Surprise LOTR marathon

Courtesy of sksouth, I have recently listened to the 1981 BBC radio production of Lord of the Rings. It's notable to me for a few reasons, not the least of which is that Ian Holm is the voice of Frodo in that production. But it's also very much a BBC production by feel, including the restrained style of lines, the pacing, and the sound effects. There's this one sound effect that they use in fact, for the arrival of the Eagle Gwaihir, that makes me snicker helplessly because it sounds a lot like the sound effect for the TARDIS.

However, while I did appreciate the production well enough, it doesn't hold a candle to the movie trilogy. So today I found myself watching all three movies, back to back, while I was working on two months' worth of balancing the checkbook. That's a LOT of Tolkien, but damn, that was satisfying.

All the best bits still bring tears to my eyes: Gandalf falling into shadow in Moria and the Fellowship's reaction; the death scene of Boromir; the entire scene where Sam follows Frodo out into the lake; and "I can't carry it for you, Mister Frodo--but I can carry you!" The battle speeches still absolutely grip me: Theoden's speech right before that last charge out of Helm's Deep, just before Gandalf and Eomer and the Rohirrim show up; Theoden's speech just before he and 6,000 pissed off Rohirrim sweep down onto the Pelennor Fields; Aragorn's speech before the men of Gondor and Rohan before the Black Gate.

But y'know, the part that really grabs my heart and has me crying enough to drop tears right down off my face? Annie Lennox singing "Into the West". Damn. That song is a masterwork, finishing off a trilogy of masterpieces. It makes me want to play it on guitar. And sing it. In Quenya. Sniff.

And not only did the checkbook got finished up partway through the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, I even discovered we have quite a bit more money than I thought we did because I forgot to write in an entire paycheck. Oops. *^_^*;;

But, damn. I so love that I can come back to these movies again and again. Just like the books.

Book Log #40: A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

aerialscribe gets kudos for recommending A Shadow in Summer to me, the first book of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet. I very much enjoyed this and am definitely looking forward to reading more of the series.

The worldbuilding is excellent, a refreshing switch from a lot of fantasy I've read, on the grounds that the culture depicted on camera is one clearly influenced by Asian real-life cultures, not European ones. Characters address each other with honorific suffixes. With a a couple of specific exceptions, they're clearly not white--which is easy to miss until you get to the bit where the young female character Liat is described as having skin like "dark honey", and the two outlander characters are called out as unusual because of their hair and skin color. The food and architecture and clothing choices are all described with Asian influences clearly in mind. And most importantly, one of the most revered ranks in the entire culture is that of "poet", an interesting title for one whose function is to control certain abstract concept/thoughts embodied into physical form for the purpose of magically managing the society. That in particular struck me as very, very Eastern.

Abraham's writing is also excellent. He has a vivid way with a word that lushly portrays his world without drowning you in detail. The pacing is rock-solid, the characters intriguing, and events proceed along with a mounting sense of doom that leads me to really wonder how he's going to bump up the bar as the series proceeds. For this installment, four stars.

Book Log #41: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, by Mario Acevedo

Despite having a title like The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, there's surprisingly little actual sex. Which isn't terribly surprising. I went in expecting humor, and that's pretty much what you get with the first of Mario Acevedo's Felix Gomex novels. Sure, it's sex-related humor, but it's fairly clean all the same. And the schtick wasn't entirely unfamiliar, anyway--not when solarbird owns a copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun. ;)

So, yeah. Felix Gomex is a vampire, and I give Acevedo points for giving his vamp hero an unusual and pertinent-to-current-day backstory: he's a vet of the Iraq war who accidentally kills an Iraqi girl. Horrified by this, he lets himself be turned into a vampire by way of everlasting penance. He refuses to drink human blood because it gives him flashbacks to killing the girl.

Fast forward to his post-discharge, vampiric existence. He's a private detective now, and he's called to Rocky Flats to investigate why all the women employees of the facility there have been struck with an outburst of nymphomania. At the same time, he gets to contend with the disdain of the local vamps over his refusal to touch human blood, a band of vampire hunters with your standard hate-on for vamps, a dryad who doesn't need nymphomania to be interested in him--and even hints that what he's investigating may be tied into Roswell and Area 51.

It's a pretty lightweight read, all in all. Plenty of urban fantasy these days is way more sexually explicit than this book is; what violence is here, with the exception of Felix's backstory in Iraq, is fairly comic-booky. The disparate parts of this plot are all familiar tropes, though they do coalesce nicely at the end. Points to Acevedo, too, for having the love interest be a dryad; that's one of the under-used creatures in urban fantasy, that's for sure. My only beef with the story, really, is that Felix's refusal to drink human blood is resolved too easily. The rest of it, though, is fun. Three stars.

Food and exercise

I have not done weights in the past week. Part of me feels guilty about this, but that swollen bit in my surgery area isn't subsiding and I'm a little worried that I tore something there trying to do chest weight exercises. It's also starting to bruise up, and hurt a little more noticeably. So I'm going to call Dr. Towbin tomorrow and ask if he'll take another look at it. I have a followup scheduled with him for the 14th, but I'm not sure I want to wait that long.

Weight's still holding steady in that tight little range. I had some slips this week, snack-wise, but have tried to keep it more or less under control. And I've tried to compensate a bit for not doing the weights by walking more--doing the long walk in the morning, down along the goat trail to the Lake Forest Park bus stop, rather than the short walk down the hill to the stop at 60th.

Anyway, this is this week's report.

( Food stuff... )

Miles since July 21st: 20
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2975
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 138
Miles to Hobbiton: 1487