Discovering Oryx and Crake

"Snowman wakes before dawn" by Jason Courtney

I'm usually not big into reading novels on the bestseller lists. Sometimes I will pick one up to see what all of the "hoopla" is about, but normally I read Southern. Anything written about New Orleans that isn't full of sex and sleaze, down-home boy stories, plantation creepiness, anything historic. Of recent, though, in researching for a story/novel (who knows at this point) I am attempting to write, I have read my share of post-apocalyptic novels. Lit not as tame as the Hunger Games (which I DID enjoy) but not to the point of creature-infested landscape. Yes, I am on the committee for the Shreveport Zombie Walk, 4 years as of now, just participated in a zombie "race", and dressed my 7 year old up to be in a zombie music video for a local band, but I can't read World War Z. I just can't. I guess all of my zombie hobbies are done to conquer my fears. I have watched my father return as a zombie in my dreams since I was 10 year old. Maybe this is my way to "stick it" to those pesky dreams.

So, in reading of Earth ravaged by plagues, famine, nuclear attacks, terrorism, and even the slowing of the world's rotation, I have discovered a gem that was released in 2003 by Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake (first full chapter). I only speculate that I was in a different "reading place" when this book came out or maybe I just had to find it at the right time...now! And wow! I'm reading a local library copy and flew through 100 pages last night, paper cuts from the crackly plastic cover and all. I didn't want to put it down and go to sleep! Thank goodness it's a thick novel! I won't even attempt to provide a synopsis for this one, I'll leave it to the pros. I hope you will pick up a copy of this fantastic novel! If you've already devoured it, I'd love to know what you thought!

"The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes — into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief." —The Publisher.

Blue Dog

 

Blue Dog. You can't live in the state of Louisiana without knowing who Blue Dog is. This pooch is EVERYWHERE! I'll admit that sometimes it gets tiring seeing the spectral blue puppy on signs, Blue Dog Cafe t-shirts, books, and more. A few years ago, much to the artist's chagrin, someone even made Blue Dog roadkill on a street in New Orleans. The photo even made the Times Picayune. Poor Blue Dog.

My little girl Abby LOVES Blue Dog. I've taken her to the Rodrigue gallery in the French Quarter. We visited the gazillion foot Blue Dog in Metairie with Geaux Saints written across his torso. She has Blue Dog books and has even painted me my own watercolor Blue Dog for my office.

Blue Dog is now showing up in a novel that I am formulating in its most primitive stages. In this case Blue Dog will appear in his natural form, of the loup garou.

A terrific blog post by George Rodrigue's wife Wendy tells the fascinating story of how Blue Dog came to be and where he got his name. The Beginning

Sleep Book Marking - A New Reading Disorder?

I have developed a condition...

It is not life-threatening nor does it require any type of medication or therapy. It has been going on for over a year and I find it more funny than debilitating. I am a sleep book marker. 


The symptoms are as follows:

• reading late at night
• lamp light in the eyes
• instances of dropping the book
• blacking out (falling asleep, whatever)
• discovering the next day that you are no longer on the page or even chapter that you last remember. 

I have come upon four scenarios.... 1) Either I truly am jamming my bookmark between random pages and chucking it on the bedside table. 2) My husband or child has been playing a cruel trick on me for over a year. You would think they would get tired of it by now. 3) My cat and/or dog is secretly reading my books while I sleep. In this case, I need to set up some kind of surveillance because if this is the case, we're going to the circus y'all! 4) My bedroom is haunted and there is a phantom hanging around until I fall asleep and then removing the bookmark I carefully placed in my book and slipping it into another chapter. Ghostly chuckling beside the bed for making me feel like an idiot the next day, of course.

At this point I will take the blame for this strange series of events that has been plaguing me for so long, but if I wake up with a different book on the bedside table, I'm calling an exorcist!

I'll show you my support if you'll show me yours!

Paper books or e-books? Paper books or e-books? The debate goes on and on and on. Independent bookstores are closing left and right. Newspaper offices are either closing or firing staff members at enormous rates. The Times Picayune, the oldest continuous newspaper in the country, has decided to cut back not only staff members, but how many days a week they publish! The residents of New Orleans are deeply saddened over this. Apparently the newspaper office didn't get the memo during Hurricane Katrina that not everyone in the city has access to t.v. and internet. Many people's only means of getting the news is through the newspaper. I was let go from my local newspaper a couple of years ago due to lack of budget, so I know how it feels on the other side of the spectrum.

But I digress. What now has me torn up during this whole paper or electronics debate is in my search for some mass market paperbacks, of all things. I recently started Southern writer Ace Atkins' Nick Travers series. I had gotten the first book, Crossroad Blues, from an online book swap. So, now I'm finished with this book and would like to continue reading. I, personally, like to keep series books in the same format. All of them being either paper or Kindle or Nook. I look on Barnes & Noble's website hoping that I can locate the other 3 books in the store and then use the "Pick Me Up" option to have them waiting on me in the store.  Fail. So I look on Amazon.com for the books. Only available on e-book it says. Fail. So I decide to just go to Barnes & Noble anyway, hoping that the website just didn't know what it was talking about. Customer service could only find the most recent two novels by Ace Atkins, those not being the same series I started. Ugh!

That night, my husband and I watched the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Afterwards I decided that I would finally like to read the books. Seeing as I just had surgery on my neck to repair the nerves leading to my arms and hands, I am excited about being able to hold a book in my hands pain free. I would like to get a copy of the paper book of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...no dice unless I want to order it online. My local B&N doesn't even have the first book in mass market paperback. (I highly recommend the movie, by the way)

I support the independent book industry in full. I also enjoy my Kindle and Nook and take turns about with both e-book and paper formats. My argument is this...how can consumers effectively support independent or even chain book stores when the only things on the shelves are Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight? I live in Shreveport, Louisiana and author Ace Atkins lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Is is such a stretch to carry his books? Why is there such a hype over The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but then you can't even find the first novel in the series except in e format? Come on people! It's a vicious cycle, I know. Publishers have to actually print the books in order for the bookstores to carry them. Seeing that so many good books are out of print, what does this say about readers in 2012? Apparently the Twilight fans outweigh the fans of classics, if you call 1998 classic (when Crossroad Blues was published).

A Text That Everybody Knows

So, I've been spending a lot of time recovering from surgery and what-not...knowing that I want to start writing again but not knowing what in the world to say. I've browsed through piles of Cheezburger photos, listened to a lot of music, and watched hours of music videos while stuck in the hospital. It seems that everyone but me has something to say. I find it interesting that the different entertainment mediums are now crossing into each other. For instance, one of my favorite songs, Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye, has been parodied all over the internet for it's popular line "But you didn't have to cut me off." The line has been added to numerous photos of traffic jams, Vincent Van Gogh's self portrait, and many more. Isn't it funny that there's no escape from reading, even if it is fun?

Writer's Block

What would you do if you could never write again? What would you do if you could never convey your thoughts again? I encountered these questions first hand two days ago during a medical scare. These were questions I never thought I'd have to ask, especially at my age.

Even if I don't immediately put it on paper or in type on the computer, everything I encounter in my life, I think about how I could tell it in story. There are family stories that I want to tell. Fiction that I want to share. Travels that I want to write about. For a few hours this week, I thought I would lose it all. The ability to think, speak, and share. It was terrifying. I am hoping that this experience will give me a new lease on life, on writing. The importance of putting pen to paper. Of sharing what I know. Let the adventure begin!

Waking Up Slow

So, the book I am reading on my Nook is Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles. It is a debut novel that I think is appropriate for adults and YA alike. Apocalyptic books and movies abound...people getting diseases, people turning into zombies, etc. etc. Of all of the "end of time" scenarios, I have never thought of what would happen if the Earth began to slow. Slow being the key word. In this book, (Spoiler! my shout out to Kevin Smith's new Hulu + show Spoilers) the Earth slows it's rotation at a small rate that continues to build until birds crash to the ground, gravity no longer works as we know it causing accidents, and sickness from the extended hours of the day and night develop. People don't know whether to panic or remain calm causing a state of constant confusion. The story is simple and straight forward, from the eyes of teenage Julia who is dealing with the slowing as well as the happenings in her every day life. I've been reading this at night before I drift off to sleep. There are only a few novels that have ever left me dwelling on them after I have finished. I am only half-way through this novel and I seem to wake up in the morning and have to remind myself that the Earth is not slowing. Yes, I could read it during the daytime, but if reading is about experiencing through words, isn't waking up thinking the Earth has slowed a pretty good indicator of a book's character?

The Bookstore Cat

"The Bookstore Cat"

On a recent trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama my family and I took a detour into the town of Fairhope. This is the place that Southern author Sonny Brewer (The Poet of Tolstoy Park, The Widow and the Tree, Don't Quit Your Day Job) calls home. It is also the home of The Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, a writer's colony that has played an integral part in the writing lives of authors Winston Groom, WEB Griffin, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg. 

Unfortunately Over the Transom book store, the shop that Sonny owns, was closed on Sundays. So before heading over to the Page and Palette book store, I hopped out of the car to take some photos of the little white book mecca that draws so many people to this quaint coastal community. There were no people around...apparently, like most Southern small towns, the city rolls up its streets on Sundays. Just as I walked up the sidewalk, camera in hand, I was greeted by a gentle Calico cat that had a lot to say. I have never heard a cat "talk" quite the same way as this one did. It was fascinating and was almost as if he or she (I didn't bother to do an anatomy check) was letting me know that the book store was closed and that I could come back on Tuesday. I said hi to the little kitty and as I kept strolling along the sidewalk, it scampered along side me, chatting like we had been friends for years and years. Or maybe he was telling me what titles were available in the fiction section inside Over the Transom. I patted its belly a few times and I was certain that it would have jumped in the car and kept right on gabbing had I not outrun it. I don't know who the cat belonged to, however the business beside the book store had a food and water dish near its door. I just refer to it as "The Bookstore Cat".

Ray Bradbury: Music To My Ears

When I was a freshmen in college, I had the opportunity to meet legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Well, not meet, per say. He was up on the auditorium stage and I sat about three rows away gripping my mom's hand in excitement. Even then he had thick white hair and the thickest black-rimmed glasses I had ever seen. If he had had on a white lab coat I might possibly have mistook him for a professor from the science department. He told stories for what seemed like hours on end to a crowd that appeared not quite as enthusiastic as I had expected (it was north Alabama, not New York). I don't remember any of the stories he told that night...a lot has happened in life since then, but I do remember coming home with a massive hardback anthology of his greatest stories and I quickly tracked down and purchased a copy of almost every novel he had written from eBay. His short stories were my favorite and I probably read Quicker Than the Eye more than a few times.

A few weeks ago my husband, an aspiring DJ, introduced me to a deadmau5 song called The Veldt. I was immediately in love with it, even more so a couple of days later when I heard on XM radio that it was inspired by a story by Ray Bradbury. (msn article) Why I hadn't heard of this story is beyond me, being such a fan. Apparently it was originally titled The World the Children Made and was written in 1950. It is about a family living in a smart house where the children can project "television" walls in whatever scene they please. Much to their mother's chagrin, the children turn the walls of the nursery into an African veldt (a grazing area) with lions going about their predatory business. I won't spoil the ending, but it is definitely one of Bradbury's weirder stories...and that says a lot considering that all of his writings are weird in some form or fashion. In true Ray Bradbury form, however, it seemed as if the release of the deadmau5 single somehow predicted the author's death. (washington post article) Just a couple of weeks after I had heard the song The Veldt, I was brokenhearted to learn that the master of science fiction had passed away.(obituary) He was an author who had wriggled his way into my heart while I was very young and quietly inspired my passion for reading, and who knows, possibly my ability to write.