I had read the first two awhile ago, and then found the second two at ridiculously low prices. I don’t think the series is terribly compelling … but it’s functional if you’re craving magical kiddie lit. And I know it’s stupid, but the magician’s name–Stephen Tyler–kept throwing me off. I fully anticipated a medieval rendition of “Walk This Way.”
In the beginning of Carry Me Down, John Egan and his parents are sitting in a warm kitchen. It is the middle of winter, and they are reading. It’s hard to imagine a cozier, more comforting scene. But within a single page, there’s an unsettling sense of disquiet; everything just seems off. We learn, for instance, that John and his mother have an odd relationship, that John and his father have a distant one. We learn that John is almost freakishly tall. The family lives with the grandmother. John is obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records, and he is convinced that he has a talent–the ability to see when people are lying–that will get him into it. This is one of those novels where what isn’t said is more important than what is, and when it comes right down to it, everyone is lying. Even John. Gorgeously written and quietly sinister.
Elegy to a Great Aunt
She asked what we wanted, gesturing from the table
where sunlight slanted into oblong squares,
and though it seemed wrong, I picked the crystal—
because her ice water glints like diamonds
and she’s always used the sterling and good china,
not knowing dishwashers cloud.
My mother chooses the watercolor over the fireplace,
the other niece the teak cabinet, delicate
as lapsang souchong in Wedgewood.
Other items chip and split in the rinse cycle:
silver spots, gold leaf fades. My own hairline crack
is barely visible under detergent words,
but months pass.
Regret is inevitable, I think. It lurks
in the conciliation of a cardboard box,
rustles in styrofoam peanuts, yellowed papers.
And it sits there gleaming in my cupboard—
finer than anything else I own.
I used Firefox for a brief period a while ago, and didn’t like it at all. It was the tabbed browsing. It was hard to get used to.
Then I got downloaded IE7 and really got into the tabbed browsing thing. But sheesh, my antispyware programs were dizzy with overuse. It seemed like I had an “attempted browser hijack” every single day–this with regular use of Spyware Blaster (with real time protection), AdAware, and Spybot AND TrendMicro AND an enabled firewall.
So I’ve gone back to Firefox. And is it just my imagination or is IE7 a) really, really slow and b) memory hog?
*** I just posted this, and it seems like WordPress is responding much more quickly too. I’d noticed that WordPress was CRAWLING. Does it have something to do with IE7 not handling AJAX well?