A Jungle of Tales

              The minute I stumbled on this book in my local used bookshop and glanced at the summary, I thought: Someone needs to make a movie of this. I first learned of Equiano as a former slave turned abolitionist activist through the film ‘Amazing Grace’ , which tells the story of William Wilberforce’s efforts to outlaw the British slave trade. As Equiano understatedly remarks, “My life and fortune have been extremely chequered, and my adventures various” , including not only being kidnapped as a child in Africa and later writing in support of abolition, but also fighting in several naval battles, buying his own freedom, joining an arctic expedition, working as everything from a hairdresser to a plantation overseer, being shipwrecked, marrying an Englishwoman, applying to be a missionary, and serving as commissary for a venture to resettle freed slaves in Sierra Leone.      ...

  This duology, published in the mid 1990s, blends religion and science fiction better than anything else I’ve read, and tackles some heavy subjects that are still under-discussed, all while introducing a fascinating alien world. At the start of the first book, the Catholic Church and, specifically, the Society of Jesus (AKA the Jesuit order) are dealing with a scandal. When music was detected coming from Alpha Centauri some four decades earlier, they quietly sent an expedition to find out more about these other children of God. Only one member returned. A UN mission, which subsequently also disappeared, reported that they found Father Emilio Sandoz working as a prostitute, and that the first thing they saw him do was kill a child. Father General Giuliani wants to find out what the hell happened, but Sandoz is a wreck: Besides suffering from nightmares that leave him screaming and vomiting, his hands have been mysteriously mutilated. The chapters jump back and f...

                                       Madoka (center) with (left to right) Kyoko, Sayaka, Homura, and Mami   This 2011 anime does not waste any time diving into the weird! Schoolgirl Madoka wakes from a dream in which a magical girl is fighting a losing battle and a strange creature tells her she can help, only to go to school and discover the same girl transferring into her class. When Madoka tries to befriend the beautiful and rather grimly efficient Homura, she is warned that if she values her life, friends, and family she shouldn’t seek to change herself. Puzzled, she goes with her friend Sayaka to the mall but then hears a voice calling for her help. It is the odd cat-bunny-fox thing, Kyubey, which Homura seems to by trying to kill. Then all of reality fractures - illustrated by a collage of photos and patterns and animation - a...

  By all rights I should adore this book. After all, I’m a big fan of social commentary mixed with humor, magical realism, lyrical writing, and Latin American literature; this is a classic that features all those things. However, while there are indeed many parts I enjoyed, my previous 1.5 reads felt a bit like a slog through the jungle. This latest reading was faster and more enjoyable, but I also now know why I had some difficulty with the story as a whole.   Things that justifiably make this a classic: - Gorgeous writing. The first sentence is often held up as an example: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. It immediately draws you in with the mix of verb tenses and the questions it provokes: Why is this guy about to be executed? What does he mean “discover ice” 1 ? - An interesting premise. The title refers ...

              This little book is probably the most interesting ‘Beauty and the Beast’ retelling I’ve ever read. Both classic and Disney elements are certainly there: a girl who doesn’t quite fit in her provincial village is confined to the palace of a monster, starts to fall for her not-actually-so-monstrous host/captor (who gives her access to a library), misses an aging/ailing parent and leaves the palace, but ultimately returns. However, in this case the setting is not late-Medieval France but post-colonial Vietnam – post alien colonization, that is! And monster is a female dragon named Vu Côn who wants the poor scholar Yên to act as a sort of governess to her two unruly offspring. As for the matter of leaving and returning…that diverges significantly from the original as well!             The titular "Vanishers" remain rather mysterious. What we d...