I finished (finally) the above book, which according to the blurb on the Long Beach Golf Course links page is “an e-novella by Mathew Stryanka that takes readers into the angst-ridden life of Roy Merck as he surfs across Canada, looking for a place to call home.”
It’s always interesting to read a piece set in a place one knows — something that must be a common occurrence in celebrated places like New Yawk City or Paris, France, but is a rarity for WestCoast small towns.
Mat’s book is not a Great Work of Art by any means, but i found it an interesting look into the struggles of, well, Mat himself to make sense of this senseless existence, and also the ins and outs of the WestCoast surfing life. Lots of checking out waves, metaphysical wonderings, paddling out to mysterious breaks, and intense philosophical conversations.
Here’s my fave quote in the book is where Roy, sitting in a hot tub with his physicist friend discussing free will and the structure of the universe, says: Oneness isn’t separateness holding hands. It’s Oneness.
I downloaded the book last spring sometime from Mat’s surfmonkery.com website, which doesn’t seem to be active anymore. He offered the book as a free download, by donation. (Yes, i donated.)
The format was new to me: a kind of on-screen booklet provided as a Windows .exe file by DesktopAuthor.com. I’m not a fan of lengthy on-screen reading, but this made it fairly palatable with very short pages and a nifty page-turning feature. Less appealing was the lack of page numbers, which prevented me from knowing how long the book was or where i was in it. That made reading it a pretty much one-shot deal, which is one reason why it took me so long to get around to it.
I’ve still got the file, which technically i paid for, so i suppose by analogy to a paperback i should be able to pass it on to anyone else who wants to read the book. First request gets it (you’ll need a Windows PC).
On a similar note, i ran across the $300 Sony Reader (at right) during my Stressmas shopping spree (one hour long, on Boxing Day). Seems like e-book readers are slowly getting to the point where i’d want to own one.
Once upon a time, based on the recommendation of my writer friend Jackie Windh, i put the book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italian writer Italo Calvino, on hold at the Tofino library. It’s a peculiar book, Jackie said — self-referentially a novel that starts off with a musing on the writing and reading of novels, then branches off tangentially (but rationally) with each new chapter into possibly new stories, each never completed.
Greg Blee 