As promised, a few notes on Growing Up Comic, the comic book handed to me at the climbing gym last night by the writer/artist, Matt Roscetti. (Who is a MUCH better climber than I am.)

I really liked it. Reminded me a little of Bone and Tales of the Beanworld in (respectively) the art style and the lightness of approach. The narrative is a little coincidental, but engaging and it kept making me smile. Very comforting on a rough morning. (I'm waiting to take the Complaint Department to the vet, as she got into an altercation with the GRD this morning because I was an idiot and didn't make sure the airlock door was shut while I was carrying some stuff through from Dog Zone to Cat Zone. I thought she was smart enough to stay upstairs. I guess not.

Anyway, she appears to be fine, but we're getting her a checkup anyway.)

This is what I get for planning a relaxing day off.

Anyway, back to the comforting comic book, which helped a lot with the wait, and which I think generally deserves your attention,

Cover:



My favorite splash page:



Matt's web page is at www.daydreamcomics.com, and the book can be ordered online for nine bucks.

I guess that makes it #50.

As I write this (I will post it later) I am working on my laptop in a cafe. I am not fooling anyone.

And now I am home and it's later.

skogkatt made it down for the study date, and we were virtuous together. Not only did I get 2700 words on Grail, which puts me at 103 pages and 20,000 Word words.

One quarter of a goddamned book.

Yeah, I had forgotten how satisfying that is.

And I just filed my copy for a book review. So my wordcount for the day is around 3500K, and I am taking tomorrow (the hell) off.

A convenient thing about the [bracket notes] thing as I write. It gives my internal editor a place to put its bile and grue, without actually slowing me down long enough to think of the right word.

It's almost like how fast I could write when I didn't know how.


Books read since last update:

47. Margaret Ronald, Spiral Hunt
[comments redacted pending formal review elsewhere]


48. Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock
Oh, my God, I loved this. It's everything those Orson Scott Card books should have been, and more so.


49. N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
[comments redacted pending formal review elsewhere]


And a nice boy gave me his comic book at the climbing gym tonight, and it looks awfully pretty. So I shall read that tomorrow, and maybe the Girl Genius omnibus I have not read yet. And then I will tell you about them.

46. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

Tuchman's still a genius. This is four hundred pages of detailed exegesis of the first month of WWI, complete with snark, personlity profiles, and a healthy dose of mid-twentieth-century cultural baggage. It includes sentences like, "This was not necessarily a deliberate attempt to be offensive; it was normal for General Staff officers to be offensive."

It's a brilliant book, and it proves to me again that I find military history right up there with watching paint dry.

I did get lots of ideas for miserable things to do to cavalry, though.

43.)  Richard Price, Lush Life

...this is a really, really good book.

Okay, so I heard the author interviewed on NPR, and he seemed interesting and I like literary crime novel type thingies. And this sucker just blew me away. I love the characters, the generosity of spirit this book has towards everyone in it, even as it exposes their frailties--and that goes for New York City as well as for the people.

It's mostly very spare, carrying itself almost entirely on dialogue, and the dialogue is great.

Possibly the best book I've read so far this year.

41.) Aliette de Bodard, Servant of the Underworld (ARC)

A rather good first novel set in pre-Spanish Mexico, involving dark gods, murder mysteries, and imperial politics. I am not overly familiar with the culture, but the level of detail was convincing to me. I do think there was a certain amount of hesitation and repetition and temporization that could have benefitted the book by its extraction. However, we expect a certain hesitancy of line in an early work.

I'm going to be blurbing this one when I think of something clever to say about it.

42.) Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

Sadly, I suspect Professor Scarry could have been an exceptional prose stylist, if academia had not ruined her. There are flashes of very nice writing in this, an otherwise often impenetrable labyrinth of Oxford commas, vague qualifiers, and complex-compound sentences.

I disagree with a whole spectrum of her premises and conclusions (about the nature of play, about art and how it presents pain and whether it addresses pain's effects on human consciousness (I do note that many of my reflexive counterexamples to her arguments--Alan Moore, Criminal Minds--post-date this 1985 book; others however--1984, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"--do not.), about the very discussibility of pain) but it's a valuable and an interesting book and I'm glad I read it.

Sadly, I find myself feeling that her discussion of "procedural rights" (the right to vote; the right to free speech) versus "substantive rights" (the right to health care; the right to a livelihood) in the United States is just as relevant today as it was during the dark days of the Reagan administration.

Anyway, either this book or low blood sugar has made me very crabby.

40.) Alma Alexander, The Secrets of Jin-shei

I have mixed emotions about this book--it has amazingly written passages, and some incredibly rich, detailed worldbuilding, and some of the coolest conceits around--but I found it structurally somewhat frustrating (a little too meandery and unfocused*, and a little too hard keeping the characters straight) and in the end, depressing as a fork in the eye.

Wow. This is one dark world, and that's me saying so. Nifty, though.


*As a reader, I am such a structure queen, I tell ya.

37. ) Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix

I found the first three fourths of this sort of random and aimless, but I really enjoyedt he ending--especially how it works out in ways I didn't anticipate.

38.) John Bellairs, The Figure in the Shadows

Rose Rita FTW!

39.) Jon Loomis, High Season

Yep, that's Cape Cod all right. I had fun with this--it's well-written in the sort of random-POV-by-chapter thriller style, and the characters are engagingly quirky in that glossy Not A Literary Mystery kind of way.

Where are my thunderstorms, dammit? I was promised thunderstorm!

Book # 36 Sharman Apt Russell, An Obsession with Butterflies

Nifty natural history, but not as revealing as her others that I have read.

Book #37, Roald Dahl, Matilda

Somehow, I got through childhood without ever having read this. Charming, but the superpowers are a bit random.
.

---

Still freaking exhausted. I may have to admit to myself that I am actually sick. No fever, but eyes hurt and I'm exhausted and mildly photophobic.

Tired now. That was the shortest week of my life, and one of the most fun. I miss you guys already, and I hope you're having a good time with Nalo.

Today was devoted to travel home from Seattle. Along the way, I finished an ARC of cmpriest's Boneshaker, which I enjoyed greatly. I thought the start was a little rocky, but once it settled down into present-day narrative and got its legs under it, it barely slowed down for breath ever. At Clarion West, I finished Sean Stewart's Nobody's Son, which was beautifully written but seemed to me to be another one of those stories where the primary conflict is men dealing with problematic relationships with their fathers, and while I realize that this is a common issue for my XY compatriots, it's not one that gets its squids in me.

Anyway, those were books # 34 and 35, and I'm nearly done with 36.

Tomorrow, the deathmarch through Chill begins again, as I really need to send it back to Anne as soon as possible, both to meet my deadline and so she will pay me. Yay, money!

Just got back from a really delightful Clarion West Party, and I have realized over the course of a wonderfully social day that I am still thinking--and telling people--about gregvaneekhout's debut novel Norse Code. I was talking with friends today about something that the book does really well, which is that it gets a peculiar and wonderful aspect of Norse mythology: Einsteinian time. Time as a navigable dimension,as it were (and I love that he has Fenrir, among others, explaining this.)

Essentially, in Norse mythology, all events are inevitable because they have already happened and are eternally happening. A wyrd or fate is not an inalterable future, so much as a part of the present we have not yet experienced. It's a tremendously fatalistic worldview, it's true, and so inimical to modern American culture that it's rare to see it done well in English-langage fantasy, or even touched upon--acknowledged--at all.

Greg does a great job with it, and that delighted me, and I meant to mention it before.

What's also tremendously cool about Norse myth is the way things are both symbolically and literally their names. So Thor (as an example) can be an individual--the god of thunder, who carries a hammer which strikes like a thunderbolt (which IS, in fact, a thunderbolt, Mjollnir that smashes...); and he can also symbolically be the god of thunder, a personification of random violence and flash-fire temper; but he is also, all at the same time, quite literally, thunder in his own person.

Ahem.

Anyway, it's really really cool.

I'm writing this at cruising altitude somewhere East of Seattle. A string of thunderstorms brought us low--we had to detour to Denver and refuel, so predictably my arrival in Seattle will be some three hours later than planned. Yep, I love to travel.

I did manage to put the time in the air to good use, though--revisions on Chill have reached page 208. I gave up there, because I was not having a lot of brilliant ideas for the new scene I have to write, but it seems to be mostly coming together nicely--and hey, halfway done!

I also accomplished an awful lot of reading, about which more below:

Book 31, Greg Van Eekhout, Norse Code.

The title is trying way too hard. But the book itself, while I did not utterly fall in love with it, is a cheeky, fast-paced, suitably apocalyptic romp through Ragnarok, to which (predictably) I am entirely sympathetic. I did find that it had one quality that I find in most urban fantasy these days--it felt a little superficial: I wanted more crunch. But that is usually just me.

And it did keep making me laugh out loud. Just saying.

Book 32, Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy

Another one that wasn't quite for me through no fault of its own. There's a whole subgenre of beautifully written, steampunky high-gore fantasy about generally reprehensible people that I think just has too many guy cooties for me: they don't fill me with love. Examples include China Mieville's Iron Council, Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, Jay Lake's Trial of Flowers, and so on. Since they are generally well receeived by people who are not me, I am forced to accept that the fault lies not in the books, but in myself.

Book 33, Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe

Meh. Although the copyright is 1997, this book of military history appears to me to have been written in the 60's. It feels tremendously dated. I also find myself questioning some of his postulates--at one point, for example, he says that the Russian Army in 1941 was the best-equipped in the world, which doesn't jibe with my understanding.

Anyway, I did find some tiny lovely little bits I am stealing for The Steles of the Sky, like the horse-hoof scale armor and maybe some bits of the story about what happened when they exhumed the skull of Timur Leng and incurred his curse. (Hint: the Russians did so in 1941....)

Also, I wanted more economics and politics, and fewer descriptions of battles.

And now, I may endeavor to nap, and post this when I have landed.

#30, Shannon Hale, Enna Burning

I really enjoyed the first half of this. The second half made me want to shake the protagonist until some sense rattled into her head.

#29: Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

Too much boyfriend three-year-old, not enough Neanderthals.

#25, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mindhunter
#26, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Obsession

Finishing off the reread. Always on the lookout for those telling details. What can I say?


#27, Nisi Shawl, Filter House

A collection of ingenious, varied short stories, justly hailed. nisi_la is possessed of enormous sentence-level craft and a richly varied, wild and alien imagination which in some stories reminds me of Connie Willis and in some is all her own. My favorite is "The Pragmatical Princess."


#28, Sharman Apt Russell, The Anatomy of a Rose

I really like Sharman Apt Russell. This book is a kind of sensual barrage, a skeet-shoot of information and cleverness, brief and fast-paced.

#23: Anonymous, tr. by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, The Good Wife's Guide

I'm not an expert on medieval France, but I sure know a heck more about it than I did before I read his. Also, I am so very glad I am not a medieval Christian woman.

That is all.

#24: John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, The Cases that Haunt Us

Speculative behavioral profiles of various notorious killers through time, from Jack the Ripper forward, with discussion of how a modern task force might have handled the crimes. Interesting and useful--I rather thought the Jack the Ripper and Lindbergh chapters were best, and the Jon-Benet Ramsay one more focused on explaining what went wrong with the investigation than what might have led to the crime. I would personally have rather had another seventy pages on the Zodiac, but you take what you can get.

#22: Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

What an unutterably beautiful book. That is all.

21. Steve Lopez, The Soloist

A series of linked essays by a newspaper columnist, detailing his relationship with a homeless musician. Really quite good, managing to be compassionate and plainspoken without soft-peddling or glossing over the complexities of the situation.

I should go upstairs and get the next book now, but the urge to nap is rising.