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...