Robynettely

So I was reading this article: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/14/unholy_trinity/ For my non-link following reader, it's an article about state-sponsored terrorism. In the Death Squads section, the author describes Vietnamese terror squads using what sounded to me like the Eye of Sauron as a marker on victims. And in Guatemala, they used the white hand of Saruman. Weird.

The boy got this one for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I had to pretty much force him to read it (actually I read it to him, but anyway). I don't know what the problem was -- maybe it looked too set in real life, or too old, or to young, or like the books about aircraft and submarines that are so often read around my house. Maybe he was deterred by the Governor General's seal of approval on the cover. But once we started reading it, he got totally into it and asked for more pages than was reasonable on a nightly basis. If I wasn't there to read, he would read himself, which was good, really, except that then I would have to catch up before continuing. And even Ed, who so often takes no interest in the bedtime books, got into it. The prologue to this story has the main character, Matt, working on a derigible in an alternate universe victorian era. He's on watch duty, and sees a hot air balloon, apparently in trouble. He helps rescue the balloonist, who dies shortl...

So I was typing an innocent corporate email today, and when Outlook automatically spellchecked it before sending, it offered me the following as a correction to my corporate Oracle login: HAMLET. The hatchet of doom is hanging over me, I think.

Any book that has a blurb on the back saying "Probably the best sheep detective novel you'll read all year!" can't take itself too seriously. I read a review of this one near the start of the summer, maybe on www.salon.com . I think it was part of a "beach reads" article. I requested it through interlibrary loan, and got it 3.5 weeks ago. It was very fun. I wanted to read it because I want to write a "Watership down of (insert name of animal here)" kind of book, and the idea of limited thought processes, skills and abilities in a mystery appealed to me. The sheep can understand human speech (English but not Gaelic), but we can't understand them. They have lots of sheepy limitations -- they don't like to be alone, they eat all the time, they know they are edible, they generally (except Mopple the Whale) have poor memories. They have many sheepy advantages -- they can tell if a person is lying because they can smell it; no one is very conce...

This book didn't offend me. I read it to the boy, and it moved along well enough and with enough humour to entertain him. Something that amazes me (and I suppose this is a criticism of him, not the books) is that the books were sitting around for maybe 18 months before we ran out of other things to read and wound up reading the first one, and then this one in quick succession (and I believe tomorrow I will get to purchase the third volume in the series). Why is he so reluctant to try something new? Though we were casting about for something to read "in the meantime" a couple of nights ago, and he declined to start Harry Potter again. He said there was no point, now that there was nothing to anticipate. Fascinating. Update on my coworkers making fun of my clothing: Yesterday the person who referred to one garment I wear as my "elf suit" wore a boxy green jacket with a large applique weasel wrapping around the neck. The head was on her left shoulder, and the tail ...

Found this in the Young Adult section of the library and picked it up without reading the back because I like fairy tale things. I hadn't realized I had read another book in this series, "Snow White and Rose Red", which featured two girls named Blanche and Rosamund (neither of those names sounds particularly beautiful to my ear, maybe because I hear them with a New England accent). I just looked it up on Amazon to get the title right, and considering that I got it out of the library at Toronto City Hall, I must have taken it out at least twelve years ago. I'm amazed I remember much of anything about it. And I discovered it was by Patricia C. Wrede, whose Enchanted Forest Chronicles I quite liked. I had a hard time getting into this book. I read the first 40 pages or so, which alternate between short chapters where Gemma (the grandmother) tells Sleeping Beauty in different snippets to her three granddaughters (abandoning the story at a later point each time for a diff...

"A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" by David Foster Wallace Seven essays. First one was about peaking in Tennis at age 14. It was okay. Second one was about TV, written in 1990. I learned some things. To whit: Malignant addiction is defined by two things: an addiction that causes problems in the life of the addicted person, and that purports to solve the very problems it causes. In his essay TV is a malignant addiction. Written before the internet. The success of TV is based on everybody having both highbrow and lowbrow tastes. Everybody's lowbrow tastes are the same, and everybody's highbrow tastes are different, which explains why everybody I know can sing "Hotblooded" by Foreigner, but I'm the only one who knows who David Foster Wallace is. It also explains the "long tail" marketing thing about the internet and kind of predicts its hockey stick shape. The funny thing about that essay was it quoted extensively an article which se...

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com You scored as Serenity (Firefly) You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% SG-1 (Stargate) 88% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 75% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 69% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 69% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 63% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 25%

Must have read a review or something, I don't remember where. It was on order at the library forever. For months and months.They ordered eight copies, I was 9th of 11 when it eventually arrived. It's short stories. I hadn't read any stories by her before (I don't read whatever magazines short stories are published in) so it was all new. I loved "Stone Animals", which has one of the best openings I've ever read. I was happy to see it on someone's top-10 list of opening lines, I forget where. "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" had a fabulous ending. I loved "The Hortlak", though I had to go online to find out what the title meant just now (maybe when I go home later I'll check and see if it ever turns up in the story in the phrases that I mostly skipped over). Reading it while listening to Joanna Newsom was extremely disturbing. Not so much "The Great Divorce" and "The Cannon". And then I lost the book, I think at...

Last night at band practice, I told the 1st clarinet who sits next to me (who was fretting about how he freezes up when he has to play a solo) that when you're playing a solo, people are rooting for you. They don't want you to fail. When you're playing a solo, the room is totally on your side. Music is the opposite of car racing, where the audience only watches to see cars crash and burn. And then this morning I remembered Britney Spears performing at the 2007 MTV Music Video Awards. Yeah, right.

This is the first book in a series, and introduces 12-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis and the fairies he takes on. He's the only person to ever get away with fairy gold, fair and square. Well, not exactly fair but you have to start somewhere. The fairy society that lives underground is well developed, and the rules of their magic seem well thought-out. The technology that Artemis employs seems modern, not dated (which seems like a risk when you write a book these days, it taking so long to get a book into print from when you write it). It was funny, too. I read this with the boy, and the next day we started the next book in the series, so I guess he enjoyed it, too. It seems strangely appropriate to me to be thinking about this book right now, because my coworkers have taken to calling my green jumpsuit my LEPrecon outfit, thinking it's some kind of a joke or a dig or an insult, I guess. However, I think I won't be dressing up as Holly Short for Halloween. I suspect I...

Because he's the Writer-in-Residence at the TPL this quarter, I thought I should read something by him. This is a collection of extremely short stories. Some of them seemed like poems, especially in the way that they required me to think about them to even have a clue what they were about. Smetimes the title gave a hint. I had to put the context to them, figure out what was going on that the people would hurl insults at each other that way. Not that I minded. It was like doing a crossword puzzle in a way. I'm just not used to that in a book. The longest was 10 pages. I found the longer ones easier to deal with, actually. The smaller ones I had to use up energy trying to figure out what they were about. I was thinking it was a good thing probably that I got it out of the library, because that meant I had to bring it back eventually (and on time) which provided a motivation to finish it. Short stories are a catch-22. They're great for reading in short bursts, but often there...

The first book can't have been that bad, because when I was at the library the next weekend, I picked up the next book in the series. The problem is, I don't feel like there was a grand plan. Nothing is set up in the first book in order to make the second book work. What I"m looking for here is a JKRowling-esque preplanning where there are characters mentioned in passing in book three that become features of book six, (like the thief I forget his name who is always ripping off the order of the phoenix). We never hear about Tris's cousin in book 1 (that I remember anyway). Right before she needs to be able to see magic, the concept is invented. JKR would have put that in book 1. I think this may be the nature of being a professional writer who is making a living off your books. I think she writes one and then has to get it published, and then has to write the next one, in some kind of a madcap schedule. Did I mention before the "about the author" bit at the ba...

It was an entertaining read with a good amount of suspense. I read all the way through because I wanted to find out why Stephen was having the nightmares and what Brenda was hiding. But... It was exactly the same as the other TWJ book I read in so many ways. (That other book was "A thief in the house of Memory") Main character male, approximately 15 Has younger sister, approximately 7 Lives in an architecturally wacko house Family was abandoned by one of the parents Figuring out why that abandonment happened is the main quest of the book Small exurb town (I take that word to mean that it's farther out than a suburb, with farms around, but is still like a feeder community, but I could be wrong) School friends who are outrageously precocious (in this book Stephen writes whole poems out of only the letters in a person's name, and another person's name; in Memory a girl spends whole days only using words that don't contain the letter e) Coffee shop scenes This lef...

One of the women in my band had mentioned she read some of this series, and they are full of sex but a good read nevertheless. I had a feeling the sex made her embarrassed. But then, I suppose she probably reads things that are generally a bit less racy, as she teaches Grade 4. My mother also mentioned she was in some trading thing where the books were being passed around, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I have the first two of those!" She offered to let me in on the trading thing, but I figure if I never read the first two, which had been on my shelf for years, then maybe that was a bad idea. however, I threw it into my bag when we went camping as a 'backup book', and found that I could read about a hundred pages per day. I don't read many bodice-rippers, but this one definitely has some of that. It's the romance novel version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, except set in the Scottish Highlands. I find when I sit down with it, I have no tro...

So, for my current writing project, I was looking at Wikipedia for stories about evil stepmothers, and I came across this line: "More subtly, Piers Anthony depicted the Princess Threnody as being cursed by her stepmother..." I had never thought of Piers Anthony as being subtle.

It probably wasn't fair to read this just after that Tamora Pierce book, because poor Tamora can't compare. DWJ's voice is just so strong, and her story structure is so well thought out. She's one of my writing heroes. When I'm trying to put together a story, I often come back to Chrestomanci, and the way there are so many small crises that all build up into one frenzied conclusion. This book was in the Children's section of the library, and "Sandry's Book" was in the teen section, but I would say "Power of Three" had a much more complex writing style. The sentences are more varied, there are more commas. The book mainly is about three children--two who have talents and one who thinks he doesn't. They live in a society reminiscent of celts in fantasy literature (not real celts). They are in a constant war with the Dorig, another species who live underwater, and are in constant fear of the Giants. Well, the giants turn out to be us, an...

Ah, formula fantasy, my old friend. Tamora Pierce is a name I've come across a lot, but I had never actually read one of her books. So, yesterday when I was at the library and needed an easy excuse to talk to one of the staff, kind of an opening so I could mention casually that I had lost a book ("Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link, and I didn't get to finish it, and I am disdraught), I picked a Book 1 up. Clearly it wasn't that bad, as I finished it in less than a day. It's one of a series of four books, and in formula fantasy way, it has four main characters. Back in my mis-spent teens and 20s, I apparently had a lot more reading time than I do now, and I read a lot of, you know, DragonLance and Forgotten Realms, and that "Master of the Five Magics" and "The Black Company", Shanarra, David Eddings, and things like that. There's nothing wrong with those books, but a steady diet of that type of fantasy, well, it's kind of like eati...

I've already posted on this book once, but that was way earlier on in the story, when all I had read was spoilers and the first 150 pages. Since then, I have finished the book and gave myself time to think about it. This one was another forced binge finish, because the Boy was coming back from camp "tomorrow" and so I needed to finish it "tonight". Tonight actually bled a little into the morrow as I finished it after midnight. Since it's the last book, I would have liked to see more wrapping up. Maybe that's lame, I don't know. Sometimes the better book ends with questions (Tigana comes to mind, though I always loved the way GGKay wrapped up minor storylines in the middle of a book, to let you know that we won't be seeing a character again, but he did live happily ever after nevertheless. In fact, that's one of my favourite Kay-isms). Did Luna Lovegood ever find out what her father did? How did she react? She's clearly much more a descend...

I read this because I had read on GalleyCat that the real author had been sued for some absurd sum like $1.1M by the person who bought the screen rights to the book. He sued her because he had bought the rights on the basis that the book was written by a 19-year-old transgendered ex-prostitute, and this was a semi-autobiographical work. Let me say, if anyone thinks this was autobiographical, they are a sick, sick individual and America has way bigger problems than Iraq. And those problems seem to involve child prostitution at truck stops in West Virginia. Giveaways that it was not strictly true abounded, however. The patron saint of truckstop prostitutes is a magical jackalope that hangs on a wall with its ever-growing antlers, and they have to keep expanding the room it's in because the antlers are so large? Racoon penis talismans? A patron saint of truckers who protects them from speeding through weigh stations and from trouble over falsified logbooks? That said, this was an exce...

This book sat on my shelf for a couple of years. I think my mother read it with her book club. Then my sister read it while she was visiting, and so with no one else to give it to, my mother left it with me, saying "You might not like it." I started it while I was at karate camp. One of the black belts came up to me and asked what I was reading. I showed the cover and said it was about WWI in Africa, and he seemed impressed. He went on and on about how interesting it was that I was reading a book about war, and he'd like to read it when I'm done. And I finished it while we were camping, and gave it to Ed, who had finished the book he was reading (something about clans and the giant walking, fighting machines they ride in and the far future where humanity has divided into two streams). He finished it also, so we've gotten our money's worth out of this one. The book is about WWI in Africa, and written in that British self-effacing style, very funny. That's ...

This one I picked up because I read an excerpt on Salon.com, which made it sound enticing. And the first half was. It's about a group led by the guy who invented Lotus 1-2-3 (the early dominant spreadsheet program). They are trying to create something that they never called an Outlook killer though it seemed like one to me, and they're having a rough time. The book is non-fiction, something I had to keep explaining to the people I was telling about. I write computer manuals and dabble in project management in my day-job, and a lot of the anecdotes told in this book made me chuckle and shake my head. They had problems with the word "item", which meant different things depending on the person using the word; we have problems with the word Devices, and the word Preset (we have a Preset folder on the interface, and then subfolders that are also called Preset folders, but those preset subfolders hold presets, and are also called presets. I rewrote the documentation using a...

I KNEW it. http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol1184557979365S100 They're spying on me, too.

Ed confiscated all my other reading material, so I had to read the first 200 pages of HP7 last night. He was upset about the cavalier death of Hedwig. He felt Rowling had never liked the owl, and never developed the character properly. What did Hedwig want? He kept asking me over dinner. What were Hedwig's needs and desires? What did Hedwig do when she went out flying at night? Did she have friends? Who mourns Hedwig? I told him the editors probably made Rowling kill Hedwig because it just wasn't PC to keep sticking her in Hermione's magic bag. It's not like she can turn to the reader and say "Do not burn down a house. Do not light cats on fire. Do not put your pets in a magic bag, or any other bag for that matter, not knowing when it's going to be safe to take them out again." That's not the tone she's cultivated for the last six books, and I don't think her readers will tolerate it now. I didn't come up with the burning down a house, or t...

Yeah, I don't have the book, and I'm reading two other books with a third waiting for me at the library. Plus I may have read some spoilers. Don't worry, I'll read it, just so I can communicate with the Boy. Just not this week, I'm thinking. But I did get sorted. Yeah, Slitherin, but it was a close thing. I got a 79 for Slitherin, but a 78 for Ravenclaw, and a 65 for Griffindor, but just a 36 for Hufflepuff. Do the survey here! http://www.personalitylab.org/tests/ccq_hogwarts.htm Note it's really long, but that's why it's so accurate.

Another book that arrived after a long wait at the library, this one was a quick read. Part of the fun of it was that it was written in first person plural, so "We did this, we did that..." It's about an ad agency that is slowly failing in Chicago after the turn of the millennium, with the last chapter happening five years later, where everybody has a sort of reunion. There were moments that were laugh-out-loud funny, to me maybe because I work in an office where people do creative work, but nothing is as creative as the work we do filling out our time sheets. There's a woman who's in charge of all the characters, and she may or may not have cancer. The "We" all spend a huge amount of time gossiping, really getting nothing done. The worst portion of the book for me was the only chapter that was written in third-person, the chapter about Lynn Mason, she who might have cancer, at home. We needed to know what the truth was of all the gossip, but I wonder if...

Like "The Da Vinci Code" but without the lame puzzles. I found the characters much more likeable in this book. It moved along just as well for me as Da Vinci did, without insulting me, and somehow even the story seemed a little more believable.

The dude who wrote this book came to my office for two one-day seminars to turn all of us R&D types into more efficient designers, and the person who hired him bought some copies of the book, which he left around for us to read. Being a bit of a keener and wanting to get ahead, I took one home. Wow. The presentation we took was eight hours of PowerPoint and anecdotes, and the book seemed like it was written pretty much from those same slides. The anecdotes weren't nearly as great when written down. It seemed like there were less of them, or maybe there was just more content in between them. I finished the book on a vacation day in one giant 90-page slog because I just wanted it over with, and wow, every section seemed like it was a fleshed-out slide heading, and then a list of bullet points underneath, kind of like this: Reducing Boring Reading There are four reasons to reduce boring reading, as described in the next paragraphs. First of all, you should not read boring books, b...

Notwithstanding the author having the same combined last names as one of my favourite kids' authors, he is also the current writer-in-residence at the TPL, so I thought I should get out one of his books and read it so if I went to one of his events I could at least look intelligent. It's like going to a job interview and having read at least the one-page corporate bio on a company's website. It took me about two weeks to actually get around to starting this book. I read the first two pages when I got it out, and then sort of abandoned it to the point where I read an entire book that I almost randomly picked up (the Book of Absinthe) before returning to this one. But yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and get started. And today I'm writing the review, so clearly it was a one-day read. At only 180 pages and with a light word words per page ratio, this was not a "stay up all nighter". The chapters were short, often four or six pages, though there were a few t...

Picked this up once before at the library and read the intro, but put it back because I had too many other things to read. So on Saturday I was sort of trapped at the library for an hour or so (the horror!) and sought it out. Cultural histories are the way history should be taught. I've read a few -- John Hawkwood's bio, the Basque History of the World... This one had amusing interludes about why more writers tend to be drinkers (maybe because it's a job you can't exactly escape from, though I've found things like running through dance steps sometimes keep me awake at night, so maybe any job can stick in your brain and not let you go), the interesting timing of Absinthe being banned in France (just after the start of World War I, the invading teutonic bock-drinkers were going to overrun the deranged Absinthe drinkers), a bit about the american goth subculture. But it did seem oddly organized at times. It didn't run linearly from the invention of absinthe to its ...

The boy gave me this book for Christmas, probably as one of those gifts that's for me, but really for himself. I had given him "the Thief" which was the first book in the series, in the same spirit. I believe I reviewed "The Queen of Attolia" in January. Well, this book picks up where the last book left off. It's all about Eugenides still, but the story is told this time through the eyes of an Attolian guardsman named Costas. He doesn't have a whole lot of respect for Eugenides. One of the things I like about these books are the moments when the reader knows something that the character doesn't. For example, Costas receives a set of notes about a lesson that has been provided about the language of the Medes. He doens't know who theyr'e from, and I was of course saying "they're from Gen, aren't they?" You find out at the end that of course you were right. But she doesn't feel the need to tell us right away. I love that. I...

"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella" by George Saunders In a review of another work (which is still outstanding on my requests list from the TPL), George Saunders was mentioned as writing short stories about work, which apparently not many other people do. I was immediately curious, because a lot of the notes that are stuffed in my "short stories to be written" folder are about work, so I was wondering what the competition was. Were the stories I was contemplating already written? Was there any point? If this volume is representative of George Saunders' work, then I think I can write my stories in peace. These aren't what I would write at all. And that's a good thing, for both him and for me. there would be little more depressing than reading something that got published that I would have written, like literally (wishing I had written something is completely different). The stories are manic and a little bit futuristic. Theme parks featur...

After a couple of searches, I figured I must have read a review of this book on the "How the World Works" blog on http://www.salon.com/ . Interesting, because Andrew Leonard mentioned it there on April 10, 2006 -- so close to a year ago. I got it out of the library two weeks ago, and I didn't have a long wait on interlibrary loan, so I might have requested it two weeks before that. The interesting thing is that it stuck in my mind so long that I wanted to read it. I don't remember what triggered me to request it after all that time. It was really good. I can't comment on the science, but it seemed ripe with so many details -- about the economics of farming, and translation between Spanish and English, and religion, and viruses and immunology and planting transmitter/receivers inside people's brains, and it seemed so fully realized to me. I think it's set in 2061 (that year was mentioned once, though fairly early on; we were discussing when it took place, a...

“Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman To sum it up, I would say: too much Terry, not enough Neil. The plot was entertaining enough, I guess, but I got tired of the sense of humour after a while. "The Dialectic of Sex" by Shulamith Firestone I read this one because I Blame the Patriarchy was doing a readalong. Apparently I am not a participator, because I know they discussed at least the first chapter and I never said anything, but I also hate not knowing what people are talking about, so I read the book anyway. It was far more entertaining than the title and cover made it seem. My favourite chapter was the one titled "Down with Childhood", which asked, among other things, what an adult is, except a larger child with more life experience. Though the book was published in 1970 when Shulamith was about 25, and then she spent a good part of the next 30 years in and out of mental hospitals. My guess is she suffers from Bipolar disorder, though it's not fair...

Reviews So my goal for this year is to read 3 books per month, 36 books total. Last year I read 24 (my goal was to read 26, or one every two weeks). I may be goal-ridden to the point of joylessness, but whatever. I am not doing so well this year. It’s probably because of Beadwork. “The Queen of Attolia” by Megan Whelan Turner This sequel to “The Thief”, which I read last year, might not have been as good as the first one… but that’s only because it has the same main character, and it would have been really difficult to have as big a surprise at the end as the first one did. I read it after the boy did (he’s 12). He was quite impressed by the suffering that Eugenides went through – almost going blind, losing his hand, etc. There wasn’t a lot of boring exposition in this book – that’s why I love kids’ books: they don’t have long boring sections, but if they need to explain something they tend to get to the point. I wonder if it’s the editorial decisions they make when deciding the target...

I started Beadwork on the 6th of September, and when I finished two pair of socks in the last few weeks, I started to be annoyed with the number of unfinished, and in fact somewhat abandoned, projects around the house. So I pulled out Beadwork with the intent of finishing something . Well, at least a sleeve. All I had done was 10" of the first sleeve, no body, nothing. So I was at least going to finish the sleeve. I worked on it for about two weeks. And then Saturday morning, I had to pull out about 12 rows (just over an inch) because I realized I had made a planning error in the sleeve cap (I'm modifying the pattern a little bit...) and when I started feverishly reknitting the rows I had lost, I realized that my right hand was going numb and losing its grip strength. And I thought to myself, "This isn't good." I put it down and made myself lunch. And then I went back to Beadwork, and finished the 4-row rep that I was on. I had to stop every twenty stitches or so...