The Good

The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons

I decided to get back into spending my Worker Renewal money on books. I had randomly picked out Hyperion from the library a few months ago, and was surprised and pleased with it. Decided to actually purchase the second in the series, and was even more pleased. According to Wikipedia (John looked it up for me), this is sometimes described as a “space opera”. Yeah! In any case, I like it. Plot and character driven, with “science fiction-y” “futuristic” elements that add to the plot and transform the characters, rather than being gimmicks.

Julie & Julia – Julie Powell

Thanks to Hannah Dueck for bringing me this book all the way across the ocean and continents! It is a Really Fun book – I highly recommend it to everyone, but especially people who fall into one of the following categories:
- in their late 20s
- have ovarian cysts
- like to cook/read about cooking attempts
- like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (don’t let this scare you – it’s just that there are lots of glowing references about watching the show. yeah!)

I fall into all of those categories. I loved it! And I get extra points because it is non-fiction – memoir about setting the goal of cooking all of the recipes from Julia Child’s cookbook on French cooking for Americans and writing a blog about it and living in NYC and working for the federal government, etc.

a boy of good breeding - Miriam Toews

Thanks to Tasara Redekop for bringing me this book all the way across the ocean and continents!

My favorite passage about pudding – well, actually about making pudding – of all time. It entirely describes how I feel about it. One mother is giving advice to another:

“You know what you have to do, Knute?” said Marilyn.
“What.”
“You have to learn how to make pudding. It says on the box you have to stir constantly, constantly, and it takes a good twenty or thirty minutes before the stuff boils. So if S.F. is bugging you, you know, asking for this and that, you say, Sorry ma’am, do you want pudding or not? I cannot leave this pudding for a second.”
“Yeah?” said Knute.
“Yeah,” said Marilyn, “it’s great. I make tons of pudding and while I stir I read. Thin, light books ‘cause you only have one hand to hold ‘em. Josh can’t do a thing about it, so he actually amuses himself and I get a decent break. All hell can break loose around me. I don’t care, I’m making pudding.”
“That’s a great idea, Marilyn,” said Knute. “What happens when he gets sick of pudding?”
“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll think of something when that time comes, though. Something less fattening.”

Endymion – Dan Simmons – The 3^rd book out of a 4 book series takes the premise from the first 2 books and then fast forwards to almost 300 years in the future and continues the story, only of course now it is a different story with a (mostly) different cast of characters. Things have changed drastically over the 300 years, and it is really fascinating what has happened.

But what I find so impressive is that I could start the book, be immediately disappointed to not be able to follow the characters from the first 2 books any further, and then almost just as quickly be once again sucked in to the new set of characters. I really, really am enjoying this series.

Ghost Children – Sue Townsend

Thanks to Tasara for suggesting this book from the library! Really good. Really great characters. Really well written. In a quiet way, very stunning.

But n Ben A-Go-Go – Matthew Fitt

Puggled. Snochterin. Paolo’s broo wis creeshit, the oxters o his battle tunic mawkit wi swite. The craitur’s guff wis on his claes. Owre his hauns. The caircass, no ten yaired doon the brae, wis awready stertin tae ming in the foreninn heat. Paolo’s hert banged at his chist like a steekit nieve. Jammy. He had been that jammy.

That’s a sample paragraph from this book. Set in 2090, global flooding leaving most of Scotland under water, with most people living on floating islands and all sorts of odd things going on that are kind of hard to figure out because holy crap the whole thing is written in Scots.

Published with a subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council, bought by the Ranfurly Library Service, and donated through Book Aid International, somehow this book made its way to the Kenya National Library Service. How weird is that?

Um, intensely weird. At least, it is to me. Someone else checked this book out before me, and I am So Curious about who it was and what they thought.

Overall, yeah a good book. Definitely seemed to me to be more than a gimmick to write in dialect – it was part of the overall storytelling. So that’s good. And Fitt did a good job of keeping old things and adding lots of new things to the way society is run and functions. Better than most of the shite out there being published that takes place in the future. Better than most of the shite that gets donated to the Kenyan public library system.

And...of course...Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I can't even write about that yet. Give me some time.