Following Fantasy Series

Over the years I've read a lot of Fantasy, whether part of a shared world (DragonLance), or of the stand-alone variety.  The problem is that very few fantasy books stop at just one title.  Case in point - I've just finished up reading Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker series, which is comprised of six books, but does hold out the promise of a seventh.  Following taht I'm currently going for my first run through Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber - which is such fun I'm likely to revisit it again in a few years.

Every month I try to make sure I read at least one book from each of my favourite genres; Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction (SF), but although Horror and SF both have plenty of series, Fantasy seems to be almost nothing but series.

On the positive side I can invest a lot more in the characters in a Fantasy series than I can those who only appear in a single novel, but at the same time, while I'm trying out a large number of different Horror and SF authors, I find that over the course of a year I'm reading as few as two or three Fantasy authors, as it takes me months and months to get through their series.

I don't really have a solution to the problem, because I love reading these series, but sometimes I wish I could just find a nice collection of Fantasy short stories, and that would be enough.

Dealing with Donuts, or doughnuts

Late last night I got home from the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association in Philadelphia, PA.  The event was great, I had a lot of fun and met a lot of professionals from all over the US, in addition to attending various meetings, checking out the vendor displays and visiting various sites of interest in Philly.

Then of course there was the quintessential debate I had as a Canadian in the states.  How do the donuts compare to my Canadian experience?

I know this may sound silly to some readers, but up here in Canada we take our doughnuts (correct Canadian spelling) seriously, and although I grew up with both Robin's Donuts and Country-Style Donuts, when we refer to doughnuts up here, we mean Tim Hortons (pictured right).

So I knew when I visited Philly, I would have to compare the doughnuts I grew up with along side two specific competitors, Dunkin' Donuts and a small business called Federal Donuts.

Dunkin' Donuts (which appear on virtually every other corner), appeared to be the closest competitor in Philadelphia, I could be wrong, having stuck mainly to the downtown core, but these restaurants were everywhere (pictured left)

Also the lineups were crazy and if I walked into any business drinking a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, I would inevitably get approached by strangers asking me where the nearest Dunkin' Donuts was located.

The coffee at Dunkin is pretty good, but the donuts were something else all together - first of all the batter itself was sweet, the first donut I tried was a standard Chocolate dip, and it tasted kind of like a donut mixed with a chocolate bar, very sweet for my norther sensibilities, and although it wasn't really my cup of tea, I can see how addictive a sweeter donut could be.

Federal Donuts, on the other hand,  was pretty hard to find (the nearest location to my downtown hotel was about a 20-minute walk), and deciding to save my Dunkin' experience for later in the trip, I went to Federal on my first morning in Philly.

The donuts there (pictured, along with a coffeee and my book), were some of the best tasting I've had in the last ten years.  Although Tim Horton's doughnuts used to be baked in store, since 2006 they've been pre-made in Ontario and are shipped out to be finished in store, and you can definitely tell the difference.  These donuts were freshly made and simply delicious, no matter which ALA event I was at, I could not stop talking about how great these donuts were.

Do they measure up to the doughnuts of my Canadian childhood?  It's hard to say, nostalgia is tricky that way, but I will say that they are about as close as I can hope to get, so if you happen to get to Philly, they are definitely worth a try - just get there early, as they close up once they sell out their daily batches.

Bookmonkey meets a Book Monkey (sorry, Book Orangutan)

As a huge fan of tales of terror and the supernatural, you'd better believe that I would be stopping by the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site if every I found myself in Philadelphia - which thanks to my attendance here at ALA Midwinter 14 is exactly where I found myself!  What really surprised me however, was the fact that I would finally end up with a photo of myself to put on this blog (for newcomers, I've been doing this for about four and a half years, but have so far stayed out of the pictures).

Anyway, while visiting the site, I entered the kitchen and found myself in a crazy situation; here I was, your old pal Bookmonkey, and there he was, a monkey from one of my favourite books (all right, an orangutan from one of my favourite short stories).  

So there you go, me and my monkey.

Genre Character of the Week: Mitkey Mouse

The hero of exactly two short stories (Star Mouse (1942), Mitkey Rides Again (1950), respectively), and one children’s book (Mitkey Astromouse (1973), Frederic Brown’s Mitkey Mouse begins his life as a simple lab mouse (pictured left) and eventually ends his journey as this week’s genre character (er…genre mouse).

Named for the famous mouse by a German doctor working in the States, Mitkey went on a journey to the moon in his first story (1942), and while there he was granted a massively increased intelligence by the beings who lived there and was sent home. Upon his return and speaking heavily accented English (the only kind of English he had ever heard), Mitkey attempts to find a new place on Earth for his kind, a place humans may give up to mice and together the two sentient races could work towards building a grand civilization (Mitkey plans to rename the new mouse homeland Moustralia).

Without spoiling the first story, Mitkey returns in a second story eight years later where he finds that not all hyper-intelligent mice are as kind as he had hoped…

What I like best about Mitkey is his sort of everymouse appeal, trying to work best to better his life, and that of all mousekind, Mitkey is truly a hero of small proportions.

Things I've Noticed: I'm heading off to Philadelphia

So later this week I'll be heading out to my first midwinter meeting of the American Library Association, located this year in Philadelphia, PA.

Although I'll be spending a lot of the event checking out various sessions and meetings, I'm looking forward to checking out a number of the sights (including JFK Plaza, pictured right), foods, and (hopefully) various used bookstores.

So, if anyone has been there before, and knows of various spots/foods I gotta try, let me know and I'll try to fit it all in!

Movie Review: Her

Last night my wife I went out to see the new Spike Jonze film, Her. 

Short review – the film is pretty great and you should go see it.

Longer review – The main focus on the film, which takes place in the future, but no too far in the future, is the relationship between a man named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and the new operating system on his computer (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). In the world of Her, a new Operating System has just been released which included an intuitive Artificial Intelligence (AI) as its core. Theodore, who begins the film in a state of autopilot after a devastating divorce, purchases the system and begins a relationship with the program that quickly moves from friendship to love.

The film works both as a relationship story between Theodore and Samantha (the name the OS gives itself within moments of being uploaded) and as a pretty good idea of how humans and AIs may likely interact when they first meet. A lot of the concepts the movie brings up are examined positively in Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 nonfiction book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and negatively in Sherry Turkle’s 2011 nonfiction book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (also, the idea of a computer/human relationship was examined in the 1984 film Electric Dreams, but not quite as seriously as this – also the AI was created in that film by spilling Champagne across a computer, rather than through design). All in all the movie is about people and relationships, and in the end, that’s really the most important stuff to focus on.

Book Review: Looking Backward 2000 - 1887

Usually when I'm reading science fiction that involves tire travel to the future, things do not go as well as I would like: alien invasions, catastrophic plagues, or massive natural disasters, so you can imagine how pleased I was to come across this little book (written in 1888) called Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887, by Edward Bellamy, where the future actually looks just fine (considering the "future" in the book is in the year 2000).

I actually came across this book while looking for another book; Mack Reynolds' Looking Back from the year 2000. which is part of my current project to read all 100 books in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.  While looking for the book in various library catalogues, i kept coming across the one from 1887 - which makes sense and the later book is a follow-up to the earlier one.

In the book (the original one), Julian West, a young man from Boston in 1887 is transported to the year 2000, where everything is actually going pretty well.  Yes the book is definitely a description of a socialist utopia, but as a socialist, I'm kind of okay with it, and to be fair, reading the book got me pretty excited to check out the 1974 follow up by Mac Reynolds.