Enemy of Entropy

Review: Prom Nights From Hell

17 February 2008, 8:21 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Reading.

So, um, I tried to read this. I really did. I don’t know if it’s “para­nor­mal romance over­load” or the fact that I’d just fin­ished read­ing mate­r­ial from two incred­i­bly good writ­ers (Sarah Mon­ette and Eliz­a­beth Bear), but I had no patience for the fluff. Over­all, I gave the book a 2⁄10.

Cover of Prom Dates From Hell
i did get through “The Exterminator’s Daugh­ter” Meg Cabot. I don’t intend to read any­thing else by her. Yes, it was bet­ter than oral surgery, but I wish I’d spent the time clean­ing the sink or some­thing. To her credit, I did have a “laugh out loud” moment early on, when she used the phrase “tramp stamp.” I hadn’t heard that before, and I love it (although “arse antlers” is prob­a­bly still my favorite).
Read on…

Poetry: Michael Blumenthal

29 January 2008, 11:30 pm. 5 Comments. Filed under Poetry, Reading, Relationships.

For my Sam

A Mar­riage
You are hold­ing up a ceil­ing
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, ter­ri­bly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceil­ing
will soon collapse.

But then,
unex­pect­edly,
some­thing won­der­ful hap­pens:
Some­one,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arm up
to the ceil­ing beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flow­ing back
to your fin­gers and arms.
And when your partner’s arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
with­out the house falling.

From Against Romance: Poems by Michael Blu­men­thal, Pen­guin Books, 1988

Romance and Roleplaying

12 January 2008, 11:53 pm. 5 Comments. Filed under Family, Fun, Geekery, RPGs, Relationships.

Sam has talked about this sub­ject in sev­eral of his pod­casts, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to address it. I may fail mis­er­ably, but I’ll try.

Sam and I had one of our twice-​​weekly “date nights” tonight. That means that from about 7pm ’til we go to bed, we do noth­ing but have fun with each other. The girl amuses her­self oth­er­wise, or goes out, and we do what­ever we like. Usu­ally, that means we spend some time gam­ing.
Read on…

More Fun Reading from Carrie Vaughn

25 November 2007, 11:21 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Reading.

I really needed another fic­tion author to fol­low, right? But I’ve seen this series of books about a were­wolf named Kitty, and I finally got a chance to read them. I fin­ished the first, Kitty and the Mid­night Hour, today and jumped right into Kitty Goes to Wash­ing­ton. I have Kitty Takes a Hol­i­day all lined up and ready to go, but I’m already wish­ing that I had the next vol­ume, Kitty and the Sil­ver Bul­let. And that, my dears, is a sign of a fine author spin­ning a very good yarn, con­sid­er­ing all the other books wait­ing and ready on my shelf.

The library has the books labeled as hor­ror, but I’d put them in the para­nor­mal romance/​dark fan­tasy cat­e­gory. Hap­pily, the “romance” part isn’t the most sig­nif­i­cant one, and doesn’t get in the way of good plot. There was a moment today when I won­dered if ">Vaughn and Kim Har­ri­son had shared a brain to a small extent, but they’ve dealt with a super­fi­cially sim­i­lar issue in very dif­fer­ent ways.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just finally got done with my school assign­ments for the week, and must get up when Sam does in the morn­ing, I’d prob­a­bly be sit­ting up reading!

Now I really need to find a source for these short sto­ries, though. Any of you have the rel­e­vant mag­a­zine issues?

Review: A Lick of Frost, Laurell K. Hamilton

4 November 2007, 11:37 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Reading, Sex.

I hon­estly didn’t think Lau­rell K. Hamil­ton had it in her, but A Lick of Frost moved me to tears in spots. She man­aged real romance. I don’t even like read­ing romances, and I really hate cry­ing, but I couldn’t help it. I even found a quote to keep.

A Lick of FrostI don’t want to give out any spoil­ers, espe­cially since it’s quite new, but this novel could rea­son­ably be seen as the end to the Merry Gen­try series. I believe Hamil­ton will write at least one more book, to tie up some details and bring the series to seven vol­umes. All of the vol­umes have been fairly slen­der, and Hamil­ton is a guar­an­teed cash cow, so who knows how many books there will actu­ally be? I could, how­ever, stop read­ing now.

This series is not one to start if, like me, you don’t like wait­ing for another book in order to know “what hap­pens next.” Gen­er­ally, I try to wait until a series is fin­ished before I begin to read it, in case it isn’t ever fin­ished. I detest cliffhang­ers, most espe­cially, and Hamil­ton has indulged in several.

Unlike most, the Merry Gen­try series is good enough that I keep read­ing despite my per­sonal pref­er­ence. I’ve never lost track of any impor­tant details between books, which is also strik­ing. I’d actu­ally like to have copies of this series to keep, as I might re-​​read them. In con­trast, I stopped buy­ing the Anita Blake books years ago, although I would con­sider pick­ing up used paper­backs to accom­pany those I already own just because Katie has expressed inter­est in them.

Sam is totally dis­in­ter­ested in just about any­thing hav­ing to do with vam­pires, were­wolves, or any­thing else that is too sim­i­lar to World of Dark­ness. I think it’s a reac­tion to hav­ing been so immersed in research and devel­op­ment when he worked for White Wolf, but I’ll leave him to explain it if we wishes. He does tend to scoff at any­thing too far off the “canon,” as it were.

Since he was involved in Changeling (his favorite), I would have thought the same applied to urban fan­tasy con­cern­ing faery. That’s true, usu­ally, but he’s been drawn into the Merry Gen­try books once or twice, and that’s say­ing some­thing (if only for the qual­ity of some sex scenes).

I know that one rea­son the Blake series has got­ten so tire­some is that sex has taken them over, but Hamilton’s attempts to make the sex part of the plot fall flat. An even big­ger one is Anita’s angst over the species and num­bers of her loves and sex part­ners. While she occa­sion­ally men­tions her reli­gious upbring­ing as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, as an ani­ma­tor (one who raises zom­bies) she left the safety of the Catholic church behind years ago. One could argue that its the­ol­ogy left real­ity behind, but in any case, her life is per­me­ated by and depends on magic that is bound up in reli­gion, but her overt reli­gious beliefs no longer match her real­ity or how she’s truly living.

I don’t even like to include the books in that short list of those that truly deal with polyamory, due to the fact that Anita has been so guilt-​​ridden and unhappy (until the last book or two), while con­tin­u­ing to fol­low her crotch (okay, the magic, if you believe Hamil­ton, but seriously…).

Mered­ith Gen­try never has that prob­lem. It is unfor­tu­nate that Hamil­ton has to reach into an imag­i­nary cul­ture to depict peo­ple who are com­fort­able with their sex­u­al­ity, includ­ing mul­ti­ple sex­ual part­ners, but at least she has done so. There is still an annoy­ing “I must pick only one!” theme, but it is made clear that Merry is being forced into such a choice by rel­a­tively recent Sidhe cus­tom — not her heart or her con­science. She repeat­edly stresses, in her inter­ac­tions with humans, that she has absolutely no shame about her lifestyle, and that the Sidhe have very dif­fer­ent ideas about such things than humans do.

I espe­cially appre­ci­ate the repeated theme of accept­ing diver­sity and appre­ci­at­ing beauty in every­one. “Every­one” never goes to far as to includ­ing, for instance, fat peo­ple, but there don’t seem to be any of those in fairy. Her lovers are all ter­ri­bly beau­ti­ful, even the half-​​Goblin and half-​​Sluagh, but she expressly does not reject those who are scarred or “dif­fer­ent” because of their her­itage or expe­ri­ences. There is over­much atten­tion to descrip­tion of appear­ances for my tastes, espe­cially details of every character’s cloth­ing, but that seems to be all too com­mon in any­thing with any focus on rela­tion­ships these days (or I’m just notic­ing it more — was it always there?)

While there’s still a lot of sex, the rea­sons for the abun­dance of sex and vari­ety of part­ners has been inte­grated into the Gen­try plot from square one. Despite that, it doesn’t feel like the sex scenes take over the books. Any­one with the least bit of prud­ery should still stay away from the series com­pletely, of course, but that’s made clear on the cov­ers and in the excerpts on the book flaps. Nobody who has ever picked up a Lau­rell K. Hamil­ton book in the last five years, at least, has any excuse for claim­ing naÏveté if he finds the con­tent too racy!

 

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