Angels and Lives.

 

We are secrets to each other
Each one’s life a novel
No-one else has read

Rush, Entre Nous

As previously reported, I've fallen behind on my New Year's book-of-the-week resolution, but it's still proven to be a useful impetus for reducing my stack of unread purchases.  Having recently finished re-reading* Ready Player One, I belatedly realized while getting ready for work this morning that I needed a new book, so I  quickly pulled Clockwork Lives out of the pile before running out the door.

Clockwork Lives is a bit of an oddity.  I purchased it last year in Penticton during the annual Peachland winery tour as a curiousity more than anything else: the embossed, gilded cover caught my eye, and I was intrigued to see that Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for Rush**, was one of the authors, along with Kevin J. Anderson.  Although, to be honest, I hesitated for a moment because of that second name.  I think of Kevin J. Anderson as a professional collaborator/adapter - not quite to the point of being a ghost writer, but you do tend to see his name on a lot of book covers following some else's name and the word "and".

Regardless, my curiousity was piqued, and I added the book to my stack of purchases.

As it turns out, the book was written as companion piece for Rush's final studio album from 2012, Clockwork Angels.  (The live album from the follow-up Clockwork Angels tour was their final album before retiring as a band.) 

I started reading Clockwork Lives  on the bus this morning, and I'm cautiously pleased so far - it's an alternate reality steampunk novel with a bit of a fairy-tale feel to it, surprisingly like something that Neil Gaiman might have written, and the early chapters are quite promising in their description of a young woman who must fill the pages of a book with other people's lives as captured in a drop of their blood in order to receive her inheritance.

I was even more pleased to find the following description on page 30:

He lifted the lid and removed a leatherbound book with an oxblood red cover stamped with clockwork gears and inset with alchemical symbols...Flustered, she opened the cover of the volume, to find that the title page said Clockwork Lives.

 

Full points to all involved:  having the book that I'm reading appear in the book that I'm reading is a marvelous little touch, and, really, this is exactly the kind of trick that makes reading a real book fun - you just can't do this sort of thing on a Kindle.

- Sid

* My previous reading of Ernest Cline's tribute to geek life was a loaner book, so my reading was still technically of a newly purchased book.

**  It's an odd coincidence that I randomly chose a book by a member of Rush to follow Ready Player One, which contains a whole section where the protagonist has to play the title track from the Rush album 2112 to obtain a clue for the Third Gate in the quest to find the ultimate Easter Egg - a section which was, sadly, left out of the movie version.