Book Reviews

Amphigorey by Edward Gorey
This is a collection of fifteen of Gorey's odd and wonderful little illustrated stories. Gorey's work has to seen to be believed. From The Gashlycrumb Tinies which illustrates the alphabet with the horrible deaths of children, to The Unstrung Harp which tells the story of the the writing of a novel called The Unstrug Harp, Gorey is delightful and slightly mad in verse, prose and pictures. My favourite story in the collection is The Doubtful Guest about a strange creature that shows up at a family home one day, wreaks havoc and says for seventeen years. Five Stars!



Foundation by Isaac Asimov
It lives up to the hype. In a galaxy far, far away, the empire is crumbling and a dark age is approaching. Hari Selden has worked out the future for the next ten thousand years using the science of psychohistory and figured out how to keep the knowledge of the empire alive and cut down the dark ages to a mere millennium - by sending 100,000 people out to a planet at the edge of the empire and starting the Foundation. It's a fascinating story and it's truly astounding that this book was published in 1951. But! And it is a big but! In this far away future women are basically invisible and not involved in scholarship, trade, politics or religion, as far as I can tell. There are only two female characters in the entire book - both so minor they don't actually have names - whose combined presence in the story lasts about three pages. Three and a half stars for the story, negative five stars for severe gender issues.



The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
First, Toro Okada's cat goes missing. Then he meets several strange women and an elderly WWII soldier. Then his wife goes missing. Finally, he climbs down a well and things start getting weird. It's very long and there really isn't a lot of plot, but it kept me fascinated right up till the end (which I need to think about a bit more). Not all the threads are woven together, but they clearly aren't supposed to be. I didn't like it quite as much as Norwegian Wood, which was the first Murakami that I read, but it's still a solid three and a half.