PC Reading List

(and I’ve got plenty of books to talk about!)

One of the things I really like about the story is that the reader’s sympathies don’t necessarily lie with the titular protagonist.  In fact, one is more likely to sympathize with just nearly everyone else in the story more than with Artemis.  Somehow, that makes the read more fun, for me.

I will be giving a copy of the book to my 8 1/2 year old goddaughter today.  I haven’t heard any of the kids I know talking about the book, so I am eager to see how she likes it.  I have a feeling she’ll get a good laugh at it.

David Wolverton’s The Golden Queen is the book that I most recently finished.  I ended up finding it a pleasant enough read, though it isn’t something I am particularly interested in revisting.

In my reading of the novel, I found myself growing in sympathy for Gallen, Orick, and Maggie, and feeling a mix of sympathy and disguist for Veriasse and Everynne.  It seems to me that this is by design.  In addition, I found the dronons to be a pretty disgusting evil race for our friends to face, which made the overall story pretty effective.

I came across a copy of  a later book that continues this story when I recently visited a library book sale.  I had another 150 or so pages to read, meaning I’d read over 2/3 of it.  That seems like about the spot in my reading where I’ll have a pretty good idea if it is a story I want to continue to pursue when I finish my reading.  Well, I didn’t buy the book, even though it would cost me less than $1.  I am not really interested in investing the time in continuing along with the story.  

That said, the last little bit did make me smile, and I would count The Golden Queen as an enjoyable enough read in itself.

Perhaps the best deals I’ve managed to find have been at library book sales.  I love when these things happen.  In Singapore, it’s about once a year, and it is a national event held in a very large convention center.  You can imagine the crowds.  Here, in my hometown, there are several smaller libraries, and each has its own method of selling off old books.  This past weekend, the one nearest my parents’ place had their sale (I think it might be annual).  It was in a little back room, and I managed to find a number of good deals.  I ended up bringing out 10 paperbacks all for $5, and all in good condition.

This morning, my best friend and I popped into a library in a neighboring town.  They used to have a book sale every Saturday, but have in recent years opened a little shop in the front of the library to sell off old books.  Paperbacks start as low as 25¢, and some of the nicer books can be several dollars.  I really love that shop.  The only problem with it is that I usually end up with a whole lot of books to carry to the other side of the world.

I’m not entirely surprised to hear this.

It’s that time again. The holidays are upon us.  Let the preparations, the celebrations — and the shopping —  begin!

A Seven Year Old’s Christmas Wish List:

2.  Ninja Turtles.  

3.  Bath soap.

4.  Special shampoo.

5.  Spiderman 1, the movie on DVD.

6.  Cookies.

7.  Veggie Tales DVDs.

I am not much of an actor myself, and usually feel quite self-concious if I have to put on any sort of show on stage.  But I can sure see the value of letting students hear Shakespeare’s tales as if from his own mouth.

Have you ever seen these performances where the actor dresses up like the artist, and tells his/her story?  Which are some of the best you’ve seen?

Probably the thing that was most troubling to me during the reading process was the uncertainty about who was narrating the tale.  At the end of nearly every chapter, there was an address to Palicrovol.  This is an example of one such address, from one of the book’s early chapters:

Ah, Palicrovol, will you not learn that mercy is as good as the person to whom the mercy is given? You spared Asineth, who should have died; now you will not spare Orem Scanthips, called Banningside, whose good heart should be born a hundred thousand times upon the earth. Are you like Asineth? Will you learn all your lessons backward?

  The problem that these addresses create is that it is hard to tell, throughout most of the book, who is actually making these addresses.  Who is telling us the story?  While it is not too difficult to hazard a guess (there are clues early on), there is enough about these addresses that are accusing that it becomes a little distracting.  To make matters more difficult,  there are often mentioned, in these addresses, events to which we are not yet privy.  That is a nice sort of foreshadowing, on the one hand, but it can begin to wear the reader down just a little.  And of course, about halfway through the novel we realize that our narrator is not even telling us events witnessed first hand, at least for much of the time.  Rather, many of the events are being retold by the narrator, relating tales told by Orem.   The question of the reliability of the narrator, then, has to be gnawing at the back of the reader’s brain.

What these addresses do manage to do is to show us, all along, that the character we are made to sympathize with, Orem, is going to be in imminent danger when we reach the end of the narrative.  That is actually a very nice effect.  What is more troubling, though, is that the danger (and, to a lesser degree, the build up of tension) is never quite resolved.   We are left with a big question mark at the end.  That doesn’t bother me too much, really.  In fact, I kind of like the lack of clear answer that we have, because it perhaps warns us that we’ve been looking at the wrong question.  What I like less, though, is the feeling at the end of the book that we’ve also been watching the wrong career, and that Palicrovol is the one we should have cared about (even though the narrative doesn’t allow us to, really).  That part is rather troubling, and the lack of resolution in the only life story that we can really care about in the book leaves me a little frustrated.

In fact, it makes me feel rather depressed, and that the book ends on a pessimistic note.  That is sad, in one sense, because there is a potentially beautiful and profound message to the lack of resolution.  However, it misses the mark, for me, not because of the ambiguity, but because of the complete lack of empathy I feel for the character who the story has, at the end of the day, “been all about.”

On the other hand, if one is to take the ending to mean that we are all, in one sense, Palicrovol, reading the Orem story with some hope that we will begin to sympathize with him, then the book seems to work very well.  One way or another, Orem is the character to sympathize with, and finding out at the end that he is simply a footnote in Palicrovol’s story leaves me a little unsatisfied.

I’ve recently been spending a fair bit of time rereading and studying Shakespeare’sCymbeline, mostly because I have been preparing to teach it last week and this.  Cymbeline is one of my favorite plays, so I spent a little time at my new blog writing about it.  Here are some links to those articles: