The Good Fairies of New York

Title: The Good Fairies of New York
Author: Martin Millar
Published: Originally in 1992, this edition in 2008 by... umm, Tor?
Genre: Urban fantasy
Pages: 273 pages and over too soon




Whee, finally! There are only a few books by Mr. Millar that I haven't read, so I'm kinda saving them for a rainy day, but I've been looking forward to reading this! Oh, wait, I still have all the Thraxas-books to read!

(Three sentences, all ending with exclamation marks. You know, the first time I rented The Big Lebowski, the Finnish VHS tape cover had only a three-sentence description in the back, and all three ended with exclamation marks. The description was utter crap, but the movie rocks.)

A bunch of fairies from the British isles accidentally end up in New York, including Scottish Heather and Morag, who just love to hate each other and are constantly fighting. This costs them several family heirlooms, and not just from their own families. Which just creates a whole lot of other trouble. They soon find themselves pursued by local Chinese, black and Italian fairies. Solace can luckily be found at Kerry's, who's desperately trying to finish her Celtic flower alphabet to win an arts competition, and at Dinnie's, where there really isn't so much solace as there's drunken swearing and bad fiddling. Plus there's a struggling performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a bag lady on a roaring rampage of WAR!, a dead musician after his guitar, and a lot of drinking. Oh, and the Cornish king of fairies really wants two of the New York escapees back. Opressing all his subjects just isn't enough.


Like with other of his books, Millar has about a dozen characters running -or flying, especially after that damned poppy- around the place, but everything comes together to tell a lovely story which makes me all happy inside.




"Two fairies just came through my window and were sick on the carpet!" he screamed on reaching Fourth Street, not fully realizing the effect that this would have on the passers-by till the men sweating with sacks round a garbage truck stopped to laugh at him.
"What'd you say?"
"Upstairs," gasped Dinnie. "Two fairies, with kilts and violins and little swords... green kilts..."
The men stared at him. Dinnie's monologue ground to a halt.

The Back Passage

Title: The Back Passage
Author: James Lear
Published: 2006 by Cleis Press Inc.
Genre: Murder mystery and sex of the gay variety
Pages: 199 pages


Yes! Again! I'm fairly sure this is the third time I've read The Back Passage since I started this blog, but I can't find the entry for the second time around. Oh well. I'd borrowed this one to a friend, and once I got it back last... Tuesday, I immediately read it again. Jolly good times.

I still agree with everything I said about this book in the first proper entry to this blog, and find it somewhat amusing that I still, third time around, couldn't remember who the killer was. I'm starting to remember the order of Mitch's sexual encounters, but murderer? Umm...? Ehh, details. This book is very much of a case of the journey being much more important -and interesting- than arriving at the destination.



"How was that, copper?"
"I fucking loved it, sir. Please don't stop."

Fight Club

Title: Fight Club
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Published: Originally 1996, this edition 2003 by Vintage.
Genre: Someone describes this as "...American urban nightmare..." on the back cover. That sounds good.
Pages: 208

"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."

Sputnik Sweetheart

Title: Sputnik Sweetheart
Author: Haruki Murakami
Published: 1999 in original Japanese, 2001 first time in English. This edition 2002 by Harvill
Genre: Murakami.
Pages: 229




Oh, I really should write about each and every book as soon as I've read it, to remember everything I wanted to mention. Not after I've already finished another book after it. But there were circumstances. Aren't there always?


This was, I think, the third time I read this book. First time around was in Finnish, as soon as it had come out in Finnish. Second time sometime after I bought this copy from Berlin, in 2004. Third time now, obviously, and I think I'm finally understanding very many things. Or then I just forget the Ohhh!!! -things every time and think I'm only realising them whenever I read it again.


See? This is why I should write about books as soon as I've finished them.


Sputnik Sweetheart, first book I read from Mr. Murakami, is told by the narrator known only as K. He tells us of his long time friend and secret love, Sumire, a productive yet not very accomplishing author-to-be, who suddenly finds herself head over heels with a much older woman, Miu. She can't even write anymore, but with Miu close by, she doesn't care.


And then things get weird.




Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking for others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Title: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Author: Robert C. O'Brien
Published: 1971
Genre: Children's book
Pages: 268


That awesome cartoon movie about mice and super-intelligent rats which you saw as a kid and it gave you nightmares? This is it! Legend tells that my parents took little brother and me to see this in the movies, but it was so scary we had to leave halfway through. A few years later we got it on VCR tape, and watched it many times.

If you haven't heard of Mrs. Frisby (or Brisby in the movie) and the rats of NIMH, it's... well, it's about Mrs. Frisby and the rats of NIMH. Spring has come, and Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse, mother of four little kids, has to get ready to move her family to their summer home, away from under the oncoming plowing of the field. But one of the kids, little Timothy, becomes ill with pneumonia, and is too sick to get out of bed, let alone move over the field. So Mrs. Frisby goes to look for help, and is eventually sent to talk with the rats living under the rosebush. There isn't much time, the farmer's getting his tractor ready already, but luckily the rats come up with a plan.

I watched the movie again a few months back, and was still a little scared at points, even though I knew how things would turn out. And I'm glad I read the book, too. It's mainly a children's book, but definitely the kind that adults can read as well. It doesn't talk down to the reader, and even though I still knew how things would turn out (even though they changed a few things for the movie), it was full of suspense. 


"You are joking, sir; you are not serious. No rat could move my house. It is far too heavy, much too big."
"The rats on Mr. Fitzgibbon's farm have - things - ways - you know nothing about. They are not like the rest of us. They are not, I think, even like most other rats. They work at night, in secret. Mrs. Frisby, do you know their main entrance?"
"In the rosebush? Yes."

The Last Samurai

Title: The Last Samurai
Author: Helen DeWitt
Published: 2000, this one by Vintage in 2001.
Genre: 
Pages: 482


 I read this one in Finnish about as soon as it had come out, and really liked it. A little while back, I saw an English copy at one of the used book shops in Helsinki. I didn't buy it that time, although I was tempted. But I kept telling myself, I already have it in Finnish, and my book shelves are full as they are, so no. Went in to the shop again a few weeks later, it was still there, waiting patiently on the shelf, and I was thinking, it's so much better to read books in their original language, and I really liked this one, so...

Okay, so, this has NOTHING to do with the Tom Cruise movie. It's about this woman, Sybilla, and her young genius of a son Ludo. They live in London, and because they're very poor, they spend days riding on the Circle Line trains to keep warm. Sybilla types up old magazines to make some money, and Ludo learns languages from Japanese to Arabic way before he should even be in school, dazzling and confusing other Tube passengers.

Ludo has no father, so Sybilla keeps Kurosawa's movie Seven Samurai playing on the VCR through his childhood, to show him one damn good movie, and more importantly, to give him not one but seven father figures. Ludo isn't exactly satisfied with this, and eventually goes in search of his real dad. You have to read the book yourself to see how that goes, but it's pretty awesome.

Since both Sybilla and Ludo are pretty damn smart, so's the book. But it's also funny and really hard to put down. And oh, DeWitt has published another book just six months ago! Yay!



It was much easier when he was small. I had one of those Kanga carriers; in warm weather I would type at home with him in front and in cold weather I would go to the British Museum and sit in the Egyptian gallery near the changing room, reading Al Hayah to keep my hand in. Then at night I would go home and type Pig Fancier's Monthly or Weaseller's Companion. And now four years have gone by.

Annabel

Title: Annabel
Author: Kathleen Winter
Published: 2010. This edition by Vintage.
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 461




I saw this book several times in one of the big book shops in Helsinki, became instantly intrigued, and finally remembered to buy it once I found a cheaper copy. Books in Finland, sadly, tend to be damn expensive. And wow. I'd read that Winter's writing style is, at times, rather... what would be a good word for it... poetic? Kind of like a painting. And I was initially a little wary about this fact, but once I started the book and got used to her style, man. I was pretty much hooked. Read it in buses from work, between buses, in the evenings and in bed until I reached the end.


So yeah, I liked Annabel. It's about a child born in a remote part of Canada, in 1968, who is both male and female. The kid's parents more or less grudgingly decide to grow him as a boy, and name him Wayne, not telling him that there's a very real girl part to him as well. Only a few people know of this: the parents, a few doctors, and a neighbour who was present at the birth. She secretly gave Wayne the name Annabel, after her own child.


Wayne grows up taking pills he has no idea what they're for, but always feels that there's something in him that makes him different from the other boys. The book's mostly serious, but there were a few laugh-out-loud bits, and all the main characters are written beautifully. They're so real I felt I could just reach into the book and poke them. And, like many good books, it was over way too soon.




Wayne knew Donna Palliser could not see into the glass ball. He knew she was in the business, tonight, of being cruel. He did not like to see Agatha Groves made fun of  and did not mind giving Donna Palliser a change of topic. 'I dreamed I was a girl,' he said. 'I could see my sweater. It was a green sweater with glimmery buttons, like light changing underwater. I looked at my sandals and they were white. I was walking by a river. I tried to see my face in the river but I couldn't. No one was with me. I tried to run with the river. I picked one peak of water and ran beside it and I thought it was the same peak. But then I wasn't sure. I didn't realise I was a girl in the dream until I woke up. While I was waking up I remembered I'm a boy, and I was surprised for a minute, until I remembered that's what I always am when I'm awake.'