April 23, 2009
All Families Are Psychotic - Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
2001
This is the craziest book I have read in a long time. It was so good. I have no idea where to begin. I read it all between last night at 8 pm and this morning by 6:30, and I just couldn’t put it down. I already knew I loved Douglas Coupland’s work, but I think this one may be my new favourite. It’s similar in a lot of ways to Miss Wyoming, with a main plotline set in the present, and a number of chapters of flashbacks to fill in background details. The characters are just nuts. Maybe I just just point out a few of the crazy details.
- The Mom, Janet and her son Wade both have AIDS. Janet got the disease via Wade, when Ted, the Dad, shot Wade. The bullet went through Wade and struck Janet.
- Ted was shooting Wade because Wade inadvertently slept with Ted’s new wife, Nikki. At the time Wade was unaware that Nikki was Ted’s new wife.
- Bryan, Ted and Janet’s youngest son, is having a baby with Shw (yes, that’s her name, Shw) but is angry because he thinks Shw wants to abort the baby. In actuality, she wants to sell the baby on the black market.
- Something about the letter Prince William left on his mother’s casket and a pharmaceutical kingpin.
- Ted and Janet’s daughter, Sarah was born without a hand due to Janet unknowingly taking drugs that cause birth defects. She’s now taking them again to try and counteract the ravages of her AIDS.
- Sarah is an astronaut about to go into space, and is having an affair with another one of the astronauts. The wife of the astronaut is having an affair with Sarah’s husband.
- There’s more. Honestly.
This book was so messed up. I loved every second of it. I can’t wait to pass this book on to someone else to enjoy. It’s been a while since I’ve stayed up all night to finish a book, and I almost made it. It’s also been a while since I got up early to finish a book.
Oh, the the book is about this family coming together. And it works. Somehow.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Reviews |
April 22, 2009
Prelude To Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
1988
Much like the last book I reviewed, Foundation And Earth, Prelude To Foundation is a dumptruck-full-of-money book. This book is a prequel to the Foundation series, and I’d like to think it was slightly better than Foundation And Earth.
This book focuses on the great Hari Seldon. Before the book begins, Seldon discovered psychohistory and presented a paper on it at a mathematical conference on Trantor, seat of the Galactic Empire, and now everybody wants him to predict a favorable future for their political faction. The only problem is that Seldon doesn’t believe there is any practical application for his new discovery. He meets with the Emperor, and tells him as much, and is about to head to his home planet when he meets with a journalist, Hummin, who advises that he is in danger due to the Emperor’s henchman, Eto Demerzel. The journalist takes Seldon under his wing, and from then the chase is on. The journalist hides Seldon in a local University and puts him under the watchful eye of Dors Venabili, a history professor at the university. After a scary situation, they are moved from sector to sector in Trantor by the journalist, always staying one half step ahead of Demerzel. It is through these adventures that Seldon learns about Galactic history and the truth of robots and Earth, and begins to have faith in the practicality of psychohistory.
This book has much the same plot structure as Foundation and Earth which I whined so eloquently about, and I won’t repeat it here. I always knew what was about to happen as far as plot twists, which took some of the fun out of the book, and was disappointed at how spineless and pliable the young Hari Seldon was. There was a romantic subplot, and it was handled with much more subtlety than the previous book, but I still wouldn’t call it good.
My verdict? Stick with the original trilogy.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Reviews |
April 20, 2009
Saturday morning, Alan and I set out with a simple task: Have the best day ever. The plan? There wasn’t much of one. Did we succeed? Well, we thought it was pretty great day. Maybe not “Best Day Ever”, but you gotta aim high.
We started out early, before sunrise. I’d been seeing amazing sunrises all week, and Alan had borrowed a colleague’s Nikon D80 he wanted to test out, so I suggested we bundle up and hit the beach to play with the camera and take some pretty pictures of the sunrise. We got out to the water just as the sun was starting to rise, and Tim Horton’s in hand, played with the D80. Alan owns a D40 that I’m starting to get the hang of using, so I played with it while he tested out the D80.
It was a bit too cloudy to get anything really breathtaking, but we had fun. The water was really calm, and it was so quiet. It was a nice way to greet the day. Also? It was a super nice spring day. On our way back to the apartment, we dropped my car off to get an oil change, and walked the four or five blocks home, in the early morning. I spent an hour or so on Alan’s computer playing with the pictures I had taken, and there are probably four or five that are “good-ish”, and I will post them later. We spent the rest of the morning lazing about, reading books and playing on our respective computers. We had a great frozen pizza for lunch, and then played board games all afternoon. Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, etc.
We were going to go back out and take pictures of the sunset, but the cloud cover was too heavy to get anything fun. The Skyway makes a great spot for sunset pictures, because you have these two massive bridges all lit from behind, and we will go another night and get some pretty pictures of it. I don’t remember what we did for the rest of the day, but it was probably fairly lazy. I think we went to bed early because we were up before dawn, but I don’t really know.
So was it the best day ever? Probably not. It was however a pretty great day. Alan and I hadn’t had a day where we just hung out together in a long time, and it was really nice. We were both in good moods and we enjoyed just being around each other. It was certainly the best day of last week.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Life |
April 17, 2009
Last summer after Alan and I got engaged at Kairos, we had to deliver a small fleet of bicycles back to a summer camp near my parent’s house. When I got there, there was a litter box and a bowl of cat food in the entry, but no sign of a cat. Mom told me that they had just brought home a cat, and her name was Coco, and that she was a little shy.
We didn’t see her at all. The entire two days we were there. I actually hunted for the cat, and couldn’t find her. I know all the good cat hiding spots, and there was never a cat in any of them. As we were driving home, I wondered aloud if I was being collectively pranked, if my Mom had some kind of weird new hobby, or if the cat had simply run away when they weren’t looking. Alan wasn’t very forthcoming and that made me think he was in on it, too.
The next time I was home was on my birthday two weeks later, for a wedding. The first day we were there, I saw no signs of a cat other than the food and litter box. Mom was a little unimpressed that I didn’t believe Coco existed. In the middle of the night, I heard a howling outside the spare bedroom door. It sounded like an angry ghost. After trying to ignore the awfulness for about five minutes, I open the door, and a pair of cat eyes reflected back at me, and then Coco took off like she’d just seen a ghost. Turns out I was wrong. My mom wasn’t losing it, and her frustration with my half-serious musings was completely valid.
I saw the creature the next morning. She sat at the doorway, staring at us, refusing to come any closer. She is a fully grown dark brown cat with tonnes of attitude. Some cats will pretend they like people. Coco would never sink to that level.
At Christmas, Coco would come into the room for upwards of fifteen minutes at a time before fleeing. She would sit next to you on the couch, provided that you were my Dad, who has magical cat powers, but you weren’t allowed to touch her. Coco doesn’t like large gatherings, either, so the fewer people in the room, the more social she’ll be. The last few times I’ve been home, she’s let me pet her, as long as I didn’t do so for very long.
Last Thursday night, when I went home for Easter, I got home and the place was empty. I let myself in, and sat down to read a book. Coco jumped up on my lap, plopped herself down, and stayed there for an hour or so till my Mom returned home.
I’m not sure what happened. I’m betting that it has something to do with my Dad’s magical cat powers, but Coco has turned into a fairly social, friendly cat. She sucked up to all the relatives on Sunday at Easter dinner, and didn’t even try to bite me this weekend. She even let me pick her up. She didn’t like it, but she tolerated it for almost a minute. How odd.
And that’s my Easter recap.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Life |
April 16, 2009
New Kids On The Block. Love the hair.
I like New Kids On The Block more than Nirvana.
And I love the Foo Fighters more than either of them.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Pop Culture |