Arctangential

I finished Clockwork yesterday afternoon. It’s a good book.

It’s a short little thing, really only a novella or maybe even a short story. It’s set in a small German town, at some unspecified pre-industrial time. It begins with a discussion between an apprentice clockmaker and an young storyteller. They’re both nervous because they have something they haven’t finished, and they’re arguing over whose job is harder. The author then informs us that both storytelling and clockmaking are equally difficult and in some ways very similar, and proceeds to tell a story about clockwork which is itself like a piece of clockwork. At least, that’s the intention, and while the story is kind of cute, it doesn’t hold a candle to something like an Elmore Leonard story.

I won’t go too deep into the plot, but it involves an evil wizard/clockmaker, love saving a prince’s life and a dangerous clockwork robot who murders when triggered by a certain word. For 110 pages, it was a fun read.

Now I’m reading Elizabeth Boyer’s The Sword and the Satchel, the first in a series of 4 Tolkienesque fantasy novels.

I finished Invisible Cities yesterday afternoon. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’ve spent some time thinking about how to discuss the book here, and I’ve had some trouble coming up with a good approach. It’s hard to discuss any major section of the book without quoting it extensively; there’s not a lot that Calvino says in the book that I would be able to explain in words other than those that he used. However, I usually try to keep these little reviews down to about 3 paragraphs, so there’s no way I can reasonably write all that out. Not to mention, I’ve already wasted my first paragraph talking about it.

The story — or more properly concept — of the piece is that Marco Polo is telling Kublai Khan about the cities he’s visited in his travels. The book is structured so that we have short segments of discourse between Polo and Khan surrounding 4 or 5 sections each of which describes a city. This book isn’t really a novel. Not much really happens, when certain events are described, they’re in no particular narrative order. I wanted to describe the book as a kind of exploded poem: paragraphs for lines, sections for stanzas and chapters for cantos, but at the end of the day that just doesn’t work. The book defies categorization and synopsis; maybe that’s the best way to describe it.

Each section that describes a city uses extreme detail and specificity to illuminate a much more general concept. These are laid out in both thematic and ordinal groupings which share a common direction, but are out of sync. One thematic group is “Cities & Memory”. “Cities & Memory 1″ is followed immediately by “Cities & Memory 2″, but “Cities & Desire 1″ comes before we get to “Cities & Memory 3″. “Cities & Memory 4″ is separated from that by another 2 cities, and so on. The sections detailing the communication between Polo and Khan deal more with concepts which rule over the book as a whole: communication, symbolism and representation.

I really love this book. It’s not something to be rushed through, but rather to be savored, to be examined, dissected, considered and re-considered. I don’t generally read books more than once, but in this case I’ll be making an exception.

And now, having gone over my paragraph allotment, my next book is Philip Pullman’s Clockwork.

I finished A Candle for D’Artagnan yesterday over lunch. It was in some ways better than the previous books in the series, but it was still long, dull and mostly pointless.

Once again, we’re in a famous historical setting with our vampire lady, Octavia Clemens. This time it’s 17th Century France, around the time leading up to the Fronde. This was also the time of the Musketeers, as one might guess from the title. Octavia moves from her home near Rome to France, supposedly to help the soon-to-be Cardinal Mazarin seem more respectable in Parisian society. I was never really clear how she helped, but I guess at least it gave her an excuse to go to France. After this setup, the story proceeded basically the same as all the others — some political intrigue, exhaustive and obsessive descriptions of period clothing, and some mushy, hyper-romantic (not to mention sort of creepily graphic) sex scenes. There’s also a subplot about a fired farmhand pestering Octavia with small bombs, tripwires for her horses, etc.

As always, the historical background of the novel was impeccable, with almost all of the main characters being real figures in history. Only Octavia and her close friends are fictional, and they have no real impact on events transpiring around them, acting more just as a reader surrogate to get us more into the action. I will say again that I really think that Yarbro should try writing just straight historical fiction, or maybe even just historical fact, instead of trying to cram all this vampire bullshit into each story.

I’ll also mention that the last few pages of the book were incredibly disappointing, and could have been replaced with the single line, “And then everybody died.”

Now I’m reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I like it a lot.

I took some pictures of my house the other day and I figured people might want to see them. I put them up on Flickr because I really like that thing where you can tag different parts of the pictures. Here they are:

My Computer Work Area

My TV Area

Where I keep all my tools

That was interesting.