Imagine driving down the highway at night, hungry for dinner, thinking to yourself that bangers and mash would really hit the spot. You pick a random exit for food and stumble across a British Beer Company restaurant. You order bangers and mash and the bangers and mash are the balls.
Now that’s good luck!
I just finished reading The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke.
Grade: A
This book grabs you and hurtles you straight into the heart of Venice, and though I never before had any desire to visit Italy, I now want very much to go. The ending is a little too tidy and hard to believe, which is why it didn’t get an A+.
Why so many failed endings, I wonder? Could it be that authors work so hard to draw the reader in at the beginning, and struggle so hard over the middle (which I have always found the hardest part to write), that they’re worn out by the end?
Images from this afternoon—
Rain. The scent of fresh tomatoes and basil in the garden. Hailstones wildly dancing on the deck. A basketball bouncing out of the garage followed by . . . no one. Inside the garage, the smell of age, a giant spider captured under the dusty globe of an old lamp. A police car stalled in the flooded road. Raindrops hanging from baby apples. Cool air.
The next leg of the Vonnegut marathon is Cat’s Cradle, which I plan to start in a couple of weeks. I read this book in college and enjoyed it immensely. I’m looking forward to reading it again. For once, I don’t need to borrow from the library because I own it. And soon it will prove its place in my library.
Now, before I let Mother Night go back to the library, let me share my favorite passage. The main character pretends to be a Nazi and he plays the part perfectly. Too perfectly. He says this about himself:
Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history—
But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”
So he’s not crazy, he’s just a monster!
This passage caught my attention because I understand the temptation to tamper with one’s thinking machine. There are some facts I could do without quite nicely, thank you, including almost everything I’ve ever heard about global warming, war, disease, death, and belly-button lint.
Packing up your entire life and moving it to another state is an awful experience. Material items really shouldn’t be that important and yet it’s hard when you have to leave things behind or they get damaged or lost.
But how nice it is when you find something that you thought was lost for good. Today I found the paddle for the bread-machine pan and for the first time in months we had fresh bread. The dough rose like magic. The crust cooked to just the right shade of golden brown. It was a plain white loaf, but it was good.
Yup, I finished another book: Storm Thief by Chris Wooding. I found this book on the New Fiction shelf of the library’s YA section.
Grade: B
Storm Thief is a quick and fun read. It has plenty of unique elements, but they are sometimes overshadowed by similarities to other works of fiction. There are also times when the characters’ feelings and motivations are overexplained in a way that I associate with bad romance novels.
Now here’s something really interesting: the author has had several other novels published and he’s only 30 years old! It’s strange to be reading fiction by someone younger than myself, and I wonder if knowing his age might have made me either a kinder or harsher critic.
I am the Mojito Bandito. It’s true. Leave your mojito unattended and I will steal it.
What can I say? Mojitos are yummy.
We discovered the mojito on a Caribbean cruise. The cruise itself was not very good, just a big money-making machine floating between tourist traps, but the mojitos were made with real fresh mint leaves.
P.S. The Mojito Bandito gets very mellow when she drinks and does not care that her name should probably be Mojito Bandita.
What a lovely weekend! On Saturday, I did almost nothing, which was quite nice. On Sunday, we went to Providence and had some yummy falafel wrap and hummus.
It still amazes me that I eat such things. When I was a child, my parents frequently accused me of being a fussy eater and I believed them. It took me years to figure out that my so-called fussiness was simply a natural aversion to overcooked spinach and other similarly unappealing foods which no one should ever be asked to eat. Now I freak my parents out with tales of meals they’ve never dreamed of trying.
So the next time you don’t see my parents at the falafel stand, ask them who’s the fussy eater now! 🙂
I didn’t forget about the Vonnegut Marathon. Not at all. I finished Mother Night on Thursday, but I was too busy on Friday to blog about it. It’s not the kind of book that you read, breezily comment on, and then forget.
Grade: A
I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Sirens of Titan, which is why it got an A rather than an A+. Where Sirens was like a long, amazing acid trip with an ultimate purpose, Mother Night was like the short, sober day after. Don’t get me wrong. I liked it, but it’s a book in which the Nazis figure largely, making it very dark and more reality-based than I sometimes care for, escapist reader than I am.
Mother Night was completely different from all of the other Vonnegut books that I’ve ever read, and I can’t tell you how happy I am to find that he has another side. Some authors just get into a mode and then write all of their books the same way. This is possibly his most universally likable work because it doesn’t fall into the sci-fi genre, a genre which I happen to enjoy but which does not seem to have mass appeal.
My one complaint with the book is that every once in a while the main character’s words do not ring true. They sound not like his opinions, but the opinions of the author, forced upon the character in order to get them into the book.
Overall it’s a good read. There are some great passages and I hope to share some of them later. For now, I want to think some more about the moral of the story, as stated by the author in the introduction: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Have you ever thought about that? Are there ways in which you purposefully misrepresent yourself to the world? And if you pretend well enough and consistently fool everyone, then does that facade become the real you?
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