NaNoReaMo: LEVIATHAN
Nov 12, 2010 
Finally, a place with internet again!
As some of you may know, I’ve been utterly incommunicado the last couple of days. I’m still traveling with my family, and we’d been staying at a bed and breakfast on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. The down side? No internet whatsoever. The upside? About five minutes from all the wineries you could possibly want to visit. This was the view outside our window:
It’s been a fantastic couple of days, including moments like hearing koalas bellowing (yes, BELLOWING) during a moonlit tour of a wildlife sanctuary, walking through a maze of roses taller than my head, and driving down gravel roads covered by cathedral-like arches of high eucalypt trees. Plus, tons of delicious wine. All that said, I find myself missing the internet, but not in the way I would’ve expected. I used to get horribly antsy missing the internet, wanting my email and my games and whatever else, because I’d be bored without it. I find it to be rather different now—I’m not bored, with all the books I can possibly devour, and tremendously busy days. Instead, I’ve discovered that I feel a slight hint of loneliness without the internet. I want to keep in touch with all my new blogger/writer friends, and keep up on what they’re doing. I’ve just begun meeting some new folks and I feel the loss of those new tentative friendships way more keenly than I had expected. So though I’ve been having a brilliant time on vacation, I’m glad to be back in “civilization” with some internet, now that we’re staying at a hotel in Melbourne.
This is what I’ve been up to without the internet:
I’m a big fan of Scott Westerfeld’s UGLIES series, enough so that I will cheerfully read anything he writes because I know I’ll enjoy it. I knew absolutely nothing about LEVIATHAN before beginning it, though, except that it seemed to involve giant robots of some kind, and that was only from what I’d seen on the cover. As it turns out, it’s a story about two teenagers during the beginning stages of World War I, although It takes place in some sort of alternate history world, the science of which is such a delight to discover that I won’t spoil you for it if you haven’t read it yet. There’s cross-dressing, there’s giant war machines, there’s flying whales, there’s Darwinist geekery, there’s explosions and glaciers and castles and furtive escapes in the dark of night. Seriously, this book has basically everything you could ask for. Including a thylacine.
I also completely loved the illustrations, which were just PERFECT for the book. The artist, Keith Thompson, so clearly captured the characters and the swashbucklingness of the story. (Yes, that’s a word.) I normally get a flash of “Oh, that’s not right” when I see character illustrations, because my mental image is invariably not echoed in the pictures, but for some reason these worked perfectly for me.
My only complaint about the book is its ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it felt very non-climactic to me. I usually love open endings for books—in fact, I usually write them that way myself—but I like for the main conflicts of the story to be resolved, with just that sting at the end of the story to come. THE HUNGER GAMES is a great example of that kind of open ending, as is THE GOLDEN COMPASS. Unfortunately, LEVIATHAN doesn’t end with an opening so much as it doesn’t end… it just stops. I was two paragraphs into the afterward before I realized the novel had ended and I was reading about the ratio of fact to fiction in the history, and not a strange way of starting a new chapter.
All of that said, I think that when your biggest disappointment with a book is that it ends, you’re doing pretty okay.
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LOVED Australia–I so want to visit again some day!
I love it too! I love living here, and I love vacationing here. <3
I like taking breaks from teh internets because I have such a time-management problem here– as in time-mgmt skillz, I have none. But yes to the slight loneliness. I have met so many more like-minded people online than I do offline — I miss them when I’m away.
Interesting about LEVIATHAN.’s ending. That would frustrate me a great deal.
I have definitely gone through periods where mandatory internet breaks were required for sanity (and productivity)! Toootally know what you mean.
It is frustrating! That said, I’m pretty eager for BEHEMOTH, the sequel.
That view is so beautiful – I feel like I’d be inside a fairytale if I walked around there lol.
I really liked Leviathan too. I think its sequel Behemoth came out recently but I still need to save up a bit of money for some book buying 🙂
Yes! It’s exactly like being inside a fairy tale. Once I have access to my real computer again I’ll have more pictures, particularly of this one place that was a maze of rose hedges and arches and things. So, so pretty.
Yeah… it’s the money that’s prevented me from getting it so far. I will buy it, eventually, I just need to work myself up to it. 😛
It sounds like you have been having a wonderful time.I would never have imagined Koalas bellowing – how funny!
I loved Leviathan and the illustrations are gorgeous, I want one for my wall. I saw Scott Westerfeld talking about the book at my local indie and he was so interesting, he did a whole power point on the idea and showed how the illustrations changed with his input.
ME NEITHER! I thought koalas were quiet creatures. Maaaybe a gentle snuffling sound as they eat. But this was like… echo across the valley, board up the windows, hide the women and children and make for the hills noise.
Dude. I want to see that presentation! I wonder if there are any blog posts/articles online about it… I’ll have to check!
I agree that the ending was abrupt and completely left you hanging. I’m afraid that’s going to be the new thing with a lot of books. I hate that because I like for each book in a series to at least have some closure. I guess it did to a certain degree but not enough. That said, I still loved the book and have now read Behemoth.
Yeah, for me there’s a very fine line between the kind of open ending I love, and the kind that drives me up the wall. I think it has to do with the fact that I like the main plotlines in the book to be resolved at the end–but if you introduce new problems and questions to carry into the next book, that’s fine–and even a good thing–with me.
I can’t wait to read Behemoth myself. If books weren’t so horrifically expensive here, I’d have bought it by now!