…for a couple of days. I’m suffering from a head cold, and it’s left me dopey and unenthusiastic. And let’s face it–if I were sufficiently with it to write anything worth reading, I’d be at work now.

(The really annoying thing is that I don’t feel that bad, physically. I’m just too dopey for words. Lack of sleep, that’ll do it every time.)

This is yet another collection of tall tales of the outdoor life by
humorist McManus, the second that I’ve read. Not bad–McManus doesn’t
hit my funnybone square on the way some authors do, but I nevertheless
laughed out loud at regular intervals.

This isn’t a book to sit down and read straight through; the individual
pieces are quite short, rather like potato chips, and like potato chips
a surfeit of them is an unpleasant meal. But it’s great for dipping
into every so often.

For me, like many people of my generation, WWI took place back in the mists of
history. I never heard stories of the war told at family gatherings. Movies
don’t really deal with it much anymore. And when I studied history in
college, it was the aftermath with the League of Nations and the reparations
payments that were more interesting than the actual war itself. WWII, Korea,
Vietnam were the wars that were real to me as a young person. The horror of
Auschwitz and the body bag counts on the nightly news were the realities of
war. Later, it was terms like “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage.”

Then, when my kids were small and I was a broke, stay home mommy shopping at
Goodwill for clothes and books and everything else I could find cheap, I
picked up a book called “Testament of Youth” by a woman named Vera Brittain.
It cost a dime. I took it home and found a whole generation I had completely
missed. It’s a book about a nurse’s experience before, during and after the
war and it wasn’t a pretty book to read. It made a huge impression.

Now I have read this book. It’s well known and on the bookshelves at all the
bookstores. It doesn’t take long; it’s short and the writing is easy and
accessible. That is fortunate because the words tell a story more horrific
than anything I have read in a long, long time. It hit me in the gut and
made me sick. It made me cry and it made me angry. I could probably do a
nifty analysis on the use of Nature as a backdrop to the works of Man or the
development of the character but realistically, I don’t want to. I don’t
even want to do a plot synopsis. I want to give this book to everyone I
know and say “Read it. Read it now and think about it.” I want to give it to
national leaders and clergy and farmers and New York intellectuals and say
“Read it!”

Read it.

This is one strange film.

Long-time readers will remember that after buying Spirited Away on
Ian Hamet‘s recommendation I was so
impressed that I went out and got a number of other Miyazaki movies. This
is the last of the set so far.

And it is one strange film.

First, some things that stand out. The animation is stunning; I’m not
sure I’ve ever seen it equaled, even in Miyazaki’s other movies. There
are some shots that reminded my friend and I of Kurosawa’s movies. Second,
this movie is definitely not for kids. Some of this is simply the
language, which is a little more colorful than usual; there’s some (very
mild) profanity, and frequent references to certain of the characters as
being (reformed) brothel girls. On the one hand my kids have certainly
heard worse; on the other hand, I’d rather not explain brothel girls to
them.

But the language is more a reflection that the English adaptation wasn’t
done by Disney. The thing that really makes it kid-unfriendly is the
blood and gore–as Ian Hamet described it to me some time ago, “The first
decapitation surprised me.” There’s lots of blood, lots of arms lopped
off (along with the occasional head), and some really horrific monsters,
all exquisitely animated.

None of this makes it a bad movie, just a movie intended for grown-ups.
And it isn’t this that gives the movie its strangeness either–it’s just
out of character for Miyazaki.

No, what makes this movie strange is the plot and the characters.

At first, things seem to make sense–at least, if you think about it you
can come up with explanations that make things fit. But ultimately, too
much is unexplained. Why are samurais attacking Iron Town? And why does
our hero care? Princess Mononoke was raised by wolves–but if she’s a
princess, who are her parents? What’s she the princess of? And in fact
the name “Princess Mononoke” is used only once–and how does the person
who uses it know that that’s the girl’s name? It’s not what she calls
herself. What’s with the brothel girls? How come lepers are so good at
designing guns? (You might think that it’s a comment on the sort of
people who make guns, but it doesn’t seem to be.)

A lot of the movie resonates with the kind of
anti-technological spiritual-but-not-religious worship of nature that I
associate with New Agers and Hollywood stars–but not quite. It’s all
very strange, and the characters’ motivations become increasingly hard
to understand as the movie progresses.

Perhaps it’s just a Japanese thing that doesn’t translate well; perhaps
the movie depends on some Japanese legend that fills in the gaps. I
don’t know.

Bottom line: I loved the animation, which was easily enough to hold my
attention. It was truly gorgeous. The story, such as it was, left
me cold.

Capsule summary: We loved it.

I’ve been known to read a new Bujold novel to Jane in one weekend; my
throat was sore for a week. This one took us eight evenings, because I
read no more than four chapters a night to save my voice. (I did
overdo it on the last day, so we could finish up.)

This is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, though it can be
read independently. It concerns Ista dy Chalion, the dowager royina
(she’s the mother of Royina Iselle, the reigning monarch). During the
dark days of the curse which was the topic of the previous book, Ista
was thought to be mad. In fact, she pretty well was mad, thanks to
getting a really raw deal from the gods.

See, this is a fantasy series, but it’s almost what you might call
theological science fiction. That is to say, Bujold has invented a
theology (a very interesting one, I might add) and a religion to go with
it–and then, having set up the rules, she’s seeing where they take her.

So Ista is now a youngish 40, she’s no longer mad, and she’s being
stifled by idiot ladies-in-waiting who treat her like she’s made of
china and won’t leave her alone for fear she’ll throw herself off
of a tower. She married Roya Ias as a young woman, was caught up in the
curse, and has had little but hell since then. She finally has a chance
to have a life of her own, if she can rid herself of her protectors.
If only the gods will leave her alone…

…but they won’t, of course.

Then you might want to read this.

Bujold’s latest book, Paladin of Souls, is a sequel to
The Curse of Chalion which I read and reviewed
almost exactly two years
ago. As I hadn’t reread it since, and as I like to have the story
fresh in my mind, and because almost any excuse is sufficient to reread a
Bujold book, I picked it up and devoured it for the second time.

In our library, Bujold stands alone as the only author whose new books I
always read aloud to Jane. I’ll sometimes read
P.G. Wodehouse to her (not that he’s really writing anything
new), and I’ll almost always read new Terry Pratchett and
Steven Brust books to her–but not invariably. She likes
Pratchett, she likes Brust, she likes Wodehouse, but (with three kids in
the house) only Bujold will cause her to drop everything for a week until
we’ve finished.

Anyway, I liked the book just as much this time as I did the first time.
You can go read my earlier review to get a feel for what it’s about; I
rather doubt I can improve on it without giving away too much.

The Regulators, by Stephen King

When King is good, he’s very good. This, on the other hand, is just 500
pages of blood, gore, violence, and rude words. I’m still not exactly
sure what his good books add to that mix, but there must be something.

This is the companion to King’s novel Desperation, which I
read and reviewed some while back. I liked Desperation. It
had blood, gore, violence, and rude words too, but it was good. It took
place over a few hours in a small town in Nevada. This one takes place
over a few hours in a small neighborhood in the Mid-West. Some of the
same people are involved, sort of. It’s got some interesting bits in it.
But unlike Desperation, it failed to hold my attention.

I dunno. I guess you win some, you lose some.

(On the other hand, it’s not Pet Sematary, either. So I
suppose it isn’t truly dire.)

Jane found this, and passed it along to me. I think it’s worth your time.

This book is such a treat. I read it the first time 4 or 5 years ago when
they first republished it after recognizing the author’s name as the author
of the original novel “101 Dalmatians.” And then hearing that it is being
made into a movie, I pulled it back off the shelf to see if it was as much
fun as I remembered.

It’s the story of the Mortmain family as told by the youngest daughter in
her diary. The father had years before written a breakthrough book that
afforded them the luxury of taking up residence in an old castle somewhere
in rural England. In the years since, the mother has died and been replaced
by a stepmother, Topaz, who is not at all evil although a bit eccentric and
embarrassing. Father has quit writing completely and spends his days reading
detective novels and doing crosswords. The family has taken in the orphaned
son, Stephen, of their deceased housekeeper. And the two daughters have
grown from children to young women with all the angst adolescents go thru.
They are struggling along admirably with their poverty when the owner of the
castle dies and leaves it to his two American raised sons. And of course,
young men in the neighborhood send the two girls into a romantic tizzy.

There is another book about young women looking for husbands that starts “It
is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a
fortune must be in want of a wife.” Smith keep making references to Jane
Austen throughout the book and after the first couple I started paying
attention to them. And there are a lot of them. She takes elements of many
of Austen’s characters and recreates them in the modern world with modern
circumstances.

There’s the father who shuts himself up in the study. There is a Vicar and a
village spinster who are important parts of the story. There are the two
young men, one of whom is destined for one sister and the other who may or
may not be destined for the other. There are the two sisters, one who is
flighty and emotional and the other who is rational and dependable. It’s not
a perfect synthesis and she certainly doesn’t have the skill with words and
humor that Austen has, but it makes for a very entertaining read.