Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 Zevin's novel lived up to all the hype -- a story about two lifelong friends who are devoted to each other but struggle to communicate. Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital and immediately bond over Super Mario Bros. We follow them as they drop out of college (Harvard and MIT), create a ground-breaking video game, found their own company, and split over competing visions. There are misunderstandings and arguments, betrayals and tragedies, but they can never quite let go of each other. It's a moving, nuanced portrayal of a deep friendship between too prickly, creative, troubled people. 

It's also a paean to creative work, and the drive to make something. Sam focuses on what's popular, what will get the most players, and Sadie cares more about the art and storytelling, but they both want to design a game that will matter to other players, and both are uncompromising in their own ways. 

Sadie and Sam are the main focus of the narrative, but the book is filled with other characters in orbit around them, most notably Marx, the loyal friend to both and the one who bankrolled their vision. At one point, in a burst of anger, Sam calls him an "NPC" -- non-player character -- and says he doesn't matter. But as Marx points out, without NPCs there's nothing for the player character to do. Marx may continually take a back seat to Sam and Sadie, but his effect on them, and his role in the story, make up the core of the novel. Zevin excels in creating wonderfully realized characters, and in Marx she created one of my favorites ever.

If there is one flaw in the book, it's that the narration is a bit inconsistent. With two notable (and brilliantly effective) examples late in the book, Zevin uses an omniscient third-person point of view, but there's a moment early in the book where the narration changes slightly, as if the story is being told to a specific audience by a specific person. This peters out (perhaps the legacy of an earlier draft?) and the omniscient point of view reasserts itself, until it doesn't for a heart-breaking turn two thirds of the way through. 

I absolutely loved this book. And I want to start playing video games again.

Earrings, Earrings, Earrings!

 I'm on a roll with the jewelry-making.

Sari spiral earrings, inspired by a PBS show that talked about the cultural significances of spirals:

 I took two lengths of recycled sari cord and coiled them, using small tacking stitches to hold them in place. I added a sprinkle of beads for a hint of sparkle.

Frida earrings: 

 Love them, and I want to make more.

Shiva earrings (I got the pattern from an old beading magazine): 

Each earring is composed of three identical sections, each one a rivoli crystal surrounded by peyote and herringbone stitching:

 Doesn't it look like a dragon's eye?

Flower and birdie earrings:

 I actually made these in the winter, but it's only now I feel like wearing them.

Book Round-Up

The Alchemyst by Michael Scott: as tween I would have absolutely adored this fantasy novel about twins who discover they have magical powers, especially they way Scott throws in historical and mythological characters from all over the world. As an adult, I found the writing too simplistic. I'm not sure I will finish the series.

Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson: a meta-mystery that's a fun, modern take on the classic locked-room mystery, with a genre-savvy narrator who helpfully tells us which clues we can ignore and what pages the deaths happen on. I highly recommend it if you love mysteries and/or post-modern fiction.

Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater: the second of her Regency Faerie Tales. This one was a riff on Cinderella, with a fairy godfather and a housemaid so angry at the injustices she and others experience she inspires the rest of the staff to engage in collective bargaining. Although I loved the idea that Effie's magic has the ability to stitch emotions into her mending and embroidery, I didn't enjoy this novel quite as much as the second one.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher: this was an absolutely delightful story about a 14-year-old girl who uses her magical powers over bread to save her city, with the help of her two familiars -- a carnivorous sourdough starter named Bob and an adorably tough little gingerbread man.

The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez: this is a re-read of a literary mystery set at Oxford and involving math (I love math!). It's very good, but I'd forgotten about the last set of deaths, which hit too close to home and leave a lingering misery in me. The movie version is not great.

Book Round-up

Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen: Allen's latest, long-awaited (by me, anyway) novel is a delight. The writing itself was a little rough, but the story -- about lost mothers, found family, and grief -- made up for it, as did the ghosts and pesty little birds that plagued the characters' apartment building.

The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman: Next in the Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito mysteries, and a fitting choice for November, because the myth of La Llorona figures into the story. Which was both a murder to be solved and a heartbreaking love story.

[It looks like I never blogged the previous Hillerman books I read. Inspired by the excellent Dark Winds show last fall, I picked up a three-in-one volume of Hillerman novels: Leaphorn, Chee, and More. These books introduce Manuelito, whom I loved on the show, and all three were enjoyable, atmospheric mysteries. Another Hillerman novel -- Sacred Clowns, I think -- I read in college, and it was good, too.]

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S. Byatt: Inspired by the movie 3000 Years of Longing (which I have yet to see), I reread Byatt's short story collection (the title story is what the movie adapts). These are elegant, literate stories that have the feel of fairy tales but are more complex and self-aware.

Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater: An unexpected delight -- Atwater's book is a mash-up of regency romances and fantasy, with a good amount of social commentary; the Faerie Court in particular effectively satirizes the hypocrisies of the time. 

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey: Another book I read in law school and forgot all about. It's an accomplished-enough mystery set in a woman's college that's light on action and heavy on psychological characterization, but it was a letdown after the wonders of Cloud Cuckoo Land. An unexpected racist description didn't help matters.

Necklaces, Necklaces, Necklaces!

I've made several necklaces over the last couple of months, but I haven't had time to blog about them until now.

A charm necklace:

Michaels had an adorable set of alphabet charms, and I used my sons' initials for this. I interspersed them with colorful cane glass beads. But what to do with the other 23 letters ...

A silver necklace:

I cannibalized two old necklaces I never wore any more to make this one. I like it, and it has a nice weight, but I want to make another, plainer one using Hill Tribe silver; I'm just not sure if I have enough of those beads.

A vintage necklace:

I had two bracelets (one with three-strands) made with vintage plastic beads that fell apart. Since the bracelets were a little too chunky for me, I opted to mix the beads all up into a necklace. It's not really my style though, so I may sell it, if I get around to setting up a Ko-fi site (etsy has become increasingly seller-unfriendly).

A pretty necklace:

This took some time to come together; I had stacked the buttons together quite some time ago, but I didn't know what to do with them (using wire to make a pendant didn't work). Much later I bought some pendant trays, and the buttons seemed like a good fit for one of them; all that I needed to do to make the fit perfect was add a perimeter of teeny seed beads -- which took another two years to actually do. Then I finally came up with a strand, using the leftover "pearl" beads from a necklace that belonged to my grandmother.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is an achingly beautiful story of characters across vast periods of time, from the fall of Constantinople to a future where Earth has been devastated by climate change, who are united in their love of a simple, whimsical tale from ancient Greece. Anna finds an ancient book in an abandoned monastery, and uses her rudimentary Greek to share the story with her sister. Zeno learns that the book, now reduced to 24 crumbling leaves, has been recently rediscovered; he sets out to translate the story and share it with the bored fifth graders stuck in the public library after school. Konstance, in isolation on a space ship, scribbles the fragments of the story her father used to tell her on scraps of sacks.

 

The parallels between the three stories are undeniable. Constantinople, the library, and the Argos are all under siege, and in each setting there is a sense that the world as the characters know it is ending. The future is terrifying in one way or another, but the ancient story, whether in told through a damaged book, translated and out-of-order leaves, or fragments of memory, comforts and guides the characters.

 

The tale in question is a farcical tale about Aethon, a shepherd who wants to be turned into a bird so he can fly to Cloud Cuckoo Land, a paradise in the sky where there is no want or suffering. A series of mishaps sees him turned into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow; but although he finally arrives in paradise, he finds himself longing for the simple pleasures of his old life. We (nor most of the characters) never learn how the story ends, but it becomes apparent in the way the story affects each of them to stop fearing the future and instead choose the flawed world around them rather than a paradise -- promised riches, a far away city, Bishop's camp, Beta Oph2 -- that may not even exist. 

 

This is an important lesson for us; we cannot avoid the growing consequences of climate change by ignoring the problem entirely or pretending we can find another place to live. But we also cannot allow the situation to sink us into despair and hopelessness, or worse yet cause us to resort to violence. Nor does this lesson just apply to the environment. For Zeno, the battle is far more abstract; he is mired in a life of regret and missed opportunities, and must learn to finally act. 

 

I could talk about this book for ages, but I don't want to spoil it anymore than I have. Read it! It is a glorious paean to stories, libraries, and above all, hope.

 

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

 The Cloisters is a thriller set in the library of New York City's Cloisters museum (a beautiful place; I've been twice), amongst medievalists and researchers who are trying to piece together the occult history of tarot cards. Although it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on, it was a fun, interesting read. Normally I'd give it a quick blurb in one of my round-up posts, but underneath the murders and secrets lies an interesting discussion of fate and free will that inspired me to write more.

The two main characters, protagonist and antagonist, represent two sides of an age-old argument about how much control people have over their lives. Because of a tragedy in her past, the protagonist, Ann, has come to believe that unchangeable, unavoidable fate rules life; the antagonist, on the other hand, believes in free will, that people make their own fate. This is an interesting inversion of the usual dynamic in this sort of story; usually it's the hero who advocates for free will and the villain who couches his nefarious plans in the language of fate and inevitability.

The tragedy in Ann's background, which I won't spoil here, is what has caused her to believe a person has no control over one's life, but while her thought process is understandable, it's also deeply flawed. Yes, little, inconsequential choices made on a fateful day led to a terrible event, but it's a mistake to think that negative consequences invalidate the existence of those choices in the first place. Sometimes our choices will be bad, and sometimes they will lead to something bad through sheer luck or bad timing, but we still made those choices, and we will continue to make more (not least in how we choose to respond to tragedy!). 

This issue of fate versus free will obviously ties in to the use of tarot cards to predict the future, which is the McGuffin in this story (and I would have liked more about the tarot deck in question, despite not believing in them as divinatory devices), but it was interesting to see it play out in an unexpected way.