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Re: vidding. I'm not sure what could be more addictive than this. It's like finding fandom all over again.
I'm taking advantage of Z's absence to watch tons of DVDs. I finally got to see Farscape's "Plan B," an episode Tivo resolutely refused to record twice. I'm not a big fan of the term "woobie," but, man, it's hard to believe that SV seems to have popularized the word when John Frelling Crichton suffers more per episode in Seasons 2 & 3 than Lex does in any given ten episodes. (And are there any good analyses of J.F.C. as Christ figure? I've seen it done nicely for John Connor of Terminator fame, another J.C., but not for Crichton.) I'm so glad Farscape is coming back.
Also, the first season of The West Wing is really good. I teared up a few times. I love my country, especially when helmed by Team Bartlett.
And in conclusion, where has Daniel Jackson been hiding those arms? Yum. It's sort of funny how he knows it, and manages to pose, even when limping on crutches, in ways Mr. Universe could well emulate.
Richard Dooling, Bet Your Life, Brainstorm, Critical Care, and White Man's Grave: Dooling is a lawyer with an instinct for technology, from computer babble to medical jargon. He writes books that feel packed with realistic detail. The rest of their qualities vary substantially, though he does seem to be on an upwards swing. The most recent book, Bet Your Life, turns on viatical insurance, a scheme developed to let AIDS patients access money now in return for the proceeds of their life insurance policies upon death. The protagonist is an insurance investigator in a business that doesn't really want much investigation, only quick claims settlement. Dooling's female ally/femme fatale is his best-developed woman thus far, with some interesting background and complex motivations of her own, enough to match those of the protagonist and of their dead friend, whose death (murder?) touches off catastrophic changes in their own lives. This was a fun, airplane-type read.
Brainstorm, about a lawyer assigned to defend a man accused of murdering a deaf black man because he was deaf and black, is less successful. The lawyer's life goes downhill because his firm doesn't like him putting in so many (read: any) pro bono hours, his client turns out to be in some sort of militia, his shrewish wife is stomping on him with metaphorical stilettos, and a brain researcher wants either his body or his client to prove her theories about the biological determinants of behavior. There's also a semi-corrupt criminal defense attorney who helps our hero out and a crazy judge who ruins his life and then lifts him up out of the mire. I'd say the judge was unrealistic, but I've learned over time that nothing is inconceivable when it comes to the behavior of a federal judge. The circumstances of the murder turn out to be pretty interesting, but the brain research stuff just feels like Dooling got fascinated by it and shoehorned it in, with a lot of infodump about brains and violence and a tenuous connection between that and the lawyer's own desire to excuse his adulterous impulses.
Critical Care, an early work, is my least favorite. The descriptions of what a long-term ICU facility is like are compelling -- in the sense that you'll probably want to make out a living will to avoid ending up in one. But the conscious characters are much less well developed than the medical conditions of the vegetable s on the Ninth Floor ICU. Dooling lacks control of POV, forcing him to do a few limping sections in somebody else's POV to let you know what he wants you to know. Worst, the ending left me infuriated, because I felt he'd copped out.
White Man's Grave is my second favorite, though it too had annoying features. There are two POV characters, one the father and the other the best friend of a young man who's gone missing in Sierra Leone on a stint with the Peace Corps. The father's neatly brutal law-firm practice is interspersed with the friend's disorienting experience as a white American in a hostile Africa. The contrast between types of nasty, brutish existences is occasionally interesting and often ham-handed, but the book does nicely show the frustration and paradoxes of Peace Corps-type endeavors to bring a better life to people whose definition of a good life is very different and whose translations of American concepts are not what we'd expect. Dooling seems to be on the side of those who oppose foreign aid because, no matter how well-intentioned, it makes things worse due to corruption and misunderstandings on both sides, but he also conveys the suffering that prompts the aid in the first place and the self-righteous arrogance of the Westerners who want all the other Westerners, the ones who aren't as assimilated as they are, to stop interfering with Africa. As I said, the book annoyed me, but it also engaged me; the annoyance was me wanting to scream at some of the characters, things like, "Well, what should we do, then?"
Glen Hirshberg, The Snowman's Children: I saw Mystic River in DC, a film about three boyhood friends whose lives are changed utterly when one of them gets in a car with two men pretending to be police officers. Late in the film (not spoilery, I think; it's in the previews), one of the men says to another, "Sometimes I think we all got in that car. Sometimes I think we never got out." Similarly, this book is about a man returning to his hometown of Detroit to revisit things that happened to him during one winter in his childhood when a serial killer of children was active in his neighborhood. Like Mystic River, the book is a downer, reasonably well executed but not exactly inspiring, with bonus mental illness and marital breakdown. I like the concept of "we were all victims and we're all still back in that moment," but maybe I like the concept more than the realization.
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody: I remembered this book as being depressing, though that's not the reaction I had this time. The Dog Star, Sirius, is tried for the murder of a minor luminary, and convicted, wrongly, he claims. He's sentenced to life as a mortal creature, doomed to die if he doesn't find the powerful object that was lost when the luminary was killed. In fact, he's incarnated into a dog, and becomes the sole comfort of a young girl staying with hostile relatives while her father is in jail. Jones' usual flair for well-developed characters, young and old, is on display, and she does a nice job setting out the rules of superluminary existence almost by inference, without lecturing or going into detail that would only make you think, "That doesn't make any sense." The point of magic is that the answer really is "because," and Jones uses that fact with confidence and grace.
The Spellcoats, the third book in the Dalemark Quartet, however, disappointed me. The setting is prehistoric Dalemark, where ancient tribes struggle for supremacy and for the favor of the river gods. I didn't really feel much sympathy for anybody; the mythology seemed underdeveloped; and I basically didn't get the point of introducing these long-dead characters who have passed so far into Dalemark myth as to be forgotten, even in name.
Jordan Ellenberg, The Grasshopper King: Jordan's an old friend of mine, and the math columnist for Slate, which might mean more to you. This is sort of a campus novel about an absurd literary studies department focused on the works of one awful, obscure writer who composed only in a language that is essentially impossible to learn. It's not David Lodge or Moo, though; the characters and situations are too bizarre to be a real satire of academic politics. It is, perhaps, a satire of academic thinking, the conviction that all things can be explained by way of this obscure poet/chemical/theory/etc. and that anyone who isn't completely invested in the details of your favorite controversy just doesn't like to think. Wacky events lead the protagonist to decide what kind of life he wants to lead, and it's not necessarily the life he expected. Absence of genre elements puts this one outside my core interests, but John Barth thinks it's fantastic.
Jim Butcher, Death Masks: This is the fifth book of "The Dresden Files," first-person narratives by the "other wizard Harry" – the publisher is really trying too hard, both with the trade dress designed to make you think of Anita Blake and the whole HP thing. Still, the books are not that bad. Harry Dresden has enough vulnerabilities to make him an interesting guy, though he does seem to withstand more physical damage than he ought to be able to. This book sees him investigating the theft of the Shroud of Turin, encountering burglars who ruthlessly utilize all the gallant stereotypes Harry has about charming female cat burglars, an ex-girlfriend, and people who are even angrier at him. Oh, and there's a vampire duel. I like the vampire and wizard politics in these books; there are people who want war and people who want peace, and they're not necessarily arrayed in any good-vs.-evil way.
Brian Hodge, Wild Horses: Allison Willoughby holds the keys (electronic) to three-quarters of a million dollars of stolen casino money, though she doesn't know it. She just thought she was harassing her cheating, newly ex-lover when she trashed his computer and stole his backups. What she also doesn't know is that, besides the ex-lover and his new, New Agey hooker girlfriend, two monstrously charming psychopaths are also on her trail, determined not to let her get away with the money they stole fair and square. Though damaged by a string of bad men starting with her very first, Allison hooks up with a new guy as she hitchhikes back home, towards an errand whose precise nature isn't clear until late in the book, though the reason for it is hammered into the reader from the very first pages. The bad guys are more compelling than the good guy (Allison doesn't quite make it into the "good" list), and there's an awful lot of pat psychology in Allison's story, though there are some extremely nice touches, like the way Allison's estranged father manipulates her new man in a few deadly seconds. I didn't feel like the book was a waste, but it may have contributed to my moral decay.
Elizabeth Dewberry, Sacrament of Lies: It's very hard to write "depressed" well. Depressed people are often pretty goddamned boring; they think the same things again and again, and they don't get out of bed much. Dewberry overcomes this barrier with a variety of tactics: she starts out with a bang, her narrator waiting to see if her father is going to kill her; she skips over time periods during which nothing happens but depression; and she has a pretty interesting plot about politics and the possibility that the narrator covered up her mother's murder when she thought she was covering up a suicide. Is she paranoid and depressed, or is her husband – her father's speechwriter – really conspiring with her father to keep her medicated into insensibility? The father, the governor of Louisiana, is one of those sacred monsters, destroying everyone he touches and making them beg for it. Not sprawling – this is a short book – the story nonetheless has that Southern gothic feel to it. Enjoyable, if only to see depression made interesting.
I'm taking advantage of Z's absence to watch tons of DVDs. I finally got to see Farscape's "Plan B," an episode Tivo resolutely refused to record twice. I'm not a big fan of the term "woobie," but, man, it's hard to believe that SV seems to have popularized the word when John Frelling Crichton suffers more per episode in Seasons 2 & 3 than Lex does in any given ten episodes. (And are there any good analyses of J.F.C. as Christ figure? I've seen it done nicely for John Connor of Terminator fame, another J.C., but not for Crichton.) I'm so glad Farscape is coming back.
Also, the first season of The West Wing is really good. I teared up a few times. I love my country, especially when helmed by Team Bartlett.
And in conclusion, where has Daniel Jackson been hiding those arms? Yum. It's sort of funny how he knows it, and manages to pose, even when limping on crutches, in ways Mr. Universe could well emulate.
Richard Dooling, Bet Your Life, Brainstorm, Critical Care, and White Man's Grave: Dooling is a lawyer with an instinct for technology, from computer babble to medical jargon. He writes books that feel packed with realistic detail. The rest of their qualities vary substantially, though he does seem to be on an upwards swing. The most recent book, Bet Your Life, turns on viatical insurance, a scheme developed to let AIDS patients access money now in return for the proceeds of their life insurance policies upon death. The protagonist is an insurance investigator in a business that doesn't really want much investigation, only quick claims settlement. Dooling's female ally/femme fatale is his best-developed woman thus far, with some interesting background and complex motivations of her own, enough to match those of the protagonist and of their dead friend, whose death (murder?) touches off catastrophic changes in their own lives. This was a fun, airplane-type read.
Brainstorm, about a lawyer assigned to defend a man accused of murdering a deaf black man because he was deaf and black, is less successful. The lawyer's life goes downhill because his firm doesn't like him putting in so many (read: any) pro bono hours, his client turns out to be in some sort of militia, his shrewish wife is stomping on him with metaphorical stilettos, and a brain researcher wants either his body or his client to prove her theories about the biological determinants of behavior. There's also a semi-corrupt criminal defense attorney who helps our hero out and a crazy judge who ruins his life and then lifts him up out of the mire. I'd say the judge was unrealistic, but I've learned over time that nothing is inconceivable when it comes to the behavior of a federal judge. The circumstances of the murder turn out to be pretty interesting, but the brain research stuff just feels like Dooling got fascinated by it and shoehorned it in, with a lot of infodump about brains and violence and a tenuous connection between that and the lawyer's own desire to excuse his adulterous impulses.
Critical Care, an early work, is my least favorite. The descriptions of what a long-term ICU facility is like are compelling -- in the sense that you'll probably want to make out a living will to avoid ending up in one. But the conscious characters are much less well developed than the medical conditions of the vegetable s on the Ninth Floor ICU. Dooling lacks control of POV, forcing him to do a few limping sections in somebody else's POV to let you know what he wants you to know. Worst, the ending left me infuriated, because I felt he'd copped out.
White Man's Grave is my second favorite, though it too had annoying features. There are two POV characters, one the father and the other the best friend of a young man who's gone missing in Sierra Leone on a stint with the Peace Corps. The father's neatly brutal law-firm practice is interspersed with the friend's disorienting experience as a white American in a hostile Africa. The contrast between types of nasty, brutish existences is occasionally interesting and often ham-handed, but the book does nicely show the frustration and paradoxes of Peace Corps-type endeavors to bring a better life to people whose definition of a good life is very different and whose translations of American concepts are not what we'd expect. Dooling seems to be on the side of those who oppose foreign aid because, no matter how well-intentioned, it makes things worse due to corruption and misunderstandings on both sides, but he also conveys the suffering that prompts the aid in the first place and the self-righteous arrogance of the Westerners who want all the other Westerners, the ones who aren't as assimilated as they are, to stop interfering with Africa. As I said, the book annoyed me, but it also engaged me; the annoyance was me wanting to scream at some of the characters, things like, "Well, what should we do, then?"
Glen Hirshberg, The Snowman's Children: I saw Mystic River in DC, a film about three boyhood friends whose lives are changed utterly when one of them gets in a car with two men pretending to be police officers. Late in the film (not spoilery, I think; it's in the previews), one of the men says to another, "Sometimes I think we all got in that car. Sometimes I think we never got out." Similarly, this book is about a man returning to his hometown of Detroit to revisit things that happened to him during one winter in his childhood when a serial killer of children was active in his neighborhood. Like Mystic River, the book is a downer, reasonably well executed but not exactly inspiring, with bonus mental illness and marital breakdown. I like the concept of "we were all victims and we're all still back in that moment," but maybe I like the concept more than the realization.
Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody: I remembered this book as being depressing, though that's not the reaction I had this time. The Dog Star, Sirius, is tried for the murder of a minor luminary, and convicted, wrongly, he claims. He's sentenced to life as a mortal creature, doomed to die if he doesn't find the powerful object that was lost when the luminary was killed. In fact, he's incarnated into a dog, and becomes the sole comfort of a young girl staying with hostile relatives while her father is in jail. Jones' usual flair for well-developed characters, young and old, is on display, and she does a nice job setting out the rules of superluminary existence almost by inference, without lecturing or going into detail that would only make you think, "That doesn't make any sense." The point of magic is that the answer really is "because," and Jones uses that fact with confidence and grace.
The Spellcoats, the third book in the Dalemark Quartet, however, disappointed me. The setting is prehistoric Dalemark, where ancient tribes struggle for supremacy and for the favor of the river gods. I didn't really feel much sympathy for anybody; the mythology seemed underdeveloped; and I basically didn't get the point of introducing these long-dead characters who have passed so far into Dalemark myth as to be forgotten, even in name.
Jordan Ellenberg, The Grasshopper King: Jordan's an old friend of mine, and the math columnist for Slate, which might mean more to you. This is sort of a campus novel about an absurd literary studies department focused on the works of one awful, obscure writer who composed only in a language that is essentially impossible to learn. It's not David Lodge or Moo, though; the characters and situations are too bizarre to be a real satire of academic politics. It is, perhaps, a satire of academic thinking, the conviction that all things can be explained by way of this obscure poet/chemical/theory/etc. and that anyone who isn't completely invested in the details of your favorite controversy just doesn't like to think. Wacky events lead the protagonist to decide what kind of life he wants to lead, and it's not necessarily the life he expected. Absence of genre elements puts this one outside my core interests, but John Barth thinks it's fantastic.
Jim Butcher, Death Masks: This is the fifth book of "The Dresden Files," first-person narratives by the "other wizard Harry" – the publisher is really trying too hard, both with the trade dress designed to make you think of Anita Blake and the whole HP thing. Still, the books are not that bad. Harry Dresden has enough vulnerabilities to make him an interesting guy, though he does seem to withstand more physical damage than he ought to be able to. This book sees him investigating the theft of the Shroud of Turin, encountering burglars who ruthlessly utilize all the gallant stereotypes Harry has about charming female cat burglars, an ex-girlfriend, and people who are even angrier at him. Oh, and there's a vampire duel. I like the vampire and wizard politics in these books; there are people who want war and people who want peace, and they're not necessarily arrayed in any good-vs.-evil way.
Brian Hodge, Wild Horses: Allison Willoughby holds the keys (electronic) to three-quarters of a million dollars of stolen casino money, though she doesn't know it. She just thought she was harassing her cheating, newly ex-lover when she trashed his computer and stole his backups. What she also doesn't know is that, besides the ex-lover and his new, New Agey hooker girlfriend, two monstrously charming psychopaths are also on her trail, determined not to let her get away with the money they stole fair and square. Though damaged by a string of bad men starting with her very first, Allison hooks up with a new guy as she hitchhikes back home, towards an errand whose precise nature isn't clear until late in the book, though the reason for it is hammered into the reader from the very first pages. The bad guys are more compelling than the good guy (Allison doesn't quite make it into the "good" list), and there's an awful lot of pat psychology in Allison's story, though there are some extremely nice touches, like the way Allison's estranged father manipulates her new man in a few deadly seconds. I didn't feel like the book was a waste, but it may have contributed to my moral decay.
Elizabeth Dewberry, Sacrament of Lies: It's very hard to write "depressed" well. Depressed people are often pretty goddamned boring; they think the same things again and again, and they don't get out of bed much. Dewberry overcomes this barrier with a variety of tactics: she starts out with a bang, her narrator waiting to see if her father is going to kill her; she skips over time periods during which nothing happens but depression; and she has a pretty interesting plot about politics and the possibility that the narrator covered up her mother's murder when she thought she was covering up a suicide. Is she paranoid and depressed, or is her husband – her father's speechwriter – really conspiring with her father to keep her medicated into insensibility? The father, the governor of Louisiana, is one of those sacred monsters, destroying everyone he touches and making them beg for it. Not sprawling – this is a short book – the story nonetheless has that Southern gothic feel to it. Enjoyable, if only to see depression made interesting.
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*g* He was always a good-looking man, but in the first few seasons, the long hair and baggy clothes obscured all his best bits. It was deliberate, to some extent, to preserve Daniel's bookishness. But I'm glad they've decided to run with it now that Michael Shanks has bulked up. *purrs*
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