There are a few fundamental constants about my reading tastes. One of those is that any book with a decent treatment of the Sidhe is guaranteed to appeal to me. The other is that any book by C.E. Murphy is guaranteed to do the same. Combine these, and the result is a tasty little urban fantasy that pretty much has “read this, Anna” written all over it.
Lara Jansen has a strange gift: she can always, always tell when someone is lying. Compared to many high-powered, badassed urban fantasy heroines this days, this may not seem like much–and neither does Lara’s quiet profession of tailor, when you put her up against all the bounty hunters and detectives and assassins and whatnot that populate the genre. But her ability proves to be of critical importance when the Seelie prince Dafydd seeks her help in clearing him of a charge of murder.
And, unsurprisingly given that this is in fact a C.E. Murphy novel with the Sidhe in it, I enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s not a hundred percent perfect; the relationship between Lara and Dafydd started closing in on True Love a bit fast for my tastes, for example. That however is a fairly small quibble against all the things I liked about the story.
One, the heroine is indeed refreshingly not a high-powered badass at combat, either magical or physical. Her truthseeking gift has interesting character connotations for her; I liked that it made her shy away from reading fiction because it parses as “false” to her (even though, as a voracious reader, I have a hard time understanding people who don’t like to read for pleasure!), and I liked even more that it let her ramp up very quickly to accepting the truth of the existence of the Sidhe, thereby neatly sidestepping the whole traditional OMG MAGIC IS REAL?! reaction that also inundates the genre.
Two, I also like Dafydd as a hero, and I find it fun that his cover identify in the human world when the story starts is that of a TV weatherman. His relationship with the brother he’s accused of murdering is well drawn, as are his reactions as the consequences of his enlisting Lara’s aid start mounting.
To wit, three, there are indeed good strong consequences to Lara’s discovering Faerie. I particularly liked that the old-school difference in flow of time between Faerie and the human realm is used here, to very good effect and with distinct consequences for the major characters.
Given that this is a duology, the story is not resolved as of the end of this book, so be prepared for that if you go in. But fortunately, Book 2 is out later this year! And I will, of course, be reading it. For this one, four stars.
So yeah! Decided after reading the ginormous Ars Technica writeup of Lion, and after reviewing my system this afternoon to see what PowerPC apps I still had (answer: nothing I couldn’t live without), I decided to go ahead and install Lion tonight. It was definitely the easiest OS upgrade I’ve ever done, I’ll give it that.
And in no particular order, here are things I’ve noticed about it:
One, once I rebooted into the new OS, things were quite a bit sluggish for several minutes–but there were two reasons for that. One, Spotlight went and reindexed everything on the drive. Two, I launched Mail as pretty much one of the first things, and that also needed to do significant updating of its database. So things were pretty pokey until both of these finished up their business.
Two, trying to launch iTunes got me an error message about not being able to open an iTunes Library file, but this was easily fixed by doing a quick check for software updates and downloading iTunes 10.4. iTunes then proceeded to load as per normal.
Three, goddamn, Mail is very… gray now. I’m not sure I approve of that, but we’ll see if it grows on me. Ditto for the new gray scrollbars.
Four, I quite like Launchpad, a new icon at the top of the Dock that’s basically a quick and dirty way to get at all of the apps on your system. If you’re an iPhone or iPad owner this interface will look very familiar, and it lets you swipe through it as well if you have a touchpad on your laptop like I do. You’re supposed to be able to organize the icons into folders like you do on iDevices, but I haven’t tried that yet. I like it less because of the similarity to iOS and more just because it means I can lose several less commonly used icons off my Dock.
Five, I discovered entirely by accident that you can set individual desktop backgrounds on the individual desktops available in the new Mission Control feature–which is cool. It’s a much nicer version of Spaces + Expose and even after playing with it for only a few moments, I’m grooving on it. And now I can go fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip through the Dashboard and all four of my desktops in a quick line, and I see LION! ELEPHANT! ISLAND! GREAT BIG SEA! It’s neat.
Six, if I have a Terminal window up and I’m connected to the MurkMUSH and I get paged, the icon starts bouncing at me and showing a little number on it indicating there’s something that needs my attention. Didn’t do that before.
Seven, hrmm, the Ars Technica review was talking about the dots on icons on the Dock that indicate which ones are launched going away. However, I still see mine!
Time Machine is now doing a massive 9.52GB backup–over our house LAN, no less, so this’ll be a while. But on the whole the upgrade appears to have gone swimmingly. I still need to verify that I can reboot into Win7 as needed, and that I can also launch Parallels to run that Win7 install as a VM, as before. (I did update Parallels since they deployed an update to talk to Lion, or so they took pains to inform users.)
Also still need to see if Safari’s new Reading List feature will seduce me off of Firefox, and what the new document handling model will be like once I get a hold of a version of a word processor that can talk to it. (Mac Word 2008 does not.)
But so far so good. And oh yes, speaking of Mac Word 2008–if you’re using Mac Office on your system, you WILL need 2008 or later if you want to upgrade to Lion, what with Rosetta support being removed. Be on the lookout as well if you’re at all reliant on Microsoft Query, which is part of Excel. That was one of my few PPC apps left on the system, and a bit of judicious Googling showed me that Microsoft has word out that they’re advising anyone reliant on Query to not upgrade yet until they fix that. They’re also reporting that Outlook is having trouble importing data out of Mail once Lion is installed, so people this might affect should keep an eye out for that.
AND! Since I am a Big Fish employee, it does behoove me to point out that older Big Fish releases, being PowerPC games, won’t run on Lion either. Be on the lookout for our powers that be to issue word on what Mac customers should do about those specific games. If there are particular games you don’t want to lose the ability to run yet, you might hold off a bit on the OS install.
More as I observe it! (And dammit, why don’t I have a Lion icon for posting to LJ and Dreamwidth?)
I’m always ambivalent when I go back to Kentucky. I do love and also generally like most of my family, but on the other hand, I don’t belong in the political and religious climate of the place. ‘Cause I mean, seriously, “agnostic, bisexual, polyamorous SF geek” is not exactly a common breed in those parts. And there is enough darkness in my childhood that for the most part, I’m content to remain a few thousand miles away from it for the remainder of my days.
And yet. When solarbird and I went to my Grandma Hyson’s funeral this week, I did feel it necessary to do a few things.
One of these was, on Monday afternoon, going to see the house where I grew up. The neighborhood looked surprisingly unchanged from my childhood memories–although of course smaller in scale to my 42-year-old eyes than it’d been when I was small, or even a teenager. 902 itself, the house my father helped build for us, looked quite a bit smaller in particular and it did have changes. The shutters are solid white now, instead of the green with white borders that they’d been when I was a child, and the house numbers are new. There is only one tree in the front yard now rather than two, and that tree is significantly taller and thicker around than the maple saplings I remember.
The big ditch by the house is the same, though–the ditch that’s big enough to be labelled “Slop Ditch” on maps of Louisville, a ditch whose size hadn’t ever really registered with Dara until she actually saw it, at which point she proceeded to inform me that it was really more of a big creek or maybe even a small river. The thick summer plant life growing all along the banks, another thing that fit well with my memory, is certainly river-like.
Preston Highway, at least where my old street intersected with it, also looked much the same. I pointed out to Dara the church we’d attended, as well as the building that used to be the movie theater where I first saw Star Wars, and which is now (sadly) a Verizon store. The huge hardware store I remembered on the corner was still there, although the building I remembered as white is more of a silvery-gray now. And the tiny convenience shop just around the way from that hardware store, the Easy Shop which was my impetus to walk six entire blocks from home because that was where the candy was, isn’t there anymore at all. That made me kind of sad.
We went over to see my old elementary school as well, since that wasn’t too far away, and that too seemed a lot smaller than I ever remembered. But we also wound up wandering to a part of Louisville that hadn’t ever been a part of my childhood: the Bardstown neighborhood, which turned out to be surprisingly congenial to Seattleites used to walkable streets. I could have easily seen Bardstown, with its walkable main street and street parking for several surrounding blocks, as a neighborhood hub in Seattle. And since it has a huge comic book store as well as a nice little coffee shop and a used book exchange, I am fairly sure it must be a haven for geeks all over Louisville.
Monday night sent Dara and me to Lexington. We dropped in on starsongky and gazerwolf, and had a lovely chat with them; then we went out to dinner with our old friend Brent and another acquaintance from LexFA, David, and that was lovely too.
Tuesday was of course Grandma’s funeral, and as funerals go, it was… not bad, actually. It was nice to spend a couple of hours just hanging out with the family, sharing conversation and a lot of old pictures, especially many old pictures of Grandma that I’d never seen before. Dara and I were also even introduced to an old high school friend of my aunt Kim’s–who, it turns out, is an SF geek herself and is someone whose path we fleetingly crossed attending Rivercons while we were still in Kentucky. So that was pretty neat.
So was what Dara told me after we got home: that a friend of my aunt Teresa’s, while Dara had stepped outside, had given her a bit of a look and asked, “Are you the outdoorsy type? Do you like to hike?” To wit: LOL, of the very, very old school variety.
The actual service turned out to be surprisingly informal and sweet, as it was officiated by a gentleman who wasn’t actually a pastor. But he was an old, old friend of Grandma’s family, the Careys, and had spoken at previous Carey funerals. His name was Billy Maxie, and he rambled quite a bit about the history of Grandma’s family. Two things that he said, though, stood out for me.
One was that the Careys, he said, were always singers. That if you met a Carey, you’d know that they’d automatically be good at singing, and how they’d always be leading the singing at church and such. He said that if any of us with Carey blood found ourselves just singing, that that would be the Carey genes expressing themselves.
I couldn’t help but think of me walking to at from work, belting out Great Big Sea. And I had to smile.
And the other was something awesome that I don’t think I’d ever known, or if I did I’d forgotten: that Grandma was one of the many millions of women who, during World War II, worked in the factories while their menfolk went off to war. Aunt Kim backed this up afterwards by saying that Grandma had built airplanes, and she’d always had a hard time envisioning her mother with power tools. My Aunt Teresa says that Grandma had also been a bit of a clothes horse and loved her fancy dresses, and hated wearing the “dungarees” that they were required to wear at the factories!
Mr. Maxie finished up though by doing something really, really sweet: saying that as a member of the Disabled American Veterans, he’d paid a lot of respect to men who’d served during WWII. This time, though, he was going to do it for my grandma, because he firmly believed that the women who did their part by working in those factories were every bit as deserving of the same respect as the men who’d done the fighting. And so he stepped in front of my Grandma’s casket and very formally saluted her.
I teared up at that. That, all by itself, made me happy I was there.
Dara and I both got to have a bit of a chat with Mr. Maxie after, and he was startled to see that Dara had her mandolin with her–because he had in fact intended to have another gentleman play mandolin for him during the service, but that gent had not been able to make it. Mr. Maxie told Dara that if he’d known she’d had a mandolin, he’d have put her to work. And he seemed pleased to learn that I myself was of Carey blood, and that I did sing a bit.
Afterwards, because I had never actually seen it and because my mom was buried in the same cemetery, I told my brothers and sisters I wanted to see Mom’s headstone. So we went over there to pay our respects, bringing Marc’s and Sarah’s children with us. It was a bit of a crowd with the great lot of us, and it turns out that Mom is in kind of crowded company. But I was happy, in a wistful kind of way, to at least see the place where she rests.
Then we all convened at my uncle Randy’s house and hung out together for several more hours, eating food, chatting, and looking at a great many more old pictures.
Like this one, which is perhaps one of the earliest ones of Grandma in the entire set of pictures I saw. I’ve come home with the originals of a lot of the pictures I looked at, but this one in particular was old enough that I didn’t want to separate it from the rest. So I just snapped a pic of it in turn with my iPhone, just so that I can show you all an even younger picture of my Grandma, and a glimpse of the Stylish Young Miss that she was. I think that pose of her is adorable.
Stylish Young Miss
Tuesday night, after Dara and I parted ways with my family, we wandered off to the one other part of Louisville (aside from my middle school and high school from downtown) that I could remember with any immediate clarity: Jefferson Mall, which had always been the “good” mall when I was a kid, and which still periodically shows up in dreams of mine, heavily mutated, as the upper level of a dreamscape Nethack game. I remembered the L-shape of the place, and the skylights over the food court, and I had a very, very niggling memory of the Willis Music where I might even have gotten that ancient orange Elvis songbook I have once again, thanks to my brother.
There were thunderstorms Tuesday afternoon and evening, clearing out the awful heat and humidity that had made most of Monday unbearable. A good thunderstorm is one of the few things aside from my family that I do miss about Kentucky, and I was happy to see that one. A parting gift from the state, as it were.
And I bought a Louisville shirt in the airport, on the way home.
This morning when I woke up I had the word from my brother Donnie in email that our grandmother had passed away. Got it confirmed by my Aunt Teresa later by phone. It’s not really a surprise, given that this was Grandma Hyson, the same grandmother who suffered a stroke several weeks ago. I was expecting to get a call like this at some point this year.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck, though.
solarbird and I are heading to Kentucky for the funeral on Tuesday. We’ll be flying out tomorrow and coming back on Wednesday, and y’all should assume that my ability to pay attention to the Internet will be sporadic at best, although I do plan to have my phone. So assume radio silence on all blogs/journals and social networks until I resurface on Wednesday.
Anybody who really does need to get in touch with me, though, I will be monitoring my email. And there’s also always voice, if you have my cell phone number.
And here is my grandmother in her younger years, thanks to a picture just recently sent me by my sister Sarah in email. I really like this picture. I think that if Grandma had been a heroine in a novel, she would have been described as “not a traditional beauty, but a handsome and striking woman nonetheless.”
If you’re there, feel free to look for me as “Angela Korra’ti” or via either of my gmail addresses. Thanks to both and Tia Nevitt for inviting me, although Shawn’s invite got to me first.
Mind you, I didn’t really need a whole new social network to keep track of. And I’m pretty sure that at least for a while, this one will suffer the same problem that all the clones of LJ do, including Dreamwidth: i.e., that it won’t get really interesting unless there’s a critical mass of people that move to it. But hey, now I’m at least part of the initial wave. We’ll see what happens.
Hey, Seattle-based peeps! My belovedest , in her auspices of Crime and the Forces of Evil, will be doing her very first bar-type show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar tomorrow night! She will be playing along with Natalie Quist and Gimmie a Pigfoot, and I’ll be there to provide merch support.
(Yes, you heard that correctly, I will be in an actual bar on an actual Friday night. But with my belovedest performing, hey, it’s worth it!)
Music starts up at 9pm and there will be a $6 cover charge. There will also very likely be shenanigans, and definitely rage-driven acoustic elfmetal. You should all come listen, and furthermore, buy her album while you’re at it. And if you see me, say hi!
Y’know how sometimes, even if you know the book is probably going to be mediocre at best and is even likely to outright suck, you kind of have to read it anyway? Death Troopers, a Star Wars novel by Joe Schreiber, was like that for me.
‘Cause, okay, yeah, Star Wars plus zombies.
I know, I know. But I’m still enough of a Star Wars fan, and definitely enough of a zombie fan, that I could not resist seeing how an author tried to get a zombie story into the Star Wars universe. Plus, given that I saw a spoiler about two of the main Star Wars characters getting grafted into this plot (and it will probably not be much of a stretch for anyone familiar with me to guess which characters would pull me in), well okay yeah fine I’m there.
Survey says: overall, meh. I had two main beefs with this story: one, that the aforementioned grafting of primary Star Wars characters into this plot had no real suspense to it, since you knew they were going to survive. The story’s set before A New Hope, so there wasn’t any doubt at all that these characters would make it. Two, that pretty much every other character is thinly sketched in at best. They’re all archetypes zombie fans have seen in countless stories elsewhere.
Although, that said, the two main characters grafted into the story are the exact right characters you’d want to graft in. And, I do have to give Schrieber props for making the one female in the plot, the prison ship’s doctor, halfway interesting.
Also, props have to be given for a reasonably creepy Star Wars-based zombie scenario. Our protagonists are on board a prison ship that comes across a seemingly abandoned Star Destroyer, which has gone adrift thanks to its crew being devastated by the unleashing of a potent virus that, of course, the Empire had been trying to develop as a weapon. A Star Destroyer IS pretty much perfect for a zombie scenario; it’s huge, and there are thousands of crewmembers at your disposal to turn into undead. Since this is Star Wars, you get the added amusement value of non-human zombies–and I must say, zombie Wookiees? Okay yeah. That’s disturbing. So are the moments with the doomed command staff of the Destroyer being discovered barricaded inside one of the shuttles, where they’ve been slowly starving to death.
And to be fair, I did actually like the ending. The Destroyer zombies start exhibiting creepier behavior (I shan’t specify what, because spoilers), and the surviving protagonists (well, aside from the aforementioned two main characters who we knew were going to survive anyway) go out on a respectably gritty note.
I gave this two stars originally, but I’m bumping up to three ’cause yeah, there was some decent creepiness here.
I love me some Gothic romance, and Shelley Munro’s The Spurned Viscountess is certainly that, with all the right elements to yoink me right in. We have your innocent young woman with strange abilities. We have your nobleman with a mysterious secret, getting his brood on. We have your string of mysterious accidents. And we have your suitably spooky, remote mansion, chock full of potentially dangerous people. For bonus Get Anna Engaged mileage, we’ve even got a bit of an amnesia plot going on, since our hero has memory issues on top of his angst about the murder of his first love.
The atmosphere worked for me, and I found Munro’s prose solidly executed. I’m partial to healers as characters, which inclined me to like Rosalind as a heroine, though I liked her best when she expressed worry over the fate of her lost maid; she seemed a stronger character there than she did even in her interactions with hero Lucien. The mystery of what happened to Lucien and Rosalind in Europe provided a reasonable backbone for the plot, although it never really gelled for me until the very end.
Overall I liked this one well enough, definitely enough to read it through to the end, even if it never quite managed to be more than the sum of its parts. Three stars.
My sister Sarah just sent around a whole fleet of old pictures of various members of our family, including a couple of very, very, VERY TINY me! Like this one, wherein it is demonstrated that even at a very tiny age, I liked to have books in my lap.
Tiny Anna is Tiny
And then there’s this one, of me and my mother, circa 1971. She really did look like me. Except with a bigger forehead. I come by my GIGANTIC HEAD honest!
