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aseYou know the drill - cuts are for length, spoilers incidental to nonexistant.
M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link (Robert Aspirin): Vlad Taltos, but not really. A loose group of stories about the employees of Magical Trouble-shooting Young Heroes, Incorporated. Aspirin calls this a transitional book in the author's introduction, and it shows - there's a big honkin' cliffhanger after a string of vignettes about a common set of characters. Overall, not too bad, but - say it softly - I'm not fond of the Phil Foglio cover. Intense orange-tinged red, with orange highlights and large, emphatically green giant/troll things surmounted by a slightly cartoony, smirking character doesn't really sell the book for me. Once you get past the cover, though, it's not bad, in a fluffy sort of way. Worth reading during exams, or other times when high concentration's out of the question.
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (Simon Garfield): Nonfiction. Story of William Perkin's creation of the first synthetic dye and its impact on the world. I'd call this book tangled - it wavers between Perkin's life story and spin-off chemicals, technologies and subfields inspired by Perkin's discovery. (Mauve was the first "tar coal" or aniline textile dye. It revolutionized the dye industry, which was until then was stuck with natural dyes of sometimes dubious strengths and fastness.) Garfield traces the impact of its discovery in 1856 into modern textile dyes, fashion, microscope slide staining, medicine, rubber making, and other scientific and commercial fields. All reasonably interesting, but somewhat oddly formatted. For example, presenting a short description of a modern lab synthesis of mauve at the end of the chapter covering its discovery is relatively logical, but tacking on a recipie for Nesselrode pudding, last seen in the prologue for a fleeting moment, seems really weird. Also, I think the book suffered from a lack of graphics: it frequenty references a number of chemical compounds, but doesn't graphically depict any of them, even mauve. I find this truly annoying, because I can not find the molecular composition or a picture of the molecule, and after reading an entire book inspired by it I want to know the chemical formula. (All right. Let's admit that what I really want to do is find a chemical subfield that lets be play with color all day, every day, for the rest of my life, and I want to know where color comes from. I think it's got something to do with conjugation and pi electron systems, but I don't know the details. This bugs me.)
The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part One (Christopher Tolkien):
The evolution of The Lord of the Rings, specifically The Fellowship of the Ring, to Moria. It's astonishing to see how many turns of phrase and significant plot moments are present in Tolkien's earliest drafts. It's equally astonishing to see how many drafts Tolkien goes through before adding critical elements like the nature of the Ring.
For the record, six drafts of Bilbo's party were about three too many. Tolkien is a mad perfectionist. It's fun reading through the discarded ideas in the various drafts, though; they're AU, but in a different way than readers' AU fan fiction is. (Or, for the truly surreal, imagine fanfic based on the drafts. Except that leads to bad Mary Sue fic about Boromir of Ond, poorly written evil!Treebeard vignettes, and/or Trotter/Bingo slash, and if you can't see the inherent bizarreness of proto-Aragorn/proto-Frodo slash, it may be time to step slowly away from the computer and get a life.)
Anyway. I'm not going to sell you on this. Either you're a terminal Tolkien geek already, and think this stuff's really cool already, or you think this is too tedious for words. I sympathize with both opinions.
The Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera): Short novel the movie of the same name is based on. It's only 152 pages in large print, but I really liked it. It's partly a coming of age gig, and not exactly a cosmogonic myth (is there a term for a story that re-creates or reaffirms the comogonic myth? Or for a "before the Hero is heroic" story?), and sings with shockingly vivid, colorful, descriptive prose. The beaching scene blew my mind. On a bus, no less. And the descriptions of physical locations are spectacular.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kd5mdk, if you're reading this, please take tons of pictures while you're in New Zealand. It can't be as gorgeous as LotR and Whale Rider make it out to be. Right?
Now I want to run out and find out all about Witi Ihimaera, and read all of his work I can get my hands on. Whale Rider is short, but there's a lot going on around the story - story glosses or digressions - that suggests Ihimaera's thought a lot about Maori cultural identity and the state of New Zealand. Some of those thoughts are written down, and I want to read them.
Since people may or may not see the movie before reading the book, a few quick notes on the differences. The narrator(s) are different - which pulls the non-personal questions and themes into sharper focus - and the movie simplifies some of the action, rearranging, simplifying or rewriting events to make them more friendly to moviemaking. The movie does an astonishingly good job of hanging onto the "feel" of the book through all this.
M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link (Robert Aspirin): Vlad Taltos, but not really. A loose group of stories about the employees of Magical Trouble-shooting Young Heroes, Incorporated. Aspirin calls this a transitional book in the author's introduction, and it shows - there's a big honkin' cliffhanger after a string of vignettes about a common set of characters. Overall, not too bad, but - say it softly - I'm not fond of the Phil Foglio cover. Intense orange-tinged red, with orange highlights and large, emphatically green giant/troll things surmounted by a slightly cartoony, smirking character doesn't really sell the book for me. Once you get past the cover, though, it's not bad, in a fluffy sort of way. Worth reading during exams, or other times when high concentration's out of the question.
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (Simon Garfield): Nonfiction. Story of William Perkin's creation of the first synthetic dye and its impact on the world. I'd call this book tangled - it wavers between Perkin's life story and spin-off chemicals, technologies and subfields inspired by Perkin's discovery. (Mauve was the first "tar coal" or aniline textile dye. It revolutionized the dye industry, which was until then was stuck with natural dyes of sometimes dubious strengths and fastness.) Garfield traces the impact of its discovery in 1856 into modern textile dyes, fashion, microscope slide staining, medicine, rubber making, and other scientific and commercial fields. All reasonably interesting, but somewhat oddly formatted. For example, presenting a short description of a modern lab synthesis of mauve at the end of the chapter covering its discovery is relatively logical, but tacking on a recipie for Nesselrode pudding, last seen in the prologue for a fleeting moment, seems really weird. Also, I think the book suffered from a lack of graphics: it frequenty references a number of chemical compounds, but doesn't graphically depict any of them, even mauve. I find this truly annoying, because I can not find the molecular composition or a picture of the molecule, and after reading an entire book inspired by it I want to know the chemical formula. (All right. Let's admit that what I really want to do is find a chemical subfield that lets be play with color all day, every day, for the rest of my life, and I want to know where color comes from. I think it's got something to do with conjugation and pi electron systems, but I don't know the details. This bugs me.)
The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part One (Christopher Tolkien):
'Lastly to make an Announcement.' He said this very loud and everybody sat up who could. 'Goodbye! I am going away after dinner. Also I am going to get married.'
He sat down. The silence was flabbergastation. It was broken only by Mr. Proudfoot, who kicked over the table; Mrs Prooudfoot choked in the middle of a drink.
- A Long-Expected Party, pg 14
The evolution of The Lord of the Rings, specifically The Fellowship of the Ring, to Moria. It's astonishing to see how many turns of phrase and significant plot moments are present in Tolkien's earliest drafts. It's equally astonishing to see how many drafts Tolkien goes through before adding critical elements like the nature of the Ring.
For the record, six drafts of Bilbo's party were about three too many. Tolkien is a mad perfectionist. It's fun reading through the discarded ideas in the various drafts, though; they're AU, but in a different way than readers' AU fan fiction is. (Or, for the truly surreal, imagine fanfic based on the drafts. Except that leads to bad Mary Sue fic about Boromir of Ond, poorly written evil!Treebeard vignettes, and/or Trotter/Bingo slash, and if you can't see the inherent bizarreness of proto-Aragorn/proto-Frodo slash, it may be time to step slowly away from the computer and get a life.)
Anyway. I'm not going to sell you on this. Either you're a terminal Tolkien geek already, and think this stuff's really cool already, or you think this is too tedious for words. I sympathize with both opinions.
The Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera): Short novel the movie of the same name is based on. It's only 152 pages in large print, but I really liked it. It's partly a coming of age gig, and not exactly a cosmogonic myth (is there a term for a story that re-creates or reaffirms the comogonic myth? Or for a "before the Hero is heroic" story?), and sings with shockingly vivid, colorful, descriptive prose. The beaching scene blew my mind. On a bus, no less. And the descriptions of physical locations are spectacular.
kd5mdk, if you're reading this, please take tons of pictures while you're in New Zealand. It can't be as gorgeous as LotR and Whale Rider make it out to be. Right?Now I want to run out and find out all about Witi Ihimaera, and read all of his work I can get my hands on. Whale Rider is short, but there's a lot going on around the story - story glosses or digressions - that suggests Ihimaera's thought a lot about Maori cultural identity and the state of New Zealand. Some of those thoughts are written down, and I want to read them.
Since people may or may not see the movie before reading the book, a few quick notes on the differences. The narrator(s) are different - which pulls the non-personal questions and themes into sharper focus - and the movie simplifies some of the action, rearranging, simplifying or rewriting events to make them more friendly to moviemaking. The movie does an astonishingly good job of hanging onto the "feel" of the book through all this.
