(Cover image by John Jude Palencar)

Guy meets girl. Girl disses guy. Guy limps off with wounded pride with thoughts of vengeance. No, this isn’t your typical tale of jilted love, this is the story of normal goings on happening in a place that is anything but normal: Charles de Lint’s fictional city of Newford. And while the guy in this case is at first glance your typical egotistical, self-centered jerk, the girl is not so typical. Not at all. In fact she believes her origins are from a website called the Wordwood. And when she meets up with another young woman who is herself the cast-off shadow of a Newford author, the two soon discover that there is a very thin line between what is and is not “real”, and that a petty act of prideful revenge can have consequences far greater than anyone could have anticipated.

This is the second and final post in the discussion that Kailana and I will be having in regards to our buddy read of Charles de Lint’s book, Spirits in the Wires. There will be mild spoilers in the post here and I suspect on Kailana’s site as well, so please be forewarned. If you choose not to read on, please allow me to take a moment to encourage you to spend some time in Newford. This was yet another novel in which I closed the final page with an intense feeling of satisfaction. Charles de Lint knows how to tell a story with characters who are at once tangibly real and impossibly fantastical. He demonstrates with Spirits in the Wires that he can take what seems to be an implausible premise–spirits living in the internet–and weave a sophisticated story around it that hits all the right emotional notes while exploring concepts such as our belief systems as well as what it means to be alive.

This week I had the task of coming up with the discussion questions. I do hope you’ll join us and share any thoughts you feel like sharing.

Continue reading Spirits in the Wires ~Charles de Lint →

Long before joining with a larger band of readers to participate in a “group read”, Kailana and I were doing “buddy reads”. I believe we started these during one of the Once Upon a Time challenges with a Charles de Lint book and have been trying to read a de Lint book together for this event each year. We decided to continue that tradition this Spring with Charles de Lint’s 2003 novel, Spirits in the Wires. We will be posting our discussion of the book in two parts, with Kailana asking the questions for each of us to answer for the first half of the book and me taking on the second half.

Spirits in the Wires is set in Newford, the North American city of de Lint’s imagination where magic rubs shoulders with the mundane. It is a city where artists and musicians, the homeless and folks with an open mind discover that the veil between our world and the fantastic can very thin indeed. In a number of short stories and novels Charles de Lint showcases the lives of the various inhabitants of Newford and in so doing spotlights how very extraordinary the ordinary things of life can be.

Now on with the discussion.

Continue reading Spirits in the Wires ~Charles de Lint (Part 1) →

Could there be any more fitting image to represent our departure from this three month journey through the books that make up The Lord of the Rings? Alan Lee’s depiction of the bittersweet parting of those going into the west perfectly embodies the mood of these final moments in the life-altering journey of four hobbits who left the Shire.

How can one’s heart ache and soar at the same time? No work of fiction makes me feel that as poignantly and as profoundly as does that of J.R.R. Tolkien. If anyone ever captured lightning in a bottle it was him. Little wonder that these books remain as beloved as when they were first launched upon a waiting public.

You can tell from my ramblings that I get a great deal of pleasure out of discussing The Lord of the Rings and although I am sad that this is our final post discussing The Return of the King, I am not too sad as there will be many more Tolkien-related posts in the years to come.

Continue reading The Return of the King Group Read, The End →

The major battles have been fought and won. The One Ring has been destroyed. There is hard won victory and the bitterness of death and destruction. And this is only part two of our discussion!!!

This middle section of The Return of the King is a densely packed section of action, adventure, introspection, hope, despair and triumph. I couldn’t help but tear through this section. Even though I remembered much of it quite well, I could not stop turning the pages.

I had the privilege of coming up with the questions for this part of our group read. Please join us in our conversation.

Continue reading The Return of the King Group Read, Part 2 →