The Face - Dean Koontz

I love my friends! On Wednesday afternoons, I go to Olympia for a sewing circle with me friends. And I just happened to be at the really exciting, climatic part of the book. I didn't want to leave early, but I was dying to finish the book. And my friends let me. It was so nice not to have to choose, and to be able to read particularly choice passages to them.

I really like The Face, and I've actually read it before, but I found myself thinking about it, more and more. Koontz's books are kind of hard for me to classify. Clearly fiction, often with science fiction themes, but with a more... spiritual bent. And I don't mean, Jesus and church and necessarily G-d type spiritual; more of the spirit world. Though his versions of the spirit world definitely have GOOD and EVIL. I really like the spiritual good/evil twist at the end of this book, but I'm not going to give it away this time, you'll just have to read for yourself. As prolific as Koontz is, he can't write them nearly fast enough for me.

Quote for this one? Nothing spiritual, rather a clever turn of phrase that I find myself thinking no infrequently. He wanted him arrested "on charges of felony cliche and practicing hilosophy without an idea."

Playing catch up

Well, I got stuck for a while on the Wedding Banquet post so I'm going to try to summarize what I've read in the last couple of weeks.

The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides - Read this one just before I went to a lecture Eugenides was giving about the writing of Middlesex, which had already read. I didn't care for The Virgin Suicides as much as Middlesex (which I loved). Eugenides uses an interesting first person plural, but not of the protagonists. Being a book about the decline of this family, and the suicide of 5 sisters, I wanted to know what was going on in the sisters' heads, not the neighborhood boys. Of course, it's possible I found this unsatisfying for precisely the reason he chose that voice (ie: we can never really know what was going on in their heads).


The Crown Of Dalemark - Diana Wynne Jones - A good book that neatly ties together the previous three books in the quartet: Cart And Cwidder, The Spellcoats, and Drowned Ammet.

The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones

A Sudden Wild Magic - Diana Wynne Jones

The Silent Child: Exploring The World Of Children Who Do Not Speak - Laurent Danon-Boileau - An interesting book that I did not quite finish. I'll have to check it out again some time, if for no other reason than to retrieve a good quote about statistics.


Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein - A much worn book of mine that I haven't read front to back in a number of years. I know it well enough, that I've just flipped it opened and read a chapter at random. Great quote on being crazy:

[...]"crazy" -- a nonscientific term meaning that the person to whom one
applies that label has a world picture differing from the accepted one.

The Wedding Banquet - Movie

Years ago, when I was in college, the campus LGBT club showed this movie. Unfortunately, I was sick and didn't get to see it. My partners told me the basic plot line: gay chinese man marries a woman to please his parents, dad tells gay partner to take care of his son, showing that he understands the underlying relationship . For some reason, during my recent illness, I remembered this movie and how I had missed it. Suddenly, my life would not be complete without watching it!

I was actually impressed with the movie. The summary I had heard was really a shadow 0f the story, an inherent danger in short summaries, and prepared me for a lighthearted movie, if not a comedy. The plot and character developments were complex and sincere, and definitely not a comedy. I was pleased that even with five main characters, each one seemed very much like a real person with individual concerns, character traits and growth.

[Spoiler ahead]


The topic is a tough one, simple answers really don't suffice; and this movie faced up to that. No one was happy with the fraudulent marriage: the bride wound up pregnant, the groom wound up tangled in a web of lies, the partner wound up ready to leave. When the father has a mild stroke, the groom tells his mother the truth, but they both swear not to let the father know. Meanwhile, the father gives a bride gift (red envelope of money) to the partner, but swears him to secrecy about the fact that Pop knows.

The Seer: Don't Die Dragonfly by Linda Joy Singleton

Well, I've been out of commission for a while, first with a stomach flu and then with a major project. But I finally managed to get some reading done while waiting for doctor's appointments.

This is the first book I've read by Singleton and it is listed as a young adult book. The series centers around an adolescent girl, Sabine Rose, with psychic talent. It was interesting to read, and other than the basic premise, pretty down to earth: no alien invasions, serial killers, long lost relatives or other contrived trouble. From the information given, and not given, I would not be surprised to find that Sabine originally appeared in another series, of which Singleton has written several.

The true test will be to see how the narrative holds up over several books and/or series. Often authors will find a formula that works once, and run with it over and over. So my final opinion is on hold until I read some more.