Elizabeth Gilbert's fine fiction.

City of Girls is great, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Nevertheless, I am such a push-over for narrators--reliable or unreliable--that I like the main character / narrator even though I might have second thoughts about her in real life. And she wouldn't care a pin about my opinion in real life either. So that's me sorted!

I was given a free ebook version in exchange for an honest review. I liked it so much that I bought the audiobook from Audible.

But this book is worth your time and your book credit. The narrator is lively and contrary and full of life, both in spite of and because of choices that she makes. The people she knows and comes into contact with are interesting and convincing. Even though some of the issues addressed in  the book are informed by a current mindset philosophy, I find them convincing because it's happening in pre- and post WWII New York theater environment. So things that might seem unconvincing happening among residents of Levittown, PA, seem more than plausible in New York at the time.

Vivian Morris (in her 90s) receives a letter from a young woman, asking her what Vivian was to her father. Thus, the reader is hooked into discovering what Vivian was / is to the young woman of the letter and her father. All the rest of the adventures and descriptions--most of which have nothing directly to do with the mysterious father--are shared in answer to that letter. On the one hand, that's a writing gimmick. In this case, it works well and doesn't feel as artificial as it sounds.
Through story events Vivian shares her developing philosophy of life, love, and human existence: convincing without seeming didactic or preachy. This book is worth your time and pays off in hours of enjoyment.

I Should have saved this for November, but I found it now

This is a post I wrote on another blog, back in 2009. I just liked it (a clue that it may have better remained lost...). Anyway, let me know if you think it's helpful.

   How do we start this novel thing? In the Danny Kaye movie (historical reference, ignore and move on…) about Hans Christian Anderson, when asked about his stories, Anderson says that he tells the stories to see what happens next. This suggests that his story-making style was to start with a character in a situation but not have the plot already outlined ahead of time. Another art that makes use of this technique is improv—actors are given a situation and who their characters are and have to make up a scene on the fly.

   In that vein, who are your main characters? This is one way to begin writing. Write down the things you know about two or three of them (the main character and the other character that is most involved with the main character). In technical terms these would be called protagonist(s) and antagonist(s), but you know what you mean. Name is a good start, but if for some reason that causes you to stop while looking for the perfect name or the name that “best fits” your character(s), just use a place-filler (like Bob or Kathy) and move on.

   Then write things you know about them—age, sex, what do they want? How do they look? What do they think about things that matter in their home, hangout, or habitat? How much do they care about what others think or about what others think about them? Do they spend time imagining cars or colleens? Dolls or danger boys? Something completely different?

   Once you have the two opposing characters put them down somewhere with something they want or don’t want the other to have or do and see what happens. Write down what you see. Rinse and repeat.

Cauldron of Ghosts--Third book in the Crown of Slaves series taking place in the "Honorverse" of David Weber

This book is very good--action, suspense and favorite characters.

Action--fights on a small enough level to follow individuals--space ship takeovers, urban fighting in defended and booby-trapped buildings, and cargo "truck"-jackings gone sideways.

Suspense--will the characters be caught or will they succeed? Will they die? Will they Die AND succeed? The reader in the moment is kept guessing.

Favorite characters--Anton Zilwicki, Victor Cachat, and others from the Crown of Slaves segment of the Honorverse are all here doing their characteristic mannerisms; dangerous, insane plans; and forlorn hope actions. The one exception to known character similarity is Andrew Artlett who acts younger yet more thoughtful than his appearance in Torch of Freedom.

In any case, there's a lot to love in this volume and a reader's favorite villains to hate as well--from bit-part slavers to (literally) evil genius father & sons.

Full four stars from me! The only thing that kept it from being five stars for me is that (as other reviewers of the David Weber Honorverse books have complained about a couple of other titles) is that in this book several paragraphs are taken word for word or nearly from the second book in the Saganami Island series, Storm from the Shadows. Since the scene takes place in both books, it's understandable, if not  justifiable. I found it only a little disconcerting.

Nevertheless, for readers who enjoy the Honorverse or for readers who just enjoy good space / spy / military adventure stories, this is a four-star read that they will want to dive into. Like a number of individual books in a series, it may not be the best volume to jump into from a standing start, but it does read well on its own, and for first time readers, the repeated paragraphs won't even be noticed, because they fit perfectly in this story.

For fun and adventure, read this book!

The Sea without a Shore by David Drake, review

The Sea Without a Shore by David Drake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Drake pours on the adventure and gives readers an excellent time.

The Sea without a Shore by David Drake is the latest (#10) in the Daniel Leary / Adele Mundy space navy series. Drake keeps things fresh in this adventure of the duo in the Cinnabar Navy--RCN as all the insiders call it. Because this is one of a series, and because the author has said he tries to make it possible to start the series from any one of the books, this book has some passages that readers familiar with the series will either welcome as familiar friends or feel some level of annoyance with the repetition of stuff they already know. Mine was the familiar friends reaction.

David Drake (as his author's note explains) takes earth minor historical events and recasts them as a plot framework for Leary & Mundy to work through in different planets and star systems. It's a technique that works very well for me. The author is able to take his characters through multiple adventure scenarios without becoming repetitive (except in as much as some have found the explanations of the Matrix or Leary or Mundy's personal history repetitive, as mentioned above).

In this book, they are not acting as official RCN members. They escort the son (formerly a ne'r do well, but now reformed) of Adele's civilian boss to a planet where there's a revolution going on, where the son hopes to find a buried treasure to help his side buy weapons and win the revolution. They don't know if there really is a treasure, but they set off to help--with Adele having a related secret mission that she doesn't share with Daniel or anyone else!

In one sense, it's a well-known pattern for fans of the series--Daniel & Adele are given a nearly impossible mission, Daniel thinks up a bold and sly plan, and Adele gets normally inaccessible information and fools the opposition. This may sound simple and mundane, especially after nine previous novels in the series, but once again, for me, Drake pours on the adventure and gives readers an excellent time.

I've read all his books in the Leary & Mundy series more than twice! and I expect to do the same with this volume.

View all my reviews

A Song for Closing

Sometimes, one must change up the routine to get the attention of perfectly fine, but busy people when the time comes to empty the building. One method for this is my "Poorman's Al Yankovik" Fair Use parody of some helpless, innocent song.

I submit for your consideration, "I Think We Are Closed, Now," wrenched from Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now," also covered in the 80's by Tiffany.

Print files or save!
That's what we say when we are closing
And don't let's delay
Let's close like we planned
And so we're checking out as fast as we can...
Giving to you a helping hand
Trying to get away into the night
And then you gather up your items and you wander to the door
And then we say, "I think we are closed, now
There doesn't seem to be anyone around.
"I think we are closed now,
The beating of our hearts is the only sound."

The song ends there, because when you're making closing motions, people really don't want a two or three minute radio ditty. About a minute is enough inflict on people without rousing their annoyance beyond having been interrupted in their task and being asked to leave in the first place.

When metaphors don't work

A line in a song says, "Open the eyes of my heart..." Now, I've mentioned this somewhere else, but that metaphor (which I believe does work, and I'm willing to stipulate so here) made me think of one that I feel should work when you look at the comparisons involved, and yet it doesn't.
   "Sprained ankle of the heart"--certainly sprains ache and hearts ache. And the way that sprained ankles can keep paining you for months or years after the initial injury fits how an heart ache can do. So it seems to me that it should work as a metaphor, but it just doesn't. It' lacks that "Aha!" moment that the best metaphors have. Maybe, you could have a working metaphor if you just referred to "sprained my heart," but I'm still not convinced. It would have the immediate relation to "break my heart." So, like you can sprain a joint or break its bone--sprained ankle, broken ankle--you could have "sprained heart," "broken heart." I'm just not sure if that works or works enough.

Writing on writing: A short short

Writing on Writing

  When I took driver's ed, it was held at a near-by college campus. The driver's ed simulation room was near-by the freshman English composition classroom. On a bulletin board between the two rooms, students' one, two or three sentence works were posted. Some were amusing; some were "meh"; I assume for the sake of argument, some were horrible, but I can't remember any of those.
The one that I remember all these years down read like this: "A guy asked me for an aspirin. I gave him a Mydol."


My short short for this post is in the picture at left, transcribed below:

Some students, unwilling to revise their writing, seem to imagine themselves as some kind of Pontius Pilate of composition saying, “What I have written, I have written.” (cf. John 19:22)

Snack and writing

I was thinking of a Beatles song, "I've got a feeling." I guess I was hungry, because I started thinking of a parody involving a large amount of pizza.


I need a pizza, a pizza deep and wide
Oh yeah, Oh yeah
I need a pizza, a pizza I can’t hide
Oh no. no. Oh no! oh No.
Yeah! Yeah! I need a pizza. Yeah!

Oh please believe me, pineapple and the ham
Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
And if you leave me, no anchovy again
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
Yeah Yeah I need a pizza, yeah.
I need a pizza.

All these years I’ve been wandering ‘round,
Wondering how come nobody told me
Anchovy, ham and garlic is a bit of
an over do

I need a pizza, with sauce of tomatoes
Oh Yeah, Oh yeah.
I need a pizza with prawns and cilantro
Oh yeah, Oh yeah, Oh yeah.
Yeah! Yeah! I need a pizza. Yeah!

Ev’rybody had a bread stick
Ev’vrybody had a red wine
Ev’vrybody had a salad
Ev’vrybody had the Key Lime
Oh yeah, Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Ev’rybody had a good beer
Ev’rybody let their belt out
Ev’rybody wiped their spill up
Ev’rybody put their tips down
Oh yeah. Yeah Wooooo Hooooo


It's not as funny nor quite as inventive as a Weird Al Yankovic composition, but it pretty much fits the syllable count and stress. :-)

It's all about making odd connections

I almost feel like this needs an idea tree or something to show when things occurred simultaneously.

While de-selecting outdated consumer guides [weeding],

I was reminded that my dad had said (as part of my instruction for pulling weeds from the yard), “A weed is any plant someone doesn’t want growing there.”

Then I thought how weeding items from the shelves (particularly books) is like pulling unwanted flowers.

That made me think I’d like to write an haiku about “filing away unwanted flowers”

I decide that the syllable count is closer to 7 than to 5 on that phrase, so I plan to write around it.

I’m counting the syllables and changing things around, when I try “file.” “File” looks like one syllable, but as I say the word, it seems to me I say it in two syllables-[fye-ul]. I can’t believe that’s right so I look it up in two different dictionaries (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed., and American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed). Both indeed claim that “file” is one syllable. (So why does it come out as two when I say it, albeit a very fragile 2nd syllable?)

While I looked down in the dictionaries, I noticed next the word “file’” which is described as “powdered sassafras leaves used to thicken soup, stew, or gumbo.” Ha! You may be aware in the Hank Williams’ song, “Jambalaya (On The Bayou)” has the line mentioning “fillet gumbo.” I thought it was a gumbo with fish fillets in it. But no! It was file’ gumbo, which doubtless any of you southern, not to say Louisiana types, already knew.

But now I’ve forgotten how I wanted to arrange my haiku, except that it had the line
Filing unwanted flowers
In the middle.

Still. I think it is an apt metaphor for librarian de-selecting items.

Hmmmmmm. I’ll try this:

Books sent, shelf to bin
Filing unwanted flowers
past lost tomorrow.

Stranger than Fiction

I usually like Dustan Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Queen Latifah has been good in all the movies of hers I’ve watched. I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, but this movie was one of the good ones.

I liked it so much that I naturally questioned my taste and went over to Rotten Tomatoes to see what they had to say about it. STF got 6.9 out of 10. The critics’ consensus quote was a little mean-spirited, I thought:
“MOVIE CONSENSUS
A fun, whimsical tale about an office drone trying to save his life from his narrator. The cast obviously is having a blast with the script, but Stranger Than Fiction's tidy lessons make this metaphysical movie feel like Charlie Kaufman-lite.”

Kaufman, you may know or remember is the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and others.

"Tidy lessons" "Kaufman-lite"--these are deliberately pejorative. The consensus statement is fair to the overall comment from critics if they were mashed together. Some liked the whimsical tale, the cast having fun with the script and roles; some people felt annoyed with the movie's accessiblity. Because it wasn't dark, difficult, nor ultimately damaged, they devalued it.

Well, them and the horse they rode in on!

While I couldn't sit still in the last third of the movie just before the ending (I stood up and watched shifting from foot to foot. It was the decongestant, I think. Or maybe I was just edgy. But you can be as crazy as you want if no one's there--no matter what the voices are saying to the contrary), I thought it was a good ending. Perhaps not a great ending, but very, very good. I'll be watching this film again.

Some of my favorite things:

Emma Thompson is daring and perfect!! Ms Thompson is a pretty, perhaps even beautiful woman, but she's playing an frazzled author with writer's block, and her make up looks like splotchy no-make up. I love her twitches, her habits, and her red nose. She rocks! She dares to be scrungy and not sweet scrungy like a comic hobo or something. Her character is unattractive and makes you want to look away.

Dustin Hoffman is funny and eccentric (dare one say, as usual?). He plays literature professor Jules Hilbert who takes Harold Crick (Ferrell's character) seriously enough to try and figure out what kind of story he's being written into, and to see if he can discover who the author might actually be so that Crick can do something about it. And for Hoffman's character, literature is more important (if not sweeter) than life. After all the work Hoffman has done, though it's hard not to see some schtick from his other characters show up. The professor's detailed perfectionism towards literature seems heavily borrowed from Hoffman's Michael Dorsey from Tootsie.

Queen Latifah as the publisher's author assistant who is trying to get Karen Eiffel to finish her book has just the right amount of no-nonsense, humor, and caring. Because the character, Penny Escher, is so perfect in a serving kind of way, I wonder if some people or critics would find the character objectionable as a movie/literary descendant of the mammy character Hattie McDaniel used to play. In any case, I liked the character, and I liked Queen Latifah.

In the spirit of overthinking, what about those character names!!!??

Harold Crick

Karen Eiffel
Ana Pascal

Penny Escher

even

Jules Hilbert (I didn't know, but I googled Hilbert, and there was a famous mathematician named David Hilbert who came up with some important concepts and theorems that have to do with finiteness and multidimensional space--which are quite beyond my capacity at this time.)

Stranger than Fiction has the straightforward emotional story of a guy trying to sort out his life and make it more meaningful than drudgery, it has a "chick-flickesque" love story, and it has tricksy details for those who want to overthink darkly. I think the critics who thought it was too simple didn't get the tricksy things. Myself, I'd give it an 8.9 out of 10!!

Life isn't all Beef Steak and Skittles

Omnivore’s Dilemma
By Michael Pollan

Known among book clubs as the author of Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan follows up on his fifteen minutes of fame with another book about how millions of years of evolution can’t be all wrong while 60 years of industrial farming development certainly may be. That is, once people have moved away from being their own hunter-gatherers, deciding what to eat becomes a trickier question than seems readily apparent to most consumers.

The strong points of this book are its lively presentation of information, both researched from sources and from personal experience; the interesting and sympathetic people—both industrial food source producers and non-industrial food source producers and a problematic hybrid of the two, large-scale organic food producers—that Pollan introduces to readers. Pollan’s humor and reasoned approach to his topic are also refreshing.

A weakness of the writing is that some phrases and words are repeated more than felt felicitous for me. Pollan identifies his sections of the book as he investigates the different paths that food might take from living entity to food on the table, but in his reporting, he sometimes makes some large leaps in geography and time back and forth through his experiences. The repetition of phrases and words and ideas gives the book an aura of being a collection of articles on this topic. Still, while this weakens the book if one is reading straight through, it also means that one could read in any one section and have a coherent presentation of Pollan’s ideas and discoveries about the topic(s) under consideration.

I listened to the recorded book (on CD), and I think the redundancy was helpful in that format (even though I noticed it and it disconcerted me enough that I had to examine what I really felt about the repetitions), because if I missed a point, he would remind the reader about it a little later on. (Not as a reminder, as such, but just in the course of bringing the same point to bear in another sub-topic.)

I’ll feel differently about what I eat from now on. I won’t necessarily stop eating over-processed foods based on unnatural uses of corn and corn by-products, but I’ll be more conscious when I do eat them. In any case, Pollan is persuasive without being strident and reasoned without being boring.

#26 Reflections of a Chocolate Bunny & 27--One more Thing

3169_ChocBunny "I'm thinking, '27 Things, but
at least no one bit off my ears!'"
Originally uploaded by YorickWell.

Ah, I remember that Learning 2.0 project, 27 things to learn and play. In terms of affecting my lifelong learning goals, I couldn't say that it has, because I'm always looking to learn new and amazing technologies--at the level of playing.

As in, "What do you play?"

"Oh, I play the cassette player; I play the MP3 player; I play the CD player." (I actually play the guitar as well, but that's a litter deeper than I would say I can do with technologies. I also play the word processor, but I don't play assembly language, C, C+, C++, nor any of the other current computer languages. I do dabble in HTML, of course.)

Having said that, L2.0 has assisted my lifelong learning goals in that I have now done several things I hadn't done before even if I had known about them or not. I had never put any photos online--although having gotten a digital camera in late December, it is likely I would have posted soon, but this program provided the impetus (not to be confused with the Pompitus [of Love] which is a mysterious phrase in a song lyric that is not clearly defined, even at this moment! Oops: This just in.
http://www.algebra.com/algebra/about/history/Pompitus.wikipedia is an article about what the word means and where it probably came from. Amazing). I'm also easily distracted at times, and the multiple lessons and exercises assisted me in the sense that I had no time to get bored by anything. (I hope the readers take longer than I deserve to become bored with my blog entries.)

I've been captured by this blogging thing. And the ability to start posts off with a picture, somewhat like an allusion to illuminated manuscripts or to stick a picture in the middle of a post to illustrate some point or just to relieve the readers' eyes from all this text has been great fun for me. I think the combination of Flickr and Blogspot is much better than either of them by themselves. I'm also pretty addicted to LibraryThing, although I must say my cataloging much more resembles copy-cataloging than original cataloging. (When I see a book in someone else's LibraryThing that I've read or own, there's a button that allows a signed in user to just add the book to her own library catalog! Whoooo hooooo!!!)

I've been surprised at how easy some of these Web things are; I've been surprised that some sites (like Myspace) strike me as less useful than I had hoped.

Moving to the next landing of this controlled wandering, I can say that I had enough help when I needed it, but I didn't necessarily feel that I was approached as much for help as I had imagined I might be. Most of my colleagues either had a different schedule from me or else didn't need much help (or possibly found me less than approachable, but people I've asked have said that's not the case.) I have had a few people ask questions, just not as many as I expected.

Improving the format or the concept:

I think I would have appreciated a written transcript of the podcasts (although, someone would have had to have transcribed them and that would have been a drag!). I don't quite know how to justify that feeling--I listen to audiobooks all the time, I listen to other mp3 files on my Palm. I guess that it has to do with perceptions of time pressures: I felt I needed to keep moving to the next activity, to the next lesson, and the information at the speed of sound (podcasts), was slower for me than information at the speed of sight (text, duh!). Also, the one time I had to use dial-up access, even the loading of the website and the loading of the links was slower than I could endure. I used dial-up for longer than many people, but now that I'm on faster connections at home and in libraries, it is a stress to operate at the speed of dial up. (Although one thing libraries should keep in mind is trying to have alternative services for those with slow Internet. The text-only version of the catalog is one of those dial up compensations that I think is still a good idea.)

One other format improvement would have been if the progress logs had had room for more than one URL, given that several weeks actually comprised two or three of the 27 Things each. The current progress log required that these two and three things be in one post in order to list the response in just that one URL.

I thought the concept of Learning 2.0 itself was sound, albeit somewhat second-round trendy. But I'm more of a second- or third- stoner* myself in relation to technology, so the drifting close to "me too!" nature of this program was probably just right. (*allusion to the proverb/quotation "[L]et ... him cast the first stone.")

I would like to see similar training opportunities when some new library-relevant technologies emerge, but I think we should try to come up with some steps or protocols for determining which things should be explored and taught, and which things are likely to be analogous to 8-track tape technologies. Libraries that had vinyl disc collections, that had (and have) cassette collections, and that have CD collections turned out to have guessed/bet right for the most part. Any libraries that had 8-track tape collections, I think probably had them go obsolete sooner than it was worth to have them. It's easy to say, but we should avoid adopting 8-track tape technologies.

In closing this ever-so-long post, I'd like to thank my parents, without whom I wouldn't even be here. And if I could go back in time and tell me stuff, I'd freak out. Er, no, that wasn't the question.

If I could go back in time and tell me to either participate in this program or skip it, I'd still tell me to participate. I'd also tell me to be careful of typos in naming my blog's URL so that I wouldn't lose all my readers when I fixed the typo of the URL and then no one could find where I had "gone."

#27. One more Thing.

At first I couldn't think of "one more thing." I re-read the wiki article on Web 2.0. Still nothing else. Then I gazed at the comments on the KCLSU #27 blog entry, and someone mentioned Second Life. An excellent example of how this collaborative can work: other people working together can help give ideas that we recognize as great but we might not have thought of on our own. (I'm thinking of a Venn Diagram here with overlapping and discrete areas of coverage.) So, anyway, my one more thing would be training and collaborative activities in SecondLife (which I had briefly looked at earlier in the program but didn't proceed on my own yet, because of so many other choices to look, learn, and play with.

Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh! Shiny!

Review of Un Lun Dun

I just finished Un Lun Dun a couple hours ago. I found it engaging from the beginning. I think Mieville has done some really interesting things in his book. It reminded me of a lot of other other books, but in a good way.
A laundry list:The first and most obvious is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman the whole UnLondon of Mieville is very like Gaiman's London Below. Richard Mayhew becoming invisible to people in London Above because of his association with the people from below is like Deeb being nearly forgotten by her family and friends while she's away because of phlegm.

I did think it was too bad that Zwazzy was so quickly essentially written out of the novel (that's an admittedly a bad writing choice--similar to what Orson Scott Card does with the real estate agent in Homebody.) Nevertheless, Deeb is like Sophie in Howl's Moving Castle,--she's not the one who's supposed to be the hero/savior, but she's the one whose intelligence and bravery solves things anyway.I thought the Wraithtown was a lot like the City of the Dead from Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. It was especially similar given that people either go to Wraithtown or sometimes go straight to the other place. UnLondon is also like Narnia in that one route to get someone there may not work to get back there the next time.

Finally, in a really far reach, Un Lun Dun is like Watership Down in that each of the characters on the good team contributed their part. I don't know that I'll read ULD every other year and get teary-eyed like I do with Watership Down, but Deeb will definitely be in my list of strong, clever, admirable female characters along with Sophie from Howl's, Coraline from Coraline, Lyra from the Dark Materials Trilogy, Thursday Next, Ruth Thomas from Stern Men and others.

Number 17

Catch-up and Play Week: Play with an online image generator.

done and done. But now, a word from our sponser, the Number 17.

The Japanese verse form known as Haiku contains exactly 17 syllables. Note that it consists of 3 lines, with 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively.
Back to our show.
This poster was made at the Do It Yourself tab at
the Parody Motivator Generator at Despair.com. (The do it yourself part included the picture, which is mine, and the aphorism, which is also mine, all rights reserved!)

Addendum to post below--I rather hate how time flows backward in posting

Although it was brief, there were several things going on at once, so to speak, in terms of goals and objectives for the post below. I wrote out what I wanted to say with pen on paper as I was going along and then when I was ready, typed it into the post blank. Even then I had to correct typos and one spacing issue.

I hope there were no other errors that got past me.