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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "araken" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:10 pm
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Values
Insightful column by David Brooks today, which I think captures well why fiscal conservatives and fiscal liberals often talk past each other:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
From the article:
"The bottom line is that we face a brutal choice.
[Health care] [r]eform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values."
Tags: politics
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09:09 pm
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Genre Breakdown
Interesting meme going around (I got it from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) revolutionsheep and calico_reaction) inviting people to list what genres they read in this year. Counting the one book I haven't posted about yet, (but not counting Kushiel's Avatar and Greg Keyes's The Blood Knight, which I started but never got around to finishing), here are my counts:
- Fantasy: 15 (both high and urban, but there were only one or two urban fantasies on the list)
- Science Fiction: 7
- History: 6
- YA: 3
- Science: 2
- Slipstream: 1 (because I didn't know where to put The City and the City)
- Literary: 1 (arguably Time Traveler's Wife could have gone here too, but I called it SF)
- Computers: 1
It felt like I was reading a lot less fantasy this year and a lot more history than usual, but it turns out that's really wasn't so.
Last year I believe I read about 50 books; this year I seem on track to end in the mid-40s. Not quite as much, but then, given my shorter commute and the size of some of the doorstoppers I read this year, not surprising!
Tags: books booklist genres
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11:41 pm
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Book List
37. Enemy at the Gates by Andrew Wheatcroft
An interesting military history, read well as always by Stefan Rudnicki. (His deep, gravelly voice is perfect for this sort of book.) It chronicles the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, taking care to sketch out the history of the conflict between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, before going into a detailed, often gory account of the siege itself. His accounts of the tactics of the various players was particularly interesting to me (and which I will use in my future worldbuilding.) For example, the Turks and the Austrians had roughly the same level of technology, but their entire approach to war was completely different.
There seemed to be a tug of war going on between the editor, who wanted a clash of civilizations book, and the author, who wanted to write a more academic treatise on how fear affected the relations between the two nations. Thus you get the rather strange conclusion, where, after having read for nearly the entire book about a centuries-long clash between East and West, the author's conclusion claims that he's been arguing the opposite. He seems to be writing the conclusion for the book he wanted to write, rather than the one he actually did!
Tags: books booklist wheatcroft ottoman
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11:40 pm
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Book List Catching Up
33. All Rustles and Whispers by Sarah Kelderman (unpublished)
34. Ebon Blade by Rebecca Shelley (unpublished) -- these were both for the novel swap.
35. The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
I'd never read Richard Dawkins before, because as both a believer in God and a man who admires, accepts and respects the scientific method, his insistence that I have to choose one always annoyed me. This book is his apology (in the old sense of the word, which means "explanation") for evolution, and his refutation of creationist thinking. I'd hoped that it would be a book that I could have shown to my creationist best friend growing up, during our arguments. Instead, I found a book that was aimed at me during those arguments, something to read other than wrestling with the talk.origins FAQ. The difference is subtle, but real: Dawkins does try, but he can't resist throwing the occasional ad hominem attack on those he's debating, and he makes the common mistake of not distinguishing between "professional" creationists at places like the Discovery Institute (who are worthy of contempt because they ought to know better and are deliberately deceiving the public), and those who simply were never taught good science.
Those issues with tone aside, the book is an interesting and engaging review of evolutionary biology, which I gained many insights from. (For those of you, like say capriciousbee, who do biology for a living, most of it's probably a bit basic for you.) He really does prove, step by step in many different ways, how evolution is the only reasonable explanation.
It's just a shame that such a cogent, well-reasoned argument will likely never be read by those who most need it, because the wrong messenger is delivering the right message.
36. The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, reviewed earlier
Tags: booklist, books, dawkins
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09:55 pm
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Book List
36. The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
When Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan's widow, tapped Brandon Sanderson to finish Jordan's immense Wheel of Time series, she gave him a nearly impossible task. After all, the series's scope--eleven books and a prequel, a world with a depth to rival Tolkien, a cast of hundreds each with their own subplot--was so vast that even Jordan himself couldn't always handle it. (Exhibit A: Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight, which proved that you actually can write 800 pages of epic fantasy in which nothing happens.)
Sanderson was faced with wrapping up the story, using outlines, tape recordings, and some draft chapters left behind by Jordan before his untimely passing in 2007. What was to be one book soon became three. (The second, Towers of Midnight is slated for release this time next year; the final volume, A Memory of Light, in Fall 2011.)
After reading Gathering Storm, I think he just might pull this thing off. I'll try to keep this non-spoilery.
First off, you can tell in places, particularly toward the beginning, that this book was written by someone other than Jordan. Sanderson has said that he intentionally didn't try to ape Jordan's lush (sometimes far too lush) prose style, but to make his own style more descriptive than he normally would. For the most part, this works, though every so often a more modern idiom that Jordan would never have used sneaks in. There are also moments in each character's first POV where it seems that Sanderson's trying a bit too hard--laying on, say, Nynaeve's speech patterns a little too thickly and overcompensating. Once the book gets going however, I stopped paying attention to the style.
The previous volume, Knife of Dreams, managed to trim away a lot of the useless subplots that had been clogging up the plot, and Sanderson puts that work to good use, by refocusing the story on the main characters.
As even the cover flap of the book makes clear, this book belongs to Rand and Egwene. Rand seeks to stabilize Arad Doman, somehow make peace with the Seanchan, and defeat the Forsaken Graendal, not realizing that the shadow within him is the more dangerous problem. Egwene, still captured in the White Tower, must somehow repair the rift between the rival Aes Sedai factions before the Seanchan attack she has Dreamed is coming.
Sanderson (and Jordan) do a good job of using the two main plots as thematic foils for each other, as Rand and Egwene both face issues about the nature of power, identity and authority, and many of the subplots that do appear in this book reinforce that theme. (The exception is Mat, whose voice doesn't seem quite right and who seems to be treading water until the next book.) The middle does tend to drag; it's a Wheel of Time novel after all, and still could have used some pruning in places.
Most importantly, given the sometimes glacial pace of the Wheel, Major Stuff Happens. We Learn Things. Two long-standing issues of frantic fan speculation are resolved. (Though ironically, there still seems to be debate on various forums about which way one of them was decided!) There were moments when I cheered, and moments when my jaw dropped and I exclaimed, "Wow. Nobody saw that coming!"
And it's going to be a really long year waiting for the next one.
Tags: book booklist jordan sanderson
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10:51 am
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WFC Report, Part the Second
Friday was a day filled with friends and book signings.
( Read more... )
Tags: world fantasy wfc
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11:21 am
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WFC Report, Part the First
World Fantasy is one of my favorite conventions; it's on the opposite side of the spectrum from DragonCon, which I also love but for different reasons. DragonCon is 30,000 or so people gathered to celebrate geekiness in all of its forms--TV, movies, anime, comics, music, and as an afterthought, books. Much of the pleasure of DragonCon for me is just being able to people-watch.
World Fantasy is different. Its membership is capped at 1,000 people, and just about all of them are either in the SF/Fantasy book business, or dearly want to be. Since I'm not shopping around a finished manuscript, the con is still about being social with Odyssey and Taos friends and meeting new people. I wonder if I'll enjoy it less next year when I'll have to actively schmooze.
( Read more... )
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08:07 pm
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The Wheel Turns
In October of 1994, I was 13 and in the eighth grade. Text based online services were still a viable business model. And I was driving the librarians at the library down the street from me absolutely batty waiting for the next Robert Jordan novel, Lord of Chaos to come out. When it came, I devoured it in about a day (of course), and was amazed by the sheer bloody awesomeness that was the battle of Dumai's Wells. And of course, sure that since the army of Salidar was finally marching forth, that the whole White Tower split subplot would soon be a thing of the past, along with its boring scenes of shrill Aes Sedai plotting and scheming in the most boring ways possible.
Ah, the innocence of a youth yet unblemished by Path of Daggers or Crossroads of Twilight...
Fifteen years later, I'm 28, six years out of college, and tomorrow when The Gathering Storm hits shelves, I finally get the subplot-ending battle I was promised back in 1994. It's not the Last Battle (that comes in 2011), but I'll take it.
I might be a little difficult to reach for the next couple of days.
Edit: OK, Wikipedia says that it was Crown of Swords in 1996 when the Salidar Aes Sedai finally moved, but the point still stands! :-)
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09:04 am
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Book List
28. The War Within by Bob Woodward
29. City of the Dead by Abby Goldsmith (partial)
30. The Final Balance by Laurie Lemieux
31. Groupmind by Brian Rapatta
(29 - 31 are unpublished manuscripts I read as part of a novel swap; two more to go!)
32. The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes (Book 2 of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone)
Back in the 1990s, there was a series of video games called Breath of Fire, which were console RPGs that served a very particular purpose. With the Dragon Quest/Warrior series by Enix no longer being translated into English, and Final Fantasy games few and far between, the Breath of Fire series gave RPG fans something to play while they were waiting. As games evaluated on their own merits, they were fine, and I had fun playing them--but they knew and you knew that they weren't the pinnacle of their genre.
So far I feel that way about Greg Keyes's Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series.
One thousand years ago a human queen made a deal with dark forces for the power to overthrow the elf-like Skasloi who had enslaved mankind, and unless there is a queen on the throne, all mankind will be destroyed when the bill comes due. This volume deals with the aftermath of the opening novel, The Briar King.
( Spoilers for book one )
I can't actually put my finger on anything that Keyes does wrong. It has everything an epic fantasy is supposed to have. The political intrigue works, the worldbuilding's sound, and the action scenes are exciting. (He even understands the difference between fencing with a rapier, as Cazio does, and fighting with a broadsword in armor, as Neil does. LOTS of fantasy gets that wrong.) The writing's crisp and the pacing moves right along. It's a fun read--a fulfillment of the formula.
And yet...so far the series doesn't add very much to that formula. If it had been published in the early 90s, it would have been compared similarly to Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which started to move the genre past the Brooks, Eddings, and Feist novels which dominated the 80s and early 90s, and paved the way for authors like Robert Jordan and later George RR Martin who blew it wide open. Now though, I can point to too many authors who have moved beyond this.
It's ironic to me that epic fantasy is no longer the "hot" thing that it was eight or ten years ago, when there's so many amazingly good examples of it being published. Brandon Sanderson, David Anthony Durham, and Patrick Rothfuss are all completely different from each other (and different from GRRM, the current acknowledged master), yet all obviously writing the same kind of thing. Each of their books expands the genre.
In the meantime though, as I wait for the next Ice and Fire novel, and the next Janny Wurts, and Sanderson's Way of Kings, I'll enjoy reading the last two Keyes novels. Just like I enjoyed Breath of Fire.
Tags: books booklist keyes
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10:40 pm
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DragonCon Program Book
The DragonCon program's out. Here's the link
Apparently someone thought that scheduling the "Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner" panel AND the "Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell" panel against each other was just a GREAT idea. On Friday. At 10 AM, when most people aren't at the con yet, or are just picking up their badges. I'll be at work until noon, and the Trek panel does not repeat, even though I think Nimoy's doing some other things on his own.
I mean, I've come to expect them to schedule the Janny Wurts reading at some horrible time, because there are only ten of us who go to it every year. (And they didn't disappoint.) But this--WHY?!
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09:41 pm
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Writing Status Update
So the novel swap deadline has come and gone. Those who pay close attention to my occasional ramblings might remember that the goal for the novel swap was "Finish the Damn Novel".
Well, I didn't. But I got really close, and sent in what I had.
Right now the word count is 105,000, with maybe three chapters left to write. (Plus about a half dozen "Oh I'll go back and write that scene eventually" gaps). That probably adds up to about 10,000 - 15,000 words left. For the first time I feel like I've got a book with some holes in it rather than a partial manuscript. It's not as nice as a THE END, but for the moment, I'll take it.
My output's likely to be pretty slow for the next few weeks. I'm moving across town to an apartment of my own after renting from my friend epilonious for the past three years. Then comes DragonCon, and actually critting everyone ELSE's manuscript from the swap.
But a complete draft is within reach for the first time--even at my pokey pace, one month of sustained effort should do it. Now I just need to force myself to find that month. :-)
Tags: writing status
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09:44 pm
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Health-care Wonkery
So, a question for those of you on the left:
I'm seeing lots of angst today about the possible demise of the Democrats' much debated "public option", possibly in favor of some sort of non-profit health co-op in its place.
To review, the plans in Congress seem to roughly boil down to this:
Either you get health insurance from your employer
OR
Your employer (and possibly the government, if you make below a certain amount) chip in some money for you to buy health insurance yourself on an "exchange", which gives you the choice of some private plans (probably the usual suspects like CIGNA or BlueCross/BlueShield) and possibly a public or non-profit plan.
The public option's being touted as a way to control costs. I can see two ways that might work:
1. Because it doesn't need to make a profit, it can charge lower premiums for the same benefits--assuming that low overhead actually does translate to lower costs. I'm somewhat skeptical but willing to accept this for the sake of argument.
2. Because the public option would be an arm of the government, it can cheat. This could be done either in blatant ways, such as running at a loss using tax money, or in more subtle ways, like piggy-backing on the rates that Medicare and Medicaid negotiate, which are lower than any private insurer can match. Blatant or subtle, if it cheats the public option would have an advantage over the private companies, and within a decade or so would kill the private plans, giving us single-payer by default.
The President promises that he will refrain from all the stuff on #2. Near as I can tell, any non-profit would have the same advantages as the government on #1. So, assuming the President and Congress are being honest when they say the public option's not a trojan horse to bring about single-payer, and if a co-op would work just as well, why is the public option such a big deal on the left? Or are my assumptions flawed?
I've been meaning to chime in with my own thoughts on the whole issue for awhile, and probably still will, but for now I'm genuinely curious about the question. :-)
Tags: politics healthcare
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07:10 pm
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Book List Catching Up
Despite my lack of book posts over the past month or so while I've been traveling, I actually have finished books. I'm far enough behind that I won't write up reviews for all of them, but if anyone's interested in hearing my thoughts on any particular one of these, please comment and I'll try to oblige. :-)
24. The Briar King by Greg Keyes (Book 1 of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone)
25. By Heresies Distressed by David Weber (Book 3 of the Safehold series)
26. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
27. The City and The City by China Mieville
Tags: books booklist keyes weber niffenegger m
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11:09 pm
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Some Choice Words on Architecture
The Hilton Bonaventure Montreal is made of fail.
Oh, the service is fine, the rooms are gorgeous, and the rooftop garden and pool are really quite lovely. The failure is a series of architectural design flaws of gigantic proportions.
The exterior of the building is a model of the concrete Brutalist school that gave us such "landmarks" as Duke's Gross Chem building and the main Atlanta public library. (There are plans under way to tear it down and build a new library, as it's just too damn ugly to make it worth renovating.) But of course, the outside would be of no consequence if not for the rest.
The hotel sits several stories above ground level, wrapping around a fairly large city block; perhaps a quarter mile to a side. Underneath it is space for small conventions, a tiny food court, a connection to Montreal's subway system, and even a connection to a series of underground walkways that let you walk the several blocks to Worldcon out of the rain. All of which is fairly nice, assuming you can manage French signage.
So let's say that you're an architect designing the Brutalist fantasy of your dreams on top of a nice setup like that. No possible way you could screw that up. The brochure practically writes itself.
So long as you remember to include enough elevators. And distribute them evenly around the block. Unfortunately, this architect doesn't seem to have thought of that. There are only two elevator shafts for the entire hotel. They both serve the front door, which is on the wrong side of the giant block to reach either Worldcon or the Worldcon parties. Which means that anytime I leave the hotel, I must add ten minutes of walking in a spiral (either outside around the block or through a mazelike series of escalators and corridors signed in French only) just to get to a starting point that I can see from below my hotel window. It gets worse after working hours when half the doors are locked.
Seriously guys. There are a lot of fine looking hotels in Montreal. If you're ever visiting, don't try the Hilton.
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04:42 pm
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Worldcon
I have arrived.
I'm staying at the Hilton, and I have my phone with me, though it being Canada that means that calls are $2 a minute--texts are better except in an emergency.
Can't wait to see everyone!
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11:06 pm
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Costa Rica Pics
I posted the pictures from my trip to Costa Rica here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/gjacoby/CostaRica#
Enjoy!
Tags: costa rica pics pictures
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02:45 am
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After Jason's Wedding
So, for the record: after attending a beautiful Catholic wedding, I still think Jewish weddings are the best, on the all the criteria that really matter: rich symbolism, expressions of devotion, and speed with which you get from the start of the ceremony to the buffet.
That said, these Costa Rican Catholics throw way better wedding parties than we do.
In other news, apparently I can fake salsa and merengue (or multiple dance partners were very good, kind liars about it), despite being barely adequate at contra and downright pathetic at techno or hip-hop. Strange.
A full trip report and incriminating photos of the whole Atlanta gang to follow here and on epilonious, I'm sure.
Tags: costa rica, dance, wedding
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10:39 pm
[Link] | I feel like I got a lot done with this weekend--almost wrapped up the apartment hunt, read a good book, spent time with good friends, and even had a nice date. But my word count was terrible--maybe 200 words.
Some of that's because I've genuinely been ridiculously busy over the past week or so. Mostly though, it's because the next scene has me frozen. I know what happens, in an outline sort of way--I can tell you scene-by-scene the next couple of chapters. It's that the next scene has to do a lot of very subtle things, with little room for error. I have to show the deep emotional bond between two characters who are both very reserved by nature, and who will only appear in the same scene once or twice in the entire book. Yet that bond of family is central to not only character but plot and theme as well. It's the starting point for a transition that won't really be complete until the next book.
At the same time I have to do all the usual mundane things that happen when arriving at a new setting, which is hard enough for me. (Silly description.)
(/whiny rant)
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08:36 am
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TNEO
To all my friends at the TNEO workshop starting today:
May you all have a fantastic time, be reminded both of your talent and your potential for growth, and learn much. May you have enough sleep to be alert and excited, but not so much that you miss out on some great late-night talks.
And may your muses be kind and your goals for the next year all come true.
Wish I could be there--miss you guys!
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07:21 pm
[Link] | You know, there's a perverse logic to the way the Senate does Supreme Court confirmations. Anyone who can sit still for three hours listening to 17 senators bloviate about them without being able to speak or to even shift their expression from pleasant blandness MUST have a judicial temperament, by definition!
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