Short Cuts

Not much to say about these books:
            A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

 In this Discworld book for children starring the young witch Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men (basically the toughest fairies of all time), Tiffany moves away from her home to study with another witch, but doesn’t realize that she is being chased by an ancient evil. Granny Weatherwax makes an appearance. Like everything Pratchett writes, it’s really funny, but it’s not his best and there are actual chapter divisions and fewer ridiculous footnotes. I love his footnotes.

Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted       (YA)

This novel is a modern retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story, with the Beast being Lucas, who accidently blew off his hands in a chemical explosion and is starting over at a new high school. Aurora is the Beauty, who has moved after her mother’s death. It’s short and sweet, but I feel like the author could have gone an awful lot further. The story isn’t particularly fable-like, with the first person point of view switching between the two main characters, so I feel like there could have been more realism around Lucas’ disability. Yes, Lucas does talk about wishing he could touch Aurora, and his shame around the explosion, but I would have liked some more information about how he used his hooks to do everyday things. Sometimes, I honestly didn’t understand how he was doing certain things. As well, Aurora could have had more personality. She’s beautiful and she’s kind, but because she’s new she’s going to go around with the popular crowd. I believe that, but I can’t believe that she doesn’t have more defining features.

                Thank you, Jeeves by P.G Woodhouse

                I usually love P.G. Woodhouse. I love the wacky hijinks, I love the silly names and I love how incredibly smart and sane Jeeves is, especially since he’s the personal valet to the (though often engaged) permanent bachelor Bertie Wooster. Most of this novel gives me exactly that, but unfortunately the entire last half of this plot revolves around black face. Bertie and other characters end up with boot polish on their faces, while they are masquerading as black musicians and can’t take it off for various comic reasons.  It’s a novel from the 1930’s, so it’s not entirely surprising but it did really ruin my enjoyment of the novel. Bertie is mistaken for the devil a few times with his face covered in boot polish, and although I hope it's because boot polish simply looks unnatural on skin, I don't think that was where Woodhouse was going with it.

The Quiet American

The Quiet American by Grahame Greene

Sometimes there isn’t a fight between good and evil. Sometimes there are just varying levels of evil and the reader has to decide what is worse. The Quiet American is a story about the moral complexities of life, and how a simple, reductionist view of a conflict, of a country, or of a person is never possible.

 Set in Vietnam  during the French colonial war, the novel is told from the point of view of Thomas Fowler, a British journalist. He doesn’t seem to do much reporting, for he spends a lot of time smoking opium with Phuong, his lover.  She is beautiful and decidedly much younger than him, but we never really get to understand her, mainly because Fowler doesn’t understand her either.   Then Pyle arrives and changes everything. Pyle is an American idealist. He believes that a Third Force will save Vietnam and since he’s part of the (soon to be) CIA, he has the power to put his ideals into action. He also loves Phuong and since he is younger (and unmarried) he decides that he would be a better lover for her. He could marry her and take her away to America, while Fowler still has a wife in England.

The clash in the story is between cynicism and idealism, with cynicism being the voice for actual, individual people. Pyle’s idealism and innocence  allow him to see civilian casualties as necessary in the grand scheme, while Fowler is distraught over the carnage and knows that no matter what happens, France cannot win.  Metaphors abound, with Fowler and Pyle representing the old colonialism and the new imperialism respectively and Phuong being both a woman they love and a country that must be won. Fowler always tries to escape his colonial ties by having no opinion, by simply reporting, but even he cannot escape taking a side.  As the French captain says, “It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and the we cannot get out. War and Love – they have always been compared.”

I decided to read this one because I noticed that there were spies and opium addicts in it. I mean, I was also recommended it by Sarah, who knows her books. But I am a sucker for spies. My love for John le Carré doesn’t need to be documented, and the flawed perceptions of an addict can add completely unexpected twists and turns to the story. I liked this one a lot, and I’m still pulling the ending apart in my head. Has it all been done for moral reasons, or was it simply for love? And if it was for love, was it something real, or imagined that will all fall apart soon enough?

Going Bovine

Going Bovine by Libba Bray  (YA)

                I haven’t really been reading much because of exams, but this book  got me through the drab, desperate days of December.

Cameron is a slacker in every sense of the term. He doesn’t try hard. He doesn’t really have friends, and he can’t pay enough real attention to the people in his life to really get to know them and try to understand them. All he really does is smoke pot and make fun of the music of the Grande Tremeldo, who sings Portuguese love songs in a ridiculously high falsetto. His mom doesn’t really do anything, his sister is too popular to talk to him, and his physicist father may be having an affair with his research assistant. Cameron isn’t really happy with the life he has, but he’s too lazy and apathetic to try to turn things around. Then he gets diagnosed with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, also known as Mad Cow.

He learns is that his brain is basically turning to Swiss Cheese and he is definitely going to die, very, very soon. Then, like all human beings, he gets mad. He’s only sixteen, and he hasn’t really done anything , which is partially because he is young, but also partially because of his own unwillingness to really live. Unfortunately, he’s now stuck in the hospital, hooked up to IV fluids. That’s when he meets Dulcie, a pink-haired Angel who tells him that only he can save the world. The only way to do it is to grab his hospital roommate Gonzo, a hypochondriac little person with a ridiculously overprotective mother, and go on the run to find Dr X, the only person who can stop the end of the world, and might even be able to save Cameron’s life. Cameron grabs Gonzo and goes on a road trip from New Orleans to Disney World, even picking up the Nordic god Balder, transfigured into a garden gnome, on the way.

This book is very surreal and definitely is inspired by Don Quixote, as it’s the book that Cameron was reading in class. Unfortunately, I never got very far in Quixote (but if someone could recommend a good translation I could try ) so I may be missing countless references. I think the key point though is that it’s only as he’s dying that Cameron tries to live. And boy does he live. He finds a  community where everyone has to be happy and equal in every single way, and he helps bring it down by exposing it as the totalitarian regime that it is. He’s a wanted fugitive, he falls in love, he plays the drums on stage in New Orleans. He fights the fire giants that he sees everywhere, and he faces the Wizard of Reckoning. Key to it all, is that everything might just be in his head. All of his adventures might be the last of his brain cells dying off, transforming his memories into some strange story that he’s telling himself. The question is: does it even matter as long as he’s having an actual life?

                I definitely cried, which I did not expect. There’s just something about  people taking chances and being good to each other that makes me sob. That’s just the way I work. I didn’t expect to like it so much, but I just love the surreal and the strange elements of the story. It was wild and crazy but it all made sense.  Cameron grew on me, as he slowly realized what he had been missing out on, and that life is about taking risks and being with people. And it’s such a bittersweet thing to learn, as you’re going to die.

The Manual of Detection

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

Imagine a city with a rather strange detective agency. There are the watchers, who meet the clients, the detectives who investigate, and the clerks, who make the detective’s notes into tidy little reports. The clerks and the detectives are never allowed to meet.  As well there are the archives of the agency, including one of mysteries, one of solutions, and one of… well that’s sort of the secret at the heart of the book, so I can’t really tell you.

Charles Unwin is the clerk to the best detective in the agency, Travis Sivart, but when Sivart goes missing, Charles is promoted to detective and gets his office. Unwin really doesn’t want to be involved with this sort of thing. He feels that he’d be best as a clerk, so he decides that his first and last case should be to find Sivart and get him back on the job. Things aren’t that easy though. He’s dreamt that Sivart was in his bathtub and told him to look at chapter 18 of the manual, but it’s non-existent in his copy. He gets a secretary to help him with his work, but she’s narcoleptic and always falls asleep. He goes to meet his watcher, but discovers him dead. To top it all off, as Unwin investigates he discovers that Sivart’s three greatest cases: The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker, The Oldest Murdered Man and The Man Who Stole November Twelfth, were undeniably solved completely wrong.

The book is surreal and strange and it drew me into its odd little world. There’s a cast of wild characters including the separated Siamese twin  gangsters, Jasper and Josiah Rook,  who never sleep and Edwin Moore, the museum guard who tries to forget everything he hears.  There are also some incredibly beautiful odd moments, like crowds of sleepwalkers arriving at a grand mansion and gambling away their alarm clocks, and the man who types down everything everyone says. The revelations of the story make sense in the logic of this book, and the climax is genius and genuinely thrilling.

I have a soft spot in my heart for both surrealism and mysteries so I loved this book, especially Unwin and his discomfort with being a detective. His love for logic and reason has made him cut out parts of Sivart’s reports, so the cases have only one obvious answer. However, once he learns how wrong the solutions are, he realizes that he’s probably the only one with all the information, and that his need for reason has made him lose sight of the irrational nature of life. The overarching theme of the book is that mystery is necessary, and that logic can be restrictive and even wrong. The facts may speak for themselves, but they can be lying.