June 2009

For my “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” post, I’m afraid I may have to disappoint.  An overnight trip turned unexpectedly into nine days, so I am without my handy little Moleskine in which I record books.  My memory is hardly good for a matter of hours, so I’m certain I won’t be able to remember all the Books Read, much less Books Bought.

I do know, however, that all month I’ve been reading things that are Not Real. I read Ursula K. Le Guin‘s “Annals of the Western Shore” series, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, some Connie Willis, and some Iain M. Banks.  Then I shook up my SFF streak by reading Longitude by Dava Sobel, a story about the race to measure longitude reliably at sea.  Some people tried to achieve this by measuring lunar distances from fixed stars, and some, like John Harrison, attempted to make an accurate clock.  I selected this book because I’d owned it for some time and because it was the shortest nonfiction book I could find.  …And my last book of the month, which I have yet to finish, is another reread: A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, which I love because it’s about Sherlock Holmes.

I’ll post my official list when I’ve returned from vacation.  Meanwhile, Happy early Fourth!

::edit

Finished A Slight Trick of the Mind before July.  I’d fogotten how the book touches upon ‘the deep beautiful melancholy of everything.’  Will have to cast around for something to cheer me up.

Death, like crime, is commonplace, he’d once written.  Logic, on the other hand, is rare.  Therefore, maintaining a logical mental inclination, especially when facing mortality, can be difficult.  However, it is always upon logic rather than upon death that one should dwell.

Last Day Ever

Tomorrow is my last day of retail ever.

Is there a vow I can take, or something?  Because I’m 110% certain that my personal happiness would disappear if I ever had to sell another book.  Not that it wasn’t useful, but it really wasn’t that great.  Despite my forehead-smashing despair at the plodding numbness of the daily grind, I have nevertheless in the past ten months (the time that I labored at B–), written a bare minimum of

101,000

words of fiction.  I just counted.

Thank you very much.

Oryx and Crake

A review on the cover of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood brags that it outdoes Orwell.  My husband, seeing the claim, asked me if it did so; now having finished the novel I can say a firm and definitive Yes.

This is Dystopia.  Imagine a world of sophisticated bio-engineering that produced ‘rakunks’ (rat/skunk) or ‘pigoons,’ semi-intelligent organ-growing pigs.  Add overpopulation and food crises and government conspiracy.  The narrator, Snowman, exists in the aftermath of a world-wide catastrophe that has left him the last surviving human… at least, of humanity as we know it.  His companions are pigoons, wolvogs, and the Crakers, a perfected kind of human created by Crake, gene-by-gene.  A lifelong words man, Snowman finds himself spinning a new mythology for the innocents, helping them understand their lives as he fails to understand his own.

Snowman’s attempts to maintain his sanity while finding food and protecting himself from predators take him on a journey to the past, to the Rejoov compound, where he reviews the events that brought him to the present, from his childhood friendship with Crake to his love and fascination for Oryx.  As he maps the events that led to his personal and global tragedy (as inevitable as it is shocking), Snowman lives, if he can, in the utopian horror of his planet.

And, the end of the novel!  Oh, magnificent.  Oryx and Crake deserves to share the subtitle “an ambiguous utopia.”  But forget not that ambiguity can describe something as having both multiple interpretations and doubtful character, and that at its heart Utopia is no place.

9.0 / 10.0.

Fifteen Authors

In modified response to a Facebook meme, here are fifteen authors whose writing I adore, in the order that I thought of them.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin.  Sing, O Muse!  I believe she is my Very Favorite author, because of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and Earthsea.
2. Umberto Eco.  Because The Name of the Rose is so very, very brilliant, and because I aspire to understand some of his literary criticism someday.
3. Ann Patchett.  Her prose is poetry and her theme is life.
4. Megan Whalen Turner.  Eugenides!  (And Book Four!)
5. Jorge Luis Borges.  Because after reading these stories, my mind feels as though it has been  through a juicer.
6. Connie Willis.  For the glorification of the scholar, I thank you; for exposing the hilarity of his work, I also thank you.
7. Neil Gaiman.  Because of you, I do not hate graphic novels.
8. Iain M. Banks.  Because I was tricked.  Several times.  And I liked it.
9. Agatha Christie.  Perhaps Hercule Poirot above anyone made me love a good mystery.
10. Alexandre Dumas.  Swash, swash, buckle, buckle, and I really love Edmond Dantes.
11. Madeleine L’Engle.  Because all Christian writing should be this good.
12. Orson Scott Card.  Because I’ve read Ender’s Game at least three times and liked it better on each occasion.
13. Anne Tyler.  Mostly for Digging to America, but her other books too, which are about people.
14. Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sherlock Holmes!  Is my hero!
15. William Shakespeare.  Tragedy is never so perfect as King Lear.  And though Twelfth Night is probably a more spotless comedy, Benedick and Beatrice are too excellent for words.

Extended to twenty:

• C.S. Lewis.  Because you can grow up on Narnia, but you mature with Till We Have Faces.
• Patricia C. Wrede.  For Cimorene & Mendanbar.
• Mary Doria Russell.  Can’t think of why I didn’t think of her first, or second, or third.  Because The Sparrow can make you love and doubt God at the same time.
• J.R.R. Tolkien.  Read The Lord of the Rings aloud someday.
• David Mitchell.  Because I liked Cloud Atlas.

And there you have it.  Who are your favorite five? ten? fifteen?

I am silly. And tired.

I always get these words mixed up.

• epigram – a short, witty turn of phrase, often in poetic form.

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew,

Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

– Alexandrer Pope (written upon his Highness’ dog’s collar)

• epigraph – a quotation at the beginning of a book.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

– G. K. Chesterton (quoted at the beginning of Coraline by Neil Gaiman)

• epitaph – an inscription on a gravestone.

Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Wreckage Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship

– from The Royal Tenebaums (film, 2001)

…But not anymore, I hope.  It’s kind of embarrassing to say epitaph for epigraph.  Language is silly and tired too, sometimes.

Good night.

Missed Connections

I spent this morning proving that life is a comedy.  Some days it’s unflappably a tragedy, but not today.  Today I drove up to the university (forty-five minutes each way) to fill out a form that took forty-five seconds.  The irony here is that I already filled it out, only unbeknownst to me it was the wrong version.  But all is now well; and to avoid feeling as though I’d been sitting in a car for an hour and a half straight, I decided to stop into a Starbucks for a late breakfast.  I could finish the chapter I was reading, at least, before heading home.

As I was digging for my change, the short, stocky man behind me asked, “What did you get?” He gestured to my right arm, in which I was holding purse, book, and breakfast.

“A zucchini walnut loaf,” I told him (rather coolly, as I did not want to encourage a conversation), “and Earl Grey tea.”

“Is it for school?” he asked.

“Noo,” I answered carefully.  “It’s because I’m hungry.”

He and the barista laughed at me.  “No, I meant your book.”

“Oh.”  The full embarrassment of my words and manner tied up my tongue.  I showed him the cover.  “Matter by Iain M. Banks.”  Which he could see for himself.  “It’s science fiction,” I added.  “For pleasure.”  Too awkward and mortified to say more, I ducked away.  As I put Splenda and too much milk in my tea, I heard the man telling the barista several times, “I meant her book, ha ha.”

And then I promptly spilled my tea all over the table.  Twenty-odd napkins later, I drop my bookmark on the floor, consume my breakfast as quickly as I can, and leave in enough time to catch the one red light that turns the rest of them red.  Stupidly missing an opportuniiy a) to talk about one of my newest favorite authors or b) to be even generally friendly.

Comedy.

Water Witch

I hate to be a stereotypical church-goer, but my religious worship this morning made me exhausted.  Or perhaps it was the old-fashioned donut that I allowed myself to eat for the first time in weeks.  In either case, I arrived home and lay down on the couch with a book.  And woke up about an hour and a half later, dry-mouthed and groggy.  So I scarfed down an extra-thick roast beef sandwich to bolster myself with protein.

Eventually, when I finished reading Water Witch by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, I did not regret the time I spent asleep.  It was… all right.  [Warning: Spoilers.]  Deza is a con artist, pretending to be a princess of the Red City who can detect water in pools underneath the dry planet of Mahali.  After a con-gone-south, (during which her father dies and his spirit takes up residence in an mbuzi, which is a fancy word for goat,) she meets up with Radi, a prince whom she mistakes for a pirate, and they decide to go through with the con against the off-world Tycoon.  But Deza learns that she doesn’t need to pretend to be a water witch because she is a water witch, spirited away from the Red City by her father at age three.  And she and Radi fall in love.  And sort of save everyone too.  It was fun, but it wasn’t remotely a surprise.

6.5 / 10.0.