(no subject)

[oyceter]

Extremely tired from job.

Funny thing I saw during lunch -- this guy, with white blond hair, dressed in a long leather jacket, black jeans and black shoes. First thought: Spike! Hee.

Funny books I ran into -- Jumping for Health/Joy/I forgot: How to use gravity to improve your life. I kid you not.

Also sticking my head in the sand and pretending the whole Spike vs. Angel thing is not continuing. Because honestly, I like 'em both.

The boy and I are playing Final Fantasy X right now, a game I can actually play because it doesn't matter that I have no hand-eye coordination. I can even do the fight stuff because it's all turn based and I can take as long as I want to make a character do something. I also mercilessly make fun of the main character, because honestly, he's as dumb as a brick. I like Lulu right now, despite the horribly silly name, mostly because she looks evil, casts magic, and wears a long black dress. Hey, it's a computer game.. I'm not supposed to be deep about it!

Still looking for chewy books to read... don't feel like romance fluff as of now. Picked up Tad Williams' War of the Flowers and Brust and Emma Bull's Freedom and Necessity from the bookstore (i.e. borrowed, not bought), and am working my way through them. Kind of scared to read the Williams book because he does the gore and scariness. Plus, the Brust and Bull book is Victorian epistolary (sp) and horribly fun so far.

Comments

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Ah Brust and Bull. Great book. I just finished
Jo Walton's The Prize in the Game and am close to finished with King's Peace, both of which I would recommend, although not necessarily in the order I read them. Prize is a sort of prequel for some of the secondary characters in KP, but it helps to have read KP I think for most people (based on the reviews at least.)

Hoping to get over to Flight's of Fantasy Bookstore tomorrow for Bujold's signing and pick up Paladin of Souls, if my car gets fixed by then... it conked out after I got back from Albacon yesterday.
Ben plays quite a bit of Final Fantasy also. I was thinking recently how the boys get so much of their stories from games not books:

Re: Have fairytales gone out of fashion
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If you're going to look at children's literature, I think the variance in readership is similar to to what I remember growing up in the 70's. Although, it's a very valid point that you can find the elements of say for example Cinderella in romances.

As a "descendant," I'd like to suggest gaming texts. This is an area of readership that I find almost universal among the boys and teens I know and the Fantasy and Fairy tale elements are striking. Most of the young men read about the games and then read/experience the story through playing, which I think is a fascinating element in and of itself. http://pub25.ezboard.com/fsurlalunefairytalesfrm1.showMessageRange?topicID=1489.topic&start=1&stop=20

[oyceter]

Having great fun with that book so far ^_^. One of my favorite lines: "But now Richard is off after James, trying to rescue him as if he were the hero of a book, only the book was written by Malory or Spenser, or more likely Disraeli, while Richard was written by Cervantes..." Made me laugh aloud during lunch. It just seems a lovely little touch. I wonder if I were described like that, whose author's creation I would be. Also love how each character has such a distinctive voice.

Jo Walton... haven't heard of her. What else has she written besides those?

Looked up that discussion on SurLaLune, and I'm rather surprised that the question came up! Course, I am biased, as I've always been interested in fairy tales, and to me it feels as though scholarship on folklore and fairy tales has really started to take off recently. But of course, all this could be colored by my impressions of only having hunted down scholarship in the past five or six years or so. I do think the Endicott gang and Brust and Bull and etc. up in Minneapolis (?) have helped revive the fairy tale in fantasy lit. and offered it as an alternative to the more RPG/video-game-esque adventure fantasies out in the market.

Also, just given the prevalence of Disney and the number of YA authors working with fairy tales and myths (Meredith Ann Pierce, Donna Jo Napoli, Adele Geras, not to mention Yolen, Coville, Gail Carson Levine, etc) I'd think that the younger generation would be somewhat educated. Of course they might not know the originals and may be even more familiar with fairy tale remakes like The Stinky Cheeseman, Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest books, Fractured Fairytales, etc. that all use fairy tale archetypes than with the sources. But I feel that's just part of the tradition... they are starting to remember the retold tales, and thus, once again, as with every generation, the stories are changing form.

[thewildmole.livejournal.com]

Love, love, *love* Freedom and Necessity :).

War of the Flowers was also good - I think I blurbed about it over on tome_ho. It suffers a little bit by being a stand-alone in that it feels a bit rushed towards the end. Then again, Williams had been writing multi-volume series for so long that he probably was used to a larger canvas (so to speak) to spin out his story. It's very enjoyable, though.

BTW, if you want something "chewy", I am cleaning out my shelves and am going to be getting rid of Janny Wurts' series, The Wars of Light and Dark. I have from Curse of the Mistwraith through Peril's Gate. Let me know if you're interested.

[oyceter]

I'm having quite a bit of fun with it right now! I just love the voices of all the characters and the snippets from The Times, etc.

I think I'll be getting into War after Freedon and Necessity, because right now, a dip into Victorian England feels much more enjoyable than urban fantasy... change of pace from Otherland, which was my last big read.

Wurts... oo, are her individual books any good? I've only read the Daughter of the Empire trilogy she did with Feist.

[thewildmole.livejournal.com]

I love the first line from Freedom and Necessity about how the recipient of the letter probably didn't expect to hear from the writer.

Wurts - I haven't ever really liked the stuff she did with Feist. Then again, I don't think Feist is all that great himself :P. Her Wars of Light and Dark series is very....dense. Although it's not exactly new territory as far as the storyline (half-brothers who fight against each other), she builds worlds with the same type of depth as CJ Cherryh and she makes sympathetic, well-rounded characters. Even though I didn't like Lysander, she gave him enough character-building that I could understand his mindset.

You may also want to take a look at Karin Lowachee's Warchild. It's the novel that won the Warner First Aspect competition after Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring. There are some obvious "first novel aspects" to it - I think she takes too long to reveal part of the character's past when you've pretty much been able to guess it - but her alien society is also along the lines of Cherryh, and the main protagonist (Jos) is set up similar to Ender's Game.

[oyceter]

K... thanks for the tips. Hrm, haven't actually heard of the Warner First Aspect competition -- I assume it's for finding promising new writers?

Someday I will also finally have to finish Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy, which has been sitting on my shelf for about two years now, sigh.

It's strange rereading some of the first scifi/fantasy books I read, like the Empire series... The last time I read Feist I just couldn't anymore, sadly, and the Empire series isn't holding up too well either. Too much orientalism for me, and my mind, tainted by too many EAS classes, has started debating politics and how the books reflect attitudes toward Japan/Asia too much for it to be the escapism it used to be.