10-pages-in

How, I keep asking myself, have I missed this book for my entire adult life? It is everything I love in a book – it’s clever, witty, cheeky and just the tiniest bit sacrilegious. It’s irreverent, intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny. It seems like every one of my friends has not only read it but loved it. I feel like a science fiction fan who has somehow missed the entire enterprise that is Star Trek.

This book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I at least been aware of Neil Gaiman for years, and have been quite enjoying a few of his books for kids and for grownups over the last year or so. From Fortunately the Milk for the kids to The Ocean at the End of the Lane for me, I was happy to discover a quirky author whose work I had previously overlooked. I was a little less aware of Terry Pratchett – I knew his name, and loosely his genre, but thought he was more straight fantasy in the lines of George R R Martin or David Eddings. In fact, I think I had been confusing him with Terry Brooks, now that I think about it.

As the boys and I started casting about for something to read after we finish the Anne of Green Gables series, Discworld tripped my radar and I realized that Terry Pratchett was revered on par with Douglas Adams for his witty irreverence. And to complete the mental loop, I had just last summer read Neil Gaiman’s biography of Douglas Adams called Don’t Panic. And so, I picked up Good Omens on a lark.

I don’t often literally laugh out loud when I’m reading by myself, but this book had me doing just that. The book is, to do it complete injustice in the summary, loosely the story of an angel, a demon and the coming of Armageddon to a sleepy little English hamlet called Lower Tadfield.

I have to admit, there was a bit early in the novel when I scratched my head and wondered where the hell all the various plot lines were going, but the humour kept me hooked. There was an early and ongoing bit of schtick about how “all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into ‘Best of Queen’ albums” that had me sniggering, and at least once a chapter I was laughing out loud and thinking to myself, “Self, you have really GOT to figure out how to turn on the highlighting and underlining thingee on the Kindle so you can mark some of these quotes for future reference.

Some of my favourite bits:

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it, hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Crowley got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and come back and got drunk for a week.

And this:

“Anyway, it’s like with bikes,’ said the first speaker authoritatively. ‘I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl’s bike.’
‘Well. You’re a girl,’ said one of the others.
‘That’s sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they’re a girl.”

And this:

“I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset cos’ they act like people”, said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”

And this:

“In every big-budget science fiction movie there’s the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it’s gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn’t have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput …
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway.”

I could really just go on and on pulling quotes from this book. Seriously, HOW did I miss this treasure of a book for my entire adult life? The more I read, the more the stories started to come together, the funnier the lines got and the more I wanted to read. By the half-way point, I had tripped that magic spot where you start thinking about the book even when you’re not reading it, and by three-quarters of the way done, I knew it was going to end up on my top ten faves of all time list. I cannot remember the last time I finished a book and immediately started thinking about reading it all over again. (Oops, did I say “10 pages in” book review? Sorry, I’m a little late on this one!)

You might have heard that Sir Terry Pratchett died this past March, just a few weeks after I realized he was an author whose works I should have been reading since I was a teenager. We were discussing my late-to-the-party adoration of this book on Facebook and a friend shared this list of 50 great quotes from Terry Pratchett. I discovered one that has to be the new motto of anyone who works in social media for the government: “It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing it.” And this one, which came >this< close to being the new tag line for the blog: "If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become part of someone else's story" As another wise friend said, "Lucky for you, there's only about 50 more Pratchett books for you to discover. Sad for all of us, there will never be any more than that." I am still perplexed as to how I so utterly failed to notice this book before now. I'm delighted, though, that we have just a few chapters left to read in Anne of Ingleside, and then I can start reading The Colour of Money (aka Discworld #1) by Terry Pratchett with the boys. I think I may cue up a little Neil Gaiman for my own reading next. Where should I go? American Gods? Neverwhere? The Graveyard Book? Clearly I can no longer be left to my own devices when choosing books, or I would have read Good Omens 20+ years ago!

Enlighten me, bloggy peeps – what ELSE have I been missing?

{ 2 comments }

Waaaaay back in the day, I used to write what I called “10-pages-in” book reviews. The idea behind the 10-pages-in review is that early in a book there’s often a tipping point where you decide whether a book is worth the effort. At 10 or 20 pages in, you can still comfortably walk away and not feel like you’ve invested too much to quit. Or, you know you’re so hooked that you start canceling playdates and dental appointments just to make more time to read.

I’m more than 10 pages in to Michael Crummey’s Sweetland, but by the time I’d hit the 10th page I was in love. It’s one of those books where you keep checking to see how much is left so you don’t gorge yourself and read it too quickly – you want to slow down and savour it, but you also want to gobble it up in one big feast.

The Goodreads synopsis for Sweetland sums it up well:

For twelve generations, when the fish were plentiful and when they all-but disappeared, the inhabitants of this remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement, and each has been offered a generous compensation package to leave. But the money is offered with a proviso: everyone has to go; the government won’t be responsible for one crazy coot who chooses to stay alone on an island.

That coot is Moses Sweetland. Motivated in part by a sense of history and belonging, haunted by memories of the short and lonely time he spent away from his home as a younger man, and concerned that his somewhat eccentric great-nephew will wilt on the mainland, Moses refuses to leave. But in the face of determined, sometimes violent, opposition from his family and his friends, Sweetland is eventually swayed to sign on to the government’s plan. Then a tragic accident prompts him to fake his own death and stay on the deserted island. As he manages a desperately diminishing food supply, and battles against the ravages of weather, Sweetland finds himself in the company of the vibrant ghosts of the former islanders, whose porch lights still seem to turn on at night.

I am utterly enchanted by this book. I love the way the dialogue perfectly captures the rural Newfoundland idioms without reducing them to caricature. I love the gentle quirkiness of the characters. I love the way past and present are layered so they bleed through each other. I love the protagonist and his obstinate ways. I want to crawl inside this book and live there.

It’s more than a little ironic that given the book is about relocating people off the tiny rural island, a huge part of my heart yearns to move to just such a place. Between reading Anne’s House of Dreams to the boys and this book, I’ve practically packed our bags and moved us to Canada’s easternmost coastline. I’m not sure why PEI and Newfoundland suddenly call to me so strongly, but they do, and these wonderful books with their roots deep in a sense of place are only throwing gasoline on the fires of my imagination.

I’m already dreading the ‘tragic accident’ that’s mentioned in the synopsis, but even more I’m dreading the end of this book. I don’t want it to be done, and have already lined up Michael Crummey’s previous novel, Galore, as my next book.

Have you ever read a book that made you want to crawl inside and live there? What books have captured your imagination like this? To be reading two at the same time is rather dizzying. It also means I’m spending a rather alarming amount of time casually perusing real estate listings on PEI…

{ 2 comments }

Once upon a time, I used to write 10-pages-in book reviews. I haven’t written one in a very long time, and a large part of the reason for that is that I’ve spent the last six months immersed in the seven books that comprise Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series. I got the first four books for Christmas, and settled in to read them just after I finished the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy. (It was, in retrospect, apparently a dark Christmas.) It was prolly mid-January when I turned the first page of The Gunslinger, and I was reading book three, The Waste Lands, while waiting for the pitocin to ramp up my contractions in the delivery room when Lucas was born. I took a bit of a breather from reading for those first blurry six weeks or so of his life, and have been charging headlong through to the end of the series since then.

To steal a phrase: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

I loved these books. They moved me, they inspired me, and they gave me the creeping willies more than once. Hell, more than a dozen times. They also deeply annoyed me at times, and I rolled my eyes in exasperation in a few places. I don’t think anyone can maintain perfection through a full novel, let alone seven of them, but much like JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, this series was on whole much more good than bad, and the characters and the stories both got deep under my skin and into my head. Especially as I rolled through the last couple of books, I frequently found myself wanting to reach out to Stephen King somehow — to e-mail him, to give him a call, to pace back and forth in front of his fence for a while until he came out for a bit of a palaver*. I wanted to know more, to chew the fat about these characters and this world, to have the chance to savour them just a little bit more.

So what are the books about? This dude named Roland, who lives in a world like ours but not quite ours, is on a quest to the Dark Tower. That’s it in less than 25 words, but it takes about 5,000 pages to get there. It’s about an obsessed man’s single-minded quest, but also about love and friendship and fear and some nasty things that make squelchy noises in the dark — this is, after all, a work by Stephen King. If you’ve read a lot of King’s books, you’ll recognize visiting characters from Hearts in Atlantis, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand and a whole whack of others. Towards the end, there’s a surprising homage to the Harry Potter books, and even King himself makes an appearance as a character.

As I’ve written before, I avoided these books for many years. I’d see a new Stephen King book on the bookstore shelves, and then sigh in dismay. “Ugh, another stupid ‘Gunslinger’ book. Bah!” and I’d turn away. In a way, I’m glad I was late to these books, as I truly loved being immersed in the world of the Dark Tower so completely, and for such a long time. The books are set, as I said, in a world like ours but not quite like ours. Eventually, we find out that this world intersects ours, and that there are innumerable parallel worlds (another neat crossover with the central idea of Pullman’s trilogy.) The story weaves back and forth through wheres and whens in this world and others. King has not only sketched a set of alternate universes, but has coloured and contrasted them with their own histories, customs and linguistic quirks. I think this was my favourite part of these books, how rich and textured the worlds are, and after a while it felt less like reading the books and more like inhabiting the worlds. You know how sometimes when you’re reading a fantasy book, it’s like there is a little bit of scenery sort of half-imagined directly around the characters like the shadow of a spotlight, but everything else is kind of hazy? I felt like I could crawl right into these books and the scope of the world(s) around me would just go on forever.

I was fascinated by the fact that this series took Stephen King the best part of his life to write. He started it in 1970, before Carrie was written or published, and finished it a quarter of a century later in 2003. I think that fact contributes to the sprawling, epic feel to the books. In a way, Roland the Gunslinger ages and matures in Stephen King’s real time. Time is major theme in the books, almost a character in its own right.

Stephen King says in the forward to the books that what he wanted to do as a young writer was get inside peoples’ heads. He’s always been able to do that to me, always been able to crawl deep into the tiniest hidey-holes of my soul and shine a light on the bits that I try hard not to think about. In the Dark Tower series, he’s done it again. It’s been called his magnum opus, and I can see why. As I paged relentlessly through the last book of the series, I watched the dwindling amount unread pages with dismay. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll head out into the interwebs to see if I can find a discussion group or fan site somewhere. I’m deeply hooked on Roland and his ka-tet and his quest, and not quite ready to give them up just yet.

*Actual goosebumps raised on my arms when I was reading the afterward to the very final book, and King spoke about how much he values his privacy and how he intentionally obscured details of his location even as he incorporated himself into the stories so as to protect his ever-eroding privacy. To me, it was almost like a personal “thank you” for not disturbing his privacy when I was stalking him that sunny Saturday morning last year. Chills.

{ 7 comments }