by Jasper Fforde
Fforde books are insanely difficult to classify and tend to end up in literary fantasy with Lewis Carroll and C.S Lewis. I'm more familiar with his other two series and wasn't even aware this book was out. Imagine a sort of Orwellian world where the paramount importance was a person's type and strength of color perception. A whole society arranged around chromatic perception with social rules organized in a rigid hierarchy. Imagine too, that all medicine was administered through the visual cortex and came on color swatches...like in a paint store color swatches. Now imagine that young Edward, an untested but strong red percever, get's dropped in the middle of a conspiracy along with his swatchman (doctor) father. And of course, there's a girl. There's always a girl.
Most of the book is presented as a sort of extended flashback while Edward is head first in the belly of a carnivorous tree. It is all handled with an unusual amount of adept finesse. Normally extended flashbacks are jarring and unpleasant. It's difficult to manage a POV where the narrator knows how it's going to work out, especially when, in the last 50 pages of a 380 page book, it suddenly pops out of the flashback and into the current time-stream. Well done and as it turns out not jarring at all.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
2. Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand
by Alex Kapranos
Love is when someone can wade through a stack of media, much of which is the kind of crap that led you to discount the whole pile, and identify the one gem worth caring about. Double heart points if the media in question is totally out of that someone's interests. I get a surprising number of books and video games that way, through my husband. Great man.
Sound Bites was another Asheville find. The Guardian paid Kapranos, front man for Franz Ferdinand, to write about all the exotic foods he and his band ate while on tour. I'd always suspected that, at that rate of travel, even the most gustatory minded would end up eating a lot of junk. In Kapranos's case, junk = Subway. It's not always satisfying to be right.
Amidst the subs and cold pizza, though, they did actually manage some interesting food, or at the very least, some interesting venues. The book is written as a series of vignettes and is often less about the food and more about the places and people. I particularly found his recounting of a place called 'Ninja' in Osaka and a rather petty incident in Singapore hilarious. The only time he mentioned Atlanta was a sideways reference to the Sundial Cafe, a rotating restaurant at the top of a skyscraper downtown. He hated it as much as I did for its massively overpriced and wretched food. See previous comment about the problematic nature of being right.
Kapranos has a lively voice, an adventurous palette, and excellent background knowledge as a former cook. It was a fun read, but not the height of literature.
Love is when someone can wade through a stack of media, much of which is the kind of crap that led you to discount the whole pile, and identify the one gem worth caring about. Double heart points if the media in question is totally out of that someone's interests. I get a surprising number of books and video games that way, through my husband. Great man.
Sound Bites was another Asheville find. The Guardian paid Kapranos, front man for Franz Ferdinand, to write about all the exotic foods he and his band ate while on tour. I'd always suspected that, at that rate of travel, even the most gustatory minded would end up eating a lot of junk. In Kapranos's case, junk = Subway. It's not always satisfying to be right.
Amidst the subs and cold pizza, though, they did actually manage some interesting food, or at the very least, some interesting venues. The book is written as a series of vignettes and is often less about the food and more about the places and people. I particularly found his recounting of a place called 'Ninja' in Osaka and a rather petty incident in Singapore hilarious. The only time he mentioned Atlanta was a sideways reference to the Sundial Cafe, a rotating restaurant at the top of a skyscraper downtown. He hated it as much as I did for its massively overpriced and wretched food. See previous comment about the problematic nature of being right.
Kapranos has a lively voice, an adventurous palette, and excellent background knowledge as a former cook. It was a fun read, but not the height of literature.
Friday, April 8, 2011
1. Dreamers of the Day
by Mary Doria Russell
I found this in a used book store in Asheville, NC while killing time and waiting for everything else to open up. In Asheville's downtown, even the breakfast places don't open till 9. Everything else seems to open at 11 AM or even later. Color me aghast. Living in a major metropolis has evidently warped my concept of appropriate opening times.
In any event, there I am floating around and not feeling terribly reader-ish and I find this book with an artsy-fartsy photograph of the pyramids with WWI era woman strolling around on it. It looks like the worst kind semi-romantic literary shmaltz and the only reason I picked it up is because I happen to know who Mary Doria Russell is.
Mary Doria Russell was trained as an anthropologist and is responsible for writing The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace. The first is one of the most chilling imaginings of human first contact with alien intelligence that I've ever read and the second is a historical novel about the Jews who fled to Italy during WWII. Both books were masterfully well written and heartrendingly depressing. Russell gets enough cred to get me past a dubious looking cover.
I'm glad I gave it a shot. Dreamers of the Day is set in the time immediately after WWI and the influenza outbreaks which is a time period that many schools gloss over. It's strange to think that a relatively common disease that is generally regarded as an inconvenience once swept through world leaving corpses in the streets and we've more or less forgot. Bigger worries I guess with WWI raging on. In any case, Russell's main character, Agnes, decides to take the opportunity immediately postwar to use the money her now entirely deceased family has left her to take a trip to Egypt and in doing so manages to meet Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Quite the cast.
The book is typically well written but a little slow starting and the end is a little...odd. I've come to the conclusion that Russell, has a hard time dealing with loose ends at the end of a story and resorts to somewhat bizarre vignettes. I can forgive it though in view of the otherwise brilliant prose.
I found this in a used book store in Asheville, NC while killing time and waiting for everything else to open up. In Asheville's downtown, even the breakfast places don't open till 9. Everything else seems to open at 11 AM or even later. Color me aghast. Living in a major metropolis has evidently warped my concept of appropriate opening times.
In any event, there I am floating around and not feeling terribly reader-ish and I find this book with an artsy-fartsy photograph of the pyramids with WWI era woman strolling around on it. It looks like the worst kind semi-romantic literary shmaltz and the only reason I picked it up is because I happen to know who Mary Doria Russell is.
Mary Doria Russell was trained as an anthropologist and is responsible for writing The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace. The first is one of the most chilling imaginings of human first contact with alien intelligence that I've ever read and the second is a historical novel about the Jews who fled to Italy during WWII. Both books were masterfully well written and heartrendingly depressing. Russell gets enough cred to get me past a dubious looking cover.
I'm glad I gave it a shot. Dreamers of the Day is set in the time immediately after WWI and the influenza outbreaks which is a time period that many schools gloss over. It's strange to think that a relatively common disease that is generally regarded as an inconvenience once swept through world leaving corpses in the streets and we've more or less forgot. Bigger worries I guess with WWI raging on. In any case, Russell's main character, Agnes, decides to take the opportunity immediately postwar to use the money her now entirely deceased family has left her to take a trip to Egypt and in doing so manages to meet Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Quite the cast.
The book is typically well written but a little slow starting and the end is a little...odd. I've come to the conclusion that Russell, has a hard time dealing with loose ends at the end of a story and resorts to somewhat bizarre vignettes. I can forgive it though in view of the otherwise brilliant prose.
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