Mad Times

Pi is a young boy who finds himself in a lifeboat after the ship carrying his zoo-keeper family from India to Toronto is sunk in the South Pacific. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that he is sharing the lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger.

A friend loaned me this book several years ago and I’m just now finishing it even though I started back then and have picked away at it off and on since. So the first third of the book is a little fuzzy in my memory. This fragmented approach should not reflect badly on the book. I was just flipping through the first third to check some points and reading it now it threatened to pull me in with each paragraph. The style is conversational, digressive, and funny, moving from childhood trials to facts about the zoo animals to religious issues. But the shipwreck promised by the book’s cover doesn’t come until after that first third. Once Pi is in the lifeboat with the tiger it becomes significantly harder to put the book down. I think I have an inkling now, though, of how much more impact the book would have had if I’d had the concentration to read it straight through from the start. Should you read it, I strongly recommend this course.

This is the second book Walton has set in an England which made peace with Hitler’s Germany. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is again one of the point of view characters. He trades chapters with a new character, Viola Lark who, on the first page of the book, is offered the lead in a gender-swapped production of Hamlet.

The production is dealt a setback when the actress slated to play Hamlet’s mother dies along with another man in an explosion at her house. Inspector Carmichael is assigned to the investigation of the explosion and deaths. The explosion would seem to have nothing to do with the play, but when it’s revealed that Adolf Hitler himself plans to attend the play’s opening night along with the British Prime Minister, things start looking a little more suspicious.

The book highlights how hard it is for people concerned with their everyday lives to believe in atrocities committed in other parts of the world. And even when the atrocities come into focus how hard it is to see how they apply to those mundane lives. Alongside that abstract message, Walton shows how easy it is for her two sympathetic main characters to fall into situations where they may commit terrible acts of their own.

Theo is never happier than when he can tie you down by resting his chin on your hand or arm.

Another from back when the babies were small. I can’t imagine how we must have gotten into this position.

Sixth in Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series. I started with the third book which worked okay, but I wouldn’t recommend starting with this one. There’s just too much back story taken as given. New in this volume is a second primary point of view character (at least I don’t remember the narrative being this split in the other books). We meet a young woman named Talia Shindo whose mother is kidnapped from their home on Jupiter’s moon Callisto by a Recovery Man early in the book. Actually there are several other POV characters too now that I think about it, so maybe I’m misremembering the other books as staying closer to Miles Flint.

The setting of these novels has human culture interacting with a large number of alien species. In these interactions, humans become subject to alien laws. These laws are sometimes viewed by humans as trivial or incomprehensible, so humans created Disappearance Services which are like a witness relocation program on steroids: the offending person is given a new identity and hidden away so the affronted aliens cannot exact their punishment (usually death). Humans being the opportunists that they are, a parallel occupation springs up called a Tracker. Trackers will find disappeared people for the alien governments. They’re not very well liked. Retrieval Artists are like human-sympathetic Trackers, they will find a disappeared person, but only under circumstances where that person would presumably want to be found (e.g., when the violated law changes and their offense is no longer fatal to them, or when they suddenly come into a large sum of money.) Those three occupations were in all the previous books. In this book, Rusch introduces a new one. A Recovery Man is someone with the quasi-legal job of returning wayward possessions to their rightful owners. And yes, the word “possession” there does denote that people are a bit out of the Recovery Man’s normal line.

Meanwhile back on our moon, Miles Flint is still working through the revelations from the previous book, Paloma where he found that his mentor wasn’t the ethical pillar he’d thought she was, and in particular he discovers that some of her transgressions may have involved Miles himself.

The major plot points in this book build off events from previous books in a way that feels a little flimsy, like it didn’t occur to Rusch that this might have been what really happened behind the scenes until now. But while those points strain credulity a bit, the execution of the new story line is good enough, and the newly revealed characters interesting enough that I can forgive her. It can’t be easy to maintain a series whose books each hinge on personally life-changing events for the main character. If a little retconning is required, at least it results in an interesting story.

I’m a little worried about the next book, though. It could easily stray into the territory of cop buddy movie cliche (actually a subgenre of that, but I can’t tell you which one without spoiling this book) if she’s not very careful.

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The house itself is a nearly-new manufactured home. The build quality and installation are excellent. It feels (and is) solid, roomy, and cozy.

For all the details and to arrange a showing see the agent’s listing. Or if you have questions, leave a comment or fling me an email.

This picture is from back when Alice and Theo were only about a year old. Now there are no CRT monitors left in the house (there’re a couple on the bikeport waiting to go to recycling, but none in the house). Also neither cat would tolerate this much contact with the other any more. Which is too bad since the only thing cuter than a couple of kitties is a couple of kitties stacked on top of each other.

A friend was reading Russell’s The Sparrow for a book group which reminded me that we had this book on the shelf. This one isn’t science fiction, but instead a historical novel set in Northern Italy towards the end of World War II.

There are a number of point of view characters: an Italian soldier, various interconnected Italian Jews and Catholics, families of displaced Jews from other parts of Europe, a few Nazi officers, even a British soldier. The book includes a chart of characters, but I never had to resort to it. The people were all real enough that I easily recognized them when they came back into the spotlight.

I was half-way through the book before I committed to finishing it. My uncertainty was mostly because I wasn’t in a mood that could endure a book about the holocaust. While the camps are a constant lurking presence in the book, it is a mostly unfocused presence. To the characters, the death camps are mostly wild and unbelievable rumors. So while the Jewish characters are trying desperately to avoid capture by the Nazis, they are spared true knowledge of what their fate would be. The reader gets to supply his own sense of sick dread at what capture would really mean. I would have thought this approach would give the book a kind of intimate horror, but instead, for me, it put such a gulf between the characters’ view point and mine that I was never able to sink into the book enough to forget that it was just a book. With this subject matter that was actually a good thing.

Rather than being about the holocaust the book ends up being about the lengths people will go to to protect their neighbors from evil. Practically every character makes personal sacrifices that would be unthinkable in any situation less extreme than that war. The result is both inspiring for what it shows is possible and disheartening for the horrors it takes to make us put aside our differences.

Becky read about this book somewhere and got it from the library then failed to read it. She suggested I take a look at it and I read it. Then it sat around the house for another few weeks after it couldn’t be renewed any longer accruing overdue fines while I caught up on my backlogged book reviews. I couldn’t review it out of order, you see. Sucks to be compulsive.

Two alternating story lines. One set in the present day where Blake, a young boy, discovers a strange book in the St. Jerome’s College Library in Oxford while waiting for his mother who is there doing research. The other story line is set in Germany in 1452 and focuses on a young apprentice to an inventor. The inventor is Johann Gutenberg. The apprentice is Endymion Spring. Into their lives comes a man named Fust who has money to support their efforts to perfect their new book production machine, but also has an obsession of his own that centers around a mysterious chest with even more mysterious contents.

All these mysteries keep the pages turning along. Blake has a childish acceptance of the impossible things that keep happening to him coupled with a burgeoning intellect that tries to find explanations and an emotional fragility that keeps him on the edge of collapse. Unfortunately the other characters are not so richly drawn. And the plot while pleasingly twisty feels thin and capricious as it bounds towards a conclusion that wants to be profound and inevitable but ends up just seeming forced.