Last Night a Backup Drive Saved My Life
Knowing that weapons-grade uranium was just being driven around in Turkey makes wondering what BtVS was doing setting a scene in the same country seem a bit trivial. Though I probably have more influence on Buffy than on uranium-selling, cash-hungry lunatics.
Things that have stopped working while my husband was away: (1) my beloved iBook, possibly because of hardware damage caused by my indiscriminate use of the hard restart; (2) my Palm Pilot, making me think that I'll just go back to a paper address book; and (3) the TV-entertainment-industrial complex, twice, victim of apparently faulty wiring. At least the last can be fixed by flipping the circuit breaker, although its first demise did mean that I missed TiVoing the second episode of Firefly.
I'll be computerless at home for at least a week, while I ship the iBook to Texas. I do a full mirror backup each night, fortunately, and though there are a few files that don't back up properly (including, for some reason, a song by REM) it should be mostly okay even if they have to replace the hard drive. And when Z. gets back tonight, I'm going to ask him to dig through the mirror drive so I can send my Clex stories to work & continue with them there.
I just finished Patricia Briggs' The Hob's Bargain, and was dissatisfied. I loved Dragon Bones, the first fantasy of hers that I read, which has a character who's pretended to be profoundly stupid for years to avoid his father's rage and jealousy, and who inherits a whole new set of problems when his father dies, leaving him the family holdings, complete with family ghost. Naturally, everyone else thinks he's stupid, too, so they don't exactly trust him to run the place. What I liked about the book was that people weren't bad guys just for the plot's sake, but because they had understandable human agendas. The good guys weren't necessarily the hero's allies, either, because they were trying to do the right thing and they weren't sure that leaving an idiot in charge was the right thing. Things were tied up a bit neatly, to be sure, but after years of vomitously long five-book epics, a one-book story is a welcome diversion. So if you like character-driven fantasy, Dragon Bones is a good buy.
The Hob's Bargain, however, was frustrating, and I'm not even sure I can explain why. I was distracted by what seemed to be unbalanced POV shifts -- I sure don't mind multiple POVs, but if you're going to shift between first and third, you have to be very careful, and it doesn't hurt to give both equal time, which this book didn't. And, in one of the third-person sections, the titular hob thinks a very cold, calculating thought, which I thought would be an interesting plot point, and then at the end the first-person narrator blithely asserts that the hob's motivations are completely different, and much less complicated, than that thought indicated. Now, this could be extremely interesting, if that were the beginning of a clash of narratives. But it's the end of the book, and the happily ever after is simply announced, as if it happens by the author's fiat. As between the two characters, who am I supposed to believe?
Anyway, I was going to look for other Patricia Briggs books, which sell for surprisingly high prices if you look at bookfinder.com, which you should if you're ever looking for new or used books (it's an aggregator engine, and searches Amazon and Half and many, many other sources). But now I doubt I'd pay the premium prices, though I'd still give her a chance if I could get another book for a couple of dollars.
Things that have stopped working while my husband was away: (1) my beloved iBook, possibly because of hardware damage caused by my indiscriminate use of the hard restart; (2) my Palm Pilot, making me think that I'll just go back to a paper address book; and (3) the TV-entertainment-industrial complex, twice, victim of apparently faulty wiring. At least the last can be fixed by flipping the circuit breaker, although its first demise did mean that I missed TiVoing the second episode of Firefly.
I'll be computerless at home for at least a week, while I ship the iBook to Texas. I do a full mirror backup each night, fortunately, and though there are a few files that don't back up properly (including, for some reason, a song by REM) it should be mostly okay even if they have to replace the hard drive. And when Z. gets back tonight, I'm going to ask him to dig through the mirror drive so I can send my Clex stories to work & continue with them there.
I just finished Patricia Briggs' The Hob's Bargain, and was dissatisfied. I loved Dragon Bones, the first fantasy of hers that I read, which has a character who's pretended to be profoundly stupid for years to avoid his father's rage and jealousy, and who inherits a whole new set of problems when his father dies, leaving him the family holdings, complete with family ghost. Naturally, everyone else thinks he's stupid, too, so they don't exactly trust him to run the place. What I liked about the book was that people weren't bad guys just for the plot's sake, but because they had understandable human agendas. The good guys weren't necessarily the hero's allies, either, because they were trying to do the right thing and they weren't sure that leaving an idiot in charge was the right thing. Things were tied up a bit neatly, to be sure, but after years of vomitously long five-book epics, a one-book story is a welcome diversion. So if you like character-driven fantasy, Dragon Bones is a good buy.
The Hob's Bargain, however, was frustrating, and I'm not even sure I can explain why. I was distracted by what seemed to be unbalanced POV shifts -- I sure don't mind multiple POVs, but if you're going to shift between first and third, you have to be very careful, and it doesn't hurt to give both equal time, which this book didn't. And, in one of the third-person sections, the titular hob thinks a very cold, calculating thought, which I thought would be an interesting plot point, and then at the end the first-person narrator blithely asserts that the hob's motivations are completely different, and much less complicated, than that thought indicated. Now, this could be extremely interesting, if that were the beginning of a clash of narratives. But it's the end of the book, and the happily ever after is simply announced, as if it happens by the author's fiat. As between the two characters, who am I supposed to believe?
Anyway, I was going to look for other Patricia Briggs books, which sell for surprisingly high prices if you look at bookfinder.com, which you should if you're ever looking for new or used books (it's an aggregator engine, and searches Amazon and Half and many, many other sources). But now I doubt I'd pay the premium prices, though I'd still give her a chance if I could get another book for a couple of dollars.