The Book Thief, Zusak. No. I didn't hate I Am the Messenger, but I hated this. I gave up after the first chapter or so, and the chapters were very brief. It made me long for Mandy Patinkin. I think the lesson here may be that if you have a stunt premise, you need to go easy on the stunt writing style. Of course, easy on the stunt writing style is almost always the way to go, irrespective of your premise.
The Historian, Kostova. Yes. I found very little to dislike about this book. I hear that lots of folks disliked it, and my librarian speculates that there may have been a reflexive "I don't like genre fiction" effect. It's enough to make me sympathize with Harlan Ellison's quest to get his works out of the SF ghetto. Whatever aspects others may have disliked, my complaints are minor: there are multiple narrative time lines, some presented in epistolary form, and others related differently, but there is so comparatively little action on what one might think of as the main narrative line that I couldn't help wondering whether some other structure might have been less jarring (and, yes, there are fine reasons for going with the epistolary tradition, and I surely can't advocate the book being any longer, so maybe it was the best way to go). I was also distracted by "a historian" vs "an historian". I'm quite sure Kostova was consistent as to which characters said which, but I think she may have just made the Americans say "a" and the non-Americans "an". Given how long ago some of the action takes place, I would have expected even the Americans of the time to use "an". There's also at least one section where Kostova renders dialect via non-standard spellings of words, and that pulled my head right out of the book every time. Complaints notwithstanding, I think Kostova did an admirable job with the material.
I'm at a professional training on web 2.0 in libraries, and the point was made that blogging (and other 2.0ish type deals) are interactive, a back and forth conversation. But I've got comments turned off on my blog, and very few people read the posts to begin with. Every new (successful) technology is used to talk to other people. I'm just talking to myself.
But I'm also talking to Craig: Hey! Look at busmonster!
I am linking to this story about 3d video clips of the sun solely so I can say "Coronal mass ejections? Sounds like spring break at Cabo!"
The nine-o'clock show is completely different from the six-o'clock. Try the veal. Tip your waitresses.
Unfortunately, you can't see the articles without an additional subscription, but you can see Science Magazine's tables of contents and ads at the back for a whole raft of old issues, going back to 1880! I hope Project Gutenberg gets some of those, too-- I only see some Scientific American there right now...
Despite its understandable focus on business, I found this article on how becoming great at anything takes a lot of practice extremely interesting. I was especially struck by the notion of "deliberate practice", and how it's the only practice that matters when seeking improvement.
West Nile Virus is officially in King County, so it's time to offload your tire garden and your collection of open-topped rusty barrels. The good news is that bird surveillance pays off. The CDC lets you know how far your DEET budget will go.
Yet still more research into how to do something that will almost certainly be misused. I do wonder whether Flexitral's theory would allow them to reduce the "hundreds" of chemicals the olfactograph requires.
Update: poking around Flexitral's pages led me to this bit of marketing to a narrow audience: "the first carnation aromachemical incorporating a thioether moiety." Finally!
Start counting the days until the episode of Bones based on this event.
Did you know you can volunteer in the airport? How about the emergency room in a busy regional teaching hospital?
Those guys who evaluate how well students in different countries are doing in math and science (you know, the ones where USanians do better than Cyprus. USA! USA!) evaluated the curriculum in the Bellevue Schools. Here are their thoughts.
Article about the odd messing about with body sense that can be done when you poke the brain, with implications for the messing about the brain does on its own.
Flights, ed. Sarrantonio. No. It's perhaps not entirely fair to dismiss the entire collection, but the first half convinced me that I would be better off skipping the second half. I had a bad feeling about the collection from the word "Extreme" in the subtitle, and this feeling was reinforced by the presence of a story written by the editor (I didn't make it to Sarrantonio's story, but his introductions did not inspire me to persevere). The "Extreme Visions" in the subtitle invites comparison with Dangerous Visions, a nearly 40-year-old collection. Flights is not worthy of the invitation.
Check out these cute (but spendy) vinyl dolls! Very good expressions on these guys.
The commitment: love, sex, marriage, and my family, Savage
A well put together and often touching story of Savage's own family contrasted with national debate on same-sex marriage. Sometimes a little forced, and he only has one "wha???" moment in his argument, so he's improving significantly in his writing. Three stars.
Banana Sunday, Nibot & Coover
Graphic novel: hated the writing, loved the art. Two stars on the basis of Go Go the Gorilla.
Astonishing X-Men v.2: Dangerous, Whedon
Wow, Joss sure can write! Zippy dialogue, characterization with an economy of words, I'm eagerly awaiting v.1. Four stars.
Astonishing X-Men v.1: Gifted, Whedon
Again, the man can write. Genuinely dramatic moments helped immensely by the page layout and blocking (is that the right word?). Four stars.
Runaways: Pride & Joy, Vaughan (Y)
Read it because I heard that Whedon would be taking over the story sometime soon. Not amazingly great, but quite a fun premise and some promise for the characters. Worth a book-talk. Three stars.
King Dork, Portman (Y)
Read it for a mock Printz award deal, and I don't think it will win a big award for literary literaryness (though I have been wrong before), this book KICKED AZZ! I thoroughly enjoyed the character and language stylings. Four stars.