Wow.
When RDC wants to lure me into an evening of playing boat (i.e., not moving from the couch because of the sharks in the floor, a holdover from my sister's or my being being sent to our room not to move from our bed but the other freely sharing in the exile, thence not to stir from the bed, because of the sharks), he'll announce that there's nothing on but Jane Austen movies with Peter Gabriel soundtracks.
The fact that "The Last Temptation of Christ" is unwatchable has nothing to do with this. And I don't think he's seen "Birdy," but that doesn't matter because it's the book, not the movie, that's better worth knowing.
Peter Gabriel love aside, Long Walk Home approaches but does not touch its movie's brilliance. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with three of the most natural child actors I could ever imagine. It makes for particularly good watching so soon after reading Pigs in Heaven.
Someone recently compared this with The Lovely Bones while implying that the greater success of the latter was due to its being marketed as straight fiction instead of being ghettoized into fantasy. So I picked this up to see; the ongoing issue of What Is Genre Fiction interests me.
One reason The Lovely Bones sold better is that it's an adult book, or more easily an adult book, than this, which is straight YA (another layer of ghetto). Another is that Bones is about the death but more so about the relationships, and less the reason for the death--it's thematically more complex.
House aside--Flying in Place is from Tor, so I mentally waved at the Nielsen Haydens whom I know by two removes through online journaling and three in the real world--I wouldn't call either a fantasy. Fantastical elements do not make a fantasy in my world, any more than the horses and the southwest made All the Pretty Horses a western. To me the only thing that makes a genre book genre rather than mainstream is being formulaic.
Hey! "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a C.M. rating! True to the saying, the rule is thus tested. It's euthanasia.
16 miles, not technical though gravel and hairpin turns made things a little interesting, at 8,000 feet.
God it was beautiful. I was talking to my notstepmother on the phone as RDC and I sped west toward the foothills, which is the only thing that kept me from shouting with joy. The foothills, glory be, were green! Green green green, not brown. Green, such a lovely color.
The north-facing slopes were greener, but even the sun-blasted south-facing slopes had grasses and flowers on them, and the trees, for the first time in three years, had enough water to put out softly, brightly green buds on their tips. Berthoud Pass still had lovely quantities of snow on its peaks, and the north-facing slopes still had snow quite far down the mountainsides--well below the treeline, in the shelter of the pines. Last year at the end of June when we drove to Steamboat Springs, the state was already on fire in some bits and blowing into dust in other bits. As far as I know the reservoirs aren't full yet but I doubt if we passed Green Mountain Reservoir this year that we'd pass through a dust storm like last year's.
Last weekend we gave someone the basic introduction to Rocky Mountain National Park, and I was hoping, for the first weekend in June, that Moraine Park would be as filled with wildflowers as it's reputed to be. But not yet.
Today, in contrast, the Fraser River valley was a riot of color. We biked the Fraser-Granby trail, a lovely, easy ride, with some hills, some slopes, some up, some down, for me a perfect little tour. Lots of dandelions of course, lots of richly blue larkspur, something that looked like snow-in-summer but denser and lower and whiter though without the silvery-gray foliage, relatives of a daisy, several interesting little low mounds with yellow flowers tight to the ground and leaves above. Just gorgeous.
Riparian meadows, actually flowing water in streams and creeks, horses, lodgepole pine forests smelling of vanilla, century-old broken-down cabins, mountain bluebirds, quantities of swallows, and the most beautiful fox I have ever seen--not that I've seen many or had a long look at any--stippled grey and red with an enormous white tip to its tail.
And, despite the perfection of the day, furthering that perfection, we encountered but seven other cyclists the whole way.