"The Electric Church" by Jeff Somers

I just finished "The Electric Church." It's one of those dystopias that can easily be turned into an action/adventure film. There are some good ideas in there. The System is in charge after the riots and Unification and more riots. The System Police are the ultimate overpaid, gun-wielding, bureaucratic bad guys. The Monks are the lobotomized proselytizers on the street who have a habit of "converting" those with no means, i.e. the seething masses who have few morals because they're just trying to make it to tomorrow, much less their 20th birthdays. Enter our narrator, the rare man who lives by a code.
It's good. It's fast. It's not brilliant or unique in toto, but it had some good ideas.
Picky point, but I wish Somers could have come up with more than one way to explain the taste of blood in the mouth of the narrator. He gets beaten up too much for the taste of blood to be described as "coppery" over and over again. I know this is the digital age, but pick up a thesaurus.

Now on to Midaq Alley, written by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

"Trying to Grow" by Firdaus Kanga

This is a gem of a book. It's about a Parsi (Persian) family living in India after partition in 1947. It's a semi-autobiographical account of a boy with osteo imperfecta (brittle bone disease) who not only has to deal with being different because he's severely handicapped, but also because he's an ethnic minority in a country that is struggling with it's post British identity. The characters in this book are so alive! Each one sparkles with his/her quirks and failings. It's hard to dislike even the most unlikeable characters, because each is so bizarre and human. Brit, the boy with OI and narrator, is so wry, witty, sassy, and thoughtful that he makes his family and friends look like a bunch of loving and doting clowns smashing themselves in and out of the clown car of his life. Everyone in this novel is "trying to grow" and almost all of them do, little by little.

One of the women in my bookclub is writing her dissertation on the diaspora that occurred after partition, so we had a unique look at the culture. Though the Parsis are not her specialty, she brought up some things she did know about this community. They're small and insular - obvious from the book. Also, they're Zoroastrian, which means that their god is the god of light or fire, and that they have fire temples and their dead are left on a hill to be picked clean by vultures. So little things that slipped by like Brit's mother being horrified by smoking cigarettes, start making more subtle sense. The funerals that occur start making more sense as well.

Beautiful read. So glad Penguin decided to pick it up and publish it again.

My birthday

One more revolution around the sun!

New Beginnings

The editor in me wants to scrap this post and start over, but I've decided that the process is as important as the product. I have always talked about that day when I stop doing all of those things I have to do and just get down to writing.
And then, something deep down snapped, the theory has become reality. It is time to do, to be in the now. Writing is just like a yoga practice, or learning a musical instrument; it must be done in order to be. Unfortunately, "to be" is a passive verb in the English language, which masks the reality. "Being" in the now requires intense effort, focus, and concentration. It may not be pretty, but it will grow, and the journey will amaze and astound.
So we begin. My New Year's resolution for 2011 is to finish the things that I start. Tall order. Many times we start something rolling and then when we realize what we've done, we want to shelve it for later. Many times, we have no idea what ball we started rolling and want to switch balls mid-roll. Sometimes we realize we've started too many balls.
That's the challenge, being more aware of the cliche of the ball.