Books

The Golden Sentence

Posted on by Patrick

My friend Don­na came up with the idea of the Gold­en Sen­tence, and I think it’s great.

Pick a book at ran­dom (or not-so-ran­dom), check the total num­ber of pages, and divide by φ (aka the Gold­en Ratio, aka 1.618…).  Now go to the page you get, count the num­ber of sen­tences, and divide that num­ber by φ.  Count the sen­tences till you get to that one.  That’s your Gold­en Sentence.

I’ve been mak­ing my slow, savour­ing way through Gene Wolfe’s Wiz­ard Knight duol­o­gy, and so here are the gold­en sen­tences for those two books:

I would have liked to have Hob there, too; and in a way he was, because he was what the rest of us were think­ing about.

—The Knight

“We told her we had no sub­jects, that the Angr­born fol­low King Schild­starr, that though a queen we do not rule.”

—The Wiz­ard

(Some con­text: in The Knight, Hob was­n’t there because an ogre had eat­en him, which was sort of why they were all think­ing about him; in the snip­pet from The Wiz­ard, Queen Idnn of Jotun­land, new­ly-mar­ried to King Gilling, is speak­ing, using the roy­al “we”.)

What’s the Gold­en Sen­tence for your favourite book?  (Or even the one near­est you?)

Series: Gene Wolfe

The entire series: The Gold­en Sen­tence; A les­son in a line; Inde­scrib­able; My head­’s swim­ming now; The Island of Dr. Death.

Shelf Awareness’ Q&A

Posted on by Patrick

On your night­stand right now:

Fic­tions by Jorge Luis Borges, thanks to an essay in William Gib­son’s Dis­trust that Par­tic­u­lar Fla­vor.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Strange­ly, it was prob­a­bly The For­ev­er War by Joe Halde­man.  I grew up in a house where my father’s sci­ence fic­tion nov­els dom­i­nat­ed every book­shelf — and there were a lot of book­shelves.  I did­n’t under­stand a tenth of what was real­ly going on in the book, but I read it over and over all the same.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Shelf Aware­ness’ Q&A” →

Horns, by Joe Hill

Posted on by Patrick

Horns is a page-turn­er.  Most nights the only rea­son I stopped read­ing was because I had to make a choice between find­ing out what comes next and being use­ful at work in the morning.

The sto­ry con­cerns one Ignatius “Ig” Per­rish, who wakes up one morn­ing after an ill-remem­bered night of drink­ing to dis­cov­er that he has grown horns overnight.  They look a bit like dev­il horns, and they hurt to touch.  He dis­cov­ers the horns seem to have giv­en him cer­tain pow­ers, too:  peo­ple can’t help but reveal their dark­est secrets to him, and they don’t seem to remem­ber talk­ing to him.

Ig’s girl­friend Mer­rin died about a year ago, a hor­rif­ic sex-mur­der; all the evi­dence seemed to point to Ig as the cul­prit, but he knows he did­n’t do it.  The evi­dence con­ve­nient­ly van­ished, and no one was ever con­vict­ed.  The towns­folk all assumed Ig’s rich par­ents bought off the jus­tice sys­tem to pro­tect the fam­i­ly name.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Horns, by Joe Hill” →

Review: Black Bottle Man

Posted on by Patrick

Black Bottle Man

Black Bot­tle Man

Rem­brandt is ten years old when his life is turned upside-down.

It’s 1928, and the Great Depres­sion has yet to begin. Rem­brandt’s entire world is his extend­ed fam­i­ly, three house­holds of farm­ers who live very close to each oth­er, as farm hous­es go. He’s the only child in three fam­i­lies, and his aunts both want a child very badly.

So bad­ly, in fact, that they’ll cut a deal with the Dev­il to get what they want.

To save his aunts’ souls, Rem­brandt, his pa, and his uncle Thomp­son have to take to the road, nev­er stay­ing in any one place longer than twelve days. Because on the thir­teenth day, the Black Bot­tle Man will come for them…

* * *

This one took me by sur­prise; it built so steadi­ly, and so qui­et­ly, skip­ping from Rem­brandt’s youth to his 90-year-old dotage, that I did­n’t real­ize until the end just how much I had invest­ed in it. The cli­max caught me off guard with just how much emo­tion it wrung from me. Not many books have made me tear up. This one did­n’t, either, but man it was a near thing.

My only com­plaint would be that I found a few gram­mat­i­cal quib­bles, here and there, but on the whole this book is high­ly recommended.

Writ­ten by Craig Rus­sell, based on his radio play of the same name, Black Bot­tle Man is pub­lished by Great Plains Teen Fic­tion, an imprint of Great Plains Pub­li­ca­tions. My copy is signed because I went to the book launch at Pen­ny­wise Books here in Brandon.

Get it…
from the publisher
from Chapters/Indigo
from Amazon.com

This morning came awful early

Posted on by Patrick

When my wife’s alarm clock went off at 5:30 AM, she said to me, “When did you get in last night?”

Me: “3:30.”
Her: “Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren’t in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep.”

Those idiots were me and my cow-ork­er Craig, and the rea­son we got in at 3:30 AM was that we went to the city to see Neil Gaiman last night.

A cou­ple photos:

Neil Gaiman in Winterpeg

Neil Gaiman's green scrawl

I’ll prob­a­by have more to say lat­er. Right now I have to get back to work.

____

* My wife would like it point­ed out that she called us dum­mies, not idiots.

Triple threat

Posted on by Patrick

I’m kind of a suck­er for cer­tain things:

  1. Images of galax­ies — I love the great whorls of stars that make up the vis­i­ble mass of the Universe
  2. The his­to­ry of sci­ence, espe­cial­ly physics and astronomy
  3. A clever title

So it was prob­a­bly inevitable that I’d check this book out of the library today:

I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done read­ing it.