NaNoReaMo: LEVIATHAN
Finally, a place with internet again!
As some of you may know, I’ve been utterly incommunicado the last couple of days. I’m still traveling with my family, and we’d been staying at a bed and breakfast on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. The down side? No internet whatsoever. The upside? About five minutes from all the wineries you could possibly want to visit. This was the view outside our window:
It’s been a fantastic couple of days, including moments like hearing koalas bellowing (yes, BELLOWING) during a moonlit tour of a wildlife sanctuary, walking through a maze of roses taller than my head, and driving down gravel roads covered by cathedral-like arches of high eucalypt trees. Plus, tons of delicious wine. All that said, I find myself missing the internet, but not in the way I would’ve expected. I used to get horribly antsy missing the internet, wanting my email and my games and whatever else, because I’d be bored without it. I find it to be rather different now-I’m not bored, with all the books I can possibly devour, and tremendously busy days. Instead, I’ve discovered that I feel a slight hint of loneliness without the internet. I want to keep in touch with all my new blogger/writer friends, and keep up on what they’re doing. I’ve just begun meeting some new folks and I feel the loss of those new tentative friendships way more keenly than I had expected. So though I’ve been having a brilliant time on vacation, I’m glad to be back in “civilization” with some internet, now that we’re staying at a hotel in Melbourne.
This is what I’ve been up to without the internet:
I’m a big fan of Scott Westerfeld’s UGLIES series, enough so that I will cheerfully read anything he writes because I know I’ll enjoy it. I knew absolutely nothing about LEVIATHAN before beginning it, though, except that it seemed to involve giant robots of some kind, and that was only from what I’d seen on the cover. As it turns out, it’s a story about two teenagers during the beginning stages of World War I, although It takes place in some sort of alternate history world, the science of which is such a delight to discover that I won’t spoil you for it if you haven’t read it yet. There’s cross-dressing, there’s giant war machines, there’s flying whales, there’s Darwinist geekery, there’s explosions and glaciers and castles and furtive escapes in the dark of night. Seriously, this book has basically everything you could ask for. Including a thylacine.
I also completely loved the illustrations, which were just PERFECT for the book. The artist, Keith Thompson, so clearly captured the characters and the swashbucklingness of the story. (Yes, that’s a word.) I normally get a flash of “Oh, that’s not right” when I see character illustrations, because my mental image is invariably not echoed in the pictures, but for some reason these worked perfectly for me.
My only complaint about the book is its ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it felt very non-climactic to me. I usually love open endings for books-in fact, I usually write them that way myself-but I like for the main conflicts of the story to be resolved, with just that sting at the end of the story to come. THE HUNGER GAMES is a great example of that kind of open ending, as is THE GOLDEN COMPASS. Unfortunately, LEVIATHAN doesn’t end with an opening so much as it doesn’t end… it just stops. I was two paragraphs into the afterward before I realized the novel had ended and I was reading about the ratio of fact to fiction in the history, and not a strange way of starting a new chapter.
All of that said, I think that when your biggest disappointment with a book is that it ends, you’re doing pretty okay.
As some of you may know, I’ve been utterly incommunicado the last couple of days. I’m still traveling with my family, and we’d been staying at a bed and breakfast on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. The down side? No internet whatsoever. The upside? About five minutes from all the wineries you could possibly want to visit. This was the view outside our window:
It’s been a fantastic couple of days, including moments like hearing koalas bellowing (yes, BELLOWING) during a moonlit tour of a wildlife sanctuary, walking through a maze of roses taller than my head, and driving down gravel roads covered by cathedral-like arches of high eucalypt trees. Plus, tons of delicious wine. All that said, I find myself missing the internet, but not in the way I would’ve expected. I used to get horribly antsy missing the internet, wanting my email and my games and whatever else, because I’d be bored without it. I find it to be rather different now-I’m not bored, with all the books I can possibly devour, and tremendously busy days. Instead, I’ve discovered that I feel a slight hint of loneliness without the internet. I want to keep in touch with all my new blogger/writer friends, and keep up on what they’re doing. I’ve just begun meeting some new folks and I feel the loss of those new tentative friendships way more keenly than I had expected. So though I’ve been having a brilliant time on vacation, I’m glad to be back in “civilization” with some internet, now that we’re staying at a hotel in Melbourne.
This is what I’ve been up to without the internet:
I’m a big fan of Scott Westerfeld’s UGLIES series, enough so that I will cheerfully read anything he writes because I know I’ll enjoy it. I knew absolutely nothing about LEVIATHAN before beginning it, though, except that it seemed to involve giant robots of some kind, and that was only from what I’d seen on the cover. As it turns out, it’s a story about two teenagers during the beginning stages of World War I, although It takes place in some sort of alternate history world, the science of which is such a delight to discover that I won’t spoil you for it if you haven’t read it yet. There’s cross-dressing, there’s giant war machines, there’s flying whales, there’s Darwinist geekery, there’s explosions and glaciers and castles and furtive escapes in the dark of night. Seriously, this book has basically everything you could ask for. Including a thylacine.
I also completely loved the illustrations, which were just PERFECT for the book. The artist, Keith Thompson, so clearly captured the characters and the swashbucklingness of the story. (Yes, that’s a word.) I normally get a flash of “Oh, that’s not right” when I see character illustrations, because my mental image is invariably not echoed in the pictures, but for some reason these worked perfectly for me.
My only complaint about the book is its ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it felt very non-climactic to me. I usually love open endings for books-in fact, I usually write them that way myself-but I like for the main conflicts of the story to be resolved, with just that sting at the end of the story to come. THE HUNGER GAMES is a great example of that kind of open ending, as is THE GOLDEN COMPASS. Unfortunately, LEVIATHAN doesn’t end with an opening so much as it doesn’t end… it just stops. I was two paragraphs into the afterward before I realized the novel had ended and I was reading about the ratio of fact to fiction in the history, and not a strange way of starting a new chapter.
All of that said, I think that when your biggest disappointment with a book is that it ends, you’re doing pretty okay.