Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the far west coast, this is a rare phenomenon, and even when we do get the occasional flurry, it generally disappears within a few hours, or a day at most. But, as we all know, Mother Nature loves a good surprise, and thus she decided that we needed to really appreciate this heavy white blanket, and decreed that it should hang around for a good while that we might get the full effect of it.
As you might expect, this also meant that the temperature remained quite cold, with a bitter enough wind that we concentrated on hunkering down, getting more intimate with our wood stove than I really cared for, cooking spicy dishes, cursing the almost non-existent internet access, and, yes, doing a good bit of reading.
As a kid growing up, I was not what you'd call normal in that I was always very tall (I shot up to 6'5") and painfully skinny. I remember coming home from the barber with a flattop (crew cut) at one point, and my dear maternal grandmother squinted up at me and proclaimed I looked like an Auschwitz survivor. I tended to be quite introverted and rather than play sports (I was always one of those kids last picked for any activity), I would park myself behind a book and escape into other worlds. The library was a place of wonder, and I would go home after each visit with an armful of books on topics as varied as I could find. I could lose myself completely in a book, and only come up for air to grab for the next one.
My tastes varied, but I always had a keen interest in Science Fiction, and then later, as a teenager, I delved into fantasy. I well remember a friend giving me The Hobbit, and I was enchanted by the rich world and fascinating, albeit rather simple, story. My pleasure was increased when I returned the book and was presented with The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy (of which I had no knowledge at that point). The complexity and sheer weight of characters, places and themes drew me in immediately, and it became an instant favorite.
Years later, I was similarly introduced to a trilogy by Stephen R. Donaldson, called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The hero, or really the anti-hero, Thomas Covenant, is a leper who is summoned from ordinary life to a place called 'The Land' to help fight Lord Foul, the Deceiver. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this work, it is far better than this sounds, and for those of you who are familiar, enough said.
When I first read the trilogy, I remember thinking, OK, this guy is really just basing it all on LOTR, but he could certainly weave a tale well enough that, regardless of similarities, it created a world rich in detail and character. Some years later, it was followed up by the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, in which Covenant, and a new character, Linden Avery, again battle evil in the Land.
In 2004, Donaldson published what was to become the first book (of four) of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I immediately bought and read the first volume, and then waited... and waited... and waited. Donaldson, you see, is a painfully slow author. Suffice it to say that the fourth and last book was just released, and we are finally able to read the quadrilogy from start to finish.
The blizzard enabled me to get a good straight read all the way through, and having just finished, I can say it was highly enjoyable. One of Donaldson's strengths is his ability to create characters that resonate and who are unique enough to carry you through what can be, at times, and excruciating read. Excruciating because of a couple of things: first, his characters spend pages upon pages in self-doubt, self-loathing and self-recrimination, to the point where you want to slap them and say, "Enough, for fuck's sake, get on with it!"; and secondly, he positively delights in using words that you need the Oxford English Dictionary (not the concise version) to decipher.
Now I pride myself on having an above average vocabulary, but Donaldson just makes me feel like a second-grader! Here's a few choice examples that are actually in the iPad dictionary: toxin, debouched, propinquity, sepmiternal, asservation, telic, irenic, oneiric, and the ever-popular, enscorcelled. Then, of course we have a ream of words that the iPad dictionaries simply give up on, such as: objurgation, surquedry, fuligin, ensepulture, assoil and rimose. Add to this a smattering of words that he has himself invented, such as Haruchai, caesure, brissance etc, and you begin to see the difficulty in the continuity of how you read. I'm constantly snagged by the unfamiliar word, torn between just having to know what the hell it means, or just wanting to skip over it to get on with the story. And these traits are not simply confined to the Covenant books, but are also rampant in his other main series, such as the wonderful Mordant's Need, and the difficult but epic Gap Series. All of this aside, however, the story is heavy going, yet satisfying, bringing back giants with their wonderful names, such as Rime Coldspray and Baf Scatterwit, and the staunch Haruchai warriors with names such as Stave, Galt and Clyme. Donaldson has no trouble in writing characters that you either love, or love to hate.
Once I had finished the Covenant quadrilogy, I felt the need for something much, much lighter, and so I am now charging through Bill Bryson's Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a uproarious tale of his growing up in middle America during the 50's. As I too grew up in this period, it is a book that I can relate to in so many ways. Bryson is one of my favorite authors as he has a marvelously irreverent sense of humour that is very similar to my own. He also has an unerring way of finding nuggets that you can immediately relate to and which he then writes about in a manner that has you in stitches. Let me give you an example:
“A whole morning could be spent just getting the laces on your sneakers right since all sneakers in the 1950s had more than seven dozen lace holes and the laces were fourteen feet long. Each morning you would jump out of bed to find that the laces had somehow become four feet longer on one side of the shoe than the other. Quite how sneakers did this just by being left on the floor overnight was a question that could not be answered—it was one of those things, like nuns and bad weather, that life threw at you from time to time—but it took endless reserves of patience and scientific judgment to get them right, for no matter how painstakingly you shunted the laces around the holes, they always came out at unequal lengths. In fact, the more carefully you shunted, the more unequal they generally became. When by some miracle you finally got them exactly right, the second lace would always snap, leaving you to sigh and start again.
The makers of sneakers also thoughtfully pocked the soles with numberless crevices, craters, chevrons, mazes, crop circles, and other rubbery hieroglyphs, so that when you stepped in a moist pile of dog shit, as you most assuredly did within three bounds of leaving the house, they provided additional absorbing hours of pastime while you cleaned them out with a stick, gagging quietly but oddly content.”
Absolutely hilarious! And so many of the other things he talks about resonate so well with me too. He grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, whereas I spent most of the same time in and around the Toronto area, but so much of what he talks about brings forth poignant and vivid memories from my own childhood. It's a book not to be missed!Excerpt From: Bill, Bryson. “Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.” Random House, 2006-01-11T05:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
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When the snow finally cleared, Marcelle and I were able to get out and resume our almost daily walks, so, Dear Reader, I have a few new pictures for you...
Ta ta for now!
Hellfire and damnation!
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