ABAW: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, Grand Central Pub (via Hachette Audio 2010). 

Without death, life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?

A modern-day bookshop owner/writer meets an odd man who gives him some old books and a list of names before disappearing. The unlikely books are the private journals of Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s most revered presidents, and - as his journals detail - also a secret scourge of vampires. The bookstore owner’s unlikely task is to make known to the world the truth of Lincoln’s life and the truth about vampires. 

This story was very entertaining. who can resist an axe-wielding man of letters and philosophy? And audiobook narrator Scott Holst brings alive the nuanced accents and speech patterns of the various characters in sharp and subtle ways. 

Grahame-Smith is also the author of another supernatural reboot that I enjoyed, Pride and Prejudice With Zombies. In both cases, Grahame-Smith employs the original story (whether novel or history) in such a way that the addition of fictional monsters both entertained and increased my appreciation for the original. For Lincoln, he seamlessly weaves historical fact with the vampire fiction, making the mashup not only feel plausible, but also inspiring a greater curiosity about the details and hardships of Lincoln’s real life.

I enjoyed it so much that I nearly recommended it to Sonar X11. But I checked myself, worrying less about the violence of the vampire slaying than about muddying with vampires the Sonar’s ideas of an important historical figure and period. Maybe later, when his grasp of the (non-vampiric) history is firmer.

Tim Burton has adapted the book into a movie due out this June. Check out IMDB for a moody trailer full of singing blades and vampire growls. 

ABAW, Sonar-Style: Wells' Time Machine and Colfer's Opal Deception

Bedtime reading has been wonky around here, with interruptions from overscheduling, but a long car ride gave us some extra time to read. Sonar X7 has found the 39 Clues books, managing to swallow up three of them over spring break. Now he’s working on some of Mike Lupica’s middle-grade sports books.

Sonar X9 reread the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series as a segue into reading The Heroes of Olympus series for the first time. Oh, it was hard to wait his turn to get his hands on a library copy of the much-coveted Son of Neptune.

Sonar X11 has scored the biggest coup, I think, recently finishing The Silmarillion. Few people I know have attempted to read that one, and fewer still have finished. Oh, so he was reading it as part of a graded school assignment. He still did it, and liked it.

We also managed to finish a couple of books out loud.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Kindle free edition.

I suggested The Time Machine to the Sonars for bedtime reading (which is subject to a rigorous vetting regimen). They are becoming less likely to read anything I recommend. Which is to say that my recommendations are a sentence of doom to any book. I’ve taken to tucking books innocently in the reading basket or leaving the Sonars completely to their own choices without any input. They stand a better chance of not ignoring the good stuff that way. For whatever reason, The Time Machine caught their attention in spite of my suggestion. 

I’m not sure how well any of them would have handled this one alone. It’s short, but the century-old style and diction feels foreign to them, as does the boys’-club setting of the group of men meeting for dinner and cigars. Together we were able to navigate some of the that difficulty and get a chance to enjoy the story.

The coolest part (at least for me and the older Sonars) was recognizing sci-fi tropes that for Wells were innovative, but we know them as routine or even cliche. We also enjoyed some surprise at how modern the nineteenth-century philosophy and science was. We share many social concerns. Wells’ vision of the future was both weird and uncanny. And in the end, the Sonars were riveted by the suspense and puzzled by the vague ending. 

Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer. Scholastic 2005.

This is the fourth book in the series about the preteen criminal mastermind. I’m not sure I have anything new to say about Artemis Fowl. The Sonars love these books and they’re fun to read out loud. 

Artemis - his memories of anything fairy-related erased in the previous book - returns to a life of crime, specifically stealing a painting from another thief. But pixie-villain Opal Koboi has escaped her coma and incarceration to seek revenge on those who jailed her. She wants to frame Holly for murder, feed Artemis to trolls and destroy the fairy world of Haven before setting herself up to rule humanity as a precocious human girl. Can Artemis and his human and fairy friends survive, stop Opal, and save their reputations before Mr. and Mrs. Fowl return from vacation???

As soon as I finished reading the last page, the Sonars wanted me to start reading The Lost Colony (Book 5) right away. but it will have to go into the queue behind The Phantom Tollbooth and The Order of the Phoenix. 

Franzen's Freedom (again)

In my previous comments about Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, I did not discuss the title. In his much-ballyhooed 2010 Time Magazine article about Franzen, Lev Grossman wrote:

There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough. It’s necessary but not sufficient. It’s what you do with Freedom — what you give it up for — that matters.

Freedom begins with agency. Freedom involves a lack of restraint and an ability to act. In Freedom, once characters throw off the strings of the family who raised them and begin making their own decisions, they have an agency that can be called Freedom. But that is also the point at which the Freedom ends, as each choice has consequences, eliminates other options, and piles up casualties.

No one in these stories is free. Those advantages they enjoy are bought by someone. Walter and Patty’s upper-middle-class gentrification and their bright children? Paid for by Patty’s decision not to have a career and to give up an independent identity. Some opportunities are bought with money inherited by earlier generations. Patty and Walter’s marriage? Bought at first by Richard’s superhuman (for him) self-denial of temptation. Wildlife could be preserved, but only after mountaintop removal mining or the death of a loved one. All those transactions restrict subsequent choices and limit freedom. The birds that seem so free, must adapt to an existence that is increasingly circumscribed and exponentially depleted. Further, the resentment felt by Walter and his forebears is located in the belief that they have paid but someone else has enjoyed the spoils. 

Perhaps Franzen wants us to see the characters’ (and our) short-sighted entitlement, that there is Freedom even if we do not feel free. Perhaps, writing from his spartan, cell-like space, with his (now habitual) wad of tobacco, Franzen’s Freedom is an ironic title for a story about entanglement. I’ll spare you the Bobby McGee quote.  

Something Knitty: Soccer ball and hearts

Watch out, actual knitting content. 

Felted Heart Milagros

Pattern by Mags Kandis. Yarn is Lion Brand Amazing in the Glacier Bay colorway. Not so much felted, but still squishy sweet. If you are a Ravelry member, I highly recommend browsing through the project gallery for this one. People have put together some amazing heart stashes. 

Sonar X9 modeling Felted Heart Milagros 

Futbol

Pattern by Yana Ivey. Yarn is Hobby Lobby’s I Love This Yarn in black and white (for obvious). So that a soccer-loving friend can play ball in the house. Knitting the thirty-two pieces was great. But there was EPIC SEAMING. Next time: I’ll use wool instead of acrylic so that a little bit of light felting will help tighten up and even out any little bulges and puckers.  

Sonar X7 modeling the hand-knit soccer ball

And the rain came down: Puddle Ducks

We had a little rain this morning. Twelve to fifteen inches depending on who you ask. When the storm blew over and the water receded, the Sonars went out to play. They’re lankier versions of the waddling puddle ducks they were a few years ago. They have an angular grace now as they leap over puddles and bogs rather than swishing through them. When I watched them splash and chase grass-blade boats in the gutter currents, I remembered a short piece I wrote a while back, on an afternoon when heavy rain surprised us at afternoon pickup from school.

Could you resist a puddle like that?

Puddle Ducks

The first drop from the grey-black sky splatted against my right lens. One, two, three beats between the lightning and the thunder. One, two, three strides to damp hair and a spotted shirt. By the time I crossed twenty yards of macadam to the portico my hair dripped, my shirt was plastered to my chest, my arms were slick with rain. I jogged the last few feet, leaping over the final puddle alongside another mom. We laughed our disbelief at the suddenness of the downpour.

Cars wound around the pickup circle, lights blinkering, wipers swiping uselessly at the sheets of rain. The car queue stretched down the block like a sluggish, twitching snake thumping out a wiper-blade heartbeat.

Older kids were outside under the portico. Younger in criss-cross-applesauce-nobody-goes-anywhere-unless-you-tell-your-teacher-first lines in the entry hall. Aides and administrators in ponchos and walkie talkies tried to match kids to cars without dripping on the floor, without putting the wrong kid with the wrong adult, without losing little sister in the crush of people, trying to keep kids from washing away in those last steps to car doors under umbrellas.

I slide through a door between a custodian with a Yellow Caution Wet Floor sign and the gym teacher in neon green galoshes and two terrified looking preschoolers clutching his jacket. I find one of my kids by the cafeteria door, catch the attention and a thumbs up from his teacher, scoop up my second child and touch his teacher on the elbow. She smiles and squeezes my hand as I squeeze back through the crowd with my treasures. I dodge out the side door, stepping aside for the principal in a long yellow raincoat and waders.

I ask the kids if they’re ready to get a little wet. Their eyes twinkle.