Perspective, thou art a shovel to the head.

friday videos is food for the bees

oddmonster — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 18:13:52 GMT

as you can see from this enchanting cover of Feist's "Honey Honey". Bee well, y'all...

On all fours, inching through a cascade of blood, he began crawling back toward the stomach.

oddmonster — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 21:32:55 GMT

Meg, by Steve Alten:

Jonas adjusted his midwing, decreasing his angle of descent. He hovered twenty feet above the seabed and slowed, waiting for D.J. Spread out below him were row upon row of giant clams, pure white and glowing, each over a foot in diameter. There were thousands of them, lying in formation around the [geothermal] vents as if worshipping their god.

Synopsis: Men swear at a giant prehistoric shark, who eats them with a merry chomp. Then the author realizes he can't let the shark win, and the hero gets to bunny-hop his tiny submersible across the surface of the Pacific.

So the hero: Jonas, as in he who got swallowed by the whale. This will be important later. For now just know that he's a sensitive, tortured deep-sea submersible pilot with claustrophobia. He's summoned by an old friend to come drive a submersible, despite the fact that the old friend has a son and a daughter who can both pilot submersibles, because California, apparently. Despite the fact that a) the daughter rilly rilly wants to pilot the submersible and Jonas rilly rilly doesn't (see above: claustrophobia), he agrees to do it anyway, after warning everyone about the possibility of giant MEGASHARK.

On the dive, the old friend's son is killed by oh, I don't know, a giant MEGASHARK, then Jonas returns to the surface and everyone blames him for the boy's death. The daughter expresses her grief by falling in love with Jonas. Meanwhile, a cadre of bitter old ex-Navy dudes forms, all BOO MEGASHARKS. DOWN WITH MEGASHARKS.

A fight breaks out over whether to nuke the MEGASHARK from space or try to capture it in a lagoon. The lagoon wins and the bitter old ex-Navy dudes take off in a huff, determined to capture and blow up the MEGASHARK themselves.

Note: they are terrible at this.

In fact, everyone is terrible at capturing the MEGASHARK, except Jonas' wife, who is sleeping with his millionaire best friend (because California) and is determined to get excellent film footage of the MEGASHARK. She kills an endangered whale as bait, hops in the water in a plexiglass bubble and gets excellent film footage of the MEGASHARK chomping her in half before swimming merrily away. As a result, the millionaire best friend joins up with Team Bitter Ex-Navy Shark-haters.

This book gives good MEGASHARK, I'll give it that. The shark gets to do a lot of swimming around eating things and escaping. In fact, Team Bitter Ex-Navy Shark-haters manage to blow themselves up while the shark swims by unmolested. News teams try to catch her. Foreign governments try to catch her. Illegal Japanese whaling boats try to catch her (and she eats them).

Now, let's take it to the breakdown:

Never gonna get it never gonna get it
Never gonna get never get it--

Except Jonas does wind up getting it. He teams up with an old Navy buddy he spent time with in a psychiatric hospital who does things like fly his helicopter into boats and come out with gems like:

"I'll be at the tavern getting shit-faced. Find me when you're done playing. If I'm with a woman, wait ten minutes. If she's ugly, wait five."

Anyway, Jonas winds up piloting his submersible directly into the MEGASHARK's mouth, because he's Jonas, and whale (or in this case shark). He climbs out of the submersible and stands balls-deep in MEGASHARK stomach acid, which strangely does not affect him, then he takes out his trusty diving talisman, a MEGASHARK TOOTH, and saws his way through the stomach lining into the shark's heart and because the arteries are too tough to saw through with the tooth, he rips the shark's heart apart with his bare hands, which is genteelly depicted as follows:

In total darkness, Jonas lay on his back, covered in warm blood that continued cascading down upon him in buckets. On his heaving chest, like an enormous tree trunk, lay the detached heart of the 42,000-pound Megalodon ...His fingers felt something hard, yes, the light. He wiped the lens but the beam was barely perceptible. On all fours, inching through a cascade of blood, he began crawling back toward the stomach.

Basically, what with all the heaving chests, scheming wives, pliant daughters of old family friends, yachts and explosions, this book is basically a Jackie Collins novel for dudes. It's about men who just want to bone Mother Nature and aren't afraid to die trying, or try dying. Or bad flying and fish-heart frying.

Whatever. Good marine science, though.

Maybe next time
You'll give your woman a little respect
Then you won't be hearing her say AAAAAAAAA I'M BEING EATEN BY A MEGASHARK AAAAAAAAA

*Ahem*.

I'm pro-rivermonster and I vote.

oddmonster — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 03:38:48 GMT

Blackwater I: The Flood, by Michael McDowell:

Elinor wasn't Oscar's only mystery, of course. There were many things Oscar didn't understand. He didn't understand what was going on between Mary-Love and Elinor; he only knew that he was glad he wasn't at home all day the way Sister was. He didn't know what Elinor saw in him; he didn't know why she loved him, though apparently she did. He'd get up at five in the morning, and stand at his bedroom window and look out at the Perdido. There he'd see his wife, wearing her coarse cotton nightgown, swimming around and around in the swift water that would've drowned any normal person.

Synopsis: My comfort chick-lit, in which the heroine is a rivermonster and the river eats small children. Ymmv.

THESE ARE SPOILER!YOGAPANTS, BECAUSE A BODY IS TIRED.

I love the Blackwater series for so, so many reasons. It's not every day that a book begins its six-part epoch by coming right out and revealing that the heroine is a shape-shifting rivermonster. Or it wasn't back before the time of pararom, or whatever the term is, and besides, this isn't so much paranoroma as it is eco-gothic: the landscape here has sent powerful emissaries up onto land and they'll just unhinge a jaw and swallow you whole.

Elinor Dammert, heroine, protagonist, force of nature and shapeshifting rivermonster, lets herself be rescued by Perdido, Alabama's first son, Oscar Caskey, when the town of Perdido floods one spring in 1920, up to the second story of most buildings in town. Elinor is cool, collected, and clearly amused by what she finds when the water recedes. Oscar is sweet, simple and totally smitten. And Oscar's mother, Mary-Love, is horrrrrrrrified by what her darling son brings home from the flooded Osceola Hotel.

Cue shenanigans.

"Your mama," said Elinor, "is peering at us through the camellia bushes."

Oscar stood out of his chair, and called out, "Hey, Mama!"

Mary-Love, discovered, stepped from behind the cover of camellia. "Oscar, I thought that was you!" she called from the porch.

"Didn't you see the car, Mama?" he called out. He looked down at Miss Elinor. "She saw the car," he said, in a voice his mother couldn't hear.

NOT GETTING ANY LESS AMUSING.

This time through I was more struck by Oscar, who, let's not forget, is named after a type of fish -- one presumably consumed by rivermonsters when they are unable to find small children to eat. He's just so adorably earnest. He goes about wooing Elinor the best and most earnestly he is able, which is to say that he manages to do it despite himself.

"I don't know," said Oscar after a moment. "It only just occurred to me this minute -- while James was talking about not getting a letter from [his wife] -- that I ought to be married myself. And I looked up and there you were, just sitting there not married."

Oscar is a doll, and in my head, he looks an awful lot like this:

In case you need a visual on Elinor in her rivermonster state, allow me to assist there as well:

And if that isn't perfect, I don't know what is. Ssh.

Anyway, I've long been fascinated by why, exactly, we're all so fascinated by drowning girls, and Elinor Dammert is the living, breathing embodiment of The Girl Who Doesn't Drown. She's a creature of fierce currents and what kills other people simply allows her to feed, as you get to see in the scene where she swims into the Perdido, out into the deadly whirlpool, the one everyone's terrified of, and she lures in a small child and drowns and eats him.

There's some powerful subversion of the drowning girl trope at work there, and also how much do I love that McDowell's heroine is someone who, for all intents and purposes is sweet and kind, and the only person to call out racism where it stands in 1920s Alabama, and helpful as all get out, and also she eats children. I love this! I love that she is both and that's the whole backbone of the series. When Oscar's mother goes after Elinor -- and she hella does in all kinds of ways -- you're rooting for the rivermonster the entire time.

Another fun character is Sister, who is -- brace yourself -- Oscar's sister, who lives at home with her Mary-Love. She could be a stereotype of a spinster, and for the first few chapters I think she is. She runs her mother's errands to collect gossip about this mysterious new woman Oscar has brought back with him from the flood and gossips with her uncle James and does needlework on the porch while the main impetus of the plot (Oscar wooing Elinor vs Mary-Love wanting Elinor to gtfo and away from her beloved son) goes on without her.

There's a line in those chapters about how everyone in Perdido knows Sister will never marry, and little_tristan pointed out that as, later in the series Sister does marry, what the line really means is that her mother has caused everyone in Perdido to believe that Sister will never marry.

But the whole stereotype gets peeled away once Oscar realizes what his mother is up to and becomes desperate to take Elinor and escape. The one person he goes to for advice is Sister, and she pins his ears right back and gives him the key to moving forward. And from there, in the series, you see a totally different arc for her. She begins to plot. She begins to hope, and foment.

It's a complicated and delightful family drama. So many machinations! So much Mary-Love thwarting her children's desires for their own families, which is kind of ironic, considering her name is nearly "marry-love". She wants them to do no such thing! Everyone stay where they are until told otherwise! Mm. Mary-Love does a lot of sitting on the porch and fanning herself while Sister does all that needlepoint and the party goes on next door at Uncle James' house.

Uncle James by the way, is coded by McDowell as "bearing the stamp of femininity" and everyone and their chickens (including Mary-Love) explicitly state he never should've married. He collects silver flatware.

And he's a hero of the story!

He's not side-lined by his unspoken homosexuality, he doesn't die to it, he's a fantastic father -- and this was published in 1983. James is one of my favorite characters in the series. He's so unstintingly generous and so happy hosting Elinor while she's playing the role of the single school-teacher, and having Oscar come to dinner each day and again after work while he woos her. He loves being in the thick of things and very little seems to discomfit him -- the notable exception being his wife, Genevieve, who he pays to stay the hell away from him.

Overall, this book has an awful lot to say about motherhood.

Mary-Love is a terrible mother who tries to strangle her children with her own apron strings.

Genevieve is nearly a worse mother who seals her own demise by beating her daughter. Pro tip: don't beat your children where a rivermonster can find out about it.

Elinor, when push comes to Mary-Love's shove, gives her mother-in-law her first-born daughter in order to win hers and Oscar's freedom. And it's surprisingly unemotional, this exchange. You never feel like she's in pain and you as the reader certainly aren't in pain for her.

It's like a big game of chess being played by these women -- and make no mistake, Elinor engineers her courtship by Oscar, he just shows up and is cheerful and understanding. In fact at one point Sister thinks about Elinor as seeing everyone in Perdido as dolls on a game board that she can just pick up and move at will.

Author's Note: Perdido, Alabama, does indeed exist, and in the place I have put it. Yet it does not now, nor ever did possess the buildings, geography, or population I ascribe to it... Yet the landscapes and persons I describe, I venture to say, are not wholly imaginary.

friday videos: grooving along with the band

oddmonster — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 17:54:04 GMT

The first day of spring! No wait, might still be winter

oddmonster — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:57:41 GMT

Because ain't no winter like a late Vermont winter
'cause a late Vermont winter don't stop.

March 21st, Burlington waterfront. In case you're wondering, technically the lake is still frozen over, but the Coast Guard has gotten sick of yanking everyone out of the damn water and have issued a statement to the effect of knock it off, y'all.

friday videos started as a different kind of plan

oddmonster — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 23:55:55 GMT

friday videos dances at its own rainy party in the woods

oddmonster — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 15:49:09 GMT

This year was very year-like.

oddmonster — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:03:33 GMT

I'm pretty over 2013 as a year, y'all. As the very wise evilsupplyco said, "If 2013 was an enemy, realize it is almost dead and you are yet alive. Show the corpse to 2014 as a warning."

/me shakes 2013 menacingly

/gives it a kick for good measure

Behold! A book meme! I would love it if y'all readers would do something similar on your journals, or just a list, or even just a brief interpretive dance expressing how you eschewed books for wolves and horses. I'm easy to please, man. And now I can post this because unlike back on 12/21 or whatever horrifying date it was that GoodReads emailed me all LET'S CELEBRATE YOUR YEAR IN BOOKS while there were still ten fine days left in December, I am finally ready to do my tally. Seriously GR, that was totally uncalled for.

Anyway!

Total # of books read: 110
Fiction: 98
Non-fiction: 12
Rereads: 19

Favorite book: Carol O'Connell's The Chalk Girl, a weird and creepy mystery set in NYC's Central Park, all about how middle school can be way more terrible than anyone could ever realize, this book was both awesomely funny and inexplicably gross. Which is a combination I'd be fine with having on my tombstone, really.

On the way home from school, we stop off for a slice of pizza -- Phoebe's treat. She says there's an upside to what they did to me today. I've marked my place in the annals of school history. She says, "They'll never get that bloodstain out."

Honorable mention to Michael Connelly's Angel Flight and Ian Rankin's Resurrection Men, both of which are chock-full of placeporn and demonstrate how to keep readers interested in really really long series.

Unexpected Pleasure: I went on a Xmas-themed mystery binge this year (like you do) and I'd been saving Murder Sets Seed all year for it because that is the color of my OCD. And it basically annihilated all the other Xmas books. So good. It's basically a Bechdel-test-passing crone-centric prairie gothic set in Missouri, and I loved the snot out of it. It has a huge run-down old house, a small town flower shop, eating your feelings, crazy snow pellets that people from California could never believe. All my boxes, neatly ticked.

Biggest Disappointment: I reread Man With a Load of Mischief as part of the Xmas binge, and just did not love it at all. I felt the whole thing would've gone a lot better if someone just put Jury over their knee. Whiny, whiny man.

Book Club Treasure: World War Z. I totally didn't imagine it would be as good as it turned out being. Hey look, I found a zombie book I really like. Although I also really dug Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues, which is about as different of a zombie book as you can get. Maybe the undead are growing on me. :)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Read Again: Talking to the Dead. First book in a Welsh crime fiction series with a protagonist who supposedly hears the dead and thus can communicate with them and-- whatever. The reality of it was way, way grosser, featured my number-one pet crime fiction peeve (hooker-in-a-box) and the last third of it turned into Rambo VI: Cardiff Blood Beach. So much grah.

Biggest over-sharer: I started reading Linda Fairstein's NYC sex crimes prosecutor series by just randomly leaping into the middle of it (thus proving little_tristan totally right about my lack of respect for reading series properly) with The Deadhouse, which concerned the entirely fascinating history of Roosevelt Island (spoiler: abandoned mental hospitals) and I liked it so much I skipped ahead to Death Angel, set in Central Park. Much less awesome mainly because for a good 3/4 of the book the protagonist ran around bemoaning her romantic life and other people's perceptions of her romantic life. Grr.

Best dramatic performance when faced with sure death: Linda Fairstein again. Her protagonist, when cornered by the SKOTW (serial-killer-of-the-week) morphs from incisive, steely-eyed lawyer person to Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. I guess it's a skill you develop over 16 brushes with death, but it's a little weird and definitely why I don't rate these books higher.

Did you run any books over with a car this year? *whispers* Mebbe.

If so, please list them. *whispers from behind hand* Mainly they were everything by Mo Hayder and everything by Carol O'Connell that was not Chalk Girl.

(Authors, is it really so hard not to whomp on dogs in your books? I'm genuinely curious.)

I know I set out to do more awards but I've totally lost my train of thought and whoo-doge is this entry ever long enough already. So. Here's to the new year (*looks askance at 2013*). May it be healthy, productive, a little more balanced, and filled with good books.

Happy Friday to this wonderful, ridiculous universe.

oddmonster — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 23:13:52 GMT

I tried to lift spirits with Flanders and Swann's hippopotamus song

oddmonster — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:11:46 GMT

Eat, Sleep, Ride: How I Braved Bears, Badlands and Big Breakfasts in My Quest to Cycle the Tour Divide:

On closer inspection the town consisted of no more than a crossroads, the branches of which were populated by half a dozen motels, a couple of diners, a post office and two gas stations with convenience stores attached. And JR's Taxidermy Studios ('Mounts on Show!'); just as long as they hadn't taken to stuffing cyclists. It ill behoves (sic) a rider on the Tour Divide to moan about such a broad array, but somehow Lincoln's practical benefits were outweighed by its sombre ambiance. The forest seemed to have thickened again and its tentacles had enveloped the town.

Synopsis: Paul Howard really wants to be Bill Bryson, and disdains fat people, Americans and hippies. But he did ride 2,800 miles on his bike once.

I fell in love with the idea of the Tour Divide both by watching a 2010 documentary on the race, Ride the Divide and by reading Jill Homer's Be Brave, Be Strong, her account of smashing the women's course record in 2009 for the Tour Divide bicycle race, a 2,800-mile route from Banff, Alberta Canada to the US border with Mexico in New Mexico.

But the idea's very different from reality.

Paul Howard fell in love with the idea of the Tour Divide and then in 2009 (same race as Homer (she's mentioned twice in the book; she was way far ahead of Howard the whole time)) he rode it. By his own admission, his preparation had been a bit spotty: maybe two 100-mile attempts a few months beforehand? I'm not sure; the first part of the book is so peppered with Howard's attempts to convince the reader he's funny that it was hard to tell what was actually going on.

Then Howard actually goes and rides the Divide -- and let's be clear here, that takes chutzpah. It takes determination and stick-to-it-iveness and the vaunted ability, as Bree Loewen puts it, "to suffer for long periods of time and not die."

The suffering, it is, well....kind of weenielike. Howard really goes light on what must have been sore legs and feet and chapped and sunburnt skin and that is awesome for him if none of that happened. But what really tits him off is Americans and their ugly strip-mall-sprawl.Oh and quad bikes. Those upset him too. Basically, Paul Howard is happiest on a bike (and who could disagree, really) and while eating large breakfasts, the very specter of which he rails against in his book. He is a man of paradoxes, is what. But--

"Given that he looked like a bear and she looked like she had just swallowed one whole, I felt inclined to believe them when they said we must use the bear bins for food."

Wait, what?

"I stared in amazement at the array of hot food being served and tried not to stare too openly. Eventually a large lady completed her order."

Maybe he's just--

The eponymouse founder had apparently been a daredevil horsewoman famous for her bareback tricks (the horse was bareback that is, not the rider -- had it been the other way round her fame might have been even more widespread.)

hahahahhahaha TITTIES. Titties are high-larious, y'all.

We were not the only cyclists to have passed this way that day. Seated at the bar, considerably cleaner than when she had arrived earlier in the afternoon, was Cricket, for whom this whole adventure was a 'Mommy holiday' (some holiday, some Mom, I had thought at the time in Banff)

So...some Mom for taking a month to herself to devote to adventure? Or some Mom for leaving her children for a month? (Sidenote: Howard left his children for a month for this race. His wife did not.)

And here is where I am simply going to say that the term "'injun' country" made an appearance in the book and let y'all fend for yourselves.

But um, sir? Mr Howard?

Petunia is silently judging you.

So in summation, this book needed more bike and less Howard. I think his companions might've needed less Howard too, as Howard is the type of person who sings a merry hippopotamus song in pouring rain uphill, and makes other jokes that come off as twee. He does attempt to interject some history factoids into his account but they're very much not enough to bear the brunt force of his personality.

Now to be fair, I'm exactly the type of person who, like Howard, when biking through mud so thick it actually stopped wheels from turning, in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, as dark fell, would sing the hippopotamus song. My companions, if I had any, would likely feed me to bears on Day 2.

I ripped around Burlington this weekend on my bike, singing the bottle song (99 Green Bottles (A-Hanging On the Wall)) with a ridiculous cheerfulness that belied the rain and gloomy 40 degree-ness of the day. And then I went home, having ridden approximately 2,780 miles less than Howard did in his book.

Compulsive nerd confession #13

oddmonster — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 15:12:16 GMT

I never manage to read enough recently published books to feel justified in voting in Best of The Year contests like the GoodReads 2013 awards. Then I go over to look, just in case, and my TBR pile explodes.

friday videos rejects your idea of "friday". Also "seasons".

oddmonster — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:52:55 GMT

Still aten't ded. But I did go two weeks without reading and that did nearly finish me off.

oddmonster — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:27:05 GMT

Work. It was worklike, then it was bananas, then it was super-extra bananas with the full split and marshmallow sauce (Me: "That's it, I've had it. I am taking 12 full hours off!" Everyone sane: Um.)

I really did go two weeks without reading anything. I think it was terrifying but honestly I don't remember much other than blind panic and listening to RHCP songs on repeat. (Also I just found a bunch of messages in my Inbox LJ had no intention of ever telling me about, so if one is from you, I AM TOTALLY NOT IGNORING YOU AND WILL WHOMP ON LJ IN YOUR NAME. Kisses! --Odd.)

Oh where is this beautiful beautiful entry going.

Oh! Reading. First of all, misura wrote Sharp Teeth (or: My Island is Not a Petting Zoo) with Doctor Impossible/Feral (from Soon I Will Be Invincible) for the current older_not_dead challenge, with the delicious prompt, "Your sharks have gotten fat." I LOVE IT. Go read it.. It feels like the most obvious pairing in the world now that misura has written it down and made it beautiful. And a fandom is born. Yay!

I can't figure out LJ's new Home screen, which seems to be intent on bleating celebrity gossip at me in a manner that indicates it's entirely unaware of how close to death it is. For reference, I've managed to figure out tumblr and am Oddmonster over there as well.

How is it 1pm already?

Wait, I'm talking about reading. So, yeah. After I got off work, I then slathered myself in all US history I could lay hands on for a week. I finally made it to Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, a look at the US annexation of what became the state of Hawaii. I was underwhelmed, this time out, by her ADD and obsession with religious doctrines of 18th century New England, and I didn't really understand her decision right at the front to do away with some of the apostrophes in the names of Hawaiian royalty, but overall, a good read.

I got hold of the latest in my favorite trashy non-fics with Hospital Babylon, 24 fictional hours in a London ER cobbled together from 2 years of anecdotal research. Read it in one night, which was fitting. Warning: it's not for the squeamish.

I read Nancy Eileen Muleady-Mecham's Park Ranger Sequel: More Stories which did what it said on the tin, namely tell more stories from the author's long career as a park ranger. As I happen to love park ranger stories, this one was like a long, warm bubble-bath for my reading soul. It turns out, there really was at least one dude at the Grand Canyon whose last words were "I can fly!"

I think you can guess what happened next, but what most people don't realize is that someone has to clean up the mess afterwards.

I read Alexandra Robbins' controversial Pledged: Inside the Secret Life of Sororities. I do think it is problematic that Robbins' claim that her stories are true is based "I can't tell you how I found all this out, you're just going to have to trust me that it's true". Did that stop me from enjoying the hell out of her book? Nope! I had been expecting it to be like a long episode of As the Greeks Turn, and to be fair, it was that, but it was also packed with historical information about sororities, a look at how the sorority system deals with race and the problematic LGBT issue. The first intersectional feminist book I've read in a long, long time.

And finally, I read On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the New West which was PHENOMENAL, as long as you're okay with defining the New West as UC Berkeley. I was surprised by how fine I was with that. Summary: rich white woman gives two museums to Berkeley, then devotes her life to finding the fossils to fill them. In return, Berkeley ignored how Alexander was fucking the President's daughter for forty years. I'm paraphrasing, but barely.

Cue a spate of fictional doolallies:

Clammed Up, by Barbara Ross (a murder mystery set on a small island off the coast of Maine that was just like being there);

Red Velvet Revenge, by Jenn McKinley (a cupcake-flinging murder mystery at a rodeo);

Fogtown (a gender-bending graphic novel of 1950s San Francisco PI's)

Manhunter (a very disappointing super-hero in Los Angeles)

Daisy Kutter: the Last Train (a graphic novel whose art-style and protagonist I loved, but whose ending I didn't)

Such Wicked Intent, by Kenneth Oppel (an Edwardian retelling of Frankenstein where Victor F is the quintessential teenage boy, which is to say he's a jackass-and-a-half, but everyone punches him with butterflies, so that's okay).

I'm back to the park rangering now (Nature Noir, with two pages taped closed) and moreover, back in a writing space, and looking at all the great prompts open until the end of the week at older_not_dead. It doesn't help that my usual writing spot, the basement, is still drying out and being de-mushroomed (hey look, more rain in the forecast). How's everyone else's summer going?

Wait...is it basically fall* already???

*You Antipodeans are, as in so many other things, on your own with that lovely springtime. :) I hope it's going well for y'all.

friday videos wants all the bells to ring. All of them.

oddmonster — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 15:10:34 GMT

(I totally sniffled at the end. All hail the empty office, baby.)

55-question book meme (aka Distraction! Chaka-Khan!)

oddmonster — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:45:46 GMT

Trust little_tristan to bring something delightfully bookish and distracty to the table. I am entirely here for that this morning.

1. Favourite childhood book?
The Westing Game

2. What are you reading right now?
Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco
The Reckoning by Jane Casey

3. What books do you have on request at the library?
None

4. Bad book habit?
I dog-ear at an Olympic level

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?
Oh dear. Well, here we go:

The Drowning House by Elizabeth Black
The River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw
Urban Flow: Bike Messengers and the City by Jeffrey L. Kidder
Marcia Muller and the female private eye : essays on the novels that defined a subgenre / edited by Alexander N. Howe and Christine A. Jackson
Old Louisiana plantation homes and family trees / by Herman de Bachellé Seebold

6. Do you have an e-reader?
Yes (Two, technically)

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?
One at a time

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?
I read more recommendations from friends.

9. Least favourite book you read this year (so far?)
A Darkness More Than Night, by Michael Connelly

10. Favourite book you've read this year?
Redshirts, by John Scalzi
The Drowning City, by Amanda Downum (favorite re-read)

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?
Rarely. Basically I'm dragged when necessary.

12. What is your reading comfort zone?
Everything except animal stories and epistolary novels.

13. Can you read on the bus?
Do you enjoy being thrown up on?

14. Favourite place to read?
My giant bed, covered in dogs.

15. What is your policy on book lending?
Only to three people outside my house.

16. Do you ever dog-ear books?
Hell yes.

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?
No! *faints*

18. Not even with text books?
I'm much more fond of highlighters. Like 2-3 colors of highlighter

19. What is your favourite language to read in?
English

20. What makes you love a book?
A nice font (no brown ink on cream paper), pleasing paper choice, nice endpapers, sewn binding rather than glued, and I prefer cloth to leather covers.

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book?
If I find a book that I know will interest someone I routinely talk books with. My book-rec genie powers are scarily accurate.

22. Favourite genre?
Crime thrillers.

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did?)
Non-US history

24. Favourite biography?
Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs, by Brendan Mullen

25. Have you ever read a self-help book?
Nope

26. Favourite cookbook?
The Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups: Recipes and Reveries, by David Ansel

27. Most inspirational book you've read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

28. Favourite reading snack?
I don't eat while reading, but Sea Salt Vegan Chips might change that

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.
The Professionals by Owen Laukkenen. Highly touted by publisher and my editor over at Crime Factory, both of whom, I suspect, were sorely disappointed by my reaction to the book. The book was exceptionally not good.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?
Rarely

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?

For me there's a big difference between a bad review and a negative review. A bad review is: "This book sucked!" It's also: "This book rocked!" because neither statement contain objective information about the book. But I don't feel in the least bit bad about giving negative critical reviews, pointing out why I personally found a book problematic or lacking, citing examples from the text to support my thesis and drawing on comparisons with other works in the field to make my point.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose?
Hebrew. I have like, a 3 year old's reading level right now. It's sad.

33. Most intimidating book you've ever read?
House of Leaves? Does that count? Because I wound up not reading it.

34. Most intimidating book you're too nervous to begin?
N/A. If I don't want to read a book, I'm not gonna. Life is too short.

35. Favourite poet?
Daphne Gottlieb

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?
Way too many

37. How often have you returned a book to the library unread?
All the time. It's a function of how much time I have to browse in a library pre-checkout. And that's almost never enough.

38. Favourite fictional character?
Serge Storms

39. Favourite fictional villain?
Doctor Imposible, from Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible

40. Books I'm most likely to bring on vacation?
As many as I can carry, as it's unlikely I'd enjoy reading on an e-reader just because I'm on vacation.

41. The longest I've gone without reading.
Maybe a week. Fucking dayjob.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.
So many. If it has a dog in it, I'm not likely to finish. If it has outright animal cruelty in it, there's a good chance I'll back over it with the car.

43. What distracts you easily when you're reading?
Dogs needing wees.

44. Favourite film adaptation of a novel?
The Haunting

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?
The David Suchet version of Peril at End House made me throw things.

46. The most money I've ever spent in the bookstore at one time?
Does Subterranean Press' website count? Or ebay?

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?
I totally cheat to find out about potential dog situations.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?
See above, where I grab keys to the Subaru. Although I got halfway through Heart of Steel by Meljean Brook, and the two protagonists have to pretend to be married, for plot, and that is one of my least favorite devices ever.

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?
Yes, but no one understands the system.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you've read them?
KEEP

51. Are there any books you've been avoiding?
World War Z.

52. Name a book that made you angry.
Charged with Guilt, by Gloria White. It's the 3rd book in a mystery series I really liked, but the author's depiction of a developmentally disabled person made my skin crawl.

53. A book you didn't expect to like but did?
Drift, by Jon McGoran

54. A book that you expected to like but didn't?
The Treatment by Mo Hayder (vroom vroom!)

55. Favourite guilt-free, pleasure reading?
All reading is pleasure, but when my brain wants to go doolally, which is what I suspect this question's really trying to get at, I bust out the inspirational romances.

Ignore me, I'm in shock. Look! I have a blanket.

oddmonster — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 13:16:36 GMT

Drank the Sherlock Kool-Aid this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed episode 1, "Study in Pink". Mycroft is perfectly unctuous and slithery, but more than that, I loved that bit at the end where Watson is waiting patiently, just outside the police-line, with a wee mousey look, all, JUST IN CASE YOU NEED ANYTHING, YOU KNOW, I'LL JUST BE, UM, HERE, FOR ETERNITY.

Married in the first episode.

Feel free to fling slashy fic in my direction. :)

Day One, hopefully of many by Bill Cameron

oddmonster — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 21:56:47 GMT

What can I say? A title like that you're gonna hit the easy pitches.

Born and raised in southern Oregon farm country, Ellie Spaneker flees her home and abusive husband, unaware she's being tracked by an ex-cop in the hire of her vengeful father-in-law. In Portland, retired homicide detective Skin Kadash fills his idle days drinking coffee and searching for Eager Gillespie, a teen runaway of special interest as the only witness in a troublesome and long-unsolved murder. Eager, meanwhile, is on his own, grifting and oblivious to the danger he's in.

Synopsis: Oregon's really bleak, y'all.

I've been to Oregon on vacation quite a bit, because I used to be one of those annoying Californians that did that sort of thing, and this book captures an Oregon that's just below the surface. A gritty, dark, problematic Oregon that will mess with you.

I read a lot of crime fiction -- too much crime fiction, probably -- so the flight of the abused wife as plot is problematically familiar. What's new here is the involvement of the sheriff father-in-law and how it ties in with retired homicide detectives and adorable but doomed runaways. Basically, this book shouldn't work. But it does.

Ellie is sympathetic yet not without her own flaws; Kadash, the retired detective, has a welter of ghosts he carries with him while searching for Eager, the runaway who is both more and less than he seems. But the real star here is Oregon itself. The turbulent, bitterly cold Willamette (Will-AM-it) River; the seedy hipster underbelly of Portland; all the dry, aching volcanic fields leading inland from I-5; the Sisters; the weird enclave of Shakespeare near the border, after which the highway just goes, and goes and goes.

In fact, the over-sized caveman standing sentinel at Grant's Pass feels almost like a cyclops, watching over this story. The thunderbolt of Ellie's flight, the helmet of invisibility Eager wears, witness and runaway both, the trident wielded at times by the vengeful sheriff and Kadash. All of them eventually pay out.

I agree with other reviewers who've complained that the shifting timelines/perspectives can be a little jarring on the reader. I could've used less shifting, true. But I stuck with it for the placeporn, and my faith was justly rewarded, as all the myriad plots tie together in a neat little Gordian knot.

Have read. Would read again. Would recommend.

friday videos has probably watched this one 10 times. No lie.

oddmonster — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:23:15 GMT

killedthekat's Bioshock Infinite vid, to Florence + the Machine's "No Light, No Light". CONTAINS ALL THE SPOILERS. ALL OF THEM. And they are glorious.

So glorious.

I'd watch the hell out of this.

oddmonster — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:50:00 GMT

Originally posted by matociquala at I'd watch the hell out of this.

Originally posted by kylecassidy at post

Share it if you like it.

Clickenzee to Embiggen

Add me: [LiveJournal] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Google+] [Tumblr]

friday videos gives you Hot Gossip dancing in a bath-house filled with glitter

oddmonster — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 01:24:22 GMT

Oh happy day indeed.

The curse began when a severed foot was found in the court.

oddmonster — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:47:50 GMT

Rising Tides (The Threat from the Sea, Book 1) by Mel Odom:

Her face took on a more somber look. "Know too, that there are those who would stop you in your journey," she said. "They fear you, fear what you will become, and with good cause because your life will touch the lives of many. There is a darkness out there, greater than any darkness you've known. Should you live, understanding and more will be yours."

"And should I die, lady?"

She looked at him, gave him a small smile and said simply, "Don't."

Synopsis: The fish people get pissed and get magic and go whup on some land-dwellers, finding them crunchy and good with ketchup. Also there's a subplot about the world's wieniest secret pirate.

The sahuagin are kind of sea goblins, and one of their princesses gets it into her head to track down a mysterious and forgotten manuscript. Because that always goes so well. And indeed she follows the manuscripts directions to the undersea tomb of a dessicated naked dude, which a) is reason number one never to go on forgotten manuscript adventures and b) results in two fellow princesses getting immediately eaten, because the dessicated naked dude is secretly a great white shark. And boy is he annoyed.

Of course he wasn't a good great white shark, he was an evil one, and that's how he got imprisoned in an underwater tomb without any trousers. I guess whoever stuck him there thought a lack of pants would totally stop this dude. Who's a shark. Anyway, Iakhovas the Sharkshifter decides to wreak his revenge on basically everyone he can get his hand-fins on, including the sea goblins. He launches an amphibious attack on Waterdeep and uses the full kitchen sink: water dragons, giant turtles, sea serpents, bloodworms, were-rats, aboleths (which I had to go look up in the sourcebooks), sahuagins, marine scrags (which I'm still kind of unclear on), more sahuagins, jellyfish, just everything he could lay his hands on. And yet, all of them pale in significance before the scariest monster in the book, and indeed in any Forgotten Realms book I've read, the raggamoffyn.

The raggamoffyn are a race of sentient scraps of cloth. Cloth. Apparently there are good raggamoffyns and evil ones, but the one in this book was supposed to be good and it full-on mummified a nine-year-old boy:

Before anyone could react, the raggamoffyn exploded into hundreds of wet fabric pieces that flew through the air. They hovered around the boy like a bee swarm, twisting and turning like gulls gliding through storm weather. The fabric pieces covered every inch of the boy's body, including his eyes, nose and mouth, slamming into place with wet splashes ... The raggamoffyn held fast, following every movement with its shape. The boy clawed at the fabric pieces, trying to rip them free.

...BAD DEADLY BLANKET! Bad bad blanket!

Its name is Skeins, btw.

Also, pro-tip: if you watch Venture Brothers, then go back and read 90s swords and sorcery books, you WILL wind up picturing Brock Sampson as the dude who rolls up on horseback all, "Let's do this." And saves the city. With help from the city mage. As played by Dr Orpheus. And when that city mage is described as being in a hissy bitchfight with the other city mage you'll wind up picturing Dr Orpheus' monk friend.

"I am Piergeiron!" he roared in a loud voice that echoed from the buildings and over the water. "Called Paladinson and Known Lord of Waterdeep." He drew his great sword Halcyon and held it aloft so it gleamed. "As long as I can fight, this city will remain standing and be free!" He lifted the sword, and as if in answer, a salvo of flaming rock seared across the sky from Castle Waterdeep's catapults. They splashed down in the harbor around the bloodworms and dragon turtles.

Take your pick from the smorgasbord of awesomeness. Do you want the sharkshifter, the rat shifters, the city mage slapfight, the 70-foot-long sea serpents or the DEADLY BLANKET?

There's also a subplot about the world's wieniest secret pirate (Who's not a pirate! Honest! He's just terrified of his father! Who IS a pirate! And his pirate tattoo won't come off! And he gets kicked out of the house! And people see his tattoo and realize he's a pirate even though he worked so hard not to be a pirate! Life is so UNFAIR.) who is basically milquetoast in a leather apron (Yes, that's all he wears. It gets so hot working on ships! And running away from girls! And being a secret pirate!).

Anyway, his subplot has like, zero bloodworms or firedrakes. It has pirates, but they're mainly just him hiding in a crow's nest reading romance novels (not making this up) and being sad about being a secret pirate.

But back to Waterdeep and the live-action Iron Maiden album unfolding there:

Maskar Wands [city mage numero uno] stood in a flying chariot drawn by a pair of red firedrakes whose claws struck sparks from the sky as they ran. The wizard's hairline had receded over the years to reveal his broad forehead, but silver hair still flowed in the wind. He wore the robes of a wizard. ...Maskar gestured at the chariot and firedrakes and they disappeared. The wizard gazed blackly at the snake hanging from the huge hand he'd conjured. "Now," he said sternly, "now we show these invaders that Waterdeep will never bend, much less break."

Oh yeah. The city mage saves Waterdeep from the 70-foot-long sea serpent by wizarding up a giant hand that chokes the snake. And there is exactly zero irony present in any of the snake-choking scene. None.

IT'S. AWESOME.

The prose is, in case you have not guessed, a little stilted, like how someone feels a rabid mouse "coiling in his guts" when he gets scared (three guesses who) and that thing with the severed foot in the title never really gets explained, but takes four full pages to not be explained in. And you either love this kind of epic nonsense or you already knew, like three paragraphs into this review, that's it not really your kind of thing.

But really, how can you say no to a book where the SHARKSHIFTER is one of the least notable things about it?

She was washing the plate like she was strangling someone.

oddmonster — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:54:16 GMT

KL Noir: Red edited by Amir Muhammed:

You run into The Tea House with the birdcage and your results slip from the machine. Mr. Chan has just closed the till and is contemplating an object on the counter. It is a package wrapped in brown paper and the size and shape of a cauliflower.

"I'm dead," you say, and drop the birdcage on the counter. You hand Mr. Chan the results slip for him to read out--

(Eeleen Lee, "The Oracle of Truth")

Synopsis: 14 dark and creepy stories set in Kuala Lumpur. One essay too, which was helpful even if it felt a little misplaced.

Overall, a mixed bag, but that's what you have to say about 95% of anthologies. It's difficult to find 14 short story writers and an essayist who can all hold it together on theme, plot, character and technical excellence. And rating this anthology is complicated by the fact I'm a white non-Malaysian, so I have exactly zero standing to comment on things like authenticity or exoticness. For me it's just good enough that now I know there's a place in the world called Port Klang.

So, in the order they appear in the book:

"The Runner" by Adib Zaini: Teenage girl gets in over her head with drug-runners, has to figure out how to get out. Solid ending.

"Rukun Tetangga" by Preeta Samarasan: About a weird bachelor uncle who gets weirder, but not in any interesting way

"Mamak Murder Mystery" by Marc de Faoite: was indeed mysterious, and a little ambiguous, but I got the idea it was mostly written to draw attention to the existence of an Indian immigrant population who staff Malaysian fast food restaurants and dream of returning to India. And on that front it was successful.

"Asian Angel" by Shaz Johar: Nice twists, but mostly forgettable.

"A Gift of Flowers" by Shih-Li Kow: I think this story really wanted to go the O. Henry or Isak Dinesen route but the vignettes just weren't sharp enough for the direction to hold.

"Kiss from a Rose" by Fadzlishah Johanabas: Almost worked. Maybe for someone more romantic than me.

"After Dark, My Love" by Dina Zaman: The one essay in the book, it's captivating and informative, but comes totally out of left field. I kept trying to figure out if it was fiction or not.

"The Oracle of Truth" by Eeleen Lee: Brutal and curious, and very nicely done.

"Chasing Butterflies in the Night" by Kris Williamson: Excellent! One of the two most squarely noir stories on offer, and better than a good 80% of the noir shorts I've read lately. Finally, someone has done something new with crime fiction's dead hooker problem. Not that it does anything to help the problem, it's just refreshing to see someone try anything new with it.

"The Dualist" by Shivani Sivagurunathan: The one story I could not follow at all. At. All. I had no idea who was sleeping with whom, or who thought they were sleeping with someone and who the professor was and who wasn't supposed to know. Someone smarter than me should read this and explain it to me.

"Vanished" by Khairulnizam Bakeri: There's a note in the introduction that the publishers like noir that veers more towards what's thought more as pulp than American conceptions of noir, and this is the story that really kicks off the serious pulp portion of the book. And it's good. It's strange and modern and ghostly and weird.

"Cannibal vs. Ah Long" by Megat Ishak: Not my favorite story in the bunch, but holy crow is it good. It's just balls-out pulp and horror and if that's not enough to convince you to read it, there's this quote from it in the frontispiece to the book: "Several teeth shot out from his rectum and clinked against the porcelain bowl before dropping into the water." Should probably win some sort of award.

"The Machete and Me" by Dayang Noor: My 2nd favorite of the collection, it tells the story of complicated, tragic matriarchies and cursed heirlooms. It passes the Bechdel Test and it's astonishingly good.

"The Unbeliever" by Amir Hafizi: My favorite, hands-down. Three words: Malaysian Cthulhu mythos. All pulp, all the time, no line, no waiting. Like smelling fresh cigar smoke in the library of a mansion when no one's been home for decades. Fantabulous.

"Mud" by Brian Gomez: Mean, nasty and very well done.

Three stars for the collection overall because for me, there was that long section in the middle that felt a little sloggy, but this is the first of four themed volumes from this publisher, so I'll be sure to pick up the next one when it comes out.

Top Five Meme

oddmonster — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:11:58 GMT

Top Five Favorite Stories

Post a list of your top five favorite fics you've written, regardless of fandom or the reason you love them. This isn't about the BEST things you've written, but what you LOVE most. Then tag five other people to do the same. (I'm not going to tag anyone, but I'd love to see all my friends do this!)

Something Nice for Harriet (Miami Vice, Switek and Zito)
And That's Why We Quit the Forest (Riptide AU (glow-worms), Nick/Cody)
Helitack (Riptide, Nick/Cody)
Sneaking Out (Riptide, Nick/Cody. "Help had arrived. It had hidden under the bed first, true, but it had arrived.")
And the Toast Isn't Even Warm (The Tick, American Maid/Ottoman Empress)
The Girl from Marin (Riptide, Nick/Cody)

Yup, I spell five with a six. I blame the bossanova.

Empathy is not identification; there is a crucial difference.

oddmonster — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:20:47 GMT

Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers by Michael Connelly:

Sometimes the killers called me. The phony hit man who was convicted of killing and burying his wife called from jail to say I had been too harsh on him.

Synopsis: Before he began writing Harry Bosch and Mickey Whatnot, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter who took very detailed notes and then fanficced his own articles.

I think it's fair to say that if you start your adult career as a crime reporter in 1980s Southern Florida, which to all extents and purposes appears to have been an epicenter of drug-induced weirdness that continues to this day, there's a 100% likelihood of you winding up in L.A. at some point. And not because you're looking for your own reality show.

L.A. and Southern Florida always feel very linked in my mind, maybe due to loving both Miami Vice and crime fiction set in California, but in my defense I'd like to point out that in the only book in which Serge A. Storms leaves the Sunshine State, it's to go to L.A. Exhibit B, of course, is this book.

When he was 16, Connelly was the only witness to the flight of an escaping gunman in Fort Lauderdale. When he went to the police they refused to believe him, and the teenage Connelly spent some quality time with Fort Lauderdale's finest, doing line-ups and then being grilled by them as to the veracity of his story. The gunman was never caught. But it sure seems like Connelly became addicted to the inside view of catching criminals.

And he went on to write a ton about real-life crime capers, on which he later cheerfully and admittedly based several of the Bosch's I've read: the bank robbery in Black Echo; the extradition mission in Black Ice where L.A. cops had to bring gifts of guns and ammo to their Mexican counterparts; the mob guy stuffed in his trunk in Trunk Music. And of course the death of the cop-suing lawyer in Angels Flight.

Maybe there are more, but I'm only up to #8 in the Bosch series. Also as far as I can tell, the lawyer wasn't killed in real-life, just in Connelly's book, and I can't tell whether that's just creative license or a form of wish fulfillment by an author who very clearly empathizes with the cops he profiles in these articles. Even the corrupt ones.

Connelly even wrote an article about a murder that happened in the school district of my Vermont hometown, of which I was entirely unaware until now. A teacher allegedly killed another teacher, then fled to L.A. Which explains a ton about how the district office is currently set up.

Connelly's non-fiction is every bit as good as his fiction, although it appears he has a template for articles that he's determined to stick to without any deviation whatsoever. I'm sure that made reporting under a deadline a whole lot easier, but when the articles are all pulled together in one collection, the rigid structure makes for a kind of tik-tik-TICK. tik-tik-TICK. tik-tik-TICK. rhythm that detracts from some of the pretty fascinating subject matter. My advice is to read the book in multiple sittings, not, as I did, over the course of one day.

But if you enjoy Bosch and L.A., and the muggy, neon-lit weariness of South Florida (which Connelly captures perfectly), I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this collection. If nothing else, y'all can tell me which other cases he fan-ficced.

Got my bags, got my reservations. Spent each dime I could afford.

oddmonster — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:10:18 GMT

I'm dog-sitting up near the Canadian border this weekend and hoping to get a glimpse of the Northern Lights tonight. I just cooked Dunkin Donuts coffee in a saucepan on the stove, and in lieu of anything that looks like milk in my friend's fridge, I just creamed and sweetened it with caramel biscotti spread (like Nutella, but caramelly).

When I packed to come up here I brought two bags of books, a spaghetti squash, three tomatoes, and onion, an avocado, wine, a bagel and some tea bags. If J hadn't said anything I'd've forgotten a change of clothes, toothbrush and meds. On my way out of town I stopped by the library.

This frontier lifestyle is one I can heartily embrace.

Also, I'm reading Bosch #7, A Darkness More Than Night, and it's so cheerfully full of owls as harbingers of deathity death death (now with extra damnation!) that I can very well imagine David Lynch reading it, nodding along sagely. Scowling and making notes in the margins when Connelly's owls don't match up with his own exhaustive research.

There is one thing, though. In the book, Connelly creation Terry McCaleb suspects our own Harry Bosch of evildoings (with owls, naturally*) and at one point McCaleb asks Bosch if he ever thinks of "the girl on the hill" which is clearly meant to be a reference to the earlier case they worked together but which is completely escaping my memory right now. Was it Trunk Music? Last Coyote? I can tell at some point I'll be re-reading the whole series, but can someone remind me who the girl on the hill is? It's making me bananas.

Not bananas enough to stop reading, though.

ETA: Apparently the girl on the hill is about to be explained in the book. Huzzah, my brain is not pooping out on me. At least not about books.

*Clarification due to syntactic ambiguity: McCaleb suspects Bosch of evildoings where owls are the weapons, not the victims. Important difference.