Steinbeck

Yesterday I went to Half Price Books (one thing I do love about Texas) because they are having an “everything 20% off” Labor Day weekend sale.  As I was browsing their mythology / folktale section in search of The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell – no luck – I overheard a mother and daughter arguing.  They were shopping for school books and the daughter wrote down the titles, but not the authors, from her required reading list.  Neither could remember who wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

I told them.  Someday I should read The Grapes of Wrath.

Today at work I will be working at the register and world-building for my upcoming NaNoWriMo novel.  I wonder if other people live most of their lives wandering around inside their brains, too.  I think I might call my new protagonist Ellen.  Ellen…Helen…Hélène…Athene…Athena…  The gray-eyed goddess and the rosy-fingered dawn.  Perhaps I will invent epithets for my book; then I can be like Homer, and people will read my work for the next twenty-plus centuries.  The lank-haired Ellen.  The crooked-nosed mentor.  The dust-smelling Library.  The lank-haired Ellen followed her crooked-nosed mentor into the recesses of the dust-smelling Library. Or perhaps that literary technique is a little antiquated.

I am already looking forward to some Earl Gray during my break tonight.  The tea-drinking writer.  The inky-fingered woman.  The double-lived imaginer.

Runemarks

I would be the last person to suggest that a children or a young adult book ought to have a dogmatic, overriding moral principle – I always advocate reading widely, and with one’s eyes open – but I feel as though a small measure of morality might have improved Joanne Harris’s first young adult novel, Runemarks. It is set in the world of Norse mythology, with a lively illustration of the Nine Worlds before the table of contents; granted, the old Norse are not marked by their concern for modern Protestant values, but they too had an honor code, and at the least, consequences.

Maddy Smith, a fourteen-year-old born with a rune, Aesk, in her palm, becomes involved in the lives of the gods through her fellow rune-marked friend and instructor One-Eye. (Hmm, which god is that one? Maybe…Odin?) During a venture to the World Below, Maddy meets Loki, a trickster, and the most sympathetic and morally ambiguous character. Through the course of the adventure, the shallow, bickering Sleepers (lesser gods) are wakened, the villagers from Maddy’s town are shown to be mostly shallow and cowardly, and the mysterious new religion called the Order – which is really the use of magic disguised as asceticism – gains power against the old gods. However, everyone’s motivations, particularly Maddy’s, are as vague as which of the nine worlds the action is actually occurring.

For instance [spoilers], Loki and Maddy descend to Hel, and thence to Dream, in order to (knowingly? unknowingly?) fulfill a prophecy given by the Whisperer. However, Loki, who belives he is the trickster mentioned in the prophecy, is actually the sacrifice; the trickster is the Whisperer, who is also the mysterious source of the Order. Supposedly he is working on world domination, but this is never clear. What also is unclear is the reason Maddy trusts One-Eye, and then Loki, and then the Whisperer, carefully doing what they say even when she suspects duplicity. Her own initiative usually includes sneaking behind someone’s back.  Also, Loki tries to betray Maddy several times but can’t seem able to, nor is she bothered by this when his trickery is uncovered. And although the two of them tear up the lower worlds with a giant snake, everything ends up being fine, with no one really punished. Oh, and Maddy is a god, too. Surprise, surprise.

What this book needs is a tighter rein on the changing points of view, a sympathetic and most importantly dynamic main character (readers never have cause to doubt Maddy’s ultimate success), and clearer motivations and consequences for the many mistakes and actions of the enormous cast of secondary characters. It would also benefit from a sort of textual self-consciousness – a book that understands that it isn’t really real, and has a sense of humor about it, too. My call is not for Protestant morality (e.g. thou shalt not lie), but it is for some sense of right and wrong with ramifications (e.g thou shalt not lie without discovery and punishment).

I’m sorry, Ms. Harris. You just aren’t Terry Pratchett. Maddy Smith does not and will never equal Tiffany Aching.

First Among Sequels

Before you read Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, you must read the first four Thursday Next books (The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten).  In this latest installment, Thursday Next must continue her work as a SpecOps-27 Literary Detection agent, as well as her role as a member of the fiction police force, Jurisfiction.  Problems include Thursday’s facing the fictional selves from the books previously written about her, as well as figuring out how to persuade her son Friday to join SpecOps-12, the ChronoGuard, so that he can save the world from running out of time before the end of the week.  The original text of Pride and Prejudice is in jeopardy of being turned into a reality TV show, and also it appears that someone has murdered Sherlock Holmes.

If you love literary allusion, humor, fantasy, sci-fi, and witty writing, you ought to read this series.

Try this as a representation of the hilarity one might find between the [dangerously interactive] pages of a Thursday Next adventure:

I opened a door off the corridor.  The room was much like a psychiatrist’s office, full of bookshelves and with diplomas on the wall.  There were two chairs, a desk and a couch.  Two men were sitting in the chairs: A beard and pipe identified the first man immediately as a psychiatrist, and the second, who seemed desperately nervous, was obviously the patient.

“So, Mr. Patient,” began the psychiatrist, “what can I do for you?”

“Well, Doc,” muttered the patient unhappily, “I keep on thinking I’m a dog.”

“I see.  And how long has this been going on?”

“Since I was a puppy.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “I’m looking for the Piano Squad.”

“This is Very Old Jokes,” explained the psychiatrist apologetically.  “Pianos are down the corridor, first on the left.”

As it turns out, there are only fifteen pianos to share carefully among all of the books ever written.  The Piano Squad’s exact timing and skillful monitoring of when and how closely books are being read ensures that readers never notice.

Bellwether

Upon first reading To Say Nothing of the Dog under duress, I have become a decided Connie Willis fan. In the past six months I have read Uncharted Territory, Passage, and Doomsday Book (taking the latter with me on my honeymoon because I simply had to finish it). In this most recently read novel, Bellwether, I have at last perceived an element of Ms. Willis’s work that gives it so much success.

Pairs of scientists, one male and one female, one a ‘hard’ scientist and one a ‘soft.’ No matter the wide-ranging backdrop for her highly imaginative fiction, two researchers will eventually collaborate to solve the problem, the primary character usually attaining the answer by some form of insight. In Bellwether, Sandy Foster, a sociologist investigating the source of trends and fads – particularly hair-bobbing in the 1920s – hooks up with Bennett O’Reilly, a badly dressed chaos theorist. Numerous chaotic events which occur in the workplace, a scientific research facility called HiTek, debunks the myth that science is orderly.

For those interested, a bellwether is the leader sheep, the director of the ‘herd’ mentality, usually an old ewe who is “the same as any other sheep, only more so. A little hungrier, a little faster, a little greedier. …A bellwether doesn’t even know it’s leading.” If you want to know how sheep are involved in trends and chaos theory, you must read the book.

What puzzles me most, however, about Connie Willis’s books (note that she is hailed as winning the most Hugo and Nebula awards) is that some of them are not really science fiction. True, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday involve both history and time travel; and I will grant that Uncharted Territory takes place on a foreign planet; but both Passage and Bellwether are set in contemporary times, and aside from an investigation of near-death experiences and what would possess people to chop off their long hair respectively, nothing surreal or even very strange occurs. There is nothing that would particularly qualify these books as science fiction, save that the characters are scientists and the story is fictional.

Insert rant about authors being wrongly pigeonholed into a genre here.

May I refer the reader to the following post, which discusses at length the essential question of science fiction, namely the exploration of “What is human?” What Bellwether isn’t is sci-fi, but it is excellent, humorous, well-researched, intelligent, and entertaining.

Lunch & Ferret

I just ate a very delicious lunch, comfortable and savory.  To a can of Amy’s Kitchen Cream of Tomato soup, I added two spoonfuls of ricotta cheese, parsley flakes, a pinch of pepper, and garlic salt.  I whisked it over medium-low heat until it was thick and warm.  On Chera’s suggestion, I also made an accompanying grilled cheese sandwich with Oroweat Health Nut bread.  And may I recommend topping it off with a homemade chocolate chip cookie?  Feel free to wish you’d eaten lunch with me.

Anastasia has been particularly adorable lately.  Whenever I wake her up, she is quite cuddly, curling and stretching in my arms, opening her little pink mouth in a series of enormous yawns.  Sometimes she also sneezes, and occasionally she’ll even nuzzle up against me and sigh.  …And then she wakes up, and the fun really begins.

All day I’ve been singing:

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks

and snickering to myself:

“Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.”

Today at work

Today at work I got asked for the books Gift of Fear by DeBecker, Gideon by Jacquelyn Frank, Jewel of Medina by somebody (out of print), Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight calendar (which we didn’t have in stock), and The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I only did one semi-stupid thing all day long, and helped some people to boot. Yay me.

I also spent a good deal of time in the story-world Chera and I have been working on. Character questionnaires? Fun.

We successfully made scones, and have just finished watching our third episode of Firefly in two days. We are sitting on the futon having a Mac party. We are enjoying ourselves.

Also, I have a new cell phone number. As I quipped today, “My car is a Texan, my phone is a Texan, and according to my driver’s license, I’m a Texan too.”

Es regnet.

I must say I didn’t expect this: a rainy day in Texas in August. For some reason I particularly like listening to Chris Rice when it is overcast. I’ve been lounging around the apartment by myself, which is wonderful, baking strawberry bread and reading about the Arab Revolt and about the history of the telescope. This afternoon might involve an excursion to Ikea, or possibly to a bookstore, as if I don’t own an overwhelming number of books that are dying to be read. But my currently reading, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence, is a 600+ page monster, so don’t expect a review too soon. If you’re impatient, I encourage you to pick it up yourself, as it is positively marvelous so far.

Here is a license plate Philip spotted:

BLT 666

He called it the sandwich from hell. I married a very witty man.