It’s been a good day for taking photos with my phone, evidently.
Snow for May Day.
Someone loves the Duke.
My favourite of all the false messiahs.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pj/8698738931/
Books
The Golden Sentence
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?)
Happy Hollow Bean, everybody
This is still one of my favourite quotes on the subject of All Hallows’ Eve:
“Who holds this celebration?”
“The children, who actually rule the Blue Planet of Earth. They are more intelligent than the older people and outrun them on bicycles.”
Shelf Awareness’ Q&A
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.
Horns, by Joe Hill
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”Keycon 28 (1)
This past weekend I went to Keycon 28, the latest iteration of Winnipeg’s science fiction convention. I had been invited by Craig Russell, and since I’d never been to a con, I figured, Why not? Continue reading “Keycon 28 (1)”
Congratulations to Craig Russell
Craig Russell, local author, has been nominated for an Aurora Award for his novel Black Bottle Man (reviewed here). He’s in a category with Marie Bilodeau, Hayden Trenholm, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Robert J. Sawyer. Good company, in short.
Congratulations, Craig, and best of luck!
Heat Death
Published, woo hoo!
Review: 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
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:
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.