…we might see more of this kind of thing.

Here’s yet another outstanding review of The Return of the King. It’s really amazing, when you add it all up, how many really, truly, stupid things Jackson managed to cram in there, and it’s even more amazing how much of the original magic still comes through in spite. (Via Captain Yips.)

On another note–did Legolas’ dance with the oliphant remind anyone else of Luke Skywalker and the Imperial Walker in The Empire Strikes Back?

This, the fifth book in Brust’s “Vlad Taltos” series, picks up
immediately after Teckla. The initial plot concerns an
extremely odd bit of “work” that Vlad does for a most unusual
client–Verra, the Demon-Goddess. And as such, it takes us to some
interesting places we’ve not seen before.

But mostly, this is the book in which the tensions, the doubts, and the
self-examination begun in Teckla begin to ripen. This is the
book where Vlad decides what’s really important to him, and just how far
he’s willing to go in pursuit of it. It’s not an entirely satisfying
book–Vlad and Cawti remain estranged–but it’s got some pretty nifty
moments.

Byzantium’s Shores has a wonderful post on The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s version of it. Without ranting, or dwelling on specific departures from Tolkien’s vision, Jaquandor pinpoints a number of ways in which Jackson has…–what’s the opposite of “deepened”? “shallowed”?–produced a creation less deep than Tolkien’s.

Jane and I went to see Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King this afternoon and evening. Having seen the first two episodes of the trilogy, I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic; I figured that the good bits would be interspersed with mountains of nonsense, and in the event I was not disappointed.

I won’t do a detailed post mortem; either you’ve seen the movie, in which case it’s unnecessary, or you’ve not, in which case I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll confine myself to making two comments.

First, the one bit that Jackson absolutely, positively had to get right he got right. He overdid it a bit, but in general he got it right.

Second, Denethor was robbed, and if I were Faramir I’d sue Jackson for defamation of character.

’nuff said.

This is the fourth of Brust’s tales of Vlad Taltos, and it’s probably my
favorite of the nine he’s written to date.

Having pulled us through the wringer in Teckla, Brust now
steps back and gives us a tale of Vlad’s earliest days. The main plot
concerns Vlad’s first meetings with Morrolan e’Drien, Sethra Lavode, and
(eventually) Aliera e’Kieron, as well as such divinities as Verra, the
Demon-Goddess. As such, it’s as close to a straightforward heroic
fantasy as we’ve yet seen in this series. But in addition to the main
plot, we’re also given a series of vignettes about Vlad’s childhood and
young adulthood. We hear how he regularly got beaten up by groups of
punks from the House of the Orca until he got strong enough and quick
enough to start picking them off one by one. We hear about how he joined
the business side of House Jhereg, and how he became an assassin.

Truly, when we first meet Vlad he isn’t a nice guy. In this book we
learn how he got to be what he is when we first meet him–and we also see
the seeds of the person he can become when (not if) he eventually
overcomes them.

Man, I hate this book.

It’s not that it’s badly written. It isn’t. If it were badly written, I
wouldn’t hate it so much.

This is the third volume in Brust’s “Vlad Taltos” series. We saw
something of Vlad’s “normal” life in the first volume,
Jhereg, and something of how he got there in the second
volume, Yendi. As the book begins, Vlad is one happy camper.
He’s got a good job, he’s reasonably affluent, he’s got the respect of
his peers, he has some powerful friends outside of the Jhereg, and above
all he’s got a beloved wife.

Until she married Vlad, Cawti was a freelance assassin for the
Jhereg, working as one half of a team. Her partner retired due to the
events in the previous book, and though Cawti has “worked” occasionally
since then she’s mostly had a lot of time on her hands. Consequently,
she’s been spending a fair amount of time in South Adrilankha, where
(unlike she and Vlad) most “Easterners” in the city live in squalor and
poverty. She’s made some new friends there–friends who are convinced it
is time for the Easterners and the Teckla (the Dragaeran peasantry) to
band together, rise up, and take over the Empire. More over, she’s come
to agree with them, body and soul.

When Vlad discovers what she’s been up to, he is not best pleased. Nor
is he pleased when she begins to question his livelihood, both as a
Jhereg boss and as an assassin. What follows is a detailed portrait of a
loving marriage going straight to hell.

I hate that a whole lot.

It’s especially painful because even as I identify with Vlad, I
have to admit that on most counts Cawti is right. Assassination really
isn’t a good way to make a living. Easterners and Teckla really are
fairly well down-trodden.

At the same time, Vlad knows that any such attempt at revolt is doomed.
In the Dragaeran Empire, the ruling house
can only be succeeded by the house that follows it in the Cycle.
Empress Zerika is of the House of the Phoenix; it’s well known that her
successor will be of the House of the Dragon. The House of the Teckla is
halfway around the Cycle, and so Cawti’s rebel friends have about as much chance
at succeeding as your average Christmas fruitcake does of getting eaten.
I might add that this isn’t simply political theory; in Dragaera, the
Cycle has pretty much the same force as physical law, and Vlad, for
reasons we do not discover until the next book, has a better reason to
know this than even most Dragaerans do.

So Vlad’s in a real bind. Knowing what he does, he can’t bring himself
to buy into Cawti’s new political views. On the one hand, he wants to save his
marriage; on the other, he wants to prevent Cawti from getting herself
killed. It’s not at all clear that he can do both. Meanwhile,
revolution is bad for business; his Jhereg superiors aren’t happy with
Cawti’s activities.

Teckla is an ugly, unhappy, unpleasant book, and unfortunately
it’s also the hinge upon which the rest of the series turns.

Bottom-line: if you read Jhereg and Yendi, and you
like them, read this one and get it out of the way. Then you can go on
to Taltos, which is a lot more fun.

I just got a piece of spam with the following text appended; the spammers get better and better at defeating the spam filters:

Was not the door closed? asked the Princess
Yes, your Highness; I am sure it was; for when I opened it Dorothy’s white kitten crept out and ran up the stairs
The rails were lined with officers and men straining their eyes for the first sight of their beloved VATERLAND after a long foreign cruise, and a ringing cheer, as from a thousand throats, came faintly to Rob’s ear
Hearing this, Dorothy and the Wizard exchanged startled glances, for they remembered how often Eureka had longed to eat a piglet Again the scene changed, and within a dingy, underground room, hemmed in by walls of stone, and dimly lighted by a flickering lamp, a body of wild-eyed, desperate men were plighting an oath to murder the Emperor and overthrow his government

It appears to be a selection of lines from public-domain e-texts. There’s an Oz book in their, obviously; anyone recognize the other bits?

Deb reviewed this not long
ago, so I don’t intend to say much about the setup.

In the books prior to this one, Marsh had begun to introduce Inspector Alleyn
very late in the story; in one case, his role didn’t amount to much more
than a cameo. She reverses the trend here, introducing Alleyn right at
the beginning, but with a twist: the murder is about a year old, and
the trail is consequently muddled.

The murder took place on a remote New Zealand sheep
station. Alleyn arrives there as the book opens, and spends the first
half of the book listening to the four primary suspects as each one tells
his or her story in detail while the others heckle. We gain a lot of
information about what happened once upon a time, but there’s next to no
action in the present. Part of the fun of a mystery novel is following
the sleuth around as he chases down blind alleys, and Alleyn remains
firmly planted in a chair for far too long.

Bottom line: Marsh gets points for invention, but loses them again for
tedium.

This is the second book in Brust’s “Vlad Taltos” series. Having
introduced the major characters (Vlad; his wife Cawti; his lieutenant,
Kragar; Dragonlords Morrolan e’Drien and Aliera e’Kieron; and Sethra
Lavode) in the previous book, Brust now proceeds to tell us how Vlad
first came to be a mob boss for House Jhereg, and about some of his early
challenges.

As the book opens, Vlad is informed that the Jhereg boss from the
neighboring territory has just opened a gambling den in Vlad’s area.
Vlad brings his crew to shut it down, and so begins a war that will
quite literally rock the Empire. Vlad even gets killed at one point–
by a pair of elite assassins known as the “Sword and Dagger of the
Jhereg”, it’s quite an honor really–and after Sethra Lavode and Aliera
revivify him he’s inclined take it as such. Especially since the Dagger
of the Jhereg is a pretty little Easterner named Cawti.

Aliera and company are more interested in Cawti’s partner Norathar–and
it begins to seem that there’s more going on in Vlad’s little war than
internal Jhereg politics.

A word about the names of these books. The Dragaeran Empire is made up
of two kinds of people: humans like Vlad, and Dragaerans, like Morrolan
and company. But there are in fact seventeen distinct Dragaeran
races–the Seventeen Houses of the Empire. Each house has its own
distinct characteristics and traits, and is named after an animal that
typifies those traits. Sixteen of the houses are considered “noble”; the
seventeenth, the House of the Teckla, is the largest and constitutes the
peasantry. There is little crossbreeding between the houses; half-breeds,
having no proper house of their own, are ostracized. The few such that
there are can join the Teckla, swearing allegiance to some noble, or they
can buy their way into the Jhereg. Even Easterners can buy their way
into the Jhereg, which is how Vlad’s father got in. That is, in fact,
how House Jhereg got started–as an accumulation of outcasts from all of
the other houses.

For what it’s worth, a jhereg is a winged lizard, rather like a small
dragon. Jheregs are about the house of hawks or falcons, and like them
are scavengers.

Now, the yendi is a kind of snake, and members of House Yendi are known
for cold, calculating, and devious. It is axiomatic that a Yendi’s
schemes are too subtle for anyone but a Yendi to comprehend. And if I
didn’t mention a single Yendi in the above plot summary, it just goes to
show that the book is aptly titled.