Mom said something which–to her–seemed completely innocuous to me when I came downstairs just now. She said, "You can bring whatever you're doing downstairs and just do it down here." Which really just shows kinda the misunderstanding going on.

As a general idea, that's a fine idea. But "what I was doing" was inextricably tied to the computer. A lot of what I do is, for better or for worse. And since the computer I use currently is a fixed-location type, that means I couldn't bring it down. Which I'm not terribly fond of either, I'd prefer more-mobile access, but it is what it is.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to paper, I guess. Paper's good as an artifact for consumption, as reading fiction (but not certain kinds of scholarly/intellectual-type work); and for certain kinds of reference; and at least some kinds of note-taking— I rather like editing with pen on paper, honestly. Not saying that it's efficient, but that's how things are. But paper's crummy for arguing, a halfway-decent internet discussion thread is much better, so long as the people involved aren't dicks— and if they are, the chance of a decent argument is right out no matter what. And paper's terrible for storage, as my recent experience with using both version-control and paper on the same writing project has shown me. Dear god is that a nightmare-in-waiting.

Now where did my point meander off to OH YE— no, wait, false alarm, I don't actually remember. Drat. Well, I guess this is just a drivel anyways. I dunno.

Review: Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk

Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk is a wonderfully preposterous bit of exquisite nonsense. Well. I say nonsense. Once you accept the time-traveling stegosaurus, and the goopy green space aliens, everything else makes perfect sense. (Well, except the piranhas.)

The father, the main character of the story, gets interrupted on the way back home with some milk—all-important for breakfast cereal and tea, you see—and in the course of his adventures ends up saving the world almost, but not quite, entirely by accident. Along the way he meets pirates, dinosaurs, aliens, space police, wumpires, and one Angry Volcano God. (But no piranhas.) He meets them all out of order, of course, and timey shenanigans are used multiple times to save the day. Twice, at the very least. (Hey, that's high for (what's nominally) a children's book.)

The book is illustrated in a Seuss-like manner. Well—. The illustrations don't look at all like Seuss's work, but otherwise they've got the same kind of absurdity look to them. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this review from memory, I don't have the name of the illustrator at hand.

Final Verdict: 8/10. Well worth reading, but may not be worth buying if you don't have kids who'd enjoy it. I liked it, but I don't expect I'll be buying a copy. I've been very spoiled by fanfic. (Mind you, I probably 'should' buy a copy, to support the existence of such books. But....)

Appendix π, "Monster Manual"

Bandersnatch

A fruminous creature, with incredibly strong arms and a long, downright extensible neck.

Fruminous Bandersnatch

Much like a Bandersnatch, except fruminous.

Cthu

Mad giants from the edge of unknown space. Half-dragon, half-octopus, and half-humanoid.

Stuff I've read this week

Maps in a Mirror (center): 675 pages. Read cover to cover in eight days. I think there may be something wrong with strange about me. Contains a whole mess of Orson Scott Card fiction, and bits of him commenting on it. Quality is all over the map, because this spans his entire career at least up until publication. (But does not cover his entire career. It's only a collection.) I could probably comment on individual stories, if asked.

Epic (left): 364 pages. Read in a day or two, but certainly under 48 hours. Took a break from Maps in a Mirror to read this. Set on a distant planet where economic life and a large fraction of the economy are based around a video game. YA, but there are strong undercurrents of moral and economic philosophy.

The art of Thinking Clearly (right, open): around halfway through, I've read something like 150-160 pages. A collection of short essays (generally 3-5 pages) on thinking errors. Each prevents the error in a colloquial way, some evidence and/or arguments for it, and usually some clues for how to avoid it. I'm not sure how useful it is. It's generally not perscriptivist, but I don't know whether that's a good thing. Though it probably is.

Not mentioned: the large amount of internet reading and downloaded computer-only reading I did this week. Nor the chunks of magazines I read.

Also not mentioned: The first three episodes of season one of Star Trek: Voyager I watched, the first three episodes of BBC's latest Sherlock I watched, or the episode or two of Star Trek: TNG I watched. I'm pretty sure I watched a bit of TNG, anyways. I liked Voyager better, so that's what I stuck with.

a journal

Day three. Or maybe Day 4. I really can't tell. I haven't been keeping track. It's too late now.

The space warping is starting to leak out. I'd swear I turned both alarms off last night. But instead the cd played straight through once and stopped. I figure this had to be a warp, because the alarm that stayed on is between the off one and the cd control.

Then again, maybe I'm just fatigued.

I'd made a deal with myself, of sorts. That's not a book you read at night. So of course, recently I've been up past one-thirty, two-thirty AM reading bits and pieces of it. The footnotes are sometimes the worst parts. It had never occurred to me that you could refer to a footnote that was on a previous page, or hadn't happened yet. And that's just the numbers.

I can do a reasonable job of faking being well-adjusted in the evenings if I've been away from the book all day. Then I go back and pick it up and it all falls apart.

---

It's funny, but this book is something of a microcosm of my life the past year. descending, deteriorating, obsessed. ending up strange places there can be no return from because they were never there. I think I need to get out.

I've been reading bits of the book out of order, but I discovered that Navidson has a book titled House of Leaves with him. I wonder at that. What manner of recursion is this? but because I read out of order I know almost nothing else about it. Only the page count, which differs from the page numbers in my version. I feel compelled to tally up all the pages in mine and compare.

The last thing to disturb me this much was Everything is Fine, where Fluttershy 'is' Johnny and the Minotaur.

notations

It's the commentaries on House that matter. Kind of like shakespeare, if you read the quotes.

"Saying House of Leaves is different for everyone who reads it is like saying a used car is different for everyone who drives it. And like that used car, that's a big part of the experience.
"i will not Deface a library book. But i will not remove my Postit annotations, either."
Inside front cover, behind the flap (but showing just past it).

"Knowing some of what this means gives me pause for thought.
"Yet what does it truely mean?"
Page xix, next to the Jan. 1997 note from Zampano.

"Are these colored scrawls part of the original book, or somebody's addition?"
Page xx. Picture attempts to show both scrawls.

"The most frightening thing in the world is man himself"
Page xxiii.

I feel, rather strangely, like I'm writing House of Leaves/Just Another Fool crossover fanfiction. Wonder where that came from?

Leaves

My (library) copy of House of Leaves came in today. I already know that mainly I don't know what to think of it. I bet it could make for a great (La)Tex leaning tool, trying to re-create it. Whoever double-spaces their sentences, though; I like that^[1].

Apparently there is also braille which my edition does not have. Has anyone got notations or pictures or somesuch of those?

Footnotes:

^[1]Their monospaced sentences, at least. I can't tell about the other ones (I haven't gotten to them yet, but I doubt I'll be able to tell even once I do get there).

Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Title says it all, really.

Interm review: The Book Theif

I've been reading The Book Theif recently. Dunno if I'm going to finish it, though. "Poised to become a classic" (USA Today) or no, I really don't know how to feel about it. It's got little formating quirks that really bother me. For example, around page 49 there's this thingy:

* * * AN IMPORTANT NOTE * * *
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule.

Nothing wrong with this factoid, of course. But it's offset like this, and I think it would be better put intergrated into the narrative. There's no reason it couldn't be. The book has pictures in it too, and the whole thing could just be a stylistic thing. But it's jarring and, in all the cases so far (that weren't in the prologue), in my opinion completely unnecessary.

Current Rating: 3/10 Dump it. The offset chunks are jarring and gratuitous. The message may well be good, but the writing style is off-putting.

Review: Of Mice and Men

I've heard about John Steinbeck for a while, but I've never read any of his stuff. A writer friend recommended him recently, so I finally picked up Of Mice and Men to give it a read.

Steinbeck. ZOMG Steinbeck. Where to start...

Review: Michael Vey: Rise of the Elgen

There are good books, and there are bad books. And then there are books that make you want to throw them across the room. This... is one of the later kind.

Plot-wise, Rise of the Elgen is ... okay, I guess. It's the second book in the Michael Vey series, and I've read the first one. I'm basing mostly on that, because I didn't finish this one.

Why? Because I've seen trollfics that were better-proofread.

Review: Legend

There are lots of books out there. Big books, little books; fantasy books, science fiction books; optimistic books, dystopian books. Legend doesn't do a whole lot to add to the collective definition of 'book'. It's just a book. But it's a pretty decent book.

Review: Hero

I love my books (well, reading materiel anything, but that's not the point just here), and I'll pick up anything that sounds interesting enough. Sometimes, that can get me into trouble. It's happened before, and there's flat-out nothing preventing it from happening again. This time, it was a book called Hero.

Review: The Wizard Heir

I picked up this book, The Wizard Heir, at the local library recently. It's got a nifty coverimage of a fancy magic staff, and a fascinating description that really made me want to read it.

It turned out that I'd read another book by the author in the same 'verse. I didn't notice this at first, I picked it up from the author description in the back some time after first picking it up. This was okay, I only very vaguely recalled the other book, and Wizard Heir recapped more than well enough to stand on its' own.

I rather kinda liked this book. The plot works quite well, it occasionally taking a while to get around notwithstanding, and she's got an interesting magic system going. The world is quite believable, and no, not because she uses real-world locations; it has to do with how it's written. I'd say she's put a good amount of thought into how this verse works.

Final verdict: I liked it. Go ahead, give it a read. I'll encourage you to check out The Warrior Heir too, but you don't really need to have read it to get this.

Review: Insignia

So it turns out I don't necessarily like doing reviews. Oh, they're great when I can do some sort of snarking or something, but that's about it. Or something.
Anyways, the point is that I'm doing a review because I'm doing a review and for no other reason.

This book Insignia has a very cool premise and setting, don't get me wrong. This kid who's made himself pretty much a professional video-gamer/con-man by necessity gets recruited into the government's remote-warfare program. All the kids in the program have computers in their heads that they use to interface with the bots/drones/whatever. Catch is, these computers can also exert some major control/influence over their minds.

The main character Tom isn't that good of a programmer. Most kids in the program aren't, frankly. Some pretty silly situations result from this, especially when the resident superprogrammer/superhacker goes on a rampage.

Some pretty disturbing situations result from this, as well. A bigwig at one of the superinternational megaconglomeratecorps tricks Tom something bad, and manages to heavily rewrite his brain. Luckily, the superprogrammer is one of his friends and installs a firewall package that cleans him right up. Their revenge on the guy is pretty intense.

However, Tom's one of -- as far as we know -- only two people in the world with a weird, impossible ability to work with any networked devices, not just ones designed to work with their brain comupters. The other person's on the other side. An Tom has to fight her.

Rating: 6.5 out of ten. It's kindof a fun read, but I dunno. I'm kind eh.

Review: Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman

I've been reading this collection of short stories called, simply, Stories, and edited by Neal Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. I try to make it a point to write a review, or whatever these things are, for everything -- or every hardcopy, anyways -- I read, but this presents a new and therefore interesting problem: How do you review an anthology?

Well, here's a li'l not-so-secret for you: I don't write these 'reviews' for you. I write them entirely for me. I read so much stuff, you see, that if I don't keep track of them somehow I will forget them. Which is, at least in part, why my reviews lean heavily towards plot summary. ( I'm sure there's a fair amount of "I'm not a good reviewer" in there too.)

So what happens in Stories? Well: Santa Clause is killed, and alternately revealed to be an alien. A character steps out of his story and becomes real. An author adds two paragraphs immediately after what could have been a "Lady and the Tiger" ending, and leaves us with no fewer questions, but a good deal more closure. Exacting, cold, and calculating retribution is taken for an unspeakable crime. A lunatic is put on trial, as is a sane man. Various forms of ghosts drop by. An impossible flying machine actually flys, and presumably gets picked up by aliens. A man climbs millions of stairs. Another man kills himself. Some rich nutcase gets it in his head that it'd be a good idea to literally give someone the things in the song "Twelve Days of Christmas". Through it all, they manage to stretch your imagination, give your brain a real workout. This is good.

The one I'm the most unsure about in the collection is one called, almost ironically, "Stories". It's got a unique flow, with a good number of commas. It's a little hard to follow at first, but it wraps itself up well near the end. The beginning doesn't make any more sense, but the context pulls it together and throws any need for the beginning to make sense out the window. There's less too it, in a poorly defined way -- I think 'having a moral' may have to do with it -- than with the others, even though it's longer than many of them.

Rating: an easy Seven or Eight for the collection. Not worth trying to rate the individual stories.

Mini pseudo-review: Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath

I finished Scott Westerfeld's 'Leviathan' Trilogy recently. It was pretty good.

The trilogy is set in an alternate history where World Ware One split actually rather neatly along the lines between the 'Clankers', who use technology we'd recognize as rather steampunk -- and quite advanced for the time, frankly -- and the 'Darwinists', who make use of Charles Darwin's discovery of DNA to mold living creatures into forms they can use. It's a handy technique used to cleanly delineate the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'. However, the story follows two kids from opposite sides of the war -- an Austrian prince named Alek, and a British airman named Deryn Sharp.
But this is (supposed to be) a conglomerate mini-review.

I can't speak properly to Leviathan, as it's been a fair while since I've read it. The cliff notes is that Alek's parents were killed, so he goes on the run and ends up in the Swiss Alps. Deryn (who's disguised herself as a boy so she could join the Air Force) and her ship end up there too, too badly damaged to escape on their own. They join forces, something that's presented as fairly odd in this book.

Behemoth takes us to Istanbul, which is rather blended compared to Europe. Though rather Clanker under German influence, their designs are heavily animal-inspired, and there's some minor indication that they use animals too. Alek and Deyrn assist a local revolution in order to prevent the war from ending unfavorably. There's lightning cannons and creative improvised weaponry, and apparently Deyrn's been in love with Alek and I missed it. Good book.

Goliath is probably the weakest of the bunch. It ties together a decent number of threads from the other books, and its tour of the Americas shows us that Clanker and Darwinist can get along. But its major plot, while well-written, seems rather cheesy, almost to the point of Deus Ex Machina (well, sortof -- God is the Machine, in the sense that the Machine doctor Tesla calls Goliath is supposedly going to end the war; but God has the machine, as Tesla has something of a god complex), compared to the other books. Still decent, just not as good. I wasn't fond of the way the core conflict was wrapped up.

Ratings:
Pass on Leviathan
Eight of Ten for Behemoth
Five of Ten for Goliath
Seven of Ten overall.

Review: Cinder

Cinder is an interesting little mash-up. The title character is a cyborg, and I picked it up because she goes to the ball. Parallels, anyone? Took me fairly by surprise however, it's rather deeper than I expected to go. Being more involved this way means it does have the potential to go a lot further than I expected, though.

Cinder is of course a sci-fi novel. In this future, the world has picked itself up into a fairly small number of large nations following I think it was world war four. Robots and magnetic hover-cars are the norm, and humanity is dealing with a massively infectious and always-fatal virus. Meanwhile, the queen of the Lunars, an offshoot of humanity who live on the moon and have psychic powers, wants to take over, and to that end has been trying to get the emperor of China to marry her for something like decades. How long is never said exactly, but it's been a while. Cinder, who as a side effect of being a cyborg is the best mechanical engineer in the city, gets thrown into all of this when the prince brings her a robot to fix and ends up falling for her.

Maybe I'm just good, but I was able to predict chapter thirty-seven's big twist way back in chapter four. A couple of twists I wasn't expecting, such as Cinder being immune to virus and her doctor being a Lunar. I think it works out okay though, since this turns out to be the first book in a series. The others I expect to veer off in their own direction relative to what I was expecting from this one. I don't normally like reading the first book in a series before the rest of it is out, but this one works pretty darn well as a stand-alone. I'll keep an eye out for the rest (according to the coresponding front panel, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter).

Rateing: Seven and a half out of ten.

Review: Ready_Player_One

Ready_Player_One is a sci-fi/video-game novel set in the not-to-distant future. The real world has been thoroughly trashed by humanity's continued expansion, and so most people spend all their time logged into a virtual 'world' called OASIS. Then the guy who created OASIS dies, and basicly leaves control of OASIS, as well as his vast personal fortune, to whoever can solve a sequence of puzzles he created (and based off of the eighties of his childhood) as an "Easter Egg".

The book follows one of the fanboys/'professional' egghunters named Parzival. (Well, he has a real-world name, too. It's Wade. But it doesn't really come up.) Years after the first announcement of the contest, Parzival stumbles on the first part of the easter egg, and accidentally tips off everyone else looking for it, including a major megacorporation conglomerate that wants to take control of the OASIS and basicly lock it up forever. Now Parzival and a couple of other 'gunters' are in a race to solve the entire puzzle chain before them.

I greatly enjoyed the book. It knows its popculture, and weaves it together expertly. I found the review-o-blurb inside the front flap kind of disappointing, though. Combined with the cover, it gave me the impression that a fair amount of the book took place in the real world, like James Bond, Bourne, or Spy Kids. But practically the whole thing, including most of the real action, is in OASIS. It does make a few stops out into reality though, and those are good.

[SPOILERS AHEAD] My biggest gripe with the book is actually with the handling of Aech. Aech is Parzival's best friend, at least at the start of the book. In the last fourth or so of the book, they meet up in the real world for the first time, and it turns out that instead of being a guy like her avatar, Aech is actually a girl.

Now, Parzival has fallen for another of their little save-the-world treasurehunting group, Art3mis. This makes her the designated love-interest. Which is fine, don't get me wrong; but at the reveal I was hoping that Aech could challenge that, and by extension the entire Trope. Instead, she's a lesbian. It's handled fairly well I thought, considering it's mostly irelevant and how close it is to the end of the book; but the missed opertunity bugs me, perhaps more than it should. [END SPOILERS]

RATING: A high eight out of ten, would read again.

Review(s)

The Brave Little Toaster

Whelp. That was fairly short.
The only word I really have to apply to this story is "beloved". I don't see why, though. The movie, sure, I could see that. But not the book. Although, it did help explain some half-remembered scenes from the movie.
Rating: Out of ten stars, four and a half. Five, tops.

In the Forrests of Serre

Not bad, I guess. Not really my thing.
It's a well-developed setting. On the other hand, it moved too slowly overall for my tastes. It did pick up after about, mm, a quarter of the way through, so don't judge based on that.
Some good twists. I could accurately say that there were several I was not expecting, but I wasn't 'expecting' any one way or another for most of the book.
Rating: Out of ten stars, I'd say about five point nine.

Tim

...Interesting.
Tim turns out to be a romance novel. I suspected that would prove to be the case when I first picked it up, but it took me by surprise. Pretty good read, actually. Even one or two decent twists. It's not 'my thing', but it's still fairly good. Just not my genre.
Rating: Six of ten. I'm not sure what the bottom five stars are for?...

More to come. Now I just need %$@! posted.