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Sigh. Went out to find presents for the family today, and the thing I wanted to get my mom was $70 at Bed Bath and Beyond! Maybe I will look at Sears tomorrow. Couldn't find anything cute for my sister either, or anything happy for me at Express (I have a gift certificate to use, yay).

All in all, an unsatisfying experience. I wonder if I've just lost previous enjoyment of shopping, or if it's just that I'm not really in the mood lately. Also, shopping with the boy is not exactly the most fun thing around. Nothing wrong with the boy, but he definitely does not actively shop, unlike going out with my mom or my sister or friends. So it's kind of like me shopping by myself with someone to walk around with.

Well, shopping can wait for home as well. As can my haircut, which I quite desperately need now.

I've found I've been playing a lot of video games lately (this year), if I can use "play" to mean watching the boy play and offering hints and telling him where to go. I tried my hand at Final Fantasy X, but even though it requires no real hand-eye coordination, I still can't figure out easy things, like this button means select and this one means back. I blame this all on Timmy -- he had this interesting sounding game at his house last year, Eternal Darkness, with an insanity effect that was really cool, and me and Sarah got sucked into watching and we made the boy play it, hee. It's mostly action-adventure, with a good deal of evil-creature-killing, but with enough puzzle solving and the insanity effect to keep onlookers amuzed. Then that was that, and I figured it was a fluke.

Then the boy got Zelda: Wind Waker, which basically sucked his entire room, Sarah included -- three different games were being played at the same time (me and the boy, Todd and Sarah, Jared), everyone didn't want to be spoiled for their own game, we'd be rushing back to the room to grab the Game Cube first. Kind of funny. Anyhow, Zelda was an awesome game. I can't play them worth anything, because I can't even make Link walk in a straight line, much less do anything half as complicated as killing evil creatures on screen, but they've got a whole bunch of puzzles that I am good at. Well, maybe not giantly, but I did figure out some things no one else could ;). And then the boy and I played through Prince of Persia recently, and we're now in the middle of Beyond Good and Evil, which is really fun.

It's kind of weird because I always used to roll my eyes at the boy's gaming habits. And I still kind of do when he plays obsessively -- he plays lots of games that I'm not interested at all. Last year it was Halo and Generals, right now it's Project Gotham Racing 2 on XBox Live, and soon Halo 2 will come out (yikes!). But I kind of get it now... it's totally different from books and movies because you can make the little person walk around and do things, like take pictures of different animals or whatnot. It's also more frustrating in some ways, because I always want to do more things than the game will let me, but I'm kind of figuring that living with the game's rules is another game in itself. I like the puzzle games with a little adventure (Myst drove me nuts as a kid), but pretty much everything else bores me, especially shoot 'em ups and stuff like the Sims and Civilization. I generally don't like racing games unless they're like Mario Kart Double Dash, in which I get to sit in the back of the cart and throw stuff at other people while the boy does the actual driving. But good adventure games are like giant puzzles or trivia games, which are just up my alley.

Hetley, James A. - The Summer Country

Unfortunately, not as good as the blurbs in the back sounded. The Summer Country is about Camelot after Arthur's death in the vaguest sense -- we are told it is Camelot, but there's really not that much in the mythology that makes Arthur and Camelot anything but a throwaway history for an imaginary land parallel to our own.

Our heroine is Maureen, someone sexually abused as a child, and thought of as slightly insane by most people. She quickly finds out that she isn't who she thought she was; in fact, she carries the blood of the Summer Country in her and is a powerful witch. Various powerplays ensue.

I had various problems with this book -- not enough to really hate it or even powerfully dislike it, but it's also nowhere near a potential good book for me. I was a bit iffy on the treatment of Maureen's sexual trauma. I can't really pin down why, and I'm a bit scared to, because I have no knowledge on the subject matter and have no idea how accurate or not it may be. I liked the grittiness of the book up to a point, but I got quickly tired of Maureen's paranoia and was rather glad when her sister Jo and Jo's boyfriend David also started taking part of the story, rendering it something other than the Maureen and Brian show, Brian being the guy who tells her about the Summer Country.

The toughness of the characters and the attention to small things like wetting one's pants out of sheer fear were nice touches, especially in the too often glossed over fantasy genre, but in the end, I felt somewhat that the characters were tough just for show. No one in the book felt like a real person to me. Also, sadistic villains with no depth at all annoyed me (incest! torture! rape! like a bad romance's villain!sex).

I don't know. The snippet on the back of the book -- "They have slaves in the Summer Country. Camelot is dead. Arthur is dead. Law is dead. Power rules." -- was so evocative of a dystopia, of Camelot gone horribly wrong, that I was kind of disappointed when the real conflict of the story turned out not to be anything big like saving Camelot or helping or anything, but rather, rescuing Maureen once she is kidnapped! After the rescue of Maureen (by herself, which was also nice. One cannot argue that Hetley wrote wussy females), the book basically ends. From the blurbs, it sounds like a single volume.

Something that also alienated me from the book was the (imho) gratuitous violence, particularly a scene in which Maureen avenges herself. Squick. Blood everywhere. I don't know if I'm particularly sensitive to violence... I think I am, but I can also read bits like the Kushiel series and not be disgusted at all. It depends on the level of emotion I've invested in the story and in the characters and if that investment is paid off. I like the pain and the angst and the blood, but only if there's some underlying bright human emotion underneath, from the twisted love of Spike/Buffy and Wes/Lilah to Phedre enduring Darsanga for Imriel or the thorny lines of hate and love and sorrow and pain in Tigana. This one I felt didn't have that to justify the violence. Also, I was a little irked at the true love of Brian and Maureen overcoming sexual abuse thing, especially when there was absolutely no development of why Maureen might like Brian except that he *gasp* was nice and protected her, or any reason Brian might like Maureen except she was a giantly powerful witch.