A New Identity

If you should happen to search my future married name on Google, you will find that I

• Have profiles on Zoominfo Business People Information, Classmates.com, and Facebook.
• Am the daughter of George and Susannah.
• Hold the patent on a ‘cylinder block mounted two-pass oil cooler.’
• Am involved in Race for Relay to benefit cancer research, and have achieved 4% of my goal.
• Married David Russell in 2006.
• Am an aspiring medical student.
• Am the director of operations of an Italian restaurant chain in Tennessee.
• Died in 1842.
• Currently live in Newark, OH, Langhorne, PA, and Phoenix, AZ.
• …And my middle name is Minerva.

Not that I’m bored at all. Or avoiding writing. Definitely not.

When I got to work today, my manager told me about a lady who had asked for a book about the “bowling sister” yesterday. It took my coworkers a while to realize she was apparently asking about the Boleyn sister. The book she wanted was The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. Probably she had seen the movie. We agreed that this was probably the most deplorable thing since Shakespeare in English. We also debated whether to mention to Porn Man (a very loyal, if perverted, customer) that it really is all right to subscribe to Playboy et al.

In order to recover, I think I’m going to watch The Great Mouse Detective, which is quite possibly my favorite animated film. Still working on my pint of Dove. I’m also going to write five thousand words before going to bed this evening. Sometimes it’s shocking how long twenty-four hours can take.

Anansi Boys

If you’ve never read any Neil Gaiman, start with Neverwhere, then Stardust, then Coraline, then Smoke and Mirrors or another short story collection; and then, after you’ve appreciated what it means to be Gaimanesque, you may read Anansi Boys. Its apparently a kind of sequel to American Gods, which I’ve never read, but I don’t feel as though I missed anything from the previous novel, and there were, thank heaven, no tedious briefing-you-on-what-you-missed paragraphs.

Fat Charlie is the son of Anansi, the spider-god who won (or earned) all the stories from Tiger, who used them for evil. Fat Charlie, though not particularly fat, is certainly confused when his long-lost brother, Spider, appears after their father’s funeral and causes havoc. Though the premise of the story (normal British guy gets pulled into some sort of alternate/mythical world) is a shadow of Neverwhere, the years that have stood between my meeting Richard Mayhew and Charlie Nancy make Charlie more likable and less redundant.

There were some very nice bits about story-telling and mythmaking. As Ursula K. Le Guin would put it, the power of naming a thing. Fantasy authors understand people’s need for story. For instance, who else can bear witness that

There are myth-places. They exist, each in their own way. Some of them are overlaid on the world; others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.

There are mountains. They are rocky places you will reach before you come to the cliffs that border the end of the world, and there are caves in those mountains, deep caves that were inhatibed long before the first men walked the earth.

They are inhabited still.

What is this but the credo of the author? I believe.

The book was fun, it was funny, it was fast. Easy and entertaining: highly comical. I can guarantee that no one will be studying it in sophomore English classes in fifty years-no, not even mythological critics, whom I hope will come back–but if whoever reads it will think a little bit and laugh.