Answer Hazy, Ask Again!

Will
by

Christine Bernard (Goodreads Author)

Yorick's review

Oct 09, 2019  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: audiobooks, fantasy, thriller

I was given a free Audible audiobook copy of this title for an honest review.

This book according to the stars, is pretty good. It reads like a Twilight Zone episode, and I really like Twilight Zone. Will, the title character finds a Magic Eight Ball in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore/novelty shop. He buys it for nostalgic reasons and races out of the store because the clerk creeps him out.

At first it seems like a normal kids' toy, but soon, its answers start having more direct impact / connection with Will's world. After that, things get weird and ominous. It drew me into the story. Like watching a horror movie, I found myself thinking the equivalent of, "Don't open that door!"

It's an entertaining read. I can't really say more about the story without leaving spoilers. If you like stories that were in The Twilight Zone, you'll like this book. If you really don't know anything about The Twilight Zone, let me say that the book is mysterious, eerie, and is a look at what a normal person might do under unexplainable circumstances. You might not want to read it alone at night. Or maybe that's the best time for a shiver!

Read this series by Patrick Weekes!

The Paladin Caper by Patrick Weekes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fun, quirky adventure fantasy. Third in the series. I suppose this one could be read on its own, but generally, I think this is one of those series that should be read in order. This seems to be the end of the "Rogues of the Republic", although Mr. Weekes has other books out.

The main character is a strong woman, former military turned thief. She's mouthy, clever, strong, great fighter--similar to Jim Rockford (Rockford Files TV show) but she gets beat up less. Her crew members each have different specialties that contribute to the success of the "caper". And there's humor throughout as well as danger and suspense.

I read through all three books in the series, and I was sad to see them end.

View all my reviews

a table not next to the wood stove

I just posted a lie as a comment at a friend's posting request. He asked his Facebook friends to lie about how they met him. I am (much) more pleased with my lie than it deserves, so I thought I might inflict it on you as well--a kind of a "short-short" story. (You may hear an imperfect echo of a Marty Robbins song.)

We met...

Down in the West Texas town of El Paso, where I was drinking a Dr. Pepper.

You sat at a table placed next to the wood stove, and asked, "What do you think on a day like today?"

Thinking that this was the espionage pass phrase

I had been waiting for I answered thus, "Like the tide when the moon is leaving the seaside, your hair line, though dark is receding."

You started to jump up in umbrage proclaiming, "That is the rudest thing I've heard all day!"

Apprehending your meaning was not based in spying,

I tried to leave quietly, out the back door.

The waitress, though cute, had no patience with vagrants however they looked.

She brought a bouncer, bounced me back to the cashier. I was embarrassed and red.

This was not the unobtrusive meeting my handler had said.

And you were astonied, as they tossed me out, muttering, "I just bet he listens to old rock and roll five times a week if not daily!

We never saw each other again until, ironically, I was checking meal tickets and collecting lunch money at the serving line entrance in an El Cajon campus. Mostly unobtrusively, but without any espionage to keep me warm.

The snow! The Snow!

. . . (Despite the tags for this post, that is a real

picture of the falling snow in the parking lot.)

Another Imaginary Book: The Duesenberg Diary

Ernesto Guevara--Ché to much of the world--was among other things a diarist. He wrote The Motorcycle Diaries which were adapted into a 2004 flim of the same name. Also published after his death was a collection called The Bolivian Diary or The complete Bolivian diaries of Che Guevara, and other captured documents, edited and with an introd. by Daniel James.

The Duesenberg Diary fits in between those two and is a record of Guevara's travels in a Duesenberg Straight Eight across one Autumn until the rains led to mud over the running boards and Ché had to climb out the window and abandon the car. After that, it's pretty much off to the revolution.

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!!

YouTube, PodCasts and Ebooks--#23, #24, #25

#23.
I went to YouTube, but all I got was this silly joke video.


(As it used to say at the end of X-Files tv show, "I made that!")

#24. Lacking a microphone on my system, I haven't started podcasting, but I've subscribed to a podcast on my bloglines and I've turned my Audible dot com subscription to The New York Times Audio Digest into receive by Podcast using Juice. Since I listen on my Palm Tungsten, I'm having problems actually getting it to be an automated process, but it works well enough if I listen through Real Player or Media Player on my desk top.

I suppose a once a month podcast doing a book talk or high lighting some special KCLS event might be a good use of podcasting for KCLS, but one needs to consider content and time constraints before jumping into the crowed pool of more experienced and entertaining podcasters. It's better not to use some communication outlets (for a while) than to use them with embarrassing content (Parker the Well-Dressed Panther, notwithstanding).

#25. Ebooks. I have downloaded eaudio books, Mobipocket print versions and AdobeReader print versions. I notice that AdobeReader now has a separate Digital Editions add-on that has to be down-loaded. This was not the case when I first started using it a couple years ago. I'm glad I know that and found it out, but I still like Mobipocket better because it takes up less memory on the device. EAudiobooks from KCLS don't work right from the download with PalmOS devices. They don't work right from the download with I-Pods either. I consider this a flaw--but at least knowing it is so, one can tell patrons about it.

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.

Calling all fantasy lovers!!

I'm handsome, fair, and close enough to six feet tall that, well, who's to quibble
Ummmm......forgot where I was for a moment.

Anyway, for the other kind of fantasy lovers, lovers of those stories, you may know or want to know that since Februrary of 2007, a re-mastered DVD of The Last Unicorn has been available. If one buys it from the Conlan Press website http://www.conlanpress.com/index.html , Peter Beagle gets a better cut of the moneies. Two versions are available there--a $24.98 that's autographed in 3 places by Beagle, and a $14.98 unsigned edition. But the important thing about this is that sound and picture are much better than the earlier DVD version that (I own and )was a lower quality recording of the videotape.

Well, I suppose another important thing is that Beagle is getting fairly compensated for his work by sales at that site. But mostly I was really excited to see this is available, especially since I didn't know there was a new version coming available and couldn't wait anyway two or three years ago and bought the lower-quality DVD with no special features. I would have liked to have seen this new one in my Easter Basket, but now I'll have to wait until the next gifting day....

But you pick it up right away if you want.

In related news, he's got a short story called "Two Hearts" that is a bridge story/sequel to The Last Unicorn and is on the short list for a Nebula Award. And he's writing a full-legnth novel sequel. Find it! Read it! Share it!