So January is winding down and all in all it’s been a pretty good month. We had a couple weeks of really cold -40 Celsius weather but no real snowfall since before Christmas. However, that streak ended this last Friday when we got 15 cm of snow. The thing with living in Alberta in the wintertime is that when you get snow it sticks around until spring. But c’est la vie, compared to what I’m seeing on the news for weather and other parts of the world we’re getting off pretty easy.

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On the reading front, I just finished reading Stephen R.Donaldson’s first book in his new series – The Great God’s War – Seventh Decimate. The premise of this book is two kingdoms are engaged in a brutal unrelenting war. A war that is fought with magister’s on both sides that wield the magical decimates of fire, wind, drought, lightning, earthquake, or of pestilence. And that is what happens to the country of Belleger. Desperate to regain the lost power of their magister’s, Prince Bifalt is sent on a desperate quest to the Last Repository to find this book of the seventh decimate.

After the verbal density of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles, this book was a breeze to read in comparison. Not only is the book slim in the number of pages, a mere 302, it is also markedly bereft of Donaldson’s trademark dense vocabulary. In some ways, this felt like reading a Coles note version of a Chronicles book so it was an interesting change of pace. Bifalt does share some characteristics of Covenant in that his character flaws are so deep and pervasive that it makes it difficult for the reader to empathize with him. I suspect, and hope, that as the series progresses Prince Bifalt will grow and so will my attachment to him.

 

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Another book I read was My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent.

This was a hard read because of the subject matter but the skill level of Tallent – Tallent’s got talent! (sorry had to go there) – is quite evident in this book.

My Absolute Darling is a book peopled with archetypes rather than actual characters. This is plain to see in the dialogue. And the inner dialogue of Turtle. The characters are avatars playing the part of the oppressor, victim, the experienced, the naive, and so on.

Certainly, understand why many will balk at the sexual content that is used as the driving force of the story. This happens whether or not one wants to have to deal with it, either in real life or in a piece of entertainment. Facing ugly things is never pleasant. The power of this book are those tender moments that happen in the worst of circumstances even to the most hardened of characters like Turtle.

Disturbing? Hell yeah! But isn’t that what the best of the arts accomplish by making us face the ugly? It makes the beautiful all the more so.

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On the movie front, my wife and I, sat down to catch a Spanish horror thriller on Netflix called The Bar. This is a bottle type movie where eight characters are trapped in a Spanish café when a man outside the doors is shot and killed. One of the patrons inside the restaurant decides to go and try to help the man and subsequently is quickly shot in the head too.

What follows is a swirl of conspiracies, finger pointing, group dynamics breaking into little cliques – only to fall apart as new accusations are raised. You have your stereotypical characters and how they act is conventional but how they interact is not. The characters literally end up swimming in a cesspool of human waste as they struggle to find their way out.

This one was quite fun.