Once Upon A Time III Wrap Up

This marks the end of the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I had only committed to do the Journey (one book) but ended up doing a few short stories and three books.

Book of Lost Things
Death with Interruptions
City of Saints and Madmen


Short Stories:
The Library of Babel
The Lottery of Babylon

I never got a chance to post the links on the review site for Death with Interruptions or City of Saints and Madmen before Mr. Linky went away. By far my favorite read was the City of Saints and Madmen and I definitley plan on reading more by Jeff Vandermeer. Death with Interruptions was also good but I was very disappointed with Book of Lost Things. And of course the Borges short stories were fabulous as always. I enjoyed the challenge and look forward to next years.

City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff Vandermeer

I first discovered this author last year when I participated in the Once Upon A Time II Challenge and came across a post on the author’s web site of the Exhaustive Essential Fantasy Reading List. I was intrigued by this list because it included many of my favorite authors such as Kafka, Saramago, Peake, Borges, Calvino, Marquez and made me rethink what fantasy was.The author also has an interesting blog and it made me curious to read this author.

The City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories that all take place in the city of Ambergris. In its first edition it was just four stories, the deluxe second edition expanded to include an appendix which has more short pieces as well as letters from a director of an insane asylum and an Ambergris glossary. The second edition also included an encrypted story on the dust jacket. The paperback edition which I read includes an additional couple of stories and decrypts the story for you.

Ambergris is a fascinating dark and mysterious city with frightful grey caps or mushroom people, strange afflictions, giant squid in the River Moth, bizarre festivals and rituals and an interesting history. The first three stories in the book which introduced me to Ambergris reminded me of China Mieville’s New Corbuzon, although certainly not in a derivative way. The city is slightly evil, creepy, scary, richly imagined and enticing. I really enjoyed the fact that everything was not explained to you but you only caught glimpses and understanding gradually develops as you read more and more. The fourth story, The Strange Case of X, is my favorite and reminded me more of Kafka or Borges then Mieville. I don’t want to give anything away but it makes the reader, and author question what is reality, inserts the author into the story and makes you think about the writing process. The appendix then plays off of the Strange Case of X and includes materials that were in the possession of X such as other pieces about Ambergris in the form of stories, letters, pamphlets, scientific articles and a glossary. I enjoyed the fact that the appendix not only further developed Ambergris but explored different formats to do so. The appendix reminded me of Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimentation with format in House of Leaves and Revolutions. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and definitely will read more of this author.

Death with Interruptions

by Jose Saramago

Blurb from the Dust Jacket: On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course, causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is celebration - flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life.

Jose Saramago, a Nobel prize winning Portuguese author who is now 86 years old has a style uniquely his own. His sentences run on for paragraphs or even pages, there is not much punctuation used and any dialog is imbedded in the run on sentences so it is sometimes difficult to tell who is saying what. His focus is not a strong fast moving plot or extensive in depth character development. The author definitely makes his presence felt and I have heard my friends remark that he makes himself too evident in the writing and that he was just showing off but should just let the story speak for itself with out intruding. But if you enjoy a different style once in a while Saramago is wonderful and one of my favorite authors.

I love his beautiful use of language, his acerbic wit, and his social satire. The time and locations are rarely identified and characters are often unnamed making the stories seem more like a fable. He takes a big question such as what would happen if everyone went blind (Blindness) or the Iberian Peninsula became unattached from Europe and floats off (Stone Raft) and sees where it takes him. In Death with Interruptions, his latest work (2008) translated into English, the question is what if Death stopped? The first part of the book looks at this situation from the big picture view point and explores what this would mean for politicians, the Church, funeral directors, grave diggers, insurance companies, nursing homes and the mafia. In the second part of the book we meet death, with a small not capital d. I don’t want to give too much away but she, yes death is a she, is faced with a situation she has never had to face before. At the end of this fable humans have a much better appreciation of death and death has a better understanding of humans.

This is not one of my favorite Saramago books and probably not where I would recommend someone start but I thoroughly enjoyed it and will continue to read whatever Saramago publishes. My favorite is All the Names which I selected for my book club and was well received. Blindness seems to be very popular and would be a good place to begin but please don’t see the movie first!

BTT: Niche Books

What Niche Books do you read?

I have a lot of reference type books on my shelves pertaining to photography, Photoshop, dog training, gardening, travel and a huge collection of cookbooks (my husband loves to cook) but I don’t think of them as books that I “read”. They are simply references that I dip into to extract the information that I need and move on. There are three categories of niche books that I will curl up with and read cover to cover for pure enjoyment: 1) Books about Books 2) Books about Antarctica and 3) Books about the Carribean.

I absolutely adore books about books or reading or writing, either fiction or non-fiction. Some of my favorite fiction ones are The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski, Club Duma by Arturo Perez-Reverte, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and the Cliff Janeway mysteries by John Dunning. Some of my favorite non-fiction are Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, Used and Rare by Lawrence Goldstone, and Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles.

I find Antarctica fascinating and hope to get there someday. I have enjoyed fiction set there such as Ice Limit by Preston & Childe and Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robbinson as well as non-fiction such as Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson and In the Ghost Country by Peter Hillary. I will note that I have yet to find an extremely well written book about Antarctica but for some reason I am willing to tolerate poor or average writing that I normally wouldn’t read if it has interesting information about Antarctica.

The last niche that I sometimes read is books about the Carribean, either fiction or non-fiction, especially if it about or set in the Virgin Islands. This is a small niche and most of the books that I have are out of print or only available in the Virgin Islands. I must admit that I used to read and collect a lot more in this niche when I didn’t live in the Virgin Islands then I do now. When its cold and snowy in New England it is more fun to read about the Carribean but now it is more fun to read about the ice and cold of Antarctica.

Does anyone have any suggestions for Books about Books or Books about Antarctica?

Edit:

Having perused the other responses I have found some great books about books to check out. From the comments to the post by Savidge Reads:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - Jeremy Mercer
Ex Libris - Anne Fadiman
Classics for Pleasure - Michael Dirda
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop - Lewis Buzbee
The Polysyllabic Spree or Housekeeping vs the Dirt - Nick Hornby
The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New - Rosenberg
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel -Jane Smiley
How to Read Literature Like a Professor -Thomas C. Foster
Why We Read What We Read - Lisa Adams and John Heath
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan

And from Molly from My Cozy Book Nook:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
The 7 Basic Plots - Christopher Booker
How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler
The Well-Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
Mini Lessons for Literature Circles - Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

And a new one:
A Temple of Texts by William Glass

May/June Bookmarks

Here's what sounded interesting in the May/June Bookmarks Magazine.

The City & The City, China Mieville
Prayer's for the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno
Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd
Book of Air and Shadows, Michael Gruber
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Emperor's Children, Claire Messud
Vagrants, Yiyun Li
Way Through Doors, Jesse Ball
What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling (SF)
Drood, Dan Simmons
The Terror, Dan Simmons
Incandescence, Greg Egan (SF)
Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)

Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Wow! I don’t think I have said that about a book in many a year. Here is what the blurb from the book says:

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

While that is the set up, the book is the stories of six of the pilgrims. When the pilgrims first meet up to begin their journey to the planet Hyperion to see the Shrike they decide to each honestly tell their stories and their connection with Hyperion which may aid them in their endeavor. The worlds that are depicted in the six stories are amazingly well realized and could easily serve as settings for entire novels or even a series in their own right. The characters themselves are also very well developed.

I don’t want to give too much away but .... The pilgrims are 1) a Catholic priest 2) a Colonel in the military of Palestinian descent 3) a female private detective with an AI client 4) a Jewish scholar who brings his infant daughter on the trip 5) an incredibly old poet who lived on old earth before it was destroyed and 6) the Consul, a former governor of Hyperion. There are so many worlds and concepts that could serve as entire books in them selves. I loved the idea of “the World Web” which were worlds linked together not only by communications but by “farcaster” portals that literally allowed you to step from one world to another. There are even houses described where each room would be on a different planet. I found the TechnoCore fascinating - AI’s that are linked together in the “datasphere” and that provided humanity with the “farcaster” technology and basically run the World Web. But I don’t want to give the impression that this is just a hard scifi book because it certainly is not.

I loved the depictions of old earth before it was destroyed - the water levels rising, the extreme rich partying in their little enclaves while the rest of the world went to hell. I loved the planet Maui Covenant (think Hawaii) with its living “motile” islands that migrate in groups with the seasons and the dolphins transplanted from Earth that humanity can now speak with. I also loved all the references to the poet John Keats from which the author takes the novel’s name. Keats not only provides the book’s title named after one of his poems but at one point is the name of the main city on Hyperion set up by Mad King Billy to be an artists colony. And then there is a memorable “cybrid” which is an artificial recreation of the poet John Keats. It seems that all the different segments or aspects of earth have been transplanted to the stars. Catholicism, Islam, Judaism all play a part in the story. There are also Templars who have mysterious tree ships that travel between the stars. And then of course there are some other non- earth aspects such as the Ousters - the enemy that Man is about to go to war with. It is interesting that it is not entirely clear that the Ousters are really the bad guys at all.

This book ends after hearing the six pilgrims tales but before they reach their destination to see the Shrike. I understand that there are three more books in the Hyperion Cantos - the Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion. I immediately bought the Fall of Hyperion when I finished this book to see what happens to the pilgrims but the six stories are so completely rendered that even with out reading any more I would have been satisfied.

Book of Lost Things

by John Connolly

This is my first novel for the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I have read such glowing reviews of this book that I not only read it for the challenge but was thinking that it might be one of my selections for my book club. I am afraid that I didn’t like it. I didn’t hate it either but it certainly didn’t live up to my expectations.

The story is about a 12-year-old English boy, David, who, after the death of his mother, moves with his father and new step mother to the new wife’s family’s country estate. David is given an attic room lined with old books from a previous occupant and the books begin to literally whisper to him. One day after seeing an intruder in his room, David hears his dead mother’s voice in the sunken garden calling to him for help. He follows the voice and finds himself in a very different place where he searches for his mother and a way back to his world.

There is nothing I like better than a book about books. I loved the beginning - who could resist books actually whispering - but as soon as he goes through the crack in the garden wall and finds himself in a different world, the book totally lost me. I appreciated that this new realm is not the realm of Disney fairy tales but harkens back to the brutality of the original Grimm fairy tales that do not necessarily have happy endings. The book is definitely not written for kids, or adults who are the faint of heart. But for me, his retelling of extremely familiar fairy tales was not unique enough to keep my interest. As soon as Roland entered the story I wanted to lay this aside and pick up the Dark Tower series by Stephen King which really does a fabulous job using Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. And it’s not that I don’t like fairy tales (I love the Russian ones like Baba Yaga) or re-telling familiar fairy tales (I loved Wicked by Gregory Maguire).

Not only did the plot not hold my interest but the writing itself just wasn’t enough to captivate me. Some authors could write about watching paint dry such as David Foster Wallace, Tom Robbins or Haruki Murakami and I still would be totally entertained and awed by their writing. The writing in this book does not fit into that category. I kept feeling that I was reading a children’s book, even though it is clearly too gruesome in some parts for children. I think that this came from the very simplistic writing style which I found annoying.

Finally, every review I have read has mentioned something that lead me to believe that reading and books would play a major role in the story. (Like the Shadow of the Wind or the Uncommon Reader). I loved the whispering books at the very beginning of the story but that idea was never developed. I was hopeful that since the boy was ultimately seeking “The Book of Lost Things” that a book would play a pivotal role. It is indeed a book about stories and fairy tales but I had hoped that books themselves or reading would play a role.

It was a quick and easy read. All in all I was disappointed as it didn’t live up to my expectations. I do believe however that even if I had not read the rave reviews and had simply read the cover blurb I still would have been unsatisfied with the book.

March/April Bookmarks Magazine

Here are the books that look good from Bookmarks Magazine.

Book of Chameleons - Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Deathe with Interruptions - Jose Saramago
Elegance of the Hedgehoge - Muriel Barbery
Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
Little Giant of Aberdeen County - Tiffany Baker
Gridlinked- Neal Ahser
Suicide Collectors- David Oppengaard
Daemon - Daniel Suarez
Lush Life - Richard Price (Clockers)

History of Computers and the Internet

When I am in the mood to read about the history of computers and the internet, here are two books to try.

Dealers of Light - Michael A. Hiltzik

Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

by Robert A. Heinlein

Years ago Robert A. Heinlein was one of my favorite authors and even though this book had been sitting on my shelf for many years I hadn't gotten around to reading it. I finally read it as a book selection for my book club, the first sci fi book ever in its 8 year existence- and I didn't even select it. Published in 1966 it is described as "His classic, Hugo Award winning novel of libertarian revolution." The moon was used as a penal colony by Earth but was also responsible for growing a large percentage of the food consumed by the Earth. The story is of a lunar revolution by a computer, a computer technician, a scholar and an agitator to free its citizens from the control of the Warden and the Lunar Authority.

I must say that I had a very hard time getting into the story at first because of the writing style. For some reason the dialog was not written in complete sentences and the lack of articles or pronouns was hard for me to read. I knew what it was saying it just seemed wrong and took me out of the story. About a 100 pages in however either the author gave up this style or I became engrossed in the story line and failed to notice it any more and from then out I loved it. My favorite character was the self aware computer Mike who was instrumental in the rebellion but also had a fascinating personality. The computer's quest to understand humans, such as his attempts to understand jokes, made for an interesting meditation on what it means to be human. This is a novel of ideas, especially about politics and different forms of societies but the novel also had plenty of suspense and action.

I enjoyed this book but it does not rank up there with some of my favorite Heinlein such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, the Cat Who Walked Through Walls, Friday or Job. I was very supprised that my book club's first foray into sci fi was successful and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

April Wishlist

When ever I come across a book that I would like to add to my wish list at work I email myself the info. This is my accumulated list from emails from July 08 to present. It appears to be heavy on sci fi and antarctica.

Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

City of Dreaming Books – Walter Moers

Glasshouse – Charles Stross

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town – Cory Doctorow

Alchemy of Stone

Secret History of Moscow – Ekaterina Sedia

Antarktos Rising – Jeremy Robinson

Raising Atlantis – Thomas Greanias

Terra Incognita, Travels in Antarctica – Sara Wheeler

Antarctic, Life on the Ice (Traveler’s Tales) – Susan Fox Rogers

Alfred Bester – Stars My Destination, Demolished Man

Shadow of the Scorpion (Polity Novel Prequel) – Ken Asher
1st Polity Novel – Gridlinked

The Android’s Dream – John Scalzi
Also Old Man’s War.

Stealing Light - Gary Gibson

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks - First one Consider Phlebas

Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy

Fallen Angels - Niven/Pournelle

Altered Carbon

by Richard K Morgan

I read Altered Carbon for Carl V’s SciFi Experience but then life got crazy and I didn’t get a chance to write a review. It is hard scifi combined with a classic noir detective novel. (I have seen someone else refer to it as cyber pulp which fits exactly.) Takashi Kovac, a former envoy, gets hired by a very wealthy Meth (a person who lives a very long time) on Earth to find out if he really committed suicide or whether it was murder. The gentlemen isn’t dead in any case because his consciousness is backed up periodically and he has cloned bodies on the ready to slip into but he cannot remember what happened between his last backup and his death.

I really enjoyed it but was a little disappointed that it was really just a detective story that happens to be set in the future. I would have liked a little more emphasis and exploration of the interesting world that the author created and the implications for the new technologies. The memories of a person are stored in a stack and those memories can be resleeved, as long as the stack is not destroyed, either in a clone of your body or a totally different body. Of course for the super rich you can have remote back up of your stack and can go on indefinitely . People no longer have to travel. You can just have your consciousness transmitted and then placed in another sleeve. If you are convicted of a crime your stack is placed in storage and your body can be rented out to others for use. Of course the ordinary deceased citizen may find his family hard pressed to afford either a synthetic body for him or a virtual world to inhabit or be stuck in storage until they can save enough money for you to be resleeved.

I enjoyed the fast paced convoluted plot and the author’s view of the future. The characters were not particularly well developed but then again neither were Dashiell Hammett’s. I especially liked the Artificial Intelligence that ran the hotel in which Kovac stayed. I found the hints about Kovac’s past on Harlan’s world very interesting and was disappointed that the events of the novel were confined to Bay City (obviously San Francisco). It was not quite what I expected but I did enjoy it. Someday I would like to read the sequel, Broken Angels that takes Kovac on adventures outside of earth and supposedly deals with some of his back story.

The Lottery of Babylon

The Lottery of Babylon by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells the myth of a lottery run by the secret “Company”. Centuries ago the lottery started out as chances to win prizes such as we are familiar with today but it soon evolved into “a major element of reality”. First the idea of only winning money was done away with because it had no moral force and the idea of unlucky draws was added. As the lottery evolved, eventually the Company had to assume all public power and made the lottery free, universal and secret. “The mercenary sale of lots abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free citizen automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in labyrinths of the god every sixty nights and determined each citizen’s destiny until the next drawing.” As the lottery permeated all elements of life it is described as “an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos”. At the time of our narrator there is much debate as to whether the Company still exists or even if it ever existed. Some argue “that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.”

I don’t want to tell you too much for fear of ruining it for you but you can read it on line here. This is one of my favorite Borges stories which not only asks what is reality but what role random chance plays in the universe. Is the universe run by a higher authority such as the Company or does the lack of discernable meaning signify that it really is all chance?

The Library of Babel

For OUT3's first Short Story Weekend I read one of my favorite Borges short stories, The Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian author and librarian most famous for his short stories. Indeed, Borges never wrote a novel or novella and some of his short stories are so short that they are only a single page. In addition to fiction he also wrote poetry, literary criticism, essays and screenplays and translated many works into Spanish from English, French, German, Old English and Norse. Common themes in his work include the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality and philosophy.

The Library of Babel imagines the universe as a vast, if not infinite, library which contains all possible books. The books contain all possible combinations of the 25 symbols (22 letters, the space, comma and period) arranged in apparently random order. There are no two identical books in the library. This means that the vast majority of books make no sense but the librarians endlessly search for sense in the books and the mythological one book that would explain all the other books. Young men travel throughout the labyrinthine library searching for books that will explain the origins of the library or the Crimson Hexagon that is rumored to hold those books that are “all-powerful, illustrated and magical”.

It is not very long and you can read it for yourself online here. In my mind the art accompanying the story online is far more contemporary and well kempt than I envision the library. But that is the great thing about reading - everyone gets to interpret the story in their own way. The labyrinth library from Umberto Eco’s book Name of the Rose (complete with a librarian named Jorge Burgos) is more in keeping with my vision of this library.

Once Upon A Time III

Apparently it has been a year since I joined my very first challenge and it is now time for another round of Once Upon A Time hosted by Carl V of Stainless Steel Droppings. It lasts from March 21, 2009 to June 20, 2009 and you can choose to participate in many different ways reading fantasy, fairy tale, folklore or mythology. For details please check out the challenge site here. The review site is here.

I was originally hesitant about this challenge last year because I didn’t think that I normally read “fantasy” but as I participated I came to realize that I really do read and enjoy fantasy, I just didn’t know it. See my June 12, 2008 post on the subject here. Author Jeff VanderMeer has posted a fascinating Essential Fantasy Reading List on his blog. I loved the list because it included books and authors that I really love that I had never thought of as fantasy such as Kafka, Saramago, Peake, Borges, Calvino, Marquez which of course leads me to believe that I will like the others on his list as well.

I am going to do “The Journey” meaning that I am going to participate but am not committing to reading a certain number of books. Here are some books that I would like to read:

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

I would also like to read something else by China Meiville because I so enjoyed his Perdido Street Station last year. I would also like to try something by Charles de Lint because he seems to be so popular amongst other participants. If anyone has any suggestions of which would be a good first de Lint book to try let me know.

I also intend to participate in some Short Story Weekends. Borges is one of my favorite authors and would be perfect for that.

Okay, now I am getting really excited about all these great books to read and thinking that I should just sign up for a quest - but no. I am going to be restrained and stick with the journey and if I read five books great.

Worst Best Book

Booking Through Thursday asks:“What’s the worst ‘best’ book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?”

I haven’t participated in BTT in a while or done much blogging for that matter (life just got in the way) but this is a great question so here it goes.

What immediately leaps to mind is the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. I have had to read the entire thing on three separate occasions in the course of my academic career and it was torturous on all three occasions. I understand why it is an important work but not readable. Of course I am not sure that it counts because it is non-fiction (although there is some debate as to whether it should be read as history or literature).

On a more contemporary note, I have tried to read Ullysses by James Joyce on numerous occasions and haven’t been able to do it. I have every reason to believe that I should like it given my reading tastes. But that cannot count because I haven’t read it.

The other classic that leaps to mind is the Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger which I did read. I just didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t very impressed with the characters nor the writing style. I can understand if you read it as a young boy perhaps the teenage angst would resonate but when I read it as an adult woman and I just wanted to tell Holden to stop whining.

I also read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and the Celestine Prophesy back when they were all the rage to see what all the fuss was about. I just didn’t get it. They obviously have some sort of philosophical appeal to lots of people but they just don’t have any literary merit.

January/February Bookmarks Magazine

What looked interesting in this Bookmarks issue.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Death with Interuptions by Jose Saramago
The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Something by David Liss - I enjoyed the Coffee Trader, Perhaps A Conspiracy of Paper
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (Enjoyed Cloud Atlas)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

This is the story of a man who’s wife leaves him and his efforts to get her back. At the beginning of the novel Toru or Mr. Wind-up Bird, has quit his job at a law firm and putters around the house cooking and looking for their lost cat while his wife supports them. One day his wife goes to work and simply doesn’t come back. Because this is Murakami it does not involve any navel gazing about what could have gone wrong in the marriage or any action by the man to go out and get a job to impress her and win her back. Instead Toru drifts along letting fate take him where it will and in this case it takes him on some very interesting adventures. In his wife’s absence Toru meets Malta Kano, a psychic helping him look for his lost cat and her sister, Creta Kano, a prostitute of the mind. He crosses paths with his evil brother in law, Noboru a pragmatic politician who defiled Creta Kano years ago and may have something to do with his wife’s absence. He meets Lt. Mamiya who tells him about war atrocities in Outer Mongolia and Manchuria. He runs into a mother and son team that he calls Nutmeg and Cinnamon and joins up with them to psychically heal wealthy women. Toru also makes friends with a teenage girl down the street, May Kasahara , and spends quite a bit of time sitting in a dry well where he has some unusual experiences.

What I really love about Murakami is his writing. This is how he described a smile: “The hint of a smile played about his lips, as if he had just heard a joke and was smiling now in the most natural way. Nor had the joke been a vulgar one: it was the kind of elegant pleasantry that the minister of foreign affairs might have told the crown prince at a garden party a generation ago, causing the surrounding listeners to titter in delight.” Most authors would just call it a smile but Murakami draws a vivid picture. I also love the crazy characters and the way you never know exactly what is going to happen because reality as we know it does not apply in a Murakami novel( New York Times review called the novel Kafkaesque). I have read some reviews that said they didn’t like the ambiguous ending but I like to be left guessing about what happens after the novel ends. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. While I like Kafka on the Shore better because I liked the main character more, this was a great read and I will certainly continue to read Murakami.

Lending Books

Today’s Musing: “A few weeks back we had a question about borrowing books, this week I was wondering what your policy was on lending books. Do you lend books to anyone? Just friends? Only big readers? How long are they allowed to have them?”

I hate lending books and try not to do it too often. I have book shelves in my office at work filed with my personal books (almost all fiction) because we don’t actually use books for work anymore. Sometimes co-workers will brows my shelves and ask to borrow books. I lent one person a hard cover that subsequently was lost and then eventually found more than a year later but without its dust jacket. My boss borrowed five or six books that I only got back three years later when she retired. And it is not just a problem at work. I certainly cannot loan books to my family. My sister never ever buys books and usually reads whatever paperback she can find free in a book swap to which she returns it when she is done. She has no notion that a book is not to be treated with respect and any book will not only be dog eared but with the spine broken, splattered with wine and/or dipped in the swimming pool when she is done with it. She is absolutely not allowed to go into my books shelves.

The only time I lend out books is when I read a book and just know that so and so absolutely has to read it. For those few friends that I know will take care of books and I am convinced that a particular book is something they must read, I do not hesitate to lend to them the book and they do the same for me. Some of my favorite books are ones that a friend knew would be perfect for me and insisted that I read it. I don’t set any time limit on the loan. Interesting question.

Guardian's 1000 Novels - SF & Horror

Carl V at Stainless Steel Droppings has an interesting post regarding the Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Should Read which includes a section on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.
Following Carl’s lead, below is a list of those SF books with those I have read bolded and in orange. I was surprised that I had actually read 34. The Guardian list is a little strange until you read their introduction that explains their selections criteria: “all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.” Of course it is also odd that the introduction specifically mentions that Tolkien is on the list and he isn’t. The fun of lists like this is to not only get new ideas of books to read but also disagree and quibble over the books left out (Perdido Street Station, Ender’s Game) or inexplicably included (Darwin’s Radio), pleasantly surprised by ones that you had forgotten about (Weaveworld) and confirm the ones that you vehemently agree are must reads (Titus Groan, The Trial). This list has given me some good reading suggestions - like I need more books on my wish list!

THE LIST
1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
7. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
11. Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
13. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
25. Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
29. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
30. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
32. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
36. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
37. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
38. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
39. Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
48. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
49. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
59. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
80. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
90. Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
110. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
118. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
119. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
120. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)