Not too bad right now

[annathepiper]

I am functional again, and it is a relief. I haven't managed to lose the cough entirely, it still peeks up every so often, but now at least I have my brain back. I can work, and I can write. After a weekend where I was mostly fried, nice though it was to be able to rest a lot, it's good to get the words going again.

This is not to say that the weekend wasn't good, because it was! Sunday night we watched Sky High, which was amusing and fluffy fun. llachglin, kathrynt, and non-LJ friend and ex-renter Danny came over Saturday night for video games, which was a great deal of fun. Q and I, as I have mentioned over on my writing journal, had a fabulous chat about what I've got going on with Lament. If she keeps up this level of helpful I may have to name a character after her. ^_^

Last night, solarbird and I watched the original Mel Brooks version of The Producers, which I had never seen all the way through. Bwahahahaha. I'm still songvirused by "Springtime for Hitler".

Meanwhile, some book commentary!

I have recently read Charlaine Harris' Shakespeare's Champion, as I mentioned the other day. As I think I also mentioned when I read my first Lily Bard book, Shakespeare's Trollop, this series is a bit of an odd read. The books are among the shortest I've read in quite some time, barely over a couple hundred pages, which means that Ms. Harris gets to show that she's capable of some good, tight writing! This particular book in the series was a jump backwards for me--Trollop is book 4 and Champion is 2, so it was slightly strange to have to readjust for that. But this book also had the introduction of Lily's love interest Jack, which was fun. Her scenes with him were brimming with edgy chemistry, made all the more effective for the terseness of the book.

Patricia Briggs' Raven's Shadow was somewhat clunkier. I generally like Briggs, she's churned up some very readable, straightforward fantasy novels without pretensions. I mentioned in my remarks on her recent Moon Called, as I recall, that she's got a gift for making an otherwise standard plot feel new and refreshing just by tweaking small details in unexpected ways. She uses that talent with this book as well, but unfortuantely it wasn't as effective this time around. I liked that for once the Quest Du Jour involved a woman with an established family who's setting out to save her husband from the Bad Guys, and I liked that the apparently useless fop of an Emperor (who I kept seeing as Commodus from Gladiator, heh) turned out to not actually be an asshole.

But there were a couple of big clunky things I had issues with as well. One was that at more than one point throughout the book, I kept getting scenes chock full of exposition in dialogue. One scene early on in the book involved the heroine explaining in great detail to her children what the various magical Orders of her people were and what their own individual Orders meant--and what they themselves could do. And another scene between the hero and the aforementioned Emperor threw out a lot of historical exposition in the dialogue between the two characters. At no point did it quite become an "as you know, Bob..." situation, since there were legitimate in-plot reasons for these things to be discussed, but it still felt off-kilter to me.

The other big clunker was that towards the end of the book, when the heroine and her two sons are breaking into the palace to save her spouse, they just... show up. And spend another dialogue-heavy scene telling our hero how they got into the palace with the help of a bunch of NPCs they picked up along the way. Three words: "Show, don't tell." I mean, there was no real doubt that the guy was going to be rescued, but completely skipping over how they got into the palace really threw the pacing off for me and knocked out a lot of the suspense.

Briggs is usually better than this--Moon Called was a good example. This was the first book of hers that disappointed me, and I'm not sure yet if I'll be picking up its sequel, Raven's Strike.


And I have actual work to do, which is a fun switch. Getting back to it now!

Monday miles: 3.75
Tuesday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 776.6
Miles out of Rivendell: 318.6
Miles to Lothlórien: 156.1 ETA 3/16/06: 145.4

Comments

[kissare.livejournal.com]

I rented that and watched it with my boyfriend. We were both totally songvirused by Springtime for Hitler too - him more than me. That was at LEAST 6 months ago, and he STILL adds "and Germany!" to the end of any sentence involving " for ."

[annathepiper]

Hee! Makes me wonder how the remake held up. The dude who was presenting the movie (this was on TCM, I think) was commenting about how the remake had to take out the hippie character who gets cast as Hitler in the Mel Brooks version, since he is dated for today's audiences.

[kissare.livejournal.com]

I was told they changed the ending in the remake. I haven't seen it yet, though.

[annathepiper]

*peers over at imdb.com entry for it* Huh! I'd read more on it, but I think I'd like to keep my options open in case we get the urge to put this on our Netflix queue here at the Murk. :)