Bookshelf:

Doing Little

I had a lazy time at home this weekend. Well, mostly at home.

Friday a bunch of us gathered at Becky's condo to play Bridge. It wasn't a sterling evening on my part, as I've lately been struggling with my play, and we had a lot of hands which seemed to play to the weaknesses in my bidding. I had a good time just hanging around, though. Friday night is a tough night to play Bridge seriously, it being the end of the work-week, and I basically need to work on thinking about my bidding and understanding the rationale behind some of the conventions I'm currently grappling with.

Well, it'll come.

Saturday I did very little indeed. Watched a little TV, wrote a couple more Perl scripts for my journal (total automation is not far off... then I'll be ready to write a new topic index script), worked on some of my Web pages, and went up to Borrone to do a bunch of reading.

I also did some shopping, and had a nice little encounter at the pet store I went to: This chain of stores often has cats for sale in their store, usually from local groups which rescue street cats. This store had three kittens in it, and they'd opened their cage door and were letting them roam free around the store! I got the impression that they're thinking of keeping them (much like my vet in Madison did), though I wasn't sure. Anyway, the orange striped one was snoozing, but the two grayish-black ones were running around with bells on their collars playing their hearts out! It was adorable! I picked them up, they purred, I held them up to let them look out the window (fascinating!), and they chased each other up and down behind the bags of dog food in the back of the story. A pet store is obviously a great place for kitties to run around and have fun! I just hope the employees keep an eye on them so they don't somehow hurt themselves!

That was a great fringe benefit to my day. Made me think (again) that it would be nice to get a kitten. But, that's for the future, if at all. Other than that, Saturday was, like I said, not too busy!

Sunday was a little more interesting (well, aside from doing some house-cleaning). For one thing, I wanted to haul my bicycle out (it's been lying unused for about a year and a half) and go for a ride along the nearby creek trail. I've been thinking of going for rides in the mornings when I don't work out. Unfortunately, I discovered that somewhere along the way I managed to lose both bicycle pumps I own! I dimly recall that one of them was the one item I lost in my move to California two years ago, but I don't know what happened to the other one. I'll have to buy a new one before I can start riding again.

I also finished reading the novel for tonight's Keplers speculative fiction book discussion group, Louise Marley's The Glass Harmonica. This novel has two separate plots told in interwoven chapters: Eilish Eam is a teenaged girl in 1761 London, who lives in a poor section of town and plays water-filled glasses to beg money on the street. Benjamin Franklin is introduced to her and invites her to come play his new invention, a treadle-powered "glass armonica", and she accepts, but she's troubled by the fate of Mackie, the young, crippled son of the whore she lived with, who seemed to rely on her, and she feels out-of-place in the house Franklin's staying at.

In 2018 Seattle, Erin Rushton is a world-renowned performed of the glass harmonica, and her paraplegic brother Charlie composes acclaimed music for her to play. But Charlie dreams of overcoming the disease that hobbled him, and goes to neurophysiologist Gene Berrick as a last hope. Berrick is feeding sound and rhythm into Charlie's ears in an attempt to reroute his neural pathways to bypass the disorder keeping him from using his legs, but Charlie latches on to the approach a bit too forcefully, while Erin - skeptical at first - starts falling for Gene.

Mixed in with this is the supposed curse of the glass harmonica, and Erin and Eilish occasionally having visions of the other throughout the story.

The best theory at the book discussion group as to what's going on here is that Erin, Charlie and Gene are reincarnations of Eilish, Mackie and Ben Franklin, and that they're fulfilling the needs and goals they were unable to in their previous life. This isn't an uninteresting premise, but it's conveyed far too subtly to be effective here (if the two threads had been split apart into two separate sections of the book, then it might have worked), and the tragedies of the 18th century story seem less a matter of character flaws than of the nature of the time and the circumstances. If it's a novel of redemption, it didn't work for me.

Beyond that, though, there isn't a lot to recommend The Glass Harmonica. The characters didn't particularly compel me, and the 21st century thread in particular seemed incredibly manipulative (especially in the Erin/Gene attraction). And the apparitions of Erin and Eilish appearing to each other seemed completely superfluous to the story, as they barely interacted, and not I felt in any meaningful way. It was a terribly frustrating book in that sense, and at the end I was left wondering what the point of the story was. Nothing really clicked for me, and I didn't see what the author was trying to get at.

The discussion was pretty lively. People ranged from finding it interesting and appreciating some of the research that went into it (I found the aural neuro-adjustments to be a bit far-fetched, especially in the "let's see what this does" approach presented), to people with more-or-less my view. Anyway, I'd recommend you give this one a pass.