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

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Monday, November 9th, 2009
5:40 pm	Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler) Via ase. Okay, Dawn (and the two sequels) blew me away. Just. This is some extraordinary SF -- humans (or what's left of them) are conquered by an alien race. Only it's not that simple. The humans might think it is. The aliens are really alien and don't look at it that way (and indeed are both much more ruthless than most humans, and much more compassionate than most humans, at the same time) -- they look at it as a sort of symbiosis. The humans, once they start understanding the aliens, can sort of see it the aliens' way, but humans deeply think of things in the form of dominator and dominated, and in that respect the humans are definitely the latter. Um. This synopsis is a mess. I cannot possibly describe what's going on and do it justice. Butler always catches me a little off guard; this is true of both her short stories and her novels. I suppose it's partly because she makes no secret of her perspective as a black female and that it is going to differ from, say, my perspective; but some of it is, I think, her own style as well. For Parable of the Sower and the Pattern novels, I'm not sure I was working so much with that strangeness as against it (though I do very much like the Pattern novels). With the Xenogenesis books she leverages that strangeness to aid her in describing the very strange alien society, and it really, really works for me. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
5:43 pm	Trashy red-haired heroines! For a while there I wasn't really feeling up to reading much meaty. I was in fact craving trashy-but-not-completely-badly-written novels. My usual go-to for that is to reread Judith Krantz's Mistral's Daughter, which has oodles of trashy romance, not to mention three generations of gorgeous professional-model red-haired Mary Sues. It's not even horribly badly written (for example, I can no longer physically read the Sidney Sheldon I scarfed down as a kid, it's that bad), though note I am not particularly recommending it to anyone here. So, I finished that and was still casting around for something. I decided to reread that trashy-but-usually-not-unacceptably-badly-written long-novel with gorgeous model-quality heroine and hyper-masculine red-haired Gary Sue. Yes, The Fountainhead. I love that book! It is so deliciously trashy, what with the frigid heroine melting when Her Man shows up, the total bonding of Peter Keating (whom, by the way, I totally love) to his alpha male, the wife swapping, the total manly-man Roark-Wynand friendship and love triangle. (Note also that I intensely despise most of Atlas Shrugged, which tries to be bombastic rather than deliciously trashy, thus losing all the charm of Fountainhead. And is depressing to boot.) Yes, I know Ayn Rand is turning in her grave at being compared to Judith Krantz... bonus! This all led to a conversation with D in which a reorganization of our bookshelves was proposed. They are currently organized in a Byzantine system involving a) how much we like the book (horizontal depth and partial vertical placement), b) category of book (room and vertical placement), c) height of book (inter-shelf placement), and d) author last name (intra-shelf placement). The new proposed system: a) hair color, and possibly b) eye color. Besides Mistral's Daughter and Fountainhead, on the red-haired shelf would go Bujold's Cordelia books, Hero and the Crown, Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset (the only reason I own this one is because of the heroine's marked resemblance to my awesome high school junior-year roommate)... Cordwainer Smith's stories about C'mell... probably more I can't think of off-hand. I'm a little shocked, actually, at how much red hair there is around, given how few people I know in real life with red hair, though I suppose I shouldn't be. (Also, I recently picked up one of the Alanna (Tamora Pierce) books from the library because I was feeling nostalgic, and was horrified to find that Alanna has red hair and purple eyes AND a sentient cat. Who also has purple eyes. (D thought this was hilarious, mind you.) Does anyone else have trashy but still compulsively readable fic they would be willing to recommend? For reference, besides Krantz, I like in this category Maeve Binchy and Agatha Christie (well, I don't think of her as trashy, but she is not exactly literary). (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
10:25 am	The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (Elgin) Via nolly. This was really interesting. How to deal with verbal attacks. In particular, the idea is that a verbal attack contains underlying implicit suppositions, and defending against the wrong thing can get you into trouble and escalate the confrontation instead of defusing it. A lot of the tips she gives I had already had some experience with from muddling through thirty-odd years of learning how to deal with conflict in my own life (go after the actual words, not the supposition, or ask to clarify whether the speaker really means the supposition or is just using it as a rhetorical trick), but it's interesting to see it codified and laid out like that, and seems a lot easier than my (and I imagine most people's) trial-and-error ("hmm, okay, that made Mom even more mad, that wasn't the right move") way of doing it. I especially found the specific responses very interesting -- there are certain situations where Elgin recommends a particular phrasing, with examples of how deviating from that specific phrasing can make the situation worse intstead of better. In particular, I wish that I'd been able to give this book to my sister five years ago, when she and our mom got in raging battles on a weekly basis. I'd also recommend it for any writer -- if you are a good writer you will have figured out how a lot of this stuff works already just from watching people interact, but it's kind of neat to see it down in black and white -- so I wouldn't necessarily buy it were I a writer, but it would be worth checking out from the library. I also checked out the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work, which I was much, much less impressed by, mostly I think because it was written for an era and situation with which I do not identify at all. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that espouses more of a "if we work together we can get more stuff done" philosophy than a "let's play off people against each other" philosophy, which she very much assumes. And the examples she used to demonstrate "woman thinking about work" versus "man thinking about work," made me think, "Wow, those women are idiotic, who thinks that way?"... so I guess I've internalized some of the "male" way of thinking. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
6:11 pm	Stuff I read that I'm not interested in dedicating a whole post to ...Yeah, I have a backlog of posts... these date back from first trimester, in fact. These are sorted by how much I enjoyed them (from most to least): Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm) - I've been on a Wilhelm kick recently. This one started slow but I thought was a strong book, though the science is... um... a little suspect. (I get the impression Wilhelm is not, er, a hard scientist; about three books in a row now I have been rolling my eyes, the worst being in Smart House where she talks about the big million-dollar question in computing being melding digital and analog computing. Er? Granted I believe she wrote it in 1989, but, what?) It's about the end of the world, and clones, and individuality, and honestly rather a Gary Stu type whom I quite enjoyed. I recommend it highly if you can get by the iffy science and treat it as entertainment rather than as A Classic Of Yore (in which case you are sure to be disappointed). Dreamsongs, vol. 1 - I enjoy George R.R. Martin a lot, though I can't say I actually like his stories, and I realized why after reading this. I don't know about now, but at least for the part of his life these stories cover, he was not exactly successful in love, and these stories reflect that -- maybe half of them weren't about disillusionment and dysfunctional relationships, but a whole lot of them were. The Host (Meyer) - Oh, yeah. I read this quite a while ago at the behest of the Kid, but forgot to post. It was much, much better than Twilight. I actually enjoyed it, though as usual with Meyer's stuff there was some disturbing relationship/gender subtext. Fairie Wars (Herbie Brennan) - not to be confused with Sarah Rees Brennan, of course! - I think this is a first book? Anyway, it's got a lot of energy, and there's a lot going on. As usual in fantasy, the "science" is cheesy and stupid, and I have to say the nomenclature of "Fairies of the Light/Fairies of the Night" made me laugh hilariously, but I liked it! Purple Emperor (Herbie Brennan) - Sequel to Fairie Wars (and, I think, the second in a trilogy). Well. He certainly has the can't-catch-your-breath plot going full speed in this one as well. I'm a little less enamoured of this one, because I noticed more that the plot seemed to crowd out things like, oh, any kind of character development at all. Still, I did finish it. The Emperor's Children, Claire Messaud - Mainstream. People interact in New York; hilarity ensues, or something. This was, well, better than I thought after reading the first twenty pages, and by the late middle I thought it was quite good. Then the end happened, and I was all, "That's it?" I guess it's pretty good, but being the mean evil person I am, I totally wanted more of the characters to get a satisfying comeuppance. Warning for preponderance of unlikeable characters. (I think I have yet to read a mainstream book set in New York with a preponderance of likeable characters.) Better, go read Edith Wharton instead; Messaud just wants to be Wharton. Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, Alison Goodman- It's of note because the mythology involved is Chinese-oriented rather than Western-oriented, and I feel like I should support non-Western-based fantasy in general. However, the prose seemed a bit clunky to me (it wasn't horrible, just a little too much first-book-ish), and the ending was completely cheesy; I said aloud, "That's it? That's the answer?" Interesting enough that I'll probably pick up the sequel from the library, but probably not enough that I'll more than skim it. I read a couple of good reviews of it, though, so YMMV. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
5:56 pm	Valjean, at last, we see each other plain I was listening to Pandora today and a song from Les Miserables came on. (They must recently have gotten the rights, as Les Mis songs had to my knowledge never shown up before.) It catapulted me back to the first time I ever saw Les Mis -- I was in middle school at the time -- and it blew my mind and knocked me flat, in large part because it was the first real Broadway musical I'd ever seen, partially because it was first adaptation of a book I'd ever seen where they actually got the spirit of the book right. I can't even describe the effect seeing it had on me except by saying that I went out and bought not just the recording but the full symphonic recording -- and when I was that age the $30 that you had to shell out for the full recording was basically a real fortune, something like six months' worth of discretionary spending. (To compare, I don't think I bought any other CD that was more than $5 until I went to college.) Now that I'm older, I can see the flaws. Many of the tunes are simplistic bordering on inane (no, I never did like "Castle on a Cloud" much). Much of the libretto is quite silly (especially Cosette's lines). I suspect if I saw it now I would think it was okay, but nothing special. I'm really glad I saw it as a kid, when it had the power to do that to me. The only other things I can think of offhand that had this effect on me were reading The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which I got to at precisely the right time (fourth grade and, um, second grade? respectively) for them to turn my world upside down and explode it into color. (And no, LoTR didn't do that for me -- I grew into that one.) Oh, and Dead Poets Society, which I now recognize as a maudlin sentimental film, but which I saw when I had no idea about poetry (fifth grade, I think), and it had a profound and dizzying effect on me. I'd love to hear the things that you found extraordinarily powerful at the time and that now you wouldn't quite be so impressed by... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
8:49 pm	I think we are buying a house ( cut for wibbling and severe buyers remorse ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
3:34 pm	so, it appears we're having a kid January 22, more or less. A girl! We're alternating between being excited and apprehensive. ( Random thoughts on this general subject. ) (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
9:12 am	Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake (Lahiri) I have been absolutely blown away by Jhumpa Lahiri's work. She is a mainstream fiction writer who writes predominantly about immigration and assimilation in the Indian/Bengali community, and who writes superbly and elegantly. I read Interpreter of Maladies (short stories - her first book, and won the Pulitzer; this is what we're dealing with!) first, and The Namesake (novel) after. I had varying reactions to the stories, but almost all of them moved me. The first and last stories are, I think, the strongest emotionally, and also complement each other nicely. The Namesake is almost like an expansion of and sequel to the last story in Interpreter: it chronicles an Indian couple as they move to the US after an arranged marriage and have children, and follows the oldest child, a son, as he grows up and takes his place in the world. It is about the process of immigration and assimilation. It is about expectations and rebellion, and how both can lead to unfortunate results. It is about growing up. It is about names, and families, and love. (And yes, sarahtales, I thought of you. No idea whether you even read this kind of book, but if you do, I think you will like it.If not, you won't.) Warning, it is a slow book, with very little in the way of plotting. I have a special tie to these books because my parents, of course, are immigrants, who had basically an arranged marriage, and a lot of the things she writes about are applicable to my parents as well: how puzzling it must be to try to adapt to a completely new culture; how courageous it is to leave everything and everyone you know and care about for a new life that, as like as not, will start off in hardship (it certainly did for my parents); how painful it is to see the gulf between you and your children, because you have brought them up in this new world so that they don't understand you or where you came from; how heartbreaking it must be to see your children embrace all the things about the new culture that you wanted them to reject, but how proud you are of them too, as they easily move through a world that still, sometimes, baffles you. It made me think in a different way about my parents (it's always quite wonderful when a book turns sideways the way one thinks about the world), and what they went through, and how incredibly courageous they were and are, and how much they must love us, to encourage us to assimilate the way that they have. (They are really wonderful. My parents have never had any problem with us having friendships, dating, or marrying outside our race/culture, and indeed brought us up more American than anything else on purpose, and I cannot fathom what degree of love that must take, to bring up your kid in such a way that you know she will be half a stranger to you, and that your grandkids will be even further away-- because you want what will be best for them.) Now, so that this isn't all sappy: I hated Mouse. She was really, incredibly lame. I was totally all, "Get a life!" I understand the point Lahiri was trying to make, but really, did she have to do it via such a completely lame character? (After talking about this with K, I've decided the problem might be mine: I don't deal well with characters' infidelity unless they have a good reason, which Mouse manifestly does not have.) This is absolutely the best thing I have read this year, in what has been a very strong year for books so far. I don't know if people who don't have strong ties to this immigrant experience will be quite so impressed. It is also true that she doesn't seem to write about anything else but the immigrant experience, so although I continually get new things out of her writing, I could imagine someone else getting kind of bored with it. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
6:36 pm	Mindblowing SF stories So I was thinking a little bit about "mindblowing" stories because of seeing Matthew Cheney's list here. I don't really care that much about the controversy; as far as I can tell "Mammoth" does not necessarily mean "comprehensive" (I own the Mammoth Book of Fantasy, which is not at all comprehensive), or even really anything at all. As far as I can tell from the table of contents, none of which are stories I actually found mindblowing, I suspect it's just that Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF sounded better than Book of Friends of Editor That Would Be Willing to Give Him Cheap Reprint Rights, which is what it actually looks like to me (and would explain the skewing against authors, women and POC and otherwise, that I actually think have written mindblowing SF stories). In addition to the Butler, Chiang, Kress, LeGuin, Moore, Tiptree, and Willis stories that Matthew Cheney names, I thought offhand of the following (note that almost all my good SF anthologies are in NC, so I'm sure I'm forgetting some good ones). Note that these are all stories I found mindblowing at some point in my life (possibly not this one). Mountains of Mourning (Bujold) The Dead Lady of Clown Town (Cordwainer Smith) Pots (C.J. Cherryh) Salvage (Orson Scott Card) I'm sure some story by Alfred Best should go here Piecework (David Brin) (I adore Zenna Henderson and Tanith Lee, but I wouldn't call anything I've read by them mindblowing SF. Same with Cheney's Delany, Fowler, Goldstein, Murphy, Russ, and Wilhem -- I've read them, and liked many of them, but maybe didn't get to them at quite the right point in my life, or something.) (Restricting to hard SF would, I think, mostly restrict my list to the Bujold and Brin, and Tiptree.) He was explicitly trying to make a list of non-white-males, and I wasn't, but notably I got two on my short list anyway, not counting that I would definitely have put Tiptree and Willis on my list if he hadn't (I am ashamed to say that I probably would have forgotten Butler, even though I think several of her stories are pretty darn amazing). Anyhow. My real question is the following: more mindblowing SF short stories I Must Read? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
6:41 pm	Wagner! "For the last year perhaps I have been in love... I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding." -A.S. Byatt, Possession So, I'm quite embarrassed to admit it, but I... I... have been suffering for the past two months from this dreadful obsession with Wagner's Ring Cycle. I mean, let's face it, in just about every book I've read with one, the Wagner fanatic is a pompous bore who has nothing better to do with his (I don't think I've ever actually met a literary Wagner fan who was female) time than to spend twelve hours (at least) watching buxom women scream at the top of their lungs. And, okay, there is a fair amount of buxom women and burly heldentenors screaming at each other. (The Siegfriend/Brunnhilde love scenes are just irritating.) But, but -- The Ring Cycle is totally like Beowulf meets the Silmarillion meets Star Wars, only with better music. It's got an awesome plot (waaaaay better than the epics from which Wagner drew the story; much more coherent) with a dragon, dwarfs, true love (sometimes romantic, sometimes not), a cursed ring, corrupt gods, a trickster god, betrayal, and the end of the world. I defy you to find anything in John Williams that matches the sheer exhilaration of the Ride of the Valkyries. If you get the Andrew Porter translation, you can see the lovely alliteration that I am just a sucker for (in fact, it was the poetry I fell in love with before I fell in love with the story, or the leitmotifs). It's got an incredibly complex series of allusions, both mythological and musical, that make up the fabric of the story and the music. The thing is, I find most of opera pretty dreadful. The music, of course, is lovely, but the whole concept of opera is that it's supposed to be a story as well, and that's where a lot of them fall down. But with the Ring, I kept thinking over and over again while watching it, "Oh! THIS is what you can do with opera! It can be done! It really CAN, like the best literature, say something about the human condition that I didn't know before, and it can use the music to work with the plot to do that!" (A couple of other operas do that too, but the Ring does it very obviously.) I mean. I'm not a huge rabid fan of Wagner's music; except for a couple of places in Die Walkure, it doesn't perk me right up the way Le Nozze di Figaro does, or wring my heart in two the way that the ending of Ballad of Baby Doe does. And it's pretty clear that Wagner was an excessively unpleasant guy (I used to think his anti-Semitism was just, you know, cultural blinders, but now that I know a little more he really does seem to have been quite disgusting on the subject, and let's not even get into his penchant for stealing other men's wives), which is reflected in Siegfried being quite awful (I can't stand Siegfried almost ever opening his mouth-- he comes across as a stupid and violent boor). And Brunnhilde goes from being totally awesome to really irritating, and the end of Gotterdammerung just didn't... quite... do it for me. And now that I've finished the whole darn thing, the obsession seems to have faded. But Die Walkure is still made of win. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
12:08 pm	Words meme [Um, so, yeah. I have been really, really bad about posting recently. There is a reason for this, which I'll get to at some point. Meanwhile I think I may be able to get back to posting.] Via ase [an unfortunately long time ago, now; sorry!]: reply to this meme by yelling (or even saying gently) "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. ( Science, novels, choral, California, and camera ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 15th, 2009
9:13 pm	In which Dag finds out that those cool mathematical objects he came up with are called "matrices" Finally got around to Horizon (Bujold). Well, I liked it fine. It definitely reminded me of Cherryh a bit (though markedly less grim): the big bad was not defeated, or even understood, but a minor (well, relatively) part of the big bad is defeated, with the idea that it may now be easier to defeat the big bad entirely; and a culture is not changed upside down, but nudged, little by little, into a better shape. ( Cut for minor general spoilers - tried to stay away from specific spoilers) ) (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
12:01 am	The Demon's Lexicon (Sarah Rees Brennan) So I was terrified I wasn't going to like this book, because I like sarahtales very much indeed. I should not have worried, as it turns out. So, first: This is a book about family! Siblings! I cannot even describe how happy I am to read a YA novel that does not revolve around romance, because you know how many couples I know who were serious about romance at that age? Two. I was very, very pleased -- and I should really not have been surprised by this, given SRB's book reviews -- that the book didn't fall into any of the cliche traps that I exceedingly hate. In particular, Nick takes some risks, but they're reasonable ones that don't blow up in his face and bring Danger and Doom upon them All! (Oh, man, am I tired of that one. Look, *coughHarryPotter* if your protagonist is more-or-less capable, he's probably not going to screw up too badly, and if he's not, I may not really want to read about his screwups.) The characters are lovely, not cliched or retreads from other fantasy at all. (Jamie bears the marks of a typical mild-mannered SRB hero, but even so transcends those roots.) All four major characters are distinct, non-Mary-Sues, and far more interesting than their first categorization upon appearance (the way that real people are almost always more interesting once you've known them for a while). The mythology seems fairly well-grounded (and I loved the Goblin Market... Christina Risotto, hee!) which is a huge compliment coming from me, as I routinely abandon books in the middle because I don't think they're being consistent or reasonable with the system of magic. The style I found slightly off-putting at first (by which I mean that I was not immediately grabbed by the first couple of chapters). I can't exactly put my finger on what it is; I think it has to do with having to get used to Nick's stylistic voice, and that being slightly jerky (the paragraphs being very short and choppy, for instance). By the third chapter or so, it is clear that this is mostly a reflection of Nick's personality, and did not bother me subsequently. The thing that was pretty much just phenomenally awesome about it, to me, is SRB's plot management. ( Plot management skillz, shading into meandering about Alan and the heart of the book: Book-destroying spoilers here! ) Anyway: yeah. I liked it exceedingly. Go read it. (with the caveat that, should you find it slow at first, you should push through at least three chapters before giving up.) Can't wait to see what she does next! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
7:01 pm	The Books of Great Alta (Yolen) Sister Light, Sister Dark, White Jenna, and The One-Armed Queen are books I meant to read at a much younger age (especially the first two) and somehow never got around to it. Yolen's great strength, of course, is her weaving of myth and fairy tale, and it's all here. It's the sort of thing that, if you like her other work, you'll like the first two books, and if you don't, you most certainly won't. I like her work, so I like these books. SLSD is, to my jaded grown-up eye, actually a little more interesting than WJ because there is less of a sense (to me) that the myth and story are of course right and the history is wrong; in SLSD it seems that it could go either way, and there's some evidence that perhaps the historians, who strip all magic from the world, are right, and the story is only a story. Or maybe the story really is the truth and the history is a lie. It's hard to tell, which is neat. In WJ it becomes a little more obvious that oh, yes, of course the magic prophetic explanations are the right one, and those stupid silly historians who don't believe in magic are just spiteful and deluded. Eh. Also, I found Jenna's reaction at the end (of WJ) kind of weird. She has this agonizing choice, it's made for her by, basically, death, and she's totally cool with that? No angsting at all? Ooookay. But the myth at the end is beautiful and kind of heartbreaking. The third book was written much later, I believe, and I don't like it nearly as well -- the mythic ideas of the Chosen One and the dark sisters and the prophecies are kind of sort of there, but not nearly as powerful as their incarnation in the first two books. Also, Scillia is a whiny brat, which doesn't go well with myth. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
9:17 pm	Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert) A fun book, recommended by lightreads, about why we are so bad (except when we're good) at predicting the future. It's not a bad pop pysch book, though I had my usual pop-social-science problem: he describes an experiment, what it's supposed to convey, and I go, "Yes, but..." Which maybe I wouldn't do if I saw the actual paper, but I don't find the level of detail in pop-social-science convincing. For example, he has this thesis that people deriving satisfaction from having children is a myth propagated by human society, and isn't actually true, which he "proves" by showing a graph of how marital satisfaction diminishes once people have children, and showing that women find looking after kids less satisfying than doing other tasks. Yes, but... but I find working less satisfying than reading books, but I can tell you right now that my overall satisfaction would diminish if I were reading books all the time instead of working, which lets me exercise my technical skills, spend time with interesting geeky people, gives me satisfaction that I'm contributing to society (maybe that is the "myth" part -- but if it really does make me happy because I believe that it should, is it a myth?), and not least, makes me money to buy the books with... And there are lots of things -- he wouldn't even disagree with this -- that can honestly make you happy once you've convinced yourself they ought to make you happy. ETA: Not that I disagree with his hypotheses (certainly, for his hypothesis on child-rearing, it is supported by kids being a Big Pain to raise) but it irks me that his proof standard is as bad as it is, even for my pleasure reading. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
10:43 am	Nothing sort-of-on-racefail Okay, I may actually post a couple of times, for a change! julianyap told me to read Octavian Nothing (Anderson), without telling me anything about it. (It is a YA book, though it's one of those YA books that is perhaps better read after one is a YA.) And he was right, both to tell me to read it and to tell me nothing about it. Because if you know something about it before reading, it does take something out of the lovely first section of the first book (it is a two-book series), which starts out, you think, as one thing, and gradually one finds out one is in another world entirely. This is an astonishing pair of books which tackles some pretty explosive issues (mostly with great finesse, showing and not telling, although Octavian does have a couple of annoyingly anvilicious whines in the first book); I was blown away by it; and I think everyone should read it. I do not love it desperately (it's pretty grim, and I have a hard time loving grim books, which is not really the author's fault), and I do not own it. On racefail: I have been making no secret of the fact that as far as I can tell, racefail is at least 99.9% a complete and utter waste of time. On both sides. But then... there is always that 0.1% (and I'm glad for the people who wade through the crap to bring me the 0.1%, even as I marvel at the black hole of what must be gobs of their free time) that makes me, at least, think about things a little more. It was in the context of racefail raging in the background that I read these books, and it made me think about how I responded to the first and second volumes, and what that means about me as a reader, and I came to some less-than-comfortable conclusions. ( Cut for spoilers that will pretty much ruin the coolest part of the first book, though it's still worth reading otherwise ) (edited to fix annoying typo) (Comment on this)
Friday, May 8th, 2009
9:47 pm	keeping cool The fire hasn't gotten to us, as we live (and work) to the southwest of the major conflagration, and no one expects it to anytime soon (we'd have to have several more windy days... knock on wood). However, about a quarter of the people I work with have been evacuated (and that is a lot, considering how many people commute in and don't live in town at all). My company building is being used as an evacuation site for employees and family (though almost everyone had cleared out by 9pm tonight -- I think there were only a couple of families staying overnight). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 24th, 2009
3:36 pm	What they ought to have been called Perhaps y'all have seen these (and here and here, though I think the first is the best) before, but I hadn't. Hysterically funny especially if you, like me, grew up reading bad 80's SF/fantasy novels (Dragonlance! Xanth! Valdemar! ...hey, why are you running away? Wait, did I actually admit to reading those?) I'll add Katherine Kerr: People Make the Same Dumb Mistakes When Reincarnated Patricia McKillip: Riddles in the Welsh Tradition Kinda Suck Diane Duane: The Door Into Alternative Lifestyles Rosemary Kirstein: Wouldn't It Be Cool If People Revered Their Scientists? Susan Cooper: The Search for Plot Coupons (okay, that one was not original) (and yes, I adore McKillip and Cooper, and have a certain fondness for the others; I mock because I love!) Any other suggestions? Especially for 80's stuff? (Most of the really bad 80's stuff I read has completely escaped my memory...) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
8:08 am	in which I reveal my apocalyptic leanings (also: go Elizabeth Warren) I have been a fan of Elizabeth Warren since reading The Two-Income Trap, which significantly changed the way I thought about practical economics. In brief: if everyone's income goes up by a factor of 2, this does not make, say, houses cheaper. Because now everyone can bid up the prices of houses to two times what they could before, housing prices will also go up by about that much. Of course I did learn this in first-year economics supply and demand, but this was when-- okay, fine, I am slow-- I really got that yes, this occurs in non-textbook situations, and a similar application to the lax-credit market of the last five years (guess what-- if everyone regardless of income can get a mortgage loan of $500k, houses will cost at least $500k!) helped us to keep our head about it. I am still a fan of hers based on her TARP COP remarks. Transparency in disbursing government money! Oh, my heart. I promise to shut up after this, but let me just say once: I strongly believe things in the financial system (and not just the US's) are Very Bad, people don't realize how bad they are, and things are just going to get worse. Probably much worse. I'm talking about Depression-era worse; I don't think we have staved off a depression, at all, and have probably made things worse. (Note I am not being partisan here; I don't think this is Obama's fault, or Bush's. I do think both of them did/are doing stupid things, but I'm not convinced any other politician would have done much better.) My main sources of gloom-and-doom apocalyptic-ness are Mish and Karl Denninger-- the latter is kind of crazy, but then again look at his predictions for 2008 (scroll down to the bullets)... he might just be crazy like a fox. I'll shut up now and go back to books. You can take all this with a large lump of salt, of course (and I realize I do look silly given this morning's news/stock market surge); I certainly don't claim to have a particularly high batting average with this stuff. Still. Save. Don't take on any more debt than you have to. Don't take your job for granted. Have a backup plan. Always good ideas, but I think now more than usual. I would add, don't invest in stocks right now; my dad begs to respectfully disagree. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
5:54 pm	back from wedding The Kid had a wonderful and beautiful wedding (I guess I need to stop calling her that now that she is an old married lady!). The weather cooperated beautifully. The cherry trees (at least, I suppose that's what they were) were in bloom, which was lovely. She was a beautiful bride (I wasn't close to crying except for the moment she started walking in on Daddy's arm, trailing the gorgeous veil I wore to my own wedding... ohh!). My family was all very happy. In particular, my mom was very happy and mellow (it was the perfect party for her -- music, dancing, excitement-- whereas ours, much more low-key, was rather more suited for my dad, who left the Kid's reception early). It was also fun to meet all her friends I've heard so much about. Some of them were just utter joys, and I feel so lucky that my sister has these amazing friends; and all of them were at least amusing. Now, of course, I'm recovering from both a cold (which I have furthermore transmitted to D) and the stomach virus which I finally got. Oh well! (4 Comments |Comment on this)