Le Braconnier

15. Of Love and Other Demons

2007-09-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I picked this short novel off of my parents' book shelf during a recent visit. I was looking for something to tide me over, but I got rolled over. What an unbelievably great book! Caveat emptor – I am a great fan of magical realism, and this book has that and much more. Here, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is in masterful control of language (I give a big nod of the old hat to the translator who probably also deserves a Nobel prize for her unbelievable work) and story. What I love is that unlike many other authors who are capable of describing scenes in great detail, Gabriel Garcia Marquez manages to do that and keep the story rolling forward at a blistering pace. Because it proceeds as quickly as it does, the story mirrors and conveys the passion and impulsiveness of its characters, causing the reader to be caught up in an emotional landslide.

In the book, the young rebellious daughter of a Marquis in decline is bit by a rabid dog and, despite not being infected, becomes a charmed creature who is thought by the local Bishop to be vexed and possessed. Her father, after having overcome his self-obsession and rediscovered his love for his daughter, commits her to a convent for spiritual treatment after he learns that there is no medical intervention sufficient to save her. The Bishop sends a highly regarded and scholarly priest to determine if she is in fact possessed and, if so, to perform an exorcism on her. Instead, he falls in love with her and eventually, she with him. This is not a story where the end is ever really in doubt, but the journey that the reader is taken on is a compelling one: well worth the brief ride.

14. Angels & Demons

2007-09-19T16:57:00.001-07:00

By Dan Brown

Virtually everbody who has read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code has heard it: the prequel, Angels & Demons is the same, but better. I beg to disagree. It is just the same. That is not to say that it is not an enjoyable page-flipping affair: it is. Brown works his formulaic charm with the same protagonist, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. This time (actually, the first time...), Langdon must bring to bear his considerable academic and intellectual prowess to decode age old secrets of the Illuminati society before anti-matter planted somewhere in Vatican city, on the eve of a conclave to select a new Pope, causes havoc and kills thousands – all within the span of 24 hours. There are a few hilarious Oh, COME ON moments in the book, but they are just really humorous and if you get your nose out of joint about them you should probably see a therapist or switch to Dostoyevsky. Particularly amusing is Brown's portrayal of the arousal and attraction of biophysicist Vittoria Vetra to the much older Langdon during the adrenalin-induced pursuit of the evil-doer(s) and within twenty-four hours of her adoptive father's murder. One passage, describing the reaction of her physique to the awakening of her attraction to Langdon had me laughing out loud. Good fun.

What is probably the best thing about Dan Brown's stuff? Blessedly short chapters. You never really feel like putting it down because you're always thinking – ah, just one more short chapter! It also makes it easy to pick up and put down if you have just a minute, or you just want to turn a few pages before nighty night.

If this book takes you longer than 3 days to read you should re-enroll in elementary school or wait until the film, again starring Tom Hanks, and likely to be directed by Ron Howard, comes out in... ?

13. Refugee Sandwich: Stories of Exile and Asylum

2007-08-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

by Peter Showler

Peter Showler is the former chairperson of the Immigration and Refugee Board and so the fictional stories in his book, Refugee Sandwich: Stories of Exile and Asylum, are based on considerable personal insight into the dynamics and drama of refugee hearings. This tableau will be a fascinating one to many people, given that it is one largely set behind a veil of secrecy and not subject to public scrutiny. The stories in the book are fictional, but inspired by the facts underlying a myriad of claims he has been involved in, or been familiar with, over the many years of his dedicated contribution to refugee determination in Canada.

Showler does a commendable job of conveying the considerable challenges inherent in refugee determination. While, in places, Showler focuses on legal process and definition that will not be of significant interest to many readers, he also proves he is more than capable of stepping outside of his role as adjudicator and seeing things from the other side of the bench. His writing is at its best in a story like The Go Between, speaking with insight of the moral and philosophical dilemmas routinely faced by interpreters.

12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-08-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

by J.K. Rowling

In trying to catch up on all my reviews, I almost forgot this one! Wow... how? I had been reading through the series last year, and enjoying the books, although I found them increasingly dark as she moved through the series. This is to be expected, I guess, given that Rowling's audience matured and she matured as a writer (to an extent) as she completed them over the span of some 17 years. Rowling's real mastery is not in the calibre of her writing, however, but in her creative imagining of a world in which we might all wish to live, where magic is as common and delicious as peanut butter. Besides, all adults who read these books invariably must imagine what it would have been like to have written something so popular and influential!

I am hesitant to discuss the plot of this last book over much, given the potential for spoilers. There are good places to read about the book and discuss its content online, if one wishes, and I'll leave the reader with those cues (try Mugglenet.com or The Leaky Cauldron). Besides, my wife is still reading Book 5 and it'll mean murder if I let something slip!

I will say this: Deathly Hallows is slow as molasses in the first half. Disappointing, too, I would say. The second half, however, lives up to all possible expectations and then some. I personally believe that the epilogue is either unnecessary or incomplete (this latter interpretation is supported somewhat by JKR's subsequent comments to the press about the epilogue, which need not be repeated here). In any case, the question about book seven isn't whether it is worth the read: if you've read the first six, of course it is! The question is whether it is a suitable end for the series; and even in that, I'd say a heartfelt YES!

11. Born on a Blue Day

2007-08-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

by Daniel Tammet

This autobiography is written by a savant with extraordinary abilities, underscored by his rare synesthesia, an ability to perceive numbers as colors or sensations. There is a documentary, Brainman, about him and numerous television shows, news/documentary and novelty (eg. David Letterman) have featured him.

I opened the book, a quick read, expecting to gain real insight into his abilities, and his relationship to numbers and math. There is some of that in there, but much of the book is really about how the Asperger's Syndrome he suffers from challenges his ability to meet what life throws at him. If this is where your interests lie, you are in for a fascinating read, because there are few people suffering from autism-related disorders that can articulate the sensations of their condition the way that Daniel Tammet can. Unfortunately, that subject holds limited interest for me and I found his numerous descriptions of difficulties dealing with a lack of routine, crowds, noise, etc. to be repetitive and uninteresting.

8, 9 and 10. The Wheel of Time, books 2, 3 and 4

2007-08-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

Book 2 - The Great Hunt

Book 3 - The Dragon Reborn

Book 4 - The Shadow Rising

Despite a couple thousand page of reading, I don't have much more to say than, "nothing to see here. Move along."

Actually, one brief note. The Shadow Rising is the best book of the entire series, as far as I am concerned. The best character of the series, who isn't caught up in endless infantile bickering with the opposite sex, is Perrin Aybara, a man who, although peripheral to the Dragon reborn, is "ta'veren," a person around whom the wheel of time weaves its wily ways. Perrin leads a heroic rescue of his home town from hordes of Trollocs (nasty beasts!) and the clutches of White Cloaks, an army of puritanical zealots. In the book he actually takes a step towards a semi-mature relationship with a woman named Faile, by marrying her. Novel, in this series (pardon the pun).

As for the rest of these books, Jordan continues to drift from one character to another, and I have a real problem with the fact that, although he is sharing the main characters' innermost thoughts, there is always some hidden revelation when a critical juncture in the story arises, as though the characters whom he is writing have been holding out secret thoughts and plans from the omniscient narrator. This, as opposed to characters reaching actual revelations about themselves or the world around themselves... oh well...

7. The Eye of The World

2007-03-27T07:58:00.001-07:00

I'm a pretty lucky guy. My wife caters to my idiosyncratic nerdy tastes; for example, she bought me the latest book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series for Christmas. Book Eleven. My problem was that it had been such a long time since Jordan's last book, that I had forgotten what had transpired. That is the most significant problem I have with this series -- Jordan has introduced so many characters and plotlines over so many pages, in so many books, that it is almost unmanageable for any but the most dedicated fans of his work. I had to go back to the beginning again.

I decided that a recent trip to Mexico was the perfect time to dive into another long string of brain candy. Who wants to read serious dreck on a hot Caribbean beach? Not me! I needed something as sweet and lacking in substance as the Pina Coladas I was drinking. I started re-reading The Eye of the World.

Jordan is a great fantasy writer (although I think that comparing him with Tolkein, as many do, is an act of conceit) . The Wheel of Time series starts well with The Eye of the World, introducing us to the central characters - Rand al'Thor (the Dragon reborn), Perrin (a guy who learns that he can communicate with wolves), Matt (a guy whose future, at this point, we are unsure of -- although we know he is Ta'veren, somebody that the threads of the Wheel of Time wind themselves around), Nynaeve (stern older sister type, village wisdom and able to wield the True Source -- magic), Egwene (another capable of wielding magic and, at this point, potential love interest for Rand), Moraine (an Aes Sedai, read sorceress) and her Warder, read guardian, Lan; and finally, Elayne (imperial princess). Additional "central" characters are added in later books in the series.

The storyline runs as many fantasy stories do, a humble and modest sheepherder living in a small town (Rand), through a series of dramatic events, is forced to leave his small town heading towards the realization that he is more than he ever dreamed he was, accompanied by friends and visited by frequent danger. Along the way he realizes his connection to history, begins to doubt his family origins and comes to the realization that he can and must work magic to defeat the evil efforts of the Dark One. Sound familiar? The familiarity of this plotline is not an indication that Jordan's work lacks originality. This plotline is to fantasy what the pentatonic scale is to blues music. Jordan's characters are refreshingly chippy and real. They fight and argue with each other. They make mistakes. Jordan also manages to work chillingly dark evil forces into the narrative, and he seems to enjoy it. The detail he brings to bear in imagining the workings of magic is impressive.

What I like best about The Eye of the World, as opposed to later works in this series, is that he manages to separate the characters he introduces enough, both spatially and emotionally, that they maintain both a loose connection with one another while, at the same time, are separate and distinct. Later in the series, they become a scattered gang with little in common, and it becomes increasingly difficult to see how Jordan can bring all of the diverse threads of the Pattern back together.

6. A Practical Guide to Linux: Commands, Editors and Shell Programming

2007-03-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

Last year I took the step of installing Linux on my new computer. I installed a variant of Ubuntu Linux, called Kubuntu. Kubuntu installs as many new Linux distributions, like a windowed graphic-user-interfaced operating system (see screenshots here) -- similar in many ways to Microsoft Windows, but wonderfully different in others. Just for sheer plug, if you haven't tried it, download the LiveCD, burn a copy onto cd-rom and then try it out.

My difficulty lay in the fact that, although I have tinkered with a number of different operating systems (DOS, Commodore / Amiga, Apple Mac (pre-OSX), etc.), none of them were as Unixy as Linux. While I suppose that it is theoretically possible to just download and utilize a graphical distro of Linux and just use it, I think that if you want to be able to accomplish anything meaningful, or configure your system to do something a little bit differently, you will eventually need to use a command line. If your background resembles mine in any way, though, you'll quickly be lost.

I went looking for a book to help me navigate the Linux command line and understand a little of the behind-the-scenes workings of Linux. Because of the large user-support network on line for Linux distributions like (K)Ubuntu, it is possible to access a lot of information on-line, but it is oh-so-much-more-convenient to have a handy desktop reference book which consolidates much of this information.

A Practical Guide to Linux: Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming is that and a lot more. This book has pretty much everything you could want in a generic Linux reference work, and then some. The book provides a useful background to the history and development of Linux, Command Line Utilities, the Linux Filesystem (including, for example, Linux's somewhat convoluted file permissions system) and Command Line Shells. There is too much focus on command-line editors for my liking: the only time I've had use for one is when the GUI won't load. The section on the Bourne Again Shell (BASH) and TC Shells was also useful. With its section on programming tools (programming in C, BASH, GAWK, as well as the SED editor), the book goes beyond my needs and current interests, although I'm glad the content is there. Finally, the book has an extensive Command Reference providing all Linux commands and useful examples.

I didn't read the entirety of this book, although I did tackle a good chunk of it. It is a reference book and not necessarily meant to be read chapter after chapter; although, I did have the thought that it would make an excellent companion to a Linux evening course. There is a quiz section at the end of each chapter and the Author maintains a website for the book to provide answers to the even-numbered questions.

Anyways, two thumbs up. A useful desktop, or handy shelf, Linux reference. Those with interest may want to check out the more detailed Slashdot review.

5. The Wicked Day

2007-02-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

by Mary Stewart

From the potent seeds sewn in Stewart's Merlin Trilogy comes The Wicked Day. This adjunct to the Merlin Trilogy tells the tragic story of Mordred, the bastard born of an act of incest between his scheming mother, Morgause, and the then-unsuspecting Arthur, fresh from the field of his first battle. The Wicked Day is understood to be the day foretold by Merlin, the day when Mordred will prove to be the bane of his father, Arthur.

Stewart's powerful prose is at work here again, providing somewhat moving and complex descriptions of both character and scene. This time, there is no “voice over” from Merlin, or another central character. Although she mainly conveys the story from Mordred's perspective, she changes perspective to that of other characters – such as Arthur – as she feels it necessary to advance the story. The work as a whole has a Shakespearean quality to it, and the tragedy of the tale, having been foretold by Merlin in the Merlin Trilogy, unfolds slowly over its 450-odd pages. Like all works which set out with their endings foretold, the main question is not what will happen, but how will it happen. All in all, and I feel very much unlike as was the case in the Merlin Trilogy, there is too much exposition here and not enough exhibition.

The most fundamental problem with The Wicked Day is that the story itself is just not very compelling. The book feels like the last season of a television series that has gone one season too far. I got the sense that, despite the efforts that Stewart went to to reconcile the legend of Mordred to the works she had written before, Stewart herself was tired of the story by the time it came to setting it out on paper. The story moves along in fits and starts: unnoteworthy moments go on for pages, in agonizing detail, and critical years get leapt over in a few words or sentences. When Mordred and Arthur finally meet on the field of battle at the end of the piece, and despite Stewart's obvious talent for dealing with such critical passages of dialogue, the reader is denied the content of their conversation. Moreover, Stewart draws out seemingly minor plot points which leave you wondering whether you have misunderstood their significance when, in the end, you realize that you haven't: they're just insignificant.

While Mordred could never be a traditional protagonist – at least in the sense of the fantasy genre – Stewart's portrayal of him seems to be less than passionate, especially given that he is by all rights a character whose hubris is his impulse to rash action based on his passionate feelings. She glosses over his relationships with women to the point of making him, like Merlin, seem an asexual figure, but then, in the end, gives him as a motivation for acting in apparent defiance of his father, a desire to be with his step-mother. The other characters, even Arthur, also seem similarly flat and uninteresting in this telling.

Having given such a hearty recommendation to the Merlin Trilogy, I find myself saying, of The Wicked Day, move along good friend, move along.

4. Eragon

2007-01-29T14:04:00.001-08:00

by Christopher Paolini

If you wanted proof that I'm following a long string of brain-candy fiction, this read would suffice. You'll find this one in the kid's section at the bookstore or, with a somewhat charitable interpretation, under the "young adults" section in some libraries.

Eragon is better known as the run-away bestselling book written by then fifteen (15!) year old Christopher Paolini, recently adapted for, and about to be released to, the big-screen.

Wikipedia says:

Christopher Paolini was home schooled in Paradise Valley, Montana, and graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. He and his parents felt he should wait before attending college, so meanwhile he began writing Eragon. His parents' publishing company, Paolini International, LLC, published his book when he was nineteen. The book was then discovered by Alfred A. Knopf and was republished under Knopf in 2002. With Knopf as the publisher, Eragon became a success and a New York Times Bestseller. After release of the film for the movie, a new cover was released for the book.

The story follows young Eragon who, while out exploring in the mountains one day, stumbles across a dragon's egg which has been translocated by an Elf who has been attacked. Eragon's real adventures begin when the egg hatches and a dragon is born. Sinister forces develop a nefarious interest in him. Eragon's destiny as a dragon rider is secured, but he must flee from his family and home to keep him and his dragon safe...

Although Paolini stays true to the genre, both the plot and characters feel... well, let's just say too familiar. Wikipedia indicates that some critics have called it derivative and that may not be too far off the mark. There is really little that feels terribly fresh or original in the book and the portrayal of the characters? Well, it feels like it was written by a fifteen year old -- not much depth or emotional maturity. The main character can't seem to hold onto an idea for more than a page. The ending is pretty deus ex machina.

The good news? If this can get published, there is hope for all of us wanna-be fantasy writers out there.

1., 2., and 3. -- The Merlin Trilogy

2007-01-19T12:56:00.001-08:00

By Mary Stewart

I start here with a disclaimer that, due to a number of stresses in my life, the details of which need not be shared here, I have been reading nothing but what I will generously call "brain candy" – for months. I have relentlessly pursued comforting fantasy fiction, reveling in its capacity to distract me from some of the darknesses of real life. I plunged into my basement and extracted books from dusty boxes – books that I once adored in my teen years – re-reading them for the nth time to immerse myself in emotional comfort. For those of you who might be passing under dark clouds, I heartily recommend the fantasy fiction approach to therapy.

In the midst of this run on brain candy (and I start here because they are the book(s) that I found myself reading as 2007 mercifully kicked 2006 in the ass on the way out the door), I returned to some old favourites by Mary Stewart, which I found in my local library. The series is the Merlin Trilogy, comprised of The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment. I'm not sure, in all fairness, that Stewart's trilogy could be said to constitute brain candy, as it has a complexity of character and story not commonly seen in all but the best of the fantasy genre. It can only be considered brain candy in the sense that it has the capacity to transport you to a comforting world so far from your own that you can, for a time, shed the burdens on your heart or soul.

Let me say that I have never been overly fond of the various tales of the Arthurian legend that one sees kicking about; however, Stewart's books really brought me around. I tried, for example, to dive into The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, before I re-tackled Mary Stewart's series, but I didn't make it past the first few chapters. By contrast to Stewart's works, I found White's voice as dry, dusty and cobwebbed as his description of Merlin's apartments.

The story of the trilogy is too lengthy to repeat here, but it essentially follows Merlin's life from childhood through a reunion with his father, Ambrosius, to his counselling of Uther Pendragon and, finally, to his fostering of Arthur of legend. Part of what makes these books work so well is that they are set and placed in a transforming Britain that is the backdrop to the Arthurian legend. Stewart paints the lingering influence of the Roman empire with a fine brush and ties the story to the historical development of Britain – although with, admittedly, grand artistic licence. Let me assure you, you will have no difficulty recognizing or reveling in it. I personally found her brief writer's comments, at the conclusion of each book, about the various legends and myths surrounding Merlin and Arthur to be fascinating insights into the vast amount of research she put into understanding these characters, the precedent literature and the choices she made in directing the story as she did.

Throughout the trilogy (there is a fourth book, The Wicked Day, which follows the trilogy and is “on deck” to be read -- see sidebar), Stewart tells the story of Merlin – part druid, part bard – in his own voice, as though recalling his life from his death-bed. Any author that can convincingly tell a story in the voice of a person from another gender deserves our respect; however, Stewart has done so much more than that here. She has taken a legendary and mythical figure (and freely admits to adapting myth and legend to her own creative and imaginary ends) and given him a voice that is unbelievably authentic and compelling. While Stewart grants him a power of vision, or foresight, she explains away many of his mythical accomplishments as products of his intellect and guile. For me, there is enough magic, portrayed as the guiding hand of an unknown God, in her portrayal of his character for this work to have both an entitlement to membership in the fantasy genre, but also to be a really compelling read. There is never a difficulty for the reader to willingly suspend their disbelief in order to accept some implausibility as the story moves forward.

Here, just as a teaser (there are so many other fine passages that I could have selected), is Stewart brilliantly at work describing how Merlin raised the Giants' Dance (aka Stonehedge) as a monument to his dead father, Ambrosius:

For the raising of the uprights, once we had aligned the stones, dug the pits and sunk the guides, there was nothing that could not be done with rope and shear-legs and plumb-line. It was with the great lintels that the difficulty lay, but the miracle of the building of the Dance had been done countless years before, by the old craftsmen who had shaped those gigantic stones to fit as surely one into the other as wood dovetailed by a master carpenter. We had only to find means to lift them. It was this which had exercised me all those years, since I first saw the capped stones in Less Britain, and began my calculations. Nor had I forgotten what I had learned from the songs. In the end I had designed a wooden crib of a kind which a modern engineer might have dismissed as primitive, but which – as the singer had been my witness – had done the task before, and would again. It was a slow business, but it worked. And I suppose it was a marvellous enough sight to see those vast blocks rising, stage by stage, and settling finally into their beds as smoothly as if they had been made of tallow. It took two hundred men to each stone as it was moved, drilled teams who worked by numbers and who kept up their rhythms, as rowers do, by music. The rhythms of the movement were of course laid down by the work, and the tunes were old tunes that I remembered from my childhood; my nurse had sung them to me, but she never sang the words that the men sometimes set to them. These tended to be lively, indecent, and intensely personal, and mostly concerning those in high places. Neither Uther nor I was spared, though the songs were never sung deliberately in my hearing. Moreover, when outsiders were present, the words were either correct or indistinguishable. I heard it said, long afterwards, that I moved the stones of the Dance with magic and with music. I suppose you might say that both are true. I have thought, since, that this must have been how the story started that Phoebus Apollo built with music the walls of Troy. But the magic and the music that moved the Giants' Dance, I shared with the blind singer of Kerrec.

Towards the middle of November the frosts were sharp, and the work was finished. The last camp fire was put out, and the last wagon-train of men and materials rolled away south back to Sarum. Cadal had gone ahead of me into Amesbury. I lingered, holding my fidgeting horse, until the wagons had rolled out of sight over the edge of the plain and I was alone.

The sky hung over the silent plain like a pewter bowl. It was still early in the day, and the grass was white with frost. The thin winter sun painted long shadows from the linked stones. I remembered the standing stone, and the white frost, the bull and the blood and the smiling young god with the fair hair. I looked down at the stone. They had buried him, I knew, with his sword in his hand. I said to him: “We shall come back, both of us, at the winter solstice.” Then I left him and mounted my horse, and rode toward Amesbury.

Picking up a thread from the legends, she casts Merlin as a virtually, although not completely, asexual figure. Towards the end of the trilogy, as he lives out his foreseen “doom,” we see him fall under the spell of the Lady of the Lake (aka Nimue, Viviane, Niniane, Nyneve, and other variations ) – believing him to be a young male apprentice. This is not the first time in the series that Stewart attributes Merlin with a not so subtle attraction to members of the same sex, but she manipulates legend to high purpose here as deftly as Niniane works her enchantment on Merlin.

My mother had originally put me onto Mary Stewart's works in my early teens and I had enjoyed them then, but now, looking back, I can honestly say that I missed so much of the complexity and intricacy of her fine style at that time. Re-reading them again was almost like reading them anew. I can honestly say that these books are some of best reading I can possibly imagine. Although Stewart completed the trilogy in the late 70's, they are timeless works. If I had one, I would certainly put them towards the top of a list of my all-time favourite reads. Re-reading them has truly whetted my appetite for The Wicked Day, a review of which will be forthcoming as soon as I finish it.