Happy Victoria Day! With Happy Days All Around

Happy Victoria Day!

A view of the sky, Victoria Day 2020.

For those of us in Canada, where Victoria Day is a statutory holiday, that much was obvious. However, it turns out that there have been many other commemorative days this past week. My social media feeds are teaching me something, it seems.

On this holiday Monday of gorgeous weather and relaxing outside, on a day commemorating the monarch when Canada gained independence, let's also reflect on:

International Museum Day: Celebrated on May 18th every year, International Museum Day gives tourists and locals alike as good a reason as any to delve into the world's rich physical and cultural history. Sadly, I wasn't at a museum on May 18th in either 2020 or 2021 due to COVID-19-related restrictions, but the spirit lives on.

World Bee Day: Celebrated on May 20th every year, World Bee Day is a time to give thanks for all bees do for us, from pollenating flowers to creating delicious honey. I admired my houseplant while eating my homemade honey mustard dressing; I don't know a more festive way to celebrate from home. Remember, colony collapse is a science fiction-level disaster. Buzz on!

World Turtle Day: Shellebrated* on May 23rd every year, World Turtle Day lets us all watch Franklin, dream of post-pandemic Galapagos adventures, and withdraw into our shells at the end of a long, exhausting day. I wasn't sure how to mark the occasion, so 

On some other year, Victoria Day may fall on any of these days. Victoria Day is, by definition, the Monday on or before May 24, meaning it will always fall on May 18-24. I like it best this way, celebrating four days instead of three. If you've heard of these other fine days, now you get to see them all in one place.

Bzzzt!

*The World Turtle Day website encourages the use of this groan-worthy pun. Don't shoot the messenger.

May's Book: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Post-Apocalypse (2006 - 287 pp.)

Cormac McCarthy's The Road became a feature film within three years of its release (2009). I saw it when it came out, at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto. Usually, I read a book before watching the movie. In the case of The Road, watching the movie first helped me read the book.

The Road follows the lonely story of a man and his son travelling by foot across an unnamed portion of a post-apocalyptic United States of America. No character is ever named, even in memories, but there's never an everyman feel to The Road because of how non-relatable the experience is. The Road is perhaps best told as a movie, aside from Viggo Mortensen's terrific acting job, because of how blurred together the various buildings and stretches of road become in McCarthy's novel. McCarthy's dialogue and imagery are intense, drawing the reader into the story, but in a disembodied way that makes it feel like the reader is never really in those haunted houses or huddled under a beaten-up scrap of tarp.

McCarthy's refusal to reveal the cause of the apocalypse is crucial to The Road's appeal, yet he weaves the story so vividly I never bother to wonder what happened. Different eras worry about different apocalypses, from foreign takeover to mutually assured destruction to who knows what. The unstated apocalypse of The Road focuses instead on the contrast between the before times, which the father remembers constantly but exist only as a haze to the son, and the after times, which are so rife with danger that survival is the only goal. When the father recalls the before times early on, when the mother is still alive, "She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame." (19) McCarthy presents it as though it is a still from an old movie, the film wearing away with time as the owner frets over losing a memory. The after times are so bereft of options that the reader never stops to wonder what the father used to do for a living or where the son would have gone to school. The Road must have been simultaneously easy and difficult to write: easy in that a lot of character background can be omitted, difficult in that each scene has to shuffle the deck in terms of ways to portray life on the eponymous road.

The tensest moments are when the father and the son encounter other people. The floor hatch scene, (in)famous for how scary it is in the movie, makes the reader's heart beat faster just as the characters' hearts do. For all the monotony that most of the road entails, the main challenge being the stripped-down version of nature the characters endure, human threats present some of the greatest difficulties: "Run, he whispered. We have to run." (111) Conversely, the father and the son stay for short stretches in various abandoned houses, where the presumably deceased former inhabitants leave behind canned foods for our heroes' taste treats. Coca-Cola, canned pears, and canned tuna are among the best finds. As canned food evolves, a more futuristic take on The Road could feature anything from canned tom yum to canned butter chicken soup - but that would be cold (heated-up?) comfort to future characters.

For all the harshness of nature, whether it's the burnt-out ex-farmland or the oncoming winter, wildlife never seem to be a concern. Bears and wolves, if they still exist, don't appear tempted by the stacks of supplies people leave out while they go for walks on the beach. Humans, not animals, are the scavengers. The lack of corporeal wildlife makes the mere mention of animals as a conversation topic into spiritual subject matter. When the father and the son discuss the phrase "as the crow flies", the conversation quickly turns toward crows' lack of need to follow the road, charting their paths all over (but not as far as Mars), prompting the boy to ask: "If you were a crow could you fly up high enough to see the sun?" (158) It's refreshing to see some of the world's smartest avians presented as stand-ins for dreams of freedom rather than as stand-ins for death. Euphemistically left out of the corvid banter is that if people, who can open cans for food, are so starving, crows' situations must be at least as bad, if not worse.

The relationship between The Road's characters and freedom is a strained one. With society destroyed, there's no one left to tax, compel, or otherwise corral the characters. There's also nothing left to fight for. There's no freedom to do anything, as anything worth doing is irreparably lost, like a Toronto Raptors game during the COVID-19 pandemic but for all time. It also means that anytime a possession is lost, whether it's an article of clothing or a frying pan, replacing that item is a morbid scavenger hunt. Some of the people the father and son pass on the road stink and are wearing rags.

Amorality reigns in The Road, but the father grounds the son by repeatedly insisting that they're "the good guys". The bad guys are highway robbers, so by refusing to rob from others, or do anything worse, while repelling any robbers they meet, the father and the son become good guys by default. The son, who has few memories of the before times, ingrains the good guys/bad guys duality as his morality, in the absence of anything else. Near the end of the book, he asks a kindly stranger on the beach:

How do I know youre** one of the good guys?

The stranger answers:

You dont. You'll have to take a shot. (283) 

The guessing game the father and son play - deciding which houses to enter, which people to approach or avoid, which places to sleep - is totally encapsulated in those two lines.

Neither good nor bad, The Road is verbose. McCarthy uses words I didn't know frequently enough that I didn't bother looking up many of them, as I can generally tell what he means through context. Sometimes, the terminology creates a darkly medical atmosphere, as in "rachitic"; at other times, entire sentences are composed mainly of 7+ letter words. The density of the language adds to the book's dreamlike quality, as a first-person narrator would never describe the world with such arcaneness.

My emotional connection to the book revolves around the growing awareness of just how much I have, as does everyone I know. Something as mundane as a dish towel - there are four of them hanging in front of my oven - borders on unthinkable in The Road's world. I'm surrounded by outlets, which power all manners of electrical devices that occupy my time during the stay at home order; in The Road, electrical power is non-existent. When I lock my door, I feel content that I'm safe from whomever may lurk beyond my premises... but, as in post-apocalyptic fiction more generally,* the father and the son don't even feel safe when they're barricaded in a basement.

They have nothing, yet the pass the time they have, just like we all do. I'm just thankful for all the lighting, shelter and fresh food.

Ease of Reading: 8

Educational Content: 1

*Now there's a good novel study project: comparing the highway robbers in The Road to the vampires in I Am Legend.

**At various points, McCarthy omits apostrophes in contractions. It makes the book feel more scrawled down, although the presence of apostrophes in other places confuses the matter.

Bonus Book! Burn

Burn by Patrick Ness

Fantasy (2020 - 371 pp.)

I don't usually read young adult fantasy novels, but when I do, the back cover of Patrick Ness's Burn sets up a clear winner of a premise:

On a cold Sunday evening in 1957--the very day, in fact, that Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath of office for the second time as president of the United States of America--Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm...

My mind brimmed with possibilities. Historical labour relations fiction, like In the Days of the Comet? A sleek, sober take on the '50s, a la Queen's Gambit? A fresh take on dragons, like His Majesty's Dragon and Throne of Jade? Burn is also a very impressive book physically. My hardcover copy has a beautiful black dust jacket with flames and a stylized dragon on it, thick card stock-like paper, and fully black pages starting Part 1 and Part 2. It was all there for the taking...

...and to an extent, Ness takes it. The rural Washington State setting feels real. Sarah Dewhurst and Jason Inagawa, two misunderstood teenagers who aren't the right race at the right time, develop a palpable emotional connection. FBI agents Dernovich and Woolf, tasked to track Malcolm, have a good rapport for the first hundred pages. Kazimir the blue dragon, named as a "famous destroyer (of peace)", has a bouncier personality than his role as an independently contracted farmhand would suggest. The deal at the start of the book, in which Sarah's father Gareth negotiates Kazimir down to a quarter of the asking price up front because he can't afford the rest, immediately sets off a lightbulb in the reader's head that maybe there aren't a lot of good guys in this world.

The characterization falls apart whenever a character is only required to display a certain stereotype. Deputy Sheriff Kelby is a non-character, needlessly cruel and with no discernible motivation. Miss Archer, the librarian, seems to exist for the purpose of relaying plot-related gossip to the reader. Sarah herself is prophesied* to be present when potentially world-destroying events occur, signaling the presence of religious fanatic-slash**-assassin Malcolm and his newfound lover Nelson. Everyone is misunderstood and finding him- or herself, which I understand is a staple of young adult fiction, but I really wish they'd get on with it.

Ness succeeds with the '50s setting when it captures atmosphere and technology. With the advent of the smartphone rendering entire genres obsolete, writing a period piece is a convenient way to have characters be unable to reach the outside world. The agrarian setting also works in the '50s, given the Cold War uncertainty toward anything farther than house and home. The more Ness leans on these topics, the less on characters' soliloquies on social issues, the better.*** Ness's most incisive comment about his chosen time period comes right at the end of the book, capturing the spirit of Mutually Assured Destruction and the ambient buzz of paranoia that came with it: "All annihilation was mutual in the end." (367)

Similarly, when Ness discusses dragons, he clearly enjoys it, contrasting Russian blue with Canadian red, and dragon-cleared farmland to the interior British Columbia wasteland they call home. However, there are only two dragons with speaking parts in the entirety of Burn. The book has a dragon on the cover, and is ostensibly about dragons. As a reader, I want less chatter amongst the humans, more dealing with dragons. Call this the Snakes on a Plane Effect: when I see a movie called Snakes on a Plane, I want motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane. Similarly, when I read a book called Burn, that has a picture of a dragon on the cover, I want dragons. On the plus side, in a bizarrely academic turn, a dragon-turned-human explains Schrodinger's theory of alternate universes. (202)

Ness pulls off one-liners that keep Burn entertaining. Shortly after Malcolm and Nelson meet, Nelson says the eerie, "A world where you never wake up? Sounds like paradise." (82) This foreshadows the alternate universes existing in Part 1 and Part 2. When Agent Dernovich's daughter Grace notices Malcolm's movements toward the Dewhurst farm, he says to her, "Your eyes, sweetie... I should have them insured, they see so much." (289) Ness is clearly a talented writer, which makes Burn's highs high and its lows all the more head-scratching.

In Part 1, Gareth receives a blackmail letter that Ness never tells us who sends the letter or why, although we can certainly guess. Some questions are never meant to be answered, and some reader itches are never meant to be scratched. I like the lack of knowing; it's scarier that way. The triangle of tension between Sarah, Gareth and Kazimir jolts the story forward, putting our main characters in danger for the first time. That visceral, up-close danger is far scarier than a regular teenager having to save the world for the 34757039509th time. Ness hints at subverting that Hunger Games-esque trope when Kazimir tells Sarah, "What you must remember throughout all of this... is that you are not special", (119) but then she is. Of course she's special. You, reader, are too.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*I'm not even bothering to have Burn take the Fantasy Novelist's Exam.

**This is a brilliant pun. When you read far enough into Burn, you will know why.

***At one point, Ness, via the third-person omniscient narrator, teaches the reader the years in which Oregon and Idaho legalized interracial marriage. Burn is not set in either of those states.

April's Book: A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Historical Fiction (2016 - 462 pp.)

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles follows the life story of the fictitious Count Alexander Rostov, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow by the newly formed Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War I. The book spans the 1920s through the 1950s, featuring characters as diverse, and hilarious, as Emile the head chef, Audrius the bartender, Anna the actress, Nina the young girl who takes Rostov on a tour of the hotel, and an antagonist known as the Bishop.

I tend not to say this, but I wish I'd thought of A Gentleman in Moscow. Considering my love of old architecture and of European history, it seems like a natural fit. I especially love that Towles stayed at luxury hotels while writing the book. That said, Towles was 56 when A Gentleman in Moscow was released, and I'm only 33, so there is time yet. Much of the Metropol looks as it would have in that era. The next best thing, of course, is that I'm a discussion leader for the University of Alberta Alumni Association book club, where many of my fellow alumni are discussing the book.

Reading A Gentleman in Moscow during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the associated lockdown orders, made me simultaneously identify with Rostov and feel as though his experience is alien to mine. On the identifying side, I've certainly been cooped up, although thankfully, I purchased a treadmill in December and have run over 665 miles on it. On the other hand, the simple joys Rostov experiences at the hotel restaurant and bar, which form much of the action, are now foreign to me.

My apartment in downtown Toronto: decidedly not the Metropol Hotel, but then again, Rostov doesn't have my laptop, exercise equipment, or access to online shopping. With a little work and some creative ergonomics, it's cozy enough, though.

As I said last week to the U of A book club, Rostov starts the book surprisingly unexcited to explore the hotel, which is the first thing I would have done:

At first, he seems at a loss as to what to do. The fact that he needs Nina to inspire curiosity in him, despite him still being quite young at the time (he starts the book as a 33-year-old), made me sad when I read it. If I’d been imprisoned in the Metropol, I would have been darting around the place like a weasel.

I can relate to the “gilt cage” feeling in a big way. The lockdowns and stay at home orders effectively erased my lifestyle. My ROM membership is pointless. Last month, when retail stores were more open, I frantically used up my Winners/Homesense gift cards, having no clue when I’d be back. (I did actually need the items, though!) That said, I spend every day being thankful I have a nice apartment, my parents’ house and the cottage, plus enough money in the bank to survive, fitness equipment, kitchen gadgets, all the books and movies I can manage, and online shopping.

When staying in hotels, I make a point of exploring them, from any available fresh air (why is Rostov not constantly on the balconies?) to every amenity the hotel offers. I also love climbing stairs, which Rostov doesn't seem to take too seriously until four years into his stay.

The historical context is jarring; by being imprisoned in the Hotel, Rostov is effectively insulated from World War II. While millions of his countrymen were perishing on the Eastern Front, led by a government the polar opposite of what Rostov believes, he can lounge in the hotel restaurant with his old friend, the poet Mishka. To think that Rostov is almost executed at the start of the novel, but then is able to salvage a charming but silly life story including a lengthy stint as a waiter, makes the power plant scene all the brighter. (414) For all those decades, though, Rostov is incapable of visiting anyone else, so he is entirely at the mercy of his visitors' schedules, especially Anna's and Nina's.

Towles's prose flows effortlessly, replete with one-liners. Some of Rostov's funniest observations occur when he runs into his ever-changing cadre of friends. He first meets Anna in the hotel lobby, where she is incapable of commandeering two large wolfhounds that chase the hotel's one-eyed cat to the edge of the carpet. The dogs, suddenly on tile, slide almost all the way out of the hotel. (111) The Bishop always moves diagonally. (220) A peppered moth is used as a metaphor for the lightning-fast industrialization of the USSR. (336) 

A Gentleman in Moscow jumps around a bit, but is otherwise written in an easy, accessible way. I learned a fair bit about the Metropol Hotel, which made me feel transported to Moscow in a way I can't go anywhere right now. Nonetheless, fans of The Grand Budapest Hotel should like A Gentleman in Moscow well enough.

Ease of Reading: 8

Educational Content: 3

On Louder Sound's Top 20 Metal Albums of 1992

As Louder Sound recently pointed out, 1992 was a huge year for heavy metal. Mostly in the USA but also in Europe, metal bands ruled the pop music roost in a way rarely seen before or since. Megadeth's Countdown to Extinction hit #2 on the Billboard Album Chart, for example, and Alice in Chains's Dirt hit #6. Other highlights include alternative metal acts like Faith No More, rap metal like Rage Against the Machine, crossover thrash like Body Count, groove metal like White Zombie, and the utterly chilling black/death metal of Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky.

I get ahead of myself, though.

I repeat, here is the list.

Here's Louder Sound's list, stripped of all the descriptions (follow the bolded link above for those). Note that this list is unranked. I think that's a smart move given how diverse metal had become by 1992; while you say with confidence that Iron Maiden was greater than Saxon, how do you compare them to a thrash or death metal act?

Alice in Chains - Dirt

Body Count - Body Count

Cannibal Corpse - Tomb of the Mutilated

Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky

Dream Theater - Images and Words

Exhorder - The Law

Faith No More - Angel Dust

Godflesh - Pure

Helmet - Meantime

Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark

Kyuss - Blues for the Red Sun

Megadeth - Countdown to Extinction

Ministry - Psalm 69

Napalm Death - Utopia Banished

Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power

Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine

Rollins Band - The End of Silence

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain

Stone Temple Pilots - Core

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto

There they are, all twenty.

Here are my RateYourMusic ratings for 1992 albums, for reference as I set out my thoughts. I've also mentioned Megadeth and Alice in Chains on this blog, referencing their 1990 song "Five Magics" and their 1995 self-titled album respectively.

In the spirit of this entry being about a list, here are my thoughts, in bullet point form, as they come to me. Of course, they're unranked:

• If EPs are eligible for this sort of list, Tool's Opiate is a glaring omission. Its running time is 26:52, only a minute and a half shorter than Slayer's iconic 1986 album Reign in Blood. Longer EPs are more like albums than singles, so I'd put Opiate on the list.
• For extreme music, I'd like to have seen Brutal Truth's Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses and Demolition Hammer's Epidemic of Violence included. They're both better than Utopia Banished. For a more obscure pick, Aversion's Fit to Be Tied is great, but given most of the entries on the list, I suspect it's meant for more widely known names.
• Why 1992, why now? Thematically, it seemingly makes more sense to pick a notable anniversary, so the 1991 list would be released now, the 1992 list a year from now, and so on. I consider 1992 arguably the best year in recorded music history, though, so here we are.
• I'd pick Fear Factory's Soul of a New Machine over Godflesh's Pure, but they aren't far apart, and the industrial metal scene is covered either way.
• Although Fear of the Dark has the anthemic title track, it doesn't have enough other strong songs to place it in my Top 20. Sorry, Iron Maiden, but 1992 wasn't the '80s for you. Similarly, Helmet's Meantime isn't strong enough front-to-back, despite the awesomeness of "Unsung".
• The only one of these albums I haven't yet heard in full is the Rollins Band's The End of Silence. I was about to rectify that situation while writing this entry, but the album is somehow not on Spotify. Fiddlesticks.
• For more tripped-out music, Melvins' Lysol and Neurosis's Souls at Zero would have been good editions. While neither was a chart hit, both were at least as notorious as Exhorder's The Law, which I'd omit, considering Pantera and White Zombie are both clearly better groove metal bands. I'd also take Melvins or Neurosis over Sleep, but that's a stylistic choice.
• For more death metal, Obituary's The End Complete and Solstice's self-titled album should both find a way onto this list. The lack of FLDM is another omission. Fun fact: Solstice singer/guitarist Rob Barrett joined Cannibal Corpse in 1994. In one of the more puzzling decisions in death metal history, the band didn't prod him into singing. I consider Barrett a better singer than George Fisher. That said, we're still in 1992 here, when Cannibal Corpse still had Chris Barnes...
• Is Core really metal? It's certainly at the hard end of hard rock, especially in songs like "Crackerman". Although Core might be a top 5 album from 1992 in rock music in general, it's tempting to disqualify it here in order to open up a spot for a more purely metal album. I'll leave it on, if only because albums like Angel Dust are often softer than Core. Seeing two California alternative bands headline a Best of 1992 list doesn't offend me in the least.

My drops:

• Exhorder - The Law
• Godflesh - Pure
• Helmet - Meantime
• Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark
• Napalm Death - Utopia Banished

I wouldn't include Rollins Band if I were making my own list from scratch, but I can't recommend dropping an album I haven't heard in full.

My adds:

• Brutal Truth - Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses
• Demolition Hammer - Epidemic of Violence
• Melvins - Lysol
• Obituary - The End Complete
• Tool - Opiate

Genre-wise, I've kept the distribution roughly the same. Think of replacing Exhorder with Demolition Hammer as maintaining the thrash/groove balance, replacing Helmet with Tool doing the same for alternative, and the rest being a slight tilt toward sludge and doom metal. Obituary is mandatory.

It'd be a failure to not include some auditory evidence for my adds, so here's Demolition Hammer's "Skull Fracturing Nightmare":

Here's Obituary's "The End Complete", which, unbeknownst to me until now, has a music video:

Not top 20-worthy, you say? Well, you'd be wrong.

Hopefully I didn't miss anything...

March's Book: The Scar

The Scar by China Mieville

Fantasy (2002 - 638 pp.)

In China Mieville's The Scar, the story picks up off where his 2000 novel Perdido Street Station ends, but with completely different characters and settings. Bellis Coldwine is an exile from the city of New Crobuzon, where she is on a ship containing Remade* cargo destined for slavery abroad. The ship is captured,** making Bellis, the Remade Tanner Sack, and a host of other passengers into unwilling inhabitants of the floating city Armada, which is on a mysterious mission across multiple seas. Along the way, they encounter strange species, are involved in multiple intrigues, and have to endure characters of unknown loyalty such as Silas Fennec (Simon Fench), the professor Johannes Tearfly, and the elite mercenary swordsman Uther Doul. Unlike Perdido Street Station, the urban setting takes a back seat, as do the Remade. The human characters' internal demons and the open seas are what move The Scar.

Being stuck inside during the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders made me more than ready to read a book that takes place on a floating city. The ship seems to lack any jurisdiction other than its own, going even farther than the walking cities in Mortal Engines, to the point that Armada is a piratical denizen of international waters more than it can be identified with any nationality. Fittingly, the ship is teeming with characters who may be working for the Lovers, who are Armada's mysterious captains, or for New Crobuzon, various other factions, or simply for themselves. Doul, my favourite character, is so cloaked that Bellis can never guess his intentions despite having multiple one-on-one meetings with him, discussing seemingly sensitive information she genuinely does not know why he is sharing with her. Then he uses his Possible Sword to hack and slash all the possible cuts into his enemies, though, so at least that part is clear. When Bellis first boards Armada, the woman of the Lovers explains to her, "In Armada you are not distinguished. Here you are free. And equal." (79) The characters' ragtag equalities reminds the reader of the Royal Navy or of conquistadors, adventuring without a care as to where they came from.

Mieville's interest in economic issues shows throughout The Scar, which, with my industrial relations background, is one of my favourite aspects of the book. During one of the Doul-Bellis discussions, Doul tells her that "You have no idea of the liberation of selling your services, of doing what your employer tells you. I am not a leader." (386) In a world in which characters often own their own ships (e.g.: the Lovers) or are slaves (e.g.: the destiny of the human cargo at the start of the book), Doul loves being an employee. Ironically, piracy lends itself more to boom-bust propositions than to a steady salary, but Doul never appears to struggle financially throughout The Scar. Armada is wealthy in general: "Poverty was less likely to kill. Fights were more likely to be fueled by booze than desperation. A roof was likely to be found, even if it drizzled plaster." (263) It is never made entirely clear who is poor on Armada, but the main characters all have money and freedom, which is all they ask for. Even Bellis and Tanner are constrained mainly by their inability to leave the floating city.

With the Armada drifting in all sorts of directions, fueled by a creature called an avanc that is never completely described but calls to mind a whale/giant sea slug hybrid, everyone is powerless, even the powerful. When Bellis and Silas engage in conduct detrimental to the ship (no spoilers), Doul invokes Hanlon's Razor in his remark to Bellis that "You weren't trying to destroy us; you were just stupid." (503) While Bellis comes off as highly intelligent, there is always a sense that there is more to the story that neither she nor the reader knows. This is not limited to the other characters' intentions; her own letters are to "Dear ____", with the blank never filled. While Doul points out that the unknown identity of the recipient robs her of using any inside jokes, she counters that she is more able to bear all her secrets. By the end of the book, inspired by Doul's adventures and reasoning, she writes that "I am very powerful right now. I am ready to mine all of the possibilities, make one of them fact." (637) I love this letter to no one concept, as it has all the personality of a diary but also the explicit intent to be displayed at some undisclosed future point.

Throughout The Scar, Mieville loads the reader with vivid descriptions. Characters' weapons include a statue that can turn its owner into a snakelike creature living outside the existence of time. Characters themselves can have anything from tentacles sprouting from their chest to a gigantic proboscis. The veining cracks spreading across a submarine's portholes create suspense in a way pure action can't. One particularly beautiful description is of the lightning elementals emerging from the storm over the sea, "metamorphosing in arcs of current, trailing a slew of ghost shapes formed in their discharge, mimicking the outlines of the city's buildings, mimicking fish and birds and faces." (409) Earlier on, when the reader is still getting used to the characters' disparate heroics, Tanner's escape from the bonefish reminded me of the giant Pacific octopus eyeball I saw at the New England Aquarium in 2009.*** On the flipside, the language is so dense at times it would be almost impossible for an ESL reader. I have no idea if a translation of The Scar is even possible. I usually give nods to when a book I read teaches me a new word, but The Scar contains so many obscure or fabricated words it's best to set aside the dictionary and read through for context.

There are two roadblocks for beginning readers looking to dive into The Scar. One is the sheer number of characters, species, ship names and place names. Imagine Game of Thrones but also having to remember which characters have wings, gills, more than four limbs, or some similarly crazy setup. A Dramatis Personae-style itemized list of characters could have arguably helped here. The other is the extremely slow start. Bellis is unmentioned until page 9, after a prologue that consists of nothing but description. Then  when she does appear, it starts in the form of a letter containing contextless people and places. Although Bellis's letters make increasing sense as The Scar goes on, the first one is a difficult read. The Scar has the polar opposite of in medias res.

Like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is a long book, clocking in at 180,000 words. If you've read Mieville before, this is to be expected, so plan your locked-down evenings accordingly. If not, start at the beginning. The possibilities are many.

Ease of Reading: 3

Educational Content: 1

*Remade are explained in the linked November 2017 entry on Perdido Street Station. From that link, "Remade [are people] who have animal parts grafted onto them for various reasons". For example, someone might be remade with eagle wings to be able to fly, or gills to be able to breathe underwater.

**This piece of information spoils the first 50 or so pages, but is completely unavoidable, as most of the book's events make no sense without knowing that the entire book isn't spent on the Terpsichoria.

***The only pictures I could find of this ocular marvel have so much light shone on them that the effect is lost. Imagine a shimmering silver disc, the size of a dinner plate, the only thing visible against a field of blackness. That's what I saw.

Happy March Madness Kickoff Day!

It shocks me that I haven't posted about March Madness on here before, but here we go.

Every year since the '90s, I've watched the NCAA Division I Men's basketball tournament. I spent hours on my bracket this year, analyzing each individual matchup. That may all be for naught, but I thought I'd share it with the world nonetheless:

Go Winthrop, Liberty, and especially Gonzaga!

My NBA Draft-crazy mind will be going nuts over all this.