07.28.07
Booking Through Thursday — Best moustache-twirling
Or maybe that should be Booking Though Saturday this week… oh well.
Who’s the worst fictional villain you can think of? As in, the one you hate the most, find the most evil, are happiest to see defeated? Not the cardboard, two-dimensional variety, but the most deliciously-written, most entertaining, best villain? Not necessarily the most “evil,” so much as the best-conceived on the part of the author…oh, you know what I mean!
Cool question, but hmm… the “worst fictional villain … the one you… are happiest to see defeated” and “most deliciously-written, most entertaining, best villain” are not the same for me. I can’t think of a good one from the former category at all, probably because if they aren’t well-done enough to make me sympathetic towards them then they just aren’t as memorable.
That said, one of my favorite bad guys is Gerald Tarrant from C. S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy. I love Javert in Les Misérables too (even if he isn’t really a villain).
07.19.07
Booking Through Thursday — Just Wild About Harry
- Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?
- If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?
- If you’re not going to read it, why not?
- And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?
I’ll read it, but I’m not going out of my way to get it immediately. In fact, the last few have been given to me within a few days of the release, so I’m happy to wait a bit… and you could not pay me enough to go to one of those midnight parties. Well, that’s not true. On the scale of things that I’d require money to do, this is pretty cheap. So there’s still time, if anyone does want to make an offer 
As for the last question, I’ve never really speculated about what will happen. I enjoy the books, but not enough to spend much time pondering them. He’ll die or he won’t, whatever. As long as the ending makes sense and doesn’t wind up being cheesy, I’ll be good.
The Coffee Trader by David Liss
I’m still not sure I’m into the whole review thing, so this isn’t really going to be one.
I finished The Coffee Trader by David Liss the other day. It’s about Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese Jew who fled to Amsterdam to escape the Inquisition. He’s a trader on the Exchange, and comes up with a plan to remake his lost fortune by promoting and manipulating the new coffee trade in Europe.
Overall, I didn’t like it as much as A Conspiracy of Paper (the book that prompted me to pick this one up). I can’t quite put my finger on why, though. There are plenty of conspiracies and secrets, and everyone has their own motives that they often hide from everyone else–both reasons that I liked the first book, and things I sorely miss in more simplistic novels. Lienzo isn’t a very nice guy, but then Weaver, Conspiracy’s protagonist, isn’t exactly the epitome of morality himself. I’m not sure. I just wasn’t drawn as deeply into the characters and the story.
Still, it was an enjoyable book.
07.18.07
Revelations
The subconscious is a wonderful thing.
The other day I was writing a scene with a relatively new character in a relatively old world; I’ve written more in this world than anywhere else, though most of it has been in a limited area. The thing is, I thought I’d figured out the magic. My character, a wizard, had other ideas… in fact, she casually mentioned something that made several other pieces fit in ways I’d never thought of before.
I love it when that happens.
07.12.07
Booking Through Thursday — Celluloid
From Booking Through Thursday:
1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?
And, by all means, expand this to as long a list as you like. I’m notoriously awful myself at narrowing down to one favorite ANYTHING. So, feel free to list as many “good” or “bad” movie-from-books as you like.
Hmm. I almost always like the book more, and definitely so if I’ve read it before I see the movie… in that case my decision is almost always based on how close they kept the story.
So… let’s see.
I thought that they did a good job with A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, though I think it suits a book format better than a movie one. I was pleased by the movies from The Lord of the Rings series. Another good one is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I liked the screen adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn too (recently bought it… I hadn’t seen it since I was a child); he wrote the screenplay for it, which helped. And I liked Gone With the Wind better as a movie, but then I saw it long before I read it.
The worst… hmm… I tend to forget the bad ones. I’ve heard such terrible things about the movie based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea that I’ll never see it, so maybe that doesn’t count. Frank Herbert’s Dune has had some horrible adaptations. I didn’t care for the recent movie of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Except for Marvin. Alan Rickman did a killer Marvin. I’m sure there are others that I have mercifully forgotten.
On a somewhat different note, I recently saw Spam-a-lot, the stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I enjoyed it… but the parts I liked best were the parts that were different than the movie version, because I’m so used to the movie actors, and their voices and mannerisms, that any differences jumped out at me. But… “The Song that Goes Like This” had me cracking up for weeks. Heck, I’m laughing now.
07.09.07
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
One reason I picked this up was because I rarely read Western novels. In fact, I can’t recall a single one, though I’m sure I picked up one or two of my father’s when I was a kid. At any rate, it’s a new setting for me. Not that All the Pretty Horses is a “typical” Western, at least as far as I can tell from the reviews and whatnot I’ve read. But it has an almost exclusively male cowboy-type cast, and it has horses and guns and western-ness about it, so I figure it counts.
The story: Sixteen year old John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins leave Texas for Mexico when Cole’s mother sells the ranch after the death of her father. They meet up with a third boy, who calls himself Jimmy Blevins, though his true background is rather mysterious. I hate spoilers, so all I’ll say about the rest is that they get into a number of situations both good and bad, and they find that Mexico is not always a pleasant place to be. It touches on friendship and loyalty and trust, love and life and death, and all the conflicts that they bring.
The story is good and the characters are compelling, but for me the best thing about the book was the prose. The dialect is wonderfully done–it’s more rhythm than spelling, so it flows (I hate it when I have to sound out words and guess what they are… Mark Twain drives me crazy). The writing style is alternately lush and spare. The descriptions of riding and the land, in particular, are beautifully detailed and often poetic, and have a natural rhythm that would be well-suited to reading aloud. Other times whole scenes are skipped with no more than a full-stop, often to poignant effect. In the same way, there is very little exposition at all, with a few notable exceptions; the past, it seems to say, is over and only the present matters.
The ending was… inevitable, I suppose. Nothing else would have fit the characters and the story. Again, I hesitate to say too much, but the ending maintained the feel of the novel as a whole: Nothing is permanent, nothing is certain–but if you don’t give up, there’s always a chance that you’ll find what you’re looking for.
There are only a few things I didn’t care for. Nitpicky ones, really. McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, which I find annoying. I’ve heard people say that this is because it makes things flow better, but that’s not true for me. Also, there were a few scenes in the beginning when no names were used, with only men in the scene, so I wasn’t always sure which ‘he’ was doing things, and in the same vein there were long stretches of dialogue where I would misplace who was saying what; usually it was ok, but when there are a dozen short lines without a break, it’s easy to switch speakers. This sort of thing, I admit, is a pet peeve of mine. Ambiguous meaning is fine, but the actual text? Not so much. The rest of the book made up for it, though.
And one last thing, which didn’t bother me because I can read Spanish… but I don’t think I could have made it to the end if I didn’t. There’s enough scattered around that it would have driven me crazy even though, in all honesty, none of it is terribly important plot- or character-wise. Just a heads up for anyone else like me.
07.02.07
Pomegranate Soup
by Marsha Mehran
I was curious after some of you mentioned it, so I decided to read it 
This wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t a particularly memorable one either.
The story: Three Iranian sisters, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla, flee the revolution and end up in a small town in Ireland, where they set up a Persian-themed cafe. The sisters have to overcome the town’s prejudices, especially in the case of Thomas McGuire, the owner of the neighboring pub, who besides hating all foreigners also wants the cafe building for his own purposes.
It’s a pretty enough story. We learn about the townspeople, and about the sisters’ pasts in both Iran and London. A lot of the book, in fact, is flashbacks. Quite a lot, in fact, but it ties in well enough for the most part. We get the main characters’ stories as we go along, but the minor characters… this is one of my complaints. We get a page or two of descriptions and history about pretty much all of them, and often it doesn’t really add much to the book. It’s paced slowly enough that is doesn’t take a huge amount away either, but I would have prefered it to be less obtrusive; some of them read like character notes more than narrative. The main characters’ stories are given in large chunks too, but it flows better with the narrative because it’s usually presented as the character remembering things at a logical time, and timed better, so it’s where you’re more interested in reading it. I’m not sure why she felt the need to go into such depth into everyone’s past… with the priest, for example. It’s obvious he’s a comedian of sorts, and it’s not surprising that he can write a play either; it doesn’t really matter why he went into the priesthood. It didn’t make me understand him any better, and it didn’t make the story any more interesting to me.
One thing I found odd: she threw in a rather mystical touch with the sisters and a few others; the effects of Marjan’s food could be interpreted as non-mystical, but Layla? Not so much. And the Italian lady, who sweats sugar-water. I’m just not sure why. Maybe this is only because I’m coming from a strong background in fantasy, but the fact that it’s there makes me want it to have some purpose. The story would have been exactly the same without any of it. The characters weren’t changed at all by it. It did not add (for me, at least) anything even to the atmosphere of the book. So… why? Even if you argue that the outpouring of creativity was directly due to Marjan’s little food-magics… it still wasn’t necessary. She could, you know, just talk to people and perhaps spark an old memory. I don’t know. I would have liked it better without.
And then, the ending. Like I said, it’s a leisurely story, and one where discovering the main characters’ pasts is as important as discovering what happens to them during the course of the novel (which I rather enjoyed). There isn’t anything very surprising about the end. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I don’t really care for stories that rely on a ‘twist’ at the end to work, and I don’t prefer unpredictable endings over predictable ones (in non-suspense stories, at least). Overall, though, the ending was too sweet and neat and tidy for me. Now, I expected the general outcome from the beginning, and I was fine with that. But the details… I guess it’s that a few things just seemed contrived, and they made the ending too unnaturally sweet for me.
Overall, an ok book but I doubt I’ll pick up her next one.
