The Devil's Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow

Book 16 in the Hugo project.

OK, biases laid out right up front: It's pretty hard for me to take someone seriously who calls herself Lilith Saintcrow, as I doubt it's the name she was born with, and it's melodramatic and silly. It's also hard to take seriously a character named Dante Valentine. It's just as melodramatic and silly as Lilith Saintcrow.

Now, on to the novel: Dante Valentine is a necromancer and bounty hunter in some future world where magic & psychic powers work. She somehow became entangled with a demon who was Satan's personal assassin. He fell for her, and has renounced Hell and most of his demon powers in order to be with her. I assume that this happened in the previous books in the series. They are living together peacefully in a villa in Tuscany until he tells her that Satan wants to meet with her. They meet in Venice, and Satan recruits her to act as his new assassin (taking the place formerly held by her lover) to track down four rogue demons and kill them.

Ordinarily I would be turned off by the romance overtones of this book, but something about the description sounded interesting to me, and I tracked it down. Fortunately it felt more like Simon R. Green than Laurell K. Hamilton. Dante is a very frustrating character to ride around with. She's bratty, whiny, and obnoxious. She's the sort of person who is always angry, always wound up about something, always wanting to scream and hit people. This was a bit of a problem for me. I am not a quivering ball of emotions, and I don't relate very well to people who are. Interestingly, she was a lot more tolerable when separated from her demon lover. Her worst traits seem directed mostly at him.

The story was rather slow to start, as she spent the first 80 pages rememering dead people and regretting their loss. I suppose it was supposed to be an introduction to the backstory, but it was rather tedious being trapped in 80 pages of flashbacks and self-doubt. Despite that, I rather enjoyed the book. It's candy--I sucked it down in an afternoon. There's nothing the least bit challenging about this novel, but it was interesting. I think what saved it was that there was regular action scenes, and between those they were trying to figure out what the heck was going on. A question or problem to investigate usually makes a story interesting to me. Nevertheless, I found Dante very frustrating and I wanted to shake her just as badly as her lover sometimes wanted to.

This is not a Hugo-worthy book. But it was kind of fun, and I might look for others.

New project

The last couple of weeks I've set aside my knitting to work on a kumihimo project. Kumihimo is a Japanese technique for making braids, and I'm kicking around an idea for using it. I promised Kristin I'd post photos when I finished a couple of them, so here they are:



Probably not very exciting, but I'm kind of having fun with it.

The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine

This is a book group selection, or I would never have picked it up.

In The Female Brain the author, a neuropsychiatrist who founded the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, attempts to explain to her readers why women are so special and different. A good deal of it is told by relating the stories of her patients, all of whose problems are apparently solvable with hormone therapy and antidepressants. It's pop science, aimed very low and not very well written. The author does not have a harmonious relationship with the English language, and repeats herself too often. She makes absolute statements of things that are not absolutely true. Instead of shading her meaning with words like often, usually, sometimes, and so on, she states things outright as if they are true of everyone.

I was also disturbed by the way the author wrote about males; she appears to not like them very much. In fact, the whole book felt imbued with a pissed-off, 1970s feminist baby boomer attitude which was disturbing and very off-putting. For instance, she explains that in utero the female brain is the default, until the baby boy starts developing testosterone. From page 15: "Girls do not experience the testosterone surge in utero that shrinks the centers for communication, observation, and processing of emotion, so their potential to develop skills in these areas are better at birth than boys'." And from page 18: "This superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones plays out early in a baby girl's behavior." She then goes on to explain that little girls communicate well, share, play together, and obey their parents, while little boys are aggressive, violent, and their testosterone-addled little brains are incapable of understanding when their parents tell them something.

We are told several times that boys' brains are marinated in testosterone, and then we are told several times that a man's ability to communicate could be expressed as a one-lane country road, while a woman's ability to communicate is a superhighway. On page 131 we are told: "Typical men speak fewer words and have less verbal fluency than women, so they may be handicapped in angry exchanges with women." This is part of a claim that women speak nearly three times as many words per day as men, and also that women speak twice as fast as men do. And that is just a crock of shit, as should be obvious to anyone who lives in the real world. Study after study has shown that men and women, on average, speak about the same amount. And anyone could observe from daily life that women don't speak twice as fast as men do. It's sloppy, and makes me highly dubious of the scientific veracity of everything else in the book.

The author also seems to confuse the ability to observe others and guess what they're thinking with emotion. We are all supposed to be great communicaters because we're emotional. Really, though, I'm not, nor are a lot of other women I know. Being experienced and observant of others is not the same thing as being emotional. In fact, I might argue that the two are orthogonal to one another. I think people who are highly emotional are sometimes the least observant of others because they're too wrapped up in their own dramas. The repeated use of the word emotion to mean something other than emotion was sloppy and annoying. But then, the whole book was sloppy and annoying.

Unfortunately the book group is reading this because someone thought it was wonderful, so I suppose I can't go to the meeting and announce that I thought it was crap and I can't believe that she bought into this shit. That wouldn't be very female of me, would it?

Reading pace?

Over in one of the forums I lurk in, someone posted a statistic that the average person reads at a rate of about 60 pages an hour. This seems logical to me, since that is my average reading pace. However, I was startled by all the people who said they couldn't believe it, because they read much more slowly than that. It then degenerated, as these discussions sometimes do, into assertions that people who read quickly must be just skimming, and don't really understand the books as well as a slow reader does. In other words, people who read fast just aren't doing it right.

Which is absurd, of course.

The other way of measuring reading, of course, is by tracking the number of books you read. That is more a function of the amount of time you spend at it than your reading pace. I average about 75 books completed per year, that are new to me. I probably start and abandon an equal number of books, as I don't see the point in wasting my time reading a book that doesn't grab me.

So, if that statistic is to be believed, I'm about average. If I read more books per year than other people, it's probably because I devote more time to it than they do, not because I read faster. How fast do you read?

Word Play

I like puzzles. I like crossword puzzles, word games, mystery novels, match 3 games, logic problems, and sudoku. I enjoyed Myst, Riven, Safecracker, and The Seventh Guest. Give me an interesting problem to work on, and I'm a happy camper. And I'm definitely in the target audience for Word Play.

Word Play is a documentary about people who love crosswords. They begin with Will Shortz, the puzzle editor for the New York Times, who also makes appearances on NPR. From there they proceed to famous puzzle enthusiasts, including but not limited to Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and the Indigo Girls. From there they interview a handful of crossword puzzle whizzes, who are a really interesting group of eccentric people. It then proceeds to the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, where puzzle enthusiasts gather to solve puzzles competitively, ending with a head-to-head competition to determine the year's crossword champion. I found it all utterly fascinating.

The Crossword Puzzle Tournament is a lot like a science fiction convention, except that they're there to compete. It's a gathering of smart, literate people who are passionate about a somewhat obscure hobby, and they sit around geeking over it in hotel ballrooms and bars. In fact, for those of you who are familiar with the concept of the "fannish" accent--these people have it, too, in spades. It's a group of intelligent people with huge vocabularies, who spit out long, complex sentences, and speak faster and faster as they get more excited.

I found the whole thing utterly fascinating, and watched it four times--once straight through, twice with the commentary on, and then one more time with the commentary turned off. Probably the most interesting part to me was where they showed someone constructing a crossword puzzle. I've always wondered how they did it, and it was fascinating. The film also renewed my interest in crossword puzzles. I've always liked crosswords, but frankly my true love is logic problems, and the last couple of years I've been pretty obsessively working on sudoku, which are tidy little logic problems without text.

Highly recommended for geeky people like me.

Stranger Than Fiction

I watched this move because Kristin recommended it. I don't tend to like Will Ferrell, so I wasn't sure I'd like it, but I trust her taste. She was right. It's a fun, interesting movie.

Harold Crick, IRS auditor, starts hearing a voice narrating as he lives his life. He quickly realizes that he is a character in a book, and then tries to figure out who the writer is so that he can prevent her from killing him off. Meanwhile, he breaks out of the rut he lives in and tries to enjoy life more.

It sounds like a cookie-cutter plot about a fellow who realizes he's going to die and goes on a journey of self-discovery, but this one was quite funny in places. Emma Thompson is wonderful as a neurotic, death-obsessed author with writer's block, and Queen Latifah is a nice foil as her sensible administrative assistant. I also thought that Will Ferrell was quite good and sympathetic as poor Harold Crick, and Dustin Hoffman plays the literature professor he turns to for help in deciphering the story he's in. All good. Harold's romance with tattooed baker Maggie Gyllenhaal didn't work for me--I couldn't see what they saw in each other, and it seemed contrived and too convenient how quickly they fell for each other and jumped in the sack. Nevertheless, the movie was clever and warmly human. It's a movie filled with good people.

The special features on the DVD don't include a director's commentary, which is too bad, but there is some nice material on the cast and on shooting in Chicago. However there was one thing that bugged me--someone described Harold as a drone. It pisses me off when people from Hollywood seem to assume that everyone who has a 9 - 5 desk job must be boring and unhappy. Some people are, but most are not. Otherwise, it was a pretty good but not outstanding film.

End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Book 15 in the Hugo Project.

What can I say about End of the World Blues? It felt a bit like a William Gibson novel, except that I tend to like Gibson's work, whereas this was rather a mess. The novel is about a fellow named Kit Nouveau (not his real name, of course), a British ex-pat who we later discover was a deserter from the British army because he didn't like the way things went in Iraq. He is a drug addict, womanizer, and asshole. He is married, unhappily, to a Japanese woman, and together they own an Irish-themed pub in Tokyo where people come to buy drugs. One day he is accosted by a mugger, and his life is saved by a street child named Neku who is either a displaced refugee from the twenty-fifth century or mentally ill. Then his bar explodes, his wife is killed, and he discovers that they weren't legally married in Japan and that there is no record of his ownership, and his inlaws have cleaned out the bank accounts and taken everything. And he is advised by a mob boss that it would be a good idea to leave Japan.

He then meets up with Kate O'Malley, mother of a girl he once had a brief affair with, who persuades him to go to Britain with her to search for her daughter, who probably committed suicide. Or perhaps not. Since he never got over his brief but stormy relationship with her, and it ruined the rest of his life forever, or so he thinks, he goes. Neku follows. Together they have adventures with cops and spies and mobsters in London, which don't entirely make sense, and then he kills a Chechnyan mobster and flies back to Japan to commit suicide. Well, he probably wouldn't admit that he was committing suicide, but his actions are asinine and suicidal. Oh, and I almost forgot--Kate O'Malley is also a mob boss. Isn't that an amazing coincidence?

Two thirds of the way through End of the World Blues, I was considering putting it on my Hugo nominating ballot. The final third was enough to change my mind. What a fucked up mess. And what is it with Grimwood and asinine, suicidal narrators? Nouveau is mildly less horrible than Bobby Zha of 9Tail Fox, but it's a close thing. His brief relationship with Mary O'Malley did not warrant his lifelong obsession with it, and throughout he inevitably seemed to pick the stupidest course of action. I hoped that End of the World Blues would be like Nova Swing, which I didn't understand but found interesting. Instead, I didn't understand it all and found it tedious. Very disappointing.

Juno

I saw Juno on Saturday. You've probably seen the trailers--it's a quirky movie about a smartass 16 year old who gets pregnant and has to figure out what to do. The trailers make it look like a comedy and like her boyfriend plays a large role in the film. Neither is entirely true. Juno certainly has funny moments, but it's a lot darker than I expected from what I'd heard. And the boyfriend actually is fairly unimportant in the film.

It was a film I could take my mother to, and I did. I was a little concerned that some of the language might bother her, but she seemed weather it just fine. Overall it was an enjoyable movie. I'm glad i saw it. It just isn't quite what the trailers might have you believe.

edit: Oh, and another thing: the beginning and ending theme/credit rolling music sucked.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction. I tend to prefer genre fiction and nonfcition. I occasionally pick up a mainstream work, and often regret it. It just often seems to me that not much happens in these books. The plots are slight, the storytelling tricks more annoying than effective, and the people and situations not very interesting. Really, give me a couple of murders or exploding spaceships any day over dreary stories about dreary people leading boring lives.

So, biases laid out in advance, I found myself wondering, as I read this, why I was bothering. It's a dreary tale about a rather unpleasant family whose family firm produces a very successful game, comparable to Risk or Monopoly. A large US corporation wants to buy them out, and they plan to meet at the family's remote Scottish estate to discuss whether they should sell. Most of the story is told from the viewpoint of Alban, semi-disgraced, semi-recluse grandson of the family who walked away from the family firm and sold most of his shares to become a lumberjack. He's a directionless, self-pitying whiner who has an unhealthy sexual fixation on his cousin and is far too likely to go off on political rants about global warming, nukes, American imperialism, and the evils of capitalism. Yawn.

Most of the book is just a leadup to the family meeting, and a large part of it is Alban's life history told through flashbacks. Most of them involve sex, alcohol, or drugs, except for those that show how he is misused by his family. His teenage affair with his cousin was cruelly broken up by his unfeeling grandmother, and he's never gotten over it. He met a sexy lady at a conference and they became lovers. He met a sexy lady in Paris and got laid. He did drugs with various cousins, and drinks heavily with his aunts. Meanwhile one of his elderly aunts has suggested that he investigate the matter of his mother's suicide in his infancy. The result of that was probably supposed to be surprising, but wasn't. Nor was it satisfying.

So, why did I bother to read it? Because, at the sentence level, Banks can write. Really, he is a master with words. The text just sucks you along, even in a book with a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist and almost no plot. It was well written. It just kind of sucked.

Star Blazers

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was a space-themed cartoon on Saturday mornings called Star Blazers. Here in the Twin Cities, it was broadcast on channel 9. This was before cable, and our house was situated in a little valley where reception of the station was terrible. Nevertheless, I sat in front of the TV, watching and listening avidly and trying to make out what was happening behind the static. I loved that show. This was my first exposure to anime, and I was hooked.

I recently found Star Blazers on Netflix, and have been watching it with interest. It has truly been a trip down memory lane. The opening credits, the music, the characters...all clicking into place with my memories. It is interesting to watch it as an adult and recognize where certain aspects of the story were stolen from, and see some of its themes with a better understanding of their context. For instance, in The Quest for Iscandar, they decide to try out the Wave Motion Gun and are shocked and amazed that it's much, much more powerful than they'd expected, and they realize the heavy burden of responsibility it puts on them. And I said aloud: "Oh, it's the Bomb." I didn't get that when I was eight, but it's really obvious now that I'm 30 years older.

Star Blazers (Japanese title Space Battleship Yamato) is set at the end of next century. Earth has been attacked and bombed nearly into oblivion by aliens and the people have been driven underground by the radiation. However, the radiation is seeping further underground, and Earth is running out of time. They retrieve an old battleship from the sea bed and retrofit it into a space ship which is sent off on a mission to save the earth with a crusty old captain, a crew of eager young men in white bell-bottom jumpsuits, one lone woman, and a robot and a very weird doctor for comic relief.

Watching it again, I realize how deeply I imprinted on this, and why other Japanese animated shows later clicked with me: they seem to borrow heavily from it, from G Force to Voltron to Sailor Moon (Yes, when I was in my 20s I watched Sailor Moon every morning before I went off to a job that made my life a living hell. And sometimes Sailor Moon was the best part of my day.) I was wondering if Star Blazers would hold up well when viewed as an adult. The answer is: not really. Now, Star Blazers doesn't suck. It has a certain charm, and I still like it fairly well. But now I see that the lead, Derek Wildstar, is a hot-headed young idiot. It is odd, too, that the crusty old captain never gives any orders until one of his young crew members try to tell him what they should do. And the creators were having too good a time to be concerned with, you know, actual astronomy or physics. In one of the episodes I was watched last night, they took refuge under Pluto's equatorial sea, which was remarkably liquid, and then went running around outside in their white jumpsuits with no more protection than a face mask. Nevertheless, it's kind of fun. I just don't feel the need to watch the remaining 4 DVDs to see the rest of it. Eight episodes were enough for me, but it was a pleasant walk down memory lane.