HSU IT Department

...how the mighty have fallen. But it's nice to know you have a sense of humor :)

I so much wanted to love Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, with its odd photographs and mysterious grandfather and menacing hollow creatures and, well, peculiar children, but I couldn't, not quite. I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. The use of photographs was clever, the idea of living inside a time loop intriguing if a bit fuzzy in its logic, but I had two biggish problems with the book as a whole.

The first is a lack of good pacing/tightness. Ideally a book hooks you immediately, the tension gradually ratchets up as you go on, until you have a nice big finale. In this case, most of the gripping stuff came at the beginning; although the rest has some good bits it struck me as somewhat meandering and unfocused. The second was that the main character, rather than maturing through the course of the book, seems instead to become more childish (perhaps it's a side effect of hanging out with beings that have been children for 80+ years?). I can't recall when/if his age is given, but based on how he's presented at the beginning I would have guessed him to be 17 or 18; by the end he comes across more like a 13 or 14-year-old.

Then there's the fact that it's obviously a setup for a sequel, which I didn't know ahead of time and which was therefore irritating. (Does no one write good standalone novels any more??) So all in all, I give it a resounding "Meh."

Lives up to the title, "Year's Best." The best collection of short-form SF I've read in quite a while. All the stories are top-notch, with a wide mix of voices, settings, topics, length, styles and approaches. There are tales of post-apocalypse, space adventure and genetic modification; there are children and old men and guitar-playing dinosaurs and even a sort of steam-punk female Napoleon.

The only disappointment was the last one, a modern riff on the Benandanti -- I'm a fan of updated/retold folklore and fairy tales and I don't mind unreliable narrators or meta-fiction so I was intrigued at first, but in the end this comes across as too self-conscious an exercise in cleverness by both the narrator and the author.

Now, what to read next?? I can't decide if I want to re-read The Stand (about which Mr Psmith and I had a rousing debate last night, regarding the absence of a religious element among the bad guys) or tackle 11/22/63. I also have to finish Swansea Girl. Lots to do!

(N.B. The fact that I am STILL getting ZERO notifications from LJ, and my ISP apparently can't be bothered to look into it or even respond, is SERIOUSLY vexing me...)

People seem to be rather polarized over this book; either they love it or they hate it. Well, I loved every bit of it and yup, I cried at the end -- partly due to the lovely unspooling of the story itself, but partly because I didn't want to let these characters go. I wanted to stick around and see Cordy's baby and what happened with Dan, Rose in England and how she blossomed, how Bean learned to be Bean and not some imaginary Sex in the City chick. The writing is clear, vivid, lively; the characters are three-dimensional, believable, so very human; and the situations and interactions are so real -- the warmth, humor and love as well as the anger, fear and irritation. If you have a sibling, you will identify with these people. If you don't, read this and you'll know what it's like.

Each of the sisters -- Cordy, Bean and Rose -- has a distinct, unique personality, but in some ways they are strangers to themselves as well; they've each reached point where the old ways aren't enough. One of the joys of the story is watching each sister unfold new parts of herself, recognize that what she had thought was a strength might instead be not just a weakness but an actual burden, realize that she is free to say, "What if...?", that she has the courage to make new choices, let the old ways go and welcome the new.

My mother is one of three sisters. I plan to buy three copies and send it to all of them...

Much goodness this weekend!

Goodness the first: Friday night Mr Psmith and I saw The Marriage of Figaro -- a great performance, not just well sung but well acted with lots of physical comedy. I kept thinking how much it reminded me of the old screwball comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Figaro was a riot in his facial expressions and movements and had a fabulous bass-baritone voice, and I even liked the sopranos, which usually I don't, finding them too screechy. Countess Almaviva in particular was lovely, very smooth and lyrical. I was a little thrown by the fact that Cherubino was played by a female; I know that minor "page-boy" parts were often played by women but it was a little odd to hear her singing about her infatuation with the Countess. And everyone else. Bonus: The venue has changed its policy and now allows you to take drinks into the performance hall, meaning you don't have to slam your intermission merlot. Sweet!

Goodness the second: Saturday was a stunningly gorgeous day so Mr Psmith and I decided to venture downtown for dinner. We chose a brew-pub we hadn't eaten at in a long time; it was the first day that their outdoor seating area was open, and lo, we got a table! Mr Psmith had an elk-burger with Black Magic Stout and I had a catfish burrito with a nice peppery merlot, all eaten outdoors in the sun and the breeze while people-watching (some very funny) and car-watching (some very posh!). And the waitress had some amazing ink, an octopus that twined two-thirds of the way down her arm. I do love seeing good ink, although I have none of my own.

Goodness the third: Today was also a stunningly gorgeous day so we opened all the windows and doors, chasing out the winter staleness and making me feel as though I were outside even though I had to work (after helping Mr Psmith put up the trellises -- trelli, trellorum? -- for the clematis, of course). I completed an editing project for client and then rewarded myself by (finally!) taking the time to write up a long-overdue response to a friend's excellent novel manuscript. It's a classic space mystery/adventure with wonderful characters and many twisty plot strands, all cleverly integrated in a highly satisfying ending, so I really enjoyed writing a nice long meaty feedback/critique. I hope she sends it off to a publisher, because it's as good as anything I've read and better than many.

Now, off to grade some student projects and then (since the kitchen is still a war zone) wash dishes in the bathtub and order pizza for dinner. Nomz.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes advantage of the flash mob craze to promote the re-opening of the museum. This is SO COOL. I mean, it has HORSES!! (There's more on the video here, if you're interested.)


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Our local zoo does occasional special fund-raising events focused on a particular animal. You pays your money and you get to come to the zoo in the evening, have drinks and hors d'oeuvres, the keepers give a little talk about the species (both in general and specifically about the ones at our zoo), and then you get to do some kind of special behind-the-scenes activity. We've done several of them: for the lions, we got to get up close near their cage (you could feel them eying you, thinking "Hm, they look tasty..."), for the primates we got to watch a training session, etc. So Mr Psmith and I went to one on Thursday about penguins and the special thing was...we got to actually pet a baby penguin!!! It was so amazing, so soft and warm since it still had all its downy grey baby feathers. Very sweet.

The zoo is also doing major construction work, and as we were leaving we saw they had posted this on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area, which we giggled over and thought rawther clever esp. the bit about "loud vocalizations lol :)

The Western black rhino was declared extinct today, and the top story on Yahoo News was Suri Cruise's new haircut.

[Edit: The link above was to an old news item, sorry, and now I can't find the correct one. Curse you, interwebz! However, in trying to find it, I did learn that they've found footprints of the Sumatran rhino someplace where they thought it was extinct, so the news isn't all bad. Still...]

Humanity, I weep for you. And yes, that's a poem, so it counts as one of my 100 Things. *sigh*

Well, I did not get accepted to Clarion West. It was a very complimentary and encouraging rejection ("very competitive group...our readers were impressed with your work...please apply again..blah blah blah") which of course I immediately think, "Oh, that's what they tell everyone."

How could they not recognize my genius? How??! Grrrr.

However, this means that Mr Psmith and I can once again do season tickets to our local Ren Fest, which is a Nice Thing. A chance to ponce about in hoop skirts and a tight bodice while drinking ale and singing bawdy traditional folk songs is not to be sneezed at.

Things have been mad busy on other fronts, between trying to finish a freelance job which has been postponed twice (by the client, not by yrs truly) but is now nearing completion (which means yay, I can soon get paid), Mr. Psmith's birthday yesterday (which required baking the family-tradition Grandma's Dark Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Boiled White Icing, a terrifically sticky endeavor with a profoundly delicious conclusion), a two-week guest lecturing stint for a graduate-level course, the need to assist in the testing phase of a standards revision, and of course the usual work stuff.

Plus I'm in the middle of re-reading Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, which is soooooo good I can hardly put the book down. I nearly came to an untimely end yesterday as I had my nose buried in the second volume while walking from the parking garage to work and tripped merrily off the curb into traffic. Good thing that lady in the green Kia had had her morning coffee.

Phew. No wonder I'm tired.

A man has died of rabies from a kidney transplant. After seventeen months. Yay, now we can worry about long-incubation period rabies! The lesson here I guess is take good care of your kidneys so you don't need a new one.

So, The Infinity Concerto. I loved Greg Bear's Blood Music, and the title, summary, and about the first third of this book intrigued me very much, which made me all the more disappointed when it all went flat. Bear incorporates some excellent fantasy elements -- Lamia, the Crane Women, humans confined to a sort of ghetto in the realm of the Sidhe, the mystical power of music -- but he never seems to effectively meld the components into a coherent whole.

The most obvious example is music: the title has the word "concerto" in it, Michael's translation into the Realm is instigated by a composer, nearly all of the humans in the Realm are there because they experienced a mystical response to music (either playing or listening), no musical instruments are allowed in the Sidhe realm and it's mentioned more than once that the Sidhe dislike human music, etc. But in the end, all of that is completely irrelevant. Music plays no part whatsoever in the central conflict of the book, either in its unfolding or resolution. That was a major "WTF?" for me.

Another example of apparently important but ultimately unincorporated story elements is Eleuth: she loves Michael to the point that she dies for him but in the end her death means nothing, since he learns nothing from it and it has no effect on his quest, his training, his knowledge, or even his emotions! Many of the other characters such as Nikolai, Lin Piao, Savarin, the Sidhe horse, even Lamia suffer from this same lack of integration into the plot. As a reader, if I spend time getting invested in characters -- learning not only their names but little things about them -- I expect that investment to be returned somehow. The ROI on 95% of the characters in this book is about zero.

It wasn't just characters that floated about unattached. Since the main character is initially completely at a loss about what's going on, so is the reader. This is not a problem if the main character slowly begins to piece together the puzzle, carrying the reader with him or her. That didn't happen here, at least not for me. The back-story about Mages battling each other and turning each other into Earth(?) animals was intriguing but I had a lot of trouble following how it was connected to the Michael's story, what with the muddle of humans, Sidhe, gods and Mages who are, or pretend to be, each other, or something else. There also seemed to be a lot of extraneous information that wasn't integrated into the story (interstellar Sidhe travel, for example, and the weird brass cylinder floating in the Maelstrom).

This is at bottom a quest tale, which by definition means that the main character undertakes a journey, with a goal, and he changes along the way. Here again, Michael's journey and growth seemed to be largely unconnected to the climax of the story. His goal was never clear even to himself; his training consists of a lot of running, learning to generate heat so he doesn't need a fire, and throwing shadows to distract attackers. The "power" he uses at the end to defeat the Isomage is that he's a poet - but he was a poet from the beginning, so nothing about his journey has anything to do with it.

As a minor nit, I totally stopped caring about Biri when it's revealed that the first task he's assigned on joining the Sidhe version of the priesthood is to kill his horse, and he does. Maybe it's Bear's shorthand for demonstrating that the Sidhe are irredeemable bastards, but I think there are more sensible ways to demonstrate it. Besides, it doesn't really jibe with their other characteristics, such as nature magic and becoming trees after death.

This is a lot to say about a book that I didn't much like, but I think it's because it had so much potential and it vexes me that the potential was unrealized. (By comparison, Andre Norton's Dread Companion is a similar story about a human being translated to the Faerie Realm, but it does a much better job (maybe because it doesn't try so hard). I re-read that one on a regular basis.)