(no subject)

1070 tonight, for those keeping score. I spent the past couple days rearranging three chapters into some semblance of sensical order. I may have succeeded. I hope.

The boy and I spent three hours tonight driving around downtown Dallas, observing the migrational patterns of the free-range hoochie. There ain't shit to do in this town, if you don't like hip-hop or eurotrash-trance-techno, or if you don't have people to hang out with. I remember hanging out with people, I think... In person, even.

I think I'm getting old. I find myself switching to the classical or oldies stations in the car more and more often (assuming no CDs, of course), as they are so much less annoying than most modern music. I'll turn on the radio and think God, that's just noise. At this rate, I'll be a crazy old cat lady before I'm 35.

Summer reading

Rambling book reports, by Amanda.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. The Baroque Cycle is exactly that--elegant sentence-level, elaborate plots, characters weaving together in an elaborate lace tea-cozy of doom. It's one part math, one part etymology, three parts history, boatloads of wacky adventures, and a dash of spec in the form of Enoch Root, who may or may not have found the Philosopher's Stone. This book is not as devastatingly funny and silly as Snowcrash, but I enjoy it a bit more in the long run for its seriousness. And the run is long. The next Baroque book, the Confusion, has muscled aside Song of Susannah in my list of books I'll get around to reading later this summer.

The only critism I would offer is of a certain amount of scaffolding in Stephenson's prose--a common pitfall of baroque sentences--and some emotional distance with the characters. Nothing debilitating, but a gap between my emotions and the characters' that I would prefer a writer to bridge. But, as some of the zoo critters commented recently, we are the harshest of critics. These books do in fact kick ass, and should be read.

Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison. I would not have bought this book--and still won't--but upon the offer of a loan, I decided to try it. (I write this 100 pages into the book. If I chance upon anything over the next 300 that changes my opinion, I will be charitable--or uncharitable--enough to comment on it.)

*facepalm*

Just what the world needed, you say, another LKH pastiche. From my viewpoint at page 100, I have seen nothing to disabuse you of that description. Harrison's prose is better than Hamilton's by a long shot, but I am hard-pressed not to scream "Mary Sue!" as I follow the exploit's of the green-eyed, fiery-haired (but magically unfreckled) first-person-narrating witch. The first person feels like a contrivance and not necessary for telling this story. I was disappointed in LKH's past two books, but I do grant Anita Blake a decent narrative voice, and one that is stronger in 1st.

So far the rest of the cast isn't stepping up to carry the slack. The hot-but-angsty vampire chick is every hot-but-angsty vampire chick. The annoying pixie sidekick is every annoying, spastic sidekick. The bad guy whose villainy drives the first 100 pages is a Bad Guy, and what's worse, his actions make no frickin' sense. Narry a drop. I have not yet stumbled over the Romantic Interest, and will refrain from speculation. All of these characters have shown a frightening tendency to sit around saying "As you well know, Bob..."

All this said, I'm still reading the damned thing, despite closing it in disgust a few times. Some of Harrison's description is very pretty, and her world is not uninteresting. A girl has to get her pulp fix somewhere, after all.