Ah spring break, bastion of college days... I'd like to say I'll be lying out on a beach somewhere, but I'm stuck in this snowy land. Oh well, doesn't mean I won't be having fun, eh? In return for a lovely picture of my roommate sunning on the beach of some western shore, I'm supposed to take a bikini clad picture of myself, sunning in the snow. (That was the deal, wasn't it, Kat?) Somehow I think she gets the better end of the deal. Perhaps I'll post said pictures up here sometime, but I really don't think I'm going to want to.
Instead of all the the beach fun, I shall be reading the whole break, and doing other...stuff. I checked out stacks of books though, so I'll review them as I read them. First off is
Coraline by Neil Gaimon. I love his
American Gods and
Anansi Boys, so I thought this should be good. Now
Coraline doesn't exactly inspire the same philosophic thought but it does offer some interesting questions. For example, the cat remarks that playing with mice is actually merciful. At first, I don't think many people would agree, claiming that the cat is simply cruel, dangling slim chances of freedom and terrorizing their prey. Although this is true, there is also a truth to the mercy aspect. As the cat reminds us, sometimes in the game, the mice do get free. Isn't that terror worth it, if for suffering it, some small chance of freedom arises from an almost certain doom? I think so. The cat was definitely my favorite character, due both to his demeanor and my inability to relate to Coraline. This quote is also one of his: "Now,
you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names." I like that quote, because its so true. Names have such immense power over the individual, they are the ultimate label. They tell us what family we belong to, if someone is married, and usually the gender. Once someone knows your name, you can't pretend that they are calling some other "you." There's a certain freedom in anonymity, when no one but you kn
ow your name. But do really use name to tell ourselves who we are? We can, if we're other orientated. We can use are name to judge our self worth, by connecting our names to others. Maybe the cat is right, you only need a name if you don't know who you are. Still, I like my name, I need my name, and maybe that says something about me too. Finally,this scene towards the end of the novel make me pause. Coraline throws the cat at the other mother, using the resulting confusion to grab the final object and to escape, with the cat. It seemed so blatantly wrong of Coraline to use the cat in such a way, an animal who only so recently had helped her and who feared the witch so much. Perhaps though it wasn't so much a betrayal of the cat, as it was an confession of ultimate trust. Coraline trusted the cat would do what needed to be done, even with out telling it, that she risked the few precious moments she had and her ultimate chance to rescue everyone on the ability of the cat to react and distract the other mother. Maybe she simply had no other choice.
The next book I'm reading is
Five Fates, by Keith Laumer, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Gordon Dickson, and Harlen Ellison. I'm currently on the forth fate fate, and I must say each fate takes quite an interesting spin on the introductory scenario. Right now, I must say I like Hebert and Dickson's takes the best, with Anderson's in second place. I'm not sure that I really like the fourth fate all the much though, this being Ellison's. I'll do a better review once I read the last fate, but right now... this bit form the introductory piece piqued my interest. "Bailey's last thought as the endless blackness closed in was of the words cut in granite over the portal to the Euthanasia Center: '...send me your tire, your poor, your hopeless, yearning to be free . To them I raise the lamp besides the brazen door...' ." It stuck me as an infinitely twisted way to use the words so intertwined with the Statue of Liberty and all she stands for. In a very odd way though, they fit...
