October Books

October 20th, 2008

1.
Beaufort (Ron Lesham) is a *Really Great* book. It’s a war book about Israeli soldiers stationed at the Beaufort outpost between Israel and Lebanon in 1999. I enjoy reading war books anyway, but this one was particularly cool because it addressed all sorts of sticky moral questions about following orders even though you disagree with them and when it means you will die even though your team gains no ground. Also, it’s just really well written. The prose and the voice are stellar and the world fully engrossing. The main character, Erez, is flawed and memorable.

2.
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient) was interesting for completely different reasons. Ondaatje is… an original. I’ve never read writing like his before. It’s distant and vague and off topic, yet it works. The plot involves a woman, a forensic anthropologist, investigating a skeleton she believes came from a political murder during a war in Sri Lanka. The book deals with the plot, sure, and goes into the war and some of the aftermath, but it’s more about what shaped the woman’s personality. It’s kind of hard to explain; I recommend it because I want to know if anyone else finds it as strange as I did.

3.
And! I’ve discovered Jose Saramago. I learned of his existence while choosing whether to go to a movie. Blindness, which is playing now, was based on one of his novels. The premise sounded so cool I decided to check out the author, and wow, this guy is fascinating. He has controversial political views (and is a hardline communist!), and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He writes a particularly amazing type of magic realism. His premises alone are prime examples of his wild imagination. In The Stone Raft, which I just read, the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and floats out into the Atlantic. In another book, a guy changes one word in a history book and all of history changes. Saramago also wrote a fictional biography of Christ which put him at odds with the church in his home country, Portugal.

It’s so not autumn yet

October 17th, 2008

What the heck?! I walked to Lake Sekrit yesterday hoping to see amazing colors but found mostly green.

Here’s a pic of the lake and mountains. Notice the kinda-yellow trees.

The whole set is here, on Flickr.

The Cliffs of Insanity (k, not really, but)

The mysterious weed is still around. I think this is its “bloom.” Poor ugly weed.

A self-portrait.

There is now a Puppeh

October 12th, 2008

Her name is Pebbles. She’s a very silly border collie. She’s supposedly my husband’s dog, but clearly she loffs me most. Here she is on her first day with us.

(There are a few more pics of her first day in the flickr set.)

There are seven pics in the most recent set. Here she is last week:

And today:

Posing especially for you:

October Reading

October 12th, 2008

I read Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin (Hugo winner!). I liked it a lot and found it super compelling. I could not stop reading, wanting to know who was behind the spin and how it would resolve. I liked the explanation and the science and possibility of the ending, but it did feel slightly too happy. When an ending is *that* happy, it sort of makes the rest of the book feel like “why the heck was I so angsty this whole time?” But that was only the final pages, and I understand why Wilson made that choice. It still made sense, and it was *very* cool science.

I also read Dalia Sofer’s The Septembers of Shiraz, about what happened in Iran in 1982 when the Shah died. I love books about regular people caught up in political upheaval, so this story naturally appealed to me. In it, a man is falsely imprisoned and tortured for being a spy. His family deals with his absence in interesting ways. The writing was beautiful and poignant in many places, and the story was absolutely engaging. Although Sofer used the quiet-slip-into-backstory trick a few too many times, the plot was solid. It gave a vivid picture of what Iran was like in those days. I’d recommend the book if you like political history novels.