brown paper packages
Granted, they're taped and not tied up with string, but they keep bringing me wonderful things.
My copy of Cowboy Bebop (Remix collection) arrived today. I'm very excited about watching it; many of my friends whose tastes I trust love the show.
Recently and less recently, other things have arrived:
Shades of Milk and Honey, by maryrobinette (Mary Robinette Kowal), which I enjoyed and put me in the mind to get a copy of the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I'm looking forward to Mr. Firth's Mr. Darcy (*rrrrowr*). Regarding Shades of Milk and Honey, I found it charming and well-written, but I haven't read enough Austen to know how well its conceit kept to the ideal.
I can't remember if I've mentioned it, but if I have not, please do yourself the great favor of watching the HBO/BBC adaptation of The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency, which is fantastic and just a damn joy to watch. Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose, in particular, are amazing, as is Lucas Msamati. It's really an excellent story, and it's the kind of thing you could watch with the entire family, as it were, and feel wholesome, in the best possible way. Mma Ramotswe has a light in her that shines.
Moonshine, by utsusemia (Alaya Dawn Johnson), arrived and was devoured a while ago... I've been hesitating reviewing it because while I really like Ms. Johnson's short fiction, and Alaya is a casual friend, I didn't find that Moonshine worked. As I read it, I had two main thoughts: 1) it would make a great movie, and 2) as a novel, it needed another revision before being done. For me, it felt like too much of the world's necessary details where just hinted at, only lightly drawn in--I had to fill them in by drawing on convention ("oh, this is a world where everyone knows about magical and non-human beings and there are Hunters and such..."), rather than organic to the world as shown. In a movie, you can get away with that to a far greater degree than in writing because you have the visual means of showing and suggesting huge amounts of information for the audience, and the story is slight enough that you could do it justice in under two hours. Honestly, I think it would be a great summer flick. But here, in the novel, I felt like I had to fumble in the dark, and I think that would have been fixed with another revision--it really seemed to me that I was reading a late draft instead of a finished work, and that was disappointing. I did, however, greatly enjoy how the protagonist seemed modern to herself, instead of being a Naughties heroine in flapper dress. That said, I did have some issues with suspending disbelief with regards to Zephyr (the heroine)--not that I did not believe she would have the attitudes that she does--I did believe that--but because I didn't see how she came to have them, beyond the whole convention of "I'm an independent gal from Montana raised and trained by my famous Hunter dad, and I happen to be fortunately immune to vampire venom, and can kick serious vampire ass and am sexually liberated in New York City!" in general.
This didn't come in a brown paper package, but I did bring it home from the bookstore in a brown paper bag--Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Novacs novels. I've read Altered Carbon, which is fantastic and does NOT read with any of the uncertainty you might expect in a first novel. Morgan's words are sure and he uses apt metaphors that arise organically from the world his protagonist inhabits. Mind you, I would have preferred that he called that hairstyle a mohawk, because there's just no way that people in Bay City (San Francisco) are going to refer to it as a mohican, but that's just a trifle. I'm currently working on Broken Angels, the second Takeshi Kovacs book, and am enjoying it, too.
Thanks to the magic of Netflix streaming video, I've been watching Friday Night Lights. Damn. It's good. Really good. I'm only about six episodes in, but damn. (Also? I hadn't realized that I know as much about football as I do. Well, all those years of band pay off in all sorts of ways, don't they?)
Oh, and another thing: my hot air popcorn popper should arrive tomorrow. This makes me ridiculously excited. We had one when I was a kid, and it was a marvelous thing, exciting out of proportion, to watch and listen to the kernels spinning around the chamber, hotter and hotter, until an avalanche of delicious fluff poured into the waiting bowl. And it was cheap! Seriously, I'm so excited. I can't wait to melt butter, or make caramel, and have at.
I mean, fresh hot popcorn and Colin Firth? Rrrrowr, indeed.
My copy of Cowboy Bebop (Remix collection) arrived today. I'm very excited about watching it; many of my friends whose tastes I trust love the show.
Recently and less recently, other things have arrived:
Shades of Milk and Honey, by maryrobinette (Mary Robinette Kowal), which I enjoyed and put me in the mind to get a copy of the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I'm looking forward to Mr. Firth's Mr. Darcy (*rrrrowr*). Regarding Shades of Milk and Honey, I found it charming and well-written, but I haven't read enough Austen to know how well its conceit kept to the ideal.
I can't remember if I've mentioned it, but if I have not, please do yourself the great favor of watching the HBO/BBC adaptation of The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency, which is fantastic and just a damn joy to watch. Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose, in particular, are amazing, as is Lucas Msamati. It's really an excellent story, and it's the kind of thing you could watch with the entire family, as it were, and feel wholesome, in the best possible way. Mma Ramotswe has a light in her that shines.
Moonshine, by utsusemia (Alaya Dawn Johnson), arrived and was devoured a while ago... I've been hesitating reviewing it because while I really like Ms. Johnson's short fiction, and Alaya is a casual friend, I didn't find that Moonshine worked. As I read it, I had two main thoughts: 1) it would make a great movie, and 2) as a novel, it needed another revision before being done. For me, it felt like too much of the world's necessary details where just hinted at, only lightly drawn in--I had to fill them in by drawing on convention ("oh, this is a world where everyone knows about magical and non-human beings and there are Hunters and such..."), rather than organic to the world as shown. In a movie, you can get away with that to a far greater degree than in writing because you have the visual means of showing and suggesting huge amounts of information for the audience, and the story is slight enough that you could do it justice in under two hours. Honestly, I think it would be a great summer flick. But here, in the novel, I felt like I had to fumble in the dark, and I think that would have been fixed with another revision--it really seemed to me that I was reading a late draft instead of a finished work, and that was disappointing. I did, however, greatly enjoy how the protagonist seemed modern to herself, instead of being a Naughties heroine in flapper dress. That said, I did have some issues with suspending disbelief with regards to Zephyr (the heroine)--not that I did not believe she would have the attitudes that she does--I did believe that--but because I didn't see how she came to have them, beyond the whole convention of "I'm an independent gal from Montana raised and trained by my famous Hunter dad, and I happen to be fortunately immune to vampire venom, and can kick serious vampire ass and am sexually liberated in New York City!" in general.
This didn't come in a brown paper package, but I did bring it home from the bookstore in a brown paper bag--Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Novacs novels. I've read Altered Carbon, which is fantastic and does NOT read with any of the uncertainty you might expect in a first novel. Morgan's words are sure and he uses apt metaphors that arise organically from the world his protagonist inhabits. Mind you, I would have preferred that he called that hairstyle a mohawk, because there's just no way that people in Bay City (San Francisco) are going to refer to it as a mohican, but that's just a trifle. I'm currently working on Broken Angels, the second Takeshi Kovacs book, and am enjoying it, too.
Thanks to the magic of Netflix streaming video, I've been watching Friday Night Lights. Damn. It's good. Really good. I'm only about six episodes in, but damn. (Also? I hadn't realized that I know as much about football as I do. Well, all those years of band pay off in all sorts of ways, don't they?)
Oh, and another thing: my hot air popcorn popper should arrive tomorrow. This makes me ridiculously excited. We had one when I was a kid, and it was a marvelous thing, exciting out of proportion, to watch and listen to the kernels spinning around the chamber, hotter and hotter, until an avalanche of delicious fluff poured into the waiting bowl. And it was cheap! Seriously, I'm so excited. I can't wait to melt butter, or make caramel, and have at.
I mean, fresh hot popcorn and Colin Firth? Rrrrowr, indeed.