In Summary

I'm coming off a fairly successful weekend where I was able to take Henry to his first petting zoo and where we all went on a long trip to the beach yesterday which for the first time, he seems to have really engaged with, playing on swings and waving at pretty much anybody, so I figure that I should re-engage with the blog a little bit.  It also helps that the work on my office is finally finished and the most expensive room in the house is devoted to video games and aurally offensive music.

My analysis of the works or Beatrix Potter is still on hold.  Reading her books to him as he falls asleep continues to be a challenge due to a combination of the sparseness of her writing as well as a lack of rhythm while reading out loud.  Henry has had several colds and flus so I decided that since he was spending so much time in bed, I should start reading him something with a little more substance which lead me to The Thief of Always by Clive Barker.

I got this book during my Stephen King/ Clive Barker phase and remember being disappointed that it was a book for children.  I'd been hoping for the standard scary/ freaky/ violent fare I was gobbling up at the time.  I also devoured the book very quickly and loved it.

Reading this with new eyes, I was surprised to find so much going on in it.  The entire first act serves as a warning to children about how easy it is to fall into the hand of a stranger and be seduced my false promises away from your parents.

The second act traces the shift from the fantasy of how life would be without rules to the horror of discovering you've been kidnapped and cannot escape to return to your old life.  It ends quite darkly where the young protagonist gets to experience the horror his family has has to go through in losing a child.

Of course, this is a kids book so it is in the third act that the young man decides to regain control of his life and make amends, you get the sense that things are going to turn out alright however, as Mr. Barker has already gone down a rather dark route earlier, there is the niggling question as to just how happy the ending is going to be.

This is definitely a book for ten year olds (This point is reenforced several times throughout the story as well as on the flap) and can be quite scary if you're so inclined. The illustrations by Clive Barker add to the overall creepiness (e.g., fat naked lady melting with her eyeballs dangling from their stalks obscuring her breasts).  But with the books theme of illusions and the constant reminder that much of what is happening is not real, it should be a good kind of scary.  The final act is also dedicated to the concept of overcoming you fears so there is a nice little catharsis there as well.

Hollywood has been dithering about making this a movie for years and I find it a pity this has not come to pass.  It's also made me curious about Clive Barker's Abarat series of children's books and, should Henry have any interest in The Thief of Always when he's older, will certainly consider picking these up for him as well.

Next up, I read Henry The Little Prince.  To this day I'm still frustrated that the book really has nothing to do with this:

Which is a shame because then I would like the it.  This was my first time reading it to the  end, nt in spite of doing at least two book reports on it in my school days.  Both times I reached the same point and never finished reading the book (Granted, i was reading it in French) and wrote the book report based on my knowledge of the first thirty or so pages and the cartoon.  It's an interesting reflection of the school system that on both reports I got a fairly good grade, considering that I was a million miles off with regard to what happens in the rest of the book.  Namely that at the end, The little Prince does not go off into space and have further adventures; he gets bitten by a snake and dies.

I suppose a case could be made using the Life of Pi Defence that the book is open ended and you can decide that The Little Prince flies through space through the power of death but I find this is a stretch of the imagination even for a book that gets away with the idea that there is a 20' diameter plant upon which lives a drunk with a never-ending supply of alcohol.  Really, M. de Saint-Exupery, you paint such a wonderful picture of Heaven.

Any cynicism I have for the book is primarily due to an awareness that there is something going on, some kind of message in all The Little Princes adventures, that is entirely lost on me.  Other that the religious ones.  Those hit you over the head like you're in a whack-a-mole.

With that done, I have now moved on to reading Henry Treasure Island.  We're only three chapters in and I doubt we'll get much farther.  He's reached a stage where we need to retrain him to fall asleep on his own and if we're not doing that, he's so zonked out by the time we put him to bed that there's no point reading to him.  Which is unfortunate because I was pleasantly surprised by the first three chapters.  It was not the dry, dated kind of story I was expecting and trucked along nicely with lots of pirate-speak.  I'll keep at it for now for my own entertainment and should Henry go through a pirate phase, I imagine this will sate his interest nicely.

As for me, I've just wrapped up ShadowMarch by Tad Williams.  I don't want to turn this into a Game of Thrones rant but in relation to my thoughts on this book, but it feels inevitable.

This is the third novel of a four part series originally conceived to be a television series.  It was, however, never picked up.  This is unfortunate because George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Fire and Ice after reading tad William's first fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and realizing that you can write epic fantasy while exploring adult themes in mature ways.

It frustrates me that HBO has picked up a still unfinished fantasy series  in which the author take five-plus years to finish a novel, while Tad Williams is a known quantity who, at the very least, has established that he can finish an epic and tie together all the lose ends.

As it stands, the Shadowmarch series is on track to better Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.  This being the third book in what is essentially one very long novel, he continues to pick up immediately where the last one ended and entirely lack an ending or resolution of any single plot point.  It's infuriating yet I love that the book just stops and you have to wait for the next one but, if you're going to write a single massive story, i think this is the way to do it, rather than to shoehorn in needless plot developments which do not serve the plot just to give your readers some satisfaction.  I can think of no greater cliffhanger that to have the story simply stop and have to wait a year to pick up where you left off.

Next time: A gratuitous attempt to post more than one entry in the month of June.