Thirty, or rather Twenty-Nine, Days

I didn't want to steal any thunder from yesterday's announcement, so you get your Fate-related goodies today.

This time, it's the soundtrack! Just the listing thereof; I haven't had a chance to try and set up an iTunes mix. Also, the usual caveat applies, that although none of the track titles have outright spoilers, they do provide hints of where the story is going; read at your own risk.

But wait! There's more!

Backing up for a moment to Midnight Never Come instead, you can now buy a print of Avery Liell-Kok's portrait of Invidiana (as seen to the right, there) from her shop on Etsy. There's lots of other great art there, too, including some painted parasols (which might appeal to a few of you), so I encourage you to take a look through it all, and see if anything catches your fancy.

I'll be out of town when the next spot in the countdown rolls around (which will feature the last bit of the excerpt), so it may be a bit delayed -- not sure what my internet access situation will be. I'll try to get it up at something like the right time, though. In the meanwhile, enjoy!

The DWJ Project: Mixed Magics

Like Sophie, I am remorseless, but my remorselessness lacks method: I failed to actually determine whether there was a particular subset of the short story collections I could obtain so as to cover all the short stories, with a minimum of duplication. As a result, I've already read two of the four stories here in Warlock at the Wheel, and technically I also read "Stealer of Souls" on its own, since I ordered the World Book Day edition of that before I realized it was in (and subsequently ordered) Mixed Magics.

Anyway. "Warlock at the Wheel" and "The Sage of Theare" I've reported on. As for the other two stories:

"Stealer of Souls" pleased me all out of proportion by answering the morbid question that's been lurking in the back of my head for years: what happened to Gabriel de Witt? If he still had eight lives left when Christopher was a boy, then it must have taken a heck of a lot of dying to get rid of him between then and Christopher's tenure as Chrestomanci. Turns out it's more or less like I thought, to whit, once you get old enough your lives just start slipping away via the same natural causes that everybody else suffers from. You don't get extended life or anything, just more chances to bounce back. And it makes sense to me that, being as old as he was, and passing in that fashion, he would abdicate and let Christopher take over. (So for a little while there, they had three nine-lifed enchanters around. Man, knowing that we'll never get any more of these books has apparently stuck my brain in fanfic gear, because now I want a story about the one time Gabriel, Christopher, and Cat had to team up to lay a smackdown on something.)

Oh, you want me to talk about the actual story? I liked it, though I kept being irresistibly distracted by the fact that the guy was calling himself Neville Spiderman. It was good to see some follow-through with Tonino, and the whole thing with the souls was suitably creepy. Not the most memorable, but not bad, either.

"Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" scratched the "so what happened with Oneir, anyway?" itch, though only tangentially. I liked it for its commentary on storytelling and creativity, and also for watching Christopher be a politely sarcastic bastard (which pretty much never gets old for me). I think I wanted it to be longer, so it would have more space to develop things, but what we got was pleasant enough.

Books read, July 2011

A lot of short things, a lot of re-reads; it was about all I had the brain-power for. But it adds up to a reasonably respectable-looking list.


The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Warlock at the Wheel, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew. Comic-book adaptation of Jane Austen's novel. Not entirely successful; it depends way too much on captions to explain stuff, and (naturally) the dialogue bubbles tend to the extremely wordy side. But I'll say this for it: I felt like it told the story about as completely as the film adaptation I've seen did (the one with Alan Rickman et al). That's pretty good, for something this length. (I haven't read the original novel -- I know; I know -- so that's the only metric I have.)

Charmed Life, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Conrad's Fate, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Tokyo Babylon, vol. 2, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 3, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 4, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 5, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 6, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 7, CLAMP. The Parallelsfic exchange reminded me that I'd started a re-read of this manga series a while ago, so I went back to it. Tokyo Babylon is urban fantasy in a way that not many urban fantastists try to achieve: it spiritualizes the way the city (in this case, Tokyo) chews people up and spits the bones back out again. It isn't happy, as that description might suggest; it's extra not happy once you get into the character-level metaplot. But the individual stories resolve . . . not hopefully, I guess, but well. The episodes basically all concern Subaru using magic to lay ghosts to rest, and his empathy and patience are kind of beautiful.

Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan. Discussed elsewhere.

Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett. So I started reading Sourcery twice and kept getting distracted from it; the beginning just didn't hook me. I'm sure it's a perfectly fine book and I'll go back to it someday, but for now, I said "screw it" and went ahead to the book with Granny Weatherwax and Shakespeare and other such fabulous things. This is probably my favorite Discworld so far, simply because I want to copy down into my quotes notebook entire paragraphs of Granny Weatherwax thinking about theatre and words and art and truth.

Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus. Another comic-book adaptation; this one was written before Sense and Sensibility, but I read it second. I found it the less successful of the two, but that may be because I know the source better. The intro talks about how Butler knew she'd be pilloried if she changed around Austen's story too much; me, I wish she had, to make it work better within the medium. Then she might have avoided the heavy reliance on captions and two-panel scenes and all the rest. (On the other hand, it could be a stellar case study in why a faithful adaptation is not necessarily a good one. If that sort of thing is useful to you.)

Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Ovid, David Wishart. I nearly bounced off this on the first page because the first-century Roman narrator called the woman who came to hire him a "tough cookie." But it ended up being a nicely intricate (and well-researched) historical mystery -- "mystery" of the political sort, rather than the evidence-and-prosecution sort; it revolves around Emperor Tiberius' refusal to let Ovid's ashes be returned to Rome -- so if you aren't turned off by mythological and historical allusions rubbing shoulders with hard-boiled detective tropes, I do recommend this one. And there's more in the series, too.

The Magicians of Caprona, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne. I don't think I've ever read any Verne before, though I know of his work pretty thoroughly. This made for a fascinating read, in that you're 40% of the way through the book before they even start her descent; everything prior to that is a) discovery of the notion and b) the logistics of getting from Germany to an obscure mountain in Iceland. And then at that, they don't even make it all the way to the center of the earth! But it reminded me a lot of the Golden Age SF that came later, with its scientist-heroes and unabashed willingness to spend pages on the discussion of scientific theories.

His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik. Re-read, because I needed to get my brain into nineteenth-century-dragon gear early in the month, and then didn't finish it until the month was nearly over. It remains a very fun read, especially if you're fond of Patrick O'Brian and his ilk; the blending of the Napoleonic Wars (and the British naval mindset therein) with dragons is just cool.


Traveling for a chunk of this month, so I expect the next list will be shorter.