2012 Book Count: 6

This was a really interesting book that I enjoyed very much. Unfortunately I took it out of the library of the university where I work, so a student requested it and I had to give it back and didn’t have an opportunity to read it over again and think on it very much. So obviously I am going to have to go buy a copy.

It is a series of descriptions of cities as told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo. Don’t worry: it doesn’t bare the slightest relation to anything at all historical, except for these two characters. The cities that Polo describes are more the spirits of cities, rather than physical places. After a while, you also come to realize that they are also the spirits of people, too.

This is a real thinking book – it makes you think so much more beyond the text. It took me to all sorts of places, both within and outside myself. Mr. Calvino uses the city as a metaphor for not just one thing, but many; too many to really count on one reading, now that I think of it.

This is definitely a book that you can’t just read once. And since I have only read it once, I am going to leave you all to continue my musings uninterrupted.

2011 Book Count: 67

Karen Russell is one of my new favourites. I think she’s totally brilliant, and I have her full length novel, Swamplandia! on my bedside table, awaiting the perfect moment to be cracked open and savored.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever read anyone who can write the voice of children so very, very well. And it’s not just the voice of children, I’m pretty convinced by her adults*, too, but her children are absolutely special.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of short stories, mostly – well, actually, I think all – focusing on children and the places they live both within and without. Except in the title story, she never really sticks both of her feet into the ‘magical realism’ pool, but it sure feels as though she does. The lives of these children are so surreal, both to them and to us that it’s hard not to assume that this is all happening somewhere else. Certainly not earth. Perhaps it is not our earth, but it is not so far beyond what we know, I think.

Story highlights are:

• A summer camp for children with sleep disorders
• Alligator wrestling
• Death at sea floating giant crab shell
• Ice-skating primates
• Avalanche singing for pirate gold
• Snow machine adultery
• What to do when trapped in a giant seashell

If any of these sound at least a little intriguing, then I think you should run out and get a copy of this book to read. It will take you far away and then bring you right back home in the most delightful way possible.

*My favourite adult in this book is Grandpa Bigtree, who lives in a floating old-folks home (everyone has a houseboat), and whose favourite game to play with his community outreach teen-ager is “This Object is Older Than You”.

2012 Book Count: 3

Conversation held in the Lunch Room:

So what are you reading today?

A Visit from the Goon Squad. I started it because somewhere I read that fashionable literary people liked it. I’m not sure if I like it enough to finish it yet.

It’s good – I read it and really liked it. I’m not a fashionable literary person, though.

Anyway, this co-worker gets huggs tomorrow for encouraging me to keep on with this book, because I really, really liked it.

I have a particular weakness for non-linear storytelling, and I think that Jennifer Egan does a bang up job of it here. There is something about getting the little pieces one at a time and slowly letting them click together that I find intensely satisfying. I’m not sure I liked how it ended – which is a the future outcome of the events of the first chapter. I kind of think this is cheating, but I understand the appeal to keeping everything insular and contained like that. I think that maybe there are better ways of doing it, but I’m not sure the book would have been a best-seller in those cases. It would just be more appreciated by me. And really, I would prefer an author have a best-selling book which naturally leads to the financial security so she has an opportunity to make it up to me.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time, and the way that it moves on and the things it does to all of us. Once again, Ms. Egan does a really stellar job of using a non-linear format to emphasize how forward moving time is, and if you can’t swim with the current you’ll get towed along by it.

I really appreciate this book for not keeping any of the characters the same all the way through – they all grow and change and become many other things, just as people do in ‘real life’. Teenage punks become mothers of three, run away drug addicts get clean and try to study Spanish at night school, publicist to the stars become publicist to a genocidal general and then a gourmet food shop owner.

Something that is really interesting, that just occurred to me now as I was making that list, is that all the truly memorable characters were women. They are the ones that went through the most changes, the most living. There were lots of men and boys, but some how they lost some of the impact that the female characters had. I don’t know if this was intentional on Ms. Egan’s part, or if I’m just imagining it. The thing is that she is not around to correct me or give me any context, while I have a copy of her book and a laptop, and so therefore an think pretty much anything I want about it.

So, read this book, and keep reading beyond the first chapter. I think my impatience with it stemmed from not knowing anything about this book before I read it, and assuming that the whole book would be like that. A whole book like the first chapter would not be a good book, but the first chapter as a part of this book is genius.

2012 Book Count: 2

I really cannot believe that I never read Ray Bradbury before now. His books are really quite spectacular, and The Martian Chronicles is one of my favourites yet.

The Martian Chronicles is a book about Mars, but it is also a book about Earth. In fact, it is very much about Earth, and people, and the things that people do to each other and the different names under which they do it. He takes a few very sharp jabs at the North American way of living and consuming, but he definitely allows for hope – that not all people are callous and self-serving, that there are individuals who are respectful, understanding and kind who are truly trying to make their world and others a better place. Unfortunately it is also clearly depicted that those people are in the minority, and often at the whim of the cruel majority.

I’m really interested in the fact that Mr. Bradbury called The Martian Chronicles fantasy instead of science or speculative fiction.

First of all, I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time—because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.*

I find this statement incredibly fascinating, especially because The Martian Chronicles was written in 1950, and he said the above quote in 1999. I myself, in 2012, can definitely see the mythic qualities, but it is not so far fetched to me. I could see this happening literally. Maybe I am overly inured to the idea that myths have to necessarily reflect a kind of truth back at us, or I just read so much speculative fiction and have such a bleak outlook on humanity in general that nothing shocks me. Hopefully it’s the former.

When I first started reading science fiction and fantasy when I was young, I thought that these ideas were all new. And as I delve deeper and deeper into the past of science fiction, I realize that there have always been people thinking these things – whose imaginations taken them to the end point of the actions we make as a whole. I am always humbled by the idea that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932, or that EM Forster’s The Machine Stops was published in 1909. And I wonder why these ideas aren’t more prevalent in our society. They are inconvenient ideas, to be certain, but they have been part many parts of our cultural media for a very, very long time now.

One thing I find encouraging, though, is the popularity of dystopian fiction in writing for young adults (heard of The Hunger Games? Find a teenager and give to them). There is a whole generation of young people for whom this will be something they’ve thought really carefully about.

So, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, EM Forster, I salute you.

*Taken from Grandfather Time: an interview with Ray Bradbury by Dennis O’Leary

2011 Book Count: 62

This was a pretty incredible read, and one of the most convincing speculative fiction novels I have ever read. I hesitate a little to call it science fiction, even though literally speaking that is exactly what it is, because it’s all just so darn plausible. Perhaps even more than plausible.

It’s about the aftermath of a food and energy crisis (there are no more fossil fuels, or anywhere a very small amount, and most crops are susceptible to a variety of diseases fatal to humans), and, what I thought was a completely brilliant stroke, set in Thailand.

Thailand is an absolutely perfect location for this story. It could have worked somewhere else in Asia or perhaps Africa, but it wouldn’t have been nearly such a successful or original work if it were set in North America*. But there is something about the exoticism of Thailand and their isolationist history, not to mention the inherent respect that most of us have for the idea that during an ecological disaster, Thailand has some very special things to protect. It also brings a little bit of magic (not really magic, just the figurative kind) to a rather bleak imagining of the future. Also, Bangkok is one of my favourite cities on the planet and I love to read about it.

You can tell that this is a definite ‘what if’ book – that Mr. Bacigalupi took his idea and was so exquisitely thorough with it, and asserts the findings of his thought experiment with such conviction that very early on in the story the situation stops becoming a question of ‘it could happen’ to ‘it is going to happen’. And what is going to happen is that genetic engineering is going to both starve and save us.

China Mieville does a very similar thing in his writing, but perhaps Mr. Bacigalupi appears to be more thorough and grounded because the ideas that he is processing are practical and topical, rather than theoretical and fantastical. They are both masters of their chosen art forms, however, and would never, ever choose one over the other.

This is definitely a book to check out. It’s won a million awards and with very good reason. Mr. Bacigalupi has really created something here – and it’s a real joy to stroll through it with him.

Also, his world is run over by camouflage cats. Like I said, it’s love.

*Though his other novel Shipbreaker is set in North America and that works very well because the situation leads one to believe that they are in the third world, so when it is revealed they are in North America, it is something of a humbling moment.

Last year I didn’t finish a single book in Japanese (though I am pretty sure I started one or two). So, this year I think perhaps I won’t go for the high score, exactly, but I will go for that eternal binary: Quality over Quantity.

Not that I really think that I pad my numbers with “easy” books – at least I don’t intend to. I do, as you know, like junk food fiction and I think it has a place in everyone’s reading life, but I hope you know that I never intend to let it take over my diet. It’s hard to make the quality goal, however, without making it look like you are admitting to such an embarassing fact. Oops.

What started this literary soul searching was, one: I am only two thirds of the way through The Brothers Karamazov and it’s been fourteen days. Ouch. Two: I recently watched a movie adaptation of a Japanese book, Shokudou Katatsumuri, and I thought I might like to write about it. In fact there have been a number of adaptations of Japanese novels that have really interested me and I have really enjoyed.

So, goal: read more challenging books and more Japanese books. Let go to my attachment to the high score. Submit myself humbly to books that take me a long time to read. I also think it will be a very interesting project to write about books in English that I’ve read in Japanese. I’m not sure what kind of final product I’m going to get, but it will be an interesting experiment.

So watch this space for some exciting looks at literature across the Pacific! Across the Pacific from one specific place! An Island! I think it will be fun (and improving!) times.

*I read in English really, really fast. When I was a child I was told that I couldn’t possibly be enjoying them if I went so fast. This is rubbish, naturally.

2011 Book Count: 61

I was just looking at my 2011 Book Count Post-Mortem, and I realized that I hadn’t written about many of the books that made my Notably Excellent Books of 2011 list. Oops. so I thought I should start, seeing as how I liked them so very much, and I thought I would start with Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric!*

I Sing the Body Electric! is a collection of some of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, including the title story, which he adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. I really like Ray Bradbury, who is most known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (which I also read in 2011, and greatly enjoyed).

The Electric Grandmother

When I first thought of writing about I Sing the Body Electric! I thought it would be really easy and quick – but then I thoght I had better go and read it again, so I would be all fresh for writing this. Well, I turned on ye olde eReader, and the first thing I saw was that the title is taken from a poem (of the same name) by Walt Whitman – and thanks to my purchase last month, I had the ability to go and look up and read said poem very quickly. Then I remembered the episode of The Twilight Zone (its 100th, in fact), which I had also better go watch if I was to say anything intelligent at all (also you know how I can’t resist a book adaptation on television). I had also better make sure that I read that particular story again very closely. The outcome of all of this is that I’ve been ‘researching’ for some hours now.

So in order not to go on forever, I thought I would just stick with the title story. The story is about three children whose mother has just died, and their father feels they need someone to care for them – someone more than just a sitter or a teacher, what they need is a grandmother. Unfortunately, all their biological grandmothers are dead, so what to do but call on the Fantocchini Company to build one for you. The perfect grandmother built to your specifications. As I mentioned before, the title of the story comes from the Walt Whitman poem of the same name – and Ray Bradbury uses a piece of it in the dedication of the book:

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

The poem is very beautiful – it’s an ode to humanity as seen in the reflection of the human form itself, which is very much what Mr. Bradbury does so well in conveying with this story.

The Electric Grandmother is a machine, but not a machine because she is in the form of a woman, and not just any women, but the women all children want for her most to be.

Her’s was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.

So while the Electric Grandmother doesn’t look like a machine or talk like a machine or behave like a machine and is really and truly more than a machine, it is her very machine-ness that, in the end, really brings her closest to the hearts and minds of the children. The Electric Grandmother, unlike their mother, can never die, can never run away. She can be loved without the fear of loss. She can be loved with the certainty of return.

When all the children are grown, the Electric Grandmother must return to the factory to pass on what she knows and to wait for the time when they will need her again, because when they are old they “shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear”.

The Twilight Zone episode was penned by Mr. Bradbury himself (he wrote several scripts for The Twilight Zone, though this was the only one that ever got produced) and it made me cry. It was a little more sentimental than the story, if that is at all possible – and something about seeing the love of the Electric Grandmother for the children portrayed visually reduced me to a quivering snotty mess. Rod Stirling’s closing narration:

A fable, most assuredly, but who’s to say that in some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother, whose stock and trade is love. A fable, for sure, but who’s to say.

*Let it be known that I love it when book titles have exclamation points.

I was quite amused later when I was reading on Wikipedia* that the critics had “rubbished” it. If I were a real critic, I would probably rubbish it too. It did have one or two redeeming moments, however, so it wasn’t a complete write off.

What really struck me while I was watching it was how hard they were striving for realism. I thought this was pretty neat for a little while, and then I realized that I don’t read and re-read Treasure Island for it’s realism. I read it for its Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum-ness. I care more about cutlasses and treasure maps and parrots than I do about moral dilemmas and realism, etc. But they did make a really good go at it – one thing that I liked at the time was how they really wanted to make Jim Hawkins a kid. They did a lot with his being impressionable and looking up to the various role models around him. There was one adorable moment when he was fooling around with Silver’s crutch that I enjoyed especially. The thing was that when I went back to the book the next day to clarify one or two points I realized that I liked Jim Hawkins far more when he was a heroic, no-nonsense, old beyond his years, clever boy who occasionally got caught up in the romance of his pirate adventure and did a few rash things than this impressionable, slightly irresponsible and completely realistic lad they portrayed in the film. Also, they made Squire Trelawney a complete asshole, which I did NOT appreciate. Poor Rupert Penry-Jones, he does a lot of really brilliant television work, but always seems to pick lame book adaptations to star in. Ah well.

But one thing that I did really, really like was Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver. He was super fantastic, and pretty much everything I wanted my favourite pirate captain to be. Parrot and all. He was the one truly redeeming feature of this whole debacle, well, him and the scenery. And Elijah Wood killing goats and covered in dirt and trading treasure for cheese wasn’t half bad – though I found his accent distressingly irritating.

So it wasn’t a complete waste of time – nice scenery, Eddie Izzard, pirates, boats, sword fighting – but the best thing that it gave me was the desire to go over the book again, which is always a treat. Wikipedia has a very huge long list of Treasure Island adaptations, maybe I should conduct a survey – because I think the last one I watched had Muppets in it.

*It seems as though this particular comment has been taken down, actually. Doesn’t make it any less true.

This whole series is definitely a feather in BBC’s cap – and the one glaring fault that crops up immediately for me is the same fault that crops up in nearly every single adaptation I see of anything, which is I could have done with just a little more time. Just one more episode, maybe. I think that we checked out of Henry Rackham and Mrs. Fox’s stories a little too early, and one or two things that should have been little on slow simmer were a little thin on some of the emotional impact when they finally came to a boil.

But I have this complaint about nearly everything, so let’s not take it altogether too seriously.

I was a little surprised, though, that an ending that left me completely dizzy at the end of the book had such a cool finish here. I find that the BBC is usually pretty good at getting your heart pumping right at the last second before the screen fades to black, but throughout most of the series, the endings – those final moments that are to leave us wanting more – were just a little bit soft. I found myself wondering how they took something with so much drama, and presented it without any. Or very little, anyway.

But! I did enjoy it altogether most heartily. If you haven’t read the book, I do recommend it – it even made it on to my best books of 2011 list. And this series was definitely four hours of quality. I think it’s nothing short of criminal that Mr. Faber’s books aren’t widely available in North America – for shame on you, Publishing Industry! But luckily this is one of the ones that you are most likely to find, so go and find it – you won’t regret it.

Did your nurse bring you extra blankets, miss?

No, but that’s how I know you needed one.

That is the whole episode in a nutshell, really.

Sugar has moved in with William into his house in the position of governess to his daughter, Sophie. Sugar, in ‘adopting’ Sophie does everything she can to give Sophie what she never herself had. It’s a little shocking to watch Sophie realize that rich children can have terrible childhoods too – though when she goes back home for a glimpse of Christopher, the child of one of the other girl’s at Mrs. Castaway’s, she remembers that it probably sucks more to be starved and beaten every day rather than just completely ignored and unacknowledged, as Sophie is.

Sugar’s real redeeming quality, though, is that this doesn’t alter her perception of Sophie. In fact, Sophie is loved even more; now for both herself and for Christopher. In the book Sugar goes through a lot of guilt in not taking better care of Christopher, but it does to be reminded, as we were done last episode, that Sugar is herself only nineteen, and as much as she feels responsible for everything and everyone, she can’t be.

When I first read the book, I couldn’t believe that clever and cunning Sugar could ever believe that her lot would get better moving into the Rackham household. She thinks that it will make her even more indispensable to William, but what it does is just make her another piece of the furniture, instead of the exotic creature she was when she was his kept woman. But then, how could she possibly known all this at nineteen? She was just thinking of how to keep close and be needed and appreciated.

Sophie, however, gives Sugar purpose back to her life, and by the end of the episode is back to being clever again. At least, making the right choices, anyway.

I’m really, really looking forward to seeing how they deal with Michel Faber’s fabulous ending.