Besides burning some popcorn last week and setting off the fire alarms at work, I managed to singe the crap out of my processor (see right). Notice that burned-looking spot in the middle? That’s what you call a dead processor. For those not geeky enough to know how the insides of your computer work, there is a fan that sits right on top of your processor intended to keep it cool. Processors can get hot, and if they aren’t kept cool, they fry. As my luck would have it, the fan on my processor stopped working, so the processor overheated and fried itself. When processors overheat, computers get upset.

Now I have a new fan and a new 1.3 GHz AMD chip (upgraded from a 700 AMD chip). Sweet. My computer is noticeably not faster. But hey, at least it doesn’t lock up every five minutes.

I finished The Final Confession of Mabel Stark this weekend. Overall, I enjoyed it, but there were oddities.

First, the sequencing was kind of weird. At the beginning of the book, the narrator (Stark) claims that as the years passed, time lost its sequential quality and progressed in a gumball-like fashion:

…what it boils down to is time. The way it works changes. Used to be, I imagined the way young people do, as something with an order and a flow, like sand through an egg timer. Then, around the time I started wearing orthopedic splints, I began to view time as something different, as more an accumulation than a march forward. I’d have to say it’s like gumballs in a penny machine, all mixed together, jumbled up, rubbing the colour off one another.

Because of this random sequencing of events in her head, the story is told in a haphazard manner. Entire decades are skipped and visited later. Characters in her life vanish and reappear in other chapters, and unheard-of characters have brief and underdeveloped stints.

…there’ll be times I take liberty with this thing called order, with this thing we pretend is time, if only because at my age it’s hard as the dickens not to.

Sometimes I wonder if the author used this random structure to compensate for the fact that there could have been holes in the research he did on Stark’s life. If reading it above kind of sounds like a cop-out, imagine reading it in the context of the whole story.

The other oddity was the language. The narrator spoke in a very colloquial form of ‘southern’ English. Just take a look at the two above passages to see what I mean. It does have an endearing quality, I admit, it feels like she’s right next to you in a rocking chair, sipping a beer and telling you about her life. It takes some getting used to, but once you hit the groove, you start thinking like she does, in her language.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was Stark’s sharp tiger sense and Hough’s excellent job with the research he did on it. One passage that stuck with me was:

Naturally, I could barely drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 4:45. Felt logy all day. Even Goldie noticed it- when I was finishing boning our her cage she gave me a good long look and an eye roll followed by a lazy high-pitched arf, which is tiger for I know, I know [italics original]

A compliment I gladly award to Hough is that he could not have done a better job in portraying how much Stark knew about tigers, how much she loved them, and how much they controlled her life. Stark had a grand total of five husbands and one tiger (that she raised from birth). She stayed with that tiger for its entire life. She slept with it, cuddled with it, shopped with it, wrestled with it, let it use her as a rubbing post, and performed any other non-tiger-conducive behavior you can think of. This tiger was 550 pounds and, with her, as docile as a house cat. She trained it to think it was human. Amazing.