What a fascinating, odd little book. I’m compiling a bibliography on dogs in literature and thus came across this book by John Muir about an expedition to Alaska and the funny, little dog named Stickeen who accompanied him on his adventures. After a particularly perilous situation in which they were trapped on a glacier and had to negotiate a dangerous crevasse, Muir pays homage to Stickeen in wonderfully florid language:

“I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion; but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the leat promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light and through him as a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals.”

Well, sure, dogs bring me into deeper sympathy with my fellow mortals all the time. So, rock on, John Muir!

This just arrived today via ILL and, as it turns out, it is exactly what I needed for the paper I finished and turned in last Tuesday. It is clear, accessible, complete, quite readable overall, for those of us who are not geeks. Ah, the blessing and the curse of interlibrary loan. If only I had started my research earlier and requested this earlier. Drat and doubledrat.

I recently asked a professional librarian to be my mentor at work. Now, she has assigned me this book to read. Funny how whenever I ask one of the librarians for help or advice, they always give me something to read ;-) Go figure.

It has probably been at least 20 years since I read Over Sea, Under Stone. When I was a child, the Dark is Rising series was one of my very favorites. It had everything: time travel, magic, quests, striking English scenery, etc. What I notice now is how much agency the child protagonists have. They go on this quest through the Cornish countryside completely unsupervised and their parents hardly even keep track of where they are going. The kids get to do important things (e.g., saving the world from darkness). They are actual people, even though they are young. My life as a child was so incredibly constrained, I think this must be part of what drew me to these books and others, such as the Narnia books, the Wrinkle in Time series, even Dickens.

I’m looking forward to rereading the rest of the series.

Oh, we absolutely loved this series! I thought Gillian Anderson was at her best being all creepy and gloomy. I’m also a big fan of Mastepiece Theater back from when the series seemingly went on for years. Upstairs Downstairs, anyone? So, my only complaint is that it wasn’t longer.

Have any of you read the book? How do the book and movie compare? Does the book go into more detail?

I ask because my partner and I agree that it feels like the movie was missing some important pieces of the story that perhaps were included in the book? For example, if humanity can’t have any children, then why the xenophobia? Why the complete disregard for life? Why all the killing? One would assume that a catastrophic event such as humanity not being able to procreate would make people (and governments) value life more. So, perhaps I am missing the point. I get that the movie explores the current actions of the U. S. and British governments taken to dystopian extremes. I get the message that all of us should be willing to sacrifice everything for the life of a child. I get that all of the parties in the film – the government, the activists, the proletariat, the work-a-day drones – continue to do what they do without question because, well, that is what they do. I just don’t get why human life isn’t valued more by all of the aforementioned parties. So, does anyone have any thoughts about this?

By the way, I think one of the most effective little scenes in the movie is in the abandoned train station (or whatever it is) when the Julianne Moore character mentions the high frequency sound and says something along the lines of, “Hear that sound? Well, enjoy it while you can because eventually you will become deaf to it and then you won’t be able to hear that frequency at all anymore.” Theo is one of the few who can still perceive that something is terribly wrong with the status quo. He hasn’t been totally assimilated yet and so Julian is able to pull him out of the greyness of his life, to convince him to risk everything, to try to make a difference.

I have such a love/hate relationship with Orson Scott Card. I happily read everything he published, starting with Songmaster many years ago. I loved the Ender books and the Alvin Maker books especially for their originality, their ideas & intelligence. I loved how Card makes us think about the big issues.

Then, I read Folk of the Fringe, which is basically a Mormon tract. And I read some of Card’s essays and interviews. It turns out that Card is a very public and vehement homophobe. He uses the platform afforded by his success and celebrity to broadcast his ideas about how we (queer people) are going to burn in hell for our sins. So, I no longer read all of his books and I absolutely do not purchase any. Do I still think he is a good novelist, worth reading? Yes. Do I now read his books with a much more skeptical eye? Yes.

For more information on Card, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card