Obviously, my inability to come up with clever post titles remains unchanged. C'est la vie.
It's accurate, though. I'm going to put the chronicle of my search (and yearning) for an online home to escape to aside for a moment. I do this to talk about a book I literally just finished, Among Others by Jo Walton. This will be my first book review/report since grammar school. Or maybe high school; I don't actually remember if they made us do these or not.
I happened across the book via StumbleUpon. My SU interests certainly include 'books', 'fantasy', and 'science fiction', so I get a lot of sites with lists of books to check out. This one piqued my curiosity, so I decided to take a whack at it. I'm going to try and do this right...I feel it's important. I'll probably be all over the place, though.
If you were to ask me point-blank if I liked it or not, I'd have to say I really did. I've hardly put it down for the last several days. I can't say I cared for the pacing, though. The plot didn't seem to move very much for the first 3/4 of the book, so I wondered where this was going. I DID enjoy the trip, though. I think it was largely due to the narrator/protagonist, Morwenna. (Though she insists on going by 'Mori'.) The story is told through her journal entries, which she allegedly writes in mirror, so as to keep it private.
I see bits of myself in Mori, or at least the me I remember from childhood. She's more than a little odd compared to those around her, a perpetual outcast in her own view. She's intelligent, but just can't viscerally grasp those things that her classmates else view as important (class, wealth, breeding, etc). She's in her own little world, and it's not that she's unaware of the rest of the world around her, it's that she doesn't initially see anything there that she can relate to. Aside from books.
Mori reads the way I used to, and my few happy childhood memories involve me sitting in a quiet place with my nose in a book and my mind in another world. I sometimes half-joke that Stephen King and the Dragonlance books are my real parents. They certainly had more to do with my values than my parents did.
Anyway, most of the book chronicles her less-than-happy stay in a Welsh boarding school in 1979, her dealings with her estranged father, her three aunts, and her malevolent, insane witch of a mother. 'Witch' is not used as a pejorative here, she literally is a witch. Mori and her twin sister had already thwarted their mother's evil ambitions once, but at a high price. Mori's leg is forever crippled, and her sister is dead. For the most part.
A main theme that runs through the book like a river is Mori's love for science fiction, and as one review puts it, "More than anything else, “Among Others” is a love letter to the literature of the fantastic and to SF fandom." It makes for an interesting read...a fantasy novel that pays homage to the greats (and not-so-greats) of science fiction.
What I took away from this was that Mori, like me, was raised more by the books she read than by her family. And as that goes, one could do a lot worse than SF and fantasy. There's a few things in my makeup that people have complimented, and I could make a case for all those having come from the books I've read. Also, we share a powerful need to belong somewhere, and if I was as brave as she is, maybe I'd find it. However, there's also a sense of hope inherent in SF. So, who knows?
I'd like to say more, but I'm not sure I'd make any sense, and I don't want to spoil it. If you're looking for something different, I'd definitely check it out.
