It was hard to figure out the cut-off point between Mongrel and Meld. In a way, the whole of Mongrel is Tardi’s backstory and set-up for his role in Meld.
I felt that, with at least the main character a familiar person, we might all be able to better understand the new scenario. Experience it through his senses, as it were. It was hard to write and it’ll be hard to understand. But I hope you’ll find it intriguing.
— — — —
I’ve seen most snakes in the wild, but never a death adder. Like most bush-walking Australians I was always on the look out for them. Very scary. I’ve known several people who thought they killed one, only for the animal to turn out to be a blue-tongue skink.
Been home since yesterday and today assessing what I’ve been reading since last time I talked about books.
And that seems weeks ago. A lot has happened.
Book 15, Banks by Grantlee Kieza , published in 2020 by ABC Wave and HarperCollinsPublishers.
Though I’ve always been interested in Sir Joseph Banks and his plant discoveries in Australia, I had never read a biograpghy.
So was pleased to see this among the biographies in the Vista foyer. Started reading that night, full of vim and vigour.
My my! Did I get bogged down? I’ve seldom read a boggier book, such a disappointment. Kieza’s style is turgid, the first fifty pages are an unbroken list of namedroppings with numbers for endnotes. By page 50, there are 76 endnotes.
Normally, if a book doesn’t grab me by page 50, I give up. This time though, because it was about Banks I thought I should continue. After all, my thinking went, Banks himself is in the scene now. It isn’t just his friends and relatives tripping the stage.
On page 81 there is an interesting paragraph about the fitting out of the ship that was eventually to be named ‘Endeavour’. I must admit that here I appreciated the detail.
How a ship ninety eight feet long and twenty-nine feet and three inches wide could fit into it a crew of seventy, twenty scientists, dogs, cats, goats and poultry, is beyond belief.
The crew were alotted a space of fourteen inches wide for their hammocks. They’d have to swing top and tail, my reading buddy reminded me.
What I’m saying with these few facts … yes there are nuggets of gold in this book. They’re so far apart is the problem.
Book 16 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. First published in 1990 by Victor Gollancz.
Started reading this when I hit another long slow chapter in Banks’ life.
The Difference Engine is a whole other kettle of fish. Fiction, of course, it’s said that with this story, Gibson and Sterling invented the cyberpunk genre.
Not a fast read either, but definitely interesting. The hold up here was the unusual terminology for what are normal concepts these days. So although you know you’re reading about a computer, it is called the difference engine.
The research done for this novel is astounding. Every kind of Victorianism is present and acounted for. Omnibuses, Hansom cabs, steam trains. Line-streamed aka stream-lined. China- hard platter of mud … many descriptions have been built using concepts right for the time.
The kind of story you want to read fast to see what happens next, but also slow to enjoy the richly described world. Quite a conundrum. I think probably in the goodness of time I will read it again.
After another couple of chapters of Banks, I picked up the so-called New Jack Reacher
Book 17, The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child. 2020 by The Bantam Press
I planned for this to be fast and thoughtless read. Pure relaxation. Didn’t turn out to be. The collaboration between these two gentlemen doesn’t work for me.
Lee Child’s normal style is spare and suspenseful. Andrew Child’s style slowed it down but not in a good way. Not by cranking up the suspense. Sentences are longer and sometimes there’s too much description.
I’m still supposedly reading Banks. Be hard to get back to it now. I might look for another biography about him
Now you get to witness the difficulties I have finishing. I never have been able to end a story naturally, always have to study how it’s done. Jeff Vandemeer’s Wonderbook has helped me numerous times.
In Mongrel I ran up to the end a couple of times and each time wrote yet another chapter or part and in the end … well you’ll read about the end in the goodness of time.
Now imagine this forest but thicker, with more trees …
Image by Casuarina grove (Marathi- सुरू वन) (3228093703).jpg
The rabbit-hole, when asked for an image of silver water pouring, coughed out this illustration for an article on colloidal silver. Then of course it had to be screen-shotted, resized and otherwise groomed to take its place in this story. In the process I lost the name of the website-of-origin, my apologies. Let me know if you recognize it as yours and I shall reference you.
Various species of Leptospermum, or Teatree, an Australian native genus have been made into balms and other medicinal products for thousands of years. Here the flower and fruit of the Pink Teatree (Leptospermum squarrosum)
I’m pretty happy with this image, another cut from a ceramic puzzle I once made. The original 30 centimeter tile broke across during storage, a risk associated with green-ware. IE not yet kilned. I took the pieces home over the Christmas holidays to decide what I was going to do with it.
Ended up breaking them into 13 pieces to try a different experiment on each piece. In this photo are four of the pieces representing a creek. As well as incising them, and painting them with ceramic slips, I searched one of the local bottle dumps and found fragments of old blue and old white glass to crush. Kilning the glassy fragments made the foamy creek water featured on these pieces. Below them the pieces that were inscribed with creek bank vegetation and fungi.
Rita de Heer 