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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label Wizard of Oz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wizard of Oz. Show all posts

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Reading road trip...Kansas

Kentucky was once known as "the dark and bloody ground" but to my mind, it's Kansas that deserves that appelation. We tend to think of Kansas as the birthplace of Dorothy Gale and the starting point of the Wizard of Oz, but it is equally the place where, 1959, a family named Clutter was murdered by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. A chronicle of that crime became famous as the first "non-fiction novel" and In Cold Blood catapulted writer Truman Capote to literary stardom.

Kansas is also the setting of Ann Rule's true-crime best seller, Bitter Harvest. Like so many of Rule's books, this one revolves around a seemingly perfect woman (a doctor with her own medical practice, a physician husband, three loving children) who isn't what she seems to be.

Sara Paretsky set her stand-alone novel, Bleeding Kansas, in the state where she was born, and in her introduction and "background" to the book, she talks about what her Kansas childhood meant.



Friday, October 10, 2014

Sexism dies hard....

I saw this on Twitter today and you know, at first I thought it was kind of funny. But then I saw the comment by the person who posted it and it was something along the lines of, "Seems legit." And that hit me wrong. It just seemed so last century somehow, this idea that women are just about the shoes. I prefer to see Dorothy in a different light. So on further consideration, this kind of makes me cranky. Shoes...

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Review of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the orld by Hauki Murakami



Call this Inception by way of The Wizard of Oz.  In fact, readers that loved either of those movies should embrace Murakami’s work which mixes a stylized reality with a dream world populated by people from the “reality.” The protagonist is a "calcutec," a human data processor perhaps inspired by William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic.

The book slipstreams between science fiction, hardboiled noir, cyberpunk, horror, and literary fiction.  (There’s definitely a little Franz Kafka here.)  It's a dazzling, dizzying bit of writing that fits nicely into the "new weird" typified by China Mieville’s The City and the City, where two different worlds exist simultaneously in the same place.

Murakami is working with a palette that includes ambiguity, consciousness, and self.  In both sections of the book, the hero (an unnamed Narrator) is an outsider who’s being kept off-balance and trying to fit in. 

Perhaps the best way to read the book is to see it as a spy story in the Bourne Identity mold.  The Calcutec is a pawn in the info-war going on between the System and the Factory, and he ends up in End of the World severed from his shadow, the repository of memory.  The scenes where the narrator tries to help the librarian remember are filled with a delicate emotion that could be intense in performance.  (This material could easily be adapted into a play, with the different locations indicated by differing lighting.)

This novel is literate, adult entertainment with an edge of magic and a veneer of science fiction; a romp through the tropes of pop culture, and cross-culturally (and self-consciously) hip, in an almost cinematic way. In the end, this is a brilliant book.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Feminist Fiction Friday: Witch Rhymes with Bitch

I was Googling around and put in the search terms "feminist mysteries," expecting to get back a list of books by women writers or books featuring female protagonists. Instead, what I got were links to a series of books about the neo-pagan movement, some of which I've read (Drawing Down the Moon) and some of which I haven't (The Holy Book of women's Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft,Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts).
That search led me to this excerpt from a paper on occult crime and law enforcement by a writer named Isaac Bonewits. (The website is holysmoke.orghttp://www.holysmoke.org/  which turns out to be a Scientology site.)
And that sent my train of thought derailing into the whole subject of witches. Some of the greatest villains in pop culture and English literature were memorable witches--Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty and Narnia's White Witch and the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (and also her kinder/gentler self in Wicked). There is the wicked queen/witch of Snow White and the witches in The Golden Compass. In The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, a contemporary woman discovers she's heiress to a tradition of healing that goes back to the Salem Witch Trials and an ancestress accused of witchcraft.  The book is a historical novel first and last, but it has a theme that you see over and over in witch books--a woman inherits a supernatural destiny. And in all of these books, the heroine is a strong woman, powerful and in command. (And usually beautiful, which is in itself a sort of power.) The only exception I've seen is Anne Rice's "Mayfair Witches" books, which have, to me, an unpleasant undertone of victimization and sexual politics.