My assistant at work recently abdicated his position to go and work in the Produce department. Before he left, he told me, sotto voce, "this doesn't let you off the hook for Christmas." And it didn't: our Christmas presents to each other have become a something of a running joke over the years. "Hey, Ken!" he'd shout across the store. "Have you got my golf balls yet"? "Yeah, Ric, I've got your balls", I'd call back, causing customers who hadn't heard his question to look at me askance.
Ric, you see, is the most avid golfer I've ever met. His four seasons are Golf, Hot Golf, Windy Golf, and Talking About Golf. Back when he joined our happy little Price Chopper family, I asked him what sort of a thing I should be getting him for Christmas. "Just golf balls," he said. "Really, Ken, I've got everything else. But a man can never have too many balls."
Fair enough, I thought. Golf balls are about the only thing associated with that sport that I can afford, anyway.
For my part, I insisted a gift certificate to Chapters was all I would ever want or need, my passion for books being at least the equal of his for golf. And so, every year, we've exchanged a gift card for a box of balls and called it even.
I wanted the final two volumes of Dan Simmons' Hyperion series. And I could have had them easily enough, if I'd had a mind to use my gift card online. But that would have meant waiting. I have this problem with instant gratification. My chief prayer in this life is "God grant me patience...right now!"
No, I wanted a book or two...right now.
There are three semi-convenient options for books in this city. For used books, there's the Bookworm, a little store that, under its previous ownership, always seemed to have exactly what I wanted at any given time...but since the ownership changed, the service has gone downhill and the selection has staled.
There's Chapters, and ten years ago I would have told you there was no better place to buy a book. Hell, you used to be able to sit and read entire tomes in comfy chairs...
Back before I met my wife, I spent entire days in that store. Four hours into the latest Stephen King opus and deeply engrossed, I spotted a sales clerk out of the corner of my eye, coming steadily toward me. Shit, I thought. I'm about to get kicked out. And right at a cliff-hanger, too. She got about three feet from me and I closed "my" novel and looked up at her, only to hear "Enjoying the book?"
"Y-yes," I stammered.
"Great!" She smiled and turned away, having won my undying affection. (That used to be an easy thing to do.) Still, what a wonderful store.
Chapters has changed over the years, and not for the better. Their selection used to be second to none: now it's dropped back to sixth or seventh to none. By which I mean you can still find any number of books in there that don't exist for sale anywhere else outside of cyberspace...but rather than carry everything a given author's ever put out, they're likely to stock ten copies of her latest and ten more of his greatest and leave it at that.
The chairs are largely gone. They've kept a few of the least comfortable chairs, true, but the atmosphere's ruined. You can't read for very long without getting the creeping feeling that the bric-a-brac's gonna get you.
Yes, that's the most disturbing change. Chapters is no longer just a bookstore, and soon, if the trend keeps up, it won't even be primarily a bookstore. What Chapters increasingly specializes in is candles. (For setting fire to the books you don't like, perhaps?) Candles and gift bags and little crystal doodads on shelves and CDs and stationery and God alone knows what else. The Waterloo location has gotten so bad it resembles a Bowring when you first walk in--you know, the kind of store that plays tricks with your center of gravity. Between the rude customers running around and the fragile crap everywhere, I'd just as soon stay away.
That leaves Coles, up to the mall. And that's where I found myself last Thursday, searching for books to add to the collection.
The two Hyperion novels weren't there, of course. I spotted a Vinyl Cafe book right away--quick, grab that before somebody else does! Then I settled into cruise mode. There are about a dozen authors whose work I will buy without question. Strangely enough, most of them are Canadian. CanCon strikes again. Anyway, scanning the scifi shelves I noticed multiple copies of Robert J. Sawyer's latest in paperback. My heart leapt. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more! Two books and I'm OUTTA HERE!
Both Eva and I have read Mindscan now, and I have to say it could have been a contender for Best Novel of Ken's Year, if not Ken's Decade. Here's an excerpt from the dustjacket text:
Jake Sullivan has cheated death: he's discarded his doomed biological body and copied his consciousness into an android form. The new Jake soon finds love, something that eluded him when he was encased in flesh: he falls for the android version of Karen, a woman rediscovering all the joys of life now that she, too, is no longer constrained by a worn-out body.
But suddenly Karen's son sues her, claiming that by uploading into an immortal body, she has done him out of his inheritance. Even worse, the original version of Jake, consigned to die on the far side of the moon, has taken hostages there, demanding the return of his rights of personhood. In the courtroom and on the lunar surface, the future of uploaded humanity hangs in the balance.
Mindscan is vintage Sawyer — a feast for the mind and the heart.
Blah, blah, blah, right? This one actually does live up to the hype...almost. It has one of the best courtroom scenes I've ever read and it certainly does provoke thought in the way so few authors can. When I finished the novel, I slowly came back to the real world and found myself saying 'wow' over and over.
Then I sat back and let it percolate. The more it dripped and bubbled through my brain, the more sour the flavour became.
There are three main flaws in this novel. Two of them will go unnoticed by a certain type of reader: in fact, if you are viciously anti-American and just as viciously anti-religionist, you'll get a real kick out of reading Mindscan. Myself, I'm anti-Bush and anti-fundamentalism and even I thought Sawyer was over the top at times. He's set his book in 2046 and if the States actually ends up that close to a theocracy, we're doomed.
The third flaw was more substantive and more critical: the denouement. The climax was great; I was turning pages like wildfire. Then he contrived to end the book using a cheap gimmick and it was like hitting a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. The more I thought about the ending, the more preposterous it seemed. It knocked what could have been a Great Book back into the realm of average.
Too bad. Because Robert J. Sawyer is Canada's answer to Robert A. Heinlein: a guy who can mix the science with an equal dose of story.
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