All posts by Karen

About Karen

Karen (she/hers) is a Culinary Literacies Specialist at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre library. When not in the kitchen, she can be found knitting, reading, and repeating.  |  Meet the team

Solaris

, ,

Stanislaw LemWhat do you think about movie remakes? (I don’t suppose anyone has tried to rewrite a book, so I can’t really ask about that. Unless someone has done so, in which case, please let me know! The fairy & folk tales I won’t count, mind, since they’re rather perpetually in flux. Neither do adaptations. How does one go about rewriting a book without it becoming a spinoff?) Personally, I haven’t watched too many remakes, but I did just watch two versions of Solaris within a week or so of each other, and the remake wasn’t terrible, which from what I understand is just short of a miracle.* (To really complete the post, I feel like I’d have to have read the original novel by Stanislaw Lem as well. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to that just yet, but if anyone has, please let us know how you feel/felt about it!)

*I did also watch the remake of It, based on the behemoth of a novel by Stephen King. I  haven’t watched the original, but I did enjoy the 2017 edition (even as I found it a little preachy during that one scene – was this influenced by the times, or is this also found in the original?).

Back to the main topic. The premise of Solaris is something like this: A psychologist, Kris Kelvin, is sent to the space station where a crew of scientists are studying the planet Solaris, in order to find out what’s happening there. The ocean covering Solaris has been conjuring “visitors” that come from the crew’s minds – it’s not apparent in the movies whether they represent the scientists’ greatest regrets or if they are simply taken from their minds, because one of the scientists implies his visitor is from his imagination rather than from his memory – and they are almost perfect replicas of their originals. Even more disconcerting: they cannot be killed, and if you remove them from the ship, another will take its place that is exactly as the first, which in turn was exactly like (in form) the original memory. What is Solaris trying to do? Is it possible to understand some other form of consciousness so beyond human understanding of consciousness? Do we even understand ourselves, and is it possible for us to extend our understanding to non-human consciousness (if it is indeed a consciousness) if we do not?

Continue reading →

The Journey

, , , ,

Francesca SannaWhatever I was expecting when I picked this book up, Francesca Sanna completely exceeded them. I’d like to add this as a read-a-like to Why? (Nikolai Popov) and The Terrible Things (Eve Bunting), which I wrote about earlier, in that the reader is not spared for even a moment some of the experiences of refugees and migrants, and all of the authors do a spectacular job of opening up conversation about these heavier topics.

I’ll just quote Sanna’s blurb on her inspiration for writing The Journey:

 

The Journey is actually a story about many journeys, and it began with the story of two girls I met in a refugee center in Italy. After meeting them I realized that behind their journey lay something very powerful. So I began collecting more stories of migration and interviewing many people from many different countries. A few months later, in September 2014, when I started studying a Master of Arts in Illustration at the Academy of Lucerne, I knew I wanted to create a book about these true stories. Almost every day on the news we hear the terms “migrants” and “refugees” but we rarely ever speak to or hear the personal journeys that they have had to take. This book is a collage of all those personal stories and the incredible strength of the people within them.

I hope you pick up this book and go on a journey of your own through the story, because both the text and the illustrations complement each other well, making for an experience you won’t soon forget. Find below the cut some more suggested reads from the junior section about immigrant experiences, and displacement.

Continue reading →

Of Cats and Mice

, ,

Jo Ellen Bogart, illustrated by Sydney SmithSo this is a roundup of various picture books featuring cats (and some mice) that I loved and therefore want to share with everyone because of the joy of reading children’s literature as an adult. (See LitHub for a review of Wild Things also.)

First on the list is The White Cat and the Monk, which has been on my to-read list for a while. It recently made its way back into my periphery and so I decided to finally scratch one title off that ever-growing list and bring it home.

The White Cat and the Monk is one of many retellings of a poem titled Pangur Bán, penned anonymously sometime in the 9th c. in Old Irish. It’s a meditation on the relationship between the white cat and the scholar monk and how their daily activities parallel each other despite being so disparate.

My first exposure to the book was through a review on BrainPickings, which made me want to pick it up immediately, what with the sumptuous illustrations and glowing review (and of course, let’s not kid ourselves: the cat), and it certainly didn’t disappoint. The pace is slow, but in a measured way, such that even though by the end of the poem we haven’t strayed far from the room in which the monk resides, the reader is still left with a sense of accomplishment. Not much that is tangible has been completed perhaps, but there is a sense that something has been accomplished, and that we now in a sense have a greater understanding of the world at large.

Continue reading →