I’ve got an extremely busy week just ahead, so posting might be sporadic. Or it might not; we’ll see. Everything should be back to normal by the end of the month.
Author Archives: wjduquette
Through Darkest Zymurgia!
I’ve just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Through Darkest Zymurgia!
If you’ve come in late, it’s a ripping yarn of adventure, exploration, and potable beverages. Try it, you’ll like it!
This man can write
I love James Lilek’s daily page, The Bleat; it makes me laugh out loud more often than anything else I see on the ‘net. It’s all because of passages like this one:
One of the how-to books my wife bought suggested a boombox in the maternity room, with quiet music that helped you “center.” Something with flutes or aeolian harps or zithers played with feather dusters. I brought some Beethoven. Bring that kid out to the strains of the fifth! I also brought some nebulous new-age stuff I’d purchased in the 80s. It all sounded like music suitable for glacier races. It wasn’t any help at all – it just trickled out from the speakers, like the faraway sighs of a lovely zeppelin slowly deflating. At sunset. Near a lake. With swans.
Brotherhood of the Wolf, by David Farland
This is the sequel to The Runelords, which I’ve just read for
the second time. It continues the tale of King Gaborn’s dual fight
against Raj Ahten on the one hand, and the reavers on the other, though
the reavers play a much larger roll. I’ve not much else to say about it,
except that I enjoyed it more than I did the first time; perhaps I was in
a bad mood. It’s a middle book in an epic fantasy series, and it does an
adequate job of continuing the story. I’ll be getting around to the third book,
Wizardborn, in the next week or so.
One-Eyed Cat, by Paula Fox
I picked up my daughter at the library after work tonight. She is
spending one day a week there during the summer months helping out
with shelving books, story hour and the young adult book group the
librarian is trying to garner interest in. I got chatting with the
librarian, a very nice woman with virtually no knowledge of the kids
market in books or even what young folks like to read. Of course,
being the type that will recommend books to anyone who even remotely
looks interested, I left her with a list of decent fiction that kids
ages 10-14 might enjoy reading. No more “MaryKate and Ashley go to
Hawaii” for this crowd!
One of the books I recommended is Fox’s “One-Eyed Cat.” It’s a
Newberry Honor book, one of the few lit awards that actually seems to
award good writing and not good publishing. The story is fairly
simple. A young boy has a father who’s a preacher and a mother crippled with
rheumatoid arthritis. His dashing Uncle comes to visit for his
birthday and brings him a hunting rifle which his father promptly
confiscates and banishes to the attic. Curiosity takes over and the
boy sneaks up to the attic at night, gets the gun and goes out to do a
little target practice. He’s startled by a noise, reacts and shoots
something. Later, he sees a cat with its eye shot out wandering the
neighborhood and realizes he was the one that shot it.
That is a very bald precis of the plot. The father is well portrayed
as a heartbroken man with a sick wife struggling to care for her and
his son. The mother is realistically depicted without being
melodramatic about her pain or illness. And the young boy finds a
friend in an old man down the road who takes in the cat and nurses it
back to health. When I read the back cover, I worried that here was
yet another anti-hunting novel along the lines of Bambi–something
not well thought of in my family of avid hunters–but really it
turns into more a tale of responsibility and consequences, guilt and
repentance than anything else. And it reads really well. Definitely a
must read for my daughter.
Napoleon’s Bloody Hands
I’ve not been a fan of the Emperor Napoleon since I began reading Patrick O’Brian and found out what he’d put Europe through. Arecent biography agrees, according to the always interesting Cronaca; be sure to click on through for Victor Davis Hanson’s review.
The Pernicious Effect of Corned Beef Hash
The other night we were having dinner, and James, our going-on-four-year-old, had been given a corn muffin and a dollop of corned beef hash. A small dollop, as he was unlikely to willing to eat much of it, and while we wanted him to taste it, we didn’t want to waste it either.
So James gobbled up the corn muffin, and asked for another. We told him he needed to have some hash first. We repeated this several times, as required, and went on with dinner, until a couple of minutes later when we realized that James was acting strangely. (He still hadn’t touched his hash.)
He had both arms raised with his hands in front of him at about shoulder level, and he was shaking his arms so that his hands flopped about. I looked at him, and he said, “I can’t control my hands, Daddy.”
“You can’t control your hands?”
“No. Hash make it I can’t control my hands.” And he kept shaking them.
“Hash makes it so you can’t control your hands.”
“Uh-huh. Hash make it I can’t control my hands.” Then he stopped shaking them, just held them still in the air. “But with corn muffin, I can control my hands. See?” And he smiled at us as broadly as he could. Then he stopped smiling and started shaking his hands again. “But hash make it I can’t control my hands.”
I had to agree that he couldn’t eat anything with his hands shaking like that, but in the end it availed him naught. Still, Jane and I had to agree that it was a valiant effort.
I still have no idea where these things come from.
The Runelords, by David Farland
This is the first book in a series, and I’m following the usual
pattern–each time a new volume comes out, I end up re-reading the whole
set. By the time I read the Nth book, I’ve read the 1st book N times.
This was the third time for this particular book, and rather surprisingly
I was pleasantly surprised. I liked it the first time I read it; was
rather unimpressed the second time; and this time I rather liked it
again. I think it’s partially because the second time I was rushing
through it; this time I took it easy.
The world of The Runelords is based on elemental magic. The
world is out of balance; Fire is becoming too powerful, and as a result
the insectoid “reavers” are pouring out of the earth and slaying humans
right and left. Prince Gaborn val Orden is chosen by the Earth to be the
“Earth King”; it’s his job to try to preserve a remnant of mankind from
the reavers. His success is by no means guaranteed (except by narrative
causality…); in similar circumstances, older races have perished.
There’s a hitch, of course. Raj Ahten, a king from the lands to the
south, is trying to conquer the entire continent. His stated goal is to
unite the continent under his rule, to better handle the threat from the
reavers. But in fact, he’s fallen in love with the destruction and
humilation he’s causing everywhere he goes; the reavers are secondary.
Gaborn must somehow save himself and those he loves from Raj Ahten, while
not neglecting the reavers.
That’s the overall conflict, but it’s obscured by the most unusual
characteristic of the world Farland has created. Given a magical
branding iron called a forcible and someone who knows how to use it, one
can “take an endowment” from another person. That is, one can borrow the
other person’s wit, or their brawn, or their hearing, or any of a dozen
other qualities. It’s a permanent loan, lasting until the death of
either party. And, naturally, the person who gave the endowment no longer
has the use of it. Those who give brawn are to weak to move; those who
give metabolism sleep as if drugged; those who give wit become stupid;
those who give glamour become ugly.
Farland’s taken this simple idea, and worked out all the logical
consequences. The noble class–the Runelords–take endowments as a
matter of course. It’s not uncommon for a King to be more powerful
than any of his knights, simply because he’s taken more endowments. But
every king has counsellors, knights, soldiers, scouts, and so forth who
have taken endowments as well. Thus, the central keep in any castle
is the Dedicates’ Keep, where those who have given endowments live and
are cared for. Kill a King’s dedicates, and you’ve hamstrung him.
On first reading, this was the bit that I focussed on. It wasn’t until
this time around that I realized that although endowments are a central
fact in this world, they aren’t the point of the story.
This isn’t a truly classic high fantasy series, but it’s good fun. I’m
looking forward to the next book.
Father’s Day
My going-on-four-year-old made me a card at preschool. The teacher asked him some fill-in-the-blank questions, and wrote down his answers, which I present herewith. The questions are in italics, and his answers in normal type.
My Daddy’s name is Daddy.
He is I don’t know years old.
He has green eyes and black hair. [Brown hair, really. Mostly brown, these days.–ed.]
He likes to eat dinner, breakfast. That’s what he likes.
He likes to watch actually, commercials on TV. [I do? –ed.]
When he goes to work, he works at work.
I love my Daddy because I do.
It’s good to be Dad.
Who Knew?
Wow! Michael Blowhard says that I’m one of the most civilized culturebloggers. Who knew?
The View from the Foothills 