beautiful monsters

Toasty

Well, here I am in Dunedin. And, quite frankly, I’m disappointed. Y’all said it was gonna be cold. I went out and bought winter clothes especially. Well, it’s not, and right now I’m feeling overdressed and slightly cheated. All the locals keep shaking their heads and saying “it’s not usually like this.” Yeah right. It’s all just a practical joke, I bet.

Actually, it’s starting to cool down this afternoon. The only reason I’m hot and sticky right now is because I’m in one of the computer suites. I borrowed my friend’s ID and password so I don’t spend a fortune on cyber cafes while I’m down here. Cheers mate!

Dunedin reminds me of Europe, the old neo-gothic buildings, and the trees… It’s nice to be in a city where the seasonal changes are actually visible. The trees are a blaze of gold and red, and there are thick drifts of crunch brown leaves to wade through. And Otago feels like how I imagined university would be when I was a kid. Somehow it feels like more of a community than Vic, I can’t put my finger on why.

This morning I discovered the university bookshop. I wandered around drooling for hours. My wishlist is huge, and growing… Darwin’s Worms, Grammars of Creation, Radical Evil, Holding Up the Sky, Displacing Whiteness, The Feeling of What Happens, Chasing Ideas, The World of the Autistic Child, When Bad Things Happen to Other People, Art Tomorrow… So far it adds up to $921.65, and I’m only halfway through the non-fiction section. If only I had unlimited money…

The house I’m staying in is practically a palace! My room is about half the size of our entire flat. And there are loads of bedrooms, not to mention multiple sunrooms, studies, hallways and bathrooms. My god, the bathrooms! It’s a really old house, but the bathrooms have been done up quite recently. My room has an en suite, and the shower has about eleven different buttons and dials and settings, with jets of water coming from all directions. For about half an hour I huddled in the corner, gingerly prodding the buttons with a stick, terrified that if I made one wrong move I might start World War Three.

I’m really enjoying hanging out with a family (four kids, from primary school to university age) and having plenty of time to write and read. I’ve just finished reading Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones. Thoughts in the “continue reading” section.

Hey, speaking of books, there’s a 24 hour booksale on Friday. For some reason I find the idea of buying books at 2am particularly delicious…

[No, no, must be strong, must not spend entire income on books]

Thoughts on Hexwood

Hmmm… It’s very very clever. But it’s not the sort of thing I’d normally read, and I didn’t enjoy is as much as I enjoy some books. I guess I prefer books that are made rich through character and language rather than through events and situations. And I tend to prefer books in a realistic setting, or perhaps with a slight twists (I’m thinking angels in French vineyards or ghosts in Latin America).

The other worlds, the interaction and travel between them didn’t interest me at all, and didn’t seem to add anything to the story. The idea of the bannus interested me, but mostly because I was interested in how she’d pulled it off as a writer. What order did she write it in?

I liked the characters of Ann and Mordion, but I was frustrated at the end when everyone emerged as their “true selves.” If the bannus couldn’t force anyone to act against their nature, I wanted to know more about how the characters they had become fitted in with who they really were. Now that would have been interesting. I also wished some of the characters had been developed more earlier on in the book. And it really disturbed me that the bannus had so much character! This seemed to make everything rather murky, especially from an ethical point of view, but this was never really explored.

The only thing that really grabbed me was the idea of magic as something that had a sense of order behind it. I really liked the way Mordion didn’t just learn spells by rote, but explored the theory behind them and so he could use the rules to work out new spells.

Hexwood was interesting, but not really my thing. Perhaps I'm just not clever enough for fantasy. Perhaps I just don't get it. I’d rather read a Brief History of time for the ideas, and Elizabeth Knox is probably the closest to fantasy you'll catch me going. But hey, I can cross off another name from our reading list.

Posted by Fionnaigh at May 21, 2003 03:41 PM