Laurabelle's Blog

Two months ago, I read Ella Minnow Pea and started this post. A couple of weeks after that, I started a great entry and then lost it because I closed the browser without remembering to save my draft. This entry will not be as good, but since it has lain on my desk for more than two months, I'd hate to turn it back in to the library on Tuesday (when it's finally due, without the recourse of more renewals) without writing a couple of words.

The title itself is great, especially when pronounced by a computerized reader: Ella Minnow Pea: a Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable. (Try saying that one five times fast!)

I was going to elaborate, but I don't think I will. The title says it all, really.

I can't decide whether I like Lisa Goldstein's Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon. I certainly don't dislike it, but it hasn't really grabbed me the way that some others have. Still, I can't stop thinking about it, turning it over in my mind.

Goldstein's urban fantasy novel is set in Elizabethan England, with historical characters like Queen Elizabeth and Christopher Marlowe juxtaposed against fantastical or anachronistic elements: fairies, dragons, and shotguns. The odd thing is that the magic doesn't drive the plot. It's there, of course, but the book isn't about magic. It's about the characters who, in their own ways, are all trying to make sense of their crazy world.

I requested Muriel Spark's Memento Mori from KCLS because I wanted an audio book, and I thought it sounded like a potentially interesting mystery story. The catalog summary reads:

A voice on the telephone warns, Remember, you must die. The recipient of the grim message is elderly Dame Lettie Colston, but soon ten of Lettie's oldest friends also become targets of Death's anonymous herald. A bizarre investigation lays bare an intricate network of deception and disloyalty that binds together the vulnerable group of aging eccentrics.

Saturday Jeff and I went down to Olympia for Mother’s Day. While down there, we made a stop by Capital Footwear, a hippie shoe store where the staff care about comfort and quality and only sell shoes made by fairly paid labor. (For example, they don’t sell Doc Martens any more because that company opened a factory in China and lowered their prices.) I only found one pair that I really liked, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, on my part or theirs; I tried on pretty near every shoe in the store. I think I’ll go back every couple of months, though, and see what they’ve got that’s new. It’s a small, quality business that deserves my patronage.

For my last birthday, Ralph and Lori gave me Booklust, Nancy Pearl's bookful of booklists. In the first lines section I found a mention of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, whose first line is I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I had Amazon send Maggie a copy for Christmas, because it seemed like a book she would enjoy. She said it was indeed delightful, and recently I decided to read it myself.

A few days ago I finished Robin McKinley's latest novel, Sunshine, which had been languishing on my shelf since December. It's a vampire novel, but it's strange in a very McKinley way (unlike Pete Hautman's Sweetblood, which is strange in an entirely different way). I wouldn't have expected McKinley to write a vampire novel, but if she were to do so, she'd write one like this, as of course she did. No, that sentence doesn't really make sense, but what I mean is that despite being a completely different genre from everything else that I've read of hers, it's very much her style.

I just finished reading a retelling of Bluebeard called Fitcher's Brides (from a version of the tale called Fitcher's Bird). I bought the book because I'm a sucker for fairy tales, and because I loved another of Gregory Frost's stories, The Root of the Matter, a retelling of Rapunzel. That story contains what has become one of my favorite quotations:

Turning men into pigs is no particular feat. The real exercise is getting pigs to write checks.

Like The Root of the Matter, Fitcher's Brides contains physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. These are not fairy tales for children.

I'm a sucker for fairy tales, and when Angie Benedetti (KCLS youth selector) got up in front of my Young Adult Materials class last quarter and told us about a retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon called East, I was hooked. Edith Pattou has done an excellent job of bringing this fairy tale to life. Although it was never one of my favorite tales, she has made me love not just her version but the story itself.

I recently finished Juliet Marillier's latest novel, Wolfskin, which had been languishing on my holds list for months after I read her fabulous Sevenwaters Trilogy. I loved the Sevenwaters books and liked Wolfskin also but not quite as much, probably because her first trilogy is very much a woman's story as well as inspired by a fairy tale, and Wolfskin (also destined to be a trilogy, I believe) is a male Viking story.

The Left Hand of Darkness is a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards and Le Guin's if-you-don't-read-anything-else-you-must-read-this. In her introduction she calls the book a thought-experiment, and I find that a good description. The story is about a world where the human inhabitants are completely androgynous and about the effects that such a physiology has on their culture. It is a fascinating question, and I think her answer is logical, credible, and realistically depicted.

I found it difficult to interest myself in the first one or two chapters, but then the plot became more interesting, and I started to identify with the main character, Genly Ai, an envoy from an inter-planet organization to this androgynous world. I understood his culture shock and especially the unexpected, unpleasant reverse culture shock of seeing true women and men after years surrounded by androgyny.

I'm not sure whether I think androgyny, if possible, would be a good idea or not, but considering the idea has certainly made me think differently about sex and gender. Even though the book consistently emphasized that the inhabitants of this planet are both sexes, or perhaps neither, I couldn't help filing them into male gender roles in my mind. This was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that our language lacks appropriate pronouns (he? she? it? all inappropriate). Androgyny is truly a mind-bending concept.