I love Guinness. God bless their opportunistic little hearts. They started a petition to make St. Pat's an official holiday. Clearly, signing is a moral obligation of the highest order. If flippin' Columbus has a federal holiday, why not St. P? We need to start a crusade for cultural sensitivity! The Irish are being shafted on the Federal Holiday front. We shall get indignant over whiskey.
On the book front, The Geographer's Library (Jon Fasman) is decent if you have the time for it. It alternates between the modern story of Paul, a journalist trying to track down information on a murdered professor, and various chapters describing the deaths of people who possessed magical atifacts. The problems are numerous. The book rivals Tolstoy for confusing jumbles of multiple characters with a million names. The plot is slow and takes forever to get to the point. If you don't have a couple hours to just sit down and motor through the first half while taking notes on who's who and who wants what when, fuhgeddabouddit. And speaking of "thread of the plot," you know those industrial looms the size of a room with a bazillion threads? Imagine one of those collapsed, tangled, broken into tiny pieces, and squished into book form. That's the thread of the plot.
But it's kind of enjoyable. Part of it is the main character, who is us, to an alarming degree. He's just out of college, bored at his job, stuck in a boring town he feels he's rapidly outgrowing, and can't meet anyone. But when he goes back to his college town, although he's innundated with memories, he knows he no longer belongs there, either. His life is work, work, sleep, moping about how boring his life is, and work. Sound familiar? Yeah. Yeah, kinda.
The language is also rather amazing. Fasman is in love with the sound of his literary voice, and could cut out half the crap he puts in, but damn. I'm in love with his literary voice, too, so I'm glad he kept the extraneous babbling. From beautiful descriptions to bizarre comparisons, even the slow sectios (and there were many) read beautifully. Plus, he described one of his boring co-workers as "humming like a stoned hornet," and I burst out laughing. Teehee. Stoned hornet. Great image.
Don't buy the book, but it's worth a library loan. It's slow, overly intellectual, and ponderous at times, but fascinating in others. Most of the non-main-character chapters could stand alone as interesting short stories. It's just when they link together that you get problems.
Happy St. Pat's, everyone!
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One might point out that nobody really celebrates Columbus Day except by taking the day off, whereas St. Patrick's Day is celebrated with huge parades, dyeing rivers green and so forth. (Also, and with all due respect to the worthy saint, he has nothing to do with America. He worked some miracles, converted some people and talked to an ancient Celtic bard who'd spent centuries living with the fairies and then returned to find all his friends dead. All of that's badass, but they don't distribute holidays based on badassery.)
I'll have to add this Geographer's Library to my reading list. (The list that keeps getting bigger and bigger until it finally attains sentience, sneaks up behind me and then strangles me during a misguided attempt to give me a massage.)
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