The Alchemyst

Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Author: Michael Scott
Ages: 12+
Rating: 4/5

About: Josh and Sophie both got summer jobs in San Francisco, Josh at a bookshop and Sophie at a coffee shop across the street, with the aim to save up and buy a car. But their summer goals very quickly change when they get mixed up in a centuries long battle with immortals they thought only existed in myths and legends.

Thoughts: I listened to this on Audio book, and really liked the narrator -Denis O'Hare. He did great voices for all the characters, including different accents.

This was a good adventure, and I quite enjoyed the way that the author wove history in with the story. This book ended with a straight lead in to the second, which I picked up right away, I was so into it.

I was disappointed that the second audio book has a different narrator. It really threw the story off in my mind and stopped listening to it. When I come back to the series I will read them instead.

Octavia Boone's Big Questions

About Life, the Universe and Everything

Author: Rebecca Rupp
Ages: 9+
Rating: 4/5

The book: Octavia's life is fun and interesting with her free spirited parents. They've brought her up to ask questions about everything and not to believe everything she's told. But life gets a lot more complicated when her mom joins a religious group that Octavia and her father don't understand.

Thoughts: This was a book with big questions as the title tells us. Octavia is resistant to her mother's interest in The Redeemers, and becomes increasingly worried as her mother drifts farther away from her family and seems to forsake the values she raised Octavia with. The people in her mom's new faith community are essentially good people, though Octavia is not shy about voicing her questions, confusion and often her frustration with the paradoxes the parishioners teach and the experience of life.

I liked that through the book Octavia though she is distrustful of The Redeemers, she is respectful of the religions and faiths of her friends and generally regards religion with curiosity -even if she doesn't really "buy" any of it.

Octavia has a logical and kind of scientific way of thinking about things. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be explained by her early admission that she has a sensory processing disorder where words for her have their own colours and smells. While this certainly added an interesting aspect to her perspectives, I'm not sure I understand the larger use of this detail for the story -if there is one.

Overall a good thoughtful book, with a realistic end. I would recommend this for a mature reader as the subject seems a bit heavy (it made me cry a little bit).

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Thoughts on the book:
This is not a book I normally would have chosen to read, but I did enjoy it.
I was in elementary school in rural Alberta during this time, so I really had no notion about what was going on or what the seige of Sarajevo was about.

I thought it was interesting that the author never really said who “the men in the hills” were. Some how the author was able to steer pretty clear of the politics of what the war was about. Someone from the audience asked him about this. His response was in two parts. On the one hand he didn’t want to take sides in the politics o of a world he was not really apart of, and besides, the story was about the civilians and not the men in the hills. And on the other hand he felt it would be far too difficult to try to explain the politics of the war and not have that take over what he wanted the novel to be about. He has had people congratulate him for this choice, but also has received some very angry responses from people who feel that by not naming them he is protecting or removing some blame for what happened.

I felt that I really responded to Arrow’s storyline as well. She won me over in the sequence where she is reminiscing about being so in love with life that it overcame her and brought her to tears.

Another comment from the audience came from a woman who was upset that Galloway would kill Arrow’s character. And while I was a little disappointed too, I think that seemed the most appropriate ending for her. From a woman who was brought to tears my the beauty of life, to a woman who was transformed into a weapon who ended other people’s life, I don’t think that she could have returned to the person she was before the war. Certainly nobody would be the same, but in becoming a killing machine, no matter how much she tried to separate that person from her past self she could never go back to that person. And in the end I think it came down to that ultimately she didn’t believe that the longer she lived the smaller the chance became that she would be able to hang on to the person she used to be.

I also think that considering how strongly she felt about allowing somebody else to choose when she would “dive into a grave,” it was important that her character choose when the end of her life would be. If Arrow and lived, she would have had to escape the city, and I don’t think I would believe that she would abandon the city in such a way.

I especially think that it is an interesting way to show how brave she was in comparison with the other two characters who were so afraid to die -and yet how she was also more scared. Kenan and Dragan lived their lives in complete fear and struggled to survive because they were afraid to die. And yet they did also have hope that there would be something to rebuild when the war was over. Arrow decided she had to die because she had no hope that she herself could recover from the war. So she was brave in that she was not afraid to fight (in the war sense) and die, and she was too proud in a way to allow anyone else to take her life from her. And yet more scared than the other two because she couldn’t wait or believe that life could return.

Notes on Stephen Galloway's Talk

The author Stephen Galloway gave a talk about his book and answered a few questions about it for the One Book One Calgary launch on November 4th.

He started talking about what inspired him to write this story, there were two things.

First, it was this photo, which he came across in 1992 in the New York Times. This is the actual photo of a man named Vedran Smailovic. He is the cellist who played the Adagio for as long as he could after 22 people whose city and lives were deteriorating around them, were killed while trying to buy bread one afternoon.

Second, he was inspired to write the story after 9/11, when governments were talking about the merits of going into Iraq and Afghanistan. He was thinking about the fact that the majority of casualties in war are civilians. And so he wanted to write about the people in a war who are “not in the business of war.”
So, who are those people? What did he have to say about them?

Arrow: He wanted her storyline to be about “the abdication of hatred.” Arrow is very concerned with the hatred inside of her and where it came from. She used to think (I don’t remember where she talks about this as I don’t have the book with me anymore, but I think its around where she shoots the sniper while protecting the cellist) that you could hate somebody because of their actions. If they hurt you in a substantial way, say because they killed someone, then you could hate them. But then shoots the sniper, even though she had determined that he had no intention of killing the cellist. Why did she do that? She can justify it to herself that she didn’t have a choice because he could have chosen to after the music stopped or on a different day, but I don’t think she really believes that. I don’t have notes on how the vein of thinking went exactly… but Galloway uses Arrow’s character to show how something like the seige of Sarajevo happens. By allowing other people’s hate and rage to dictate our own hate and rage, we are abdicating our response (or free will).

Kenan and Dragan: Are to show the role artistic expression and engagement play in humanity and civilisation. As the city around them degrades and collapses, signs of civilization fall away. Kenan talks about how he thought that the tram was a sign of civilization, and how as long as the tram was working they would be okay. But then it stopped. Dragan talkes about how the ashes of the library fell down on the city for days like black snow. So what was left of civilisation? The cellist in the street sharing his art.

Galloway talked about how he sees civilisation as an agreed upon way to act and interact. In the famous photograph of the cellist, we see that somebody has not held up their part of the agreement. Art remains when government and laws fall away, and so really isn’t ART the truest sign of civilisation?

Interesting: The book is “constructed” like a trio sonata (which is not the same as an adagio). Arrow’s storyline is the melody, and Kenan and Dragan are the bass line.

Favorite thing he said… “A book is a template for an imaginative experience.” Which made me chuckle a bit because Marc had posted this webcomic on my Facebook wall just the day before.