Brief follow-on to music geekery, then some other

Traded in the first batch of rejected CDs, or at least those I was pretty sure nobody else would ask for. Mainly because the used Cd store near mom's neighbourhood absolutely RAWKS. How's this:

Bond - BOTH Shine and Born (Born has a very weird Korobushka on it. Though the prize is probably the 1812).
Nightwish - Once (Which I've seen new for cheap several places lately, but this was cheaper)
Fairport Convention - The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood (Cropredy concert excerpts from 1986-87. Meaning I now have a damn nice rendition of the Hiring Fair on CD.)
Les Barker - A Cardi and Bloke.

And they had several more I could've taken if I'd had more to trade in. As it was, I had to cover the tail end of that with money.

_______________________________

This is how the snow was yesterday:

I live near downtown. Therefore the bus I catch from the Unviersity is *the* most common bus. Usually about two of them would show up for any one other bus. And about seven minutes apart at rush hour, and still about 12 minutes apart at most by 6:00.

So it says much indeed for the weather that in the almost 30 minutes I was waiting at the stop, I saw one of every other bus currently running, and two of some, before mine arrived. (And then two of them came in a clump. I got onto the one where I could sit).

_______________________________

Pottery this term hasn't been as exciting as last term; mostly wheel work, except for my test tiles, which are a collection of small mammal heads, because I can't apparantly stand to waste the amount of clay necessary to make normal looking test tiles. But the wheel work is coming along nicely; several of the mugs and a couple of bowls have survived past firing. And I am making most things pretty one way or another, be that fancy handles or weird glaze choices.

but it still feels rewarding, though my "first project" has turned into the whole term project.

_______________________________

Books! I have been reading quite a lot. Some short samples:

Samuel Schellabarger - Prince of Foxes. The story of Andrea Orsini, an ambitious young man working for the Borgias, trying to win the day, the acclaim, and the girl, through devious politicking and clever military action. Except, of course, that he starts to realise that the Borgias are not only potentially fatal, but may not be the best way to realise his ambition. It may even be against his slowly developing conscience. But he has a secret that could kill him even faster. And while he exhibits almost every trait a proper young noble of that era should, he lacks one; the sprezzatura, the complete pretense that all he turns his hand to is light and easy, done wthout effort or dedication. He has a few passions that he cannot ignore, and they might be the key to his undoing.

And now I know my Teresa Nielsen Hayden wanted me to read this one before dealing again with The Serpent Prince. This was a bestselling author in the 40s and 50s, and unlike msot of the forgotten bestsellers of that day (At least according to one source, that hunted them down adn sampled them) immensely readable. The political manoeuvring is something to read. So is the language usage, the immersion in the era, and all the character's assumptions about his world compared to that of the author (The narrator does get his asides in), and the reader both.

Following that fairly closely with Lynn Flewelling's Traitor's Moon and Martha Wells' The Element of Fire probably did the right things to my brain so far as Ketan's story is concerned. The first of these is relatively light, so far as books about spies, murder, treachery, and confronting one's own past demons are concerned, but it's a better read than I'd been given to understand based on the reviews (Although many of the reviews that knocked it seemed to do so partly based on the fact that it wasn't the third book in a trilogy, but a whole 'nother story from the first two books.) It's much more mindless escapism than the other two, but it gets some of the same things right as far as how many people are involved in court activities and how hard it is to keep anything quiet. Better, Seregil acts more masculine in this than in the first story, where he was almost a female in disguise. Some of his choices actually got to me, they seemed rather too real. And I really like Beka. Alec doesn't get as much time or development this time around, losing out to Beka (Oh woes!) but there's another book coming out soon, and he'll probably get his due.

And the Wells is not even remotely disappointing; this is the earliest of the Ile-Rien Books, being the author's first book (Albeit in her recently revised republication), but also being set a good couple of centuries or more before Nicholas's gaslight-and-trains adventures, or Tremaine's early electricity and ocean liners. This is still the days of swashbucklers and captains of the queen's guard, of court wits and deadly underpinnings. But it's just as good. The characters have the same kind of idiosyncratic common sense, the same undermining of expectations. She just hits the right notes, the right mix of traditional fantasy elements (the hosts of Faerie, or, here, Fayre, and the ghouls in Death of the Necromancer) with the injection of sensible, pragmatic people who do what they do for sane reasons, not because everyone else in fantasy did.

I also went through four Pratchetts around Christmas and January: rereads of Night Watch, Thief of Time, and Going Postal, and then a first read of Making Money.

These are all later Pratchetts, so they actually make an interesting comparison. Night Watch and Thief of Time are more recent installments in ongoing sub-series' about ongoing characters. Going Postal is focused on a new (At the time) character, and while the familiar characters and settings abound around it, it's a bit more accessible to a new reader.

And they also make good examples of certain properties.

Night Watch is one of Pratchett's best. I thought so the first time I read it, but more, it's rewarded me on every reread. It gives a glimpse of what Ankh-Morpork was before Vetinari came in, a great deal of commentary, overt and covert, about the use and abuse of power, and betrayal, about what the people can, and can't, do when the government has become their enemy. It's one of the stories that sneaks in and quietly cuts into you, so that when you burst out laughing (Which you will) you also find yourself falling apart. Good the first time, and the next.

Thief of Time, by contrast, gave me a very good impression the first time, and on a reread... wasn't as strong. It didn't pack as much new punch. There was more overt comedy, and Susan is always worth reading. But that;s the thing; the extra bits of laugh out loud comedy took the place of some of the serious and the depth.

And Going Postal, the first time I read it, was too much of the same. The new character wasn't terribly exciting. Except, on a reread, I started to see just how much Pratchett was using Moist, his shiny new not-so-ex-con-man to talk about justice, and morality, and rightness. The things which the first time distracted me - the irritating landslides of billions of unmailed letters, the amusing but predictable pin collectors -- were all surface scenery, and what was under that surface was full of sharp pointy teeth, furious at wrongdoing. It shot up hugely in my esteem on the reread.

That's pretty much the range of recent Pratchett. The early books are wobbly in all sorts of ways, the middle ones sometimes lose it (Maskerade wasn't that rewarding on first read or reread). The current ones seems to be either good through and through, good on the surface but a little hollow (Or maybe full of nougat?), or unattractive on the surface, but rich inside.

Unfortunately, Making Money gives me, for now, the impression of being a bit more surface than substance, another Thief of Time rather than another Going Postal. (It didn't stand a chance of being another Night Watch.) Of course, Moist Von Lipwig is rapidly turning into a character I'd follow anywhere (so long as he stays safely inside the books where I don't have to watch his hands every second). But Going Postal pitted con man against con man, brains against brains, and gave the villain all the advantages except Moist's forward momentum. By contrast, the monstrous villains in this one didn't have a chance.

And, to get the extreme depressingness of Phoolan Devi's story out of my brain after too much reading of it in a row, I ended up in another book about con men - and women. Jennifer Crusie's Faking It is probably the most splendiferous of her books I've read to date. Steve the dachshund isn't nearly as much fun as some of her other dogs, but that was the only real weakness in the book. Everythign the pther books did right, this oen did, and the things they did wrong, this one didn't. While the villains were plausibly insane and it was disturbingly easy to see how that was hidden behind their normalcy, a la Crazy for You, they didn't reach the point of terrifying and visceral that made that book rather darker than advertised. While several of the characters make bad choices, these mare made plausible, not simply stupid, as with the frustratingly dumb woman in Tell me Lies. And the problems with the central romance made more sense even in afterthought than the ones in Anyone But You.

Of course, there's a question of morality, since everyone in the book is in some way a cheat, a liar or a fake. But they make it so much fun to read about!

Although, as regards Phoolan Devi - depressing for the first two hundred pages, then depressing for the next hundred, then some more depressing - I should say I wildly recommend the book (The Bandit Queen of India) to most anyone. The story is in her own words as much as possible considering her illiteracy; her story recorded, smoothed into prose, then read back to her so she could correct any misrepresentation, and given her seal of approval. It's eye-opening. As stated even in the introduction, there are hundreds upon hundreds of women who live like she did, ignorant, unconsenting, but without options -- who didn't have her drive or her opportunities to fight back. And then she paid for fighting back, and paid again. And got some small modicum of justice or revenge. And paid for it, usually ten times what she'd gained. And took to violence and vengeance because no other option for fighting back was left. And paid for that. And turned bloody. And paid for it. And finally got the attention of her country and the world. In circumstances where I would have been one of them women who drowned herself, or lived cowed. I have *no* idea how anyone could do it.

I have to save my thoughts about India, modernization, justice, and tradition for the short essay i'm supposed to write, but really, if you can get through the Oh-my-god levels of depression, it's definitely worth reading.

Brief follow-on to music geekery, then some other

Traded in the first batch of rejected CDs, or at least those I was pretty sure nobody else would ask for. Mainly because the used Cd store near mom's neighbourhood absolutely RAWKS. How's this:

Bond - BOTH Shine and Born (Born has a very weird Korobushka on it. Though the prize is probably the 1812).
Nightwish - Once (Which I've seen new for cheap several places lately, but this was cheaper)
Fairport Convention - The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood (Cropredy concert excerpts from 1986-87. Meaning I now have a damn nice rendition of the Hiring Fair on CD.)
Les Barker - A Cardi and Bloke.

And they had several more I could've taken if I'd had more to trade in. As it was, I had to cover the tail end of that with money.

_______________________________

This is how the snow was yesterday:

I live near downtown. Therefore the bus I catch from the Unviersity is *the* most common bus. Usually about two of them would show up for any one other bus. And about seven minutes apart at rush hour, and still about 12 minutes apart at most by 6:00.

So it says much indeed for the weather that in the almost 30 minutes I was waiting at the stop, I saw one of every other bus currently running, and two of some, before mine arrived. (And then two of them came in a clump. I got onto the one where I could sit).

_______________________________

Pottery this term hasn't been as exciting as last term; mostly wheel work, except for my test tiles, which are a collection of small mammal heads, because I can't apparantly stand to waste the amount of clay necessary to make normal looking test tiles. But the wheel work is coming along nicely; several of the mugs and a couple of bowls have survived past firing. And I am making most things pretty one way or another, be that fancy handles or weird glaze choices.

but it still feels rewarding, though my "first project" has turned into the whole term project.

_______________________________

Books! I have been reading quite a lot. Some short samples:

Samuel Schellabarger - Prince of Foxes. The story of Andrea Orsini, an ambitious young man working for the Borgias, trying to win the day, the acclaim, and the girl, through devious politicking and clever military action. Except, of course, that he starts to realise that the Borgias are not only potentially fatal, but may not be the best way to realise his ambition. It may even be against his slowly developing conscience. But he has a secret that could kill him even faster. And while he exhibits almost every trait a proper young noble of that era should, he lacks one; the sprezzatura, the complete pretense that all he turns his hand to is light and easy, done wthout effort or dedication. He has a few passions that he cannot ignore, and they might be the key to his undoing.

And now I know my Teresa Nielsen Hayden wanted me to read this one before dealing again with The Serpent Prince. This was a bestselling author in the 40s and 50s, and unlike msot of the forgotten bestsellers of that day (At least according to one source, that hunted them down adn sampled them) immensely readable. The political manoeuvring is something to read. So is the language usage, the immersion in the era, and all the character's assumptions about his world compared to that of the author (The narrator does get his asides in), and the reader both.

Following that fairly closely with Lynn Flewelling's Traitor's Moon and Martha Wells' The Element of Fire probably did the right things to my brain so far as Ketan's story is concerned. The first of these is relatively light, so far as books about spies, murder, treachery, and confronting one's own past demons are concerned, but it's a better read than I'd been given to understand based on the reviews (Although many of the reviews that knocked it seemed to do so partly based on the fact that it wasn't the third book in a trilogy, but a whole 'nother story from the first two books.) It's much more mindless escapism than the other two, but it gets some of the same things right as far as how many people are involved in court activities and how hard it is to keep anything quiet. Better, Seregil acts more masculine in this than in the first story, where he was almost a female in disguise. Some of his choices actually got to me, they seemed rather too real. And I really like Beka. Alec doesn't get as much time or development this time around, losing out to Beka (Oh woes!) but there's another book coming out soon, and he'll probably get his due.

And the Wells is not even remotely disappointing; this is the earliest of the Ile-Rien Books, being the author's first book (Albeit in her recently revised republication), but also being set a good couple of centuries or more before Nicholas's gaslight-and-trains adventures, or Tremaine's early electricity and ocean liners. This is still the days of swashbucklers and captains of the queen's guard, of court wits and deadly underpinnings. But it's just as good. The characters have the same kind of idiosyncratic common sense, the same undermining of expectations. She just hits the right notes, the right mix of traditional fantasy elements (the hosts of Faerie, or, here, Fayre, and the ghouls in Death of the Necromancer) with the injection of sensible, pragmatic people who do what they do for sane reasons, not because everyone else in fantasy did.

I also went through four Pratchetts around Christmas and January: rereads of Night Watch, Thief of Time, and Going Postal, and then a first read of Making Money.

These are all later Pratchetts, so they actually make an interesting comparison. Night Watch and Thief of Time are more recent installments in ongoing sub-series' about ongoing characters. Going Postal is focused on a new (At the time) character, and while the familiar characters and settings abound around it, it's a bit more accessible to a new reader.

And they also make good examples of certain properties.

Night Watch is one of Pratchett's best. I thought so the first time I read it, but more, it's rewarded me on every reread. It gives a glimpse of what Ankh-Morpork was before Vetinari came in, a great deal of commentary, overt and covert, about the use and abuse of power, and betrayal, about what the people can, and can't, do when the government has become their enemy. It's one of the stories that sneaks in and quietly cuts into you, so that when you burst out laughing (Which you will) you also find yourself falling apart. Good the first time, and the next.

Thief of Time, by contrast, gave me a very good impression the first time, and on a reread... wasn't as strong. It didn't pack as much new punch. There was more overt comedy, and Susan is always worth reading. But that;s the thing; the extra bits of laugh out loud comedy took the place of some of the serious and the depth.

And Going Postal, the first time I read it, was too much of the same. The new character wasn't terribly exciting. Except, on a reread, I started to see just how much Pratchett was using Moist, his shiny new not-so-ex-con-man to talk about justice, and morality, and rightness. The things which the first time distracted me - the irritating landslides of billions of unmailed letters, the amusing but predictable pin collectors -- were all surface scenery, and what was under that surface was full of sharp pointy teeth, furious at wrongdoing. It shot up hugely in my esteem on the reread.

That's pretty much the range of recent Pratchett. The early books are wobbly in all sorts of ways, the middle ones sometimes lose it (Maskerade wasn't that rewarding on first read or reread). The current ones seems to be either good through and through, good on the surface but a little hollow (Or maybe full of nougat?), or unattractive on the surface, but rich inside.

Unfortunately, Making Money gives me, for now, the impression of being a bit more surface than substance, another Thief of Time rather than another Going Postal. (It didn't stand a chance of being another Night Watch.) Of course, Moist Von Lipwig is rapidly turning into a character I'd follow anywhere (so long as he stays safely inside the books where I don't have to watch his hands every second). But Going Postal pitted con man against con man, brains against brains, and gave the villain all the advantages except Moist's forward momentum. By contrast, the monstrous villains in this one didn't have a chance.

And, to get the extreme depressingness of Phoolan Devi's story out of my brain after too much reading of it in a row, I ended up in another book about con men - and women. Jennifer Crusie's Faking It is probably the most splendiferous of her books I've read to date. Steve the dachshund isn't nearly as much fun as some of her other dogs, but that was the only real weakness in the book. Everythign the pther books did right, this oen did, and the things they did wrong, this one didn't. While the villains were plausibly insane and it was disturbingly easy to see how that was hidden behind their normalcy, a la Crazy for You, they didn't reach the point of terrifying and visceral that made that book rather darker than advertised. While several of the characters make bad choices, these mare made plausible, not simply stupid, as with the frustratingly dumb woman in Tell me Lies. And the problems with the central romance made more sense even in afterthought than the ones in Anyone But You.

Of course, there's a question of morality, since everyone in the book is in some way a cheat, a liar or a fake. But they make it so much fun to read about!

Although, as regards Phoolan Devi - depressing for the first two hundred pages, then depressing for the next hundred, then some more depressing - I should say I wildly recommend the book (The Bandit Queen of India) to most anyone. The story is in her own words as much as possible considering her illiteracy; her story recorded, smoothed into prose, then read back to her so she could correct any misrepresentation, and given her seal of approval. It's eye-opening. As stated even in the introduction, there are hundreds upon hundreds of women who live like she did, ignorant, unconsenting, but without options -- who didn't have her drive or her opportunities to fight back. And then she paid for fighting back, and paid again. And got some small modicum of justice or revenge. And paid for it, usually ten times what she'd gained. And took to violence and vengeance because no other option for fighting back was left. And paid for that. And turned bloody. And paid for it. And finally got the attention of her country and the world. In circumstances where I would have been one of them women who drowned herself, or lived cowed. I have *no* idea how anyone could do it.

I have to save my thoughts about India, modernization, justice, and tradition for the short essay i'm supposed to write, but really, if you can get through the Oh-my-god levels of depression, it's definitely worth reading.