Nine Muses

I’m re-reading Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Sequence and am finally on the last book, Silver on the Tree.  I’ve come to a bit where a man is talking to the main character’s family about a bullying his son participated in a few days before.  This all takes place in the U.K. and the book was written in 1977.  The target of the bullying is a Sikh boy.  This father is going on about those Pakistani and Indian people and how they’re take jobs from honest Englishmen, live 16 to a house, and take advantage of the national healthcare system.  It’s funny (not the ha-ha sort of funny, either) that this is such a precise parallel of the sort of attitude we see here in the U.S. today, especially in CA and the southwest, regarding the Mexican immigrant workers.  I guess that sort of ignorance and stupidity is timeless.

Sheesh, I haven’t updated since September?  I knew it had been a while, but this is just excessive.

So, I had a baby and she’s six months old and beautiful.  She has her own blog.  Ask me for the link if you want it.

I’ve hardly had any time to play games for the last six months.  I just reinstalled Diablo 2 this last week once they announced Diablo 3 was coming out.  I finally managed to get some time to install the expansion for NWN2 as well, but then decided to finish the main campaign first, since I’m so close and someone totally lied about the expansion not following after the main campaign.  It totally does!

I’m also waiting eagerly for Fallout 3 and Spore.  I’ll link to my Spore page later if I can figure out how to do it.

I’m also also re-reading some classics from my tween years right now: I’m about halfway through “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and “The Grey King” (Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series).

Oh, yeah, and I took up knitting.

More comprehensive updates will hopefully come later, as I think I’m turning the corner on being able to find the time to type up a thing or two.

I don’t remember the earliest things I read so well. I remember reading a fair amount of non fiction about whatever caught my interest. (Horses, castles, dinosaurs, wildlife, etc. I could go on, if I tried.) One of the earliest books I distinctly remember reading was Escape to Witch Mountain when I was maybe eight or nine years old. I checked it out from the school library. I was already reading voraciously then, so I’m sure there were many others. I’ve just lost the memory of them in the general fog my childhood memories have become.

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Ugh. I had to put “Waking the Moon” down. I’m halfway through it and I’ve decided to take a little break.

It’s not a problem with the writing style. The author’s prose is wonderful. It’s just… so much angst, it seems… something like that. It’s almost hard to put my finger on.

I guess it’s that we’ve spent half the book establishing the roles of both sides of the conflict, and the blah personality of the person caught in the middle of the conflict. (And really, she’s not very interesting other than that she’s caught in the middle of this situation — though I think that’s the point. She’s ordinary, caught up in the extraordinary.) And everything I read is just more of what I’ve been reading for the last couple hundred pages, it feels like.

This book was highly recommended and very well reviewed. I’m wondering what I’m missing at the moment. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it… I just keep wondering when things are going to start happening.

Technorati Tags: Books Fantasy Literature Elizabeth Moon

So, I’m reading this book by Elizabeth Hand called “Waking the Moon,” and I’m just really not sure who the good guys are. It’s at least apparent who the protagonist is, but since she’s not sure who’s good and who’s not either, that’s not much help.

There’s the Benandanti, who are saying that the Goddess awakening will bring chaos and darkness and all that, and you think they’re the good guys at first, especially since the Goddess seems a bit on the bloodthirsty side.

At the same time, you find out that for thousands of years, these men have barely tolerated women at all, and have done all they can to squash anything, religious or secular, led by women.

So, I’m halfway through, I’m intensely into the book, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I guess that’s a sign of a good book.

Technorati Tags: Books Fantasy Literature Elizabeth Moon