featherxquill (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
featherxquill) wrote2008-01-20 02:56 pm
featherxquill) wrote2008-01-20 02:56 pm
Checking In!
I fail so hard at updating my LJ. But here is one now!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas/New Year/everything else, and that you are now enjoying the appearance of Easter Eggs in stores way before they need to be there (mmmm, Cadbury Creme Eggs, although I have to say that my supermarket having eggs now makes Easter less special because I will already have eaten 3645353 of them by the time the day rolls around).
Things that have been happening in the land of Angie:
i. Rita and Kingsley! They have finally got their act together and are enjoying each other's company, which of course makes me all sorts of happy, but at the same time is kind of bittersweet because there's Ollivander too, and Rita seems to have decided to finally grow up and not keep them both.
ii.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
road_ahead. I'm enjoying playing there - my muggleborn!Ravenclaw Rita is most certainly talking to me now, and also to others. She's writing an article about the war and planning a paper about the history of dark magic and having tea and attending Quidditch games with Sybill Trelawney (and Pomona Sprout, in the latter thread) and generally recovering her equilibrium and having a good time. The game is fantastic, but we need more of the older generation! If anyone is interested in playing an older generation character (game would dearly love a Kingsley Shacklebolt and a Gawain Robards, because they'd have a lot to do in the plot), go take a look. We especially need older generation men, because there are a number of women running around but no men, and it is a bit odd. Right now it feels like more of a younger generation game, but I know there are people out there who enjoy the older characters, and the more of them there are the more opportunities we'd all have to play :). Go look!
iii.quills_pbs I don't know how long this new fad of 'making icons of completely random people' will last, but that is my RP PB icon comm! There are currently only a few sets - Tarja Turunen, Mika, Peter O'Brien, Barbara Streisand - but I find random people intriguing for icons fairly often, so there will be more.
iv. I have been reading a lot since Christmas, when I went out and spent my gift-money on a rather thick pile of books. I think I would like to ramble about them:
Sarah Rayne - I bought three of her books on Ebay shortly before Christmas, and ate them all up. They are classic style mysteries, with a lack of police but full of ordinary people to whom disturbing things happen. Most of them move between times, too, and the stories are wrapped up in history. Rayne writes the most extraordinary characters. These are not 'whodunnit' mysteries, but rather the mystery is created by gaps and absences in the story that gradually become the full picture. This means that usually, we get to see part of the story focalised through the character doing the bad things, and they are usually quite insane, a creeping menace through the pages that the reader knows about but the rest of the characters don't.
The one thing I will say about Rayne that I dislike is a tendency she has to use 'female' as a synonym for 'woman'. I could get past it because the stories were so wonderful, but I am quite honestly surprised that her editor did not pick that up. Every time I went past one, it ripped me right out of the story. Female and Woman are not the same word, and I have no idea how anyone could really think they were.
Tess Gerritsen - I've read almost all of her books from 'The Surgeon' onwards, and I love her characters - the confident, brash detective Rizzoli and the cool medical examiner Maura Isles. I was slightly disappointed when I first started reading 'The Bone Garden', her latest, and Maura only appeared for about three lines at the beginning of the story -- enough time to tell the main character that the bones in her backyard were old, for a forensic anthropologist rather than a madical examiner. And then she was gone. But I got over my disappointment because the story was so fascinating - moving between 1800s Boston and present day, a story about a young woman trying to protect her dead sister's baby from people who seem out to get her, set against the backdrop of a medical school, with a killer on the loose, all of which the baby seems to be at the centre of. That's probably not a very good description of the story, but that's probably because it's so layered and complicated. Gerritsen uses her own medical training to inform her stories, and I found the descriptions of 19th century autopsy and such completely fascinating, and the inclusion about the cause of childbed fever rather sad (so many new mothers died because doctor's never thought to wash their hands after touching corpses and other sick people).
Ian Irvine - He is my favourite fantasy writer ever, and I think I did really well to wait until after Christmas to read his new book. I wasn't disappointed. Surprised, in some parts, and saddened by the direction a few things went, but not disappointed. His worlds are fascinating, his characters are brilliant, and now that I'm into the third series in his 'Three Worlds' universe, there is the sqeeing when old, beloved characters pop up. In this one, there is an abundance of that. The ending was strange, but very Darwinian, which is the basis of the story to begin with, so I will be interested to see how it plays out in the final volume of the series. I love the Darwinian fantasy apsect, the three different human species and the creatures from the void between the worlds all fighting for their own existence.
John Connolly - I'm reading this one now, and I'm not to the end of it yet, but I love this writer and his characters so much. The antihero of his series, Charlie Parker, is one of the most awesome characters I've ever come across in crime fiction, and his 'sidekicks', Angel and Louis, are even more awesome than he is. They are a gay couple; Angel is an semi-retired burglar - a scrawny little white man in mismatched clothes who spills crumbs all over himself at every opprtunity, and Louis is a tall, elegantly dressed black man - a not so semi-retired assassin. Parker, as a narrator, is a keen observer of people, and things beyond - he is haunted by the ghosts of his dead wife and child in a very corporeal way, whether those ghosts are of his own making or not. There is a strong sense of the dark underbelly of humanity in these stories, and things that aren't quite humanity, twists of horror and the supernatural. But there is also humour - Parker is wry and sarcastic and his conversations with people, especially Angel and Louis, are hilarious. I think it's the blend of darkness and humour that I love most about this series.
v. I am also working on fic, since I realised what a poor effort I made last year in that department (fic year-end post thingy to be made separately, although there is little point in doing it at all). So hopefully I will have some fic up soon!
Peace out!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas/New Year/everything else, and that you are now enjoying the appearance of Easter Eggs in stores way before they need to be there (mmmm, Cadbury Creme Eggs, although I have to say that my supermarket having eggs now makes Easter less special because I will already have eaten 3645353 of them by the time the day rolls around).
Things that have been happening in the land of Angie:
i. Rita and Kingsley! They have finally got their act together and are enjoying each other's company, which of course makes me all sorts of happy, but at the same time is kind of bittersweet because there's Ollivander too, and Rita seems to have decided to finally grow up and not keep them both.
ii.
road_ahead. I'm enjoying playing there - my muggleborn!Ravenclaw Rita is most certainly talking to me now, and also to others. She's writing an article about the war and planning a paper about the history of dark magic and having tea and attending Quidditch games with Sybill Trelawney (and Pomona Sprout, in the latter thread) and generally recovering her equilibrium and having a good time. The game is fantastic, but we need more of the older generation! If anyone is interested in playing an older generation character (game would dearly love a Kingsley Shacklebolt and a Gawain Robards, because they'd have a lot to do in the plot), go take a look. We especially need older generation men, because there are a number of women running around but no men, and it is a bit odd. Right now it feels like more of a younger generation game, but I know there are people out there who enjoy the older characters, and the more of them there are the more opportunities we'd all have to play :). Go look!iii.
quills_pbs I don't know how long this new fad of 'making icons of completely random people' will last, but that is my RP PB icon comm! There are currently only a few sets - Tarja Turunen, Mika, Peter O'Brien, Barbara Streisand - but I find random people intriguing for icons fairly often, so there will be more. iv. I have been reading a lot since Christmas, when I went out and spent my gift-money on a rather thick pile of books. I think I would like to ramble about them:
Sarah Rayne - I bought three of her books on Ebay shortly before Christmas, and ate them all up. They are classic style mysteries, with a lack of police but full of ordinary people to whom disturbing things happen. Most of them move between times, too, and the stories are wrapped up in history. Rayne writes the most extraordinary characters. These are not 'whodunnit' mysteries, but rather the mystery is created by gaps and absences in the story that gradually become the full picture. This means that usually, we get to see part of the story focalised through the character doing the bad things, and they are usually quite insane, a creeping menace through the pages that the reader knows about but the rest of the characters don't.
The one thing I will say about Rayne that I dislike is a tendency she has to use 'female' as a synonym for 'woman'. I could get past it because the stories were so wonderful, but I am quite honestly surprised that her editor did not pick that up. Every time I went past one, it ripped me right out of the story. Female and Woman are not the same word, and I have no idea how anyone could really think they were.
Tess Gerritsen - I've read almost all of her books from 'The Surgeon' onwards, and I love her characters - the confident, brash detective Rizzoli and the cool medical examiner Maura Isles. I was slightly disappointed when I first started reading 'The Bone Garden', her latest, and Maura only appeared for about three lines at the beginning of the story -- enough time to tell the main character that the bones in her backyard were old, for a forensic anthropologist rather than a madical examiner. And then she was gone. But I got over my disappointment because the story was so fascinating - moving between 1800s Boston and present day, a story about a young woman trying to protect her dead sister's baby from people who seem out to get her, set against the backdrop of a medical school, with a killer on the loose, all of which the baby seems to be at the centre of. That's probably not a very good description of the story, but that's probably because it's so layered and complicated. Gerritsen uses her own medical training to inform her stories, and I found the descriptions of 19th century autopsy and such completely fascinating, and the inclusion about the cause of childbed fever rather sad (so many new mothers died because doctor's never thought to wash their hands after touching corpses and other sick people).
Ian Irvine - He is my favourite fantasy writer ever, and I think I did really well to wait until after Christmas to read his new book. I wasn't disappointed. Surprised, in some parts, and saddened by the direction a few things went, but not disappointed. His worlds are fascinating, his characters are brilliant, and now that I'm into the third series in his 'Three Worlds' universe, there is the sqeeing when old, beloved characters pop up. In this one, there is an abundance of that. The ending was strange, but very Darwinian, which is the basis of the story to begin with, so I will be interested to see how it plays out in the final volume of the series. I love the Darwinian fantasy apsect, the three different human species and the creatures from the void between the worlds all fighting for their own existence.
John Connolly - I'm reading this one now, and I'm not to the end of it yet, but I love this writer and his characters so much. The antihero of his series, Charlie Parker, is one of the most awesome characters I've ever come across in crime fiction, and his 'sidekicks', Angel and Louis, are even more awesome than he is. They are a gay couple; Angel is an semi-retired burglar - a scrawny little white man in mismatched clothes who spills crumbs all over himself at every opprtunity, and Louis is a tall, elegantly dressed black man - a not so semi-retired assassin. Parker, as a narrator, is a keen observer of people, and things beyond - he is haunted by the ghosts of his dead wife and child in a very corporeal way, whether those ghosts are of his own making or not. There is a strong sense of the dark underbelly of humanity in these stories, and things that aren't quite humanity, twists of horror and the supernatural. But there is also humour - Parker is wry and sarcastic and his conversations with people, especially Angel and Louis, are hilarious. I think it's the blend of darkness and humour that I love most about this series.
v. I am also working on fic, since I realised what a poor effort I made last year in that department (fic year-end post thingy to be made separately, although there is little point in doing it at all). So hopefully I will have some fic up soon!
Peace out!