The Falconer’s Knot by Mary Hoffman is a novel about two teenagers in medieval Italy. One is Chiara, whose brother sells her to a nunnery because he can’t afford to keep her, and the other is Silvano, who is taking refuge is the neighbouring friary. Silvano is accused of murdering a man in a nearby town. The two are unlikely apprentices but soon find solitude in their new lifestyles. The fact that they get to enjoy each other as eye candy every once and a while doesn’t hurt.

Mary Hoffman is one of my favourite writers. She has another series for teens called Stravaganza, which is also set in Italy but during the Renaissance. It’s a trilogy and involves time travel.

I love Hoffman’s books because although the reading level is aimed at teens, the story is better written than many adult novels I read. My perception is that teen writers have to work extra hard to succeed. Their books are a hard sell–imagine trying to grab the attention of a teenager, to find a subject that will be new but not totally foreign, that involves sex but sex that won’t get banned by parent groups and librarians.

The Falconer’s Knot is a mystery. Silvano is taking refuge in the friary while his father tries to find the true murderer, but he is soon pegged as a suspect in a series of suspicious deaths in the friary. His only friend in the friary, the Colour Master, is also under suspicion. Over at the nunnery, Chiara is getting her hair chopped off and sporting the nun’s habit. She is also working with the nuns’ Colour Master.

The Colour Masters are creating pigments used for church frescos. This side story is really interesting because the information about religion and the painting of the frescos in Italy during the Middle Ages is interwoven in a non-intrusive way.

Overall this is a fun book. I’m not adept at figuring out mysteries so I couldn’t guess the ending, but in these types of literary mysteries that’s never really the point. This is just another damn-fine book from Mary Hoffman.

Bringing sexy back.

We had quite the Sunday night. I finished Kris Radish’s book The Sunday List of Dreams, and we saw the movies Perfume and Little Children. All three are thematically linked by stories of sexual repression.

In Perfume the protagonist is killing women in order to capture their scent. In Little Children unfaithful partners are endulging in the sex they don’t get at home and sexual predators are trying to control themselves.

As I say, it was quite the Sunday.

Kris Radish’s book stands well above the movies though.

The Sunday List of Dreams is about Connie, retired nurse, getting on with her list of dreams.

1. Stop being afraid.
2. Let go.
3. Get rid of SHIT. Starting with the garage.

Funny enough it’s the shit in the garage that gets her into shit.

Connie discovers a box of files belonging to her oldest daughter Jessica. Jessica lives in New York and is a very busy CEO of a manufacturing company. Connie lives in the Mid-West. Her other two daughters are happily married with children. But Jessica has gone astray. They don’t talk as much as Connie would like.

Well it turns out the box of files contains early business plans and sketches for Jessica’s company. She sells sex toys.

That’s enough to jump start Connie. She on a plane to New York to find out what the hell Jessica is up to. Mother madness. Full panic. Rescue Jessica.

There is a very funny oh-my-god moment (for both mother and daughter) as Connie enters Jessica’s store for the first time.

Nothing like seeing your mother surrounded by dildos. Nothing like visiting your daughter’s sex shop for the first time.

Things, of course, fall apart and come together, and despite very few plot surprises, The Sunday List of Dreams is a good romp.

One of my favourite lines in the book:
Quote: Look at yourself. Not your face, sweetie, your self … If you are giving driving directions to someone else it really helps to know the map.
—The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish

iGeneration is by Jason Logan, the illustrator who brought us If We Ever Break Up, This Is My Book.

iGeneration: Shuffling toward the Future is a quirky little book about technology and its control over our lives.

The whole book is illustrated, in fact, it’s very light on text. But it is pretty cute.

One of my favourite pages is “What the hell am I supposed to do whilst my music is downloading?” One suggestion is to create a false cache history to disturb your parents. For example,

panda-child-acid.xxx
makeabomboutofcommonhouseholdproducts.com
freeoldmansex.nz.org
prisons+welfare+lifeplan.com
make_some_cash_while_in_prison.com

I’d post a video review when I get a chance. The book is funny enough that you should have a look at it.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is one of my favourite plays, in part because I had to study the hell out of it in unversity and in part because it is one of the first dates that James and I had.

I was excited to see Stoppard’s new play Rock ‘n’ Roll is now published. Rock ‘n’ Roll premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in June 2006.

The cover is a very striking yellow, and the edition that I have includes an introduction from Stoppard. I find the author introductions to plays most fascinating. When I was in school I hated reading any of the extra bits, but now I’m much more interested in the context for the story, what references the author is trying to make, what he or she hopes the reader gets out of the text. The introduction to Rock ‘n’ Roll doesn’t disappoint, and it is a good recap of what was going on in Prague and Cambridge from 1968 to 1990, more directly what effect the Communist regime was having on musicians, philosophers and students.

In case you don’t know Tom Stoppard, he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England as a child in 1946.

Quote: The Amazon copy says:
Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert’s Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock ‘n’ Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil.

Rock ‘n’ Roll highlights the moments of friendship and tension between Jan and Max. Jan is a lecturer at Cambridge who returns to Prague just as the Soviet tanks are rolling into the city. He’s a music fan and in addition to a brief history of Czechoslovakia, you get a brief history of The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Frank Zappa. Max is a Marxist philosopher with a free-spirited daughter and a Sapphic philosopher wife who is dying from cancer. Over a 20-year period Rock ‘n’ Roll offers little windows into Jan and Max’s acceptance and resistance to the Communist regime.

The remarkable thing about the play is that it’s heavy in a light way. There’s a sense of bouyancy and humour. In many ways it reminds me of Chekov’s plays, but without the dark, foreboding sense that, as James says, “it’s a godless world and we’re all going to die.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll–a new play by Tom Stoppard–read more on Amazon.ca