On a Pale Horse
On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony
Published: 1983
This is my first Piers Anthony novel. My dad was a big fan of him when I was growing up, and I always saw his books lying around the house. Curiosity got the best of me, and I thought I’d start with his most famous.
Zane is a would-be photographer who has fallen on rough times. The story begins with him in an enchantments store looking for something that will change his life for the better, even though he can barely afford food. It’s an interesting scene, and does a good job of introducing the world. On A Pale Horse is set in what looks like modern earth, at least modern for the time, but magic and mythical beings have become a mundane part of life. There are cars but also magic carpets, photographers but also magicians – magic has been integrated into this society in much the same way technology has been integrated into ours.
His times fall even harder, and he eventually decides to off himself. In his apartment, while pulling a gun up to his head, Death walks in. His early arrival startles Zane and Death ends up accidentally taking the bullet. If you kill Death, you become Death, and so Zane take on the position.
He’s still mortal, and can still be killed, but Death’s accoutrements give him the special powers with which to perform his new job. The cloak protects against harm, and the shoes let him walk on water. He also has several pieces of jewellery that have been imbued with enchantments: an earing, a bracelet with a few gems on it, and a watch. He basically becomes the pimpest Grim Reaper you’re likely to see.
Most of the newly deceased travel to heaven or hell on their own, but those with a balance of good and evil in their soul need to be collected and sorted out individually, which is where Zane and his new magical bling come in. We follow him as he learns how to be Death, and over this time a conspiracy is revealed. We find that it might not have been blind luck that landed him this position.
The premise of this novel highlights what I love about the fantasy genre – being able to personify abstract ideas, for example, and play with the physics of a world allows us to really examine and challenge our regular lives without inhibition. This genre has a unique ability to pull this sort of feat off in a way that’s often underappreciated (and to be fair, often underutilized). Telling lies to reveal truth, as they say. Piers Anthony spends a lot of this novel building up scenarios that are designed to examine difficult to answer questions.
The problem lies in the execution, I think. I really could not get over his style of writing. The dialogue in particular, to me, felt so wooden. Some of it was almost as if he was trying to mimic witty Oscar Wilde dialogue and failing miserably at it, and some of it was just plain ol’ bad. Here’s a fun example:
She screamed “Mr. Z! You’re hurt!” She hurried to inspect the corpse, running right past Zane as if not seeing him. “In fact — you’re dead!”
That was not a flippant, comedic scene, or at least it hadn’t come across that way in the lead up. It was a landlord finding the dead body of a tenant. The entire book read like this – clunky and awkward. I dug some of his descriptive use of language, but it really didn’t work for the dialogue. No one speaks like this, no one has ever spoken like this, and I pray that no one will ever speak like this in the future.
I’m glad I read this finally, but it fell a bit flat. I don’t see myself continuing with the series.
The Classics Club
I’ve decided to join The Classics Club at A Room of One’s Own. I’ve been reading more classics lately, and I’d like to continue that trend. And I can’t resist a good list.
The goal is to read 50+ classic novels in five years. Will I be blogging in five years? Will I be alive in five years? Will society as we know it still exist in five years? I can answer none of these questions for you, but this will be fun up until any of that happens.
This is really just my current classic literature wishlist. If I read a classic that’s not on the list, I’ll swap one out. I haven’t really read many classics, so I’m assuming along the way I’ll find authors I love and authors I can’t stand, and the list will rearrange to reflect that.
What constitutes a classic? I have no idea. I suppose it’s an arbitrary label decided by popular opinion? For my list, I figure anything written in the middle of the twentieth century and before counts if it’s still around today. The only book published after 1970 that’s currently on the list was written by a Nobel Laureate, so I figure that works.
Here are my 50 classics to be read by March 23, 2017:
- The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato (Sometime BC)
- The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
- As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1623)
- The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (1623)
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1623)
- King John by William Shakespeare (1623)
- Othello by William Shakespeare (1623)
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (1888)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
- The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898)
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
- The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)
- The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912)
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1920)
- Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft by H. P. Lovecraft (1921 – 1936)
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)
- The Great Gatsby * by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931)
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933)
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
- The Hobbit * by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1839)
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945)
- The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949)
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)
- Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
- Moonraker by Ian Flemming (1955)
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)
- Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1960)
- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
- A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (1964)
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine by Kurt Vonnegut (1965)
- The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
- Chocky by John Wyndham (1968)
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)
* rereads
Your Brain on Fiction
The New York Times posted an interesting article on the neuroscience behind reading, how the brain reacts to the metaphors and descriptions in the same way it might react to the actual physical experience.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.”
– Annie Murphy Paul, Your Brain on Fiction
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (audio) by Mary Roach
Published: 2003
Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
What uses are there for cadavers? How have they been acquired over the years? What eventually happens to them? These are the questions that Mary Roach sets out to answer in this surprisingly funny, and often disgusting, book.
We begin with an introduction into how they’re used medically. From anatomy students to a plastic surgery workshop, the cadavers help train our medical professionals so they don’t screw up on the living. I couldn’t help but imagine accidentally walking in on that plastic surgery workshop just before it had started – a large conference room with forty decapitated heads resting on tables. That could be a shock first thing in the morning.
It wasn’t long until I had been lured into a false sense of security. I’m not that squeamish a person, but I don’t do well with bodily fluids or maggots while I’m eating lunch. There were some very specific explanations on what happens to a cadaver as it decomposes. This was at a Body Farm, where they test body decomposition in various environments to get a better understanding for forensic investigation, so it’s very worthwhile science and not gratuitous, but I should have avoided that chapter during lunch.
The chapter on body snatching was quite interesting. Cadavers were, and are, a necessary part of medicine, but in the UK before 1832 only the bodies of executed murderers were legally acceptable to use. There just weren’t enough for the required training in the country, and with no refrigeration to keep the few legal cadavers fresh, they had to look elsewhere. Paying body snatchers to retrieve fresh bodies from the cemetery became surprisingly common. It happened so often that people began to bury their dead in Mortsafes – locked iron cages. It’s an interesting moral situation, needing to steal corpses to help the living.
Roach also describes some controversial experiments around head transplants, such as Vladimir Demikhov creating a two-headed dog and Robert White transplanting a monkey’s head onto another monkey’s body. The bit that got me was when she described the act of feeding the Franken-monkey as a bit of a ‘dirty trick’, since his esophagus hadn’t been attached. It’s quite creepy, but it’s also research that could contribute to human head transplants in the future. Whether that’s an ethical choice, as opposed to harvesting that body’s organs to save multiple people, is another dilemma we may someday have to consider.
Ignoring the lunch I was eating corn chowder and reading about a cadaver’s stomach contents making its way back up the esophagus during decomposition, I enjoyed reading this. It’s a good mix of creepy and interesting. I’m focusing a little on the nasty bits, but it certainly becomes obvious that cadavers are important in training our medical professionals and furthering life-saving research.
But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on earth. To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don’t manage this sort of thing while they’re alive. Cadavers like H are the dead’s heroes.
It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.
If you aren’t already an organ donor, you can likely register online. If you live in British Columbia, you can register at BC Transplant. I know I’d rather save lives after death, whether directly through donation or indirectly through research, instead of wasting away in a box somewhere.
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Published: ~1590
This play is a little fucked up. Lets just make that clear. I’m not sure how it might have been received at the end of the fourteenth century, but I imagine it would raise the eyebrow of any modern reader. It’s politically incorrect in such a hilariously unapologetic way that you almost have to laugh in mild horror.
I’m going to spoil the plot now. I figure anything over five hundred years old is free game.
The play begins with an induction. A drunk named Christopher Sly is found unconscious in the street, and a lord orders his servants to place him in his nicest room for the night. In the morning they’re to dress him in lord’s clothing and offer him a lord’s breakfast, to trick him into believing that he’s just woken up from 15 years of delusion, that his life as Christopher Sly was all in his head. They do this, he believes it, and in the morning they present to him a play – The Taming of the Shrew. A note in the edition I was reading mentioned that this framing device may have had two purposes: it warmed the audience up to cruel humour and, by presenting the The Taming as merely a performance within the play, it takes away some of the sting of the misogyny.
Sly: [...]Ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet, nay sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.
It should be noted that this makes Shrew a play within a play within a play. Truly the Inception of the Renaissance.
So, Baptista Minola has two daughters: Bianca and her elder sister Katherine. Bianca is a hottie and Katherine is a complete ho-bag. She’s rude, ties her sister up and hurts her, and is basically a pain in the ass to everyone within shouting or hitting distance. Baptista, for some reason, won’t allow Bianca to marry until Katherine is wed. It’s a bit of a dick move on his part, so that might be a glimpse into where Katherine developed her attitude.
Bianca’s suitors – Hortensio, Gremio and Lucentio – are being cockblocked by this silly rule. Hortensio and Lucentio decide to disguise themselves as tutors so they can woo Bianca behind her father’s back (and also because it’s Wacky Fun).
Hortensio runs into his buddy Petruchio, whose motto with women is the bitchier the better, and sets him up with Katherine. He woos her, in what is the best scene of the play in my opinion, with a witty exchange of banter – every insult she throws his way he graciously endures and returns with a compliment or joke.
Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp, i’faith you are too angry.
Katherine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
Petruchio: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
Katherine: In his tongue.
Petruchio: Whose tongue?
Katherine: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
Petruchio: What, with my tongue in your tail?
He does threaten to cuff her at one point soon after this (warning sign numero uno), in retaliation to her hitting him, but that’s the only time in the play he actually threatens physical violence. They’re both very brash and sure of themselves, so it seems at this point like it’ll be a fun relationship to watch develop. Eventually she submits and they marry. He describes at this point, to Baptista, how he plans for their relationship to work:
Petruchio:
Why, that is nothing. For I tell you, father,
I am as peremptory as she proud-minded;
And where two raging fires meet together,
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.
So I to her and so she yields to me,
For I am rough and woo not like a babe.
Petruchio and Katherine get married, and he immediately rushes her off to his country home before the reception even begins (warning sign numero due). This is where it gets a bit messed up. He decides to tame her using the same technique that one would use to tame a falcon – he starves her of food and sleep. He dresses her in rags, keeps her hungry, makes sure that whenever she starts to drift off that she’s woken, and continuously threatens and shouts at all of the servants in front of her (using an exaggerated manner, as if to highlight her previous attitude).
Meanwhile, while Petruchio is waterboarding Katherine with love, things are getting sorted at the Minola estate. There’s much confusion over who’s who, but eventually Lucentio comes out on top and wins Bianca’s hand in marriage.
Petruchio and Katherine make their way back for the wedding, and we see Katherine’s final ounce of dignity and indignation fall away. Petruchio refuses to continue on the journey until Katherine declares that the moon is shining in the sky and not the sun. She’s refuses at first, but quickly gives in. Later in the journey Petruchio tells her that a man they meet is actually a woman, and she immediately agrees.
Petruchio: Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katherine: The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Katherine: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
[...]
Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Katherine: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay, then you lie. It is the blessèd sun.
The final scene involves Petruchio, Hortensio, and Lucentio betting on whose wife is the best behaved. None of them believe that Petruchio has managed to tame Katherine, so they have a servant call each woman and put 100 crowns down on whoever’s wife is first to arrive. Katherine turns out to be the only wife to actually show, but she eventually fetches the other two herself. When they all arrive, she lets them know how she feels.
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience–
Too little payment for so great a debt.
This doesn’t come across as sarcastic at all, just the final defeated message from a broken woman. I kept thinking she’d do something hilarious at the end to show a bit of her old fiery self, but no. Play finished! Enjoy the incredibly awkward horse carriage ride home with your loved one now!
A piece of ice. If thou doubt it, thou mayst slide from my shoulder to my heel with no greater a run but my head and my neck. A fire, good Curtis.
I loved getting back into Shakespeare finally. I really enjoyed the language and imagery while reading this, and I have to admit that I did get a kick out of the bizarre plot. It’s a great concept for a horror, I think, but it is a little strange with this ending.
A Long Way Down
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
Published: 2005
Years ago I read How to be Good and really enjoyed it. I wasn’t enamoured enough to run out and immediately to buy his entire bibliography, but I did mean to eventually get back to him. Better late than never, I figure. I’m extremely glad I finally did, because I ended up loving this.
The premise is simple but genius: four strangers climb to the top of an apartment building in London on New Years Eve with the intention of jumping to their deaths, but when they find each other up there it just kills the whole mood. After some discussion, they climb back down with a pact to not kill themselves until Valentine’s Day. We follow them as they struggle to come to grips with both their lives and their dependency on this newly formed gang of bewildered depressives.
A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down.
You wouldn’t think it from the description, but A Long Way Down is actually a lot of fun. It’s a great balance of serious and hilarious. The four point-of-view characters being so different and incompatible with each other, and yet desperately needing each other, results in both great bickering and interesting insights. I wouldn’t actually want to meet any of the characters, but they’re all easy to relate to and endearing in their own ways.
Coming off of As I Lay Dying, I was able to fully appreciate Hornby’s gift for characterization. They were so distinct and interesting that I never found myself rushing through a chapter to get back to my favourite character, which almost always happens in multiple viewpoint novels at some point.
There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve—apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy his entire bibliography.
Moab is My Washpot
Moab is My Washpot (audio) by Stephen Fry
Published: 1997
Narrated by: Stephen Fry
I’ve read a few articles here and there of Stephen Fry’s, but this is the first of his actual books, fiction or non-fiction, that I’ve read. Even so, I knew I was going to love it going in, as I’m already a huge fan of his. I’ve spent countless hours watching his comedy, documentaries, and interviews, and I can easily spend an evening listening to him give his opinions on any topic. He uses language in a way that can elevate fart jokes to fine art.
This is his autobiography, covering the first twenty years of his life – from childhood to his acceptance into Cambridge. He strolls through his memories, stopping now and then for a lively rant or informative digression. He’s very open in this, shockingly so at times, and it stayed interesting all the way through. The majority of the book covers fairly typical events, as this was before his life in entertainment – schoolyard trouble and embarrassment, angst over his father, experimenting and discovering his sexuality in his teens, and other such experiences an ordinary kid will have growing up. He manages to recall his childhood with a clarity, an enthusiasm, and an intellect that makes it seem a little more than ordinary.
No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.
I say these were ordinary experiences, but some, such as attending a boarding school, aren’t ordinary to me, so those events are fun to read about in their own right. Half of my enjoyment of the Harry Potter series was just the idea of going off to a boarding school every year as a kid, so in a way this is like reading about Hogwarts, only with less magic and more gay sex.
At the end of his teenage years, he really begins to struggle. After a failed suicide attempt, a long string of credit card fraud, and months without contact with his family, he found himself in jail. After his release and a change of heart, he just manages to get into the entrance exams for Cambridge and secures his acceptance.
It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
I really enjoyed this, I’m looking forward to reading about the next chunk of his life in The Fry Chronicles, which is sitting on my shelf now. I’m still considering picking up the audio book, though. He’s too good a narrator to pass up.
