My strategy for picking out books to read is pretty haphazard. Usually on Thursday after 6pm, the last time I’m working at the library before the weekend, I wander around and randomly grab things based on cover art and if I can vaguely remember someone mentioning them to me at some point. I know this isn’t a very librarian way of selecting my weekend reading, and I swear that I do have actual book lists, but they seem to exist in a kind of space time vortex which makes them immediately accessible at all times EXCEPT when I am actually looking for books.
Anyway, because of these entirely uninformed habits, it always kind of amazes me when I pick out a book I genuinely really like. And this weekend I read TWO. It was craziness.
Up first:
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge
The first chapter of this book features misfit 12-year-old Mosca rescuing a conman from the stocks in exchange for employment, stealing a homicidal goose, and burning down her uncle’s mill. The conman, after various failed attempts at trying to lose her, eventually leads her into a world of disputed kingship, guild war and espionage, heavy censorship, and religious confusion. It’s not just Hardinge’s intensely detailed world-building, but Mosca and the reader are never really sure who’s on what side until the very end, which makes for exciting dramatic reveals. My favorite part was a Robin Hood-like escape turned sea battle between floating coffee houses. Also that the Guild of Stationers threatened to fight a battle by stabbing rival guildsmen with pens and crushing them underneath printing presses. Also: homicidal goose consistently saves the day. Come on.
You should read this book if:
1) Brave New World and 1984 are too old and serious but you want the same kind of message
2) You like characters who are mostly disreputable but sometimes decide to do the right thing, you know, just to keep people guessing
3) HOMICIDAL GOOSE
Then, as if that weren’t enough book love for one weekend, I also got:
China Mieville's Un Lun Dun
The only thing I don’t like about this book is that the girl on the cover looks kind of freaky, especially at night, so I always had to keep it cover-down when not reading.
Un Lun Dun is basically Alice in Wonderland on speed. After a series of weird and unexplainable events, Zanna and her friend Deebra follow a sentient umbrella to a strange parallel-London, an “abcity”, called UnLondon, where things from the real London go after they’ve become “moderately obsolete” or have just fallen through the cracks. Zanna is greeted by the strange inhabitants as some kind of mythical hero who will deliver them from their greatest enemy, a sentient form of smog banished from London after the Clean Air Act, but it eventually falls to Deebra to go on a bizarre quest with the help of a boy who’s half-ghost, a tailor with a pincushion for a head who makes clothes out of book pages, a bus conductor and his flying bus, and a sentient milk carton. Also, KILLER GIRAFFES. Here’s an excerpt:
“They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves! Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course. There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots.”–Busconductor Jones pg. 53
And, as if that weren’t enough, China Mieville also does his own illustrations:
A Binja!
This and other illustrations (including the homicidal giraffes) can be found here.
This was definitely the best book I’ve read in a long time, and not just because they mention Extreme Librarians or Bookaneers. You should read this book if:
1) You are alive.
