Interesting and unusual fantasy in a pantheistic world, where every wood and stone has its own god -- except in the areas where people have driven them out. The greatest god of all is the River, but a rash young hero, in love with a tributary stream-goddess, sets out to kill him anyway. ( Read more... )
I enjoyed this a lot, under the impression it was a standalone. It could stand as one, but in fact there's a sequel, The Blackgod, and it's even still in print, so I promptly ordered it.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/508836.html, where there are comments.

Dame Frevisse is sent to London on a secret mission to retrieve a large sum in gold for her newly-widowed cousin the Countess of Suffolk -- not something with which she is very comfortable, but in the end the gold turns out to be the least of her problems. ( Read more... )

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/508391.html, where there are comments.

Book the most recent in an involved series. OK, I went into the other room to check; it's Book 5 (and last) of the Alliance of Light Series, but before that there were three books (starting with "Curse of the Mistwraith") in the "Wars of Light and Shadows" series, and things carry on fairly seamlessly through all eight books. (Seven in the US, I think, but my 2 and 3 were the UK editions, which came out separately.) The series has had a checkered publishing history; the book before this was published (late, with sub-par graphics) by the ill-fated Meisha Merlin, and this one didn't get a US publisher at all.

Wurts's prose has always been idiosyncratic; my usual comment on it as that no noun is left without its duly sanctioned adjective. Or alternatively, that the books would be a great deal shorter if she could confine herself to one adjective per noun. Also, she has a habit of using "if" where most writers would have "though." All that makes the reading go rather slowly, and it seems to have grown denser and more opaque over the years, as well as developing an infestation of random italics.

( What it's about. )

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/507917.html, where there are comments.

Saturday was the annual Sunday School excursion to the Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix. It was a quick turnaround after the Stanford trip last week, but I'm glad I went. The weather was perfect, everyone had a good time, and I got some nice photos.

( Several pictures and a video )

Here's the full set of photos and videos on Flickr

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/507699.html, where there are comments.

Book Two of the Codex Alera series, in which young Tavi, the one man without any control over the elemental spirits known as furies on which his whole Romanesque civilisation is built, is studying at the Academy and acting as a page to his patron the First Lord. When the First Lord collapses on the eve of an important festival, Tavi and some of his friends have to try to keep that secret. Meanwhile, the alien Vord are menacing his native Calderon, and his aunt Isana is in the capital, trying to get help and getting entangled in politics while his uncle Bernard and his beloved Amara fight the Vord hand to mandible. Then there are the Cani -- menacing nine-foot wolf-creatures -- to reckon with, not to mention the young female Marat, Kitai, with whom Tavi shares an unusual bond.

Fast-moving and engaging. I am a little uncomfortable with the way that the availability of magical healing allows gruesome injuries to happen over and over to the same people with no lasting consequences; it has a -- literally -- cheapening effect.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/507611.html, where there are comments.

In a post-apocalyptic city, Sparrow scrapes a living fixing the surviving electronics and collecting and selling old media, but is plagued by mysterious blackouts. A visit to a card-reader provides more questions than answers, but soon life is spiralling out of control and there are important lessons to be learned as well as villains to defeat. (I think that's about as long as I can keep that up!) The book is described as/subtitled "A fantasy for technophiles," which seems a reasonable way to describe a story with a science-fiction-flavored setting and voodoo gods. The setting and atmosphere are very well done, the characters quirky and distinct; the plot seems to sag a bit in the middle after a brisk start, but picks up again at the end.

( Read more... )

We made it back, though the connection in San Diego was a bit tight for comfort. ( Details and a quandary )

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/506928.html, where there are comments.

Debut novel from one of the authors behind Shadow Unit., in which a young necromancer is sent with a couple of mercenary bodyguards to foment revolution in a colonial city. I had a bit of trouble keeping all the sides straight at first, but eventually I came to the conclusion that there weren't really any sides, just loose alliances of people with similar agendas, very few of whom are what they first seem. Even the ghosts -- mostly of slaughtered villagers -- have a political angle. The city, its people, its surroundings, and the various kinds of magic, are vividly evoked, and the magic system is different enough to be interest but familiar enough to feel solid, and not just by-the-numbers. (The necromancy is not, on the whole, the gruesome sort.)

The novel pretty much stands alone, but I believe there's a sequel in the works, and I look forward to it.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/506852.html, where there are comments.

1) It hadn't occurred to me before, but given the recent proliferation of small, fingertip-operated touch-screens as seen in smart phones everywhere, and the expansion of camera-back LCDs, I suppose the emergence of the touch-screen camera was inevitable. My immediate reaction was that I get enough fingerprints on my camera display as it is ...

2) I'm not enthused by the way the netbook market has gone. Everyone seems to have standardized on 10.1 inch screens, which are hardly enough smaller and lighter than my 12-inch, four-poundish Butterfly to be worth the trouble. Also, M$ has come up with a really mean trick; the Starter Edition of Win7 has desktop customization disabled. I haven't seen a non-customizable desktop since before Windows 3, and I enjoy displaying my favorite photos that way. Fair enough not to include the rotating-desktop function of the fancier Win7 versions, but to allow no customization at all is a fairly blatant attempt to drive people to upgrade -- at a price that's a fair fraction of the cost of the netbook. (Also, if there's no second-monitor support, would it even work for showing Powerpoint on a projector?) There are still XP models available, but buy a seven-year-old operating system on a new machine? I don't think so. So if I was to get a new netbook, it would end up being another Linux one, and I may as well live with the limitations of the 7-inch Eee for a while longer.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/506500.html, where there are comments.

Another Dame Frevisse mystery, set in the days of the weak King Henry VI of England. The rumbling war in France -- ]the 100 years war -- isn't going well for England. A minor courtier dies of natural causes, leaving his widow and her brother with a dangerous secret -- a paper that could bring down the powerful earl of Suffolk.

( Read more... )The murders are not really the drivers of the plot, in this one; it's more of a political and psychological thriller, with plenty of betrayal and suspicion to go around.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/506208.html, where there are comments.

We spotted a couple of black squirrels on the Stanford campus this lunchtime -- attractive little things; it's funny how the black fur trips the "Ooh, kitty!" circuits. A bit of googling suggests that they are either a separate species called fox squirrels or (maybe less likely) a melanistic version of the common gray squirrel which some web-authorities claim doesn't exist in California. They acted very like regular squirrels, of the people-habituated urban variety; they skittered off up a tree when we approached, but not with any great urgency, and we got the feeling that they might not have been averse to an offer of peanuts or apple-cores.

We also spent a few minutes quietly viewing the inside of the Memorial Church. It's as gaudy on the inside, with lots of gilding and technicolor stained glass, as it is on the outside; I've never seen anything like it, though admittedly my experience with the inside of mainstream churches is not wide, being mostly confined to the rather faded, time-worn interiors of historic British cathedrals, which lost most of their more opulent decoration in the Reformation.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/505421.html, where there are comments.

Final entry in the series that began with A Princess of Roumania. Can Miranda Popescu make up for her earlier blenders and save Great Roumania as her dead aunt wants? Should she even try, or does the aunt have her own selfish agenda?

( Read more... )

This has definitely been one of the weirder and less conventional fantasy epics I've read in the last few years -- rather bleak in tone, and seriously short on eucatastrophe, but with enough distinctive and interesting -- if not entirely admirable -- characters to keep my interest. Having the world we know turn out to be basically a construct designed for the heroine's protection and education -- though it turns out not to be quite that simple, in the end -- is a risky move, tough on the suspension of disbelief, but the author more or less pulls it off.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/505139.html, where there are comments.

Latest (in paperback, at least) in the Vlad Taltos series, in which Vlad heads back to his ancestral homeland in the East after the events of Teckla and the breakup of his marriage.

( Read more... )

I really didn't like Vlad very much in this one; the murderous-thug side of his nature was decidedly in the ascendant, and we don't learn much more about Dragaeran society or meet most of our favorite Dragaeran characters.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/504880.html, where there are comments.

This is one of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. The Elena of the title is a Cambridge undergraduate, daughter of a professor with ambitions, who's murdered on her morning run; she was profoundly deaf, but not brought up in Deaf culture. Lynley and Havers are called in to investigate. There's a complicated web of relationships and possible motives to untangle, while Havers is distracted by her mother's slide into dementia and Lynley tries to revive his own relationship with Lady Helen, who's in Cambridge nursing a sister with a bad case of post-natal depression. The damp and cold of Cambridge in winter are vividly evoked, enough to feel chilly when I read it in Tucson in August, and the whole thing is depressing because there's hardly a contented life or a decently-functioning relationship to be seen; the flawed Lynley-Havers dynamic is about as good as it gets. (And I've never been able to understand what it was about Lady Helen, with her indecisiveness and self-doubt, that Lynley found so attractive.)

( Slightly spoilerish comment on the ending. )

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/504400.html, where there are comments.

I brought home Butterfly, the work XP laptop, this weekend, and was pulling my recently-updated files over to Diamond, the desktop that was recently upgraded to Win7. Some of the files -- presentations that I'd got from other people at some meeting or other -- wouldn't copy to eother Butterfly or the Vista laptop, because of "permissions" problems. (In fact, apparently I don't have permission to look at the permissions over the network, and XP doesn't offer any access to file permissions that I can find, other than toggling read-only on/off. On the Butterfly end, they're marked as "This file came from another computer and may have been blocked", but checking the box to unblock them doesn't help. On the other hand, from the Butterfly end there's no problem in pushing the file over to either machine. Go figure ...

I can see why MS would be trying to get more serious about file security, but it would be nice if they made it compatible with the grown-up computer world and slightly more transparent.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/503825.html, where there are comments.

Necklace 37 Mostly silver-plated rings, a couple of gold-plated ones.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/503628.html, where there are comments.

Far-future SF (or maybe fantasy? It's a bit hard to tell) set mostly on the wintry, woman-dominated world of Mars, where men were genetically engineered out of existence centuries ago, and the only males around are engineered mutants living a shadowy existence on the fringes of civilization. The daughter of an upper-class family has disgraced herself by a fleeting contact with one such, and been locked in her room for a year; when she's briefly let out for the midwinter festival she disappears soon afterwards, and her sister is forced to go searching for her. Meanwhile, a cousin spying on a hostile city is haunted by the ghost of a library. War breaks out, and things get stranger from there.

It's very atmospheric, whether in the frigid cities and wastes of Mars or the steamy, drowned marshes of Earth, and full of nifty weirdness, but I found it rather confusing -- all the three pov characters being rather similar. Also it ends frustratingly in a place which suggests it isn't a standalone, but I've no idea when or if the sequel will be available.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/503317.html, where there are comments.

It's disorienting seeing Col. Telford from SGU on NUMB3RS.

( Minor Spoilers for WOT:The Gathering Storm )

No, that wasn't the daily bookpost; that will be along shortly.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/502770.html, where there are comments.

Second in the Mistborn series. "Okay, I'm the leader. Now what shall we do?"

The rebellion has succeeded, and the Evil Overlord is dead, but the problems for Vin, the street-urchin turned powerful Allomancer, and her beloved Elend, nobleman turned King and trying to introduce democracy to a city that's lived under the dictatorship of the Evil Overlord for a millennium, are only just beginning, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions about how the world got into this mess in the first place.( Read more... )
I'm still not in love with Sanderson's prose or dialog, but the story moves along smartly, and the characters are engaging enough. I probably won't be getting to the final volume for a month or too, though.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/502832.html, where there are comments.

Standalone, British-set mystery, not detective-centered. The titular character actually calls himself that, and is a nasty piece of work living with a group of so-called travellers. (Mostly a British phenomenon.) ( Read more... )

I bought this used, and will probably be returning it whence it came on the next trade-in run, as I usually do with contemporary mysteries.

Back in my Birmingham days, one of our teaching lab technicians was a relative of the author's; she was just starting out at the time.

Also available at http://ellarien.dreamwidth.org/502504.html, where there are comments.