Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

I had put off reading this book for years, and I'm not sure why. It's not like long books are scary to me, and reviews likened the book to Dickens and Austen, who are two of my faves (well, Austen is. Dickens is a bit of a slog). My brother-in-law had read it a few years ago, and kept asking me if I had. It was getting embarrassing, so I figured I'd better get to it, but started reading with trepidation. Once I started, I had to force myself to put it down. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is long and rambling, and the tone and style change throughout the book, but it all works and melds together to form a brilliant story that drew me in and so involved me in the characters' lives that I would welcome a sequel.

Too much happens in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to even begin to summarize the story. So, in the words of Inigo Montoya, let me sum up. In York, there is a society of gentlemen magicians who study, but do not practice, magic. Then, Mr. Norrell shows up, and rocks some real magic by making all the statues in the York cathedral talk. And, boy, do they have some stories. Mr. Norrell makes the York magicians sign a contract to never practice magic, and he starts buying up all of the magic books in England.

He moves to London, and performs some very special magic to save the life of Lady Pole, but he enlists the help of a faerie gentleman, who exacts a terrible price. Not from Mr. Norrell, but from Lady Pole. Norrell grants the faerie half Lady Pole's life, not realizing that it was going to be the night-time half. Every day. She is whisked off to faerie every night, and spends her days in kind of an exhausted fugue state. And whenever she tries to tell someone about what's happening, she starts speaking nonsense. She despises Mr. Norrell for doing this to her. Lord Pole's valet gets sucked into this as well, because the faerie man takes a liking to him.

Jonathan Strange decides he wants to become a magician, and becomes Mr. Norrell's pupil. They work together to bring magic back to England, but they have differing ideas of what it means to be a magician. After they part ways, Strange goes to the continent to help with the war against France, and begins to publicly question Norrell upon his return.

There is so much more in this novel, including John Uskglass, Strange's wife, Italy, eternal darkness, escapes from faerie, and a new king of faerie. All I can say is that if you have been thinking about reading this book and putting it off, don't do what I did. I'm looking forward to next year, when I can read it again.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish starts in the same place that the first Hitchhiker's book did: with a young woman on her own in a cafe in Rickmansworth who has just figured it (the big IT) all out. The first book was not her story. The fourth book (in the trilogy) is.

Arthur has returned to Earth (which, yes, was destroyed in book 1) and hitches a ride with the young woman and her brother. She's unconscious in the back seat, but Arthur still manages to fall in love with her. His house (which was also destroyed in book 1) is still standing, although his cat didn't make it. He realizes that he has only been gone for around six months, although he's really been gone eight years. He explains his absence by telling his friends at the pub that he went to California, had his fat turned into gold and had his face dropped for that lived-in look.

Ford, meanwhile, is causing trouble in bars. As the Guide updates, he is astonished to see that the entire entry that he wrote about the Earth during his 15 years there is now in there (replacing the original entry "harmless"); after all, he was there when it was destroyed. Now he's got some unfinished business to attend to, and he sets off to find Arthur.

Arthur has set off to find the young woman in the car, and along the way meets a Rain God (no, seriously), and finds her on the side of a road. It turns out her name is Fenchurch, which must be funnier to British people than it is to me (same goes for Ford Prefect). He gets her phone number, loses it, and then finds her again when he goes looking for the cave he lived in on prehistoric Earth, when it turns out to be in the same place as her apartment. In her apartment, he finds that she has the same fishbowl that had mysteriously turned up at his house when he came back. He also finds that there's something very wrong with her - her feet don't touch the ground.

Back to the whole "what the heck happened to the Earth?" thing. As far as everyone on the planet knew, the huge yellow spaceships and destruction was all a collective hallucination brought about by the CIA dosing the water. One of the only people who know the truth is Fenchurch, which is why she was kept drugged for a while. Oh, and all the dolphins disappeared, and no one knows where they went. Arthur and Fenchurch travel to California to meet with Wonko the Sane, another recipient of a fishbowl, and possibly the only other person who may know what really happened. Wonko shows them the writing on the fishbowl, "So long, and thanks for all the fish." It's a farewell gift from the dolphins, brought to them from the Campaign to Save the Humans.

Ford makes it back to Earth in his usual exciting fashion and makes his way to Arthur's house. Ford gets what he came for (old movies) and the three of them take off; Arthur and Fenchurch to find God's Final Message to his Creation. I won't tell you what it is. That would spoil the fun.

Just about every paragraph in a Douglas Adams story is packed with humor, but a smart kind of humor that makes you think while you're reading. He made me think about things in a very different way when I first began reading his books (a real eye-opener for a teenager), and he has continued to challenge me. If you like his books, please read his nonfiction book Last Chance to See (which I will probably review some time later).

Life, the Universe & Everything - Douglas Adams

When we last saw our intrepid intergalactic travellers, Zaphod and Trillian had just met the man who rules the Universe and his cat, the Lord. Arthur and Ford had crash landed on early Earth with the useless Golgafrinchams, who may just be our ancestors. We pick up five years later - Ford and Arthur have parted ways, and Arthur is living in a cave somewhere in England (before it was called that, of course). Arthur has had no contact with anyone, save an insult from Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged (an accidental immortal who has decided to pass his forever by insulting everyone in the universe in alphabetical order) two years earlier. Arthur sticks a rabbit bone in his beard and decides it's time to go mad. Excellent timing, because Ford has just returned from a trip to Africa (where he invented giraffes) with information that there are eddies in the space time continuum. After a bit of a "who's on first" discussion about Eddy, a sofa appears galloping about, Arthur & Ford jump on, and end up on Lord's Cricket Ground in the middle of a test match between England and Australia, two days before the Vogons blew up (will have blown up?) the Earth. And this is just the first couple of chapters, folks.

Arthur and Ford run into Slartibartfast (late of Magrathea and creator of fjords), trying to save the universe from the evil Krikkit robots. Slarty's spaceship is protected by a Somebody Else's Problem field, and looks like a small, upended Italian restaurant (more on that in a bit). The Krikkit robots are the last ones left from the ancient Krikkit wars, in which the people of Krikkit tried to destroy the entire universe so they could be alone (long story - they were encased in a dust cloud, thought they were alone, sang lots of whimsical songs, and then a spaceship crashed on their planet. They were able to use it to build one of their own, flew out of the dust cloud, saw the rest of the universe and decided it had to go - more on that later too). The robots are trying to put together the key that opens the slo-time envelope in which the Krikkiters are imprisoned (and have been for millenia) so that they can get back to destroying everything. The key looks like a cricket wicket (three vertical columns and two horizonal bails), and the robots have to get them from various places, one of which is Lord's Cricket Ground on that day. They succeed, and the chase is on to prevent them from setting their masters free.

The reason why Slarty's spaceship looks like an Italian restaurant is because it kind of is. It runs on Bistromathics, because in space travel, the numbers are awful. But have you noticed that numbers behave differently in restaurants than they do anywhere else? Someone decided to harness that power, and one-upped the improbability drive for space travel efficiency. Pity about the decor, though.

After a trip to a party that has been going on for generations, and is airborne (plus a side-trip for Arthur to a cave with a weird dude who believes Arthur is responsible for all of his deaths), the boys find Trillian and make it to Krikkit just in time to see the robots complete their mission. The Krikkiters have been working hard all this time, and have developed an ultimate weapon - a bomb that would completely destroy the universe. Why, you ask? Good question.

Turns out the dust cloud in which Krikkit was enveloped wasn't a dust cloud at all, but the pulverized remains of Hactar, a supercomputer that failed in its duty grillions of years ago (that is, to create a weapon that would destroy the universe). He's been working hard and has finally done what he was tasked to do. Luckily Trillian managed to talk everyone out of using the bomb (although Hactar tried to pull a fast one on Arthur, Arthur's flying skills saved the day) and the universe was saved. Zaphod and Marvin helped a little too.

It's impossible for me to critique these books, because I've loved them since I was a teenager. Also because I read this (and the next book) in one night because I couldn't sleep because I think I might lose my job. These books helped me through a difficult night. I'm still employed (for now), but we'll see.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams

"The story so far: A race of hyperintellingent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer named Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For 7 1/2 million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet - especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program."

So sayeth Douglas Adams on the first page of "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," and why mess with the master's work?

Our story picks up where we left off, with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian fleeing the Vogons, at the behest of the universes' psychiatrists, who wanted to destroy the last two remaining Earth inhabitants, Arthur and Trillian. The theory being, if we know the question and the answer, then what the heck would we need psychiatry for? I guess that's what Scientology's all about. Only crazier.

Anyway, they're all hungry and heading for food, when they all get sidetracked. Well, Zaphod gets sidetracked, and the rest of the gang ends up in his pocket. This is after Arthur almost gets them all killed by trying to get the spaceship's computer to make tea, they hold a seance to talk to Zaphod's great grandfather (Zaphod Beeblebrox the 4th - long story), Zaphod ends up on Ursa Minor Beta at the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (where he utters several of my favorite lines of all time: "I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis. . . . Listen, three eyes, don't try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Ok, dorky, but remember I was in high school when I first read it). After a series of misadventures, the gang ends up at the Restaurant. They have to go waaaaay forward in time to the actual end of the universe - and have dinner during the Gnab Gib.

After they steal a spaceship that turns out to be a stuntship for a rock band that is programmed to dive into a sun, they use a malfunctioning teleporter to escape. Zaphod and Trillian end up back on the Heart of Gold, and get to meet the guy who runs the universe, who talks a lot like Alan Watts. Ford and Arthur end up on board a ship full of useless Golgafrinchams (phone sanitizers, marketing managers, and jingle writers, among others) who were tricked off their planet and crashed on what turned out to be the Earth. They're indirectly responsible for the demise of the natives, and therefore the corruption of the computer program. The closest Arthur gets to figuring out the Question is by using a set of made up Scrabble letters, and finding: "What do you get when you multiply six by nine." Edified yet?

Sorry for the long book report, but a lot goes on in this book - even more than what I shared. Douglas Adams was able to cram a lot of story into a little space. Every single one of his books makes me smile. This one is worth reading just for the bits about the Total Perspective Vortex and the man that runs the universe.

Up next - Life, the Universe and Everything.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

There's a reason why every time I have the opportunity to give a number (sports jersey, lottery, etc.), I always pick 42. Trite? Yes. Unimaginative? Without a doubt. But I look upon it as my homage to the late Douglas Adams, the man who opened my eyes to a whole world of literature and thought when I was in high school. I'm pretty old, so I've been reading and re-reading these books for well over 20 years. I don't remember which friend introduced me to the Hitchhiker's books, but I'm forever in her debt, whoever she is.

For those of you who haven't read any of the books (and where have you been?), here's a quick overview. Arthur Dent is your average 30-something non-Londoner Brit. On the day that his house is scheduled to be torn down to make way for a bypass, he learns that his good friend Ford Prefect is actually from Betelgeuse (not Guildford), and that the Earth is about to be destroyed by the Vogons (a vile lot) to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Ford rescues Arthur from Earth, and interstellar hijinks ensue for five books (in the trilogy). Ford and Arthur encounter Zaphod Beeblebox, President of the Galaxy, Ford's cousin, and all-around hoopy frood. Traveling with Zaphod is Trillian (f.k.a. Tricia McMillan), who Zaphod stole from Arthur at an Earth party some months before.

Anyway, the reason I decided to start the Cannonball Read with these books (and I'll be reading and reviewing all of them) is because of the effect they had on me when I first read them, and still have when I re-read them. Douglas Adams introduced me to British humor. I knew nothing of Monty Python or anything else when I was 13 or 14. No clue. These books showed me a whole different level of funny. He made me want to write like him, and to speak the way he wrote. He made me want to be clever. I fear that I will never live up to Adams' cleverness, but I try.

In this installment, our intrepid travellers make their way to Magrathea, a planet whose inhabitants made their living building custom planets for the very rich. It turns out that they built Earth for some hyperintellingent pandimensional beings, who manifest themselves in a very interesting way in our dimension. Turns out we're only the third smartest life form on the planet. Earth and its inhabitants were part of a huge computer program to learn the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything (the answer is 42, but no one bothered to figure out the question). Because Arthur was there when it was destroyed, the HIPD beings need his brain to access the question. Problem is, they need it outside his head. They offer to replace it with a simple computerized brain (which Zaphod thinks would work just fine - all is has to do is ask "what?" and "where's the tea?"), but Arthur's friends rescue him anyway.

When they escape Magrathea, they head for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Which I hope to have read & reviewed by this weekend. Happy reading, all!

Cannonball Read Part Deux, Electric Bookaloo

As so named by the Pajibans. I'm hereby dedicating this particlar blog to the Cannonball Read II endeavor. Fifty-two books in fifty-two weeks, plus reviews of each. We'll see how far I get. I remember winning the summer library reading contests when I was in grade school (first prize was - more books!), so I have a winning tradition to uphold.

Plus, it's for a good cause.

First Post

So I decided to try to write again. Maybe even do something daily, like a real writer. But I didn't want to do it on my home or work computer because then I wouldn't be able to keep it private/quiet/whatever.  Not that blogging is private, but it could be a better option so long as I don't tell anyone about it, at least not right away.

Anyway, the title of the blog is from a neighborhood where I grew up. I always thought my town was pretty small, but sometimes I wonder. I graduated with over 500 people, I think, so maybe not so small. Most streets didn't have sidewalks or curbs, the grass just ran to the street. My dad put up railroad ties to mark off our yard, but not everyone did. But there was this one street that my friend Debbie and I would ride our bikes to. The houses weren't any better than anywhere else (that I remember), but this street was special, because there were sidewalks and curbs. It made everything look nicer. We wondered about the people that lived in those houses, how lucky they were to live on that street. I've been gone from my hometown since 1987. I wonder if that street would still be as beautiful and magical to me now. Doubt it.