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| 2008-06-30 00:43 |
| This post is actual size, but it seems much bigger to me. |
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| They Might Be Giants—She's Actual Size |
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The LURID and thrilling confessions of a real-life essay addict!!!
Things I Read During June
( Can a hunger so strong be so wrong?! )
Okay, so this is the first book post I’ve done in tandem with my Goodreads thing. I think I’m liking Goodreads a lot, but I’m still working out the kinks in my, uh, methods. For now, I'm ending up with rougher versions of my reviews over there, and anything that's not in their database (short stories, Shadow Unit, etc.) ends up here exclusively. In exchange, I'll be trying to update Goodreads a bit more evenly for people who don't have time to read the whole enchilada over here.
Let me know if you want me to switch anything around.
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| 2008-06-05 19:06 |
| Things I Read During May |
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| Dar Williams—Highway Patrolman |
| books, didread |
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Got my computer back, so I might as well do my book post.
Things I Read During May
( Under the cut! )
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| 2008-04-01 23:52 |
| Book post has a posse |
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| Polara—Jetpack Blues (radio mix) |
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Things I Read During March
( All aboard. )
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| 2008-03-05 00:47 |
| Things I Read During February |
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| The Mountain Goats—New Monster Avenue |
| books, didread |
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Things I Read During February
( I'll go ahead and cut this one. )
So, looks like I turn 26 today.
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| 2008-02-09 22:33 |
| Things I Read During January |
| Public |
| Nedelle—The Natural Night |
| books, didread |
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My Things I Read During 2008. Let me show you them.
Things I Read During January
Sean Stewart—Perfect Circle (1/5)
A Texas ghost story by one of the guys responsible for Beast and I Love Bees. Yes, it's as good as that sounds. A funny and scary book about family, music, dead folk, and irreparably screwing your life up. Highly recommended.
Gene Wolfe—"Unrequited Love" (short story) (1/18)
Overdramatic narration. Bit of a bait and switch. Still affecting and creepy. (Poor sad Aibo.)
Michael Bishop—"The Pile" (short story, free at link) (1/20)
HUH. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette—A Companion To Wolves (1/24)
So look, there's this guy Vethulf, from over in Arakensberg. Short temper; been snapping at Isolfr's friends all the time. Isolfr got fed up, and wound up kicking or tripping him or something.
Later, while Isolfr slogged beside the mare that Frithulf slept astride, he smelled blood and flinched sharply. And then looked up, realizing he had been more or less dozing on his feet, and felt a warm hand on his shoulder. Vethulf, the quarrelsome, the fleet-footed, Vethulf-in-the-Fire walked beside him, his gray wolf slogging more like a carthorse than a predator.
Vethulf said nothing at first, just thrust a stake into Isolfr's hand. One quarter of a skinned raw rabbit was threaded on the pointed end; the blood smirched Isolfr's mitten.
"No time to cook," Vethulf said. "But I didn't see any signs of worms when I butchered it."
The meat was still warm, steaming slightly. Frithulf woke at the voices and looked around blearily. "Are we attacked?"
"You're fed," Vethulf said. He gave Isolfr another bony fragment of meat on a stick—"for your shieldbrother"—and a whole unskinned coney for Kothran and Viradechtis to share.
He fell away into the column before Isolfr could blink the thought of thanking him into his bleary mind, and Isolfr looked up at Frithulf in supplication. "What was that about?"
"Stay pretty," Frithulf advised, through a mouthful of meat.
I was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to decide which one of the possible reviews of this book I cared to write, and then I remembered this scene and realized I could probably skip the review altogether.
No really, check it out: You've got the dirt, muck and hardship; you've got the hothouse social atmosphere of a warrior band; and you've got the persistent gender reversals that were the thing's original raison d'être.* (Look, see? He's the good girl who fascinates all the bad boys! He literally ends up dating the Leader of the Pack! Well, of the werthreat, at least. Seriously, how can you not love that.) It's good and it's clever; it deconstructs without biting the hand that feeds it. You should read it.
(Uh, fair warning, though: it is filthy dirty, so you need to show up to the party prepared for the viking gang bang. I am not kidding.)
The Apocalypse Reader, ed. Justin Taylor (1/26) (read a quarter to a third of the stories.)
It had a Kelly Link story I hadn't read before, so I went ahead and checked it out.
- Lovecraft pastiche is better than actual Lovecraft. That is what I have learned here. (Can you believe I'd never actually read anything by him? Strange.)
- Theodora Goss's "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" was absolutely excellent.
- I am pretty sure I remember the specific internet kerfluffle that spawned Jeff Goldberg's "These Zombies Are Not a Metaphor." (Oddly enough, I think that one was indirectly Kelly Link's doing, too.)
- Yes, the Kelly Link story was good. But I think "Lull" makes a far better end-of-the-world story.
- Ursula K. LeGuin has a very dry sense of humor.
Posy Simmonds—Gemma Bovary (graphic novel; read parts, skimmed other parts.)
Cute artwork, irritating characters, dense and weirdly arranged text, deft and note-perfect eye for the bad behavior of the upper middle class, boring plot, weird cop-out ending. I think I like her short comics better? But damn, her art is great. Such an eye for expressions! So many sad-sack English people!
Martin Millar—The Good Fairies of New York (1/30)
What a strange little book—a lighthearted farce about music, flowers, fairies, Crohn's Disease, awful ex-boyfriends, race relations, alcohol, and jerking off to sleazy phone-sex ads on the TV.
The unrelentingly breezy and cheerful tone was quite charming, but the book overstayed its welcome. After the 20th time the flower was stolen, I was more than ready to call it a day.
various authors—the Shadow Unit teaser material and character LiveJournals
I don't know that I'd recommend reading all the way through Chaz's LJ (SO MANY COMMENTS), but I do rather like these characters. Looking forward to the "episodes."
Treasure hunters are advised that View ⇒ Page Style ⇒ No Style is your friend.
_____
* I can only say this because I cheated by reading both of the authors' Livejournals. You can play along, if you care to.
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Things I Read During December
( Read more... )
And that's it for Things I Read During 2007! I think I clocked somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 novels and 25 graphic novels over the year.
So what did everybody think of this little exercise? I've been having fun with it, but I'm wondering whether to keep doing it. I mean, for one thing, I could probably be having approximately the same fun on something slightly more productive.
Poll #1113857 What's the word?
Open to: All, results viewable to: None Should I keep doing this?
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| 2007-12-08 16:34 |
| Things I etc. etc. |
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| stupor |
| The Loud Family—Rocks Off |
| books, didread |
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Please to enjoy some book reviews.
Things I Read During October
( Read more... )
Things I Read During November
( Read more... )
Special preview of Things I Read In December: Everyone should go read Charlie Stross's Halting State. And the new Scott Pilgrim.
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| 2007-10-04 20:35 |
| Things I Read During September |
| Public |
| Marvin Gaye—Lets Get It On |
| books, didread |
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I'm sorry, some day I will talk about something else. I basically spent September reading, so these posts are me flushing my system. Anyway, book reviews!
Things I Read During September
Yeah, remember what I said about the two-foot stack of YA? I brung it. And many other things. ( Read more... )
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Among a few other errands, I went to Office Depot today to try this thing, and it totally works. I've never used those Mont Blanc rollerballs before, and it turns out they really do write like a dream. I got great big plans for this thing and that awesome fatty journal-book*** that ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) selfishside and lexicology gave me.
So what else is new in life?
Things I Read In August
( Well, I read some things in August. )
* PPS: while we're on the topic of bollocks.
** Well, almost. Norse myth and the End of the World got filed elsewhere.
*** It's like an inch and a half thick!****
**** Oh, and pardon the ordering on these footnotes.
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| 2007-07-28 22:52 |
| Things I read during July |
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| Hieroglyphics—Powers That Be |
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Things I Read During the Second Half of JulyMostly, I just spent my time freaking out. ♥♥♥ Also, I kind of packed most of my books into boxes partway through the month. Keep an eye out for the August report, though -- my sibs and I recover from major stress by deploying the ol' "two foot stack of YA from the library" coping strategy. But I did reread Terry Pratchett -- Feet of Clay (july 18) as kind of a drag-chute after Iron Council. This is the one with the golems, and it was one of the first Discworld books I'd read. It's not among the top tier,* but it's a pretty decent City Watch book. Somewhat heavy-handed in its treatment of Sam Vimes' class guilt, but with lots of nicely creepy stuff, especially once golems start suiciding with all those "CLAY OF MY CLAY" messages. New characters in this one: Dorfl, Cheery Littlebottom. Maybe Constable Downspout. Plus, I think this was Constable Angua's second book, and she's one of my favorites. ( Shut up, I like werewolf girls.) Oh, and I'm about a third of the way through that inaugural adult readthrough** of The Fellowship of the Ring. It'll be going on hold as soon as I crack HP7 and Whiskey and Water on That Ole Westbound Train, but don't let that fool you; I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot. (And it's much drier and wittier than I remember it being. Everyone else went ahead and copied the ethereality and ineffable beauty of Tolkien's elves, but precious few ever bothered to copy the bits where they giggle about how borrrrring hobbits are.) Final ratio of [words of body text] / [words of footnotes]: ~.62. I get a prize now, right? _____ * In my estimation? Probably something like Small Gods (see "Champion, undisputed"), Night Watch, Lords and Ladies... maybe Men at Arms (need to re-read it). After that, it's an essentially arbitrary interleaving of Granny Weatherwax and City Watch books. Rincewind books mostly suck, and the standalones like Soul Music usually have some good jokes, at least one clever idea, and an untenably fragile plot built around some arbitrary force that doesn't have any impact on the larger worldbuilding project once it's been safely dealt with in the denouement. (They're canon fanfic, really, kind of like the Bount arc in the anime version of Bleach.) Do you know, I haven't read any of that newer YA subseries yet. I'll certainly get around to it; I like the idea of exploring another persistent character/location corner of the Disc, especially one that's relatively fresh. Some of the older ones are hampered by decisions Pratchett made when he wasn't nearly as good a novelist. And unrendered enjoyed 'em. ** Right, timeline. Dad read us the whole dam' series, starting with The Hobbit, when all three of us were Quite Young, and it kind of put the fire in our brains. There were a whole bunch of things in our childhood pushing us towards the Fantastickal and the Scientifically Fictional, but that episodic, several-camping-trip reading of LotR was about as early and as significant as one could ask for. Then, eventually, intermediate school and middle school. I managed to make it all the way through The Hobbit, but faltered partway through Fellowship,*** and never quite found time to attack it again. Which is funny; it's the ur-epic that, frankly, informed my entire sense of everything a Proper Story ought to be -- from what, preschool on?**** -- and I really only had that one juvenile listen at it. Plus the movies, once I was in college. Actually, I think I'm going to stop thinking about that for now, because the closer I look at it, the more it boggles my mind. *** Although I made at least one, maybe two passes through the entire Shannara trilogy,***** getting all the way through Sword when I was still in third grade. Make of that what you will. **** That reminds me, I need to talk timeframes with someone who had a less elastic sense of time during that period. ***** Best described as Tolkien methadone. These were the books that Dad moved on to once LotR was finished and all three of us were asking for more! more! more! And come to think of it, they probably played an identical role in his own reading career. They have less lasting interest, and significantly less literary merit, but I have to admit that they were some pretty poppin' adventure stories at the time.
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| 2007-07-13 00:40 |
| Things I read during June |
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| Neutral Milk Hotel—Two-Headed Boy (live) |
| books, didread |
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Things I Read During June and the First Part of JulyBecause I had to get all that out of my system after finishing Council, and I don't feel like waiting a month to post it. Michael Chabon, Summerland (6/4) — This was Michael Chabon's first YA fiction outing, and damn, what a fun book. An inspired mashup of Native American, Norse, and Anglo mythology,* with a serviceable Everykid protag, a varied and likable supporting cast, lots of Really Cool Stuff, and, let us not forget, Coyote Hisself, exactly as smiling and sly and sinister and... cool as he ought to be. Now I'm all fired up to read The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Later. Elizabeth Bear, "Black is the Color" (short story) ( Read it here.) — Bear says that this story "takes place after a version of Blood & Iron that ends differently than the one that was published." I find that fascinating, and perfectly in line with the aesthetic of the book itself. Elizabeth Bear, "Long Cold Day" (short story) (6/13) — I heard from BoingBoing that scifi.com was going to shut down the archives of their short fiction zine, which is totally shitty. It's gone now, but I went over there and grabbed a bunch of stories for later, and this was one of them. I liked it. It took a little work at points, though; omniscient narration is kind of unsettling, and this was probably written when she was still in the process of learning how to do it unobtrusively. Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville (6/27, reread) — I found that this time, I was able to pay less attention to the plot and more attention to the theme and atmosphere. It's a really good comic, if I haven't mentioned that before. Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam (6/25) — Are you noticing a theme to this month? Sorry. Expect it to get worse when Whiskey and Water comes out. This one's an odd little novel split up into a series of 6 novellas. (A "mosaic novel," she calls it.) It's about a thousand-year-old vampire detective, a forensic sorceress, an English prince, a novelist, the Duke of New Amsterdam, the Mayor of New Amsterdam, and a young man named Jack; the whole shebang takes place at the turn of the 20th century, in a universe where magic is just one extra thing that Science is stuck holding the bag for, and the American Revolution has shown up to the party about a hundred and thirty years late. So like I said, it's broken into 6 self-contained stories, each one loosely orbiting around a murder investigation. One almost has to call them mystery stories, but they are, by necessity, bad mystery stories — secondary worlds with magical laws of physics make it rather impossible to satisfy the rule of fair play,*** and our lack of even the most rudimentary knowledge w/r/t the capabilities of magical earrings leaves us unable to trot alongside our detectives. Of course, it's just as problematic to not call them mystery stories simply because their focus is on character development and social commentary; mystery as a genre has a long history of both, and I'm not convinced New Amsterdam has enough more of either so as to disqualify. Well, fine, then: It's a cycle of six bad mystery stories which nevertheless engage, and which excel at a whole bunch of other really cool stuff. They explore the emotional world of an undying wampyr who has chosen to keep befriending mortals despite the inevitable consequences; they show the traps of divided loyalty that beset an agent of the crown in an artificially prolonged British colonial empire. Mostly, they're just about a gang of really interesting and likable characters bouncing off each other during some major social turmoil. And occasionally doing something totally badass. Also, this is the first book I've ever seen from Subterranean Press, and it is a thing of beauty. The typesetting is small but incredibly crisp, the binding and paper feel nice, and the dustjacket is pretty and has a bitchin' matte finish. China Miéville, Iron Council (7/12) — I had major problems with this one. (And the review is going to contain some spoilers, so just sayin'.) ( Also, it's going under a separate cut. )_____ * Translation: Would you like some more champagne to go with that heroin ice cream?** ** Answer: WHY YES I WOULD *** Unless the author is insane and thoroughly educates the reader in all the variations on reality before getting the show on the road. Bear isn't and doesn't, thank god. **** And some of these ideas are legitimately staggering: The Cacotopic Stain, the backsplashed Teshi manifestations, the Moment of Lost Things (whose servants can discover things that have been hidden from view, but must give up pieces of their own minds to do so). Like I said — this world is big. ***** You know, now that I think about it, all the talk about golemetry being "an intervention," coupled with all the times Judah was the decisive element in saving the day and with the fact that his characterization mostly consists of people sighing about how perfect he is, Iron Council's project might be less about applying a politically-tinged litfic-consciousness to a story about the fantastic than it is about applying a Mary Sue fanfic-consciousness to a political narrative. There's a paper in there begging to be written.
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| 2007-03-31 23:19 |
| Things I read during March |
| Public |
| Dar Williams—Empire |
| books, didread |
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Things I read during March( Cut for hella mini-reviews. )Also, via jwz: here's a fantastic Wired article about past and current efforts to graft extra senses onto stock and slightly-damaged humans. I've known about the ( incredibly awesome) low-rez-B&W-video-through-the-tongue trick for several years now, but I hadn't known you could use the same equipment to replace a destroyed inner ear. Nor about the thing that can give pilots an infallible "this way down" sense ("When the plane tilted to the right, my right wrist started to vibrate — then the elbow, and then the shoulder as the bank sharpened. It was like my arm was getting deeper and deeper into something"). And especially not about the one that keeps you aware of which way is north, causing your brain to, within a few weeks, spontaneously hack together a decent emulation of a video game navigation map. Dudes, as soon as you can turn that one into an ankle-band that doesn't make any noise, CALL ME, OKAY? Holy GOD I want that. Especially since it would drop directly into the way I get around in the first place. (If you've ever tried to give me "right-left-right-left" directions somewhere, you'll have seen this firsthand.)
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| 2007-03-29 00:18 |
| Things I read during February |
| Public |
| The Mountain Goats—Against Pollution |
| books, didread |
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Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis; vols. 1-4. The impression I got before checking Transmetropolitan out was that the reason to read it was for the pissiness and iconoclasm and misanthropy. This is not the case. The reason to read Transmetropolitan is for the sorrow, and for the beaten, defeated, heartsick sense of love. This series leaves me exhausted, angry, woozy, and hurt, and I love it.
Yendi, by Steven Brust. Better than Jhereg. Suspension of disbelief still stumbled a few times, but Vlad felt significantly more solid and real. Also, don't listen to anything I say about the "progress" of this series; this outing was published when I was two.
Bleach, by Tite Kubo; vols. 1-3. I don't know exactly why I started watching the anime on YouTube, but I actually liked it, so I got the manga from the library. (I really prefer reading to watching; it's a rare-ish attention-span disorder.) Anyway, it's really good! It's an established/clichéd genre,1 sure, but it's well-executed, and Kubo has a really good sense of characterization. I like the surly main character, and his younger sisters and stupid dad, and the growly de-powered Soul Reaper who has to show him the ropes.
I especially like that Rukia is totally believable as an immortal spiritual entity. Sure, she looks 20, but she has the fashion sense of a 50-year-old (Christ, did you see what she was wearing in the Don Kanonji episode?), and the perfect mix of vast perspective and total cluelessness.
Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons, by Justine Larbalestier. These are from a YA trilogy that everyone's been talking about. They're roughly as good as people say they are. The plot is based on the ugly tradeoffs that the magic system engenders: anyone born with serious magical ability has to use their magic at least once a week or risk a total mental collapse, but using magic uses you up; most users don't live to 25. The result is a nicely apocalyptic sort of milieu: no one understands the teenage protagonists, and they've no capacity to plan for any future further than next week, which, ultimately, is what being a teenager feels like in the first place.
_____
1. High schooler is recruited to fight forces of darkness, while trying to maintain a normal life on the side.
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