Shakespeare for Slackers

I was on the Library Thing site this afternoon, looking over the new list of books available for early review and spotted Shakespeare for Slackers: Romeo and Juliet. Turns out it's part of a series that also includes Macbeth.(And I would bet that the next book in the series will be Julius Caesar because those three plays are the ones most read in high school. (And if you ask me, having to read Julius Caesar is one of the things that turns students away from Shakespeare. But that's just me. I also think it's a bad idea to read Moby Dick in high school. I didn't read it until I was in college and I loved it but if I'd had to read it sooner, I probably would have hated it as much as everyone else.)

Review: Railsea by China Mieville

Railsea by China Mieville is a coming-of-age tale that takes its inspiration from Moby Dick and Treasure island and a whole universe of elements that he’s mixed into a wildly imaginative story of a young man who has grown up in a world bounded by railroads who discovers there’s something beyond and goes looking for it to claim his destiny.

The hero of the book, a young man called Sham (Shamus Yes Ap Soorap) has gone “to rail’ to hunt the moldywarpes, beasts who inhabit the railsea and used for their fat and meat and fur. Apprenticed to the train’s doctor, Sham is eager to hear the stories the railsailors tell and fascinated by the train’s captain Abacat Naphi, a one-armed woman who lost her limb to a wily white moldywarpe and has been searching for it ever since.

He is less enthusiastic about the rough games the sailors entertain themselves with—games like beetle races and death matches with birds and beasts. One day Sham snaps, stealing a little day bat from the “arena” so it won’t end up killed. This action marks him out to the other crew members. The captain marks him out for reasons of her own, and he’s soon embroiled in feeding her obsession with developing one of his own.

As a proponent of “New Weird,” Mieville has always blended myth and pop culture and literature in his works (most gracefully in Kraken) and in this novel, readers will recognize Moby Dick, Dune (the modlywarpes explode out of the dirt like the “worms” that make spice), a bit of Treasure Island and also Tales of the Arabian Nights.