Books read in, um, April. Ahem.

[ciroccoj]

• Me: This was re-read month for me, I guess. I re-read two of my favourite books in the world, plus one other one that was pretty good on first read, and showed up at the used bookstore.
  
  
  • The pretty good one was Humans, by Robert Sawyer. Liked it the first time. Saw it for cheap. Bought & re-read it. It's funnier the second time around, I guess because the first time I was reading for plot and missed a lot of the little Canadianisms here and there. Brief plot summary: window between universes opens up, and a person from a parallel Earth, where Neanderthals never died out but homo sapiens did, drops into our Earth through the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and thus into Ontario, Canada. The writer's also Canadian, and it shows. Lots of little in-jokes and cultural tidbits - Tim Horton's doughnuts (extra letters thrown in free of charge), the CBC, the brain drain to the US, etc. It's pretty funny. It also had a lot more atheist content than I remembered (the parallel planet's Neanderthals are all atheist), which was... interesting.
    
    
  • The two other re-reads were The Gate to Women's Country, by Sheri S. Tepper, and The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. They're such awesome books. And the other books I've read by those authors are so... godawfully bad.
    
    Follet's Whiteout is interesting, plot-wise, but the vocabulary and sentence structure is most reminiscent of Justin's Step Two Readers. "Bob went here. Then he went there. He was happy. Then he was sad. Poor Bob."
    
    In Pillars of the Earth, I can see now that yeah, his vocab isn't extensive and his sentence structures lean more towards simple than complex. But it works, in Pillars. The prose is simple and unobtrusive, and either fades into the background so you're caught up in the story rather than the pretty pretty words, or, in some instances, sounds incredibly touching.
    
    Excerpt:
    
    "You want to build this cathedral yourself, don't you?"
    
    Tom hesitated. It was well to be candid when dealing with Philip: the man had no patience with prevarication. "Yes, Father. I want you to appoint me master builder," he said as calmly as he could.
    
    "Why?"
    
    Tom had not expected that question. There were so many reasons. Because I've seen it done badly, and I know I could do it well, he thought. Because there is nothing more satisfying, to a master crafstman, than to exercise his skill, except perhaps to make love to a beautiful woman. Because something like this gives meaning to a man's life. Which answer did Philip want? The prior would probably like him to say something pious. Recklessly, he decided to tell the real truth. "Because it will be beautiful," he said.
    
    Philip looked at him strangely. Tom could not tell whether he was angry, or something else. "Beause it will be beautiful," Philip repeated. Tom began to feel that was a silly reason, and decided to say something more, but he could not decide what. Then he realized that Philip was not skeptical at all - he was moved. Tom's words had touched his heart. Finally Philip nodded, as if agreeing after some reflection. "Yes. And what could be better than to make something beautiful for God?"
    
    ----------------
    
    Gate to Women's Country, OMG I must have read this book about a thousand times in second year university. Bad break-up, lots of feminist angst on our campus (it was the year after the Montreal Massacre, so... yeah), and this book helped me through. It's about a post-Apocalyptic world where civilized society (Women's Country) consists of walled cities of women and children, with a garrison of warriors outside the walls, containing the brothers, lovers and sons of the city's women. Boys are given to their fathers at age five, and raised in the garrison, only visiting home twice a year. At age fifteen, they choose to either remain as warriors, or return to the city through the Gate to Women's Country.
    
    It's just amazing. The story weaves between three plots: the present, where the heroine's son has just chosen to remain with the warriors; a play about Troy that the heroine is rehearsing; and the past as she remembers it, showing how she got to where she is. All the parts are so incredibly well-written, coming together so well, so many little bits and pieces that fall into place so wonderfully... it's one of those "damn but I wish I could write like that!" books.
    
    I've read other works by Tepper. I don't know if Gate spoiled me, or if all of them are equally good but you can only read one because all the others are exactly the same, or if she got more shrill and less concerned with, you know, plot as time went on. I don't know. I just know that I was completely unimpressed. Every book had a Conspiracy Theory. Every one had Mysterious Magic. And of course, Men=Bad, Women=Good. Next!
    
    
  • Am also reading Heat, by George Monbiot. Whoa. Will have more to say once I'm done. Just... whoa.
    
    
  • Also read In the Rapids, by Ovide Mercredi, for my AbLaw paper. Very good book. Might buy it for myself.
    
    
  • Keys to Parenting a Child with Attention Deficit Disorder . Interesting. Don't have much to say on the subject right now, as we're getting Daniel tested this week, but it's nice to have something to go on in that department, instead of just feeling like I'm going in blind.
  
  
  
• Chris is finishing Heat, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Universe in a Single Atom.
  
  
• Daniel has been mostly reading the same old books. D&D, Bionicles, Pokemon. He also picked up a Call of Cthulhu book. Be still my beating heart.
  
  
• Justin: SpongeBob Phonics. We're almost done. Thank god.
  
  
• Chris and the boys: Still reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, though I believe they're almost done. Trip to Florida provided a lot of reading time, especially since my voice went and I couldn't do the bedtime story for a few nights. Although the walking 12 hours a day thing took its toll on Justin, and made the readings a bit short some nights, as he lasted about a page before conking out.
  
  They're so big, and yet still so small.

Comments

[umbo.livejournal.com]

I actually liked some of Tepper's other books better than The Gate to Women's Country, but I haven't been able to read her more recent work. Grass is my favorite. Then again, I think it's the first one I read, so maybe that's what the key is? I actually did a paper in grad school where we had to do some sort of family analysis with a book or film where I used the family in Grass, which was a lot of fun.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

I actually liked some of Tepper's other books better than The Gate to Women's Country,
Which ones have you read? Because I read Singer From the Sea and... Shadow's End, I think. I tried to start one other and didn't get far.

Grass is my favorite.
Haven't read it. Hm. I'll give it a try if I see it at the library. My Gate To Women's copy had a sneak preview of Grass at the end that looked kinda cool.

Then again, I think it's the first one I read, so maybe that's what the key is?
Yeah, I wondered about that because when I read the other novels at one point I thought Wow, this might have been pretty cool if I hadn't already read almost the exact same thing twice already.

I actually did a paper in grad school where we had to do some sort of family analysis with a book or film where I used the family in Grass, which was a lot of fun.
Hee!!

[neonnurse.livejournal.com]

I meant to tell you this quite a while ago, but I really appreciated the heads up about the SpongeBob phonics. I'm always looking for things that Mike will be interested in enough to be willing to try to read, just to get him over that hump of resistance, you know? So thanks!