Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird, and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages.
As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging collection are delicious, inventive and engaging with sometimes just a whiff of tainted sea air or the merest glimpse of a beslimed sea creature, sometimes more. Also included was Norman Partridge's bleakly superb Lesser Demons, which I had just been thinking about the other day without being able to remember either the title or the author (so much fortuitousness here!). Truthfully, I feel like the editor would have had to squint a little to get that one into a Lovecraft-inspired anthology, but I'm good with it.
I'm a bad rereader, I think I've mentioned that. The TBR pile is ever-growing, and much of the lure of reading for me resides in the pleasure of discovery. That's not a really good or defensible thing, though, not entirely. It's often why I pass over literary fiction in favour or sci fi and fantasy or horror, and the truth is that, for me, moderation and variety works the best in reading as well as in diet.
Wait, that kind of doesn't work for where I'm going next. Sod it, I'll leave it there anyway. After my last tear through a bunch of library holds that came in all at once, I was becalmed once again, with no idea what to read next and nothing really pulling at me. I wanted a sure thing, and as I'm realizing more and more, when you've read a couple thousand books and your memory is worse all the time, there's nothing like a reread for a sure thing - not only do you know already know you loved it, you can't really remember exactly why! Or what precisely happened! Or when!
And that brings us to about the length that my blog barometer tells me I would start getting bored after, so I'll tell you about who I've been furiously rereading tomorrow.
Best not to bother reading this if you're one of those people that are like "enh, whatever, coincidences aren't statistically relevant, don't bother me with your quasi-superstitious silliness". Also, lighten up man.
I love coincidences. I think incidents of coincidence evince extreme coolness. It's like the general perversity of things has decided to bump your hip playfully with a shaggy, golden-retriever-like head instead of working you over with overgrown spiky fingernails.
That said, a couple of my weird book things aren't coincidences at all. One was just an embarrassing lapse: I was all set to read There But For The by Ali Smith for book club. I flipped past the "Other Books By" page, and wondered briefly why my favourite of hers wasn't listed. Then I realized that the favourite book I was thinking of was Brick Lane, and that I had confused Ali Smith with Monica Ali, which is ALL KINDS of not cool, but at least I figured it out before I started reading.
Also not a coincidence: sometimes when I'm going out somewhere where I'll have to wait around at some point, I realize I don't have a book after I already have my boots on. In this case, it's too late to take something that I'm already reading, or my ipad with my library ebooks and Kindle books, because they're both upstairs and, well, I'm lazy. So I grab something from one of the three bookshelves nearest the front door. Several times, the book I grabbed was A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. It was a tattered second-hand copy, and I found the premise intriguing. It's well-reviewed and we all know I've seldom met a post-apocalyptic environment I didn't like. And yet, and yet.... every time, I would read a few pages, come home, stick it back on its shelf and go about my business. By the next time I grabbed it, I would have to start again, so I kept reading the same few pages and progressing no further.
Last week I was taking Eve to acting class, running a couple of errands and then picking her up with her friend after the class. I realized I might end up waiting a few minutes after my errands, and I already had my boots on, so I tiptoed across the floor and scanned the shelf for Leibowitz.
And it wasn't there.
I looked again. Still nothing. Totally vexed, I waffled for a few embarrassing moments, while my long-suffering cleaning lady waited for me to move so she could finish cleaning the living room. I ended up grabbing Woman on the Edge of Time and last night finished my second complete reading of that. But wither Leibowitz? Am I destined to never read the damned thing?
And now, finally, the coincidence.
I recently finished Half-Blood Blues, the Scotiabank Giller Prize winning book that was nominated for several other awards also by Esi Edugyan. I bought this about a year ago, read the first little bit and really liked it, then lent it to my mother since I had so many other books to read. When I got it back it got shuffled to the bottom of the pile, and when I finally picked it up again, it didn't totally bear out its early promise, but I did like it and think it was beautifully written.
A passage from near the end: "We both come to a stop. Across the room, seated in a cracked leather chair, his hair and beard completely white against his dark skin, was the man I'd reckoned dead all these years.
'Kto tam jest?' he said again, frowning. 'Ewa?'"
At the same time, I was reading Fearless, by Cornelia Funke, sequel to Reckless, Book Two of something called the Mirrorworld Series, not nominated for anything as far as I know, featuring fairies, curses, stone-skinned men called Goyls and a woman who is sometimes a Fox.
a passage from near the end: ""Around them it was so dark that Jacob barely saw his own hands. He stumbled over a cable, and when he tried to steady himself, his hand touched heavy velvet. 'Kto tam jest?'The floodlight that flared up above them was so bright that Fox pressed her hands to her eyes."
The VERY SAME Polish phrase in two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT books, neither of which ostensibly have anything to do with Poland, which I just happened to be reading concurrently. (It means, "who's there", I think, although I only reliably know how to say "pillow" and "egg" in Polish, sorry Babcia/Grandma).
Also, regarding the previous post, clearly The People Have Spoken. I will keep the one on the left and give Julie the ever-so-slightly inferior one on the right. Thanks for playing.
