the book club: July 2005 Archives

I devoured Absolution Gap on the flight back to Germany from San Antonio. Contemporary physics and intrapersonal recognition hooked me the most. It’s the last book (?) in an epic SF series by Alastair Reynolds; I read the others while in Europe last summer. The characters really grew on me, I have to say (I didn’t find them all that compelling at first, they weren’t very nice). I was a bit unsatisfied with the conclusion though, as it’s given as if the right choice simply takes care of the current (huge) threat. That’s why I wonder if another book might be in the making? For the conclusion to be sensible one had to recall the vast scale of interspecies interaction Reynolds invokes. If I put it in Goffman’s terms, the levels of lamination generated by transformations of the frame are as big as anyone I’ve ever read, including classics like The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, and you were on your own to keep events in context. (My memory might be improving with age (?) because I was actually able to do so....!)

I read Jeannette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping on the way from Paris to Toulouse (last week). I marked every 5th page or so, with a quote that seemed personally relevant. “Don’t regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough” (107).

“The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit into the template called language” (135). “Memory points…[to the] archives of catastrophe and mistake” (147). “I don’t know how to poultice my heart” (194). “This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in” (133). “I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start [by chance]” (33).