Uh, Yeah, I Have A Blog

Well Read # 7: The Woman in White

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:40:57 GMT

Whoa. Did you know it's the middle of December? I did not, judging by the library fines I've run up. Also, I think maybe I forgot to sign up for November this year. Or something.

Anyway, brace yourselves because I've read a Real Classic. But if you're going to do classics, you might as well do one that starts off with a mysterious woman in white who has just escaped from a lunatic asylum. (Incidentally, has it ever occurred to you to be grateful not to be crazy in Victorian times? Because you should be.)

Now, it sometimes seems like Wilkie Collins was paid by the word (which maybe he was) but I didn't even mind because there are conspiracies, suspicious deaths, secret meetings and things that I probably shouldn't give away. (Do spoilers apply to classics? I mean everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet end up, right?) You can totally tear through the odd wordy bit to find out what happens next. This is one of those mysteries where the overall ending isn't hard to guess - the real questions is how you get there, and why.

The weak point, for me, is Laura. The rest of the characters, from her hypochondriac uncle with his constantly rattled nerves to the creepily villainous count with his pet mice are excellent, and Marian in particular is nine kinds of awesome. But Laura is sweet and nice and pretty and never seems quite able to rise to the occasion. To be fair, she does try, especially at the beginning, and people in the olden days had different ideas about what constitutes female awesomeness. But she's just lucky Marian and Hartright had her back. Because I could have totally forgiven them if they'd said, "This girl is boring. Let's join the circus instead."

Which might not have been a bad book in itself....

Déjà Vu

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:46:02 GMT

If you are into book covers (and who isn't?) this is pretty excellent.

The Fetch

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:05:54 GMT

Unlike most major retailers, I have not yet moved on to Christmas so I feel it's still in keeping with the spirit of the season if I tell you about a fabulously creepy book.

The Fetch by Laura Whitcomb reminds me of a dream I had a few years ago that wasn't quite a nightmare where I was dead but not really and trying to fix that by doing some calculus problems with Simon Branch, of all random people*, who was also somewhat dead. Also there was a party and a beach and a ride in an old-timey Model T.

Anyway, Calder is a Fetch, whose job it is to guide freshly dead souls into Heaven. While making his rounds he stumbles upon the Tsar's family in early 20 th century Russia. Alexis, you may recall was a hemophiliac and almost died on a regular basis. And if you know anything about history it will not surprise you that Alexis and his sister Anastasia spend most of the book kind of dead but not really. (The rest of the family spend most of the book actually dead.)

Now the cover seems to think this is a love story, which I guess it is, a bit. But mostly it's an adventure story. They travel the world looking for the key to Heaven and there are demons and secrets and a very excellent boat trip. Meanwhile they're dead, running out of time and cut off from the Powers That Be. Good times. And by good times I mean awesomely creepy.

*Hi Simon! Stop Googling yourself.

Can Someone Explain to Me...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:14:49 GMT

What happened to the weekend? I thought the extra hour would make it, you know, longer.

Also, I cut through the mall today and saw one of the shops putting up their Christmas displays. Is it December? Did I black out or something?

Fall Is My Favourite Season

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:20:00 GMT

Well Read #6: Tipping the Velvet

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:49:32 GMT

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters starts off with Nancy working in her family's oyster house and constantly taking the train to the music hall. She has a crush on Kitty Butler, who performs dressed as a boy, although it takes her a while to realize this. This is Victorian times, I should tell you, before strange boys in bars tried to talk you into being a lesbian.* Then one night Kitty throws a rose to her. They become friends and run off to London together and I'm sure you can guess what happens next. It's all quite sweet really. But! There are these nagging Ominous Remarks and hundreds of pages left to go.

Now, the cool thing about Sarah Waters's books is that they start off seeming straightforward, then you hit part two and all the rules change. So I feel like I shouldn't tell you too much about what happens next. Although I will say that I prefer sex scenes to be of the fade-to-black variety, so I found this part a bit hard to get through. I read this on the train and kept glancing over at the girl sitting next to me to make sure she was still asleep and not reading over my shoulder even though I shouldn't care what she thinks of me and for all I know she reads kinkier books before breakfast.

This is another book where I couldn't quite cheer for anyone. But I don't feel like Nancy assumes we'll be cheering for her, which makes it all less awkward than those books where lame characters seem to take your allegiance for granted.

*Yes, this has happened to me. Strange boy, do you realize that lesbians are, by definition, not into you?

Well Read #5: Silk

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:11:15 GMT

Silk by Alessandro Baricco is a slim, elegant book that reads like a fairy tale. And I do have a weak spot for fairy tales. It's about Hervé Joncour, who is in the silk worm business, travelling to Africa to buy eggs because of an epidemic ravaging European hatcheries. Then disease spreads to Africa and Hervé Joncour's wise, mysterious friend Baldabiou sends him off to Japan. This is in the days when Japan was cut off from the world and foreigners were forbidden. Excellent bit of dialogue:
"This place, Japan, where precisely is it?"
"Just keep going. Right to the end of the world."
Undaunted, he heads off to Japan, where he meets Hara Kei who sells him silk worms and also a mysterious girl who is dazzling and mysterious and forbidden. Then he comes home the first Sunday in April in time for High Mass. And again next year. And then there is a war in Japan and Hervé Joncour comes home devastated.
There are silk scarves light as air, a prostitute who reads Japanese love letters, and a sky full of a riot of birds let loose from an aviary:
"An aviary?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
Hervé Joncour Kept his eyes on the sketches.
"You fill it up with birds, as many as you can, then one day when something good happens to you, you throw it open and watch them fly away."
And there are silk worms. Which, if you are feeling scientifically accurate, are actually caterpillars - silk is made from thier cocoons.

The Alchemy of Air

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:44:41 GMT

Of late I've had my nose buried in The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager. Those of you who are Chemistry geeks will know of the Haber process (Haber-Bosch process as it is, perhaps more fairly, called in this book.) For those of you who aren't Chemistry geeks, it's the synthesis of ammonia and it looks something like this:

I point this out because the equation is not in the book and, kids, if I were to write a book about a chemical reaction you can bet it would be packed with equations. Also no one would read it.

Anyway, this is mostly a book about history, not Chemistry. It starts off telling us about natural sources of fixed nitrogen in South America, which they used to ship to Europe for fertilizer in the olden days. There were wars over this stuff. Then there was World War I, when Germany got cut off.

Which brings us to Haber, a Jewish German Chemist who found a way to jack up the pressure and temperature and get a reaction out of nitrogen and hydrogen. (These are inert gases, who aren't usually into that kind of thing.) He then sold this to BASF where Bosch and turned it into an industrial process. This all started off for the purposes of making fertilizer, which is one of those things that seems much less mundane when you don’t have any. But you know what else you can make out of nitrogen? Explosives. And, coincidentally, there was a war.

This is a hard book to read because Germany in the early twentieth century is not always a happy place to be, and you don’t always know who to cheer for. Haber, who is patriotic to a fault, goes on to serve his country by inventing chemical warfare and all the while you know it's going to end badly for him once the Nazis show up (which it does.) Bosch, meanwhile, mostly seems like a guy doing the best he can under the circumstances. I can see why he built his war-effort factories and why he tried to make deals with Hitler and also why he drank, but you can't really cheer for that.

But, to end on a note of awesomeness, Haber also came up with a plan to extract gold from seawater. (Among all the various salts in the ocean are some gold ions, which one can theoretically precipitate out.) He sailed around the world on various cruises, testing the water and hoping to find a high concentration of gold, like a liquid mine. Turns out no such place exists and the gold concentration is too low to be worthwhile, but Dude, if the price of gold were to go up enough ... Well, that would be pretty damn cool.

Well Read #4: The Shipping News

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:38:30 GMT

The Shipping News totally seems like a book club kind of book (I believe the proper term is "literary fiction.") I am not in a book club and it's not the kind of book I'm normally drawn to, but it's good to expand one's horizons. It's about a guy named Quoyle who moves to Middle-of-Nowhere, Newfoundland, where his family are legendary lunatics, and joins the staff of the local paper writing about car wrecks and ships.

But mostly it's a book about Newfoundland - boats and fish and winter storms. And I do love a book where Place matters instead of being background scenery.

Also, there are a lot of sentence fragments. I am not a stickler about this as a general rule, but too many is distracting. There were times I found myself scanning the page in search of a subject. Or a verb.

As a random bit of awesomeness, there is a really corny joke about knitting. While I would like to think my sense of humour is more clever and sophisticated, I totally laughed.

Dear Motorists

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:30:24 GMT

Yes, you can turn right on a red light.

No, you cannot freely run over any pedestrians crossing the street at the time.

Really, this is not so hard to understand.

Well Read #3: Fingersmith

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:09:12 GMT

Yeah, I've fallen off the pace a bit what with moving and all, but Book #3 for the 1% Well Read Challenge is Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I'm trying to think of what I can tell you about it without Giving Things Away. It starts off in Victorian London where Sue gets recruited by a conman acquaintance to help him marry an heiress. The plan (or so it seems) is that they will then ditch the heiress in a madhouse and make off with the fortune.

But all is not as it seems and when things seem to be winding up with the heiress (whose name is Maud, incidentally) there are still hundreds of pages to go. And secrets to be revealed.

I have complained before that I don't care for books where I don't like any of the characters. But, you know, that's not really true. I don't care for books where it seems understood that I'm rooting for the main character when really I'm not because he/she sucks. But this is a book full of villainous people and while certainly I wouldn't like to meet them ever, it's awesome to read about them double crossing each other. I didn't really know who to cheer for here or how the ending could in any way work out okay. But it does. (That's not Giving Things Away. I don't say it's a happy ending, as such, or a sad one, only that it's an ending. And that I am okay with it.)

Also, my library copy has a picture of a pair of gloves on the front and having read the book I find this awesomely creepy. Y'all know how I love creepy books.

What I Did Today

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:28:47 GMT

Is there anything more Canadian than wool socks and beer?

Happy Canada Day, kids.

Cough

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:06:01 GMT

I thought I had enough cough drops to last till the Second Coming.

I was wrong. Or else I missed the Second Coming.

In other news, I have finished Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler and I am kind of at a loss for words. It's a collection of loosely linked short stories and I guess if you kind of squint you might say they're creepy and twisted love stories. And y'all know me - if I'm going to do love stories they better be weird and creepy. This book is awesome. And also disturbing.

Books!

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:33:12 GMT

I have a shiny new library card.

Cheater

Sun, 24 May 2009 19:52:06 GMT

After considering the list of things I would need to buy to make real muffins (flour, spices, measuring spoons), I bought muffin mix instead.

They turned out better than I expected.

I'm Still Here!

Sun, 03 May 2009 19:17:42 GMT

I am writing this at a Starbucks because as yet I have no internet at home (Thursday cannot come soon enough.) That's right kids, I'm one of those people hunched over a laptop in a coffee shop trying to look like I am writing a novel or something similarly cool. (Admittedly, not trying very hard.)

Anyway, it seems like I should have lots to tell you but really it's just all moving related stuff and you surely don't want to hear about me hooking up a phone and filling in change of address forms.

In other news, I start the new job tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Well Read #2 The Virgin Suicides

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:26:20 GMT

Well, I've been meaning to read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides for a good long while and I finally got around to it. The best part was that my library copy had this post-it note stuck on the front page:

Yeah, it's gorgeously gloomy and all that. It's about the beautiful and doomed Lisbon sisters and the neighbourhood boys who gaze at them wistfully from across the street. There are dead flies, dying elm trees and it tells you right at the beginning that all the sisters commit suicide. So, not the kind of reading that really cheers you up.

But that's okay. What irks me, though, is that the sisters never seem to do anything other than be mysteriously beautiful and the boys never seem to do anything other than gaze dreamily at them. Why doesn't someone run away to join the circus or build a race car or climb Kilimanjaro? Why does Mrs. Lisbon think it's a good plan to hide them all inside the house? Hasn't she ever read any fairy tales? Locking up the daughters never ends well. There's the moral, if that's what you're after.

One of Those Days

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:33:30 GMT

So, I kept thinking to myself "The Internet seems kind of different today. What's up with that?"

Yeah, somehow I didn't notice that I had opened Internet Explorer instead of Firefox.

Spelling Tip of the Day

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:16:14 GMT

Lose is the opposite of Win. Or find.

Loose is the opposite of Tight. Or, in some contexts, Chaste.

They are totally separate words but I see them mixed up so often I fear their feelings will be hurt. I know typos happen to the best of but, Dude, please be careful with those O's.

Well Read #1: Cloud Atlas

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:21:34 GMT

I've been kind of meaning to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell ever since it came out, mostly because I think the cover is cool. Yeah, I'm shallow like that.

Now that I've read it, I don't quite know what to tell you about it. It starts off with a nineteenth century American notary sailing home from Australia, jumps abruptly into a disreputable composer's letters to a friend in the 1930's, then into a story about an investigative reporter looking for her first big scoop and on from there until the end comes back to Adam sailing home. It's not so much intertwined stories as nested ones, like those Russian dolls. For the first half of the book you kind of have to take it on faith that you're reading a novel and not a series of false starts.

A few pages into a book, I generally have an idea what it's about - for instance, an orphan who is whisked away to wizarding school and has exciting adventures or a hobbit who has to get rid of a ring. But I've read all of Cloud Atlas and if you ask me what it's about I'll kind of stutter and say "Uh, it's about ... um ... stuff?"

Which is not to say that it's not as cool as the cover. Ambiguity can be cool.

Help Wanted

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:04:16 GMT

You know, it seems I've seen a lot of job ads that make me think "If I had a PhD, 10 years experience, an Olympic medal and my own tropical island why would I want to work for you?" I am never sure if these are more amusing or depressing.

Today I can laugh though, because I got offered a shiny new job. Although, if you happen to have an extra tropical island to give away I wouldn't say no....

Well Read

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:06:28 GMT

Remember how back in January I said I was going to read lots of books? And then I didn't? You probably don't know, unless you have been spying on me with secret cameras, that a while ago I filled in This spreadsheet of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I have read 33 of them, for those of you keeping score. While I am not really planning to read the whole before I die - I feel I have read enough Margaret Atwood for one life - I saw a lot of books I wanted to read. And then I didn't

I have since happened upon The 1% Well Read Challenge. Now, the Internet will shame me into doing it. Thanks Internet! So, my plan is to read 10 books from the old list (apparently it's been updated) by Dec. 31. Off to check the library catalogue...

I Have A Camera Now

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:47:28 GMT

Well, I thought about writing something clever and witty, but thinking is as far as I got. Sorry. In the meantime you may admire this photo I took of some ducks. Yay! Ducks!

Why I Love the Internet

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:57:27 GMT

You can happen upon stuff like this. Fed this page into Wordle and got:

Looks like it was really into that chocolate cake recipe. Mmmmmmm......chocolate.

The Professor's Daughter

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:27:38 GMT

The term "graphic novel" has always bothered me. It always sounds pretentious, as in "these are real important and serious comics. But don't you dare call them comics." And they are not, to my mind, novels, and it just irks me for things to be wrong.

If you read cook books, you will occasionally come across some snooty passage about how white chocolate isn't really chocolate as if that means it is not delicious. Well, you can see where this is going.

I picked up The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert from the library and whether you call it a comic or a graphic novel or a pile of pages really doesn't matter because it is gorgeous and funny and clever. It begins when the Professor's Daughter and his Egyptian mummy go out for a stroll and wacky Victorian London style hijinks ensue.