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My, I am in a spammy mood! Perhaps I am wishing for human contact in a language I speak. I was so delighted when I went to a Japanese restaurant in Madrid with Sara and Lawrence, because I had been bummed about my Spanish being so horrible and I hoped for a chance to speak a foreign language I can actually kind of speak. Except the waitress we got was Korean and didn't even know the Japanese word for plum. (So comment away!)
Today I read C. J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel, an earlyish work, I suspect, in the drenchingly romatic style of Leigh Brackett or early George R R Martin, but in Cherryh's spare-formal prose style (she has others) and with her usual tendency to never let her heroes get a decent night's sleep or a bite of satisfying food.
Vanye is a... hmm, sort of a ronin, though the culture on his backward planet is not Japanese-ish.. he's an outlaw warrior who must swear himself to some lord for a year of duty. He's still unsworn when a deer he shoots staggers between the shimmering air of a magic cursed gate, and a tall pale woman rides out: Morgaine, last seen a hundred years ago and not aged a day, nor remembered fondly. The gates are the destructive remnants of an ancient dead civilization who used them to travel in space and time, she is on a mission to walk from world to world, closing each gate behind her lest they destroy the universe, until the end of time, or her death, or the last gate closes behind her.
She is cold and harsh and the last survivor of her mission party; he is brave, in the sense that he has fear and does the right thing anyway, and more gentle than is healthy; he can't understand exactly what she's doing and why, and he's going to follow her anyway, no matter what. I think Oyce would especially like this.
Victor Appleton: Tome Swift: The Astral Fortess. Pulp sf I enjoyed as a kid wand was delighted to find used. It's fun. You're all too old to read it. Here's a sample:
Benjamin Franklin Walking Eagle, Tom's co-pilot and best friend, was already checking the stratling information Aristotle had described by running it through the Exedra's main computer. Ben's face bore the same intense look of concentration that his Indian ancestors had worn while stalking buffalo so many generations before.
Lindsey Davis, Silver Pigs. Mystery set in ancient Rome, in the wisecracking private eye style, about an 'informer'-- aka private eye-- Marcus Didius Falco. This works surprisingly well. The voice is great, the details seem authentic, and the relationships between the characters are wonderful.
Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone. Murder mystery set in contemporary Venice, starring a police commissioner. Very well-written and atmospheric, but suffers from an overdose of noir corruption and angst, so that the protagonist does not solve the mystery himself, but has the solution handed to him by a powerful figure in the know, and then can't do anything with the information. Also, the mystery concerns Senegalese immigrants, and everyone keeps bemoaning that they know nothing about them, but no one ever so much as gets online to google some basic info on their country of origin.
Today I read C. J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel, an earlyish work, I suspect, in the drenchingly romatic style of Leigh Brackett or early George R R Martin, but in Cherryh's spare-formal prose style (she has others) and with her usual tendency to never let her heroes get a decent night's sleep or a bite of satisfying food.
Vanye is a... hmm, sort of a ronin, though the culture on his backward planet is not Japanese-ish.. he's an outlaw warrior who must swear himself to some lord for a year of duty. He's still unsworn when a deer he shoots staggers between the shimmering air of a magic cursed gate, and a tall pale woman rides out: Morgaine, last seen a hundred years ago and not aged a day, nor remembered fondly. The gates are the destructive remnants of an ancient dead civilization who used them to travel in space and time, she is on a mission to walk from world to world, closing each gate behind her lest they destroy the universe, until the end of time, or her death, or the last gate closes behind her.
She is cold and harsh and the last survivor of her mission party; he is brave, in the sense that he has fear and does the right thing anyway, and more gentle than is healthy; he can't understand exactly what she's doing and why, and he's going to follow her anyway, no matter what. I think Oyce would especially like this.
Victor Appleton: Tome Swift: The Astral Fortess. Pulp sf I enjoyed as a kid wand was delighted to find used. It's fun. You're all too old to read it. Here's a sample:
Benjamin Franklin Walking Eagle, Tom's co-pilot and best friend, was already checking the stratling information Aristotle had described by running it through the Exedra's main computer. Ben's face bore the same intense look of concentration that his Indian ancestors had worn while stalking buffalo so many generations before.
Lindsey Davis, Silver Pigs. Mystery set in ancient Rome, in the wisecracking private eye style, about an 'informer'-- aka private eye-- Marcus Didius Falco. This works surprisingly well. The voice is great, the details seem authentic, and the relationships between the characters are wonderful.
Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone. Murder mystery set in contemporary Venice, starring a police commissioner. Very well-written and atmospheric, but suffers from an overdose of noir corruption and angst, so that the protagonist does not solve the mystery himself, but has the solution handed to him by a powerful figure in the know, and then can't do anything with the information. Also, the mystery concerns Senegalese immigrants, and everyone keeps bemoaning that they know nothing about them, but no one ever so much as gets online to google some basic info on their country of origin.
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gah, I bet my grammar is horrendous and I'm probably using the wrong words. XD I never remember the "di dove" construction and where I'm supposed to use it.
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pornmanga together, I'm assuming it's OK to use the familiar with her. :DWhat I don't know is the real boundary between the tu/Lei* usages. I have a vague recollection that in France everyday speech is getting more informal so that the familiar is getting to be used almost everywhere there, but I don't know if I'm misremembering that, and I don't know if Italy is the same way. So, Rachel, you'll want to say "Come sta?" to people there, in order to avoid offending them. :D
* (for other people tu = you familiar, Lei = you polite)
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WHY AM I WRITING ITALIAN I NEED TO BE DESIGNING WEBPAGES AAGH
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Lui è "un scrittore" mai lei è "una scrittrice."
He is "a writer (masc)" but she is "a writer (fem)".
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"Ho una scrittrice" is "I have a lady authoress as my mistress."
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But maybe she does have a lady authoress as her mistress?
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Oooooh.
Ben's face bore the same intense look of concentration that his Indian ancestors had worn while stalking buffalo so many generations before.
Stalking the WILY BUFFALO BWAHAHAHAH....ahem. Oh dear. hee.
suffers from an overdose of noir corruption and angst, so that the protagonist does not solve the mystery himself, but has the solution handed to him by a powerful figure in the know, and then can't do anything with the information
Oh, I like that! I'm a sucker for noir, tho.
Tit for tat: I just read, in about three hours last evening, a sort of disposable book about two guys from the east coast who got hopelessly lost in a pretty small NM camping area near Carlsbad and one of them wound up tried for murder. It was pretty much an expanded magazine article, and a kinda interesting story, but sort of like eating a box of plain crackers. The "local NM color" the author was also insistent on painting got sort of painful at certain points, too. (Like: it is still an honorable profession to be a cowboy in NM. The FUCK? A dude rancher, maybe. Not many cowboys even in Carlsbad!)
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When I first read the fourth book, I liked it -- less spare than usual for Cherryh. When I reread the four in quick sequence, though, I disliked its inconsistancy of character from the much earlier three.
---L.
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Say ciao to Roma for me, especially the elephant statue in front of Sta Maria Sopra Minerva. I miss the city terribly. My friend just got a Fulbright to stay in Rome for a year, and I have to figure out a way to go visit her.
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*snork* I was going to make a comment along the lines of "Oooooo shiny cold heroine and nice hero must read!" and then I saw that.
Anyhow, I am definitely going to look for this in the library.
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