(no subject)
Voting ends for the current round of LJ Idol today! My entry is here, and the votes are really close. I'm nervous. This is a "bottom 5 authors go" round. :(
It was a bad, bad weekend, and I hope to write more about it when I'm not at work. Thanks to those of you who send IMs-I turned comments off because I couldn't cope with replying to large amounts of them, but those individual messages were very helpful. ♥
On a less upsetting topic, we had a good time at Disneyland though it was horribly crowded-the worst ever for Spring Break. Lauren visited the U.C. Irvine campus one of the days, and was duly impressed. We especially like that Irvine has its own airport far from the L.A. traffic, because yikes.
I finished reading Fat Vampire, and have mixed feelings. Terrific humor, zany setup, but the foreign-culture-sensitivity AND homophobia in the same story was surprising and jarring. I'm also not entirely sure what happened at the end, just that it could have been clearer. And frankly, more "conclusive" in feel. In better news, Adam Rex is apparently writing a sequel to The True Meaning of Smekday, though I'm not sure what a sequel would be. Mostly, readers just want more of the insides of the story, I think. The book is gloriously complete as is.
I'm also in the midst of Shades Of Grey. Great opening paragraph and terrific satire, but it's definitely the hardest-going of all of Fforde's books. Mainly, you get stuck on, "But why did you use this as the construct of your dystopian future?" Color-based medicine and the vague but deadly Mildew are the troubling areas. The rest, you can wrap your head around. I'm halfway through now, and I can say that at a certain point you stop caring about the bumpiness of the more questionable ideas and just go with it. If you're wondering, this standalone book is completely separate from either the Thursday Next or Nursery Crimes series. It's a separate universe.
Back to the grind. Hope everyone's been doing better than us this last week or so.
It was a bad, bad weekend, and I hope to write more about it when I'm not at work. Thanks to those of you who send IMs-I turned comments off because I couldn't cope with replying to large amounts of them, but those individual messages were very helpful. ♥
On a less upsetting topic, we had a good time at Disneyland though it was horribly crowded-the worst ever for Spring Break. Lauren visited the U.C. Irvine campus one of the days, and was duly impressed. We especially like that Irvine has its own airport far from the L.A. traffic, because yikes.
I finished reading Fat Vampire, and have mixed feelings. Terrific humor, zany setup, but the foreign-culture-sensitivity AND homophobia in the same story was surprising and jarring. I'm also not entirely sure what happened at the end, just that it could have been clearer. And frankly, more "conclusive" in feel. In better news, Adam Rex is apparently writing a sequel to The True Meaning of Smekday, though I'm not sure what a sequel would be. Mostly, readers just want more of the insides of the story, I think. The book is gloriously complete as is.
I'm also in the midst of Shades Of Grey. Great opening paragraph and terrific satire, but it's definitely the hardest-going of all of Fforde's books. Mainly, you get stuck on, "But why did you use this as the construct of your dystopian future?" Color-based medicine and the vague but deadly Mildew are the troubling areas. The rest, you can wrap your head around. I'm halfway through now, and I can say that at a certain point you stop caring about the bumpiness of the more questionable ideas and just go with it. If you're wondering, this standalone book is completely separate from either the Thursday Next or Nursery Crimes series. It's a separate universe.
Back to the grind. Hope everyone's been doing better than us this last week or so.