Children Are Jailed For Their Parents' Crimes in Blame (Book Review)

Blame is a near-future dystopian novel set in the UK. Following a global economic depression, public anger focuses on those who benefited financially from embezzlement, fraud or other crimes. The people want revenge, but in many cases the perpetrators are dead or can't be found. So attention turns to their descendants, and the concept of "heritage crime" is born.

As Abie (a.k.a. Ant) explains it: "People don't like us, Mattie, you know that. Outside it's because we 'got away' with it for so long, because we had this great life we weren't supposed to have…. It makes them feel better if they can blame us for everything. They used to blame black people, refugees, Jews, immigrants, whatever. Then they ran out of people to point fingers at. So now it's us."

Ant, her brother Mattie, and their foster parents Gina and Dan, are all found guilty of having criminal parents, and are put in one of the new "family prisons" in the UK. Their chief tormentor is Assessor Grey, the man who spearheaded the family-jailing movement. He also dreamed up the cruel strap that bolts onto the backs of these "heritage criminals" and prevents them from walking normally. The resultant gait gives them the nickname "strutters."

Ant is a rebel and unwilling to keep her head down until her "debt to society" is paid. She's looking for a way to escape, and not a moment too soon, as conditions are deteriorating, not only in their own prison but in the prison full of actual violent criminals, which, awkwardly enough, connects to their prison via a corridor.

Bizarre circumstances ensue, leading to Ant and her brother finding themselves on the lam with a gang of other strutters. In order to survive, they must commit some minor crimes—a reminder that when we label people as bad, fairly or not, and repeat it over and over again, they tend to oblige us by becoming so.

Other improbable things happen, and it all culminates in a bonanza of triumphant improbability. People who demand realism in their fiction may not be happy with this book. On the other hand, readers who can suspend their disbelief will find it a breathless ride. It is, in fact, much like a Hollywood thriller.

It's also thought-provoking. One is tempted to dismiss the novel's central conceit as something that could never happen in our allegedly enlightened society. But look at what's happening in the world today. Even well-off people are ready to see themselves as the victims of Syrians, Mexicans, etc., who come from other countries in search of a better life. A Trump presidency seemed a laughable impossibility to many just one year ago. Blame is popular right now. The Bible itself gives us a precedent for heritage crime, saying "The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18).

One of my favorite things about Blame is its sprinkling of foreign languages. Ant and Mattie are half Haitian and sometimes speak Creole to each other. A Creole nursery rhyme that serves as a metaphor for their condition comes up in a couple of places. Creole is a fascinating mix of French and something altogether different.

Another language that comes up in the book is German. Germany is the only country in Europe without heritage crime laws. They have learned from their history and no longer give in to the temptation to blame a group of others for their problems. Thus German is seen by the strutters as the language of freedom. Strutters dream of immigrating to Germany.

Finally, the strutters have their own slang, a glossary to which is provided at the beginning of the book. The author appears to take a special interest in languages. I'm curious to see if he plays with languages in his other novels.

Book Review: The Sharing Knife Part 4: Horizon

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book 3: Passage, dealt with Dag and Fawn's journey down the rivers Grace and Grey and the experiences, good, bad, and ugly, that they have along the way. When Horizon opens, they have come to the end of their river journey, in the seaside town of Greymouth. Here Dag meets Lakewalkers of a nearby camp who are able to direct him to a medicine maker of great repute, and he is at last able to begin an apprenticeship. But the usual problem, Lakewalker non-acceptance of his farmer wife Fawn, asserts itself, and it's not long before Fawn and Dag are on the road again.

I found this to be the weakest of all the Sharing Knife books. The problem of too many characters, some of whom never get developed, cropped up to some extent in the previous book, but here it's a good deal worse. By mid-book, there are so many people tagging along with the party that it's hard for the reader to remember many of them, especially since a good five or six are little more than names, and four or so others get such short shrift that their motivations are unclear, their behaviour inconsistent, their characters murky—Calla especially. I think the book would have been better if she had been edited out altogether. I also would have edited out that poor family in the wagon; I don't think they added anything of value. Granted that there have to be some farmers around for the climactic malice encounter, they don't need to be that darned numerous. The excess of characters also bogs down the story, especially around three-quarters through, and the proceedings get downright dull for a while.

Which is a shame, because pulled down by all that bloat is a fine story, with many dramatic and even horrific elements, and once again, Fawn's talent for thinking outside the box proves essential. I mentioned Fawn's increasing domestic yearnings in my review of book 3. That does not change in book 4. Fawn still wants to settle down and have an iron cook-stove and babies. Yet she can still come through in the crunch, and so really, though fans of kick-ass women in fantasy fiction are unlikely to be pleased, I think it's for the best that she is presented this way; she makes for an unusual, and even unusually well-rounded, female heroine. And though Dag and Fawn may seem to have somewhat disparate needs, they manage to get them all met in the end while remaining together.

Speaking of Fawn having babies, there is a consistent theme of birth and pregnancy throughout the series, which culminates in an unexpected and bizarre fashion in Horizon. I haven't yet managed to work up a good analysis of this theme, but I feel it could and should be done, and that Freudian psychologists could very well have a field day with some of the imagery. Perhaps later I'll manage to come up with something.

I wonder if the book's problems may be due in part to its being fourth in a quadrilogy. It is an unusual form, and there may be a good reason for that; perhaps it is an unwieldy one as well. And of course, the longer and more complex a story is, the harder it is to wrap up. But wrapped up it is, neatly enough at the last. Whatever flaws Horizon has, it is still worth reading to see how well everything is resolved at the end.

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Book Review: The Twisted Sisterhood by Kelly Valen

The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships by Kelly Valen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is important subject matter that merits more thoughtful treatment than it receives here. One might think that Valen is just the person to write on this issue, given her painful experience of being blamed by her sorority sisters for her rape. But I think that may be what handicaps her: the issue is just too painful for her, and she lacks perspective. Whatever the case, this is less a nuanced look at a complex issue than it is a generous helping of familiar mean-girl, queen-bee and green-eyed-monster stereotypes, padded with a lot of tiresome ranting and unsuccessful attempts at humour.

First comes a chapter on how wonderful female friendships allegedly are. It's unnecessary and outside the book's purported mandate, but it's there because Valen is scared that women won't like her if she doesn't put it in; after all, she was flamed online after writing of her sorority experiences, and is understandably nervous. It strikes me that if there'd been more here on this female fear around not being liked, and the inauthenticity it produces, this would be a better book.

But Valen deals only with nastiness, not excessive niceness, and thereby misses half the female equation, in my opinion. There is some interesting, in fact horrifying, information about female bullying and the damage it can do, from various sources as well as the author's own survey. What is lacking is insight on what created this state of affairs, and how it can be bettered. Valen makes it clear that we can't just blame men—much ranting is expended on that issue. Fair enough, but patriarchy is something that men and women both participate in and keep alive, and I would have liked to see some thoughtful exploration on how it might be contributing. What, after all, must it do to girls to be told explicitly that they can be whatever they want, while receiving the message implicitly that they must first and foremost be beautiful and desirable? Is this not confusing and disturbing, and might it not explain some of the strange behaviour girls exhibit towards other girls that they perceive as too pretty, or not pretty enough?

But Valen is tired of "blaming men," which is what she thinks feminism is all about. She even suggests that feminism may be part of the problem(!). "How is it..." she writes, "that we can progress into a new age of female competence and greater equality... only to find that our competitive spirits have deepened and we're tearing down one another as much if not more than ever?" The evidence that we're tearing down one another as much if not more than ever is nowhere to be found. We are expected to take it on faith.

Subtlety and insight are in short supply. Valen can't seem to decide whether she should be outraged, appeasing, or attempting to diffuse tension with humour, and so we are treated to sentences like this: "Maybe you're among the legions of women I heard from who were traumatized or marginalized in school, in girls' summer camp, sororities, at work, or in the cotton-pickin' sandbox because you were fat, Jewish, poor, acne prone, dressed like a dork, boasted a confidence, brain, or beauty that threatened others, or did something that managed to trigger an estrogen-laced, Lord of the Flies-like wrath." There's a lot to cringe at in this sentence, but what tops the list for me is "cotton-pickin'." Good grief, lady, you're writing a book about how women should be more sensitive to each other's feelings. How about showing some sensitivity to other races while you're at it? (The author is white.)

I think ultimately Valen is too close to this issue to see it clearly or analyze it well, and this sinks her book more than either her questionable writing abilities or her questionable sense of humour. Still, I admire her for having had the courage to write it.

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Book Review: The Sharing Knife Part 3: Passage

Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the end of Book 2: Legacy, Dag decides to leave his Lakewalker camp and travel among farmers so that he can find a better way for Lakewalkers and farmers to live together, neither apart nor as lords and serfs. (Somewhat to my annoyance, he does not discuss this ahead of time with Fawn; he just makes the announcement. This marks Fawn's transformation into traditional tag-along wife and helpmeet.) Fawn arranges them passage on a riverboat in exchange for work, and they float down the Grace and Grey. Joined at the start of their voyage by Fawn's brother, Whit, and an injured boy, Hod, they soon pick up a couple of young Lakewalker patrollers, and a sort of unofficial river patrol begins to form, with Dag as leader. The boat Boss, Berry, is on a mission to find out what happened to her father, brother and fiance, missing since the previous season. They find out the ugly truth, not a Malice, but malice in human form, and the unofficial patrol camp joins up with several boaters to deal with the matter.

While Book 1: Beguilement is devoted to Fawn and Dag's blossoming romance, and Book 2 shows us how Lakewalkers live and fills us in on their history, Book 3 is very much Dag's book. Dag is struggling to develop his new-found medicine maker powers with no mentor to help him. He performs odd experiments, sometimes putting himself in danger, but overall he has more success than failure, and his powers grow. Fawn falls into the background, making dinner, offering support, going shopping and coveting wood stoves, dreaming of settling down and making babies. As Dag discovers power, she nurses domesticity. Some readers may find this unsatisfactory. For myself, I'm not sure. Certainly the traditional depiction of women in SF and F as either sexpots for men to rescue or career women embittered due to lack of a man, was inadequate. But the common modern-day solution of demanding that all women in fantasy be "kick-ass" and apparently infertile and without menstrual cycles is also inadequate. Bujold's depiction of this particular 19-year-old woman in this particular universe may be the compromise most appropriate to the story.

An aspect of this book that I appreciated is Bujold's handling of trauma. This too stands in sharp contrast to most SF and F fiction, in which the hero goes through all sorts of horrible experiences and emerges totally unaffected and free of PTSD. Bujold's handling of Fawn's flashback and emotional reaction as she revisits the malice cave (from Book 1) is sensitive and true.

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Book Review: The Sharing Knife, Part 2: Legacy

Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Beguilement, Book 1 of The Sharing Knife, Fawn and Dag successfully overcame farmer opposition and Fawn's lack of groundsense to become both married (in the farmer tradition) and string-bound (in the Lakewalker tradition). But more than simple newlywed bliss awaits them, as Dag takes his new bride to his Lakewalker home and has to deal with opposition to his union. It turns out to be much more intense than what he faced from Fawn's family. His family, arguably the more dysfunctional of the two, decides to challenge the validity of the string-binding in counsel. To complicate matters further, another malice has appeared, this one much larger and more powerful. Dag and Fawn must separate for a time, so that he can go fight the malice. But Fawn is no passive female, and in this book, as in the previous one, her unasked-for, unrespected farmer interference in Lakewalker business turns out to be essential. Not that anyone other than Dag appreciates it, and their marriage is none the less challenged in counsel.

While Book 1 was devoted largely to Dag and Fawn's relationship, this book fills in more of the backstory of this world. We are given at least a sketchy idea of how malices came to be in the first place, and we learn that Lakewalker/farmer relations used to be very different—which is not to say better.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Book 1, I loved Book 2. I am eagerly anticipating my dive into Book 3: Passage.

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Book Review: The Sharing Knife, Part 1: Beguilement

Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When farmer girl Fawn gets herself in trouble (in the old-fashioned way), she runs away from home, but ends up finding even greater trouble, in the form of a malice. Fortunately, she also finds Dag, the alluring though much older Lakewalker.

Lakewalkers roam the land seeking out and destroying malices, creatures that suck the life out of everything around them. Despite performing this important service, they are not well-liked by farmers, who fear them as necromancers. Lakewalkers, in their turn, hold the farmers in contempt and see them as something like ungrateful children. So you can imagine that when Dag and Fawn fall in love and want to get married, the reaction on either side is less than positive.

This first book is mostly about the romance blossoming between Dag and Fawn, but it also begins to fill in the background of a complex and fascinating world, where everyone has a life force, known as a "ground," that can be detected and manipulated by those with a "groundsense"—mostly Lakewalkers, but also the rare gifted farmer. Where immaterial, immortal beings called "malices" clothe themselves in flesh and gain strength by consuming the ground of all living things around them, resulting in dead areas called "blights." Where said malices can be "taught mortality" through the sharing knives, which are made through the deaths of two people, and are so called because they share their deaths with the malices they pierce.

Featuring likeable characters, tense adventures, and even a believable and sensitive sex scene (yes! who would have thought it possible?), this is a compelling and promising start to the quadrilogy.

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Review: One Night @ the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat

One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For its first three-quarters, this is a perfectly decent novel about a group of people working at a call centre. Shyam, the team leader and the main character, struggles to get over his old girlfriend, Priyanka, who works in his team. To add to his unhappiness, his boss Bakshi is an unprincipled moron who routinely takes credit for Shyam's ideas and work. Priyanka still has feelings for Shyam, but wants to make her mother happy, and her mother wants a "better match" for her. The other agents have their problems as well. Esha wants to be a model, but keeps getting told that she's too short. Radhika's mother-in-law is making her life miserable. The man known as Military Uncle says little, and suffers in silence with his secret pain. And finally, Vroom... well, Vroom is screwed up six ways from Sunday.

Their problems and interactions are told believably and engagingly through dialogue and flashbacks to dates between Priyanka and Shyam, which illustrate the deterioration of their relationship. Then comes the moment that they receive, on Shyam's cell phone, a call from God. Ironically enough, this is the moment when the story goes straight to Hell. Each thing they do to "fix" their situation is more inappropriate and implausible than the thing before it. There were scenes that I read while squinting and scanning because that was the only way I could stand them. After all, I didn't want to abandon a book 18 pages from the ending, even if it deserved that.

How did things go so badly wrong? I wonder. It's tempting to blame the phone call from God. After all, this was a completely realistic novel up to that point. One might argue that the author had no business turning it into a fantasy three-quarters of the way through. However, I was willing to accept the God call. After all, the author prepares us for it in the prologue.

In my view, the failing is a moral one. What kind of person thinks it's appropriate to meekly tolerate a boss's betrayals without a word, then all of a sudden blackmail him with a made-up email and physically abuse him? There are abundant options between these two extremes, and a moral adult would try one or two of them before resorting to violence. A moral adult would find a better way to save a call centre than by terrorizing Americans with lies. (By the way, Americans are abundantly and enthusiastically insulted in this book, so think twice before buying it if you are American. I'm actually amazed it got picked up by an American publisher.) Perhaps an author who has not managed to become a moral adult is the one most likely to resort to a literal Deus ex machina to fix his novel. There is a species of laziness here, which itself is a type of moral failing. Furthermore, if the thoroughly unbelievable turnaround of Priyanka followed by the thoroughly unbelievable rejection by Shyam followed by the thoroughly absurd and painful-to-read romantic car chase and reconciliation (thank you, squinting and scanning!) is any indication, the author has watched far too many Bollywood movies.

Yes, the previous paragraph has a lot of spoilers in it, but that's OK, because you don't want to read this book. Trust me. That would be several hours of your life you'd never get back.

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Review of Rule Zero by Laurence Timms

Rule Zero by Laurence Timms
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you love non-stop action, mayhem, explosions, wanton destruction and high body counts, with maybe a zombie thrown in for good measure, this is the book for you. Laurence Timms is a screenwriter, and it shows. If Rule Zero were made into a movie, it would be very much at home with the other Hollywood thrillers of the day, only perhaps even more so. Timms is what the genetically engineered offspring of Iain R. Banks and Douglas Adams would be like if he were also high on amphetamines.*

Towards the start of the story, when things are calmer, there are some humorous and even insightful moments, especially pertaining to Helen, the luckless fluff-piece-writing journalist who gets caught up in the dangerous game going on between the Ministry of Defense and its enemies. For example, "She was the kind of person who packed four kinds of nightwear for a weekend away on the basis that you just never knew. What it was you never knew she wasn’t sure, but in Helen’s book equipping oneself with a choice of nightwear went some way to mitigating the horror of the unknown." These felicitous observations last until the action gets underway in earnest (up until that point, several people have tried to kill Helen, but it turns out that's nothing compared to what's coming), and then things are rather grim for quite some time.

To my mind, the novel's biggest flaw is its length. There is so much of it, so many different characters and different things going on, that the problem is twofold; a great deal to remember, and plenty of time in which to forget it. So I often found myself thinking things like, "Who's that guy again?" "What is this SMILE company trying to achieve, anyway?" and finally, "Was that explained earlier? Because I didn't get that at all. Did I miss something?" I expect that won't be an uncommon experience for readers. It might be a good idea to keep notes. Failing that, you might have to read the book twice to fully understand it.

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^* And yes, he is British. Why do Brits write so much better than North Americans, by and large? Is it the educational system? The canings? Tea with milk? Frequent rain? I don't know, but I must find out. Back

The Sunday Philosophy Club: a Fatally-Flawed, Stupid Novel [SPOILERS]

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Do you like a good mystery? Then you'll certainly want to read something else. Perhaps one of Alexander McCall Smith's earlier works. I like The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, for its unconventional setting (how many white genre writers are setting their novels in Africa?) and its lack of murders. The sequel is pretty good too, and perhaps even the one after that, but then things start to go downhill. That's the thing about Smith: he's uneven. Also, he has an unfortunate tendency to moralize ramblingly. To wit:

Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs... How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. A moral disaster had ensued, because manners were the basic building block of civil society. They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. [And on and on...]

That's a quote from The Sunday Philosophy Club.* Tiresome, isn't it? There are several passages like it. But that's not the reason you shouldn't read the book. If that were its only flaw, one might overlook it. The real problem is that the story doesn't make sense.

Isabel, the editor of a scholarly review on ethical philosophy, witnesses the death of a young man as he falls from the highest balcony or "gods" of an opera house. She decides to investigate. The novel intertwines the mystery of Mark's death with two other threads: relationships and their difficulties, and ethics, particularly truth-telling and lies.

The rest of this review is a spoiler, but don't let that bother you. We're talking about a story that doesn't make sense. What's the point of trying to avoid spoiling it? It was spoiled from the get-go. Smith spoiled it when he wrote the ending.

For a while, Isabel is led to believe that Mark's murder was related to insider trading. Though this is the avenue she spends most of the book pursuing, it turns out to be one big red herring. One of the first people Isabel talks to, Mark's roommate Neil, turns out to have been the killer all the time. And here's where things get altogether nonsensical. At the end of the book, Neil, cornered, admits that it was in fact he who elbowed Mark off the balcony. But it was an accident, he claims. He was jealous of Mark's relationship with their common roommate, Hen and gave him a little elbow, not meaning to hurt him and certainly not to kill him. But it unbalanced Mark and he plunged to his death.

Aided by her ever-harped-upon, frequently tediously self-congratulatory philosophy, Isabel decided he is telling the truth, and that it would be wrong to punish him.

Let's leave aside the hubris, worthy of noted ethical philosopher Captain Kirk, of deciding without benefit of trial which killers do and don't deserve to be punished. There's a bigger problem than that. Did Isabel forget who set her on that wild-goose chase after the insider-trading red herring in the first place? It was Neil himself. He came to Isabel because, allegedly, he hadn't told her everything and it was weighing on his conscience. Mark, he said, had info about insider trading, had been subtly threatened and feared for his safety. The suggestion was that Mark might have been done in by one of those insider traders or someone working on their behalf. And this is coming from the person who knew exactly what had killed Mark, because he himself had.

Neil's is the worst sort of lie, a cowardly coverup. Neil knew that Isabel was investigating the murder and felt the need to steer her in the wrong direction, away from himself and the truth. How can she still see him as an innocent? She would have to be an imbecile to do so. Such a lie, such a deliberate attempt to confuse and foil the investigation, casts doubt even upon his claim that the killing was an accident.

How did Smith screw up this story so badly? My guess would be that he made it up as he went along. Many novelists work this way, not knowing where the novel is going until they get there. Perhaps he fiddled with the insider trading idea, decided well into the novel that he didn't want to end that way, then decided to revisit an earlier minor character and make him the murderer. Having done so, he wove all the business of relationships and jealousy throughout the novel to have that consistent theme.

Neatly done, as long as you forget all about Neil's earlier visit to Isabel and what he knew that the time, which makes the whole story fall apart into egregious nonsense. A pity, but perhaps a writer who has attained so much success and critical acclaim may forget to be careful. He may forget that he is capable of making mistakes, that even he, the great McCall Smith, may leave plot holes that call for stitching up. I wonder if Isabel with all her philosophizing would have anything to say about that. Would she conclude that Smith had failed his readership on philosophical, moral grounds? Based on her moralizing in the novel itself, I think she might have.

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* Note that similar passages can be found in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Back

The Kobo eReader: a Long-term Review

The Kobo eReader, a lower-priced alternative to devices such as the Kindle, has launched in Chapters and Indigo bookstores across Canada on May 1, and will launch in Borders bookstores in the United States on June 17. Having rejected the Kindle as too expensive and proprietary and the Sony as too slow in its page-turning, I awaited the Kobo eagerly and pounced on it as soon as it became available. Had I reviewed it during those first two weeks, the result would have been about ninety percent gush. Now that I've had a month to live with the Kobo and learn its little quirks--now that the honeymoon glow has faded, I am in a position to dispassionately discuss its strong points and shortcomings, and even those bugs that reveal themselves only upon extensive use.

Advantages

Price

Indeed, the $149 price tag is what first attracted me to the Kobo. The first e-reader I ever heard of was the Kindle, which at that time cost over $300. My initial question was, how many e-books would you have to buy to make back your money? Thirty? It would take years. I didn't see the point of bothering with e-books when such an extraordinary initial investment was involved. (Let's not even get into the iRex iLiad, with its US$859 price tag.)

Pre-Kobo, I'd looked into the possibility of getting my hands on a Sony e-reader that is no longer made, the PRS-505. For reasons known only to themselves, Sony chose to discontinue this e-reader, cutting their line down to only two, one that is too expensive (the PRS-600) and one that is too small (the PRS-300). If you don't want to shell out for the touch-screen, your other option is the piddling 5-inch screen. I don't care if my e-reader has a touch screen or not, and in my experience, they don't respond very well, in addition to getting covered in finger grease. Neither do I require all the other bells and whistles, such as 3G wireless access and the whiz-bang rotating display, to say nothing of Internet surfing. I want an e-reader in order to read books on it; isn't that really the point? Kobo, it seems, is the first company to clue into this. I might not have bought the Kobo e-reader if I'd found a reasonably-priced PRS-505 before it came out, but owners of PRS-505s charge high prices for their used e-readers. They seem to believe they are collector's items.

Page-turning Speed

I am glad that I didn't get a PRS-505, though, because it probably wouldn't have turned pages fast enough to suit me. I have tried out both the current Sony e-readers and the page-turning is uncomfortably slow, taking as long as 4 seconds. This is the Sony e-readers' primary weakness. I'm a fast reader, and I want to be able to turn pages on an e-reader at least as fast as I turn them on a real book. Kobo pages turn in about 2 seconds, which is just about right. New chapters are slower to load, but as that's an event of much less frequent occurrence, it's not a concern.

Design

I like the uncluttered design of the Kobo. Why does the Kindle have an entire keyboard? What is the need for that? It's space that they could have given over to a larger screen. Despite its smaller overall dimensions, the Kobo's screen is 6 inches across, same as the Kindle. It has a matte finish that emits minimal glare, providing a comfortable reading experience.

100 Free eBooks

The Kobo comes with 100 free public domain classics, more than any other e-reader. This is a nice perk. While it's true that all those books and more can be downloaded for free from sites like Project Gutenberg and ePubBooks, it would take some time to download all one hundred of them. Plus the Kobo versions come with prettier covers. It feels as if you're getting your money's worth immediately. After all, if you wanted to, you could read your Kobo for years without having to buy any new e-books, and fill in all those gaps in your classical literature education.

Prompt, Respectful and Helpful Customer Service

In response to a discrepancy between my experience and what was stated in the user manual--which I will describe in more detail later on--I wrote an email to Kobo customer service. I got a better response than I have received from any other customer service agent I've ever dealt with via email. This may say more about the dismal quality of online customer service in general than it does about Kobo's, but I had never before had the experience of having my issue fully understood and appropriately addressed on first contact. I'm more accustomed to the agent not reading my email carefully and so telling me things that I already know and that have no bearing on the problem. Or worse, copy/pasting a section of their help file into an email and sending it to me. Obviously I read all available documentation before contacting customer service. I don't need to have customer service waste my time in this way, nor am I an idiot, but the average customer service agent appears to assume that all the emails they receive come from idiots, and treats them accordingly. It is insulting and ultimately does not solve the problem.

I didn't get this from Kobo customer service. I got an email that carefully addressed every issue I'd brought up and told me exactly what I needed to know. It was most refreshing.

Kobo's shortcomings

User Settings Not Retained

When I'd just brought the Kobo home and was still working out what I could do with it, such was my enthusiasm that I read the user manual all the way through. I know, I know--I'll have to turn in my Techno Geek membership badge. Anyway, I discovered I could change the display of the book list, to make it look like books sitting on shelves--cute! I could also change the sort order from title to author. I preferred that. I liked seeing how many books by a particular author I had--Jane Austen is especially well-represented.

I was perfectly happy with these features until I turned the e-reader on the next day and discovered that everything I'd changed had reverted back to the defaults.

The Kobo e-reader will remember what books you are reading, displaying them in a separate list, and will bounce you straight to your current page when you select them. Why on earth can't it also remember and retain your display settings? This seems like quite the careless oversight.

Missing Features

Another thing I learned by reading the manual is that you can remove books from your "I'm Reading" list--that's the list of books you have started to read but not finished--by plugging the e-reader into your computer, logging into your Kobo account and clicking on "I'm Reading." I tried that, but could not locate "I'm Reading."

When I contacted customer service, (a positive experience, as mentioned above,) I was told is that there is no "I'm Reading" section in Kobo Online, and no way to remove books from your "I'm Reading" list. This feature hasn't been implemented yet.

I daresay it might have been wiser to hold off on adding its description to the manual until the feature itself was safely functional in the Kobo. After all, it's not as if the manual is a print publication. Appropriately enough, it's an e-book. Reprinting it and sending it to the customers when appropriate should be no very difficult or expensive thing. Furthermore, it's not a great idea to draw your customer's attention to handy little features that your product doesn't have.

Minimal Formats

Kobo supports only two formats, ePub and PDF. This is not very many, and is the one thing that made me hesitate before buying one. I bought it anyway because I knew I could convert other formats, such as HTML and word processing documents, into PDF. When I did so, I discovered quite the colourful bug. More on that later. Kobo promises to add more formats later. Readers who feel it important to have good format support might want to wait until then before purchasing.

Room for Improvement in the Big Blue Button

In his review of the Kobo Reader in the National Post, Mark Medley memorably declared about its famous big blue button, "a pox on whoever designed this thing." I have not found it as troublesome as he has, but it doesn't need to click so emphatically. One day, I was sitting on the couch reading one of my freebie Jane Austen novels. James sat at the other end, using his computer. Several pages later, James turned to me and said, "Reading e-books is a lot noisier than reading regular books." My clicking was disturbing him.

We also wonder why the choice was made to place the big blue button (Kobo calls it the directional pad or D-pad, but that's never going to stick) in the right corner. It would have been more convenient to have it in the middle, where it would be equally accessible to both hands. I suppose they might have been imitating true books, whose pages you turn by grasping the right corner, but there was no need for that and no advantage in doing it. No button is going to feel like turning pages anyway, and they may as well have put it where it would have worked best.

eBook Formatting and Proofreading (or Lack Thereof)

About those free e-books... they're not that nicely formatted. There is no indenting, and italics are represented with underscores. Sub-chapters have not been properly rendered. James is reading Madame Bovary on the e-reader, and was puzzled when he finished chapter 13 and turned the page, only to find himself apparently back at chapter 1. It turns out that Madame Bovary is in multiple parts. There are 13 chapters in Part 1, and when you finish that part, you come to Chapter 1 of Part 2. But the parts are not shown in the table of contents; only the individual chapters. James also found multiple misspelled words, as though the novel had been scanned in and then not proofread.

Kobo is using the 100 free books as a selling point. It would have been a better one if they'd gone to more effort to format the books.

Unnecessary Lights That Don't Work Properly

Besides reduced eyestrain, the greatest advantage of the non-backlit E Ink screens found on true e-readers like the Kobo (as opposed to multipurpose devices like the iPad) is the low power usage. Eco-friendly E Ink screens only draw power when the image onscreen is changing, for example, when you're turning a page. So it seems a shame that the Kobo company chose to put two indicator lights into their e-reader. I don't know how much this ups the power consumption, but I would imagine the percentage must be sizable.

The red light is meant to go on when your e-reader is fully charged. This is useful and arguably necessary, or at least it would be if it worked. In actual fact, this untrustworthy light often goes on well before the e-reader is fully charged, and pointlessly stays on even after the e-reader has been unplugged.

The blue light, on the other hand, is useless and silly. It goes on when the e-reader is processing: when you're turning a page or bringing up a new book or chapter. Or rather, that's what it does some of the time. It seems to operate fairly randomly. But in any case, you don't need a light to tell you that a page is turning; you know when a page is turning, because the screen flashes a negative image of itself. All the E Ink screens I've seen do this; it seems to be an unalterable part of their functioning. The e-reader also displays a little sunburst shape in the upper right corner when loading a new book or chapter, and in contrast to the light, it does so consistently, rendering the light even more redundant and pointless.

The only positive aspect I've noted about these lights is that they both come on at the same time when you turn the e-reader on, resulting in an attractive purple colour. Other than that, their primary impact is to force you to charge your e-reader more frequently.

Bug Report

After converting a Word document to PDF and loading it into the e-reader, I decided I wanted to make a change to its table of contents. I regenerated the PDF and reloaded the document into the reader.

To add a new document to the Kobo, you plug the e-reader into your computer's USB port, where it is treated just like a memory stick, and copy the new file onto it. But when I copied the new version of my file onto the Kobo and booted it up, the document turned out to be unchanged. My alterations to the table of contents were missing. It looked as if the Kobo did not recognize and implement the file change when a file with the same name was copied over the old version. What I had to do was delete the original version, unplug the reader and let it recognize the change, then plug it back in and copy the new file. I had to go through that whole tedious process every time I changed the file. That's bug number one.

After deleting the old file and copying the new one, I discovered that each chapter title now appeared twice in the table of contents! Neither of the two pointed to the right page either.

Thinking something must have gone wrong with the generation of the table of contents, I went back to the Word document, regenerated the TOC, and generated and loaded a third PDF. It looked fine in Acrobat Reader, but once loaded into Kobo, it now had three of everything in its table of contents.

After much frustrating deleting, unplugging, plugging back in, copying, regenerating and so on, my table of contents getting ever longer, I began to wonder if the file deletion was in fact complete. Perhaps the file was only removed from the document list, its table of contents remaining intact? Then, when a new version was introduced, perhaps its new table of contents entries were being appended to the old.

Acting on this hunch, I renamed the file and copied it into the reader. This time, its table of contents was fine.

Apparently, Kobo accumulates ghostly tables of contents that can never be eliminated, never sent to their rest. Whooooo...

Conclusion

Although the Kobo eReader has its shortcomings, they are minor (except for the lights; as an eco-worrier, that really bugs me), outweighed by the device's advantages, and many of them can probably be repaired in later software releases. If money is no object for you, you'll probably want to go with something more high-end--the iRex iLiad looks quite nice. But if reluctance to drop a few hundred dinero is the only thing preventing you from shelling out for an e-reader, then the Kobo may be the one for you.

A message from prot?

Here's a curious piece of synchronicity. While we were in Grand Manan, we paid a visit to the local library and James found a copy of K-PAX. Remember the K-PAX movie, about a guy in a mental hospital who calls himself "prot" and insists he's an alien from the planet K-PAX? Well, it was a novel first. In New Brunswick we have this nifty system where all the libraries are on one network, and we can use our cards anywhere in the province, so James checked the book out of the library.

In the movie, prot says he's returning to K-PAX on July 27. In the original book, the date is August 17. It's repeated several times: pyschiatrist Gene Brewer (who just happens to have the same name as the author) has very little time because of this cut-off date, August 17. Well, take a look at this slip, from the library book, and see what the return date was.

Coincidence? What are the odds? No my friends, this is a message. Prot lives! See you on K-PAX.

A Book Club Gone Bad

I have a bit of a dilemma. I'm sort of a member of a science fiction book club. It's a pitiful, limping creature and always has been. Only four or five people show up with any regularity, which would be fine if everyone read the books. They don't. I have gone to meetings where it was revealed that not a single person actually read the book. This is a common enough occurrence that our (for want of a better word) leader has taken to sending out mass emails saying, "The book we're pretending to read this month is ...."

Then too, there's the time that I showed up for a meeting and no one else did, as far as I could determine. I waited for half an hour and wandered throughout the place before giving up and leaving. It turned out later that there had in fact been a meeting, though I never worked out how the others managed to give me the slip. I found the experience disheartening, so much so that I haven't been to a meeting since, though I keep meaning to go. In fact, I have continued to think of myself as a member of the book club. I'm simply a member who hasn't shown up at a meeting in a while. I obtain the assigned books and don't read them, or I read a couple of chapters and lose interest. Because (and here's another problem I have with the book club) the books chosen represent a very particular taste, which I don't happen to share. The themes are either military, online gaming or space opera (a subcategory of military, come to think of it). The field of interest is so narrow that I think I can pinpoint exactly who is making the recommendations. This is not a good thing. A book club should represent as many literary tastes as there are people in the book club. That is, in fact, the advantage and perhaps even the whole point of a book club: the opportunity to experience a range of tastes, and read books you'd never pick up in the normal course of events.

Well, I'm certainly picking up books I'd never touch in the normal course of events, but they're all the same! And I don't like them. And the person who's making the choices is not experiencing anything new.

None of that is good. The lackadaisical nature of the club--not good. Book suggestions coming from only one, or at most two, of the members--not good. Said suggestions being consistently contrary to my personal taste--not good, at least for me. And yet none of those things is the reason why I am now saying to myself that it may be time to throw in the towel and drop out of the club for real. Because on top of all that, it seems that this one person (or at most two people) who is supplying us with all our reading material is not terribly discerning in terms of literary quality.

To put it another way, the latest book is pure cheese.

When I first held it in my hand and looked at its cover art, which consisted of space ships shooting at each other, I groaned and thought, "Not another bloody space opera!" Which was a bit unfair of me, since I hadn't bothered to read the previous one (New Space Opera, in case you're interested). That being the case, I decided to give it a chance. After all, I reminded myself, book clubs are all about being exposed to new reading material, and I am being so exposed, even if certain other people in the group are not. Let me then benefit. Let me open my mind.

So I began to read. The story is certainly action-packed, though convoluted as hell, what with all the faster-than-light travel through multiple dimensions. I read a lot of sentences twice, trying to figure out what was going on. Still, the captain of the ship is a woman, which is nice--it reminds me of Captain Janeway. The concepts are kind of interesting, and it certainly isn't boring. It begins with an enemy attack and hasn't slowed down for a moment. It is, in fact, paced like a short story, which is odd. But what really got my literary spidey-sense tingling was the second sentence of Chapter Three: "Fifty-three sleepless hours might explain her gaunt, hollowed cheeks, but not the ghosts behind her eyes."

Ghosts? Behind her eyes, of all places?

And things did not improve from there. Five pages later, I reached the paragraphs that stopped me in my tracks.

His face was blank for an instant, and then understanding flared.

"Of course." Life returned to his eyes--the blazing life of a man who has accepted the inevitability of something far worse than his own death and then been shown a possible way to avert it after all--and suppressed excitement lent his voice vibrancy as he nodded jerkily. "Of course!"

--from The Apocalypse Troll by David Weber

I shouldn't have to explain why this is terrible writing, but the sad fact is that this guy's a bestselling author, so I probably do. Note the melodrama, the pumping up of rhetoric in a flailing attempt to artificially excite the reader. Good writers know better. They know that if the story is exciting, they don't have to do anything extra to wring a response out of the reader. Not this writer. He follows up the flaring understanding with life--blazing life! Hallelujah! Also note that the character's voice is vibrating while he's nodding jerkily. This is quite amusing, as it was explained earlier in the book just how serious a problem conflicting harmonics can be when you're hopping dimensions in order to travel faster than light: "If a ship hit the wall just wrong or with the slightest harmonic in her translation field, she simply disappeared. She went acoherent, spread over a multitude of dimensions and forever unable to reconstitute herself..." I should think similar difficulties await the man who nods jerkily while his voice vibrates. Perhaps his head would explode.

Anyway, that's where I reached my limit. I'm sorry, but I'm not devoting hours of my life to swimming through such Cheez Whiz.

When did this happen? When did it become OK to publicly read and shamelessly tout crappy fiction, even to the point of suggesting it as a book club selection? Is this Stephanie Meyer's fault? Or did it begin earlier, without my noticing? Maybe Dan Brown is to blame? John Grisham? Danielle Steel? Sidney Sheldon? Should we have a line-up? Whodunit?

What ever happened to the good old days when reading crap was a private, guilty pleasure? Maybe they never existed and I only imagined them? Do book clubs read Harlequin Romances these days? Have I asked enough questions by now?

In any case, I realize that I'm beaten. I was going to show up at the next meeting and suggest Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory, which Locus selected as one of the best first novels of 2008. But it seems so hopeless. The book is not even a mass-market paperback. It's a trade paperback, and therefore more expensive. I've already been told that price is a concern. On top of that, it contains no gaming, space ships or bombs. Just noncorporeal demons and excellent writing. No one's going to be interested in that. Why bang my head against a wall? With or without harmonics in my translation field?

That's how I feel right now anyway. Perhaps later, as I consider the possibility that I could help these literary innocents discover good writing, my hope will revive, much as hope revived for the crew of the TNS Defender. And when that happens, life will reignite in my eyes--blazing life. My excitement, which I will be suppressing for some unexplained reason, will lend my voice vibrancy and I will nod jerkily. And then my head will explode.

My Unauthorized Guide to the Discworld Novels

This is the longest gap I've ever had between entries. Prior to this one, I did quite a long post, so that entitled me to take an equally long break. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Still, eleven days is more than enough, so I've decided to finally get down to business and write this post I've had in mind for a few weeks now. I hope it proves more enjoyable than offensive.

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Reading Discworld novels is a particularly poignant experience these days. Author Terry Pratchett has early-onset Alzheimer's disease. His fans are fond of saying that "he aten't dead yet," in reference to the sign that Granny Weatherwax wears around her neck while out of her body. I, like all his fans, hope he'll hang onto life and most of his faculties for a good long time.

Still, the experience has affected him and his writing. His latest novel, Nation--not a Discworld novel--is filled with more grief and anger than, to the best of my knowledge, anything else he has written. This is understandable. Pratchett has spoken with much honesty and humour about his anger over his condition and his treatment by the NHS (England's National Health Service), which considers him too young to have Alzheimer's and is therefore refusing him coverage. What he is going through is, in more ways than one, a life-changing experience, and even if he writes more Discworld novels, they will not be quite the same.

I suppose that's what made me take a nostalgic look back at the Discworld. I read one of the novels I hadn't gotten to before and took another look at some of the ones I had. Which has resulted in this, my Unauthorized Guide to the Discworld Novels.

What Is The Discworld?

The Discworld is a flat disc of a world that rests on the backs of four elephants, which in turn stand on the shell of a very large turtle. This world has different physical laws. Light moves slowly, flowing over the disc like syrup. Magic exists, and has its own colour: octarine. There are two types of magic practiced on Discworld: men's magic, the type practiced by wizards at the Unseen University in the city of Ankh-Morpork, and women's magic, practiced by witches in small villages.

That's a basic introduction. It's not my intention to reproduce The Discworld Companion. In fact, I don't mean to produce a guide to the Discworld itself, only to the novels.

Things You Should Know About The Discworld Novels

They contain footnotes

Novels don't usually contain footnotes. I've read a lot of novels and that's one of the major things I've noticed about them. The Discworld novels are different. Usually, the footnotes are used to insert jokes that entertain Pratchett, if nobody else, but aren't essential to the story. A startling exception can be found in the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. The entire lower halves of pages 20 and 21 are taken up with one giant footnote explaining "the shape and cosmology of the disc system." One wonders why this information couldn't have been included in the prologue, which the book does have. Perhaps Pratchett was using this giant among footnotes to demonstrate to readers, right up front, just what they were getting into.

They contain puns

The Discworld novels are satirical and humorous. Some of that humour involves puns. For example, from the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic:

Tumbling past, totally out of control, is the bronze shell of the Potent Voyager, a sort of neolithic spaceship built and pushed over the edge by the astronomer-priests of Krull, which is conveniently situated on the very rim of the world and proves, whatever people say, that there is such a thing as a free launch.

Just so you'll know.

Now that you have been warned, I shall proceed to the heart of my unauthorized guide, the intention of which is to provide you with some handy rules of thumb to help you determine which Discworld novels you are most likely to enjoy. Note that they are based on my opinion, and are therefore not at all scientific--but then, neither is Discworld.

Vivian's Rules of Discworld Novels

Rule #1: Novels with Rincewind the Wizard in them are not as good as Rincewind-free novels

Rincewind is a sad-sack sort of character. I think I can best describe him as Wile E. Coyote without the malevolent intent. Aside from his fantastic trunk that follows him around on lots of little legs and gets him out of scrapes, He hasn't got much going for him. He's not a good wizard. He's not brave or morally upright. He can't even spell, as shown by his hat, which has "Wizzard" written on it. On top of all that, he appears to be cursed: everything bad happens to him, and everything that involves him goes wrong. So it shouldn't be surprising that he also has an unsalutary effect on the novels he inhabits. It's probably some sort of magical influence that has not been sufficiently studied. The wizards of Unseen University should look into it at their earliest convenience. It could be the subject of someone's dissertation.

This doesn't mean that the Rinceworld novels are not worth reading. All Discworld novels are worth reading. Even Rinceworld novels contain funny bits and brilliantly insane ideas such as watercrafts that are kept aloft by water-hating wizards called hydrophobes. But if you are new to Discworld, you may want to choose non-Rincewind novels first, and face the annoying "wizzard" only once you have become a diehard fan.

Discworld novels that include Rincewind are:

• The Colour of Magic (#1 in the series)
• The Light Fantastic (#2)
• Sourcery (#5)
• Eric (#9)
• Interesting Times (#17)
• The Last Continent (#22)
• The Last Hero (#27)

Rule #2: Novels that contain wizards other than Rincewind are good

Wizards in Discworld generally reside at, or at least have dealings with, the Unseen University, and that's an interesting place. There's so much magic bouncing around in there that unexpected and often disastrous things keep happening. Which makes it very similar to male-dominated institutions in our own world, with the advantage that since it's happening in a humorous novel, everything works out all right in the end.

Unseen University is also graced by the Librarian, who was turned into an orangutan some time before the series started. (Correction: see below.) The wizards don't change him back, not because they can't, but because he's happier this way. I'm fond of the Librarian and wish we got more of him in the Discworld novels.

The University is located in Ankh-Morpork, a crowded, smelly, vice-riddled city--basically a magical, medievalish New York. If you prefer urban settings, stiff hierarchies and an absence of women, the novels involving wizards and Unseen University are right up your alley and you may want to disregard Rule #3.

Books that have wizards in them but do not have Rincewind include:

• Equal Rites (#3 in the series)
• Lords and Ladies (#14)
• Reaper Man (#11)
• Soul Music (#16)
• Hogfather (#20)
• The Unseen Academicals (#37)

Rule #3: Novels that contain witches are better

Witches on the Discworld stand in sharp contrast to wizards. Wizards are urban; witches are rural. Wizards love their rigid hierarchy; witches have no hierarchy but are communal. Wizards are celibate; witches are not, at least not always. It's unclear whether Granny Weatherwax ever got any action, but Nanny Ogg certainly did, and is not shy about letting people know how much she enjoyed it. Even Tiffany Aching is growing up and experiencing a little romance in Wintersmith (#35). Wizards practice dangerous, destructive magic, whereas witches use magic only when necessary, and then always in harmony with nature.

Pratchett's portrayal of women is interesting. They frequently come across as more multifaceted and human than the men, who are often simply figures of fun. Pratchett writes a lot of strong women. The formidable grandmother character crops up repeatedly, most commonly in the form of Granny Weatherwax, but there is also Tiffany Aching's grandmother, and in addition, the main character in The Dark Side of the Sun (not a Discworld novel) has an overbearing, interfering grandmother to contend with. (One wonders who may have been the inspiration for all these tough old ladies. Pratchett's grandmother, perhaps?) Pratchett's tendencies to write complex female characters while so often making the men play the fools explains the superior quality of the witch-themed novels. These include:

• Equal Rites (#3)
• Wyrd Sisters (#6)
• Witches Abroad (#12)
• Lords and Ladies (#14)
• Maskerade (#18)
• Carpe Jugulum (#23)

Rule #4: Novels that contain both witches and Nac Mac Feegles are the best

The Nac Mac Feegles, also known as the Wee Free Men, are a lot of fun. Like Picts, they are blue, and like Pixies, they are small. They speak in a sort of Scottish dialect, love fighting, and engage in strange antics. It's worth reading a Nac Mac Feegle book just for the dialogue.

As far as I know, books about the Nac Mac Feegle always have Tiffany Aching in them. She is a young witch-in-training that the Feegles are sworn to protect, and that's a good thing, because like any adolescent girl, she doesn't always do what she's told. And when you're a witch, that can have serious consequences.

The books that contain witches and Nac Mac Feegle are:

• The Wee Free Men (#30)
• A Hat Full of Sky (#32)
• Wintersmith (#35)

Rule #4: Many novels contain other characters that are also worth reading about

Death, the personification with hood and sickle, stars in a number of worthy Discworld novels:

• Mort (#4)
• Reaper Man (#11)
• Soul Music (#16)
• Hogfather (#20)
• Thief of Time (#26)

The Watch, who enforce the law in Ankh-Morpork, dominate several novels. One of the benefits of Watch Novels is the presence of The Patrician, Ankh-Morpork's lovable benign dictator.

• Guards! Guards! (#8)
• Men at Arms (#15)
• Feet of Clay (#19)
• Jingo (#21)
• The Fifth Elephant (#24)
• The Truth (#25)
• Night Watch (#29)
• Thud! (#34)

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Resources

• Wikipedia has extensive information on Terry Pratchett's books in general and the Discworld series in particular.
• LSpace is a worthwhile site.
• Thanks to Weaveworld for grouping the novels by topic. He/She made my life a little easier. It's also gratifying to see that Green doesn't care for Rincewind any more than I do.
• Terry Pratchett's official site is OK too.

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Erratum

I wrote above that the Librarian was turned into an orangutan before the series started. I've just discovered that in fact it happens at the beginning of The Light Fantastic. (It is the side effect of a spell cast by the grimoire Octavo to save Rincewind from falling over the edge of the world, if you wanted to know.) The first time we meet him, he's an orangutan, but technically he was a human until Book 2. My apologies for any inconvenience caused by this error. --April 15, '09 Back

More on Repressed Emotions

Here are some things that I didn't find space for in my last post on repressed emotions.

Writing From The Body by John Lee and Ceci Miller-Kritsberg is ostensibly about becoming more creative, but also covers the freeing of repressed emotions, since this also frees one up to be more creative. This is a wonderful book that deserves to be much better known than it is.

Here is my favorite exercise from the book (in my own words, since I gave my copy away and haven't bought a new one yet). Choose a memory from your childhood that you want to write about. Sit and think about it for ten or fifteen minutes. Come up with a short sentence, the shorter the better, that sums up how you feel about this event. Scream the short sentence. If you live in an apartment or otherwise don't want to make too much noise, scream into a pillow. Sit with the release of emotions that follow. Finally, write about the event.

I came up with a modified version of this exercise to use when you don't have a memory in mind. Instead of starting with a memory, start with whatever symptom you have. As I mentioned in the first post on repressed emotions, a repressed emotion can manifest as a physical symptom like headache or back pain. What you can do is focus on the symptom for a while, and then ask that part of your body if it can give you a few words or a short sentence related to the feeling. It can take a few tries before you get an answer, especially if you're not accustomed to communicating with your body. It helps to get into a meditative, relaxed state. It also helps to suspend disbelief, because your body can come up with stuff that sounds weird and illogical to your mind. Resist the urge to dismiss; instead, take the words you're given and scream them. The rest of the exercise is the same.

Screaming can be helpful for releasing repressed emotions. Just ask the Primal Therapy people. What I appreciate about this exercise is the way that it works in verbalisation. Sometimes you feel something and you don't know why. Finding words can clarify what is going on.

Finally, I have a suggestion for people with chronic muscle tension. If you're one of those people, you can spend an inordinate amount of time stretching your ridiculously tight muscles out in an attempt to feel like a human being. It helps for a little while, then everything bounces back. Or you have a massage, which is not cheap, and everything bounces back. So the next time you stretch, try making some noise: a sigh, groan or even a scream if you feel like it. If the tension is connected to repressed emotion, making noise will release some of that emotion and loosen you up better than stretching alone. Try it next time you stretch. I'd like to say, try it next time you get a massage, but I find that massage therapists are not always up to speed on the repressed emotions thing and sometimes they will freak if you start crying on the table. I don't know why; they should know better. I imagine the reaction would be even worse if you screamed. You might end up like Jerry Seinfeld, unable to get another massage appointment.

Four Flavours of Horror

After a long hiatus, I've been reading and thinking about (and even writing, a little) horror fiction again. My father introduced my brother and I to horror as soon as we were old enough not to wet our pants and start crying. He read us Dracula by Bram Stoker, one chapter a night. He read us the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, swooping his voice up at the climax, making me almost jump out of my skin. When I became a teenager, I went through the usual rite of passage of reading my way through the works of Stephen King.

But as an adult, I drifted away from King and horror in general, tired and bored of blood and guts. King once said, "If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out". He's far from being alone, and therein lies the problem. The easiest, laziest thing you can do in horror is be gory and disgusting. It's not a coincidence that this easiest of routes is also the least effective. I remember that ho-hum feeling creeping over me (not the kind of creeping the horror writer wants to induce) when I read Brian Keene and Steven L. Shrewsbury's short story "Death Comes For All" in Apex Magazine (vol. 1, iss. 12). Going nowhere and making no sense, this story features an army of zombies that emerge from the sea and have to be cut down in the usual tedious, limb-chopping way. Zombies have been so done to death (ha!) that their mere presence in a story usually signals mediocrity. This kind of thing gives horror a bad name.

The trick is to find horror that does something other (or at least more) than gross out. Sometimes you have to turn to the classics to remind yourself what horror is supposed to be. Poe had the ability to put the reader into the mind of his rage- or madness-driven characters. King, at his best, achieves this too. He develops Carrie and describes her miseries so well that even when she goes on her murderous rampage the reader cannot help but sympathize with her. This second flavour on offer in Horror's freezer might be called "psychological horror."

This is a bit parenthetical, but I'd like to mention that what made Poe a horror writer of unparallelled greatness was his ability to orchestrate the climax of his story so beautifully, getting it to land not merely on the last paragraph but on the last sentence or even on the last word. One of Poe's best-known stories is The Telltale Heart, and rightly so, for the climax is in the last two words. But though The Black Cat is less-well known, in it Poe achieves something even more impressive: a single-word climax. If you have not yet read these stories, do so now. Poe made horror into poetry. (Appropriate, given his name.)

H.P. Lovecraft came along about a century later than Poe but is no less influential. I hadn't read any Lovecraft until quite recently, when I played Munchkin Cthulhu and decided to find out what all that Cthulhu business was about. Somebody told me that Lovecraft stories are psychological. I disagree. Poe was much better at that sort of thing. Lovecraft makes his characters go mad a lot too, but it isn't as convincing. He seems to have conceived of the human mind as terribly fragile, as if you could go mad after finding something gruesome in your box of Cracker Jacks.

He also differentiates himself from Poe by his fondness for monsters. Many of Poe's short stories have nothing of the supernatural in them, and that is their strength: the recognition that every manner of evil arises from human beings, alone, unaided. Lovecraft, on the other hand, loves a good monster. To him, there is something monstrous about life already--"Life is a hideous thing," he wrote in his short story Arthur Jermyn, and I believe he meant it. So it was not a great leap for him from humanity to monstrosity.

Consequently, his flavour of horror is not so much the horror of psychology as the horror of the icky idea. A man breeds with an ape and produces a line of half-human creatures. An isolated family becomes so corrupted over generations that they transform into killing, burrowing creatures. Lovecraft was the master of concepts that were interesting in an awful sort of way.

The Holy Grail of horror is, of course, to genuinely frighten the reader. To induce not merely a wave of nausea or suspense or pity or laughter but actual fear in the reader, to keep him from dropping easily off to sleep that night, to affect his dreams--that is surely the horror writer's ultimate achievement. Few have managed it. King never has, and probably won't. I don't think Lovecraft did either. Poe could do it, in brief flashes. Curiously, the most frightening thing I have ever read was in not a horror but a science fiction novel.

Ventus by Karl Schroeder is mostly concerned with terraforming robots that are slipping out of control and need repair. But there's also a man who is part machine, and he's operated as a machine for so long that his humanity is completely lost to him, for a time. During this time, three grave-robbers cross his path in a catacomb. He murders one. Another escapes. The third has the worst fate:

Choltas had heard the footsteps of the devil fade away. He knew it would be back unless he stayed very still. This was the thing's home; it world not venture out into the world above. So though he couldn't hear it, he knew it was there. If he stayed completely still, wrapped around himself in this corner in total darkness, it might not find him. But if he so much as sneezed, he knew it would be on him instantly.

Even now it might be creeping up on him silently. He wrapped more tightly around himself, and tried not to breathe. Time passed, but Choltas did not move. When thirst began to torture him. he stayed still. He wet himself and shat in his pants, quietly. And eventually, delirium overcame him; he heard his mother's voice, saw drifting pictures of his home.

He kept his arms around his knees, and his face buried there against his own flesh. And he breathed weaker and weaker, aware at last only of the murmur of his own head and the torment of cold and thirst, overridden by a fear he could no longer identify.

Stay still, stay still.

Its hand hangs above me.

This is the most perfect depiction of primal, frozen terror I have ever encountered.

Eros in the Night Kitchen

In the last entry in this series on things that are unexpectedly sexy, I discussed a Muppet movie. Well, like Benjamin Button, my subjects keep getting younger. This one's about a classic children's book.

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Maurice Sendak picture books were a part of my childhood. There are two I remember well. One was Where The Wild Things Are, with its beautiful monsters done in ink and tempera. The ending made a big impression on me: after sailing back "over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day," Max returned to his own room, where his supper was waiting for him, "and it was still hot." It didn't matter that I knew this to be impossible. When you're a child, you don't question things like that. You accept, and feel awe.

In The Night Kitchen impressed me in a different way. Right from the start, it was a more sensual experience. I remember the way the book smelled. It had a strong smell that was unlike other books, whether because it was newer or printed on a different type of paper, I don't know, but I liked it. The smell seemed right for a book involving dough, milk and nudity.

A little boy named Mickey falls out of his bed and pyjamas and into the Night Kitchen, where he gets mistaken for milk and mixed into cake batter by a trio of cooks who look like Oliver Hardy (my thanks to James for pointing this out). He makes his escape in an airplane made of bread dough, but the cooks still want milk to put in their cake. Happy to help, Mickey flies to a giant bottle of milk (the Milky Way), immerses himself in it and swims out with a cupful of milk. Mission accomplished, he slides down the side of the giant milk bottle and back into his bed.

It's all very tactile. Mickey experiences air, cake batter and milk on his skin. This is not a genitally-focused, adult sexuality but a whole-body sensuality. Still, that doesn't mean there is nothing sexual about it. I distinctly remember being turned on as a child when the bakers obliviously cracked eggs and poured sugar over Mickey and mixed him into the batter. It is probably this childish sexuality, so well captured by Maurice Sendak, that has initiated so many spasms of prudery. In the Night Kitchen has been making the ALA's most frequently challenged/banned lists for years. Librarians have been known to vandalize the book by painting a diaper on Mickey (source: Time Magazine, Dec. 29, 1980).

They need to get over it. Children are sexual, something Freud was well aware of back in the Victorian Era. It should not need to be said that this does not make it acceptable for adults to exploit them sexually. Children have the right to their sexuality and to explore it, on their own or with other children, without interference or abuse from adults. In that regard, a book like this might even be helpful.

If you think it's inappropriate for a children's book to contain anything erotic, even the innocent sort of eroticism of In the Night Kitchen, consider that Eros, the Greek God of Love, is also called Cupid and is depicted as a naked boy or baby with wings. Trade those wings for a dough airplane and he could be Mickey.

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Serendipitously, Freedom to Read Week is coming soon. The displays are already up at my local library and perhaps yours too. Support freedom of expression. Read a banned book this February.

The Eros of Jeeves

Whew, my blog posts have been heavy lately. It's time for something lighter. It's time for a series of posts about things that are unexpectedly arousing.

Such as Jeeves and Wooster, a British comedy that aired on TV (or, as the British would call it, "telly") from 1990 to 1993. Jeeves, the ultimate valet, is played by Stephen Fry, and his goofy employer/charge is played by Hugh Laurie. They make quite a contrast. Those who are familiar with Laurie from the medical drama House might be surprised to see him in a Jeeves and Wooster episode, with his goofy facial expressions, randomly poking-out hair and popping eyeballs. (And of course his British accent. Laurie fakes an American accent so perfectly that many House viewers don't even know he's British.) In contrast, Fry as Jeeves is forever smooth, unruffled and as calm as the surface of a lake on a windless day.

When the two of them are on the screen together, it's Jeeves that I look at, even though Wooster is the funnier one. I like his oval face, so much more appealing than Wooster's skinny, twisted-up one. I love to watch him going about his duties in Wooster's house. I want Jeeves to come to my house and wait on me, the way he does on Wooster. I want him to serve me tea, to iron my shirts and turn down my bedsheets, smoothing the fabric down in that careful, sensual way he has. Watching Jeeves at work gets me all tingly.

Yes, I know that Stephen Fry is gay. So what? When you have a fantasy that would never, ever come true in your lifetime, because it is about some famous person you are never going to meet, why should their sexual orientation be relevant? I know it matters to some people. A guy I used to know once who told me that his wife took down her Keanu Reeves poster after she heard that he was gay. Isn't that silly? A better reason would be that he lost too much weight, and looks like a junkie. No, Fry can be as gay as he wants as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, his gayness fits nicely into the Jeeves and Wooster storyline. Here's an interesting fact: fag, which in my country means a male homosexual, in Britain means "a schoolboy forced to do menial work for another, usually older boy" (source: The Chambers Dictionary). Jeeves is a sort of grown-up fag, doing menial work for Wooster. But don't think that Jeeves is a submissive servant. Anyone who has seen the TV episodes, or read the original stories by P.G. Wodehouse, knows that Jeeves is the one in charge. Many of the episodes/stories start with Wooster acquiring an article of clothing that Jeeves, with his superior, faggy fashion sense, finds objectionable, be it a hat, vest or overly-flashy pair of socks. At first, Wooster refuses to part from the item, but by the end of the episode/story, overwhelmed with gratitude for the way Jeeves has masterfully solved all his problems, he tells Jeeves he may dispose of the item, at which point Jeeves admits that he already did. Jeeves rules Wooster with a hand in a velvet glove. Not necessarily an iron hand. More of a soft, gentle hand, one that I imagine would touch the objects of its affection with the same gentleness that it demonstrates with shirts, sheets and cups of tea.

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Of Interest

Now that Hugh Laurie is playing a mean doctor instead of a rich fop, people think he's sexy too. You can see the evidence on You Tube, in the form of clips from House set to the tune of "Sexyback" by Justin Timberlake. There are a whole bunch like this.

If you enjoyed the TV series, and don't mind books, you really must read the P.G. Wodehouse stories upon which the show was based. You can find them in The World of Jeeves: A Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus. If you don't want to buy it, there's probably a copy at your local library.

If you've never seen the TV series and would like to, the complete Jeeves & Wooster series is available on DVD.

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Coming up next: can a movie with Muppets in it be sexy? Apparently so.