| Announcing... |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|07:28 pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) julianyap reminds me it is National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month, so, a freebie:
"You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one." -Bujold, A Civil Campaign
That is to say, Elena [mylastname] [D'slastname] was born 25 January 2010, 9 lb 4 oz (eek!... that was maybe a little too big for me, although resulting in a gorgeous large baby). She is a very good baby, not fussy except when her needs are not being met. (And still we have been super overwhelmed and stressed, and I know saying that is an invitation for her to develop colic in a couple of weeks... but she is a very good baby right now! Not that we always understand what her needs are...) My mom is here and is helping out a lot, and D's mom is coming as well pretty soon. |
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| Best stuff I did in 2009, media edition |
[Jan. 19th, 2010|03:08 pm] |
Music: Iphigenie en Tauride (Gluck; Gardiner recording). For some reason this opera stole my heart, even though my French really isn't good enough to understand what they're saying, and I don't really like any other Gluck as much. I think a large part is the Gardiner recording being just so... orchestral; the orchestra is practically another character in the opera.
Movie: The Ring Cycle (Bayreuth). Up. Up was the best movie I'd seen in a movie theater since... since the Incredibles. The Ring Cycle was one of Those Things where I don't expect anyone else to like it necessarily, but... wow. Wow. Blew me away.
Book (fiction): Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri). Yeah. Lahiri is just Really Good.
Book (nonfiction): I, Asimov / Prime Obsession (Derbyshire) - a tie! Asimov wins for extremely amusing and readable memoir, while Derbyshire wins for interesting math.
Reread: The Severed Wasp (L'Engle) - Really, I think this is L'Engle's best non-Murry book.
I am really surprised that there is no SF/F on this list (I don't count Severed Wasp, even though it arguably takes place in a near-future NY). |
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| The Magicians (Lev Grossman) |
[Jan. 11th, 2010|04:56 pm] |
First, as a general public service announcement, I have been told that Lev Grossman is the brother of the sculptor mathematician Bathsheba Grossman, who I can without reservation say kicks total butt. Did I mention she is a mathematics sculptor? Swoon!
So, the book. I do believe this is the kind of book one cannot read (well, certainly not if one is me) without feeling the need to wave one's hands about wildly, pontificate about it for hours, and buttonhole random people to rant at about it... for while I had both good and bad feelings about it, they were pronounced feelings; no apathy here! (In this respect it was just about the opposite of Time Traveler's Wife, to which julianyap compared it, my reaction to which was "Eh.") It's Contemporary New York Bored Teenagers Meet Harry Potter and Narnia, which pretty much sums up the book. As for the book itself, I really very much liked the first half (okay, the geese? awesome!), I hated and despised the third quarter (I might actually have given up reading it at this point were it not for promising I'd finish it) and thought the last quarter just about made up for the third quarter (I must say I didn't see any of that coming), except where it ended a little too abruptly. So overall, that's a win, I'd say.
Quentin, the main character, although he has his moments, mostly (starting on page 2 or so) makes me want to scream and beat my head against the wall -- I know it's intentional, but Quentin's anvilicious tenth iteration of "Why am I unhappy? Is it me, or is it just that the world sucks?" MADE ME WANT TO PUNCH HIM. (Why, yes, Quentin, it's you; and all of us know it.) (It does not help that I was never the sort of kid who wanted to escape into Fantasyland; yes, I read some books obsessively, but actually live there? Uh, no.) Alice is awesome, and I found myself surprised to rather like the Physical Kids. Brakebills (the Hogwarts analogue) I rather like, and Fillory (the Narnia analogue) makes me want to beat my head against the wall and beat the book against it (not that I would) - this, I think, is the biggest flaw in the book.
Let me, in fact, say more about Brakebills and Fillory under a cut.( Cut for meta-rants about fantasy; allusions to spoilers, but nothing specific. ) |
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| Prime Obsession (Derbyshire) |
[Jan. 7th, 2010|01:47 pm] |
Still finishing up books from 2009...
I was complaining to D several weeks ago that the last time I read a math book for fun was probably back in high school. D listened, thought a bit, and said, "You know, you should try Prime Obsession."
Yup, he was absolutely right. This book is made of complete awesome, and I was totally addicted to it, reading it when I should have been unpacking (or sometimes trying to do both at once) and finishing it in under a week (which is kind of unheard of for me and nonfiction books). It is about the Riemann hypothesis, and told in two strands: the mathematical and the personal. Derbyshire breaks down all the math as simply as possible -- if I hadn't seen it done, I would've thought it was impossible to explain the Riemann hypothesis ("All nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have real part 1/2.") requiring no more math than, really, elementary algebra (he explains everything else, including the concept of series, complex numbers, logs, analytic continuation...) -- though if that's all the math background you have, it will be significantly harder slogging than if you have a bit more (I would recommend knowing the general concepts of complex numbers, logs, infinite series, and having a nodding familiarity with at least the concepts of calculus). Along the way you'd be introduced to lots of fascinating math tidbits, like the divergence of the harmonic series (Derbyshire makes it sound a lot more interesting than I just did) and chaos.
My personal background is such that I know up to calculus/linear algebra really well (I skimmed most of the early mathematics chapters in this book), and have, or used to have, a nodding familiarity with complex analysis. I had been taught the Riemann hypothesis (in the words I use above) in my complex analysis class, but had no idea why it was so very interesting. There's a point where Derbyshire introduces what he calls the "Golden Key," at which point my mouth hung open and I said to D, "Holy crap! ...I clearly knew NOTHING about the Riemann hypothesis! ...Wow!" Even so, I found a couple of the chapters near the end fairly dense (and so did D, who I suspect knows quite a bit more complex analysis than I do). So, um, yeah, I really recommend it if you know some math, though the early math chapters will be pretty trivial for you. It does make me want to find a book at a slightly more advanced level, though.
But you can even read it without any mathematical knowledge or background whatsoever, and it's still an awesome book. Derbyshire has decoupled, to a certain extent, the math and people/context chapters (even and odd respectively), so you can fairly easily skip any of the math you don't want to look at and just read the interesting stories about the personalities involved. I find his style extremely entertaining; even the endnotes are fun (there's one where he explains multiplying negative numbers against themselves that ends with a funny and rather adorable punchline from his small son). And mathematicians are an amusing lot; some of the stories he cites are mathematical classics that I'd heard before (e.g., the mathematician G. Hardy used to mail postcards before travel saying he'd solved the Riemann hypothesis, because he knew God would never let him die with such glory!) and some were new, but all were amusing!
Really, really highly recommended, especially for math nerds (though presumably not if you already know tons about the Riemann hypothesis). |
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| Swordspoint (Kushner) |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|06:47 pm] |
Okay, everyone was right. I should have read this before Privilege of the Sword. This is a gorgeous book... when I was thinking about how to describe it, I kept coming up with metaphors involving very rich luxurious jewel-toned silk and velvet (not coincidentally, the sorts of clothing that a character in Swordspoint might wear). Decadent eighteenth-century fantasy-without-magic-but-with-romantic-swordfighting; what's not to like? The writing and atmosphere is lush and a lot of fun to read. I would have enjoyed it even had it not had a plot. Which it does. And such a delicious one: plotmaster felled by the intricacies of his own plots. I also loved Richard (especially the part where he objects to irrationality in plays) and enjoyed Michael (I don't think I would want to be friends with him, but he was fun enough to read about), and thought Alec was a fairly lame spoiled brat (and am glad this was written before Harry Potter fandom, because if it had been after, I would totally have pegged Alec as a Fandom!Draco sort of boy).
I'm still not sure that my criticisms of Privilege of the Sword don't apply, and now I have more. ( (cut for spoilers) ) However, I am much more inclined to read it again and find out if I remember correctly than I was before reading Swordspoint. |
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| Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi) |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|01:33 pm] |
I almost didn't read this. Something about the title made me think, oh, I don't know, that it would be about an American teaching about sexual freedom. Or something. Anyway, it didn't sound appealing. And I tend to get annoyed with books without quotation marks. But then it totally captivated me, from almost the very first. It is about literature, which is obviously a huge draw for me (and is probably going to get me to read Henry James and at least skim through Lolita). And about Iran, which I didn't think I would find fascinating but did. And it is a political warning, to both the Left and the Right: be careful what you wish for, and who your bedfellows are.
Really a book I'm glad I read, although I did find it slightly disjointed, I didn't particularly agree with her about Jane Austen, and I never got to care about the girls as much as I am pretty sure I was supposed to.
(Also, look, tags! I'm only, what, three years behind in my organization...)
(Coming very soon: The Magicians (Grossman), which was also on hold at the library and which I am snarfling through frighteningly quickly...) |
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| The Best Rolls Ever |
[Dec. 28th, 2009|04:04 pm] |
Oh, I forgot to add, I prevailed upon D (it didn't take much) to try joyce's recipe for rolls for Christmas. She was right; they were GREAT, and D said were pretty easy (though the first batch was a little uneven on the salt... the second batch he mixed up the salt with the flour and gradually rolled it in instead of trying to force-mix it in, and it worked much better). The three of us scarfed down a whole lot of these guys Christmas Eve and Christmas night in record time. I've always thought I wasn't a big fan of dinner rolls, but I think that had to do with getting the pre-baked store kind. |
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| consequences of Christmas |
[Dec. 28th, 2009|01:43 pm] |
As a result of Christmas with nolly, we played four hands of Fluxx last night; also, our kitchen table features both very cheerful flowers with a butterfly draped over them as well as a gingerbread house with a gingerbread kid named Mary Sue (with violet candy eyes and orange gumdrop hair) hanging precariously from the roof of the house clutching one end of a strand of candy lights. We are very pleased.
Also, I have a bag of shower presents (among other things, the babylet is going to learn to count in binary before base 10... have I mentioned lately we are going to make this one screwed-up kid?) which makes me want to smile and tear up with happy tears at the same time.
Less pleasing was the kitchen mishap we had Christmas Eve, involving our refrigerator having duck blood leaked all over it and my shattering one of the washed-but-previously-blood-stained glass refrigerator shelves on the kitchen floor. D was unhappy but absolutely wonderful at cleaning up (after I broke the glass I got restricted a bit from clean-up duty). However, D is today pleased at the ultimate result, which is leftover pizza for lunch from the resulting Christmas Eve takeout.
Oh, and as another direct result of this weekend, I am starting on China Mieville (I started Perdido Street Station, but my library hold on City and the City came in today, so I'll probably do that one first.) |
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| ...if you know someone who is putting up a baby for adoption |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|08:18 pm] |
We closed. We have started to move in... did a very little bit of clothes and fragile items. And after five calls to the phone company dealing with five different incompetent people, I finally got a competent person who settled everything ("Yeah, uh, I hate to tell you this, but this order is a mess in about five different ways..." "This explains a LOT.") Tomorrow my friends L. and S. are spearheading a massive moving effort. L. is probably my best friend in this city, and is totally made of awesome, and her husband S., though I don't know him as well, is pretty much basically as awesome.
And that brings me to the point of this post: L. and S. would really like to adopt a baby. I am totally and completely sure they will be excellent parents. L. is a lawyer, and S. is an engineer who just got his Ph.D. and started working for a startup. L., in addition, plays the violin and is from an exceedingly musical family, and their baby no doubt would have lots of neat musical opportunities. And she can be sarcastic (though not mean), which is why I like her so much :) I would have no hesitation giving my own kid to them (well, if I had to... but as it is I am hoping L. and S. will feel like babysitting!) ... so... if you know anyone who is interested... I can totally send you their profile.
One thing: They are Mormon, and working through adoption services run by the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. The bio-mother doesn't need to be Mormon, but she does have to be okay with working with them (and having her baby go to Mormons). Doesn't need to be in-state, but I believe needs to be in-country (USA).
Anyway, I hope it works out for them. |
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| Incoherent ramblings about books I found more-or-less entertaining, but don't particularly recommend |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|07:11 pm] |
In ascending order of interest to me.
The Company (KJ Parker): So I really liked, or at least was terribly fascinated by, Parker's Engineer trilogy. This stand-alone was... ennh. It was vaguely interesting, I guess, but predictable and not particularly twisty (The Engineer trilogy, while the entire arc was perhaps predictable, was definitely twisty, and if it was a bit Rube Goldberg at times, one was still rather interested in how the mouse in the treadmill exactly did connect to the pulley and so on...), and at the climax I rolled my eyes so hard I could very well have sprained something. (I mean, for serious?? At least have your climactic action be not based on a biological urban legend!)
Ender in Exile (Card): No, really, Mr. Card, no one wants to hear you talk about how totally and fantabulously awesome marriage and reproduction is. No one. Not even me, and look, I'm married and reproducing! I'm on your side! But no one likes being lectured at, 'kay? Showing characters who derive great satisfaction from reproducing, yeah, fine. Having each one of them make a cute speech about how important it is for them to be married and reproducing, not so much. No one talks like that! No, not Mormons either, unless they're giving a talk, and not very many of them then either. Okay, now we've got that over with... if you can stand, or skip over, the lectures, it's really not bad, in that compulsively readable way that Card has, although sort of lacking in anything resembling a coherent plot, being more of an Ender and Valentine have Crazy Adventures in Space Christmas Special! sort of thing. And yay we are finally done I think with Achilles. Please?
In the Forests of Serre (McKillip): I love the Riddlemaster trilogy, which I find immensely satisfying. McKillip herself I think is a lovely stylist. Ever since the Riddlemaster trilogy, though, I feel a little as if she's a lovely stylist in search of a story worthy of her talents. This book made me feel rather that way too, though not so much as some of her other work I've read, and I rather do like the magicians. And I very much enjoyed the Russian/Eastern European mythology. |
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| one week to closing |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|02:04 pm] |
Yesterday we handed over a truly obscene amount of money and signed a massive amount of paperwork. I jibbed twice and D jibbed once over what exactly we were signing our names to, but we knuckled down under the combined glares of the escrow officer and the loan officer. (Nothing that I'm seriously horribly concerned with, mind; just... for example, we had to sign forms giving some unspecified person the right to look at some of our tax return information, unspecified because our lender could sell the loan... but I still don't like not having that specified.)
Because this is the sort of thing I do, a book review at this point: Mortgage Ripoffs and Money Savers (Carolyn Warren) was not actually very useful for us because no one (!) actually tried to rip us off... no last minute prepayment penalties tacked on or anything like that. Everything was almost painfully above-board (the best part was when the lender wanted us to document why our credit report had been pulled. Answer: YOU pulled it!) However, I still found the Warren very entertaining to read, and I can imagine that it would have been really useful three years ago or so. I rather recommend it if you want to read crazy finance hijinks, or would like an insider's point of view with respect to the amoral meltdown that was the mortgage industry.
Closing is on Friday. (at which point, presuming all goes well, we shall invite you all to visit :) ) |
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| Dead Magic Society |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|03:13 pm] |
A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray) - This book was hilarious to me because it was Dead Poets Society, only with girls and magic instead of boys and poetry. And when I say this, I don't mean it had some of the same themes, I mean it was pretty much exactly the same; it's like the author watched Dead Poets Society, took notes, changed the characters to girls (major points, though, for making them actual girls -- sometimes catty, sometimes kind -- and not boy clones), mashing them up a bit, and added a magic subplot. Somewhat repressive but high-falutin' school? Check. Inspiring teacher? Check. Shy student? Check. Student forced into familial expectations? Check. Student enthralled with romance? Check. Meetings in a cave out in the woods where readings are done and rebellious things are said across a fire? Check. And of course all the plot points are the same, meaning that if you've seen DPS it's not even a case of guessing the plot points ahead of time, it's more a case of checking them off against your list of corresponding DPS scenes ("let's see, we haven't had the obligatory heartwarming scene with the teach-- ah, there it is.") |
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| Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler) |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|05:40 pm] |
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. |
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| Trashy red-haired heroines! |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
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). |
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| The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (Elgin) |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|10:25 am] |
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. |
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| Stuff I read that I'm not interested in dedicating a whole post to |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|06:11 pm] |
...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. |
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| Valjean, at last, we see each other plain |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|05:56 pm] |
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... |
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| Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake (Lahiri) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2009|09:12 am] |
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. |
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| Mindblowing SF stories |
[Aug. 6th, 2009|06:36 pm] |
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? |
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| Wagner! |
[Aug. 3rd, 2009|06:41 pm] |
"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. |
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| Words meme |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|12:08 pm] |
[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 ) |
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| The Demon's Lexicon (Sarah Rees Brennan) |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|12:01 am] |
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! |
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| The Books of Great Alta (Yolen) |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|07:01 pm] |
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. |
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| Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert) |
[May. 28th, 2009|09:17 pm] |
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. |
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| Nothing sort-of-on-racefail |
[May. 27th, 2009|10:43 am] |
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) |
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| keeping cool |
[May. 8th, 2009|09:47 pm] |
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). |
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| What they ought to have been called |
[Apr. 24th, 2009|03:36 pm] |
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...) |
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| in which I reveal my apocalyptic leanings (also: go Elizabeth Warren) |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|08:08 am] |
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. |
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| back from wedding |
[Apr. 8th, 2009|05:54 pm] |
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! |
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| I am the cheese (Cormier) |
[Mar. 27th, 2009|06:58 pm] |
I read I am the Cheese for the third time today - I seem to have been reading it about once a decade or so. This time, I believe for the first time, I finally totally understood the plot. How is it that this book is classified as teen lit?? Or maybe I'm just slow. Well, at least I'm improving! |
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| kindle 2 |
[Mar. 19th, 2009|09:35 am] |
Yeah, so, I've been busy with frivolosities, and I'm not going to post more than once more until after the Kid's wedding on 4 April. Meanwhile, I've been playing with gadgets! Just the kindle today so I can get it out for julianyap, though I may quickly post on cameras in the near future.
A really wonderful co-worker let me borrow his kindle 2 for a couple of days. (He's a tech geek, not a lit geek, so only really bought it for travel.) Oh, man, I so wanted to like this. Some of it is awesome. The free web access? Worth the purchase price. The amazon store easy access is both really great and also will make a mint for amazon once I get one of these things.
But. BUT. The buttons are lame, more like pushing a (rather hard) mouse button and not at all like tapping an Ipod button, which is what it should be like. Since I have longstanding struggles with RSI, this was by itself a dealbreaker. If I wanted to push a mouse button to turn a page, I'd read on my computer.
Also, I do not read linearly. I read a page, wonder if the protagonist is going to die, flip to the end, decide I can read further since the protagonist still seems to be alive, realize I may have missed a Clew a chapter back, remember that oh, wait, something that was said at the very beginning was relevant... On the Kindle, you have to access a menu to flip to different parts. A menu! ...No.
And yet... once I gave it back to my co-worker, I missed it. I missed being able to carry lots of books in one package. I missed having (free!) web access all the time. I missed being able to download free sample chapters on practically anything that struck my fancy. I missed not struggling with a huge hardback book on the reading rack on the exercise machine. Bah. |
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| Intuition (Allegra Goodman) |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|11:45 am] |
National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month has expired, but I started writing this post in February...
His despair seemed to melt and pool inside him, until he could almost congratulate himself that he was no longer desperate, but simply demoralized and depressed -- emotions entirely accepted, even expected, in the lab.
This quotation from Allegra Goodman's Intuition captures a large part of what captivated me about this book -- it shows what it's like to do research. It simultaneously made me miss research (there's nothing like the high of discovering something) and be very very glad I don't do pure research anymore.
Yeah, so this book impressed the heck out of me. It's mainstream fic (which surprised me; I was expecting science fiction, but it's actually rather that rare beast, fiction about science) about a research lab and what happens when friction erupts in the lab over a postdoc's experiments, until it has ramifications that go well beyond the one postdoc.
But what really impresses me about this book is this: I believe quite strongly that there are empirical facts about the world that do not change. Either an experiment worked or it didn't. But people are complicated. A given empirical fact, say, a conversation between person Alpha and Beta, can to person Alpha say something about herself. Person Beta may look at that same conversation and conclude something different about Person Alpha. And the thing is, they might both be right. Because people are complicated. (And to take it a step further, it may be true that Person Beta's conclusion about Person Alpha says something, moreover, about Person Beta. That may be different from both the way that Alpha looks at Beta, and the way that Beta looks at himself.) And it seems to me that most books assume that there is one right way of looking, not just at facts, but at people and people's motivations. Even in books with unreliable narrators -- well -- it is true I am a sucker for the unreliable narrator, but the whole concept presupposes that there is some underlying truth that the unreliable narrator does not see. No, in this book everyone is a reliable POV, but reliable in different ways, and unreliable to the extent that they do not necessarily see in the ways that others see. Like real life!
The result is that there is a great compassion in this book for all the characters, and that there are no villains. Indeed, the magnitude of Goodman's accomplishment can be seen in that the character that abigail_n, in the review that got me to read the book, calls "the closest Goodman comes to an out-and-out villain" is the one I thought of, before rereading her review, as the hero of the piece (though I understand why he can be thought of as the villain as well).
I feel like I should add some caveats. I was predisposed to like this book because it describes Cambridge, MA, a city which I love, and even a concert in Cambridge that I actually watched (and which liuzhia was in)! I have no idea if her portrayal of bio-lab work is all right (I only know that her emotional portrayal of science is dead on). And indeed her portrayal of music (which only occurs a couple of times in the book, to be honest) really kind of sucks (excuse me, but no one who learned violin before his teenage years thinks about the violin spot when practicing unless it's infected, so even mentioning it is a bad sign). I found the middle section of the book, which opens up into the wider world, a bit tedious (though I understand why it had to happen).
Despite all that, my vote for my best read of the year so far, though it's only March and most of what I've read has been old Asimov novels :) I am not entirely sure about this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think ebs98, ase, julianyap, and lightreads would like it (and if you try it out and don't, let me know so I can do better next time). joyce I'm even less sure about, but the next time someone starts yapping at you about academia you could do worse than reading the first chapter of this to remind yourself why you aren't in research! |
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| NPQiYBM |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
Hmph, February is almost over and I have not posted half as many quotations as I would have liked. Well, here is a sonnet by my favorite poet:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
ETA: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as julianyap guessed. |
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| NPQiYBM/Asimov |
[Feb. 20th, 2009|07:58 am] |
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Anyone who does not know that this quotation is from Isaac Asimov should go and read a book of his in penance. I've been rereading a bunch of his stuff lately, mostly because I had a cold and was not feeling up to anything less readable, and whatever else you might say about him Asimov is very easy to read.
I had never actually read his robot mystery novels before (though I've read every single one of the robot stories), and the first two are really quite good (in, of course, a Golden Age sort of way-- don't expect psychodrama), though I figured out the killer in the first book after the first third of the book. I have always loved the Black Widower mystery short stories (joyce, you might like these -- they are short and sweet and usually pretty upbeat), though they vary widely in quality. I love them honestly for the afterwords more than anything else. Which realization started me on reading his autobiography (I, Asimov, though there are three others), which is just really charming. Asimov sounds like he was a delightful person, and I am annoyed that he left us after only 300 (!) books.
Off to Yosemite for this weekend, yay! hope the weather is nice *crosses fingers* |
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| NPQiYBM/Arthuriana |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|01:43 pm] |
( My fourth favorite Arthurian poem, after all-of-Charles-Williams, Preideu Annwn, and Winter Solstice, Camelot Station: )
"Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie,
Whatever may have happened through these years,
God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."
ETA: "The Defense of Guinevere," William Morris. I really like Morris. |
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| NPQiYBM/Arthuriana |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|06:50 pm] |
julianyap was the one who had to bring Arthur into it...
A poem from my favorite Arthurian poet:
Hued from the livid everlasting stone
the queen's hewn eyelids bruised my bone;
my eyes splintered, as our father Adam's when the first
exorbitant flying nature round creation's flank burst.
Her hair was whirlwind about her face;
her face outstripped her hair; it rose from a place
where pre-Adamic sculpture on an ocean rock lay,
and the sculpture torn from its rock was swept away.
Her hand discharged catastrophe; I was thrown
before it; I saw the source of all stone,
the rigid tornado, the schism and first strife
of primeval rock with itself, Morgause Lot's wife.
( ETA: The rest of Lamorak and Queen Morgause of Orkney, Charles Williams ) |
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| NPQiYBM |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|06:42 pm] |
She got the which of the what-she-did
Hid the bell with a blot, she did
But she fell in love with a hominid
Where is the which of the what-she-did?
My favorite SF writer ever!
ETA: "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," Cordwainer Smith. |
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| NPQiYBM/Ragtime |
[Feb. 6th, 2009|05:11 pm] |
Even people
Who ain't too clever
Can learn to tighten
A nut forever,
Attach one pedal
Or pull one lever!
I was introduced to Ragtime, the musical, by Pandora. It doesn't even try to disguise its blatant and total manipulation of the listener's emotions. So you've got the anti-racism screeds, the stirring ballad of hope (that is crushed! by racism!), the patriotic sentiments, the patriotic sentiments crushed! Crushed! by exploitation of the workers! and so on.
And I just love it. I usually hate stuff like that, because it often doesn't make good art, and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure I would call this good art exactly, but Ragtime does have a heart, and even a soul, underneath the pontificating. Some of it is due to the performers, who are almost all incredibly awesome. Peter Friedman in particular must have his own kids, as all his songs relating to his daughter in the play are just heartbreaking (while his other songs left me relatively unmoved). Some is due to the music. The orchestration in particular is exuberant and playful-- the machine-like percussiveness of "Henry Ford" makes me smile and the brass fanfare in "Journey On" makes my heart leap a little. But the thing is-- musicals are not about lofty ideas and pageantry. They are about human connections between people. And these are the moments that I love: Tateh's compassion for another man on another ship ("May you find what you need") in "Journey On" always makes me a little sniffly, as does the interaction between the kids and parents ("What is your name?" "No name." "That's impossible! everyone has a name, even the little Negro baby who lives in our attic!" "Ssh! Edgar, do not be rude!") in "Nothing Like the City." And then there's "Henry Ford," which is just so very playful-- Ford is a man and a machine and a concept and a religion ("Hallelujah!/ Praise the maker/ Of the Model T") and a driving rhythm all rolled into one, with such musical and metrical humor (for example the above quotation, which rather loses something without the driving beat) that I always smile when I listen to it.
I don't have much to say about the book, by Doctorow, except that I find it a little drab in comparison, perhaps the only time I have ever said this about an adaptation of a book.
Of course, YMMV in spades for this kind of thing. I don't recommend it, necessarily. But I love it madly all the same. |
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| National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month/Farthing |
[Feb. 5th, 2009|06:00 pm] |
julianyap has declared this month National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month. Who am I to argue? I love this kind of stuff. So, all my posts this month will have a quotation in them. From something.
A Caligula... can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.
So, let me talk about Farthing (Walton) (which the above quote is not from). I actually liked it, though it sometimes is a little (or, uh, more than a little) heavy-handed in its moralizing (but, hey, lately I've been reading Doctorow and Ayn Rand, so apparently I'm on a kick for heavy-handed political moralizing in my fiction). I liked it because I took immediately to the main character, a woman who tends to start explaining things in the middle-- guess why I liked her?-- and because I just loved her relationship with her (dead) brother. Those were the best parts of the book for me.
Farthing failed a great deal in trying to be both a mystery and a political thriller. It did okay in the second, if you're in the mood for reading about that kind of thing, and did very well at depicting the kind of darkening of worldview that happens gradually enough that you might not notice if you're not directly affected-- but the first was terrible. It's a pleasant surprise when a book you don't think is a mystery, like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, turns out to be, and a rather annoying disappointment when something you thought was a mystery isn't really (no plot twistiness, no actual mystery plot, really). And the characters of the Evil people served the political ends, not the literary ones, and so were less well drawn than Agatha Christie's, and it's not like she was the queen of nuance. (The character of the mother, in particular, was a cartoon version of the way teenagers think about their mothers.) So-- although I liked it, I can't recommend it unreservedly to someone who is like me. Also, the first sexual entanglings were interesting, but by the fifth one I was like, "is everyone in this book entangled in some irritating way??"
The book from which the above is taken (and which I cite because I woke up the morning after reading Farthing with it in my head) is somewhat more roughly written than Farthing, but in many ways has a rather more nuanced approach to evil (and evil in families/politics in particular).
ETA: Shards of Honor (Bujold). I think half the things that get quoted in our household are Bujold... |
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| We need to talk about Kevin (Shriver) |
[Jan. 14th, 2009|09:35 am] |
This book is... really disturbing. Very interesting, and explores a lot of interesting ideas about the expectations society has about parents (especially moms) and kids, and what happens if you don't fit in that mold (what if thinking of motherhood doesn't suffuse you with a warm maternal glow?), and what makes evil?, and very well written, and never goes for the easy answers, and... and I skipped to the end, about a third of the way through, because it was just too painful. (Also, Franklin, the husband, made me so mad... which he's supposed to. And so is Kevin. And Eva. It's just all a bad situation. But let me just say briefly that my feminist tendencies were highly aroused by Franklin never staying home with the baby and then having the gall to complain to Eva about her attitude! But, of course, that's part of the point.)
I do highly recommend it, if you can stomach it (it's not a horror book, but all the same the only reason I didn't have nightmares after reading it is that I'm basically not subject to nightmares), and if you don't have kids (I honestly don't think I would've made it even a third through if I had kids). An excellent summary and thoughts (indeed, the ones that convinced me to read it) here. I'll be picking up more of Shriver's work. |
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| The Engineer Trilogy (K J Parker) |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|11:02 pm] |
Okay, so, I finished the other two books and am finally posting about it. And I still really like the trilogy, but I've got more caveats. I think the take-away message is, if you really like the first book (as I did), you'll probably like the whole trilogy, which is basically just more of the same (highly dark, highly plotty, lots of descriptions of machines). And if you don't, there's really no reason to bother with the rest of it. The second book is kind of a repeat of the first, but the third does enough tying together of everything that it's very much worth reading the whole thing (again, if you like that sort of thing). The entire trilogy, really, seems to me like a print version of the machines the eponymous Engineer loves so much: a gleaming, finely calibrated machine made of words that gets you from point A to B. I have a great fondness for well-machined pieces, even if I myself am not so good at producing them, and so I think that this is a large reason of why I really, really like these books.
On the other hand, I wonder if it isn't a Rube Goldberg machine. It's all plots within contrivances within wheels anyway, which I love, but there's a significant (perhaps the most significant) strand of actions and motivations that, once I finished the book, I thought: ...really? That's really the most efficient way of getting from A to B, going through X and Z? I don't think so!
Also: I haven't read any more of his? her? stuff, so I have no idea if this is unique to this world or not, but all the women in this book totally suck. First, there are only two actual women characters who are developed at all, plus, hmm, three undeveloped ones-- and I am talking about more than 1500 pages of text here, with a fairly large cast in general. Furthermore, both the women are just really, really lame. I really hope K J Parker is female, because apparently she (he?) is married, and if my husband wrote a book like this I would start feeling really insecure.
Please, someone, read these books so I can talk to you about them! Especially the resolution of Valens' arc, which I found mildly comforting but mostly excruciatingly irritating at the same time. |
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| Best stuff I did in 2008, media edition |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|05:26 pm] |
In rough ascending order of how excited I was about it. This was a good year for media (except for movies); I had a tough time ordering this.
Movies: A sparse category this year, but I'll say Guys and Dolls. Because I have a crush on Marlon Brando this big, and seeing him sing love songs makes me swoon. He's only a minimally competent singer, actually, not a particularly good one, but he sells it well.
TV: The Office! The only TV show I actually watch on a current basis.
Books(first read, fiction): The Engineer Trilogy (Parker) squeaked in at the very end of the year. I'm not counting this as a series (although I should), mostly so's I can mention this along with Voigt. It's dark and reminds me rather of a fantastically precision-engineered Rube Goldberg contraption, but I really, really liked it all the same. Will try to post on this later. Post on the first book here. These books engage exactly the opposite circuits in my brain than the Tillerman books below.
Reread: Card's Memory of Earth series, which I don't think I've reread all the way through since high school; thoughts here.
Music: I am totally and incontrovertibly in love with Ian Bostridge. This is how in love I am: I'll even listen to him singing German art songs! though I prefer to hear him sing Britten or Handel. Honorable mentions: liuzhia hooked me on Wicked. Also, Angela Lansbury in the original cast recording of Sweeney Todd is just flipping amazing, as is the entire recording, even though I don't much like the movie version.
Book series: The Tillerman Cycle (Voigt). A Solitary Blue gets special mention here. These (YA) books are about families and reaching out and make my heart hurt. Weirdly, Voigt's fantasy books leave me almost entirely cold.
Books(first read, nonfiction): Sweet Anticipation (Huron)! Most completely awesome book I read this year, no competition, possibly the best book I've read for several years. Awesome subject matter, and Huron actually talks about it very intelligently and scientifically. However, I will note also in honorable mention that The Art and Craft of Making Jewelry (Gollberg) has beautiful pictures, and Photographing the Southwest (Martres) is extremely useful. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 5th, 2009|06:32 pm] |
Christmas (yeah, I'm running behind, as usual) was great!
-Saw my parents' truly awesome new remodeled house following their flooding disaster (yay insurance!)
- had a nice Christmas with parents, sister and fiance; mom really liked her wire-wrapped glass pendant (yay Adult Ed)
- participated in daily stressball involving sister and mom regarding wedding (yay Staples for emergency extra fancy invitations)
- bought only decent bridesmaids dress in store (bah David's Bridal for having mostly totally ugly dresses)
- had lunch with ebs98, fiance, joyce, and K&B, which was really lovely; had never met the fiance, and had not seen e. and j. for... four years?? Bah. (but yay friends!!)
hope everyone else had a lovely holiday! |
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| Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy, K.J. Parker) |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|02:15 pm] |
The first book of a trilogy (so take everything here with a grain of salt until I finish the third book). It's set in an alternate, less developed world, so has the feel of a fantasy, but without any fantastic elements.
I... am kind of surprised by how much I like this book. But it's got an engineer as the central character! A real engineer, one who reminds me a great deal of D in the scientific characterization (though very little in the non-scientific sense). It's got elegant descriptions of machinery and convoluted conspiracies and people wrecking their lives out of the best intentions (and sometimes knowing it... self-awareness is a painful thing, but one I like reading about). And the last hundred pages seems just one sock to the eye after another (ending with a reveal in the last two pages that was clearly telegraphed and which I totally should have seen coming but didn't). I liked this so much that I'm going to buy the second and third books (and I don't say that very often about trilogies).
I mean, it's got issues. I don't really like the way she does omniscient POV - it gives me a headache because she jumps from character to character too quickly for my taste. Sometimes she uses weird anachronistic phrases which really annoy me ("Great white hope"? "Piece of cake"? Umm... no). It's dark, as might be expected from a book whose themes seem to be the machinery of governments and that love leads to evil. Most glaringly, the engineer himself is a little... Mary-Sueish isn't quite right... too skilled. I liked him very much in the first few chapters, where he is revealed to be exceedingly competent about engineering, as it tallies very well with the competent engineers I know. Once he turned out also to be an expert in politics and people, I lost interest, and although I'm still psyched at his engineering prowess, I think he is the least interesting character by the end of the book.
I don't think it's much like Iain Banks or John M. Ford (though the Mezentine empire could well be a stand-in for Ford's inverted Byzantium in Dragon Waiting... um, now that I write that, maybe it is), but I can feel similar parts of my brain engaging when I read Parker, so I might expect that fans of those authors might also like these books. Dune, as well. It reminds me a lot of The Carpet Makers (Eschbach). I would recommend it highly for julianyap and dis-recommend it for sarahtales, and I have no earthly idea what the rest of you would think about it. If you do happen to pick it up, let me know so I can add the data to my rec engine ;) |
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| I finally read Twilight! |
[Dec. 17th, 2008|12:20 pm] |
As more of a sociological experiment than anything else - the first time I gave up after chapter 3 or so, but I was kind of curious as to why all the buzz (I mean, it's pretty easy to see why teenage girls would like it, but also a large proportion of the married-women-with-children I know love this book).
I think I see the appeal to middle-aged women-with-families. It really does take you back to that time when you fell headstrong and dazzingly in love with the person who is now your husband-- It's not like you would trade the love you have now, where sometimes he takes out the trash even though that's something you normally do and it makes you all happy, but it's very different from those first halcyon days where you thought and yearned about him all the time and got butterflies in your stomach every time you looked at him, or looked forward to seeing him after being separated for a whole couple of hours! And it kind of takes you back to that stage.
It also makes me extremely nervous. I really dislike the fallacy of the first lover in general, so you can see that I would have a strong visceral "No, no, no!!" reaction to Bella's sixteen-year-old (or however old she is) "unconditionally and irrevocably in love" status, after as far as I can tell they have spent the equivalent of two dates together. UGH. Plus which, I don't know that it's actually at all healthy to be unconditionally or irrevocably in love with anyone. Also? Edward is, like, a hundred years old. EW. Nasty old man! |
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| Canon breaks my heart; I have a new crush on Panasonic |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|06:00 pm] |
So D is a film-SLR Nikon junkie from way back, and both of us have bought solely Canon PS's since we first started buying digital cameras, and loved them. For the past two years or so we've been debating the relative merits of the various Canon and Nikon dSLRs out there. I have never, ever even thought of buying a Panasonic camera... until now.
My current digital compact is a G7, which I loved. Note the past tense on that. It took really lovely pictures. It has a dial for manual shutter/aperture manipulation! It has a large zoom. We had good times together. So when the G10 came out, I checked out the dpreview.com review. Which said, "Check out Panasonic!" And then my beloved G7 got a dust spot (actually four). I sent it to Canon. Canon said, "Your warranty has expired and it will cost $200 to repair." I consulted the interweb. The internet told me, "Actually, even if you get Canon to fix it you'll probably still have problems later on, because dust spots are a problem with the G7-G10 series."
So. Panasonic just came out with these two cameras-- the LX-3 and the G1 which I am totally coveting. The former is a high-end compact with a fast (f/2.0!) wide (24mm) lens, be still my heart! (No optical viewfinder, sorry ase!) The latter is a smaller-lighter interchangeable-lens larger-sensor electronic answer to the SLR. Not many lenses for it yet (and the ones it's got are slow) but this is supposed to be fixed fairly soon. The lenses are in a new "Micro 4/3" format which allows much smaller lenses (and camera body) than in the SLR format. I saw the 45-200mm f/4-5.6 (90-400mm equivalent) lens last week and it is TINY compared to the hulking behemoth equivalent lens on D's SLR.
I am really excited about the G1... There is no way I'm taking one of those huge Nikon/Canon 90-400mm lenses on, say, a plane, but I could very well see myself taking several of those cute small lenses along. And I can think of lots of situations (hiking, non-scenic trips by plane, people's weddings) where I would feel awkward lugging around an SLR with a humongous lens but could very well see myself with a smaller SLR-style camera/lens... We were thinking of taking the jump to a dSLR this year, but right now, I am leaning instead towards getting the LX3 before Kid's wedding and delaying the dSLR for even longer to see if this micro-4/3rds thing takes off... Only problem is, I tried the LX3 this weekend, and it's got this little joystick thing that, while not hard to use, really bugs me after the smooth awesome Canon-G dial I'm used to.
At any rate, even if I don't end up getting either of these cameras, I'm really pleased by Panasonic catering to my specific demographic: someone who wants full manual control, great image quality, good low-light performance, but I don't want to lug something huge/heavy around everywhere, and I don't need more megapixels than 7MP or so in my compact camera, which is what your entry-level dSLR has anyway. |
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| Things I am very happy about (music/food edition): |
[Dec. 11th, 2008|03:46 pm] |
-lilypond, which is something like LaTeX for music writing. Like LaTeX, there is a distinct and rather annoying learning curve, and once you get past that you're like "wow this rocks like crazy!" It would take me a lot to get back to a GUI-based score program. (Is there a way for me to post pdf's in LJ so I can show off my shiny new SAA arrangement of "Lo how a rose"? Thing is, I get asked to do these things for church but I can't find any arrangements I want, and it turns out to be easier for me just to write my own darn arrangement...)
-Audacity, which I've been using for a while to record lessons but which I just used to record myself singing the three-part arrangement I made in lilypond to see whether it actually worked or not (I think it does).
-Trader Joe's truffle cheese and goat-cheese with honey. I so totally thought they were gimmicky, but since I had to get refreshments for a recital... Turns out they are both my Platonic Cheese! (How can I have two platonic cheeses? Shut up!) |
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