Archive for June, 2007
June 29, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under Books Etc
As you can probably tell, I haven’t felt much like reading lately. It’s a combination of things.
I often don’t feel like reading after I’ve finished a really great book, like Mélusine and The Virtu. The kind of book that gives me that bounce-on-your-toes, suppressed-squeals-bubbling-up-inside feeling. It’s always genre fiction that gives me this feeling; sci-fi and fantasy, mainly, although I may have had the same reaction to Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. It makes me want to read more of the same, but usually there isn’t any more of the same, and I’m left unsatisfied and unable to settle down to anything else.
The other reason is that I’ve been worried about my father, who’s had pneumonia for the past few months, persisting through several rounds of treatment. He doesn’t seem all that sick, certainly better than he was at the beginning, but since it’s not clearing up, the doctors have him in isolation at the hospital. When my sister and I went to visit him today, we had to wear masks to enter the room. It was, to put it mildly, somewhat less than reassuring. Everyone thought he’d be released today, but the lung specialist nixed that idea in favour of more tests, which will take at least until Tuesday.
So I haven’t felt in much of a mood to tackle any of the books in my TBR pile.
June 20, 2007 at 12:01 am · Filed under Miscellanea
June 17, 2007 at 2:23 am · Filed under Books Etc
John P. Robarts Library is the University of Toronto’s primary humanities and social sciences library (the largest in Canada, in fact,) and the main library on campus. It houses over 14 million volumes, and takes up an entire city block. It is also, presumably intentionally, shaped like a peacock, although it looks more like a turkey.
The bulk of the building isn’t visible in the first photo, but you can clearly see the neck and beak rising from the section housing the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Even though so many Torontonians (including me) complain about how unattractive and downright silly it looks, I’m actually pretty fond of it. The beak part is ridiculous, but the main structure is rather majestic, like a modern cathedral for books.
The second photo does better justice to the structure, which looks much more dignified when shot from the back. In my first year in university, I lived in the Innis College residence, just across the road, and it was comforting to look out my bedroom window and see all the windows lit up at night.
It’s not very nice on the inside. Typical for libraries of its type, it doesn’t have (m)any exterior windows, and it’s not very well-lit. The colour scheme is an infelicitous combination of orange and brown. It’s an odd-shaped building; on most floors, this doesn’t matter, because the stacks are along the walls, with study tables in the open areas in the centre. The unusual shape is especially obtrusive on the 14th floor, though, which is mostly offices; all the hallways have lots of bends in them and never seem to meet at right angles, and some of the rooms are so small and have corners with such sharp angles that it’s difficult to fit furniture into them.
To be fair, Robarts was originally intended only for grad students and professors; it wasn’t until a successful protest by U of T’s undergrads that they were allowed to use it, too. It was also built in the early 70’s (completed in 1973), which wasn’t the greatest time for architecture. It’s built in the Brutalist style, of which Prince Charles, in a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984, had this remark to make: “You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe, when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”
Apparently there may be a resurgence of Brutalism, despite the poor success of many Brutalist structures, due to the invention of LiTraCon, a form of translucent concrete. Do visit the website; the video on the front page shows just how translucent it is.
June 15, 2007 at 12:00 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Mystery and Suspense
57. The Silent Pool by Patricia Wentworth (Mystery) 205 p.
One of Patricia Wentworth’s many Miss Silver mysteries. They’re pretty formulaic, and none of them are particularly great, but they’re all comforting and familiar, even the ones I’ve never read before, like this one.
When Adriana Ford suspects that someone is attempting to kill her, she goes to Miss Maud Silver for help. Miss Silver, a retired governess, is an unlikely private enquiry agent, but she always gets the job done.
Inspector Frank Abbott in moments of irreverence declared that his esteemed Chief suspected “Maudie” of powers alarmingly akin to witchcraft—but then it is notorious that this brilliant officer sometimes allows himself to talk in a very extravagant manner.
Patricia Wentworth’s mysteries have a lot in common with Agatha Christie’s, with their focus on the mystery and its solution, rather than on the development of the recurring characters.
Books read: 57/100 (57%)
Pages read: 16,810/25,000 (67%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Miss Silver, Patricia Wentworth
June 13, 2007 at 4:05 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
56. The Virtu by Sarah Monette (Fantasy) 439 p.
Oh my God. My love for Sarah Monette is confirmed. She rocks my socks.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d wanted to read Mélusine for a long time, and was lucky enough to find it in hardcover at the Book Depot for $7.99. When I finished it yesterday I was dying to read the sequel, The Virtu, right away. When I checked the Indigo website, it told me that there was one copy left in my area, a trade paperback marked down to $6.99. I would rather have had a hardcover, to match the first in the series, but I wanted to read it too badly to be picky, and the price was right.
So I went downtown to the World’s Biggest Bookstore (after a stop at BMV, my favourite used bookstore, conveniently located next door,) and found, when got there, that the copy listed on the computer as a trade paperback was actually a hardcover. So my copies do match after all! A little thing, maybe, but it made me happy. (I was also already in a good mood after finding Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard, one of my favourite books from childhood, in hardcover for $3.50—my original paperback copy has been read so many times that it looks ridiculously bedraggled and pathetic, even though it was new when I first got it. I also found a Patricia Wentworth mystery that I’ve never read for $1, and I paid only $3.50 for a paperback copy of The Complete Adventures of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit, another favourite childhood author, although I’ve never read any of these particular books.)
Anyway, The Virtu is even better than Mélusine. I can’t understand why I haven’t heard more about Sarah Monette. Maybe I just don’t read enough of the right book blogs. The Virtu picks up pretty much where Mélusine left off, and continues the shift between Felix and Mildmay’s first-person POV’s, a technique that works just as well in this book as it did in the first one. The sections are still labelled with the POV character, which is a courtesy to the reader that more authors who use similar techniques could stand to employ, although with Monette it’s probably not necessary—she’s done such an amazing job giving Felix and Mildmay distinct and wildly different voices that it would be difficult to confuse the two.
There was a brief incident in Mélusine which I had wondered if Monette would pick up again in The Virtu. I wasn’t sure she would, since it was only briefly mentioned and happened while Felix was mad, but to my delight, she explored it in some depth in The Virtu. The relationship between Felix and Mildmay is still my favourite thing about the series; it’s certainly one of the most interesting fictional relationships I’ve read about in a long time. I’m not too keen on Felix in this book, but I’m hoping that he’ll grow as the series progresses, even despite himself. Mildmay is as charming and wonderful a character as ever.
[spoilers]
The Virtu starts with Felix and Mildmay in Troia, still in the Gardens of Nimphele, but it’s not too long before they start to make their way back to Mélusine. I like how the plot basically mirrors that of Mélusine, with the first half of the novel devoted to travel, and the second half set in Mélusine, the reverse of how it was in the first book. It helps to highlight the contrast between the journey out to Troia, while Felix was mad and Mildmay was dominant, and the journey back to Mélusine, when Felix is definitely the one in control. The difference between Felix vulnerable and confused and Felix back to his old self (who we’re actually meeting for pretty much the first time) is really startling. The gap between the two is vast, exacerbated by the fact that Felix initially remembers very little of what happened during his year of madness. He remembers people and how he feels about them, but not the circumstances that led to those feelings. And since he can’t remember much about his madness, he’s forgotten most of what he learned from the experience.
He and Mildmay make their way back across the sea, and back across Kekropia, picking up a few companions on the way. One of things I like about Monette’s writing is that she doesn’t rush to the finish line, doesn’t put overmuch stress on the resolution of the main plot. It makes her books infinitely more lifelike, and lends her narrative a certain fluidity, as well as allowing her to introduce new characters and situations that don’t necessarily have any connection with the main plot.
I was glad to see Gideon, Mavortian, and Bernard again. I didn’t think she’d just drop them, and it was nice to be right about that. One of the best things about Mélusine was how it turned some of the traditional heroic character traits on their heads; neither Felix nor Mildmay is a traditional hero, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s Felix, by far the less likable of the two, who comes closest to fulfilling that pattern. Mildmay is a very good man, but not a fantasy hero, and nowhere is that more obvious than when he leaves Gideon, Mavortian, and Bernard behind in Mélusine. It’s not just that he leaves without them—there are plenty of justification for it, some of them which could even be used by a fantasy hero—but that he doesn’t even try to find out what’s happened to them, or even really decide to abandon them. It just that going back to investigate or help them in any way doesn’t even occur to him. Still, it wouldn’t have made sense not to bring back the other three in this book, since a sudden and unexplained disappearance is a loose end just begging to be resolved.
Really big spoilers! I’m serious—don’t read this if you might read the books.
Mildmay and Felix. When I first read the blurb for Mélusine, I thought it would be a fairly traditional (except gay) fantasy romance. I was a little confused when it started to look like Mildmay was straight, although Felix was pretty flaming. By the time I discovered that they’re actually brothers, I was so invested in Monette’s world that I actually liked that turn of events better than the one I’d anticipated (and I still do think it’s a lot more interesting than having the two of them become lovers.) I was considerably pleased with Felix’s attraction to Mildmay in Mélusine, and, as I said above, delighted to see it continued and expanded on in The Virtu.
The most interesting thing about it, though, is how many other people read a sexual aspect into the relationship between Felix and Mildmay. Astyanax makes that out-of-the-blue dig at Felix about hoping Mildmay’s good in bed, and he’s only the first in a long line of people to allude to, or outright speculate about, a sexual relationship between the two. It makes me wonder just how obvious Felix is being in his attraction—we know he flirts with Mildmay, although presumably that’s mostly a social reflex and a way to keep Mildmay off-balance and at a distance, rather than an expression of his attraction. But since we’re clearly shown that most people don’t recognize that about Felix—that his flirting is a way to control his relationships with people and get what he wants, and not a genuine expression of desire or intimacy—it’s possible that they misread the way he treats Mildmay (sort of.) I also have to wonder how much Gideon sees of that—he knows Felix isn’t having sex with Mildmay, but is he aware that Felix wants to? That Felix would rather be sleeping with Mildmay than with him?
[/spoilers]
Awesome book. The release of the next book in the series, The Mirador, on August 7 gives me another new book to look forward to. I can hardly wait!
Books read: 56/100
Pages read: 16,605/25,000
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Doctrine of Labyrinths, Sarah Monette
June 13, 2007 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Miscellanea
(Click on a thumbnail to enlarge)
June 12, 2007 at 4:12 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
55. Mélusine by Sarah Monette (Fantasy) 421 p.
I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time, so when I saw it for sale at my favourite discount bookstore, I had to buy it. I loved the name, and the summaries and reviews I’d read made it sound really good…I was just afraid it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Luckily for me, Mélusine did that and more.
At the beginning of the book, Felix Harrowgate is an aristocrat, one of the elite of the city of Mélusine, but it’s not long before his safe world begins to crumble around him. Abused, maligned, deprived of friends and allies, he is quickly on the brink of madness and despair. Mildmay the Fox, a cat-burglar for hire in the Lower City, is the only person willing to help him or believe in him.
I love books that confound my expectations, and present me with turns in the plot that are better than anything I could have thought of on my own. Mélusine is one of those books. I love the characters, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in the series (the next book, The Virtu, is already out, with The Mirador scheduled for release August 7, 2007, and Summerdown to be published sometime in 2008.)
Books read: 55/100 (55%)
Pages read: 16,166/25,000 (65%)
Days passed: 163/365 (45%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Doctrine of Labyrinths, Sarah Monette
June 9, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Fiction and Literature, Historical Fiction, World Literature
54. The Language of Threads by Gail Tsukiyama (Historical Fiction) 276 p.
World Lit Challenge: China
The sequel to Women of the Silk, and I actually enjoyed it even more than the first book. The Language of Threads follows Pei and her extended family to Hong Kong in their attempt to escape from the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.
If you enjoy the first one, there’s no question that you’ll like this one, too.
Books read: 54/100
Pages read: 15,745/25,000
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Gail Tsukiyama, World Lit Challenge
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