The pile of books read-but-not-yet-blogged is teetering and threatening to topple again. Here’s the oldest one in the pile (in terms of when I read it, not when it was written). Unfortunately it’s also the thinnest one in the pile.

Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is an exploration of what society could develop into as a result of widespread sterility, and a fundamentalist desire to control sex and anything sexual. It’s a story about society, not far in the future, where religious fanatics have gained control of the US society and reshaped it according to their will.

Individuals’ rights are severely curtailed and everybody is assigned a specific role from which they are not allowed to deviate. Women in particular have lost most of their freedom. By the time the book starts, women are all either wives, household servants, or childbearers for other women who cannot have children. (Fertility has suffered after some sort of nuclear accident or other environmental catastrophe, and is now the highest priority for all women.)

Offred, the narrator, is a Handmaiden, effectively a childbearing slave. Her life is one of restrictions and routine. She is allowed nothing except that which is prescribed. The book is presented as her diary, as she goes about her daily life of empty routine, boredom and frustration – and remembering (trying to remember) life as it was before, her child, her husband.

Not much really happens in a book, yet a great deal is said about society and about Offred’ life. The back story – how she, and society, got to where they are today – is uncovered piece by piece. This is sometimes a frustrating and confusing process, because of the large gaps in our knowledge. But as a whole I found it very well told and well written.

Commenters who are dissatisfied with the book complain either about how unrealistic the scenario is – which to me just means that they have not understood the meaning of satire – or about the language. The language is somewhat… non-standard in places: sentences have odd broken rhythms and repetitions. Possibly somewhat pretentious, but I thought it fit the story and the narrator’s state of mind. This was more work than reading a run-of-the-mill book of fiction perhaps, but well worth it: chilling, gripping, engrossing.

It is interesting to note that the book was first published just over 20 years ago, in 1985. It was a reaction to the then-current feminist debate about sexuality and pornography, in particular discussions about forbidding pornography for being demeaning to women. 20 years later it is not western feminists but Muslims who provide a more current backdrop. Their stated aim is likewise to protect women, but instead they curtail the freedom of those they claim to protect. The same kind of patriarchal ”for your own good“ rules abound in the book. Replace Christianity with Islam, and it probably gets close enough to some of the more repressive and fundamentalist Muslim societies today, where women have no right to property or to a job, or to walking in the streets on their own. Or, for an example from ”closer to home“ (in some sense) consider fundamentalist Christians’ attempts to control women’s reproductive rights.

But the book is more than just a dystopia about women’s rights. It’s a story about control, routine and emptiness; about humans being reduced to a single function. (Ironically a society that has forbidden pornography because it objectifies women, ends up objectifying them more than ever.) It’s about society’s unsuccessful attempts to stand still: even as they try to control everything and everybody, people find their ways to break the rules. Even those who are supposed to enforce the rules and set an example will break them if they get too restrictive.

This is one of the very best books I’ve read recently. I also liked Atwood’s Oryx and Crake a lot (it was the first of her books that I read). Now I’m wondering why it took me so long to discover her. Will have to buy more of her books, definitely.

I think there might be some truth in those stories about pregnant women feeling tired, after all.

Friday evening after work I had dinner, read some, and then pottered around aimlessly for a while. By 9:30 I was barely able to keep my eyes open so I went to bed and slept 11 hours straight.

Saturday I went to Oxford Street for some shopping. Took the tube instead of cycling to give my body some more rest. When I got home I lay down on the sofa to catch my breath and rest my legs a while. Fell asleep and woke up an hour and a half later.

Thus the relatively low frequency of new posts here recently.

Blump really is a very active little fellow. Even midwives comment on how much s/he moves – every time they try to listen to Blump’s heart, s/he moves away from the heartbeat monitor as soon as they put any pressure on it. And I’ve never had the kind of worries that some pregnant women write about, when they don’t feel the baby move much and wonder if everything is OK.

Standard medical knowledge expects babies to settle in one position (normally head down) around week 32. I am now coming to the end of week 33, and Blump definitely hasn’t done that yet. It feels like a minor earthquake when Blump turns around from one position to another. It’s hard to imagine two arms and two legs making all that movement! Sometimes s/he sneakily turns around during the night – twice during the past week I’ve woken up to find Blump apparently lying horizontally, with his/her feet kicking out towards one side and the head pointing towards the other side, which was a pretty odd feeling!

With all this moving around, I’ve become curious to understand where and how s/he is lying, and learned to more or less “map out” Blump’s body.

First of all there’s the kicking, of course. Kicks are strong and distinct; arm movements feel smaller and lighter. Where I feel most movement, that’s probably where the legs are. Hiccups – regular “ticking” movements – should probably come from the top half of the baby’s torso, I imagine.

In addition to feeling movements, I can figure out Blump’s position by feeling around the belly. (One of the midwives explained briefly what she feels for, and the rest is just practice and common sense.) It doesn’t work every time, but it is getting easier and clearer as time goes – in part probably because I get more practice, but also because Blump fills up more of the belly.

I find it’s easiest to map out Blump’s position when I lie on my back with my knees bent, so the water flows down towards my spine and leaves Blump more exposed. The parts towards the top half of the belly are easiest to feel – above where my waist used to be, up towards the ribs. I try to feel what’s up there, and assume that the parts I haven’t located are lying down below the waist.

• A broad thing that gives strong resistance and doesn’t yield to pressure is the torso / back. When Blump lies with his/her back towards my one side, I can feel that that side of the belly is “solid” whereas the other side is more “watery” and has more “give” (in the space between and around the limbs).
• A small sharp thing that can be pushed around is probably a foot or a knee – especially if continued poking makes it move!
• A broader lump (but not too broad) that can be moved from side to side is probably the head.
• An even broader thing that moves just a little is probably the bum.

Every body part on its own may be hard to spot, but if I can kind of guess a few of them, the various clues reinforce or clarify each other, until I get a reasonably clear picture of what’s in there.

Right now, for example, Blump seems to be lying with the head down, the torso towards the left, and legs & feet up underneath my right ribs.

I am puzzled and fascinated by the amount of attention devoted by the media (and presumably the public) to the possible downgrade of Pluto from planet to something else. What’s in a name, after all? Apparently a lot. But then I always tend to take an unsentimental view of things.

Pluto gets 5000 news stories which is only barely less than the 6000 for Darfur, despite Darfur being a fair bit more urgent, and Estonia only gets 2000 even though it is a lot closer than Pluto. But of course Pluto, planet or not, is a lot larger and older than either Darfur or Estonia.

Best comment: Language log cites a reader:

One side thinks it all-important that what people were taught in school should remain true forever (hence, Pluto is a planet). The other side thinks that classifications should be based on observable facts about the universe really does, and revised when necessary (hence, Pluto is a Kuiper belt object).

Speaking of pointless security measures (again), Eric made an interesting observation yesterday. Now that airplane cockpit doors are locked, what is the purpose of forbidding sharp items on flights? Sure, someone could take the entire airplane hostage and start threatening to cut people. But that would gain them nothing, as no pilot would give in to their demands.

This looks like a good example of how security measures stay in place even after they’ve outlived their usefulness. Things get onto the forbidden list far more easily than they get off the list.