a wolf angel is not a good angel

I’m reading the book ‘Girls of Riyadh’, which is fine, it’s fun, it’s Gossip Girl: Saudi Arabia.

We have the love trials of the wealthy girls (though with less sex than in the Upper East Side), we have the unnamed narrator, we have the focus on the narrator’s use of the internet.

I am enjoying the book, but I am reading it in Kristen Bell’s voice, which is causing some cognitive dissonance.

I’m so tired lately that I wish — for once — that I took more photos, so I could put them up in lieu of content.

I will instead link to a short story I like, by James Alan Gardner, Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream.

I read one of the books I was all excited about. It was good, but not great.

The library has the new Jeanette Winterson book, even though it isn’t yet published in Canada. I am entirely unclear about why they bothered to go and find it from the UK, but I don’t care so much, because I get to go read it this weekend. Oddly, they seem to have placed it in the science fiction section, which may be accurate for the book, but is unusual for the library, which shoves everything possible into fiction or mystery.

I think I am finally on the mend, after what must have been both a flu AND a cold, and after several mugs of ginger tea, which settles the stomach even as it burns off the inside of my mouth.

And so I bring a mini book review.

Bryce Courtenay, Sylvia. Completely atrocious. Mostly I enjoy his books, and even this one sped itself right along, but it was terrible anyhow.
Eileen Favorite, The Heroines. Great promise, but it rather petered out at the end. Somewhat reminiscent of The Eyre Affair, but less funny.
Ruth Rendell, Not in the flesh. One of her less good books. I think she’s running out of Wexford plots.
Nikita Lalwani, Gifted. A somewhat sad book about a first generation immigrant in Wales, pushed into doing math very young.
Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. A very very good book (apparently to be made into a movie with Tilda Swinton, though I cannot imagine who she will play), about someone who has had his memory eaten by a conceptual shark, and his quest to find out what that means. The writing is adequate at best (with flashes of much better), but the narrative structure is clever as all hell, and the whole thing is lots of fun.

I just read a book about Nefertiti and her sister, along the lines of Margaret George’s biographical fiction (is there a better name for this? I am too lazy to look it up). And I realised how much I enjoy this genre, especially about people I don’t know much about. Help me find some other authors who do this. I’ve read the set about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (too lazy to look up the author, again), and I also read things that are less fictionalised and more non-fiction (like Alison Weir) — but there are a lot of boring non-fiction books out there (and boring fiction), and it’s hard to pick out books in this vein sometimes.

I’d ideally like books that aren’t about the Tudors.

I just finished Un Lun Dun, which strikes me as The Phantom Tollbooth meets London Below. This isn’t a negative — I enjoyed both those books.

The book follows the Shwazzy (choisi), Zanna, and her friend, Deeba, as they go into unLondon, an abcity for London. (Other ones include Parisn’t, Lost Angeles, Baghdon’t.) The Shwazzy is prophecied to save the city from the Smog, which is like smog, except sentient. Lots of things are sentient here — Deeba picks up a pet, Curdle, a discarded milk carton, there are a set of guards called Binjas, trash bins that know martial arts, and so on. Lots of other things could be sentient, but have been somehow taken over, so there are a number of kinds of zombies.

Every now and then the overt political themes (not just “pollution is bad”, though it does sort of imply that air pollution is bad, but leaving garbage on the street is ok, because it will end up living in an abcity) show up a little too obviously, though I’m not sure children would catch it.

I love the sense of wordplay, in locations and names, especially when it’s not attached to the doom-and-gloom Bas-Lag books. (I like those books, too, but they’re depressing.) I loved, also, the subverting of a lot of fantasy tropes, most of which will be understandable even to children. (Some are, I think, a bit more subtle.)

It’s light, it’s funny — I have trouble saying that about a China Mieville book because hey look over there, hell has frozen over. But it is. It’s a long book, and the beginning needs some tightening up, and if you’re a big fan of giraffes, it’s not the book for you, but otherwise, it’s an excellent young adult fantasy.

I saw a book I thought was called ‘Russian Jew Cooks in Peru’. Sadly, there is an extra word in the actual title; I think mine is much more fun.

So, I had plans to go to the Harry Potter party. And then I read, the store manager is dressing up as Voldemort, and they will be doing reenactments of battle scenes (no idea which ones), and I admit, I’m a little scared. Even more so when they say the party will start at 8, and they expect line-ups as early as 6. Look, I want to see it, but not 6 hours of it. And I don’t want to wait in line 7 hours, either. I’m debating what time I’d like to show up there at, though this depends in no small part on who will come with me — I am not interested in spending all that much time on my own there. My aunt seems less and less interested, so now I need to lean on my grandmother to come with me, to aim to get there a bit before 11. (Yes! I am going out late Friday night with my 85 year old grandmother to the sale of a children’s book! My life is so many levels of exciting.)

My mother does not read the Harry Potter books. She does watch the movies, so she’s now up to Order of the Phoenix (Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge was phenomenal, incidentally, and entirely worth the movie, though other than the ending — from the time Harry et al get to the Ministry — I thought it was rather well-done). She did not know the ending of Half-Blood Prince, though I’d've thought she guessed who died, but not who killed him. Did not, because on the front page of today’s newspaper there was a huge article asking if Dumbledore is really dead, and if Snape is really bad, and if Harry is actually a Horcrux. Then there was another enormous article on the front page of the opinion section, asking a bunch of people what they thought would happen, which recapped in greater detail the story of HBP, and now she is irritated. You cannot forget these things.

This explains why I will go offline at midnight London time until such time as I have finished the book, just in case. Well, this and the “I am leaving at 5 am Saturday, and need to read the book from midnight to 5, so I will need to be packing Friday night anyhow” issue. But mostly it’s the fear off assholes who intend to spoil the book for everyone else.