Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Tucker's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Monday, October 26th, 2009
12:18 pm	The Malloreon David Eddings, Guardians of the West King of the Murgos Demon Lord of Karanda Sorceress of Darshiva The Seeress of Kell I didn't reread these three summers ago when I went on my Eddings binge because I didn't have a copy of the first one. I finally fixed that a few weeks ago, so figured it was about time to decide whether these are worth keeping. Um. Really bloody annoying sexism? Check. Racism as shorthand for character? Check and double check: the only reason the titular King of the Murgos is a human being is that he's half Drasnian (by which I mean "half Silk"). Plot consisting of characters being led around by the nose for no good reason? Check. Godawful dialect? Check. General exhaustion and no real desire to read much further by midway through book four? Check. And yet. I've read these books so often, especially the first three, that they're seared into my brain. In a lot of ways they're the only good memories of junior high that I've got. The dialog's snappy, the individual episodes aren't too bad. . . meh. I've got the Elenium for that, and it's shorter, to boot. Anyone want hardback copies of the Belgariad and the Malloreon? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
11:47 am	Whip It Drew Barrymore (dir.), Whip It There's a video game called Darkened Skye that's based on, of all things, Skittles. Somehow the developers managed to make it better than a video game based on candy has any right to be, through a combination of acceptable platform/action gameplay, witty self-aware banter, and a kick-ass heroine. Whip It's kind of like that for sports movies. The plot: Bliss's mother wants her to do beauty pageants. Bliss discovers roller derby and joins a losing team, propelling them to the championship by her sheer awesomeness. Hijinks and teenage angst ensue. There's a boy from the big city, a fight with her best friend, the obligatory tension with her mother, and the possibility of missing the big championship match. And despite all that, it's so much better than any movie based on a sport (even roller derby) ought to be. It has Ellen Page ("Juno") being awesome, and Drew Barrymore being kinda spacey, and a couple of deaf characters that aren't played for laughs but are just there. The fairly pedestrian plot has a bunch of interesting bits around the edges: a love story with a non-stupid resolution that doesn't take over the movie, parents that act like real parents, teenaged drinking and sex shown in a non-judgemental way. and some good characters. And it's just plain fun to watch. Also, I think it's the first movie I've seen that fails the reverse Bechdel test, which makes me happy. There's some very brief interaction between Bliss's dad and the dad next door, but that's about Bliss. The coaches from two of the teams have a brief conversation during a match, but since the teams are all-female, this is arguably two guys talking about women. (Also, I don't remember if the other team's coach had a name or not.) And other than that, there aren't scenes of two guys talking to each other. The sheer small-town-Southern atmosphere overwhelmed me for awhile. The movie does a very good job of evoking the desperation and dead-end-ness of life in such a place, to the extent that I spent the first fifteen or twenty minutes squirming in my chair. It got better once Bliss got to Austin for the first time, but still. . . yeesh. (The internets inform me that the screenwriter based the screenplay on her novel Derby Girl, which one reader summed up as "Too much boyfriend. Not enough roller derby." I am happy to report that she adjusted the proportions in the film version.) (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
12:00 pm	see monkeys Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir This is nominally a tale about Sapolsky's time studying a baboon troop in Kenya. In practice, it's a bunch of stories, some of which are about the baboons, some of which are about the tribes (Bantu farmers and Masai raiders) that live near the baboons, and some of which are about traveling elsewhere in Africa and what a horrible idea that was due to the endemic political instability. He knows how to tell a really, really good story. I spent much of the book laughing in amazement, or shaking my head in sympathy. He is, in fact, so good at evoking a response that this introvert found the book kind of exhausting, in exactly the same way that being at a party is exhausting. It's great fun and you're enjoying yourself, and at the same time you need to go home and calm down for awhile, turn off the social overload. My only other complaint is that the stories seem so fragmented. They follow a loose chronology, but often seem disconnected from each other. There's no real link between the stories of the baboons, the tribes, or the larger African situation, except for occasionally the characters. At least, there's no link until the heartwrenching last chapter, which talks about the fate of the baboons. It ties together the lives of the baboons, the cheerfully self-absorbed culture of corruption in the tribes, and the much greater scale of endemic corruption in the government, with inevitable and horrifying results. Early on in the book, Sapolsky notes that baboons live a pretty easy life: they have few natural predators, and they can forage for enough food in just a few hours a day. This gives them "about a half dozen solid hours of sunlight a day to devote to being rotten to each other. Just like our society." After reading this book, I can't fault the comparison. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
3:41 pm	Arabia and the 8th Dimension David Lean (dir.), Lawrence of Arabia I've not seen a movie fail the Bechdel Test this badly in a very long time. Maybe not ever. I think I saw a bunch of women cheering on the departure to Aqaba but it's hard to tell: they were wrapped head-to-toe in black and there weren't any close-up shots. And there may have been a woman or two at the opening funeral. Also, holy crap, Alec Guinness in nigh-blackface. Did they just not have any Arabian actors available? With that out of the way. . . it's quite an impressive film. Takes its time telling its story, doesn't compact or rush anything. Big scenic vistas (mostly of sand), lots of camels and Bedouin. Everything about this movie feels /big/, vast and ponderous. Even the characters are larger than life. I'm not certain that everyone ought to see this movie in particular, but I think that the Epic Movie Experience is not to be sniffed at. And, well, they don't make 'em like this so much anymore. Also, the AFI Silver's Theater 1 is one of the best theatres I can think of to see a four-hour film in. W.D. Richter (dir.), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension This movie is awesome. Not necessarily "good," or "worth watching," but "awesome." The eponymous hero is a brilliant neurosurgeon who's taken up particle physics and (with the help of his rock band) saves the world on occasion. And that's just the intro crawl text. Really, it defies explication. There's a plot involving two varieties of lizard aliens that are all named John. There's a genuine mad scientist, the long-lost twin sister of Buckaroo's dead wife, and the President. ("Which President?" "The President of the United States." "Oh.") Plus John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd doing their thing, and Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit that includes wooly chaps. And I can't even say that it makes no sense. There is, sort of, usually, a thread you can follow from one point to the next. It's when you look at the big picture that it all collapses into absurdity. It's not quite so far over the top that you can't even see the top from where it is, but the top is definitely just a tiny speck in your vision. Awesome. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
3:56 pm	In the Loop Armando Iannucci (dir.), In the Loop This is a comedy about going to war. Not war itself, but the process of getting there, through the eyes of British ministers and US State Department functionaries. In particular, it focuses on the naive and bumbling MP Simon Hunt, the vicious communications minister Malcolm Tucker, and Simon's new assistant Toby, with dozens of supporting cast members on both sides of the Atlantic. It's very very funny. Lines like "I will marshal all the media forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide" and "I am, however, going to have to read you excerpts from the Riot Act" pop up everywhere. (Many of the best lines are in the trailer, which I recommend unreservedly.) There's a bit of 'embarrassment comedy,' where the nominal amusement comes from watching people put in impossible situations, but it's kept to a minimum and manages to be genuinely funny. It's also sort of a political thriller, with lots of double-crossing and manipulativeness. That part was still pretty well done, but felt a bit. . . off, towards the end. Alliances break and shift as the war planning lurches on, and careers are made and ruined. That part was. . . less funny, and more painful to watch. Two scenes with Linton (the warmonger in the State Dept) in particular come to mind. In the first, he's altering the minutes of a meeting so that they reflect the "truth" of the situation; in the last, he's being an intensely control-freakish jerk for the sake of being a control freak. Both of those, but especially the last, pushed him from "amusing" over to "downright evil," and sort of broke past the "funny" part into "deeply uncomfortable." Recommended if you're looking for a comedy that ends on a discomfiting note. Also, "Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult" has now entered my vocabulary. (Wiki sez it's a spin-off of a BBC-TV series. I'm not sure if I want to see the series or not.) (Comment on this)
Friday, November 14th, 2008
11:01 am	The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age You can tell this is a Neal Stephenson book by how the plot falls apart by the end. That's not entirely fair. You can really tell it's a Stephenson by the dialogue (Judge Fang's in particular), by the names of things (the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel, at which Fang and his cohorts devour fried chicken), by the hacker in-jokes (look, it's a bazaar! With a free flow of information! And, are those cathedral bells we hear tolling at the end of the book?). And Diamond Age doesn't fall apart nearly so badly as Cryptonomicon (the book that, 2/3 of the way through, made me swear off future Stephenson books until someone gets him a proper editor). Like Snow Crash and Crypto, Diamond Age is a fun read, full of witty characters and a plot that collapses under its own weight. Unlike those, Diamond Age is about something bigger than the wild ride. It's an analysis of societal structures, of moral virtues, and of how those virtues are passed to people (children) who don't necessarily choose them. It's about the success and failure of strict societies (Victorian, Confucian) and the need for flexibility. I was having a great deal of fun with the book up until about halfway through, when the strange distributed hive-mind of the Drummers pops up (and absorbs a main character). At that point. . . something snapped. It wasn't precisely my disbelief suspenders. More that. . . they felt out of place in the techno-rational world Stephenson had created. At that point I stopped being swept along and started reading more critically. Which is kind of crucial for the enjoyment of Stephenson's books, and in particular for believing in and being thrilled by the upheaval and near-transformation of the world at the end of this one. It's still good stuff; I'd reread it, I'd recommend it to other people. It's just not as good as the first half suggests. (Much like Stephenson's other books.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
11:23 am	Stations of the Tide Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide The only other Swanwick I've read was _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_, which is not so much a fantasy novel as a deconstruction of all manner of fantasy tropes. It was enjoyable and deep, even when the sections felt disjointed, as though there were transitions missing. _Stations_ is a lot like that, too. As in _IDD_ there's a thematic reason for it: here, it's because of the implicit parallel with the Stations of the Cross. (It might also just be how Swanwick writes novels. I'll get back to you after I finish _Jack Faust_.) This feels very Wolfean. Specifically it feels a lot like _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, only it makes a little more sense. uilos observed that _Stations_ has an awful lot of theme but not much plot. That's pretty accurate. The plot, such as it is: the tide is coming in on the planet, flooding the fertile lowlands, and everyone is fleeing for the hills. (Creatures on the planet survive this by being amphibians, evolving into something that can handle the tide.) Meanwhile, a nameless bureaucrat is in search of a megalomaniac who's been using restricted technology without a license. (Digression: "The bureaucrat fell from the sky" is one of the great opening lines in all of literature.) The theme. . . technology, and humanity, and responsibility to those we see as "lesser" (and are they, actually, lesser / less worthy?). I'm not sure I liked _Stations_ but I have a lot of respect for it. I definitely want to read it again. (Come to think of it, I feel that way about Wolfe's _New Sun_ and _Fifth Head_, too.) (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
10:51 am	Joseph Heller, Catch-22 There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. I first read this book my senior year of high school. I fell in love with it on about the third page, at the line "Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his lifespan that Yossarian thought he was dead." Everything that made no sense on the surface was eventually revealed to have a rationale that seemed to hold together perfectly logically, until you poked at it. It's in everyone's interest to not poke at it, though, so the system works. Right up until Yossarian finally says "the hell with it." It's a dark, dark book. The darkness is easy to overlook at the beginning, when everything is all jokes and whimsy until you're reminded that one day Clevinger flew into a cloud and never came out again, or Yossarian starts complaining about the dead man in his tent who's not even there. The scenes about Snowden, the dying tailgunner Yossarian fails to save, start off vague and detached. Even the book's loose relationship with chronology contributes to the madcap zany humor. You always know that there's another wacky episode just around the next page. Then about three-quarters through the book Kid Sampson dies in a freak unlucky accident, and the darkness and viciousness come out in full force. The Chaplain undergoes a Kafkaesque interrogation sequence. Nately is killed shortly after achieving his heart's desire. Aarfy throws a woman out a window and isn't arrested-- but Yossarian is, for being in Rome without a pass. Catch-22 itself is rephrased by one character as "They have a right to do anything that's not against the law," and finally as "They can do anything you can't stop them from doing." That's the real lesson, no different from Orwell's "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture." The ending isn't wholly dark, though. Yossarian and the Chaplain both recognize that the only way to win is not to play, and set out to do just that. The final image is of Yossarian running, the most active thing he's done for the entire book. He's found himself and what he needs to do. I was going to follow this up with a reread of Closing Time, the sequel, but the wackiness and prose and dark were just too much. Maybe in another month or two. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
3:53 pm	Wolves Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Sidon Everything I wrote about the previous two Latro books is still true. This time Latro goes to Egypt, though, so the gods are substantially more opaque. No more gimmes like "the goat-footed man, who says his name is All." Instead we've got a host of animal-headed deities and the occasional long-dead deified Pharaoh. Latro falls in love briefly in the second book. In one of the more repulsive bits, his "friends" use this later on to exploit him and convince him to stick around. He gets a wife in this volume as well. I'm impressed by his consistency: he's loyal to his wife even when he doesn't remember that she's his wife (must be Twoo Wuv), and he instinctively distrusts the creepy woman who keeps hitting on him, even when he doesn't remember that he's married. Yay for characterization. I really appreciated that this book opened with the reappearance of the physician who first treated Latro, way back at the beginning of Soldier of the Mist. Seven Lions's return is welcome as well, although we don't see nearly enough of him. The ending screams "if this one sells well enough there will be a sequel." I'm not sure whether I'm happy about that or not. Mostly because, well, Wolfe is getting on in years, and his /next/ book isn't a Latro book either. (And what the devil is the invisible baboon that hangs around the priest of Thoth?) Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom Gene Wolfe's time-traveling pirate book. Wolfe's non-series books still tend to feel far slighter than his longer works, and this is no exception. It's got great atmosphere and characters (best and truest pirates ever), it's got typically Wolfean musings on the nature of identity and the unreliability of narration, and it's a delight to read. It just . . . didn't inspire the same love in me that the Latro books, or Long/Short Sun, did. I guess someone who's got more of a thing for pirates might feel differently. The narrator's voice feels an awful lot like Able's, from Wizard Knight. It'd be kind of awesome if he somehow tied this and Wizard Knight and another book or two together . . . Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves Anything that delivers a smackdown to Anne McCaffrey's pioneering work in the field of psychic animal companions is good by me. You know what my favorite part of this book was? The wolves don't talk. They don't think in words, they think in impulses and sensations. There's not a lot of Intricate Plot here. Coming off of a Gene Wolfe bender that particular lack was even more noticeable than it might have been. In its place there's rock-solid characterization and society-building. (And also cold. This book made me feel the cold in a way that only _Left Hand of Darkness_ has before.) So, the society. There are trolls, and they eat people. To stop the trolls, there's an army of big psychic wolves and the men who bond with them. The bond goes deep enough that the emotional state of one can affect the other. This causes interesting things to happen with gender, since only men can bond with wolves, and when a female wolf goes into heat, well . . . What really disturbed me about the wolfcarls' society wasn't the gang-rape, actually. I mean, yes, disturbing, but not in quite the same way. No, what got me was the role that Isolfr (the main character, bonded to a female wolf) was being put in. Specifically, the scenes where he's being actively courted by other wolfcarls. Given useless trinkets. Flirted at (not with, /at/). Generally treated as someone who'd be swayed by such ridiculously insulting behavior. You know. As though he were female in an overtly patriarchal society. My brain snapped after about the second such scene and it took me several days to put it back together. If he'd been female I would have thought "how insulting" and moved on, but because he's male it hit me a lot more viscerally. I didn't really understand what it was that was getting me until I read this review, and then, bam. I've been trained to reject caretaker work as lesser, as bad, and it took seeing a man first forced into and then actively accepting that role to make me realise it. Yet more work to be done in my head. (Thanks, Bear and Mole. I think.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 7th, 2008
12:05 am	Race for the Galaxy Tom Lehmann, Race for the Galaxy Me: "Oh, Race! I've heard good things. How is it?" Rick: "It's like San Juan on steroids." Yeah, pretty much. San Juan is the Puerto Rico card game. It's got no plantations (just factories) and no shipping (but it's still got trading), so you only get points from building things. Other than that, it's a pretty good adaptation. SJ preserves the main PR mechanic of every turn you choose a phase and everyone does that phase, but you get a special bonus (draw more cards, build for cheaper, etc). You pay for buildings (which are cards in your hand) by discarding a number of cards from your hand equal to the cost of the building; this means that anything you build, you have to actually want to build more than your other cards. It's good stuff. So Race for the Galaxy is like San Juan with two major changes and a number of minor ones. The biggest change is that the role selection is now simultaneous. Everyone has their own set of cards for the roles: explore, develop, settle, consume, produce. Every round, you choose one role secretly and reveal simultaneously. Any role that gets chosen by anyone, gets done by everyone; the person or people who chose it get a special bonus. Any role that doesn't get chosen by anyone doesn't happen. Roles happen in a predetermined order. So in SJ most of the roles are going to happen, but you don't know when. In Race, you know definitely that card-drawing happens before building, but the only way to guarantee that you get to do card-drawing is if you pick it yourself. The other big change is the return of shipping. In SJ all you can do with the goods you produce is sell them for cards. In Race, some buildings can turn goods into victory points. So you've got a bit of the shipping dynamic present in PR: the building up a bunch of goods and turning them into points, and the possibility of having something shipped before it can be traded for lots of cards in hand. Also, SJ ends when someone builds a twelfth building. Race can (and usually does) end like this, but it can also end when (like PR) the predetermined supply of victory point chips runs out. So someone with only seven or eight buildings can still manage to outscore someone who's rushing to get their twelfth mid-range building in play. There are also about half again as many cards as SJ, and very few duplicates. In SJ you've got a bunch of identical indigo plants. In Race, those indigo plants are planets that produce 'luxury' goods, and each one does something slightly different in addition to producing. Add to this two different types of buildings (developments and planets), planets that you can conquer through military might, and big buildings (PR's ten-cost buildings / SJ's six-cost) that have incredibly useful in-game effects in addition to the ton of points they provide, and you've got one heck of a game. And it plays in about half an hour, max, once you're familiar with the cards and the phases. A ton of decision-making compacted about as small as reasonably possible. Race was my most-played game of 2007. This is particularly impressive considering that I only started playing in December. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
11:41 pm	Tor Double #25 The Tor (and Ace) Doubles are a great idea. They're a way for longer short stories (~100pp) to find an audience, you get two books for the price of one cheap paperback, and they've got that neat flip-effect going on. (Plus, two covers! Don't like one? Store it so you see the other!) Of course these days the Reading Public wants six-hundred-page bricks for their seven bucks, so there's no real market anymore. But still. John M. Ford, Fugue State This book is made of confusion. It apparently began life as a short story, and was expanded for publication here. Joel Rosenberg, on hearing this, said "Oh good, you're clearing up some of the ambiguities, then?" and JMF replied "No; adding new ones." There are three or four, or maybe five (six?) stories going on, all with what are probably the same characters and concerning similar events. There are weirdnesses with memory, and what might be as full an explanation as possible at the end. It is amazing and almost comprehensible. Even the title is a multilayered thing of beauty, in ways that aren't wholly clear until you've come out the other side and have some space for reflection. Gene Wolfe, The Death of Dr. Island I've read this before, in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories (yes). Unlike Fugue State, the only ambiguities are in the rather clever title. That doesn't make it any less brilliant, though. The titular doctor is a therapist with ultimate control over his environment (somewhere in the asteroid belt, I think). He has three patients, whom he helps to varying degrees. Conceit: brilliant. Plot: quite good. Characters: of the four, two are fully realised, and two are drawn as they are mostly to support the theme. Which theme is my main problem with the book: the willingness of Dr. Island to play God with his patients unsettles me quite a bit. On the other hand, without that arrogance there'd be no book at all, and in the context of the book his methods are at least fifty percent effective. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 3rd, 2007
9:55 am	Harry Potter 6 and 7 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince This is the best of them so far, I think. There is Plot, there is Character, there is Harry being treated like an adult, there is a dearth of pointless digression. Dumbledore is irritatingly secretive with his blackened hand, but other than that people are pretty open with each other about what's going on. Yay Snape finally gets to teach DADA! (Why did D not just promote him last year and save us all the trouble of dealing with Umbridge?) Evil Snape is pretty believable, I must say. I'm sticking with my 'he's really a good guy' theory, as implausible as it seems given the end of the book. I base this solely on D's "Go get Snape" order. Good to see Draco do something other than 'be an annoying little git.' Angst-filled Tonks doesn't work for me. Maybe if we'd seen more of her in this book it would have. The Half-Blood Prince bit is the weakest thing about the book. A neat idea but poorly integrated with everything else. I very nearly threw the book across the room when Harry broke up with Ginny "for her own good." Lots of zooming around doing cool things, and uncovering bits and pieces of backstory, and general good times. Enjoyable. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows In which (almost) everyone dies. This wouldn't have been so bad if there had been any sort of precedent in the books at /all/ for this kind of mass slaughter. That's not the tone we'd been getting, though, so it feels exceptionally jarring. (Okay, and also I'm bitter at some of the who lives and who dies decisions that were made.) Individual episodes were good. The raid on the Ministry in particular was made of yay. And the plot's alright except for the totally random element introduced that there was absolutely no hint of previously. Do not talk to me about how JKR has had so much awesome planned out from the very beginning. Evil Snape was pretty clearly invented between five and six, and the Hallows popped into existence between six and seven. (As did D's Mysterious Past.) Speaking of which, the Redemption of Snape was rather unsatisfying. Mostly because, well, what good does it do /him/? Dramatically, hearing about it in backstory instead of having him tell (or, preferably, show) just doesn't work. Compare with the Malfoys, who actually became barely sympathetic towards the end. "All the Slytherins are evil" is just lazy writing. I've thought this since book 5. Having one or two of them join the impromptu DADA lessons, and then having one of those stay behind, would have improved matters immeasurably. As it is, "all the houses have to work together! (except Slytherin.)" Remind me again why they still /have/ houses in the epilogue? O yes, the epilogue. A bigger waste of paper I cannot conceive of. Absolutely the only thing of value there was the suggestion that the feud between Gryffindor and Slytherin, personified in Harry's and Draco's kids, would continue. Bleh and double bleh. Mostly disappointing. Worth reading to wrap things up but doesn't stand on its own legs at all. And now, off to read the comments on Making Light. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
3:42 pm	Harry Potter 5 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Ah, the Ugly Blue Book at last. In which people keep secrets from the main characters for no reason, with predictably disastrous results. Such as Harry turning into a ball of repressed teenage wizard rage. At least he's got a good sulking partner in Sirius. Oh look, a bloody /psycho/ house-elf. This is not an improvement. You know, at the point where the first book was suddenly starting to develop a plot, this one is still mucking about with the trumped-up Wizengamot trial. "Gryffindors get busted for no reason while Slytherins skate free" has been a running theme since midway through book 1, and it got old by three-quarters of the way through book 1. Maybe it's the rampant abuses of authority by every single character (with the surprising exception of McGonagall), but that sort of thing is exceedingly grating this time around. Or maybe it's just that there's more of it and it's more blatant. (Has no one in Quidditch ever heard of sportsmanship?) Harry/Cho is handled pretty well. I like Tonks, and I like that Moody is not the same as he was last book. And when did Ginny Weasley become a real character? Dumbledore, too. Wow. Oddly it's not the glimpse into Snape's past that makes me like him better; it's his reaction to Harry discovering it. Umbridge ended up too over-the-top, but then her final fate was pretty over-the-top as well. Bleh. Glad to see the back of her. Decent but not 850 pages worth of decent. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 27th, 2007
1:15 pm	Harry Potter 4 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Oh no, more house-elves. Oh dear God no, more Dobby the terminally annoying plot device. Hermione gets to play a parody of everyone who's ever campaigned to improve working conditions for slaves and near-slaves. Color me unimpressed. Onward. The book's alright; the plot is back to "things happen to Harry" rather than "Harry does things" (as happened in books 2 and 3), but everyone gets some much-needed depth to their character. Well, except for Draco, but what can you do. (It is bloody obvious that short of one or both of them dying, Ron and Hermione are going to end up together.) The Tri-Wizard Tournament was more interesting than Quidditch. I believe this statement is known as "damning with faint praise." The maze failed to convince me at all, and we only see Harry's segment with the dragons so there's not much of interest there. The underwater bit worked well, I thought. The DADA teachers are getting more and more personality as the series goes on. If this trend continues I expect the one for book 7 to utterly dominate the action. (If it finally gets to be Snape, so much the better. That seems unlikely given certain revelations about his past in this book, but one never knows.) Still worth reading. I think 2 is still my favorite so far; a second read of the series may well change that, of course. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
1:14 pm	Harry Potter 3 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Do I get in trouble if I say I liked the movie better? I mean, even apart from having Gary Oldman in it. Tighter plot, better script ("You tell those spiders, Ron"), more showing not telling (e.g. Harry seeing Peter on the map instead of hearing about him from Lupin). More interesting things with the time-travel sequence. Less Quidditch. It's good stuff. If I didn't already know about the time twister I would be throwing this book against the wall in frustration. The writer's job is, to paraphrase Gene Wolfe, to tell me something really cool. It's not to taunt me with how much more the writer knows about the world than I do. Dude, it's /your/ world. Of course you know more about it than I do. /Tell/ me how awesome it is, don't just give me impossibilities whose explanations are being kept secret for the sake of secrecy. While we're on the subject of throwing the book against the wall, Draco Malfoy nearly got me there as well. (Another point in the movie's favor: the scene where Hermione punches him out.) Yes, it is totally in character for him to milk his "injury" for all he can and then some. Doesn't mean I have to enjoy reading about it. Lupin is a better character in the book than in the movie, granted. And the movie could have done with actually explaining who Mooney, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs were. (Which plot-point was a rather nice touch.) Onward to book 4, which I expect to be better than the movie, since the movie had a distinct lack of Gary Oldman. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
10:53 am	Harry Potter 1 and 2 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Having seen the third movie, I did a double-take when I read early in chapter 1 that Hagrid had borrowed Sirius Black's motorcycle to deliver young Harry, and neither Dumbledore nor McGonagall batted an eye. This three-hundred page book has roughly sixty pages of plot, fifty of which are the last fifty pages of the book. Another 50-100 are devoted to trips through the Departments of Backstory and Exposition. The rest is, um, background noise and irrelevant stuff happening. You know. World-building. It's alright but I much prefer my world-building to have a point to it. Anyone who believes that Severus Snape is a bad guy needs to reread the Two Big Expositions (with Quirrell and Dumbledore) at the end of this book. Fluff, but fun fluff. In defence of quite a lot of editors, I wouldn't have bought it for my publishing house either. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Much better. The plot is evenly distributed throughout the book, and there's more of it this time. Dobby is a seriously irritating plot device and should have been edited out. He provides foreshadowing (there are better ways), screws around with a Quidditch match (o noz!), and provides a reason for the car to be in the forest so it can be a machina ex dea with the spiders. Bleh. It's amazing how that one scene with Lucius Malfoy makes Draco understandable, and almost sympathetic. I am unconvinced by the appointment of the obviously incompetent Lockhart as DADA teacher. For some reason the 'let's disguise ourselves so Draco can tell us important plot information' scene really grates on me. It feels like lazy writing, and I don't know why. The sword randomly popping out of the Sorting Hat was also deus-ex-machina-like. Again, fluff, but fun fluff, and a bit more substantial this time. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
8:22 am	Latro Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Arete These books purport to be translations of scrolls dating from approximately 479 BC. Latro, a soldier ("latro" is a Greek word meaning "mercenary" and probably not his original name) has been hit on the head during a battle (in which he fought for the Great King[1] against the Greeks), and can no longer remember anything for more than about twelve hours. In an effort to stave off the inevitable confusion, he writes down where he's been and what he's done. The tricky part is that Latro is a non-native Greek speaker, so he translates place names into their nearest equivalent. He speaks a great deal about the city-state of "Thought[2]," for instance, and late in the first book visits the "Hot Gates" (recently featured in the classic Frank Miller music video "It's Raining 300 Men"). So, half the fun is playing "What the devil is Latro talking about now?" The other half, of course, is the story. Latro's bonk on the head has taken away his memory, but given him the ability to see the gods and other spirits. This is sometimes helpful, as when Theseus gives him advice during a wrestling match, and sometimes less so, as when he accidentally raises a lamia during a necromancer's seance. So interesting things tend to happen around him. And not only supernatural things; in the second book he happens to be in the company of powerful Athenians and Spartans, and watches their machinations play out in his fragmented way. It's sort of a puzzle, a "why did that just happen?" type of thing, but it works because the events themselves are compelling. Latro's character is remarkably consistent, and we (though not he) can see real growth in a few of his constant companions. I would have liked to know more about Seven Lions, the Ethiopian soldier who stays with Latro from the beginning. Perhaps he will show up again for Soldier of Sidon. Like most of Wolfe's books, these made me want to read them again so I can pick up on everything I missed the first time through. Not easy reads, but well worth the effort. [1] Xerxes I; the battle in question was almost certainly Plataea ("Clay"), the land equivalent of the Persians' naval defeat at Salamis some years earlier. [2] Athens. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 4th, 2007
1:28 pm	Abre los Breakfast That You Refuse Elizabeth Bear, The Chains That You Refuse Short stories by the acclaimed author of Cat v. Monkey. They range from "decent" to "really quite good." Of particular note: the _Last Call_-esque "One-eyed Jack and the Suicide King," the cyberpunk character study "Two Dreams on Trains," the odd Western "The Devil You Don't" (a sequel to the equally odd Norse-mythic "Ice"), and the title story. Especially the last line. And the one Jenny Casey story whose title I have totally forgotten. I should probably actually read /those/ books now, too. Good stuff. Also: I picked this up in a used bookstore because it had a weird-looking cover. I later determined that that's because it was an ARC. Upon reading it I found out why publishers don't want ARCs resold: it's not only typo-riddled but fraught with typesetting markups as well. Bleh. Going to have to acquire a real copy of this one so that I don't keep getting thrown out of the story by the formatting oddities. Neil Jordan (dir.), Breakfast on Pluto I went to see this because it had Cillian Murphy as a transvestite, and also a cameo by Gavin Friday. I wasn't really expecting anything other than some light amusement and a bit of spot-the-actor. Instead I got a really fun romp through northern Ireland and London in the back half of the twentieth century, with a flamboyant half-mad viewpoint character and an ever-changing supporting cast (though a few of, um, her boyhood friends recur off and on), and quite a bit of spot-the-actor. (Stephen Rea! yay!) It's different from _Idaho_ mostly because, well, more things /happen/ in _Pluto_. Which isn't to say that there's really a plot, as such, there aren't events driving towards some sort of revelation/resolution. There's just Kitten, looking for his mother, and encountering all manner of odd characters as s/he goes. Recommended. Alejandro Amenabar (dir.), Abre los Ojos I watched this when it came out ten years ago and thought it was incredible. I can't tell if I've gotten smarter or if knowing the Big Reveal makes the whole movie less good. There are brilliant bits (when Cesar picks up the sketch of Sofia, for instance), but overall the plot feels forced and doesn't really say anything new and revolutionary about the Human Experience. Which, frankly, if you're going to go with It Was All A Dream you're sort of obligated to provide. Otherwise you've just got an exercise in plot-wankery. (On the bright side, bonus points for explicitly /not/ making it a rehash of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.") The acting was all perfectly competent. Which is to say I didn't notice it at all; I was too busy disliking every single character. (Untrue. The psychiatrist was a good guy. Other than him, though.) They're all either shallow or desperate (Cesar is both by turns), and generally failed to give me reasons to care about them as opposed to the weirdness/madness going on around them. Which, well, as mentioned above, ehh. Having said that, I'd watch it again, with someone who hadn't seen it before. The brilliant bits are worth sitting through in company. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
1:00 pm	The Princes of Idaho John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air An early work. The cover looks like bad late-sixties space opera. It's actually really really good early-eighties space opera wrapped around several cons and a lot of political intrigue. There's no knock-yer-socks-off OMG moment, just constantly building action and tension and joy in the ease with which the characters plot and carry out their schemes. The book is hardly perfect, even for what it is. The main antagonist is introduced late in the book (a flaw it arguably shares with the otherwise transcendent _Dragon Waiting_), and only one of the three around-for-more-than-two-pages female characters is much more than a cipher. But it's a fun quick romp. Gus van Sant (dir.), My Own Private Idaho I'm not sure I would have been able to figure out that this was based on _Henry IV_ if I hadn't known that going into it. Van Sant stripped out all the plot in the play and turned it into a character study of Prince Hal. Which works alright; he's basically slumming until such time as he's ready to assume his role in upper-crust society, at which time he discards all his previous friends. Including River Phoenix's gay prostitute who's searching for his mother and in love with the Hal character. I guess adding in the unrequited love story gives Hal a bit more dimension to his utterly cold calculation? It's definitely necessary for Hal to have someone other than Falstaff to play off of if you're removing Hotspur from the script entirely. It's a neat idea, and it mostly works. It doesn't always make sense if you try and analyse it from the perspective of having a coherent plot but if you can relax and watch the characters unfold, you get some perspective on parts of human nature. I'm about ninety-five percent certain that the scene in which River Phoenix and Udo Kier meet for the first time takes place on Capital Hill . . . the slope and the waterfront and the houses are just too familiar. But since the movie was made in 1991 I didn't actually recognise anything. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
4:04 pm	Farthing Jo Walton, Farthing Much of my distaste for alternate history comes from it involving hinge-points I just don't care that much about. Obvious exception: _The Dragon Waiting_. A book can get around this if it's a story that couldn't be told without the societal changes that come from the hinge point. See, e.g., _The Man in the High Castle_: in general, 'what if Hitler won' is not really a proposition that interests me all that much, since the obvious answer is 'life would suck, a lot.' _High Castle_ actually goes and does interesting things with this premise. But overall I've not got a lot of desire to just read about life in a conquered nation. Which is relevant to _Farthing_ because its Britain isn't a conquered nation at all. The Britain of the book negotiated a withdrawal from WWII in 1941, leaving the Reich free to consolidate the rest of western Europe under its rule and then get bogged down fighting Russia without having to worry about the western front. So you're left with a Britain that's almost right but not quite: some of the names and policies have changed, but it's far more recognisable than _High Castle_'s America. It's an English country house mystery, where one of the rich girls has married a (gasp) nice Jewish boy, in a society with rampant anti-semitism. (It is, of course, worse on the Continent.) So _Farthing_ gets to explore the effects of racism, both overt and deeply enough ingrained that you just plain don't realise you're being racist. The book's all investigation and mystery and ominous fascist stormclouds for the first three-quarters, and then suddenly it becomes very dark and dangerous very quickly. There is nothing I can say about the prose, which flows like wine and shifts between the first-person diary style of the the rich girl and the limited-third of the detective inspector, or the feels-like-real-people characterizations, because I was too busy being caught up in the world and the events to notice those things. One of the people Lucy mentions as having been at her coming-out was "that nice Mr Philby from the Foreign Service." I do hope he turns up in _Ha'Penny_. (1 Comment |Comment on this)