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Yet Another Reading Meme

11 Sep

Lehmunade‘s tag is my command.

Book that changed your life – Um. Literally speaking, something by Ayn Rand, I suppose. I can no longer remember which book or essay of hers I read first, but here’s a link to one short essay I think should be required reading for every human being. Even if one does tend to outgrow Rand, her writing’s moral foundations and clarity of thought are lasting gifts to her readers. Which is why I’ll never be ashamed of having once been a crazy, rabid Objectivist. :)

Book you’ve read more than once – I’m an obsessive re-reader; there is almost no book I’ve really liked that I haven’t read ten times. So the first five Harry Potters, all the Jeeves books, just about any Bill Bryson you care to name, Stephen King’s “Rose Madder” and “Different Seasons”.. you name it, I’ve reread it. I think the one exception to the rule is Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”. You’ll see why.

Book you would take to a deserted island – An empty one. With a pencil and an eraser. DOH! :D

Book that made you laugh – Wodehouse’s Jeeves books. Unparalleled.

Book that made you cry want to kill yourself – Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”. Was there ever a book so masterfully written, a book I loved so much, that also made me want to slit my wrists and DIE, because OMG the world is such a shitty, shitty place? Aargh. Wonderful book. Read it. Just… hide your knives and take some anti-depressants after.

Book you wish you had written – Oh boy. Jealousy is an occupational hazard of (aspiring) writers, so this list is endless. I’ll limit myself here to naming just the top three: Daphne Du Maurier’s novel “Rebecca”; Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”; and Mark Twain’s short story “What Stumped the Bluejays“. Though that last story? Just wishful thinking on my part. Nobody but Twain could possibly have written that one. I recommend it strongly. It’s beyond amazing.

Book(s) you wish had never been written – Dominic Lapierre’s “City of Joy”. Good heavens. You’ll look forever if you want to find a worse piece of white supremacist disease-porn.

Book(s) you’re currently reading – Uh, too many? “Introduction to Poetry” (Kennedy; very good); “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (Irving; excellent, but for some reason I am reading this SO SLOWLY); “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (Twain; rereading); “India After Gandhi” (Guha; paaathetic book, have more or less given up); “Building Better Plots” (Kernan; decent stuff).

Book you’ve been meaning to read – Anything by Tolstoy is on this list – “Anna Karenina”, “War and Peace”.

Book you have been meaning to finish – Like I said, Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” is a great read but I’ve been dragging my feet (eyes?) on that one for two months now. Also Dostoevsky – same issue, I really *liked* the first few chapters of “Crime and Punishment”, but for some reason couldn’t finish the book. Sigh.

I’m tagging the usual suspects: Juice, Sayesha, TWM (if he’s reading this), Venkat over at RibbonFarm, Saurabh and Sushil (WAKE UP DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE).

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Life Update

9 Sep

If you knew what was happening in my life (viz: nothing), you would not wonder why I haven’t been blogging. Unless, of course, you want to hear all about the facinating intricacies of transcribing tax forms into code…?

Just to prove it to you, here are a few unfinished drafts of posts over the past three weeks:

—Friday was Ice Cream Day at work: pity Wendelin doesn’t like ice cream, eh? Usually too sweet, always too cold. Brr. But I went to the 16th floor conference room anyways with the rest of the work bunch and found myself staring at a GIGANTIC container of trifle – all chocolate and jam and whipped cream. I succumbed to the temptation, but it didn’t taste nearly as good as it looked… but chocolate is chocolate, so this was worth it. Could I be more pointless?

—I haven’t exercised in five weeks! Pounds, where is thy meltage? Death, where is thy sting? Woe!

—Freakin’ Alberto Gonzales QUIT!! LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA. But this probably means there isn’t going to be any investigation any more, dammit. I want this blasted presidency over already – like the media seems to be pretending it is. This week’s Economist reminds us: there’s still seventeen months, left. Bugger. But still… there is this surreal atmosphere of everybody knows they’re bullshitting us, you know? It can only be a good thing. Someday we’re going to wake up and find ourselves back in Kansas, and maybe if that day comes within the next seventeen months, we’ll even impeach the president? Nah, that’s Oz-talk. But there is some cause for celebration at dear old Alberto’s sacking. Ding dong, ladies and gentlemen, the wicked witch is dead. Thank you.

—I got a free mug and sticky magnets today at work. Bwah.

—A Prayer for Owen Meany turned out to be a great read, not at all boring, very vivid characters, and Irving has a splendid turn of phrase I could really, really learn from. Then why is it that I can’t finish the damn book? This is freakin’ insane, I LIKE it!

… and so on: posts, I am sure you’ll agree, are best left to unpublished obscurity.

But today something wonderful happened: my stalker showed up again! Hee hee hee! His latest comment on a long forgotten post about loafers on Orkut is worth a look. Excerpt:

…u seem to be diggin your own grave..with your “oh so great” english…ur arrogant attitude towards people…what have u really learnt from all your education..?

Hilarious as this comment is, my cripplingly low writing self esteem has simply latched onto his inadvertent compliment (“oh so great” english, he calls it! *wibble*), and thus was my day made by Narayandas Murali Krishna. Will wonders never cease?

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Gender Issues (Another HPDH Rant)

9 Aug

Here’s a quick quiz on the issues of gender in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In answering all these questions, please consider the books alone – not your speculation, fannish theories or likely extrapolations. And while I realise that interpretation is an essential part of reading, for the purposes of this quiz answers should be limited to your best guess of what the author’s intent is. For example, while you may consider Minerva McGonagall to be “obviously a lesbian”, there is no textual basis for it and the authorial intent in such matters clearly boils down to Normal = Heterosexual Petit-Bourgeois. So the correct answer to the question “How many gay characters do you see in the books?” is ZERO.

Caveat: yes, this quiz is biased; yes, it’s really a vehicle for my opinions; no, it’s not meant to be an honest-to-goodness, check-the-key-to-find-your-personality-type sorta quiz. I’m venting. When seven years of happy, devoted fannishness meets the sort of train wreck that HPDH was, venting happens.

Ready?

1. Which main character does NOT have a major conflict to contend with, internal or external, that drives the story forward?
a. Harry Potter
b. Lord Voldemort
c. Ron Weasley
d. Hermione Granger
e. Severus Snape
f. Draco Malfoy

2. Which main character’s family and background do we know the least about?
a. Harry Potter
b. Lord Voldemort
c. Ron Weasley
d. Hermione Granger
e. Severus Snape
f. Draco Malfoy

3. Which main character does NOT have a character arc to speak of in the series (coming-of-age, redemption, comeuppance, conquering inner demons, etc.)?
a. Harry Potter
b. Lord Voldemort
c. Ron Weasley
d. Hermione Granger
e. Severus Snape
f. Draco Malfoy

4A. True/False: We find out more about Lily Potter in HPDH.
a. True
b. False

4B. True/False: We find out more Lily Potter herself – her life, her motivations, her personality, and the reasons for her choices.
a. True
b. False

5. Which of the following issues is apparently NOT essential to the exploration of the Lupin-Tonks marriage?
a. Remus’s insecurities about lycanthropy, poverty and age.
b. Remus’s ambivalence about fatherhood.
c. Remus chickening out on his family.
d. Harry’s thoughts on Remus chickening out on his family.
e. Voldemort, Bellatrix and the Death Eaters’ thoughts on the happy union.
f. How Tonks feels about it all.

6. Molly Weasley is able to kill Bellatrix Lestrange because:
a. of her superb DADA skills in evidence throughout the series (especially that Boggart scene in OotP)
b. Raising seven children prepares you for combat duelling action
c. The lone female (and childless) Death Eater needed killing via a Mother’s Wrath(TM)

7. True/False: The only female Death Eater is described as the famously friendless Voldemort’s “lover”.
a. True
b. False

————

Now, I honestly see that Jo Rowling is trying her level best in this series to keep men and women on an equal footing, but she still (a) fails dismally and (b) is so transparent in her efforts that she renders them mostly ineffective.

For example, I’m not blind to kickass characters like Hermione and McGonagall, but even with these characters, Jo’s inner sexism seeps through and corrupts. Hermione is a member of the Golden Trio, the bedrock of the series, and yet we don’t so much as know her parents’ names. Both Harry’s and Ron’s families are the main driving forces in the books, but Jo Rowling decided that Hermione with her inconvenient Muggle heritage was best treated like a bespectacled, buck-toothed Venus arising fully formed from her scalloped shell at the age of eleven.

In her effort to make Hermione admirable, Rowling forgets to give Hermione any faults at all. It’s almost as if she built up this character so she could point and say, look, I have strong female characters in my books! No, Jo. The essence of a real character is one who overcomes obstacles, not one who effortlessly glides through tricky situations with no story arc, emotional or plotwise. Perfect!Hermione was irritating, unrealistic and unpalatable – best left to the movies, thx.

And McGonagall? I have just one thing to say: here is a witch who needs a 17 year old boy to “chivalrous”ly rise to her defence risking his own life to protect her from a single, common, oft-used verbal insult. And apparantly, this is grounds enough for him to use unforgiveable curses. ‘Nuff said.

Tonks shows up to flash a ring, get pregnant, and run after her man in the final battle. Finito. She didn’t even do pig noses in this book, so what’s the point? [/sarcasm]

Ginny: Disqualified from the final battle because she’s a few months shy of a birthday. Disappeared for the whole book except when hero needs a birthday snog.

And Lily Potter, Queen Mother of the series with a Big Revelation coming in the seventh book, LOOK OUT! Aaaaaand….she’s the object of a man’s affections – two men’s affections. !!!!!. OMG *dies*.

I think about the only major female character rendered largely without sexist overtones in the series is Umbridge. God, I loved her – I mean, I hated her so thoroughly that I loved the character. Finally, a smart, loathesome, truly evil woman who isn’t some man’s pawn.

Oops, gotta go – work calls. That’s today’s lecture, then, boys and girls. Moral of the story is that I hate Jo Rowling.

Tra la.

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Harry Potter and the Very Spoilery Review

21 Jul

There are SPOILERS in this review. Big fat juicy spoilers. Expect plot details, character deaths (and lives, as applicable), who’s evil, who’s good, EVERYTHING.
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Jesus Christ.

There are hundreds of things I loved about Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows, and millions of things I hated with the fire of a thousand suns.

But in the end, it came down (literally) to this:

One word review: SUCKITUDINOUS.

This book is just bad.

You could lose the first 500 pages of this book and still tell essentially the same story. Rowling ditches the Hogwarts school-year structure for this book, and simply falls apart without it. Voldemort sitting and talking. The trio cleaning the Burrow. The wedding. Teen wizard camp with Harry, Ron and Hermione. All completely pointless episodes that only serve as filler in a book that is otherwise tottering under the burden of revelatory exposition.

The inconsistencies render the entire plot of not just this book, but of all seven books, meaningless. If house-elves can side-along-apparate wizards into places wizards can’t normally go, why didn’t Voldemort catch himself a house-elf to take him into Hogwarts? And take the Elder wand. If Grindelwald stole the wand from Gregorvitch, how on earth was he its master? Then Dumbledore defeats Grindelwald – fair enough. But Dumbledore chooses to be defeated by Draco by wilfully not defending himself, and Draco still becomes master. Later, Harry simply steals Draco’s wand (NOT the Elder wand), which somehow makes him the Elder wand’s master?! The most asinine part is after all this, Harry tells Dumbledore’s portrait in the end, “As long as I die a natural death, the wand’s power dies with me.”

(BTW, why doesn’t he just break the damn wand and be done with it?)

The epilogue was in a league of its own as probably the worst commercially published piece of writing I’ve ever read, and that includes Mary Higgins Clark. Holy purple centaurs. To think how we spork poor teenage badfic writers who actually manage to do better than this bilge! Rowling seems to think that what we’re dying to know about the post-war wizarding world is the names of Harry & Ginny and Ron & Hermione’s kids. And that is ALL the info she gives us. Even the aforementioned badfic writers manage to tell us more: Harry is a Quidditch star, Ginny is a model, Hermione is Minister of Magic (Ron is usually forgotten). What’s happened in the Ministry? Have wand regulations been changed to be more inclusive? Did Hermione take SPEW further? Did Harry and Ron become aurors? Did nothing change?

But by far the worst fault of this book is the unconscionable hubris that permeates every page of it. So all right, it’s Rowling’s story, and she can tell us any tale she pleases, but she writes this book as if she wanted to throw in some HUGE ideas and then hurry off to collect her paycheck without pausing to give those ideas a second thought. For example, there were all those references to World War II – could they have possibly been treated any more casually? The Wizarding World, it seems, is meekly bowing to a second wizarding holocaust without a word of protest – and yet, this idea remains unexplored, of vanishing importance next to that damned camping trip. Rowling racks up the body count as casually as throwing berries into a basket, with as little thought and as much cheer, more often than not. Just how many times do we need to have the message of “Death Is Arbitrary” hammered in, and just how incompetent is she that Remus Lupin’s death is introduced and mourned in a total of four sentences?

If you expect her own plot to escape such thoughtless treatment, you’re mistaken. Oh, the lost opportunities, the wasted potential. Dumbledore was Grindelwald’s best friend! He shared the aims of the world’s most evil wizard of the time, but we can’t stop to dwell on that. Harry’s sacrifice keeps the entire school safe from Voldemort – and that gets ONE LINE’s worth of pagetime. Even shoddier is the way she deals with ideas and characters from previous books: Where was Ginny throughout the book? Dean Thomas has more pagespace than she does. Rowling forgets all about the Veil and the locked room in the Department of Mysteries – why set it up as a mystery if you won’t return to it? All that buildup about Wormtail’s life debt, and it comes to an utterly nondescript and random closure. Inter-house unity is in shreds as Slytherin house simply up and leaves in the middle of the battle. Dumbledore’s line to Snape, “Sometimes I think we sort too soon,” is the deepest betrayal of the concept of a united Hogwarts: possibly ALL TWO (count ‘em!) halfway-noble Slytherins are not really Slytherins after all!

It felt like she was just slapping little patches all over the place on the book as a whole – consider how Snape just happens to pick the very memories from his lifetime to give to Harry that will exactly answer all the little questions Harry has about the subsidiary plots of this book. These patches consist of random factoids,hastily contrived magics and situations, and worst of all gratuitous death and dismemberment. It was hubris. “Watch me Grapple With Big Ideas, bucko,” she said, before tripping on her own feet and falling splat. And the whole of Deathly Hallows is her scrambling to retain her dignity by saying, “I meant to do that.”

Having said that, there were parts of the book that I didn’t hate – even stuff I loved, even one part that moved me close to tears. I didn’t mind that my predictions were almost all 100% correct – that’s not Rowling’s fault. Though I was never a fan of the Snape-loved-Lily theory even after I predicted it, Rowling managed to convince me in this book. I’ve seen a lot of reactions in fandom that are basically Yo, what a loser, but I disagree. Rowling’s out on a limb here, a limb I can respect. She’s saying that even unrequited love is love: it can be as strong and ennobling as what commonly passes for the real deal. This isn’t the advice you’ll get from Dear Abby, it isn’t practical and maybe it even hurts you to believe it – but that doesn’t necessarily make the thought untrue, and it took guts to say it.

It also took guts to knock Dumbledore off his pedestal so spectacularly. The guy in the long white beard is almost evil, and certainly a creep – whaddayaknow! Not only is he a manipulative bastard till the very end – he makes Severus Snape risk (and meet) death simply because he wants to delay giving Harry some information – he also succumbs to temptation at the end of his life, when he is supposed to have conquered his desire for immortality. I love it that we see why it is that Dumbledore sets himself against Voldemort so completely: they are just too alike for comfort.

So that’s it, boys and girls. The end of the line, the finish of the Harry Potter saga. Whimper, whimper.

By which words I describe not the sounds I make, but the manner of this epic’s exit.

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Timepass

19 Jul

Now, I know I said I wouldn’t be back, but I am, and for good reason. I’ve got two links to recommend (no spoilers whatsoever, completely safe links):

Go to Mistful’s LJ to read the BEST Phoenix movie post EVER.

And longtime favourite fan writer Copperbadge pens an original story about the fictional fan community of a fictional series of books called ‘Carverquest’. It’s absolutely hilarious in addition to being a stunning portrait of online fandom.

I was there, man, I was there through it all. Let me tell you something about fucking fandom.

It’s not like the Carverquest books had the sanest fandom to begin with. You had your wanks, your sockpuppets, your cosplayers who got at one anothers’ throats over who looked more like Dux Carver. Man, there was some hardcore porn in the fandom, all the wank over the underage kiddies having sex, who will think of the children? You had feuds, you do get your standard fandom feud. Seriously, the Harry Potter fandom looked at us and thought, Jesus, at least I’m not a Carverquest fan.

(Read “The Day The Music Died (And I Got Farked)”)

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Fifteen Thousand, or, I’m Sold!

15 Mar

Greenville Kleiser is a man after my own heart. He is the author of a marvellous little book called “Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases”, written in 1917, one of Project Gutenberg’s more recent releases. A book of “useful phrases”! How wonderfully quaint!

In the Introduction, Kleiser laments:

Another example is afforded by the endemic use of “of sorts” which struck London while the writer was in that city a few years ago. Whence it came no one knew, but it was heard on every side. “She was a woman of sorts;” “he is a Tory of sorts;” “he had a religion of sorts;” “he was a critic of sorts.”

While it originally meant “of different or various kinds,” as hats of sorts; offices of sorts; cheeses of sorts, etc., it is now used disparagingly, and implies something of a kind that is not satisfactory, or of a character that is rather poor. This, as Shakespeare might have said, is “Sodden business! There’s a stewed phrase indeed!”

At which I began to giggle ever so helplessly.

Scrolling down to sample some of the proffered “useful phrases”, I hit upon the Vs -

vacant stupidity, vacillating obedience, vacuous ease, vagabondish spirit, vagrant wandering…

Then pairs in Ps:

penetrating and insidious, penned and planned, peppery and impetuous, pestilence and famine…

Phrases in Cs:

Cloaked in prim pretense, Clothed with the witchery of fiction, Clutch at the very heart of the usurping mediocrity

I am so sold!

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How I Spent My Weekend

5 Mar

One of the more wtf moments of this weekend was hearing Donald Trump say out of nowhere, “Fo’ shizzle.” Jesus.

We went to Troy on Saturday, which is a nearby quaint little riverside town with lovely old buildings and more people on the streets in a day than you see in a year around my place. It’s quite a sight, that river in winter. Frozen solid, birds hopping across its surface. Found a rare non-chain, small breakfast-and-lunch type shop with oodles of homey charm and delish food. Best pancakes I’ve ever had, gigantic and fluffy.


New Economists keep arriving before I’ve had a chance to finish the old one. There’s altogether too much competition for my eyeball-time these days. I’d stop subscribing to Desipundit, except that’d be one less link to India. Ah, who am I kidding? I’ve now officially lived longer outside India than in it, if you discount the first three years of life spent pooping, dribbling and largely unconscious. Sigh.

On the bright side, I made (yes, made from scratch) bele obbattu aka puranpoli yesterday, in honour of Holi and in a spirit of competition against my SIL, who also made them. If my food habits don’t qualify me as incorrigibly Indian, your standards are too bloody high.

Fretted a little that Saurabh’s AP* documents have arrived but mine haven’t. Everybody thinks it’s frightfully funny to joke about Saurabh making the India trip alone.

I read Norma McCorvey‘s I Am Roe on Saturday. I was going to put it down after the first couple of chapters because it was so wildly out of whack from what I’d expected – geez, this woman’s an alcoholic, a druggie, practically illiterate, a whiner and generally more white trash than anything else, as far from a ‘proper’ activist as you can get. But danged if she didn’t make me kinda respect her by the end. Her politics about abortion goes no further than bewildered disbelief that anyone would question her right to it (or so she says. I don’t fully buy it but there’s no question she’s a little naive). Her love life’s completely messed up, and though she says she’s a lesbian she’s got three children (the last one was the Roe baby). She sure as hell didn’t write this book herself. But I was talked ’round to the view that it’s right that the plaintiff in that groundbreaking case should have been Everywoman – worse, the underdog. That’s who Roe v. Wade belongs to.

(Holy exploding camels, Wikipedia’s telling me that a year after she wrote the book this woman got frickin baptised, became Catholic (!!), and is now a spokesperson for the same pro-life ‘terrorist’ organisation, Operation Rescue, that she blasts in the book saying they shot at her.)

Watched three movies, one of which was Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1957). Saurabh remarked to me just as we begin watching, “Do you know more time has passed from the time you were born to now than from the time this movie was made to the time you were born?” This calls for a reassessment of my practice of referring to movies from the 80s as “fairly recent”. I feel delightfully world-weary.

Vertigo was good, especially that one freaky pinwheel-dream sequence. Woooooo. Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa was better, with fantastic poetry to boot. What the hell went wrong with Indian cinema? Though, in fairness, I could ask the same question of Hollywood after Billy Wilder and then again after the 70s. The best of the lot was Broadcast News, pathetic title, awesome movie. It’s so rare to find characters who’re allowed to be intelligent, you know?

So I’m in the library on Saturday, right? Lovely old building with marble statues and staircases, stained glass windows, trimmings in all the right places, etc.. It’s one of my favourite places around here. But my boots make an unearthly din on the wood floor of the upstairs reading room. I always forget, and walk brashly in with clumpy steps, then cringe at the stares and spend the rest of my time trying to blend into the mahogany background, making on tiptoes like a fairy. So on Saturday I was stuck by one far wall of the reading room, contemplating shelves marked ’92: Biographies, K – N’. Which is how I ended up borrowing I Am Roe and Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azhar Nafisi). For a while I thought that was it, that this time my trip to the library was just going to be my trip to ’92: Biographies, K – N’, and I might as well make the most of it. But biographies are so not my thang. How to pick?

One solemn green leatherbound book titled Thomas More caught my eye. Having recently watched the excellent but unfortunately titled A Man For All Seasons, I thought I’d get it, but then I realised dreary 18th century Catholic fanatics, however brilliant they may be as lawyers, hardly ever make good reading material. So now I’ve hit upon the one kind of movie that would be leaps and bounds better than the book: biographies. Goodbye, age-old question.

I reached for Mandela’s autobio, The Long Walk to Freedom, but that was bound to be full of self-congratulatory, whitewashed anecdotes – that’s the trouble with biographies of living statespeople, you’ve got to be in the mood for lies. There were about a hundred biographies of Marie Antoinette, which brought to mind Kirsten Dunst, eurgh. Five copies of a book titled, A Monk Swimming. Does that mean the book is good? Or that it’s the biography of a local nobody who donated these five copies? Isn’t the book being just a little bit despo by putting on such an arresting title? (Are monks allowed to wear swimsuits?) Nah, bound to be a bad read. Judge a book by its title, that’s hardly unfair.

What about writers? There was another stately leatherbound tome about four inches wide: Summarising(!) Maugham. Sheesh. Maybe some other guy I haven’t heard of, because if he’s got biographers he’s got to be somewhat interesting, right? Immediate recoil at the thought: am I actually contemplating reading biographies of random people?! It was time to make the valiant dash out of the wood-floored reading room to the main bookshelves. I didn’t look behind me to see if I garnered more stares.

*AP = Advance Parole, and don’t you run off with the idea that we’re a couple of ex-jailbirds – it’s a document that allows one to travel out of the country while one’s Holy Green Card applications are undergoing their Mysterious Processing.

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Wow.

5 Feb

Sifting Through The Embers

by Douglas Adams

There’s a story I heard when I was young that bothered me because I couldn’t understand it. It was many years before I discovered it to be the story of the Sybilline books. By that time all the details of the story had rewritten themselves in my mind, but the essentials were still the same. After a year of exploring some of the endangered environments of the world, I think I finally understand it.


It concerns an ancient city – it doesn’t matter where it was or what it was called. It was a thriving, prosperous city set in the middle of a large plain. One summer, while people of the city were busy thriving and prospering away, a strange old beggar woman arrived at the gates carrying twelve large books, which she offered to sell to them. She said that the books contained all the knowledge and all the wisdom of the world, and that she would let the city have all twelve of them in return for a single sack of gold.

The people of the city thought this was a very funny idea. They said she obviously had no conception of the value of gold and that probably the best thing was for her to go away again.

This she agreed to do, but first she said that she was going to destroy half of the books in front of them. She built a small bonfire, burnt six of the books of all knowledge and all wisdom in the sight of the people of the city, and then went on her way.

Winter came and went, a hard winter, but the city just managed to flourish through it and then, the following summer, the old woman was back.

“Oh, you again,” said the people of the city. “How’s the knowledge and wisdom going?”

“Six books,” she said, “just six left. Half of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Once again I am offering to sell them to you.”

“Oh yes?” sniggered the people of the city.

“Only the price has changed.”

“Not surprised.”

“Two sacks of gold.”

“What?”

“Two sacks of gold for the six remaining books of knowledge and wisdom. Take it or leave it.”

“It seems to us,” said the people of the city, “that you can’t be very wise or knowledgeable yourself or you would realise that you can’t just go around quadrupling an already outrageous price in a buyer’s market. If that’s the sort of knowledge and wisdom you’re peddling, then, frankly, you can keep it at any price.”

“Do you want them or not?”

“No.”

“Very well. I will trouble you for a little firewood.”

She built another bonfire and burnt three of the remaining books in front of them and then set off back across the plain.

That night one or two curious people from the city sneaked out and sifted through the embers to see if they could salvage the odd page or two, but the fire had burnt very thoroughly and the old woman had raked the ashes. There was nothing.

Another hard winter took its toll on the city and they had a little trouble with famine and disease, but trade was good and they were in reasonably good shape again by the following summer when, once again, the old woman appeared.

“You’re early this year,” they said to her.

“Less to carry,” she explained, showing them the three books she was still carrying. “A quarter of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Do you want it?”

“What’s the price?”

“Four sacks of gold.”

“You’re completely mad, old woman. Apart from anything else, our economy’s going through a bit of a sticky patch at the moment. Sacks of gold are completely out of the question.”

“Firewood, please.”

“Now wait a minute,” said the people of the city, “this isn’t doing anybody any good. We’ve been thinking about all this and we’ve put together a small committee to have a look at these books of yours. Let us evaluate them for a few months, see if they’re worth anything to us, and when you come back next year, perhaps we can put in some kind of a reasonable offer. We are not talking sacks of gold here, though.”

The old woman shook her head. “No,” she said. “Bring me the firewood.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“No matter,” said the woman, with a shrug. “The books will burn quite well by themselves.”

So saying, she set about shredding two of the books into pieces which then burnt easily. She set off swiftly across the plain and left the people of the city to face another year.

She was back in the late spring.

“Just one left,” she said, putting it down on the ground in front of her. “So I was able to bring my own firewood.”

“How much?” said the people of the city.

“Sixteen sacks of gold.”

“We’d only budgeted for eight.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Wait here.”

The people of the city went off into a huddle and returned half an hour later.

“Sixteen sacks is all we’ve got left,” they pleaded, “times are hard. You must leave us with something.”

The old woman just hummed to herself as she started to pile the kindling together.

“All right!” they cried at last, opened up the gates of the city, and let out two ox carts , each laden with eight sacks of gold. “But it had better be good.”

“Thank you,” said the old woman, “it is. And you should have seen the rest of it.”

She led the two ox carts away across the plain with her, and left the people of the city to survive as best they could with the one remaining twelfth of all the knowledge and wisdom that had been in the world.

[From the book Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams.]

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Free Fiction: The Weaveling

3 Nov

I must pause in my marathon session of make-up-bullshit-about-pearls to recommend an astoundingly good entry to PBW’s free e-book challenge.

Dean Cochrane‘s The Weaveling is dark, atmospheric, real and haunting. I’d be raving about this novelette even if I’d bought it, but free fiction doesn’t get much better than this.

Back to bullshit factory mode. Over and out.

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Kris Reisz’s Tripping to Somewhere

7 Oct


Simon Pulse YA paperback, 384 pages.

Some weeks ago, Kris Reisz made me an offer I didn’t refuse, viz., would I please read and review his book in exchange for – hear this – a free copy. There are people who will drive three hours for a free beer, people who will crash a 10-year old’s birthday party for the cake. I’m a book junkie, and free books, baby, are my version of winning the lottery.

Anyway, I just got this book in the mail, and boyohboyohboyohboy I feel this tiny jolt of excitement in the pit of my stomach because somehow, over the past few months I’ve been reading this guy’s blog I think I have internalised his road to that most sacred and fantasised-about land, publication. It feels like I was part of this. It feels like I’m holding my own dreams in my hands.

Now, Kris did say I could say anything I wanted about his book, so I must tell you that I had grown very fond of his other book cover, the one that’s ironically still on Amazon and other online stores, even though it was pulled and replaced with the one you see above months ago. I just think it’s harder to say no to a book that has just actively ripped your eyes out their sockets.

This one might grow on me, though. It is darker, edgier, and who knows, maybe the book isn’t about bubblegum-light parties on the surface of the sun.

Oh, and Kris? You look like Dobby in your author photo.

I’m cracking the book open now, a real review is coming up soon.

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