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| Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 | | 5:09 pm |
book review: The Killing Moon
The Killing Moon is the first half of a new duology by N. K. Jemisin, author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy. I'm not quite so giddy over it as I was about those, but it's still quite good (and much less romance-novel-y, for those who disliked that). I often seem to enjoy fantasy about priests and devoutly religious characters (the first Kushiel trilogy, the Chalion books, Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow), maybe because that's so foreign to me personally, it's a chance to encounter the alien. In The Killing Moon we get chapters from inside the priestly POV and also outside which makes for some interesting contrasts. Some aspects of the plot are a bit predictable, but there are some nice turns in getting there, and it's compulsively readable. Recommended to fantasy readers! There's a short story online here set in more or less the same world (I think she developed it a little more for the novels) - if you like this story, you'll probably enjoy the book, if you don't, you probably won't. | | Sunday, May 27th, 2012 | | 6:44 pm |
picture of the day
So Hollywood might make a Leviathan movie!  I'm totally kidding. This most excellent pinup has nothing to do with Leviathan, it's just art, by an artist named PinkParasol here at DeviantArt. However, due to having a bunch of tabs open at once, and a mixup over which one I had clicked back to, I briefly *thought* it was some sort of Deryn fanart, and couldn't resist trying to pass on that moment of WTF. | | 12:33 am |
| | Friday, May 25th, 2012 | | 10:29 pm |
brief PSAs
1) Turns out when you call the peds because your kid says it hurts when she pees, this is more like a "pull her out of school and come in this afternoon" call than a "do these three things and wait and see" call. Caught me off guard because she's never been sick much and I think every other time we've called about something we've gotten the treat-and-wait response (even when we were kind of freaked out, like with the fever with hives, which turns out to be a thing that just happens sometimes). 1.5) If you need to get a clean urine sample from your kid, ask for tips/instructions. The nurse just handed me the cup and a couple of wipes and was like "bathroom's over there" and I figured I more or less knew what I was doing from, you know, personal experience, but when I voiced some doubts the doctor mentioned a couple of sample-quality guidelines afterwards that I hadn't really taken into account, so I wish I'd been more demanding of the nurse. (One thing I might try next time: taking her pants off one leg entirely, for greater freedom of leg positioning.) 2) Speaking of pants, I became dissatisfied with black maternity corduroys (as a) it is late May and b) I am not actually pregnant any more) and bought myself a new summer pants wardrobe. (Two pairs plus a shorts.) I did this at Target, where they have instituted this brilliant system of categorizing all their pants into six fit categories, in terms of how high the waist is and how loose they are in the hip/thigh. So if for instance you are me and you want high-waisted big-hipped pants, you can immediately know to only bother trying on pants in category 1. I haaate clothes shopping and am never any good at telling how pants are going to fit from looking at them (I'm pants at it, one might say) so this was super useful in speeding up the process. Also Target seems to be pretty good about stocking inbetweenie sizes (I was looking for 16s, but I think I was seeing 18s too). | | Friday, May 18th, 2012 | | 10:41 am |
book rec and fic recs
Fanfic and profic mixing it up in the same post, oh the humanity! The Shattering - Another excellent YA by Karen Healey, who is going on my "read whatever she writes" list. More serious than Guardian of the Dead - real-world serious - as it's about three teens whose older brothers all committed suicide. Or did they. Three things I liked: 1) smart, genre-savvy protagonists who are 2) realistically placed on a spectrum of credulous/skeptical, when the possibility of supernatural explanations comes up (I hate it in books when real-world characters are either too quick to easily accept fantastical stuff, or stay in denial when there is like a vampire right there argh, unless it's lampshaded like the Sunnydale effect). 3) There is enjoyable romance but sibling relationships and friend relationships are major plot drivers. Also it made me cry. Recommended to all YA readers. (If anyone *has* read it, I would love to discuss, I have problems with the last chapter...) (Also: she seems to read fanfic and is possibly in fandom? I know it's not cool to ask to out someone, but if anyone happened to know if there was a fanfic author whose work I might also really like if I like Karen Healey's profic, I would be interested in that...) we were emergencies, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.3) gyzym, 37K words, Avengers, Natasha/Clint. I don't ship this pairing in canon (Natasha/"being a female character whose character arc is about something other than her relationships" all the way!) but in fanfic, anything goes, and wow, this is incredible. Post-movie, about dealing with, uh, fallout of the movie. Intense and heartbreaking and so well done. Hits my competency kink hard. And, oh, the ways these versions of them fit each other. And - I will admit that a lot of times these days I get bored with sex scenes in fanfic, I enjoy the leadup but the actual porn, it's like, okay, yes, body parts, check, but this fic has the best and best-written sex scenes I've read in ages, hot and plot-meaningful and profoundly in character. The Sky and Everything Beneath It, jibrailis, 7K words, Avengers, Steve gen. Also post-movie, also coming to terms, although more with his personal situation than movie-plot fallout. Also heartbreaking, except also extremely funny in spots. Had me at the Toyota Corolla. Also, Avengers question: how can he possibly be named Clint? Isn't that the name no one can have in comics, in the same way that "flick" is the action no one may narrate? Was that a deliberate flick-you to the poor letterer, or something? | | Thursday, May 17th, 2012 | | 2:43 pm |
gendered playground behavior in preschoolers
One thing I hear a lot is "well, I didn't want to believe there were differences between boys and girls, but once I had kids, it was just so obvious". I had the chance today to watch Junie's preschool class at the playground (it's not a school day for her, but they were taking a little field trip and we were able to join them, and then they hit the playground after) and I thought I'd try to start looking for these obvious differences. No formal scoring, just rough mental tallying. Approximately 25 kids. What I observed: most of the activity could be divided into five types of play: running, climbing, swinging, digging, and banging with shovels. Running, climbing, and digging all seemed to be approximately gender-neutral. Climbing was the most popular activity, followed by digging. Swinging was heavily female, with girls swinging higher, more wildly, for longer. Banging with shovels, that I saw, was only done by boys; all the girl shovel-activity was localized to the sandbox and seemed to involve actual sand. So, today's conclusion: while the most popular playground activities are gender-neutral, boys and girls do differ in their secondary choices, with girls showing greater interest in whole-body physical activity (swinging) and boys showing greater interest in making noise. Hypothesis: going down slides is also girl-dominated. (There wasn't enough slide activity at the playground today to count.) | | Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | | 11:36 pm |
things I think about
Avengers: what does Thor make of Fury? Does he just assume he traded his eye for wisdom? Is Loki attacking SHIELD because he's displacing his issues with one-eyed authority figures? (Has anyone written fic about this?) Do sedoretu make any sense in a world without moieties? In a proper sedoretu, can your same-moiety spouse be your sibling, or is that still icky? If the purpose of marriage is to create new alliances, essentially, it sort of seems like marrying your sibling would defeat the purpose, since you already have that relationship. But in fandom, trying to come up with possible sedoretu, it's very tempting to use sibling-pairs as a substitute for moiety, since it's got the right sort of connotations. (I have yet to come up with a sedoretu I really like in any fandom... ATLA has a large enough cast, I feel there ought to be a plausible one there somewhere, but there's always one of the legs that seems random and forced. I have a Huge plotbunny about Becca *imagining* a sedoretu between herself and Ali and Chloe and Trent, because you know she reads LeGuin, but that's meta.) In a world with soulbonds, what happens if your soulmate turns out to be asexual, and you're not? I mean, I guess the idea of soulmates is supposed to be that they are your Perfect Match and once you see them you Just Can't Resist Each Other and so must Fuck Like Bunnies, but, I don't know, I'm intrigued by the idea of "soulmates" being people who just happen to have matching psychic signatures, or whatever, and this doesn't necessarily mean anything about them being *good* with each other, and certainly not in every possible way. (Er, except I want this ace/not!ace soulmates story to have a happy ending, so I guess the question is not "what happens" but rather "how do they work it out"...) | | Saturday, May 5th, 2012 | | 12:39 pm |
book reviews: the dead and the undead
The Forest of Hands and Teeth - YA, zombies. The only reason I didn't repeatedly slam this book shut in annoyance was that I was reading it on my phone; stabbing the off button isn't quite as satisfying (I know, I tried). The best thing about this book was the setting, which was vivid and compelling and I am totally stealing for an RPG someday; unfortunately it was populated by unlikeable people, most notably our first-person narrator, in whose tedious head we are regrettably stuck. I spent the first third of this book imagining an increasingly frustrated GM: "Okay, you're in The Village Where Everything Sucks. There is a Mysterious Door and a Forbidden Path here." Mary the Narrator: "Everything suuuuucks." GM: "Ahem. A MYSTERIOUS DOOR. And a PATH." Mary: "Secrets all around me! Secrets that suck! Oh woe, if only there were more!" GM: "DOOR? PATH? Hello?" Mary: "Blah blah sucks but what can you do." GM: "I give up. Zombie attack." Mary: "SUCKS! Waaaitaminute, maybe I could... flee to this path?" GM: "... ya think?" I won't spoil ("spoil") the rest of the book but suffice it to say that Mary fails to learn from this experience and has to be prodded through the rest of the plot by similar authorial intervention. She shows a brief spark of initiative towards the end and then bam, back towards being passively moved by outside forces (literally, in the "climax", in which she boldly falls into a river and washes up at the denouement. Oops, spoiler, sorry.) Mostly she spends her time whining about her tiresome romantic tangle, which is only complicated because in their culture they don't have conversations. (Seriously, at one point Mary has a bizarre flash of common sense and suggests very tentatively that maybe they should all try, like, talking about this situation, or something? and gets shot down with an explicit "no of course we can't ever *talk* about it!". I hated that Ethan Frome shit in Ethan Frome, and at least reading Wharton gets you cultural-literacy points.) Oh, and there was one good scene. Otherwise I was pretty much rooting for the zombies. Oh, and, a worldbuilding nitpick: if you have a very small village that's been surrounded at all times by a horde of zombies for a couple of generations (check), and you know how long most zombies last before they fall apart (check), shouldn't it be relatively easy to figure out whether anyone else in the world outside of your village has survived? Either every single zombie out there is someone who came from your village, or new zombies are coming from *somewhere* else, right? Guardian of the Dead - YA fantasy. This on the other hand was terrific. Started reading it and could not put it down (I even finished it *at the expense of sleep*, which is a pretty strong statement given the month-old baby.) The characters had me from the start and then delivered a satisfying plot which I will in fact really truly not spoil (and so I have much less to say about it). Three things I liked: our heroine's tae kwon do skills and realistic perspective on their use, the setting in New Zealand and use of Maori mythology, the fact that the main character's best friend is asexual, and it's neither a big deal in the plot nor entirely irrelevant. Reminded me a little of Fire and Hemlock, are you sold yet? Recommended to all YA fantasy readers. | | Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | | 1:48 pm |
| | Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 | | 3:00 pm |
book reviews: Percy Jackson, Origami Yoda, and a supermodel walk into a bar
For awhile I had an informal policy of only writing about books that a) I liked and wanted to recommend or b) were by already-popular authors, addressing the question of whether their latest works lived up to their earlier ones. Lately I've had the urge to review everything I read even if I'm not recommending it. ::shrug:: I guess we'll see how long this lasts? The Lightning Thief is the first of the best-selling Percy Jackson books. I read this because one of my reading goals is to stay conversant with contemporary children's fantasy. It was reasonably clever, competently executed, I would recommend it without hesitation to a middle-grade fantasy reader looking for more fantasy to read, and I have absolutely no intention of reading the rest of the series myself. The Strange Case of Origami Yoda - cute middle-grade novel told in a first person "case files" style by various sixth-graders. I liked that one of the main characters is quirky in a way that, reading as an adult, I read as being non-neurotypical/on the spectrum, but there's no labeling/diagnosis in the text, his weirdness is just part of who he is in the way that other characters also have their quirks. Runaway is the third and last of a YA trilogy by Meg Cabot, a tragedy about how the ways that others see us trump the ways we see ourselves in shaping our lives. No, wait, that's not it! It's a totally fun series about how, like, if you got brain-transplanted into the body of a supermodel, you would get to be a supermodel! Like, omigod, yay! Previously forced by plot contrivance to pretend to be her body's former occupant, by the end of this last book our main character has the freedom to be and do whatever she wants. But she's adopted the habits and values of the supermodel so thoroughly that little trace of her original interests and opinions remains. Cabot's biases run counter to my own; I'm sure I would have been more sympathetic if, instead of losing interest in video gaming and discovering the importance of clothing and makeup, it had gone the other way. (My opinion of makeup is something like my opinion of Morris dancing. By all means, apply your pigments! Wave your hankies! I like to read stories where people from the teevee have sex, we all have our hobbies! Where it pisses me off is when it gets universalized, like, of course you can't expect to be taken seriously at that job interview if you show up without your bells on. Of course guys won't know you're interested if they don't see you working on your capers. That's obviously ludicrous when it's Morris dancing but somehow becomes conventional wisdom when it's makeup.) The real problem is that Cabot is trying to argue that you can be into being pretty and also still be smart and interesting, but she's failing to show us the smart and interesting part. Opting into pretty *has* come with a price for our heroine, and I can't tell whether Cabot didn't see that, or just got lazy and figured we'd be distracted by the romance working out. I will always love Cabot for Ready Or Not, but this series falls far short of that standard. | | Friday, April 27th, 2012 | | 7:57 pm |
book rec (well, comic rec): Princeless
First Princeless issue free online.Ok, I know the "princess who rescues herself" schtick isn't exactly cutting-edge at this point, but this is just *adorable*. Economics of dragon-slaying! Her grin, when [SPOILER]! I love the art, it's cartoony but has a real voice. (Or, er, whatever we call it when we're talking about pictures rather than words.) The print comic sadly seems to have sold out, fingers crossed for a TPB. (Would be tempted to buy it for my phone, but I like the idea of it sitting around on the bookshelf for Junie to discover at some point.) | | Thursday, April 26th, 2012 | | 9:04 pm |
video rec: 10 for the atom bomb loose again
A time-lapse map of nuclear explosions.This is long (15 minutes) and starts very slowly, but stick with it, oh my god. I couldn't look away. I had no idea. I'm pretty much of a post-Cold-War generation - the first major news event I remember being aware of was the fall of the Berlin Wall - and I didn't grow up worrying about The Bomb. I feel like I maybe have a new insight into that now. | | Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 | | 11:01 am |
| | Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 | | 12:26 pm |
book reviews: Paper Towns and The Mirage
(Nice pair of titles there, complete coincidence...) Paper Towns - non-genre YA. John Green is the non-David Levithan half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Paper Towns is a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and is probably *most* interesting as part of a literary conversation about that trope (I wonder whether anyone's written anything specifically responding to it yet; it came out in 2008, so quite possibly). But it also has some good scenes and lovely extended metaphors and one passage that made me laugh out loud, so I enjoyed it aside from that, although I did not find it so profound as actual Y. A.s might. Green's most recent book, The Fault In Our Stars, keeps getting mentioned, and on the basis of Paper Towns I am now more inclined to read it rather than less, so there's that. The Mirage is Matt Ruff's latest. I read everything he writes, which isn't too hard because he goes about five years between books. I liked The Mirage much better than the last one, Bad Monkeys, although not as well as the one before that, Set This House In Order, which I've re-read a bunch. The Mirage is alternate history dealing with 9/11 and is probably best if you don't know much about it going in - like, the jacket copy says too much, in my opinion. So I'm going to avoid saying anything more about the premise. I think the danger of alternate history worldbuilding can be that it's more fun to come up with than to read - there are places here where Ruff is obviously having a lot of fun being clever, but it never quite got to the point where I was impatient with it rather than amused. And in the end there was enough story there to feel like a story and not just a world. Sort of the opposite of YA, in that I think a lot of it would be lost on someone who wasn't reading the news back in the 00s, but recommended to those who were. (I'd be happy to discuss-with-spoilers if anyone else has read it and has thoughts...) | | Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 | | 9:35 pm |
book reviews
Crucible of Gold - Temeraire book, uh, six? Seven. I liked this one a lot. One of the things I really like about this series is that Laurence and Temeraire are our main characters, but the world of the books doesn't know that, and although we only get little glimpses into everyone else's story, it really feels like everyone else *has* a story, and if we were in someone else's point of view it would be just as interesting a narrative. In particular, ( cut for spoilers )Discount Armageddon - First book of a new urban fantasy series by Seanan McGuire, aka Mira Grant. There's no real reason not to read this, but there's no particular reason *to* read it either. I dunno, I liked Feed and Deadline a lot, but did not like the first October Daye book *at all* - I guess she's now sold a new series as Mira Grant, so maybe I'll read the first one of those, when it comes out, and see whether I only like her when she's being Mira Grant? Anyways, Discount Armageddon is amusing-enough fluff, could be good for a plane flight or something. | | Friday, April 13th, 2012 | | 11:03 pm |
| | Friday, March 30th, 2012 | | 10:17 pm |
BABY!
Quentin Kay Smift, a very nice 8 lbs 14 oz, likes sticking out his tongue. I guess the endless foot-dragging was my body making *sure* it was all ready, because when it finally went, it *went* - two and a half hours from the start of active labor to birth. (If you average that with the 28 hours last time, it looks like I have nice average-length labors, and thus we see the vital importance of knowing the distribution of your data as well as the mean ::grin::.) We both came out of it in pretty good shape and seem to be doing well so far. I'll try to get a more complete story up in a few days, including the world's best Skype session with Junie this evening. I think Josh is planning to put up some pictures. I have my BABY!!! | | 10:16 am |
labor!
Am finally in labor! Like 20 minutes in, and it's already... serious. See y'all on the postpartum side. | | Thursday, March 29th, 2012 | | 11:04 pm |
babywatch again
Guess who didn't have a baby today! I did however get through Junie's non-school day with a minimum of upset and even an art project, so go me for that. (I keep thinking I just can't do it and I'm going to have to ask Josh to take time off work before the baby even gets here, and then I manage one more day.) | | Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 | | 9:44 pm |
bright side, briiiight side
I got to go to Chaos's awesome monthly locals-with-babies potluck and be surrounded by babies! Babies of many delightful ages and stages. Yay, babies. A little bit envy-inducing... I want to meet *my* baby and start getting to know it - will it have hair? Will it make funny faces? Who is it going to be? But mostly just neat to remember all those different stages and anticipate seeing them again. And then to get to come home and put my big girl to bed with lots of kisses and singing to each other. Almost-three-year-olds are really super awesome. Also I am finding that this prolonged-brink-of-labor business has a marvelous sharpening effect on my sense of priorities - like, I'm able to make decisions that I normally find completely paralyzing. I was able to get rid of my college lab notebooks, which I've never been able to do because they represented so much time and effort, but, no, useless! Out! And I made some progress on picking out the pictures for our wedding album, which I hadn't touched since, uh, a couple of days before Junie was born, in fact. I guess normal people have this kind of mental clarity all the time, not just at 40.5 weeks pregnant, but hell, whatever, I'm using it while I've got it. |
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