A Day in the Lonesome October-fest, October 28

The continuing account of reading A Night in the Lonesome October with an nine-year-old, out loud and during the day.

October 28

Not many revelations in this chapter. I had filled Lily in on the details beforehand, and she had figured out the rest over the course of the book so that her only takeaway was that Jack was a lot older than Jill, and if they wind up as a couple, it may cause issues down the road. Keep your May-December romances out of her October!

A Day in the Lonesome October-fest, October 27

The continuing account of reading A Night in the Lonesome October with an nine-year-old, out loud and during the day.

October 27

There's nothing a smart kid likes more than being right about something, so Lily was, of course, overjoyed at this chapter, having speculated several days ago that the Good Doctor wasn't really a player.  Fortunately, she celebrated with quiet good grace and kept her victory strut under five minutes.

We enjoyed the dialogue with Gray and Boobie Bubo too:

Graymalk immediately moved near and asked, "Was the Good Doctor an opener or a closer?" 

"Please," he said, "let me be. I'm just a simple pack rat. Snuff! Don't let her have me!" 

"I've already eaten," she said. "Besides, I owe you courtesy as a fellow player." 

"No you don't," he said. "It's over. Over." 

"Just because your master is dead doesn't mean I should treat you as anything other than a player." 

"But you know. You must know. You're toying with me. Cats are that way. I'm not a player. I never was. Have you really eaten recently?" 

"Yes." 

"That's worse then. You'll toy more." 

"Shut up a minute!" she said. 

"See? There goes the courtesy."

A Day in the Lonesome October-fest, October 26

The continuing account of reading A Night in the Lonesome October with an nine-year-old, out loud and during the day.

October 26

Not a lot going on in this chapter. It reminded us of the older ones back in the beginning. Lily's reaction to the wolf was "Meh, that's weird, I guess", though she did wonder how it knew Snuff's name when Snuff never mentioned it. 

She was surprised when I stopped reading at the end of the chapter, certain there must be more. 

A Day in the Lonesome October-fest, October 25

The continuing account of reading A Night in the Lonesome October with an nine-year-old, out loud and during the day.

October 25

This chapter has my mom's favorite line:      Growing moon.  Angry cat.  Feather on the wind.  Autumn comes.  The grass dies.

Also, of note, I took Lily out Trick or Treating, and she said to her friend, "I'm reading a really good book with my dad, Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October? Have you ever read it?" While I'm afraid my immediate circle of friends has given her a distorted impression of Zelazny's popularity, I am very pleased to be raising a second generation Zelazny evangelist.

Lily had a lot of questions about the specifics of the shadow ritual, which I was't able to answer beyond "That's just how it functions." We also had this interesting exchange.

"Are Morris and MacCab openers or closers?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure they're openers," Graymalk said.

"Yes," Cheeter agreed. "They are."

"What about the Good Doctor?"

"Nobody knows. The divinations keep going askew for him."

Lily: Is he even a player?

Me: What do you mean?

Lily: He doesn't seem to do anything. He just hangs around on the outskirts.

Me: *steeples fingers*

Her attention wandered a bit during the shadow ritual, and I do think it is a bit longer than it needs to be. Still, we enjoyed it.

A Day in the Lonesome October-fest, October 24

The continuing account of reading A Night in the Lonesome October with an nine-year-old, out loud and during the day.

October 24

Lily called this chapter "action packed". She was still worried about Lynette, but she agreed with Larry's reasoning that it was better to rescue her closer to Halloween.

The chapter had a lot words that I thought she might not know, so I was regularly stopping the narrative to interject with definitions. Port wine (didn't know it but was able to get it from context), incandescence (knew it already), torque (new word, I defined it for her as rotating around a fixed point),  fluoresced (I knew she knew it because she defined it for the tour guide when we went on a tour of Lost River Caverns last weekend), ubiquitous ("everywhere", also noteworthy because I first began employing it after reading it in the ADRPG, though I initially thought it began with an "ooo" sound and not a "you" one), and tableau ("in this context, it means the scene"), feinted (had to clarify that Snuff was faking out the monster and not looking for the fainting couch), sherry (got it from context, figured it had to be another wine if they were drinking it in lieu of the port) and manumission ("The act of freeing from servitude").

I also filled her in on the background of the poem Snuff references as the the Things burn. 

A good chapter. Action packed, informative and funny ("What I'm wondering most, though, is what you're going to do with them now." Hm," he said, toying with his glass. "It's rather far to the river." I nodded vigorously.) What more could you want?