Quotations Weblog

See what happens when I stop reading Boing Boing? I don’t hear about the new Cory Doctorow book. Fortunately, Unshelved gave me the heads up about Little Brother by Cory Doctorow:

• Unshelved - Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

The book will be available tomorrow, but you can download an excerpted reading from Chapter 12 here:

• Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com >> Blog Archive » Reading from Little Brother, my May, 2008 young adult novel

With good reviews from Neil Gaiman, Brian K. Vaughan and Scott Westerfeld, Cory must have done something right.

Here is the plot of the story, courtesy of Amazon:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Cory usually posts his book online for download, but it looks like he’s not doing that for this one. You’ll have to go to the library this time.

Update 04-28-08 8:35am: I just received this email from Cory Doctorow:

Hey, Laura! There’s assuredly be a free CC release of Little Brother — it’ll be online sometime next week, when I get back from visiting family in Toronto.

This week, Unshelved recommends Tomorrow #1: When The War Began by John Marsden:

• Unshelved - Tomorrow #1: When The War Began

Here is a review of the book from Amazon.com:

When Ellie and her friends go camping, they have no idea they’re leaving their old lives behind forever. Despite a less-than-tragic food shortage and a secret crush or two, everything goes as planned. But a week later, they return home to find their houses empty and their pets starving. Something has gone wrong–horribly wrong. Before long, they realize the country has been invaded, and the entire town has been captured–including their families and all their friends. Ellie and the other survivors face an impossible decision: They can flee for the mountains or surrender. Or they can fight.

This is the first book of a series, so if you enjoy it, there are several others to keep you entertained.

Unshelved has recommended Magic Pickle and the Planet of the Grapes by Scott Morse.

• Unshelved - Magic Pickle and the Planet of the Grapes by Scott Morse

The Magic Pickle secretly fights crime from his HQ under Jo Jo’s bed (her house is built on top of the lab that created him). He uses his crime computer and super powers to fight the wicked fruits and veggies of The Brotherhood of Evil Produce. He’s detected some sinister citrus at the Farmer’s Market. One of Jo Jo’s classmates, has brought a strange machine to school, along with a wagonload of fruit (she was soured by the free lemonade). It’s the start of The Raizin’s plan to create a planet of grapes!

Here is Amazon’s review of the book:

Scott Morse introduces one of the most hilarious superheroes ever: a flying, green Magic Pickle!

Magic Pickle is a secret weapon developed in a secret military lab—under little JoJo Wigwam’s bedroom floor. The fearless dill superhero meets his match in this feisty eight-year-old. Together they go after Ray Sin, a renegade raisin from the Brotherhood of Evil Produce. Ray Sin has a dastardly plan: to turn every human being on the planet into big, juicy, mindless grapes, so he can rule the world!

Ray Sin has tricked the new kid in town into becoming his hapless helper and is using the class science fair as his cover. He’s got everybody in the school—kids, the principal, even the janitor—eating big gobs of grapes . . . and turning into roly-poly purple fruits!

Magic Pickle and JoJo act fast: with the skillful use of a juicemaker, they save the day and capture Ray Sin, whose criminal career is now all dried up.

I have to admit that the idea of sentient fruits and vegetables is hard for me to swallow. I can believe in self-aware PLANTS, mind you, but fruits and vegetables have been removed from the plant (or fallen off if left alone), so they seem like amputated limbs more than characters on their own.

The California Raisins, however, they were TOTALLY believable.

I decided to turn to a favorite author for my next book, The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. I have talked about W. Somerset Maugham before here:

• Quotations Weblog » Archive » Quotes of the Week: W. Somerset Maugham

• Pick Me! » Resurrection

• Pick Me! » Temptation

I hadn’t read The Painted Veil before I saw the movie with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts. I wouldn’t normally see a movie like that, but it was based on the book by Maugham, so I bent my rules and watched it. The movie was stunning, so the next time I chose a book to read, I jumped at The Painted Veil.

I wasn’t disappointed. It was the typical W. Somerset Maugham storyline. Kitty Fane married Walter out of desperation, not love. The young and promising doctor was returning to China to work and she jumped at a chance to escape her mother and the life in London. In Hong Kong, however, she met the handsome Charlie Townsend and fell head over heels in love. When Walter discovered her adultery, he gave her the ultimatum: either face divorce, shame and return to her mother’s home or accompany him to Mei-tan-fu, the cholera-infested town suffering from the worst epidemic in years. Given no other choice, Kitty faces Mei-tan-fu and almost certain death.

Here are my favorite quotes from the book:

Although very faithful to the book, there is a primary difference between the movie and the original work. The movie focuses on this quotation as its primary theme:

In the book and in the movie, Kitty says it jokingly, but in the movie, we are shown Walter, enjoying their conversation.

The whole focus of the movie is that one thought, whereas, W. Somerset Maugham had a very different focus for the book. He said as much in the preface he wrote in 1952. He conceived of the story on a trip in Italy. He boarded with a woman and her daughter:

Her daughter gave me an Italian lesson every day. She seemed to me then of mature age, but I do not suppose that she was more than twenty-six. She had had trouble. Her betrothed, an officer, had been killed in Abyssinia and she was consecrated to virginity. It was an understood thing that on her mother’s death Ersilia would enter religion.

The Painted Veil is as much about the French nuns and their vision of peace as it is about Kitty Fane. Here are the quotations that deal with those concepts:

At the end of the book, which is completely missing in the movie, Kitty Fane decides to live a life dedicated to this precept of the nuns:

The only philosophical mention that the nuns get in the movie is a quick retort from Walter:

They also go to young mothers in their homes. They ask them to give their babies to the convent. They offer them money to support their families and persuade them to do it. They’re not just here to run an orphanage, your nuns. They’re turning those children into little Catholics. None of us are in China without a reason.

Considering his leanings toward religion, this quote sounds as if W. Somerset Maugham himself wrote it, but he didn’t. The Painted Veil was written as a much more respectful and loving painting of religion and Catholicism in general.

What the movie cut from the religious aspect of the book, they added to regarding the relationship between Walter and the Colonel Ye. Showing Walter’s good works and influence on the town and the abating epidemic is far more powerful than just hearing second hand about his good works.

The final difference between the book and movie involves a spoiler, so if you wish to encounter the story without a surprise, read no further. Read the rest of this entry »

So Yesterday is one of the few books by Scott Westerfeld that isn’t part of a series. Self-contained and beautiful on its own, it another perfect read.

Shoes. Not just any shoes, but the coolest, most awesome shoes that you have ever seen in your life. These are just the kind of shoes that Hunter Braque is looking for. His job is to find the coolest trends on the street and he has found them in a pair of athletic shoes. Jen has found them too, however, and it’s a race (and eventually a collaboration) to get to them, but will they be able to get the shipment before the corporate goons do?

I thought this book was going to be stupid. I bought it because it was written by Scott Westerfeld, but I just let it sit on my shelf until I was out of all other books. I should have trusted Westerfeld to give me a great adventure, despite the object in peril being a shipment of athletic shoes.

Here’s the only quote I got from the book:

I’m sure there must be a ton of other quotes that I could have gotten from the book if I hadn’t gotten so into the story.

I am forever grateful to this book for the “Missing Black Woman” theory that he postulated. I see the Missing Black Woman everywhere now and I wonder why the advertising industry hasn’t noticed her yet.

Confused? Read the book and you won’t be!