Heroes 1x17 Company Man

( Spoilers for episode and preview )

More loot!

Anonymous rose-sender! Thank you! That cheered me up immensely.

(also, I typed "anonymouse" and didn't notice for a good hour. Rats on brain, please pardon.)

I completely forgot to mention that I got..... Honey and Clover stuff! How in the world did that slip through the cracks in my mind? But yes, I got vols. 1-3 of the manga and DVDs 1-2 (eps. 1-4, the stingy bastards), both in Chinese. I figured Honey and Clover was worth it, and I don't want to wait till the licensed ones come out, though of course I will buy those too. Knowing me, I'll end up with the Chinese, English and Japanese versions of the manga. And whatever assorted merchandise there is.

I also rewatched most of H&C II on the airplane, thanks to my trusty iPod, and I found myself nearly crying at quite a few intervals. Thankfully, I didn't, but I snuffled a bit to myself and probably grossed out the guy sitting next to me.

On the other hand, he threw up in his barf bag while the plane was descending, so he wins the gross out game.

Dunnett, Dorothy - Niccolo Rising

The short review: Dunnett! I had forgotten how much I loved you and your labyrinthe prose, insane plotting, high angst, and random funny animal bits. Dunnett being Dunnett, I feel it may even be slightly spoilery revealing who exactly Niccolo is, as he doesn't really show up for a good chunk of the book.

Thankfully, despite everyone in the book being fairly multilingual, all the dialogue is transcribed in English. This one thing already made the book much easier to understand, particularly when compared to the Lymond chronicles.

The other thing is that the hero is much, much less labyrinthe and fucked-up than Lymond, though really, that's not very difficult. I think pretty much everyone is less labyrinthe and fucked-up than Lymond. The strange thing is, I found that I actually quite liked Niccolo, which I wasn't expecting at all. I thought I'd admire him and be amused by his angst and woe, but he seems to be a genuinely nice person who tries to do good. How fresh! How astonishing! ;)

Also, there is an ostrich.

( Spoilers for the book )

I feel obliged to ask: are there any cool women who get to do a lot? Katelina was ok, as is Marian, but they don't do too much.

In conclusion: Ostrich!

Links:
- riemannia's collection of Niccolo posts
- tenemet's review

Hickam, Homer H., Jr. - Rocket Boys

I ended up bringing this on the airplane, thanks to jonquil's enthusiastic rec.

Homer Hickam, Jr., called Sonny, grew up in Coalwood, West Virginia. The town was basically owned and run by the coal company, and Sonny's dad was a company man in pretty much every way you can be. But by the 1960s, most people, Sonny's mother included, knew that the town probably didn't have much of a future and that the company would pull out soon. There's a sense of desperation underlying a lot of the book, of people trying to get out.

Sonny eventually tries to get out by building rockets with a few of his friends.

This sounds like it should be an incredibly depressing book, but it's actually not. Sonny's dad is rather leery of the rockets and of most of the town, given that he seems to be the only person who doesn't think Coalwood is dying. But Sonny's mom and the rest of Coalwood take such hope from watching the boys build rockets that it ends up being rather happy.

Also, it's really very cool, just thinking about how much BCMA (the name of the rocket-building club) manages to accomplish in a few years. Sonny and friends have to figure out the best rocket fuel and how to assemble it from the ground up, they have to engineer the shapes of the rockets, and eventually, they have to figure out how high their rockets are flying. They go from accidentally blowing up rose garden fences to shooting rockets thousands of feet into the air to winning the National Science Fair, all with almost no knowledge of rockets or mechanical and aerospace engineering.

I mean... Sonny taught himself calculus to figure out the best shape for rocket nozzles!

That's just cool.

Anyway, highly recommended. It sounds like such a dull topic, but Hickam writes well, and in a way that really undersells what he and his friends were doing at the time, allowing the reader to come to her own conclusions.

And I nearly died laughing at the assorted rocket escapades, particularly when wasp nests were involved.