Anyone else remember these books?

They were a staple of grade school libraries and Scholastic orders in the eighties. One of my friends had the whole set at home and while I was supremely jealous, I was also cognizant that whenever I tried to follow the origami instructions, I never quite ended up with anything more than a folded and crumbled piece of paper that, at best, vaguely resembled an asteroid or a hair ball.

Around that time, I came into the possession of a thick envelope full of origami paper. I know it was my aunt’s at one point, and I’m going to assume that she willingly gave it to me, but I can’t think of why she would due to my already-mentioned inability to fold paper in any way beautiful. I wonder if maybe I just took the envelope of origami paper. If so, I’m sorry Aunt S. I had somewhat sticky fingers as a kid.

Even with my origami inability well-established, I kept this envelope for years. It moved with me wherever I went. After living at home (Ottawa), I took it to university (Waterloo), grad school (Halifax), Hell (Calgary), failed attempt at being a worker bee (Ottawa again), and finally here (New Brunswick). I used some of the paper for crafts with Tesfa, but most of the time, the envelope sat on a bookshelf, upright like a book, forgotten about.

Until…

The Japanese exchange students went to Tesfa’s camp on Wednesday and showed the kids how to do some simple origami. Tesfa was enthused. She came home and told us she wanted to do more origami. Okay. Super. I can finally use the origami paper I’ve been moving around for twenty-five years!

But Tesfa was adamant on one point: she wants to do origami from a book, not from instructions on the computer. So on Thursday, she and Geoff set out to the library to find origami books and came home with the one you see above. My nemesis come back to haunt me.

But…. tada:

Please ignore the blurriness of the picture. Tesfa insisted I take it while she was sitting on a stability ball.

I MADE SOMETHING FROM ONE OF THOSE ORIGAMI BOOKS! The book tells me it’s a water bird rather than any specific water bird, so feel free to decide it is a duck or a swan or a loon or I’m out of water birds, so I don’t know.

So take that books that foiled me when I was nine. I’m smarter than you now!

One: I’m writing this post with a moderate migraine lodged behind my right eye. Probably I should lay down and not strain my eyes staring further at a screen, but migraines often make me more obsessive than usual, and I’ve got it in my head that I’m going to write my thoughts on The Luminaries today since I finished it last night and if I procrastinate, I’ll never get it done. And this book took me over a week to read. That’s a very long time for me to read a book. It’s long and heavy (the book, in terms of pages and weight). Be warned.

Now Two to $$\omega$$: My thoughts on The Luminaries.

I never really know how to rate long books. Even in long books that I end up despising (for example House of Leaves), generally there are sections that I enjoyed (there are some good spooky bits when they go exploring into the house). Similarly, in long books that I love a little more than should be allowed (Infinite Jest), there are always sections that are little more than flaming excrement (The Ebonics Chapter).

I also never know how to rate novels that I’m not enamoured with, but not because the novel is inherently bad or low-quality. I don’t want to rate lowly because the book didn’t personally grab me the whole way through, but do I rate a book highly because I can see its genius even if I was a bit meh overall? I think David Sexton’s review says it best:

Let’s concede that The Luminaries is a stunning feat of construction. The Booker judges knew, whatever else its merits, they were giving the prize to a tremendously technically accomplished piece of work

(although I think the next few sentences he writes are a bit too vitriolic. But, funnily Sexton had a similar experience to me in that he got to about page 150 while he was on holiday and then started to really question whether it was worth continuing. I don’t know where Sexton was vacationing, but I was in a yurt in Fundy National Park.)

This is an precisely constructed novel. The book is full of clever schemes. I’m usually old-hat at figuring out clever schemes, but these ones were beyond my Agatha Christie-honed skills. I appreciate that. I appreciate clever novels and clever twists, but then less so when there’s suddenly a bunch of astrological silliness about entwined fates. I don’t mind ghost or horror stories, but I’d rather be in-all on a paranormal story than just side plot for two (maybe three depending on how you count it) characters. But the idea of The Fates leads into the novel’s main theme of fortune, and, as I think it says on the dust-jacket, fortune in every sense: making a fortune, telling fortunes (as with the astrological symbols), being fortunate (lucky), the whims of fortune. But the coincidences the Fates/Stars/Deities throw at the characters start to feel contrived, no matter how many characters, in a self-aware, post-modern way, discuss how odd all these coincidences are.

And of course characters. Like with The Lifeboat, which I read this Spring, there are so many characters. I know that 19th century novels are supposed to be like a subway going downtown at rush-hour, but there are so many characters and I don’t know enough about gold rushes to be able to one hundred percent distinguish their jobs. What’s the difference between a shipping agent and a commission agent? Why is the gaoler also the Commissioner? Are those separate jobs? Did somewhere earlier in the book tell me that? Some characters could have likely been combined if slimness had been a goal (maybe Sook Yongsheng and Quee Long, maybe Thomas Balfour and Charlie Frost, maybe any of the other two Caucasian men). But there are twelve men there for the Zodiac so combining them means the book loses that structure which ties back into the idea of fortune, which in turn goes back to the parts of the book I liked the least.

What I liked best: The spelling of connexion, which is always how I spelled connection until, one afternoon sitting in OAC Chemistry, a poster told me that I should have been spelling connextion as connection, which I then switched to to avoid embarassing spelling-related incidents (obviously the poster was not about spelling the word connection and likely had something to do with chemical bonds and my Chemistry partner might have alerted me to that poster because of my spelling of connexion on our lab report, I don’t rightly recall).

All of this is a long-winded way of saying what I said much more succinctly when I reviewed Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal:

Sometimes I read novels and get mad that I am not writing novels because I want to write novels like this one. Well, most of the time. The rest of the time it felt more like a technical piece than anything enjoyable – sort of like eating kale, you know it’s good for you but you’d really rather have the cake.

So I rated The Luminaries the same as I rated The Rehearsal – 4.5/5. Don’t expect me to write anything as long or as clever as this either.

Man, writing reviews is hard. I always sound so pedantic. So much for my career as a book reviewer having publishers send me free books to review.

Tesfa has asked me to read Geronimo Stilton books to her.

I should have gone with what my friend suggested to me: Hide those books until Tesfa can read them herself.

It was not an unhappy childhood, but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it.

Eleanor Catton – The Luminaries.

Not that we’re reading that series of books.

We have moved somewhat past the picture book stage. I always thought I liked picture books, but I’ve realized not as much as I thought. I like some of the earlier Beginner Books (those hardcovers with the Cat In the Hat on the upper spine), but other than that, I feel a bit like the children in Og who spent years having to read boring picture books about good little children who always help mummy in the kitchen.

But now, as my monthly reading lists have attested, we have moved onto Chapter Books. Huzzah!

I have a fifteen year gap in knowledge of children’s chapter books. Harry Potter came out during those years, and I read them, but I don’t have the rabid love of them that so many people seem to possess. I’m sure at some point I’ll read them to/with Tesfa, but I remember thinking how rushed the last two books were and how I would have edited them way down. And the earlier books were fine. Not great, definitely not horrible, just fine. Beach reads sort of.

At the library, I grabbed a Lemony Snicket All The Wrong Questions book. Lemony Snicket is another author that arrived while I was not in the stage of looking at children’s chapter books. I do recall going to the World’s Biggest Bookstore (RIP) in Toronto in maybe 2000 or 2001 and seeing one of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books, but I kind of just ignored it, figuring it’d be Harry Potter-lite. Maybe it is. I still don’t know.

What I do know is the two Lemony Snicket All The Wrong Questions books I’ve read are fun, as in adult fun, not I see the enjoyment in my child and that brings me joy fun. When we eventually read Harry Potter together, I know my fun will be of the second sort. But these Lemony Snicket books, they are clever and well-edited and sharp and pointy and funny all together. And it’s not just me. Tesfa, a little sick last week, fell asleep before dinner, only to wake up around nine at night crying “Lemony Snicket! You didn’t read me any Lemony Snicket today!”

Now if I could only get Tesfa interested in The Luminaries, which I was really drawn into at first and then my interest sort of petered out, we could read that together and I could finally finish it before it’s due back at the library.

I am always tickled to read books about places I know exactly, i.e. not just set in Calgary but set in the North Hill Shopping Center and the condos above it, a few blocks away from where I used to live. I wonder how much that influenced what I thought about 419 (although the Calgary parts are the weakest in the intertwining stories).