on a lengthy intro. So, let's move on.

The topic for today's post is "favourite title of a book", for which I have chosen Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

Unlike the books mentioned in this challenge's other posts, Sister Outsider is not a work of fiction. Rather, it is a collection of essays and speeches by the renowned poet and writer Audre Lorde.

Lorde is a writer I first encountered almost ten years ago, when I was first coming to terms with my own identity as a young closeted queer. Reading Lorde at that time was significant, as she produced her work from the perspective of her identity as a black lesbian woman. All of the pieces in Sister Outsider are coloured by this point-of-view, some addressing it on a more personal level while others address systemic oppression - or, as is often the case, they look at the overlap between the two.

The title of the book, Sister Outsider, encapsulates one of the key themes in this collection: unity in exile. By exile, I mean being marginalised by greater society, as so many minorities are - especially those groups to which Lorde belonged, as a queer woman and a person of colour. Sister Outsider, as a title, at first seems paradoxical. How can one have sisterhood or camaraderie as an outsider? How can a person who lives their life on the margins expect any sort of community? Not without difficulty, surely, but once you realise you are not the only person on the margins - nor the only exile, nor the only outsider - then establishing such unity doesn't seem such a far-off concept after all.

In one of Lorde's most famous pieces, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", she stresses the need to embrace our differences as marginalised people (specifically women in this case) and to lean on each other, rather than merely hoping to be tolerated by those in power:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill.  It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.  For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.  They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. 

To me, this paragraph emphasises the dual meaning of Sister Outsider: of the need for unity, and the importance of acknowledging our status as outsiders. We cannot have one without the other, as Lorde so poignantly illustrates.

I chose Sister Outsider as my favourite title partially because of its clever wordplay, at first seeming paradoxical but then becoming perfectly logical when you understand the tenets of Lorde's philosophy. The other reason I chose it is because of the value of this very philosophy, so much of which is contained within just these two words. I don't know of another book whose title has managed to say so much in so little. For that reason most of all, it is my favourite. 

The Most Surprising Plot Twist or Ending // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 27

Today is the twenty-seventh day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "the most surprising plot twist or ending".

In spite of the numerous delays we've encountered since I began this (supposedly) 30-day challenge, we are finally in the last stretch! I'm hoping to get these last few posts out in relatively quick succession - fingers crossed.

I'm a little unsure about how to approach today's prompt - "most suprising plot twist or ending" - without spoiling the very twist/ending that I thought was so effective when I read it. Most likely I will just make this post quite short and vague, and if you want to find out what happens in the twist you'll have to look it up yourself. However, I would strongly suggest you do not do this and instead just read the book, as the twist really is worth experiencing in the context of the story.

With that all said, the book that I have chosen for today's prompt is Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

If you're not already familiar with her work, Sarah Waters is a Welsh writer best known for her historical novels featuring queer women protagonists. Her most famous books are probably Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, both stories set in Victorian England that focus on the relationships between her female characters. While Tipping the Velvet is more of a coming-of-age novel and Fingersmith leans more towards the crime genre, the two novels have a lot in common. I had previously read Tipping the Velvet and enjoyed it, so I was excited to read Fingersmith a few years later, especially after I found out it was due to be adapted into a film by one of my favourite directors, Park Chan-wook. While Fingersmith sat on my TBR pile for far too long until I finally got around to reading it, when I eventually did I ended up loving it even more than Tipping the Velvet.

As always copied from Goodreads, here is a spoiler-free plot summary:

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.

One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.

With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Over the course of the novel's 500-or-so pages, there are a number of surprising twists and turns, but there are two especially big ones that stand out in my memory: one partway through, and another at the end - meaning this book qualifies for both the "most surprising plot twist" and "most surprising ending" awards.

As it's also one of my favourite book adaptations and movies ever, I have to mention Park Chan-wook's film version of Fingersmith here as well. Released in 2016 under the name The Handmaiden in English, the film keeps the essential details of the book's plot but changes a number of elements. The setting moves from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea, and certain characters (most notably Mrs Sucksby) have their roles significantly reduced. I actually didn't mind these changes at all when watching the film, as I felt they were made carefully and in such a way that the most important parts of the story were preserved. The result is that reading the book and watching the film are linked yet unique experiences, which I think creates greater enjoyment for those who've read the book than a word-for-word adaptation might (although adaptations closer to the original text have been created previously, such as the Fingersmith BBC miniseries).

Most relevant to this post, though, is the fact that The Handmaiden changes elements of the twists which I alluded to before. Perhaps not surprisingly given Park's skill as a filmmaker, these changes are done cleverly and with respect to the original novel. One of the twists which I mentioned before does not make it into the film, simply because other changes to the plot precluded it from happening, so I think part of the reason why Park may have modified the other twist was to provide readers of the book with a new surprise when watching the film. I definitely enjoyed the modification Park made to the twist, and it allowed me in some way to relive the original shock I experienced when reading Fingersmith for the first time.

In general, I don't read books purely for plot twists. Sometimes I feel like they can be gimmicky, an attempt to lure readers in towards books that don't have many other redeeming features. That said, I can appreciate a well-done twist in a good book, and Fingersmith's several twisty reveals definitely qualify. Likewise, The Handmaiden is a masterclass in how to adapt (and, yes, even drastically change) the plot of a book without undermining what made it great in the first place. I would highly recommend both the book and its film adaptation if you enjoy shocking twists in your stories - or, in fact, even if you don't.