(no subject)
I'm playing catch up.
First:
Moved into the house I'm housesitting/renting for the next year or so. And it's fabulous. Big and empty and MINE ALL MINE YAY. No one cooks me dinner anymore, but no one fights me for the remote, either. And I now have cable internet, which means that I'm online. A lot. Did I mention that it's right on the river? Oh yeah. (The neighbors, however, are ... less than fabulous. When I went two weeks between lawn mowings rather than the usual one, suddenly they're calling up the owner's best friend, asking what's going on. Um, hello, I live right here. You could come knock on the door and I could tell you to your face how little I care about the state of the lawn.)
Second:
Started classes.
Nothing wildly exciting, just a Holocaust class and an online introduction to library sciences. I'm a little eh on both of them so far, as the first Holocaust class included nothing new for me, and the library course has yet to tell me anything I haven't heard before. The Holocaust class is a video conferencing class, and it's clear that most of the people taking it have never dealt with this kind of set up before. I got back to the classroom a few minutes before our break ended, and got treated to a long conversation between to guys at another site, talking about how no one could hear them. Before another site pointed out that, yes, we could all hear and see them. Also? One of the books we're using is History of the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer. I've owned this book for years (it lists a publication date of 2001, and I think I've had it since then. Maybe 2002), and actually took a class taught by Bauer himself when I was at Clark. So I'm a little skeptical of what this class is going to add on... But it will keep me busy, and it will put off having to pay off my loans, and that's all I'm looking for right now.
Third:
I bought Veronica Mars season one (it was $20, of course I bought it), and I am addicted. I sucked Rachel in with me, and we watched it in a week, around my 12 hour work days and her "packing" before heading to Orono. When she got the second season, we mainlined 16 episodes in 24 hours before she had to go back to school and I had to wait three weeks. And I'm not saying I don't get the appeal of Logan (because I so do), but - Weevil. I love Weevil. I love his motorcycle. And I might still be madly in love with Troy.
I also had season one of Lost forced upon me, and I'm almost through it. JACK. Oh my god, JACK. Unless things go wildly different in the second season (and I've heard murmurings, but we'll see), than I cannot imagine why Sawyer would ever do a thing for me while I have JACK on my screen. JACK. p.s. I can't figure out whether I love Locke desperately, and want everything to go better for him, or whether he creeps me the hell out. I think I love him madly today. JACK.
And now, I'm going to talk about books. Cause that's what I do.
Since I'm pretty on top of the book scene, I hardly ever walk into a bookstore and have one of those "____ put out a new book?!" moments. But I was over in the preforming arts section, and hello - new book from Chuck Klosterman. Now, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs I really enjoyed, while Killing Yourself to Live was, well. It sucked. That's what I get for getting excited and buying the hardcover. So I'm hoping the new one will be an upgrade rather than a downgrade. I can't figure out if he's way too smart for me, or if he's just not nearly as smart as he likes to think he is. At least I borrowed it instead of buying it this time.
I finally got around to reading the advance of Poison Study after the book came out, and after one of the girls at Bookland became obsessed with it. And it's good. I'm not usually that into the fantasy genre, but it's entertaining, if a bit over the top. One of my favorite things about Tamora Pierce's early heroines (Alanna, Daine, and Kel) is that they have flaws, and they fail, and that's okay. Yelena had no flaws. She's an amazingly powerful though completely untrained magician! She can kick lots of ass after not a whole lot of training, including the professional soldiers who taught her and even Valek, the hot professional assassin who serves as her romantic foil! She talks about how bitter and jaded she is, and still manages to trust everyone she encounters except for the blatantly evil people! She's Super Poison-Taster!1 Okay, so it was a bit cheesy. Cheesy is okay. Cheesy sells books.
Magic Study, the second book in what I presume will be a trilogy, contained what my friend Miranda called "a cheap substitute for Valek", or, romantic-foil-lite. And a very scattered plot... It's not as focused or as good as the first, and it feels like the middle of a trilogy, so with any luck there will be a third book and a happy, wrapped up ending, and then I can move on with my life.
I managed to snag an advance copy of Jaclyn Moriarty's new book, the Murder of Bindy Mackenzie and... wait for it... Opal Mehta. It worked out quite nicely, as both books center around a very serious student... and her subsequent journey to party girl/less serious student. Anyone want to take a wild guess as to which book was better?
Admittedly, any author has to be damn good to compete with my overwhelming love for all things Moriarty, but Kaavya Viswanathan never presented much of a challenge. Bindy Mackenzie is out now, and everyone should go buy it and all of Moriarty's other books. Opal is not out, will never be out, and no one should feel particularly upset about that.
So I real Opal in about three hours, and it was very eh. I honestly don't get what all the pre-plagiarism hype was about. It didn't make me want to hunt anyone down and kill them for punctuation abuse, but neither was it anything Meg Cabot or, say... Jaclyn Moriarty hasn't written, and written better. Chick lit. (Was it because the main character was Indian? Was it because she was trying to get into Harvard? Was it because everyone was so damn amused by the idea of Legally Blonde in reverse? I seriously don't get it.)
The premise is stupid. The Harvard Dean of Students calls her a dork during her interview, so she sets out to become cool! (Which is accomplished entirely by dressing like a whore. Seriously. There's not much else to the plan.) One of my big issues with Cabot's characters is how utterly clueless they are when it comes to the boys in their lives. Opal was much worse. (Honestly, I get the is he flirting with me for real or just flirting or am I imagining it all oh god mentality, but these girls are so stupid. They don't catch on until the guy professes his undying love or grabs her and kisses her. Or both. In Nora Robert's first book, the guy grabs and kisses the heroine at least three separate times, and she still thinks he's uninterested. And then he half-cons her into marrying him, and she still doesn't catch on that he's in love with her. That's who these characters are going to grow up into.)
I went back and forth between finding her parents and their crazy plans and abbreviations and desperation adorable and quirky versus fake and obnoxious. They hovered on the line between charming and ridiculous, and they leaned a little bit too much towards ridiculous for my taste. (Reminds me of the delicate balance of the townies on Gilmore Girls - funny and wacky is one thing, and batshit insane is another, and some writers have difficulty distinguishing between the two.)
The pop culture references were numerous and forced after Opal went “wild”, and already outdated. (She commented on Apple, but not Moses. No mention of Suri, either, only of Katie and Tom.) The forced feeling could have been a deliberate decision, as Opal was used to talking about Marie Curie, not Marie Claire, but it might also have been poor writing. I want to give Viswanathan the benefit of the doubt, and think that maybe she was letting the readers in on the joke of just how out of character this behavior is for this family, but I can't help but wonder if maybe she just wasn't concerned with the staying power of the book. Plus, everyone knows that the OC is so over.
I should probably go read Sloppy Firsts, but I was underwhelmed by this - why should I want to read the source material? I have Cabot and the Traveling Pants, and that pretty much fulfills my teen fluff quotient.
If I'm ever dead broke, I'm selling this first.
Bindy Mackenzie, which of course got priority over Opal, was a much better book. A better take on the extreme overachiever and social downfalls, plus someone goes crazy! Wicked cool.
Jaclyn Moriarty isn’t technically writing a series, but her three books have all featured the same private Australian high school (Ashbury), and repeat characters - notably, Bindy herself. She’s not the villain in the earlier books, but neither was she described in a particularly flattering way… And that doesn’t really change in this book.
Moriarty sticks to her very successful letters/emails/diary entries format, and it still works, though it’s a little more forced this time. There’s no pen pal fallback this time, so it’s a lot more diary entries… and memos. Seriously. At least Assignments established Bindy’s obsession with transcripts.
I didn’t particularly like Bindy, but she’s different and interesting. I love that she’s completely comfortable with who she is: she’s an overachiever, she’s always right, she knows facts no one actually wants to know, she’s socially awkward and can’t figure out why. Opal was embarrassed by who she was for much of the book, both by her GPA and Harvard obsessed self, and the popular girl persona she adopted. Bindy has no such issues - she’s smart, she’s successful, she likes school, and she’s going to be the best at everything.
I can never predict Moriarty’s endings, but I always like them; they always make sense, which is even more important. This one was well and truly a mystery, and a good one, at that. (I don’t like mysteries; I like books that have a mystery in them…)
Her characters also hover on the line between quirky and over the top, but she usually manages to make it work. Crazy pasta making woman appeared to be over the top cutesy-quirky, and I was unimpressed. But it was so much more than that!
The other kids in FAD were fun and charming, and I was thrilled to see Emily back; she’s my favorite Moriarty character save, perhaps, her boyfriend Charlie. I liked seeing Elizabeth again, and I always appreciate continuity in series/intertwined books. If an author wants me to believe that these people are real, than they need to remember that major events don’t just get ignored; they get brought up again and rehashed, and other people gossip about what happened, and sometimes your best friend looks over at you at says “This is exactly like that time we went for that drive in Bob’s car, except that we’re not in a car, and Bob’s not here, and we’re both sober, but exactly like that”, and you know what they mean. Real people and all. (For a big What Not To Do When Having Characters Refer To Previous Events see Darcy’s Story, in my next entry.)
1 (And, as obnoxiously perfect as Yelena was, she still fell short of the level of outrageous perfection attained by Aly, daughter of Alanna and George. Not only does she have the Gift (magic) stronger than her very powerful mother, she is also as adept at fighting as the famed Lioness, has inherited all of George's tricks and talents, and she's brilliant, beautiful, and is friends with every single important person in the kingdom. I have never been happier to see someone sold into slavery by pirates.)
First:
Moved into the house I'm housesitting/renting for the next year or so. And it's fabulous. Big and empty and MINE ALL MINE YAY. No one cooks me dinner anymore, but no one fights me for the remote, either. And I now have cable internet, which means that I'm online. A lot. Did I mention that it's right on the river? Oh yeah. (The neighbors, however, are ... less than fabulous. When I went two weeks between lawn mowings rather than the usual one, suddenly they're calling up the owner's best friend, asking what's going on. Um, hello, I live right here. You could come knock on the door and I could tell you to your face how little I care about the state of the lawn.)
Second:
Started classes.
Nothing wildly exciting, just a Holocaust class and an online introduction to library sciences. I'm a little eh on both of them so far, as the first Holocaust class included nothing new for me, and the library course has yet to tell me anything I haven't heard before. The Holocaust class is a video conferencing class, and it's clear that most of the people taking it have never dealt with this kind of set up before. I got back to the classroom a few minutes before our break ended, and got treated to a long conversation between to guys at another site, talking about how no one could hear them. Before another site pointed out that, yes, we could all hear and see them. Also? One of the books we're using is History of the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer. I've owned this book for years (it lists a publication date of 2001, and I think I've had it since then. Maybe 2002), and actually took a class taught by Bauer himself when I was at Clark. So I'm a little skeptical of what this class is going to add on... But it will keep me busy, and it will put off having to pay off my loans, and that's all I'm looking for right now.
Third:
I bought Veronica Mars season one (it was $20, of course I bought it), and I am addicted. I sucked Rachel in with me, and we watched it in a week, around my 12 hour work days and her "packing" before heading to Orono. When she got the second season, we mainlined 16 episodes in 24 hours before she had to go back to school and I had to wait three weeks. And I'm not saying I don't get the appeal of Logan (because I so do), but - Weevil. I love Weevil. I love his motorcycle. And I might still be madly in love with Troy.
I also had season one of Lost forced upon me, and I'm almost through it. JACK. Oh my god, JACK. Unless things go wildly different in the second season (and I've heard murmurings, but we'll see), than I cannot imagine why Sawyer would ever do a thing for me while I have JACK on my screen. JACK. p.s. I can't figure out whether I love Locke desperately, and want everything to go better for him, or whether he creeps me the hell out. I think I love him madly today. JACK.
And now, I'm going to talk about books. Cause that's what I do.
Since I'm pretty on top of the book scene, I hardly ever walk into a bookstore and have one of those "____ put out a new book?!" moments. But I was over in the preforming arts section, and hello - new book from Chuck Klosterman. Now, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs I really enjoyed, while Killing Yourself to Live was, well. It sucked. That's what I get for getting excited and buying the hardcover. So I'm hoping the new one will be an upgrade rather than a downgrade. I can't figure out if he's way too smart for me, or if he's just not nearly as smart as he likes to think he is. At least I borrowed it instead of buying it this time.
I finally got around to reading the advance of Poison Study after the book came out, and after one of the girls at Bookland became obsessed with it. And it's good. I'm not usually that into the fantasy genre, but it's entertaining, if a bit over the top. One of my favorite things about Tamora Pierce's early heroines (Alanna, Daine, and Kel) is that they have flaws, and they fail, and that's okay. Yelena had no flaws. She's an amazingly powerful though completely untrained magician! She can kick lots of ass after not a whole lot of training, including the professional soldiers who taught her and even Valek, the hot professional assassin who serves as her romantic foil! She talks about how bitter and jaded she is, and still manages to trust everyone she encounters except for the blatantly evil people! She's Super Poison-Taster!1 Okay, so it was a bit cheesy. Cheesy is okay. Cheesy sells books.
Magic Study, the second book in what I presume will be a trilogy, contained what my friend Miranda called "a cheap substitute for Valek", or, romantic-foil-lite. And a very scattered plot... It's not as focused or as good as the first, and it feels like the middle of a trilogy, so with any luck there will be a third book and a happy, wrapped up ending, and then I can move on with my life.
I managed to snag an advance copy of Jaclyn Moriarty's new book, the Murder of Bindy Mackenzie and... wait for it... Opal Mehta. It worked out quite nicely, as both books center around a very serious student... and her subsequent journey to party girl/less serious student. Anyone want to take a wild guess as to which book was better?
Admittedly, any author has to be damn good to compete with my overwhelming love for all things Moriarty, but Kaavya Viswanathan never presented much of a challenge. Bindy Mackenzie is out now, and everyone should go buy it and all of Moriarty's other books. Opal is not out, will never be out, and no one should feel particularly upset about that.
So I real Opal in about three hours, and it was very eh. I honestly don't get what all the pre-plagiarism hype was about. It didn't make me want to hunt anyone down and kill them for punctuation abuse, but neither was it anything Meg Cabot or, say... Jaclyn Moriarty hasn't written, and written better. Chick lit. (Was it because the main character was Indian? Was it because she was trying to get into Harvard? Was it because everyone was so damn amused by the idea of Legally Blonde in reverse? I seriously don't get it.)
The premise is stupid. The Harvard Dean of Students calls her a dork during her interview, so she sets out to become cool! (Which is accomplished entirely by dressing like a whore. Seriously. There's not much else to the plan.) One of my big issues with Cabot's characters is how utterly clueless they are when it comes to the boys in their lives. Opal was much worse. (Honestly, I get the is he flirting with me for real or just flirting or am I imagining it all oh god mentality, but these girls are so stupid. They don't catch on until the guy professes his undying love or grabs her and kisses her. Or both. In Nora Robert's first book, the guy grabs and kisses the heroine at least three separate times, and she still thinks he's uninterested. And then he half-cons her into marrying him, and she still doesn't catch on that he's in love with her. That's who these characters are going to grow up into.)
I went back and forth between finding her parents and their crazy plans and abbreviations and desperation adorable and quirky versus fake and obnoxious. They hovered on the line between charming and ridiculous, and they leaned a little bit too much towards ridiculous for my taste. (Reminds me of the delicate balance of the townies on Gilmore Girls - funny and wacky is one thing, and batshit insane is another, and some writers have difficulty distinguishing between the two.)
The pop culture references were numerous and forced after Opal went “wild”, and already outdated. (She commented on Apple, but not Moses. No mention of Suri, either, only of Katie and Tom.) The forced feeling could have been a deliberate decision, as Opal was used to talking about Marie Curie, not Marie Claire, but it might also have been poor writing. I want to give Viswanathan the benefit of the doubt, and think that maybe she was letting the readers in on the joke of just how out of character this behavior is for this family, but I can't help but wonder if maybe she just wasn't concerned with the staying power of the book. Plus, everyone knows that the OC is so over.
I should probably go read Sloppy Firsts, but I was underwhelmed by this - why should I want to read the source material? I have Cabot and the Traveling Pants, and that pretty much fulfills my teen fluff quotient.
If I'm ever dead broke, I'm selling this first.
Bindy Mackenzie, which of course got priority over Opal, was a much better book. A better take on the extreme overachiever and social downfalls, plus someone goes crazy! Wicked cool.
Jaclyn Moriarty isn’t technically writing a series, but her three books have all featured the same private Australian high school (Ashbury), and repeat characters - notably, Bindy herself. She’s not the villain in the earlier books, but neither was she described in a particularly flattering way… And that doesn’t really change in this book.
Moriarty sticks to her very successful letters/emails/diary entries format, and it still works, though it’s a little more forced this time. There’s no pen pal fallback this time, so it’s a lot more diary entries… and memos. Seriously. At least Assignments established Bindy’s obsession with transcripts.
I didn’t particularly like Bindy, but she’s different and interesting. I love that she’s completely comfortable with who she is: she’s an overachiever, she’s always right, she knows facts no one actually wants to know, she’s socially awkward and can’t figure out why. Opal was embarrassed by who she was for much of the book, both by her GPA and Harvard obsessed self, and the popular girl persona she adopted. Bindy has no such issues - she’s smart, she’s successful, she likes school, and she’s going to be the best at everything.
I can never predict Moriarty’s endings, but I always like them; they always make sense, which is even more important. This one was well and truly a mystery, and a good one, at that. (I don’t like mysteries; I like books that have a mystery in them…)
Her characters also hover on the line between quirky and over the top, but she usually manages to make it work. Crazy pasta making woman appeared to be over the top cutesy-quirky, and I was unimpressed. But it was so much more than that!
The other kids in FAD were fun and charming, and I was thrilled to see Emily back; she’s my favorite Moriarty character save, perhaps, her boyfriend Charlie. I liked seeing Elizabeth again, and I always appreciate continuity in series/intertwined books. If an author wants me to believe that these people are real, than they need to remember that major events don’t just get ignored; they get brought up again and rehashed, and other people gossip about what happened, and sometimes your best friend looks over at you at says “This is exactly like that time we went for that drive in Bob’s car, except that we’re not in a car, and Bob’s not here, and we’re both sober, but exactly like that”, and you know what they mean. Real people and all. (For a big What Not To Do When Having Characters Refer To Previous Events see Darcy’s Story, in my next entry.)
1 (And, as obnoxiously perfect as Yelena was, she still fell short of the level of outrageous perfection attained by Aly, daughter of Alanna and George. Not only does she have the Gift (magic) stronger than her very powerful mother, she is also as adept at fighting as the famed Lioness, has inherited all of George's tricks and talents, and she's brilliant, beautiful, and is friends with every single important person in the kingdom. I have never been happier to see someone sold into slavery by pirates.)