Monday afternoon I saw my sister safely to O’Hare for her flight back to Colorado. On the way back home I picked up the last book in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. As I mentioned earlier, I drew the second seating to read this one behind my child bride. The good news is that she finished the 759 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in less than two days. The bad news is: I’m up. Whirl is desperate for me to finish it so that we can talk about it.

I came to the Harry Potter series somewhat late. Whirl had read the first three before I picked any of them up. I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince while recovering from my brain injury. That was the first book of this series I read immediately upon its release.

So now the gauntlet has been thrown: I want to finish the book and the series before I bump into news that will reveal plot developments out of Rowling’s intended order. Rowling has already upbraided a number of American newspapers for releasing reviews of the book before its general release—including the New York Times. Even though the book has been out for a week, now, I do not intend to add to that quagmire.

If you have read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, let me know. I will be more than happy to talk to you about it. Only once I finish!

Yes. I realize that another of my favorite authors is releasing an important fantasy book on Friday at midnight. Yes, I am excited! Yes, I will read that book as well. Yes, I realize this is not that book. You see there is a slight problem. I lost out. I got to read Book Six first, so that means Whirl gets to read Book Seven first. So I needed to pick up something else– preferably something within the same genre.

And to just put it bluntly, I got distracted by something shiny. I saw the movie poster for Stardust. I recognized the title and looked more closely at the poster to doublecheck my suspicisions. I was right. The film is based on this novel by Neil Gaiman. As the novel concerns a quest for a fallen star– the very archetype of “something shiny”– I suppose my distraction and subsequent absorption were unavoidable consequences.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

It is not normal for me to reread a book. I read a book, I savor it as I do so. I pick the next book from my stack. A claim that Benjamin Franklin would read a linear foot of books a week inspires me. I have no idea whether that claim is true or not– a quick bit of research found nothing to corroborate it. But that is not the point. The point, as I see it, states that there are so many books worth reading that rereading one might just be a waste of time. So, as a general rule, I don’t do it. I don’t reread books.

And like most self-made rules, I’ve broken this one on a number of occasions. My latest reading selection, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, stands as my most recent transgression. I remember reading this book in seventh grade– twenty-five years ago. I remember the parties. I remember the suicide. I remember the classroom discussion about the elements that appeared to be autobiographical. Several years later I remember attending the one-woman play, Zelda, by William Luce.

In the summer of 1930, F. Scott’s wife and archetypical flapper, Zelda Fitzgerald, suffered a mental breakdown, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was committed to a sanitarium. Luce’s play is set in a psychiatrist’s office in that sanitarium the night before Zelda died in a fire. She spent the last seventeen years of her life in that hospital. In Luce’s play, Zelda claims Scott placed her there not because she was crazy, but rather so that he could carry on his selfish, indulgent lifestyle without her interference. Zelda recalls how F. Scott Fitzgerald used their lives together as source material for his novels. She charges he stole her diaries: he included her private confessions in his own books. And she rejoins that her own novel, Save Me the Waltz, tells her side of their story– and displays her own talent.

Inspired by these works of art and psychology, I have, on occasion, introduced Whirl as my Zelda Fitzgerald. Given the treatment Zelda suffered, and the depiction in Luce’s play, my moniker may not seem particularly affectionate. I don’t mean it that way. I can be a melancholy boy. The conflict– even torment– of life and art fascinates me. Zelda Fitzgerald fascinates me in that I view her as personification of that conflict.

So twenty-five years later, I am returning to what is arguably the supreme achievement of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career. To a time and place when the New York Times noted, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.”

Ian McDonald has won a number of prestigious awards and nominations for his science fiction. Most recently these have included the British Science Fiction Association award and nominations for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Society award for his novel, River of Gods. River of Gods gives India a powerful postcyberpunk treatment. In McDonald’s 2047 India, we find genetically engineered children as a new caste. Adults are surgically transformed into a third, neutral, gender. The Ganges is running dry, sparking a water war.

Next up for McDonald: Brazil.

Publishers Weekly writes about McDonald’s most recent novel, Brasyl, published last month:

British author McDonald’s outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America’s largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all. McDonald sets up three separate characters in different eras—a cynical contemporary reality-TV producer, a near-future bisexual entrepreneur and a tormented 18th-century Jesuit agent. He then slams them together with the revelation that their worlds are strands of an immense quantum multiverse, and each of them is threatened by the Order, a vast conspiracy devoted to maintaining the status quo until the end of time. As McDonald weaves together the separate narrative threads, each character must choose between isolation or cooperation, and also between accepting things as they are or taking desperate action to make changes possible. River of Gods, set in near-future India, established McDonald as a leading writer of intelligent, multicultural SF, and here he captures Latin America’s mingled despair and hope. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance.

This will be my first book by Ian McDonald. I am excited to get started.

For years my friends have been trying to coerce me into reading something from Tim Powers. So I am. This is the editorial review: The colonization of Egypt by western European powers is the launch point for power plays and machinations. Steeping together in this time-warp stew are such characters as an unassuming Coleridge scholar, ancient gods, wizards, the Knights Templar, werewolves, and other quasi-mortals, all wrapped in the organizing fabric of Egyptian mythology. In the best of fantasy traditions, the reluctant heroes fight for survival against an evil that lurks beneath the surface of their everyday lives.

Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and playwright. His novel, Main Street, was to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. The Columbia University Board of Trustees overturned the jury’s decision. Five years later, Lewis again was awarded with the Pulitzer, this time for his novel Arrowsmith. Lewis refused. In 1930, Lewis became the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Insightful and critical, satirical, and sympathetic– It Can’t Happen Here is Lewis’ last great work. This speculative novel warns that political movements akin to fascism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

It has been misattributed to Lewis that he writes in this book, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” And while the particular quote was never written, the sentiment behind it permeates much of the language. New American Library recently reprinted this novel in 2005 and I picked it up as my next book in part due to the the power I perceive in the quote coupled with the impact of the recent documentaries, Jesus Camp and The Corporation, and the non-fiction books, State of Fear and Fast Food Nation.

Michael Meyer wrote a new introduction to the 2005 printing. He concludes his introduction with:

[Lewis] believed that dissent– even a cranky, erratic, eccentric, old-fashioned version of it– was not disloyalty but at the heart of an American democratic identity. Engulfed in the complexities and vulnerabilities of our post-September 11 world, Americans of nearly all political persuasions are likely to find that It Can’t Happen Here, though firmly anchored in the politics of the 1930s, surfaces as a revealing and disturbing read.

The book’s back cover reads:

It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’ later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime and a liberal press.

Sound familiar?