Chatter Of The Squirrel

Book: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

All the great movies of the year come out around July.

But the good books come out a few months later.

Robin Hobb usually never disappoints, birthing a book almost every September. She’s a little behind this year though. But it’s a new trilogy, so that probably takes time. And my authors aren’t getting any younger. Excerpt from her new book, Dragon Keeper can be found here.

Terry Pratchet just came out with Nations. I’ve got the audio book, and yet to finish it. It’s not a Vimes novel, so there’s less urgency.

Meantime, there’s also Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

A family is murdered, but the baby escapes into a graveyard where its ghostly denizens adopt and care for him.

It’s like Kipling’s The Jungle Book, but with ghosts, ghouls, a vampire and a werewolf. I don’t know about you, but it makes just as much sense as a boy raised by a bear or by apes.

The boy grows up in the company of ghosts who had been buried there since before the Roman conquest of the British Isles. His guardian is a vampire, who brings him food and bails him out of trouble. A werewolf teaches him how to say “Help” in different human and non-human tongues. He earns the friendship and adoration of a witch’s ghost. Goes treasure hunting in a barrow. Makes human & inhuman friends. Makes human & inhuman enemies.

Great fun to read, and over all too quickly.

Book: Dragon Keeper

Robin Hobb is slowing down a little… I usually expect a book from her once a year, around this time.

This year, I only have a prologue to tease my appetite.

Not complaining. I love her works. I’m prepared to wait.

Book: The Terror, by Dan Simmons

I’m a fan for Dan Simmons’ sci-fi. Hyperion is the best sci-fi I’ve ever read, in my opinion.

I’m sure many old school readers will name Isaac Asimov, or Arthur C Clarke as those who wrote truly revolutionary works for their time. But I grew up with Ultraman and Transformers, so robots and aliens are not …emm… alien to me. They’re already firmly imprinted into my childhood psyche, and is part of my perceived reality.

So, going back to Asimov nowadays, I can’t help but be a little underwhelmed. I can appreciate the genius. But not that overwhelming sense of wonder.

But Hyperion blew my mind. And his recent Ilium, and Olympos is also one of a kind.

His latest work though, The Terror, is a horror. He has written a number of horrors that I’ve never bothered to read. Not my cup of tea. Read one that was based off some Hawaiian mythology. Meh.

I came across the audio book for this one, and so gave this a shot. So difficult to find the time to read nowadays. But I’ve got an hour on the drive to work, an hour during lunch, and another hour’s drive home to listen to audiobooks. Very efficient use of time, I say. And it takes the edge off facing traffic everyday.

The Terror tells of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition to search for the north-west passage. A short cut to reach the Pacific ocean from the Atlantic, without having to make the long detour past Tierra del Fuego. Historically, two ships made this voyage, the Erebus & the Terror. The ships got trapped in ice and never made it home. Sir John Franklin’s wife spent years campaigning for rescue to be sent to search for her husband. It was a historical tale of romance that inspired an opera, the grieving wife begging the navy to bring her husband home.

Nobody knew for sure what happened to the boats. But many decades later, several forensic expeditions were made to exhume graves of the crew that they could find. Evidence suggested that many crew-men died of pneumonia, tuberculosis, scurvy, lead-poisoning, and blade marks in some bones suggested cannibalism.

Dan Simmons did a lot of research and wove facts into fiction, with a dash of Eskimo mythology. In it, there’s also a huge helping of history of the English Admiralty during the age of scurvy, told with a sardonic slant. Exposing the colonial English captains to be clueless buffoons with delusions of godhood. Hardly the romantic images painted in tales such as the HMS Pinafore.

And the element of Simmons-esque horror? A 12-foot tall man-eating polar bear.

In a way, the story is like watching the Titanic. You begin the story knowing that the boat is going to sink and everyone is going to drown. But picture this, if you can, a movie cross-over of Titanic + Jaws!! This might explain a bit of what The Terror is like.

So many things went wrong with the voyage. Delusions that they’re sailing the strongest ice-breaking ships of its time. Installation of highly inefficient locomotive engines. Stocking too little coal. Stocking their pantry with canned food from the lowest bidder, which were insufficiently cooked, having meat of inferior quality, and badly soldered tins leading to half the cans becoming spoilt, and the other half laced with lethal levels of lead. If Beelzebub worked as the logistic clerk of the Admiralty, he couldn’t have doomed the expedition more thoroughly.

As if this wasn’t enough of a nightmare already, the man-eater adds another element of terror to the expedition.

The result, is a compelling tale of futile heroism.

A good read.

Day At Borders

Lunched with a friend at the Curve before spending the rest of the afternoon at Borders.

Following up in this new found interest in martial arts, I ended up browsing the sports and fitness shelves.

Flipped through two books on Bokken and Kendo. There’s a Kendo class at the Japan Club also. Kendo was also something that has always been on the edge of my To-Do list for more than a decade.

There’s nothing on Shorinji Kempo though. Guess it’s not that popular. So I flipped through some Bruce Lee books instead. One of his books on self defence was a hoot.

I looked for what Bruce would do in the same position that we learnt last night, and he did have something special to say about that exact scenario.  “Many martial arts have a series of complicated moves to free the locked hand. I find a left cross to the face to be much more effective.” (paraphrased)

Movie: Persepolis

Caught a clip of this cartoon at the recent Academy Awards. It got beaten out by Ratatouille, which I thought wasn’t fair at all. But then, since when was the Academy Awards fair? How can Transformers not win Best Visual Effects?! And bloody Bourne Ultimatum, an action film, came away with two! Ang Lee did a far better film than Brokeback Mountain, but he’s already earned his quota of two Oscars, so not even a nomination this time.

Well, at least Persepolis didn’t release a year ago or it would’ve been humiliating to be beaten out by Happy Feet.

The black and white clip presented on Oscars night intrigued me enough to seek out the torrent when I got back. It has a simple and elegant style, and a narrative that reminded me of Amelie. Persepolis is the story of an Iranian girl growing up during the revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War. It’s based on the biographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi.

The story is both funny and sorrowful. It tells of her childhood, her years in Vienna, her return to Iran, and finally her departure again because her thoughts are detrimental to her survival in Iranian society.

It gave me fresh perspectives of Iran.

Instead of merely being a hotbed of Islamic extremisms with nuclear ambitions… I now also see them as a beautiful people who were triple cursed with petroleum, ignorance, and universal suffrage. The petroleum attracted vultures, and the only thing they bought with that wealth was destruction. Their people may never have wanted their country to be this way. But they elected one wrong leader, and never lived down that mistake. The generations of propaganda and brainwashing then ground away independent thought and cemented the leadership.

Which brings me to think that the universal vote is a romantic and absurdly optimistic notion. It makes the incredible assumption that every member of the voting public is informed, and capable of choosing responsibly. To put it in perspective: you need a driving license to operate a vehicle, but not to determine the fate of you and your children. Also your educated vote will count the same as the Myanmar migrants who just got new houses.

But I’m digressing.

Back to the cartoon… Watch it.