Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Lookie! I found my birthday present to myself. :D



Also: Once again, Neil Gaiman has proven himself deserving of freshly-baked cookies. I read this and guffawed so much the better half put down his video game to find out what I was up to. From his blog this morning:

It was 5:45 in the morning. No-one had died, though, I was fairly certain of that. My cell-phone rang.

"Hello. This is Rose Trevino. I'm chair of the ALA Newbery Committee..." Oh. Newbery. Right. Cool. I may be an honors book or something. That would be nice, "and I have the voting members of the Newbery Committee here, and we want to tell you that your book..."

"THE GRAVEYARD BOOK," said fourteen loud voices, and I thought, I may be still asleep right now, but they probably don't do this, probably don't call people and sound so amazingly excited, for Honors books....

"...just won..."

"THE NEWBERY MEDAL" they chorused. They sounded really happy. I checked the hotel room because it seemed very likely that I was still fast asleep. It all looked reassuringly solid.

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo.

I wonder if I'll find the time to sit down and finish The Graveyard Book--it seemed like much fun, so I hope so. I also wonder if this means we'll get more than a couple copies of The Graveyard Book into our store. But Borders Group is still flailing in altogether disturbing ways, so I doubt it. Instead I still have the awful feeling that we're gonna see the axe falling on a few local places before this mess is all over.

Cnn.com tells me the economic turnaround is predicted at around the end of the second quarter, though. So what's that--six months to limp along? And if we make it that far, we'll be good? We'll see.

But I won't stop applying around. A full forty hours at minimum wage would net me more than "full time" at Borders. And with BGInc nixing any bonuses or raises this year (but giving ex-CEO George Jones $2.1 million to go away), I'd be stupid to not just take a rinky-dink job that's closer to home and make do with it.

Oprah's not doing so well with these authors of real-life sob stories . . . The latest person caught lying about their life story is Herman Rosenblat, who's been telling whoever'd listen that he first met his wife through the fence of a concentration camp, and that she threw him food every day to keep him alive. Oprah loved the story. Publishers loved the story; two different books were written about it, one for children (Angel Girl, by Laurie Friedman), one an autobiography. Sappy sentimentalists loved it: IIRC, the thing made its rounds through a handful of email forwards and also into a Chicken Soup collection. Even movie-makers loved the story--the movie was in the works.

Researchers debunked Mr. Rosenblat's story. Despite fighting an uphill battle with Berkley Books and the guy who wanted to make the movie, they eventually prevailed--and the movie was nixed, the kids' book was pulled from the shelves, and the (juvenile, terribly-written) autobiography shall never see the inside of a commercial publisher. (Indeed, it looks like Rosenblat's aimed straight for a DIY/vanity press.)

The question remaining for most people, it seems, is "Why?" Why do something like this, when it just gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers like David Irving--or more locally, the douchebag who named his kids Adolph Hitler and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler (because he wanted them to have "good German names.") Was it greed? Was it all about the money, the attention? Was it that he just really, really wanted to meet Oprah?

Nope. It's because the guy's bugfuck crazy. He went under anesthesia for surgery and his dead mother told him to share his love story--so while recovering, he made one up.


Do I need to talk about why we don't pay attention to crazy people without doing our damned research? Really?

Didn't think so.


Maybe instead I need to consider why so many people were so willing to ignore historians and facts in favor of a wildly, unbelievably improbable love story.

I'm up to book 6 in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series, and just hit my second wind. I'd started to get a little annoyed with Harris's clothing-and-description dumps (which have improved greatly from the start of the series), and got pretty annoyed in book 5 where the only male character who didn't want to sleep with her was really on a secret mission to kill her. My Sue-dar went a little nuts and I had to step back from the series for a bit--which kinda sucked, as I've just bought the first seven books in a box set. But I talked about the series with the coworkers, about how Sookie's an independent woman who takes no shit, refuses to be treated like property, and sees nothing wrong with dating around should one relationship crash & burn--not to mention how Harris has about ten good-sized problems marching around at once--and I went back in. And then I found a bit in book 6, Definitely Dead, where Sookie talks about fitting a size 8 on a good day but usually being more of a 10. The woman's sturdy. And not just that: as she's getting older & the series progresses, she's been gaining weight--going from a size 8/6 on a good day to 10/8--and never wangsting over it. This makes me happy. :D

(And the ex-Viking vampire Eric grabbing a severed head and going bowling for vampires just makes him that much more awesome. It's like Christmas zombies, in a way.)


I'm reading Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts and finding it enjoyable if strange. Some stories are horror, some have the directionless ramble of literature--it looks like he pretty much writes whatever genre amuses him. It's a nice change from the first-person popcorn reads. They're nice and all, but they're not giving me a brain reboot & making me want to write in the same way better-written ones do.

Next victims shall be Neil Gaiman and Jeff Lindsey; one for the sake of the wordplay and one because Jeff Lindsey's alliteration and descriptions are fun. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll get something besides maille done tonight.)

The last time I wheeled a cart of brand-new J.K. Rowling books out onto the floor, I wasn't sure what'd kill me first--the waiting fans or my dress/heels combo. This time there weren't waiting fans because Borders skipped out on having a midnight release party.

We had way, way more reserves for Beedle the Bard than we did for Breaking Dawn, and we had a midnight party for that. Our company's logic isn't the best sometimes.


Speaking of SMeyer's literary travesty: A girl today told me kids at school make fun of her for liking Twilight. I was a good person. I didn't laugh at her.


Speaking of Mormon insanity: I picked up Escape by Carolyn Jessop, the ex-FLDS woman who saved herself & her kids from an abusive polygamist marriage. The thing's surreal at times. She's going to high school (and glad she was able to get into a high school), she's telling stupid-girl jokes about a snooty group of girls who seriously think they have to act like idiots so they can make men feel manlier . . . and suddenly, at age eighteen, she finds out she has to marry those girls' father. Who's fifty.

The writing isn't spectacular--the narrative assumes the reader understands a number of Mormonism's quirks, like the sacred underwear and how God lives on a planet, and the wildly excessive passive voice makes me want to take a bite out of the book--but knowing it's a true story makes me want to keep going.

~~

I went looking for lighter reading other than Charlaine Harris (the clothing-infodumps and characters' somewhat stilted speech patterns were starting to bug me) and ended up finally settling on ( Christopher Moore. ) :D


Maybe afterwards I'll go back for Gideon Defoe, though his works didn't seem to have as much direction and thus didn't keep my attention in quite the same way.


(For all the light reading I'm doing, the writing I'm getting done is yet more of the usual: smut angst and murderous mess and more angst. Strange.)

Sam's club has little tiny turkeys (read: 11 and 12 pounds) for sale, so I picked one up--only to find it won't fit in the crock pot. Bah. Then I found that though it's a name-brand turkey, it still cooked up less tender than the twice-the-size-half-the-price walmart ones.

Whininess, I has it. :P

I've got a craft show in six days and only one box of stuff to sell. I didn't realize I'd picked up this much vintage/retail merchandise until I started splitting piles. But then again, most of the maille stuff fits in a shoebox.

Whatever doesn't go this weekend goes to Etsy. Hopefully.

~~

I picked up A. Lee Martinez's book The Nameless Witch because of the front line: "A tale of vengeance, true love, and cannibalism." It looked like it'd be silly, and it was. This thing was straight-up pure fluff--sorta like if Christopher Moore was a gigantic D&D geek. Seriously, just about every critter in it is pulled from the monster manual, complete with their basic properties. But it was still fun, and I startled zen_of_nihilism a few times by snerkling mid-read . . . like around the time when the undead MFC's demonic duck familiar meets her love interest--and promptly becomes violently ill, because the love interest is an impossibly pure White Knight. Or how the MFC really really really wants to eat him, or how her broom has OCD. Or any number of things.

No, it's not a thinky book, and no, it's not Pratchett, but it's pretty straightforward and still worth it for a giggle or two. I'm working my way through his next book, Too Many Curses, over my breaks. It's been time for me to go on a cracked-out fantasy binge.

I don't like Terry Goodkind. But I just saw the first few minutes of the TV adaptation of his books and I feel pretty bad for him. It's like someone took the general idea of the SoT series, lopped off any unpleasantness/extreme family-unfriendliness with an axe, scrubbed it over with a rough file for the fun of it, and ran it through a Lord of the Rings filter. My reactions to it (besides "Wat." and "Scene change, wat?") hinged on "This is wrong and this is wrong and this is--what?" The characters look all wrong, the canon's being nuked, the storyline's already inconsistent as hell . . .

And even though Goodkind's an objectivist nut, it really sucks that TPTB have bastardized his original concepts this much. What's worse, though, is that it's already a cookie-cutter standard fantasy trope. It's pretty much washed up on arrival--so when it finally hits Goodkind's truckload of cliches, things are just gonna get ugly.

Okay, so who's read The Watchmen?

We had a bit of a run on it at work after the trailer popped up ahead of The Dark Knight. I missed the trailer and thus missed out on didn't think much of it until zen_of_nihilism picked it up a little while back and I finally paid attention to the "One of Time Magazine's top 100 novels" thing.

Hooooly crap. Alan Moore writes the most epically FUBARed characters ever and I <3 him for it. To say "They're all crazy" is an understatement. From Dr. Manhattan's time-is-relative pedomgwtf to Nite Owl's psychosomatic impotence to Rorschach's absolute lyrical objectivist insanity--yeah, I wanna see how they do the movie now. :D

I picked up Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, am eighty-some pages in thus far, and like it very much. It's well-written, has engaging and interesting characters, isn't talking down to its audience in any way . . . It seems there's hope for kids' lit after all!

Now if Laurell Hamilton wasn't dropping poorly-worded . . . well, droppings on the back cover.

"After finishing The Graveyard Book, I had only one thought -- I hope there’s more. I want to see more of the adventures of Nobody Owens, and there is no higher praise for a book."
-- Laurell K. Hamilton, author of the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novels

I'd like to think she doesn't mean what I think she means, but I've seen her go on before and thus I ph34r the worst.

~~

I have most of a chapter for Field Research, haven't touched the initial book attempt in months, and keep plotting for NaNo and upcoming cons/shows instead of editing. I ph34r for me, too. D:

I picked up Karen Miller's The Riven Kingdom, flipped through it for a few minutes, and spent the next while wondering what was worse: the holy roller Sue from book 1 (Empress) having her atrocities be justified by her uncapitalized god, or the same holy roller Sue, now identified as savage and black, being the villain for a poor beleaguered properly-God-capitalizing white woman.

~~

I finished my ARC of A Lion Among Men a while back, tried to find words for it, and gave up a few times. Then I saw the display promoting it which said it's the final installment of the Wicked Years series. If this is the case, Maguire's going to have some fans hunting him down.

( spoilery tl;dr spoilers! )

There is one thing to say, though: Maguire gives credit where credit is due. His endnote is about how he accidentally lifted a history I don't remember seeing and a speech pattern for a minor character from a colleague. He cited it, pointed to the inspirational author for credit . . . and made me wonder what the hell's wrong with the authors who blatantly rip others off and then get lauded by morons who go on and on about how original and awesome they are. See: Sunny's Anne Bishop badfic/plagiarism of LKHamilton, whoever the recent woman is in the literature section who wrote AU Charlaine Harris fanfic (medieval telepathic woman is annoyed by hearing other people's thoughts, meets love interest vampire whose thoughts she can't hear, they fight crime & have adventures), Suzanne Collins's blatant Battle Royale ripoff, so on.

But yeah. Yay, Maguire. Nehh, Lion Among Men. I hope he goes back in to tie up those damned loose ends, but I can promise I won't glee nearly as much to get my hands on an ARC of his next work.

~~

I might pick up Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark again, since I haven't read it since '01 and could use a little bit of fluff. The show thus far is campy, has too much sex, and meanders into WTF territory for those of us who've read the book (Is the dog Tyler Durden? Why's Tara a racist moron with a persecution complex? What's with the compulsive masturbation, Sookie?), but . . . I'm watching anyway. So far. Maybe things'll change.

What scares me, though, is the upcoming tv series based on Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels. With True Blood they added the excessive amounts of sex--with Goodkind's Legend of the Seeker (not The Seeker: The Dark is Rising) they're gonna have to cut out some of the testicle eating, elaborately spiny namble cocks, and gratuitous Rapity McRapey-rape-rape-rape of however many thousands of women. I hope. D:

. . . I get the feeling I'm gonna watch the first one just out of morbid curiosity, just to see if the "Fire is evil!" speech makes any more sense out loud. Stop me plz.

I've never seen a fandom implode like this.

There's so much rage at the amazon.com forums, so much froth across the internet, so many (possibly NWS) macros and lists and sparkly text blocks and lulz at ohnotheydidnt, mmmcradle, and however many other places. Hell, professional reviewers like Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post are even taking giant bites out of it. There's also a movement starting for people to return their copy of Breaking Dawn if they hated it.


Seriously, yes, it is that bad. (I have links for downloading if you wanna see. It's terribly edited & terribly paced & terribly worded & terribly plotted in such a way that it almost makes the earlier works look good.)



But y'know, for the trash-talking SMeyer did on Rowling for taking so long with her books . . . Epic. Pwnt.

Picked up Danielle Steel's Rogue and cracked it open on a whim, just to see how bad it was. It was phenomenally bad. Sweet Jesus, her narrative is about as exciting and emotionally charged as a comma-heavy encyclopedia article written by a depressed octogenarian. It's poop, I tell you, utter poop--as if you didn't know already. :P

Started Steve Perry's The Musashi Flex and ended up putting it down. Perry's actually trained in Filipino knife systems and it shows with his fight scenes, which work pretty well (as opposed to the half-assed & barely described "knife dancing" in Karen Miller's Empress). He makes me wanna dig out my karambit and play with it. Unfortunately, his sentence structure clunks along sans semicolons and the big typo on the first page didn't really endear me to the work. I may go back for it later--just not now.

Gave up on Elizabeth George's Careless in Red around a sentence that rolled something like "running up and down his arms like the chilly fingers of a dead baby." You guys know me--it triggered a few dozen dead baby jokes and that was pretty much the end of that. Oh, Elizabeth . . . And I had such hope.

Started reading The Feminine Mistake. I think it needs more citations & a little less bias, but I'm still wading on through because I'm interested in a possible explanation for the sort of culture that'll make a runaway bestseller of Stephenie Meyer's wildly misogynistic & blatantly anti-feminist trainwreck. We'll see how this one goes.


(C. S. Lewis wrote the Christian fantasy epic. Pullman wrote the atheist fantasy epic. Meyer wrote the anti-feminist Mormon epic. Rowling wrote the boy wizard, and Paolini wrote the shameless Star Wars ripoff. I wonder what mine'd count as. Neo-pagan? Hmm.)

(I should really, really work on that first draft of BF&B more. But between that and the NYAF stuff and the wedding mess and random ficcage and the lolSue story clamoring for headspace, I really have no idea what the fuck I'm trying to create from one moment to the next.)

Next victim: Gideon Defoe, and his uber-cracky Pirates! novels.




Gregory Maguire's third book in the Wicked series, Lion Among Men, is due out later this year. I want to have a release party. I'd paint myself green and wander about with the uber-cute Ty lion. I think my store's higher-ups would be amused at the green-ness . . . but not enough to warrant a midnight release. Bah.

Oh well. If they won't give me a midnight release, I shall crack into the boxes myself and read it early, out of spite. :D

I think I found the worst sentence in the entire world.

Mysterious, this object drew Erika just as the lustrous eyes of Dracula drew Mina Harker toward her potential doom in a novel that was not likely to be a source for literary allusions suitable to the average formal dinner party in the Garden District but that was in her downloaded repertoire nonetheless.
Dean Koontz--Frankenstein, City of Night

Granted, this was on the first page I opened to, so the book may contain a whopper or six yet. But I showed it to one coworker, who went into shrieking gales of laughter and then demanded I find something worse to show her come Monday.
Likely? Not really. Bah.

~~

Current objective: get more stuff on etsy, get invitations printed, get red ribbon, and get t00bs addressed.

I'm about a third of the way into The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and am not quite sure what I think of it. The gist of the book is this: Freud and Jung arrive in New York City (yes, it's NYC again) as one young heiress is murdered and another rendered speechless by an unknown assailant. Psychobabble follows, along with a ton of extraneous detail & offshoot stories as padding. With Elizabeth George I know that all the little side stories will come into play. Here, I'm getting every impression that we don't need to know the exact amount of money Ms. Hoity-toity spent on X ball where she invited Y number of guests to a hall that was Z feet long and decorated with this, that, and the other (in these shades).

(It's like the Tolkien of period writing, in a way.)

The characters are what's getting me the most, though. Jung is thus far absolutely batshit insane. Now, I know Jung was crazy--though maybe newageamazon & I just ran into the wrong professor and Jung wasn't as crazy as we may think--but there's talking about collective unconsciousnesses playing into dream interpretation and there's being a frothing out-of-control neurotic lying racist. And on the other hand, Freud is idolized by the author main character author's self-insert, and behaves like an absolute saint. Sort of.

See, I think real!Jung was crazy but I think real!Freud was worse. I read Freud's case history of Dora once and decided that for all his analytic writings he really knew jack shit about women. So when book!Freud conversationally drops a recognizable (later cited if not footnoted) block paragraph from the Dora file of how the character "Nora" reacted with disgust to being accosted/molested & propositioned by a friend of her father's because she was really just sexually frustrated and wanted to do him? And the author's insert character (who still hasn't had a physical description--besides visually appealing, of course) is only defending her because he himself is attracted to the girl? Fuck no. Freud didn't seem to believe that a young girl could be skeeved by being assaulted by someone. No, Freud apparently believed that young girls respond sexually to everyone, no matter the guy's age or approach--thus putting them on a lower level than animals, who can and do choose whether or not to mate with one male or another. And his later claim (in the book--I don't remember if this was in the file) that the girl told her father about the assault just to get back at the guy for not pressuring her into bed? Yeah, no. But it's okay, of course, because book!Freud knows everything.

So yeah, between the quotes, the pacing, what looks like an authorial insert (The author did a thesis on Freud and loves Shakespeare. The main character loves Shakespeare and idolizes Freud, and is thus far described only as strikingly handsome and especially well-moving.), Freud being both Stu!Freud and jackass!Freud, and what looks like a wholesale vilification of Jung, I'm not sure that I'm gonna make it through this thing--which is sad, because the premise was definitely an interesting one. :(

I read Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain a few days ago and appreciated it much more than the first time I tried it out--which was on my break during an overnight shift somewhere towards the end of a seventy-hour week. Before the minimalism was a little too much--this time I meandered on through, noted the basic brutality of the human condition, picked out the turns of poetic phrase that are basically like crack to me, and liked it better.


I also got into Anne Bishop's Tangled Webs, another book set in the Black Jewels Trilogy 'verse, and liked it way, waaay better than Dreams Made Flesh. Basically, one of the side characters from the BJT (Surreal) gets tricked & locked into a death trap of a house, & has to find a way out without getting herself, her friend, or any of the accompanying kids killed.

The story plunks along pretty slowly in the beginning and somewhat predictably towards the ending, but premise-wise it's a thing of shrieking hilarity. A raging Stuthor gets pissed off that people don't like his book and decides to take it out on the people he hears making fun of it (Surreal, Surreal's male friend), the person who "snubbed" him by not sending a thank-you note or dinner invitation after being given a book (Daemon), indirectly at the person he claims stole his idea for a haunted house (Jaenelle)(when it's mentioned that he snagged his "human with talking animal companion" story from another author after seeing her popularity), and . . . Lucivar. Apparently Lucivar's just guilty by association.

Does this sound like anyone we know?

No, seriously: I know Bishop is a snarky someone, but is she snarky enough to be pointing the finger at a particular author or authors? Her characters in the BJT have names that tend to indicate something about them. Landry Langston (the Stu's name) might just be a play off of Landen, the term for non-magical humans. Maybe. And Jarvis Jenkell (the Stuthor's name) . . .

Meh. Could be anything--though it would probably be good form of her to bury the reference so far in that only a few people would get it.

Otherwise: Bishop's characterization is much better here. Saetan gets fleshed out a lot more; ironically, he's more human a character after he's left the human world to become an especially heckled & cranky librarian. Lucivar becomes more sympathetic; Marian becomes a little less the stereotypical romance novel heroine (but only a little). Daemon . . . is Daemon, but shows some insecurities, gets rumpled by his new duties, and is run over by Jaenelle a few times. And Jaenelle is no longer all-powerful and has to deal with that. There's some logical/plot/wording things left to question--No one knew where the house was but Marian and Jaenelle? Why were so many demon-dead aiding the person who'd killed them? Dear God, do you really think people speak like that? Don't tell me you snarked the infamous weeping cock but left "milking" in a supposedly serious sex scene! And plz, plz stop using the phrase "chained sexual heat"--but by the time Lucivar went into action I was too busy cackling to care. Much.

Overall: Don't go in expecting literature--this is pure, unrepentant fluff. It's better fluff than the previous fluff but it's still nothing spectacular or really serious. If you go in with low expectations, looking for just a few hours of fun read, you'll be set.

ETA: The short story at the end was a different flavor than the rest of the book and would probably be worth reading even if the rest of the novel doesn't appeal to you.

So I ran into the damndest thing in the world yesterday: A YA book that didn't blow. I also kinda crushed the entire thing in a few hours before realizing (at about 3am) that I needed to sleep.

( Say it ain't so! )

I tried reading Karen Miller's book Empress and ended up having to stop due to how much I hated the main character. ( Cut for rant and potential spoilers. )

This thing stands only as an extremely long-winded questioning of what it means when a person commits all kinds of atrocities in the name of god—and with that god’s approval. I’ve got an answer. It means that world would be a shit place to live. It also doesn’t make for a good story—at least not with that person as the supposed protagonist. This book is definitely one to pass by.

I have lost a book, and in doing so I've turned into one of our customers.

I know it's in the literature section, I know it's a QP, and I know the author's last name started with a later letter of the alphabet. I know it was released within the past three weeks. I know it had a brownish or grayish cover with a woman in 18th century clothes being held up by a non-Cassie-Edwardsed Native American man.

I know that when I opened it to a random page it damned near melted my brain.


The bit started with some beautiful youngish beautiful beautiful girl on a boat with her two pet baby moose. She was fairly lightly dressed for the season (winter) and was so wildly blindingly beautiful that half the bunch of guys on the boat took one look at her, grabbed the nearest female, and went flying behind some handy curtains for a screaming bout of fornication. The rest were standing there leering but unsure of how to go for her beautiful beautifulness (and certain virginity) . . . So a random blind fiddler (who can't see her to be overcome by her looks) starts playing, and they decide to have a dance-off for the right to nail her.

No. Srsly. Dance-off.

So half of 'em are dancing, and the people nailing each other are shrieking, and a blind pianist turns up from somewhere to play more music, (and the girl's just kinda standing there with her two moose), and the shrieking and stomping and dancing and music keeps going until . . . all their activity sinks the boat.

The guys are wearing winter clothes and all drown. The girl wasn't, and holds onto her moose, and makes it to shore and lives.



See, now I have to find it again to figure out if it's supposed to be parody or not.

ETA: The book was The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer, and he was supposedly going for beyond parody--and succeeded. :)

I just found freezer818's rundown of the second and third books of Janine Cross's Venom Cock series. (If you've somehow erased the first book from your memory, please tell me how here's crevette's sporking of Touched by Venom for a refresher.)

That being said . . . D: D: D: DO NOT WANT.



But on a happy note, Neil Gaiman's gonna put up his novel American Gods for free download. The ending of it still managed to turn somersaults while tying random bits of itself into happy little bows (read: convolution!), but I'd still recommend it. :P

I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death however long ago and found it to be one of those books that makes me happy while simultaneously making me really really fucking angry. (The main female character, Adelia, drops all pretense of being an independent woman when she decides to stick around in decidedly hostile territory for an obviously doomed relationship, as the mistress of a man she knows doesn't respect her.) So when Franklin wrote a sequel, The Serpent's Tale, I was a little iffy about trying it out; but then again, I really wanted to see if she'd done better the second time around.

She did better. Significantly better. The book pretty much starts off with Adelia's guy parading about the country while she stands off to the side with a baby tucked in her folded arms, muttering about how she hates him. I cheered. Then I slammed through the book in one night.

But sometime during my “Yay book!” writeup, I realized that she’d really just written the first book again.

The villains are still in the same sexual deviant vein: In this book, an assassin with a penchant for cross-dressing serves a religious figure whose murderous streak ties in to his inability to become physically aroused. In the first, the bad guys were a sadomasochistic predator nun who serves a pedophilic sadistic sexual predator (who can’t get a hardon while a woman’s being mean to him). Adelia gets kidnapped again and assaulted a few more times—once with more of a hostile approach, once by the bad guy with a kink in mind. She gets accused of being a witch again, though the accusations are once again cleared up by the royalty-on-premises and in this book the demented out-and-out Satanist is mostly ignored. And while we're at it, characters bludgeon the reader with once again demonstrate that it’s shitty to be a woman in the medieval ages. (Seriously, it’s like all the male characters turned into Slytherins this time, what with their overarching ignoble mentality. They all somehow manage to collectively not care when a minor character gets kidnapped and raped—instead, they think it’s funny. Page 277, hardcover: “A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.”)

Anyway. There's another case of regis ex machina at the end, and the normally chunky Rowley undergoes yet another drop in weight before it's time for another (single paragraph) sex scene. Hell, there's still problems with first-person narrated thoughts being sporadically italicized.


But damn it, the plot still charged convolutedly along, the historical detail has backing that's cited in the endnotes, and Franklin didn't fuck up the 'ship this time. Adelia and Rowley understand that they both care for each other and both seem to get that where they are is not a good place to be, and they're gonna work with things from there. I can definitely appreciate that.



From a reader’s perspective, this book was much better than its predecessor. From a ficcer’s perspective, I wanna see a lot of the aspects of this book played with. For example: A minor character is raised in a convent, falls in love with a poetry-writing minor nobleman, and plans to elope with him. But when he’s murdered she’s kidnapped, forced into marriage, and raped by a particularly brutish asshole who’s about twice her age. When the asshole’s executed for treason a few days later, she’s left with a title and a small fortune and the king-given right to never marry again.

She’s fifteen.

I want her story.



So yeah. It's a decent read if you like historical fiction and don't mind the author getting a little stuck on the trials of being a woman when the guys around you are a bunch of cocks. I've been to clubs. I know what that's like.


Started Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart. I like her characterization--she's very, very deeply rooted in the human condition and works the emotional pull hard--even if the story itself is thus far drawing distinct parallels to Stephen King's The Green Mile. I'll see how it goes.

Still reading Lovecraft. Still liking Lovecraft. Thinking of claiming Miskatonic University as my alma mater. I wonder how well that'd go over on a resume. :P

So I've picked up, cracked open, and put down the Twilight series a couple times now. What I've seen has done nothing but piss me off. WTFPlot? WTFUrple writing style? WTF, hundred year old anybody wants to be in high school again? WTF, he touches her and she turns into orgasmic goo? WTF, he calls her an idiot and it's okay? WTF, is this girl intent on proving him right? WTFSPARKLY VAMPIRES?!

newageamazon has made it through more of the books than I have. Mentioning Stephanie Meyer will invariably set her off on a high-volume rant. Thusly.

Note that with this rant, she's questioning what it is in today's society that's made a runaway bestseller series out of the romanticizing of a decidedly abusive relationship, where the guy treats the girl like shit and constantly tries to control her (Telling her where she can and can't go, or who she can and can't be friends with, WTF? Disabling her car or locking her in her house or emotionally crushing her "for her own good," WTF? Telepathic stalking, WTF?!) and the girl's entire existence revolves solely around him.


And people come trolling in to prove that our collective worst fears are true.

for NINETY percent of the time, Edward DOESN'T treat Bella like property. I think when girls say they want a boyfriend like Edward, they mean they want a boyfriend who is a gentleman, which Edward mostly is. Like I said earlier, Edward definitely has his issues with being overprotective, but the thing is he DOES love Bella - he doesn't just say it, he shows it in the books.

Because it's okay if the guy treats the girl like property as long as it's not the majority of the time? Because it's okay because he's supposed to love her--because the author tells us he loves her and he says it a few times?

the attraction to Edward is that he's a gentleman...not so much him. Some of the traits that can be considered as abuse like the ones listed above (while bigoted) aren't necessarily abuse. That's over the top protection.

. . . Words failing.

IT IS A BOOK,
i think that if half of you guys just got laid
your lives would be filled with more than bashing Edward Cullen,=.

And that one just speaks for itself.

Edward is dead, see, and he's not controlling! When did he once control bella?

. . .

Now using his "charm" to get her to do what he wants, wouldn't most people do that? I mean seriously, think about it: if you had the ability to make someone do ANYTHING you wanted them to, just by looking at them, wouldnt you use that? and if you say no to that, there is just no reasoning with you. And as for the controlling her, he is doing what he thinks is best. Now we may know that what is actually doing is not the best choice, but he doesnt know that!

So it's okay because he can. Or because he thinks he's justified.

I wanna see a fight to the death between Edward Cullen and Richard Rahl. May the most self-justified asshole win!

And yes, Edward has his moments of being opinionated and controlling, but I sware to you, he does care for Bella. Until he found Bella, he had spent many years alone. Would you want to lose something so great after having waited for so long to finally get it?

In the fact of him leaving her, he was trying to be selfless. He was giving her an opportunity to live her life, without him being involved in it. As for him dragging her along to prom, it was another case of wanting her to live as a human. He didn't want her to miss such a great experience. Edward has given Bella countless chances for her to to leave him, especially for Jacob. She is one who chooses to stay.

It's okay because he's been alone! It's okay because he felt she needed to have experiences, no matter what she wanted for herself! It's okay because she chose to stay with him!



Miseryxchord sums it all up pretty well towards the bottom:

miseryxchord: 01/25/2008 5:03 AM
Wow. Reading the comments here has been very educational... apparently:

1) It's okay to totally trash someone's opinion, accuse them of overreacting, and belittle their concerns, as long as you tack "but I respect your opinion" onto it.

2) If someone has an opinion that disagrees with yours, you should repeatedly lecture them on your right to disagree with them, while acting like they have no right to disagree with you.

3) The number of people who are excusing an abusive character's actions because 'He really loves her' or 'he's a gentleman the rest of the time' or 'he's only controlling because (insert excuse here)' totally justifiy Ashly's concerns for young women living in a society where they apparently believe an abusive person is a great catch, fiction or not. THEY (the people commenting here) are in the real world, and THEY are making excuses for his behavior in terms of a real person... he loves her, so it's okay.

So today we've learned that it's okay to squeal over a fictional character, but it's wrong wrong wrong to point out that character's faults or that they're built to be an exceptionally shitty person. We've also learned that excuses for the emotional abuse of a fictional character look almost exactly like the excuses given by someone in an abusive relationship. And that society is fucked.






And that spaghetti-o's plus the flu = nothing good. From an unrelated IM:

slinkeepie087 (2:01:24 PM): you know what is nasty to throw up?
slinkeepie087 (2:01:35 PM): Spaghetti-Os that are in the shape of letters
slinkeepie087 (2:01:46 PM): at one point i was like... oooh maybe i can throw up words!
slinkeepie087 (2:04:51 PM): i thought... in that sick way you are when you're vomiting.. for a quick second it was like... man if i threw up "Bbbblllllaaarrrrrghhhhh" id take a picture.