Little Toy Robot

I have a special, personal appreciation for librarians, so fiction featuring librarians always catches my eye. Sometimes this leads to disappointment, as with Mel Odom’s The Rover. But I saw a book in Borders the other day that looked good, The Book of Flying by Keith Miller. It’s a fable, basically, about a librarian named Pico who lives in a city where some people have wings and soar in the skies above, and some are bound to the earth. Pico, a member of the latter group, falls in love with a winged girl who realizes they can’t be together, and he dares to follow an ancient clue to learn the secret of flight. The novel is written in an extremely poetic style, but it is very effective and not at all overblown (if it gives you some idea, there’s a prominent blurb by Ursula K. LeGuin). I didn’t actually buy it, but I read about 50 pages in one sitting on one of those very uncomfortable benches at Borders and was very impressed.

Because I’m being a schmuck and talking about the book without actually reading it, here are some links for the random Googlers who find this post to people who have read it:

• A Journey of Words: Keith Miller’s The Book of Flying, a review on Strange Horizons by Yoon Ha Lee
• The book is mentioned in this installment of The Agony Column
• A review on Nimble Spirit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 at 12:02 am and is filed under books.