I just realized my last post was in July. Whoops.
I still read all my neighbors' blogs, though. :)
Still currently embroiled in my first semester of law school, probably not as stressed out as I should be - but definitely busy. My goal for this weekend is to get a library card and check out some trashy vampire fiction (I hear Stephanie Meyer fits the bill) instead of barfing out note after note about reasonableness and mutuality and springing executory interests. (Lately, I've taken to watching Disney princess movies to give my mind a break - I've decided I want little woodland creatures to do my chores and make me a dress for the barrister's ball.)
(Two word review on law school: it's exhausting)
Happily taking book and movie suggestions in the event I have some free time soon. Otherwise, look for reviews around December, when I will most definitely have down time.
I should probably update more - goodness knows I've read a lot of books and even watched a few movies/television shows since the last time I updated - but I am in the middle of a move, and starting law school. I hope law school won't be so traumatic that it prevents me from any more reading and reviewing! :D
But hey, in short:
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (movie): Not as good as the rest, but definitely enjoyable.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: AWESOME.
- The Tudors, television series: Pretty decent, enjoyable trash.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Movie Film For Theaters: I can't work under these conditions. I want a diet water and my mommy right now. (- Meatwad)
- Smashing Pumpkins @ The Fillmore: HFS! AWESOME.
Have a good one, neighbors. If you're one of my livejournal friends, I'm still posting over there.
I just finished The Stolen Child, which is essentially a fairy tale about changelings. It is beautifully written, but overwhelmingly sad. The Amazon.com synopsis reads:
From Publishers Weekly
Folk legends of the changeling serve as a touchstone for Donohue's haunting debut, set vaguely in the American northeast, about the maturation of a young man troubled by questions of identity. At age seven, Henry Day is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced by a look-alike impostor. In alternating chapters, each Henry relates the tale of how he adjusts to his new situation. Human Henry learns to run with his hobgoblin pack, who never age but rarely seem more fey than a gang of runaway teens. Hobgoblin Henry develops his uncanny talent for mimicry into a music career and settles into an otherwise unremarkable human life. Neither Henry feels entirely comfortable with his existence, and the pathos of their losses influences all of their relationships and experiences. Inevitably, their struggles to retrieve their increasingly forgotten pasts put them on paths that intersect decades later. Donohue keeps the fantasy as understated as the emotions of his characters, while they work through their respective growing pains. The result is an impressive novel of outsiders whose feelings of alienation are more natural than supernatural.
This, like The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, is one of those fairy tales that takes awhile to fully digest. It has several rather haunting themes, the one that stood out to me the most being, how well can a parent ever know their child?. The story is extremely well written and switches back and forth in perspective from the changeling who becomes Henry Day, to the child who becomes a changeling. The changeling Henry Day ages like a normal human, but the original Henry Day, stolen away from his human life, remains eternally seven years old, although he would have been in his thirties at the end of the book. As the changeling settles into life as Henry Day, the seven-year-old child he was becomes remarkably more mature than his now-human counterpart in many ways.
I loved this book. It took me a few chapters to get into it - the changeling who becomes Henry Day starts out as quite a snotty little brat - but the narrative sucks you in, and you can't help but try to figure out how it will be resolved in the end. It was not the ending I expected, and I think the book is richer for that. I would definitely recommend this book - it is dark and poignant, but uplifting in that it is a story extremely well-told.
I haven't read a Christopher Pike book in years, not since his Starlight Crystal era (ten years ago? More?). When I was browsing the new book section at the library, I was surprised to see this on the shelf - I don't know why, he seems to be incredibly prolific - so I picked it up and took it home with me.
As I said, I haven't read anything of his since the Starlight Crystal books, which I never enjoyed, but the description of this book sounded like it was more of a return to his Blood-Guts-Gore-Sex-Revenge roots. It is.
Amazon has this synopsis:
Bestseller Pike's gripping thriller pays homage to Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels, particularly in the character of FBI agent Kelly Feinman, who fills the Clarice Starling role. An unlikely law-enforcement agent, Kelly was an academic drafted by the bureau as a consultant based on her graduate thesis on mythology. Kelly puts her expertise to use on a particularly savage case, that of a man dubbed "the Acid Killer," who has sent the Feds DVDs of his sadistic murders of women he believes have been unfaithful. Her research leads her to a promising suspect, but her desire to solve the case on her own places her life in jeopardy. Pike (The Cold One) deftly interweaves this plot with the elaborate, Edmund Dantes–like revenge scheme of Matt Connor, a California man who was himself betrayed by the woman he loved. While some of the action sequences involving Kelly strain credibility, the intricate, thoughtful plot offers enough fresh variations on the serial-killer theme to keep readers turning the pages.
If you've read any Pike books before, you will recognize this plot as nothing particularly new on his part, but I have to say that he is damn good at what he does. The Amazon reviewer is correct: some of the Kelly action sequences do defy the suspension of disbelief, but they are entertaining. Pike never writes anything that isn't intrinsic to his plot, and every twist of the story takes the reader on an even wilder ride. I admire the way he can bring in several completely unrelated plots only to tie them together at the end, and as always, his use of mythology and folklore (well-placed in this book) adds a lot of interest to the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. My only (very minor) issue with it is in the last two pages, but to say why would spoil the book. Otherwise - a really well-done thriller that kept me entertained the entire way through.
I love fairy tales, particularly the original versions where the bad children get eaten by monsters in the Black Forest and no one ends up living happily-ever-after. I used to spend hours reading my mother's childhood fairy tale books, which were quite a bit darker than the ones I had, and I used to read my grandmother's 1920's Oz books, which were also surprisingly creepy (one character, I remember, was cut in half lengthwise and had to walk around like that). So this book, which is more or less pitched as a dark fairy tale, sounded good to me.
I would have to say that this is one of the absolute best stories I've ever read. It's extremely dark, and is an allegory for adult life. But most of all, it captures exactly what it's like to be in the "in-between" years of being not quite a child or a teenager. In this case, it is set in 1940's Britain, so there is the added drama of WWII as well as the time period making it believable that a twelve-year-old is still fairly innocent.
Here is the synopsis from Amazon:
High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book... The Book of Lost Things.
Although parts of this book were predictable, as all fairy tales can be, it never descended into the trite or sappy. The ending, for example, was absolutely perfect - one of those stories where you shut the book and the story stays with you for days. It is bittersweet, but incredibly well done. I love Connolly's writing style, and I will definitely be checking out his other works now. I highly recommend The Book of Lost Things, and will be putting it on my wishlist to remind myself to pick up my own copy.
The Last Boleyn: A Novel, by Karen Harper, is the story of Mary Boleyn (Bullen), Anne Boleyn's older sister. Much like The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory, this story describes Mary's life as a pawn in elaborate French and English court intrigue. Mary, through her father's political ambitions, is placed in a position where she is pressured to be the mistress of both Francis I and Henry VIII at different times in her life. She is married to William Carey, who is also thoroughly embroiled in court politics, and eventually falls for William Stafford, one of the king's right-hand men. In the story, she watches as Henry puts her aside for her younger sister Anne, and struggles to assert her own independence in a time where that was simply unheard of.
What I liked about this book is that it wasn't depressing. A lot of historical novels, particularly those centering around women, end up with everyone dead and/or brokenhearted. This version of Mary Boleyn's story has her grow from an eight year old child to a thirty-something woman who is able to negotiate her place in the world, long after she was passed around as a sexual pawn and married off. This is not to say that Mary is one of those ridiculously strong, assertive heroines that would be completely out of place in the early 16th century. Instead, Mary is, in my humble opinion, a very realistic person: she has her own mind and desires, but she is also indelibly marked by her training at court. She can be silly and weak and frustrating at times, and she can be independent and bold at others. Mary's character often submits to the men in her life, because that is simply what women did in that era - but that makes the times where she tells everyone to shove off more impressive. I found myself wanting her to find her happiness.
I thought this book did a great job of telling the Boleyn story without focusing on Anne, although the portrayal of Anne was pretty good - she was that classic neglected little sister who overcompensated, and it became the death of her. I also liked the portrayal of Henry VIII, as Harper was able to subtly negotiate his transformation from hearty young man on top of the world, to panicked king focused on dynastic succession at any cost. All in all, I thought the characters were well done, the story was well-told, and if there were any glaring historical inaccuracies, I was too caught up in the book to notice.
I definitely recommend this book.
Sometimes I think that not everyone shares my macabre sense of humor, and then I feel slightly bad about laughing out loud while reading books like this in public. In my defense, this book is written in a darkly humorous tone, so it's hard not to laugh.
Execution: The Guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey, and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death, by Geoffrey Abbott, is broken into 70 small sections, each with a different method of execution. Abbott describes each method, and then gives a short historical background and usually a primary source example. Most of them I'd heard of before, but others, like the Spanish Donkey and the Dry Pan, were new to me.
What I like about this book, other than introductions to new methods of execution, is that it's broken up into convenient, small sections. It's actually the perfect bathroom book - you need to read this one bit at a time to really absorb the information (and picture it, curiously, with the face of someone you can't stand superimposed over the victim). The drawback of this is that it doesn't offer quite as much historical information as I would like, and I was also a bit disappointed that Abbott doesn't seem to use endnotes or footnotes (which is only to be expected by a mass-market publisher). He does provide a select bibliography (some of which the nerd in me is delighted to see that I've already read!) and cool appendices with executioner terminology and even an 1884 application to be an executioner. The tone of the book is humorous, but doesn't necessarily come down on either side of the capital punishment issue, which is refreshing compared to books by, say, Richard J. Evans (scholarly author), who seems to think that his reader needs to be reminded of how! horrible! executions! are! every page or so.
I definitely recommend this book for the macabre goth kid in your family, and the history nerd, but probably not that person you always suspected would suddenly snap and kill their friends or family.
Years ago, I saw Pete Yorn open for Semisonic (yes, I know), and had one of those incredibly rare, "Wow, this guy's got something" moments as he played songs from Musicforthemorningafter and a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song. His act was one of the first opening bands I ever actually enjoyed.
Since then, he put out Day I Forgot, and now Nightcrawler. There is a place in my heart especially for Musicforthemorningafter that Day I Forgot didn't even come close to getting into (I don't know why, but it just never caught me the same way Music did), so I figured I probably wouldn't like Nightcrawler as much either.
Wrong. Yay!
I guess the best way to explain it is that as soon as it feels like the weather is changing from winter to spring, I pull out Musicforthemorning after and listen to it as the days get longer. It's mellow and bittersweet and it has always been my chill-out-and-write-in-my-journal album since I heard it.
Nightcrawler is just as good. There are some great songs on this album, especially For Us. This is Yorn's same old mellowed-out pop-rock with a little edge, but he's still an excellent songwriter, and there's something about his voice that's so... well, I would say "emotive" but that's awfully close to sounding like "emo," so, um...
The only thing I don't like about it is that he collaborates with Natalie Maines on one song - a) I can't stand her voice, and b) I can't stand her face. Incidentally, I can't stand the Dixie Chicks' martyrdom either, so The Man is one song I have to skip.
But I do really like this album. I love how his songs seem to tell stories, which is one reason Musicforthemorningafter makes such great music to write to. This one will go on repeat for awhile.
(Also, he's hot.)
I'm a vampire junkie. I have acquired a well-developed taste of exactly what I like in vampire novels, and it all started pretty early in my youth with Christopher Pike books and the like.
When I was 11 or so, I got into L.J. Smith by reading her Secret Circle trilogy, and then devouring The Vampire Diaries, The Forbidden Game, and the Dark Visions trilogy. Then she came out with the Night World series, which is basically about an underground, world-wide organization of vampires, shapeshifters, and witches, who survive in the human world by being secretive and forbidding emotional interaction between Night People and humans. This is a series of 9 young adult books - the 10th never came out - and all of them are a little over two hundred pages.
Recently, since Brooke and I went to Muir Woods (which is a place Huntress features), I decided to pick these books back up and re-read them - something I haven't done in a few years. They always change when I read them as an adult. Sometimes I think they are better, sometimes I think they are sillier, but I always thoroughly enjoy them.
I'm not going to review them as if they are adult fiction, because they're not. They are clearly meant for a younger audience (I'd say about 10-16).
- The series starts out with Secret Vampire, a story about a girl diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Her best friend (conveniently, also her soulmate) changes her into a vampire against Night World rules; the story details how she and her soulmate fight against the odds, blah blah blah.
- The second book, Daughters of Darkness - and my hands-down favorite - is about a girl who lives in a tiny Oregon town. She notices some weird happenings that coincide with the arrival of three vampire sisters. Mary-Lynnette finds her soulmate in the sisters' older brother, and chaos ensues. She also kicks her soulmate (Ash) in the shins several times, which I find amusing, because that is how I relate to boys I like as well.
- The third book: a witch girl finds her soulmate.
- The fourth book: a lost witch girl has a near-death experience and a ghost-boy makes her into a bitchy popular girl through witchcraft. She finds...her soulmate.
- The fifth book: a vampire hunter, whose mother was killed by a vampire, kills vampires...and finds her soulmate. In a vampire.
- The sixth book: a vampire's soulmate is a human girl who has been reincarnated a billion times. They are soulmates and oh by the way the name of the book is...Soulmate.
- The seventh book, Huntress, is where it starts getting more interesting again. Apparently the millennium is coming, and with it the apocalypse. The end of the world = the Night World rising. But! There's a way to stop it. Apparently four "Wild Powers" exist and if the human world is to survive, all four kids must be found, awakened, and brought over to the light. This book has the same damn soulmate thing, but it is a little more exciting.
- The eighth book is about a secret vampire kingdom/enclave in Washington. The lead vampire dude is hot. He is a Wild Power. He finds his soulmate.
- The ninth book is about a shapeshifting girl on a mission to find the third Wild Power and secure her. Along the way, she FINDS HER DAMNED SOULMATE.
- The tenth book is supposed to either sum up the whole thing, or at the very least tell the story of the fourth Wild Power, but it was supposed to be published in 2000 - and we're still waiting for it.
However, this is not to say that these books are devoid of originality, entertainment value, or engaging characters. They have all three. I love Smith's dialogue, I love how each character is defined by a particular hobby or interest, like astronomy (and one learns about it while reading), and her plots are very good for the genre. Sure, the soulmate thing gets kind of repetitive, but she does have different characters every time, and by the time you get to the seventh book, the reason she does it starts to make much more sense.
Most importantly, though, Smith always captured my imagination. I would save what little money I had for these books and re-read them constantly, then sit back and imagine that maybe all these paranormal creatures did exist. Maybe soulmates did, too, and maybe there would be someone out there without mommy issues and paranoia, whom I could tolerate for more than five minutes. (Ah yes, these were the well-developed fantasies of my youth.)
If you're a parent who doesn't mind stories of the paranormal, these books are okay for your kids, too. I believe the worst word she ever uses is "damned" or possibly (MAYBE) "shit," and although there are occasional vague references to sex, no one gets it on in full frontal text. I don't think I got them all until I was older, so these books won't exactly destroy your child's innocence. Christopher Pike books, they are not.
I would recommend anything she wrote for a teenager, and I would probably even recommend them as fun books for adults.
I got a camcorder for Xmas/graduation, which I researched before I bought. I've never had a digital camcorder before, and I had some very specific ideas about what I wanted.
First of all, I wanted something that would be easy to whip out at a moment's notice, since I usually don't get a lot of warning when someone's about to do something amusing. Second, I wanted something that would be very easy to transfer to my computer and edit, then publish on the web - this ruled out anything that records on dvd or mini-DVs, and especially those that required firewire. And finally, I wanted something small, compact, with lots of features, a nice zoom and a clear picture. There wasn't anything that I could quite stash in a small purse, but this is damn close.
So, this is a camcorder with a 30 gig harddrive, which pretty much solved all my problems.
The size and weight of this camcorder are very appealing. It weighs maybe a pound, and it fits into my palm very comfortably. This is something I could easily carry around all day in a bag, and it wouldn't be that much heavier than my wallet and makeup bag combined. That is, this isn't a cumbersome piece of equipment like the 1980's camcorder we had when I was little...you know the deal, 10 lbs of sheer advanced technology.
As for ease of use, I can't imagine it being any easier and not coming with a Following Instructions For Dummies book. It has a touch screen that's very easy to operate, and all the menus are intuitive.
The picture is crystal clear with good lighting. The zoom is excellent - so good that I can see individual nose hairs on the video of my brother snoring. The sound is stereo, I believe. Although I haven't watched anything on a regular television set yet, the quality of the unedited .MPEG files on my computer is fantastic. And it's very easy to transfer from camera to video - it comes with a docking station that charges your camera and transfers video through a usb port.
The drawbacks are small. First is the price: if you want a nice quality camera you pay out the nose. But you can usually find it $50-100 cheaper if you wait for a good sale at Best Buy. Second, the software it comes with sucks. It's very basic, mainly for transfering photos and video, then burning DVDs straight from the camera. If you want to do any editing at all, you'll have to invest in software either to convert MPEG to AVI format (try MOVAVI Suite), or better editing software (I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements).
You can see a sample video up there on the left. Bear in mind that the quality is low to save space, but the unedited form is extremely clear. Also, that took maybe 20 minutes, total, to transfer to the computer, edit, and upload. Not bad for anyone who wants to publish on the web!
