My (brief) review of Robin Hobb’s Golden Fool has garnered some comments from Michael Cleverly, including some comparisons with other books. As it has scrolled off the main page, I’m linking to it here, just in case anyone else would like to participate in the discussion.
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Witch World, by Andre Norton
Recently my brother challenged me to give Andre Norton another try, as a lot of her stuff is back in print. And I have, and I’ve been reasonably surprised–there’s more to her work than I had remembered. More embarassingly, it’s become clear that the reason I didn’t like some of her books on first attempt is that I was too young (and too impatient) to appreciate them. Now, the series for which Norton is best known is her “Witch World” series; my siblings had a number of books from the series, including the present title, and though I had tried to read it several times I never got very far. The blurb was interesting–a man from our world, a fugitive, is transported to a strange land in another universe, a land of magic and witches. But somehow the book itself never grabbed me.
Whilst visiting Portland last fall, with all of the riches of Powells Books spread before me, I decided it was time to give Witch World and its sequels another try.
Simon Tregarth, soldier of fortune, is being hunted by some men who have betrayed him. Expecting to be taken at any time, he stops for one last fine meal–and is contacted by a man who offers him a chance to escape, forever. If he will but sit on an ancient stone, the Siege Perilous, it will transport him to another world…and not to any world, but to the world where he will best fit in. He arrives in a desolate location in time to save a young women from the fangs of the Hounds of Alizon. She, it develops, is one of the nameless witches of the land of Estcarp. He adopts her land as his own, and devotes his skill at warcraft to defending Estcarp from its many enemies.
There’s more here than I remembered, and less than I had hoped. Norton is a consummate storyteller, and writes with a spare and lean voice in which every word tells. It’s easy to see why I didn’t like the book as a kid; I was a voracious reader, but I see now that I wasn’t a good reader. I surfed along the top of the paragraphs, catching the gist of the story and leaving behind everything that didn’t advance the plot–or that didn’t fit my preconceptions of what the book was supposed to be about. You can’t read Norton like that; she doesn’t tell you twice, and she doesn’t rub your nose in what’s going on. You must read her prose carefully, or you’ll miss things.
That said, I found the book to be rather pedestrian–if it’s better in the small details than I remembered, it’s by no means her best. Still, I liked it well enough to return to Powells and pick up three more from the series. More on those another time.
Why Photography: Nuts…you can’t have just one.
My friend the Test Lead is nuts. I call him the Test Lead because he’s the lead (and, in fact, only) tester for the small software project for which I’m the lead (and, in fact, only) programmer. We’ve been having lunch together about once a week for the last several months.
And he’s utterly nuts.
I don’t mean this in a bad way, mind you–virtually every interesting thing ever done in this wide world was done by someone who was utterly nuts. If they weren’t nuts, they wouldn’t have spent enough time at it to do anything interesting. Consider Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux–this is a guy who likes to spend his free time hacking OS kernels. Clearly he’s nuts. He’s also managed to parlay his interest in hacking OS kernels into international fame and a comfortable living besides, which is a neat trick if you can do it.
So the Test Lead’s nuts. And what he’s nuts about (wait for it….) is photography. Serious photography. We’re not talking 35mm photography with a fancy SLR camera–or not only that. We’re talking about large and medium-format photography with old-fashioned “view” cameras. The kind of cameras with the accordion bellows and the black cloth draped over the back and the guy who says “Watch the Little Birdy” and squeezes the little rubber bulb that controls the shutter release.
Although, I’ve never heard the Test Lead say “Watch the Little Birdy.”
He mostly likes to take pictures at night…pictures with very long exposure times. Exposure times measured not in fractions of seconds or seconds, but minutes. Possibly even hours. Exposure times so long that it’s easy to get bored while you’re waiting for the end of the exposure.
Now, normal film isn’t really made for exposures that take that long, or that involve so little light. The normal methods for determining how long the shutter should be open break down. Under more normal conditions, the relevant curves are all nicely linear, but under the Test Lead’s chosen conditions they behave more extravagantly. Timing your exposure is thus something of a black art…and when exposures take that long, bungling one is more than usually painful.
So when he’s not spending his time freezing his tail off shooting pictures after midnight, he’s calibrating his film and his development process so that he can reliably predict, with the help of some computations, just what his exposure time should be for any given set of conditions. He’s trying to remove every bit of variability from the process of making a correctly exposed and developed negative, so that he can spend his shooting time thinking about composition and not whether he should leave the shutter open another five minutes or so.
As I say, he’s nuts. Diligent, persevering, inventive, passionate about his subject, and nuts. It’s made for quite a few fascinating lunchtime discussions; I’ve learned quite a lot. Enough, at least, that when I got this new camera and saw the bits in the manual about shutter speeds and aperture sizes, I had some small concept of what it was all about. I also knew that the Test Lead would be glad to coach me if I were to decide that I wanted to more than just point-and-shoot (as indeed he has been, and I’m grateful).
In short, having been seduced by the Power of the Zoom, I’ve got help in learning how to make the best use of it. And that’s the second piece of the puzzle.
Ordermaster, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
This, yet another installment in the ever-expanding saga of Recluce, is the immediate sequel to Wellspring of Chaos, which I reviewed last year.
It’s a typical entry in the series: order wizard discovers his powers as he fights (nearly single-handedly) an increasingly nasty series of battles with chaos wizards, vanquishing all of them in his own peculiar style. It is, alas, a well-worn formula. The book (with its predecessor) stands out from the rest of the series in two ways: it’s set in a part of the world we’ve not seen before, and our hero’s order magic is rather different than that of any of Modesitt’s previous heroes.
In short–it’s an enjoyable enough tale if you’ve enjoyed the rest of the series, but there are few surprises here.
Why Photography: The Power of the Zoom
So why this sudden burst of enthusiasm for things photographic? It’s a complicated question, but as to what triggered it the answer is clear: I was seduced by the Power of the Dark Side of the Zoom.
My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica FD5. It was a point-and-shoot camera only, and recorded 640×480 pictures on floppy disks. Back in 1997 that was way cool. It was loads of fun, and I took lots of pictures with it. Sure, I had to carry floppies with me, but that was no different than carrying film, and I usually got 30 shots on a floppy–which I could then reuse.
But it had no zoom. And there were lots of shots I just couldn’t get because I couldn’t get close and I had no zoom.
I eventually replaced it with a later model Sony Mavica…the FD97, if I recall correctly, but it might have been the FD95. It took higher resolution pictures, and had a Great Big 10x optical zoom! I loved it, and took lots of pictures. But…those high resolution pictures ate up disks like nobody’s business. And though I was enthusiastic about the pictures I was getting, eventually somebody pointed out to me the artifacts that resulted from compressing Great Big JPEG images to fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Ugh. And the camera was Big And Heavy and a pain to carry around. I begin to think about getting something smaller.
Eventually I ended up with a Canon Powershot S-30: a compact (but not tiny) 3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera with a 3x optical zoom and manual controls if I cared how to use them…which I thought that perhaps I might, though I wasn’t very sure about that. The camera was just small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, and outdoors it took reasonably nice pictures. But that 3x zoom was rather a comedown. The manual controls were frustrating to use (not that I understood how to use them). Worst of all, using the flash almost always resulted in an extremely washed out subject, unless you were at least six to ten feet away…in which case you had to use the zoom to capture your subject. I took a lot of pictures with it, but it wasn’t as much fun as it could be, and I felt rather constrained. Eventually I stopped taking pictures for fun; I’d pull it out for special occasions, but otherwise Jane used it a lot more than I did.
And that’s where things stood for quite a long while.
And then, last Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law brought his Lumix FZ5: a small black camera with a Great Big Leica Lens with a 12x optical zoom! And it was light, remarkably light for its size. And it took great pictures, evidently; my brother, at one time a serious 35mm photographer back when manual focus and exposure were the norm, said he’d heard a lot of good things about it. Hmm. And it wasn’t too expensive; cheaper than my last two cameras. I thought about that. And then I started seeing positive mentions of the FZ5 all over the place, notably at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. Intrigued, I shuffled off to find an in-depth review at DPReview.com. They loved it, too.
I was hooked. It took a couple of months before I succumbed to the Power of the Zoom and bought one, but I was hooked.
First Lines
Julie D. looked up the first lines of some of her favorite books, and wrote down the ones that grabbed her. Judging by the many books on the list that I’ve read and enjoyed, I might have to go find some of the ones on the list I’ve never heard of.
Just a little test…
…to see if my off-line blogging app is can talk to my new blog.
I Guess This Will Do
…for now. I may have to spend some more time on the template later on.
Oh, And About The Site Design…
…I’ll no doubt be changing it repeatedly over the next couple of days. In the meantime, try not to let it get you down.
Welcome
My web hosting service provides automatic installation of WordPress; and they’ve just added automatic upgrading as well, when new versions of WordPress come out. I’m sick to death of MovableType’s susceptibility to spam of various kinds, so I’m going to give WordPress a try.
The View from the Foothills 