Misc

1. Is "Library Journal" (not "School Library Journal") a big or significant magazine?

2. The doctor's office says they have a policy of not giving retroactive authorizations. I have now called my employer's insurance person and sicced her on the doctor and Blue Shield, telling her to tell Blue Shield that if they don't resolve this immediately and stop harassing me I will sue them. I have also told her to tell them that I will be filing a grievance against them and contacting the Patient's Advocacy Board. (Thanks saphsmum.)

3. I still haven't seen Batman Begins because last night I went to see The Godfather at a revival house, the New Beverly. What a great movie. Not so great that they had a bad print that kept cutting out. I left a little way into Godfather II because the screen was so dark that I couldn't see the actors' faces. Man, Al Pacino was a hottie when he was young.

Misc

1. Is "Library Journal" (not "School Library Journal") a big or significant magazine?

2. The doctor's office says they have a policy of not giving retroactive authorizations. I have now called my employer's insurance person and sicced her on the doctor and Blue Shield, telling her to tell Blue Shield that if they don't resolve this immediately and stop harassing me I will sue them. I have also told her to tell them that I will be filing a grievance against them and contacting the Patient's Advocacy Board. (Thanks saphsmum.)

3. I still haven't seen Batman Begins because last night I went to see The Godfather at a revival house, the New Beverly. What a great movie. Not so great that they had a bad print that kept cutting out. I left a little way into Godfather II because the screen was so dark that I couldn't see the actors' faces. Man, Al Pacino was a hottie when he was young.

Midnighters I and II, by Scott Westerfeld

There is a secret hour between midnight and one am. Time stops, raindrops freeze in mid-air, a black moon rises, and the only things stirring are the midnighters-- the very few people who were born at that exact moment-- and the darklings. You don't want to mess with the darklings. You might not want to mess with the midnighters either, as they all have special powers and some of them are interestingly screwed up as a result.

As teenage Jessica Day discovers when she moves to Bixby, Oklahoma, the secret hour can only be accessed from a very few places in the world, and Bixby is one of those few places where she can claim her power as a midnighter. She promptly gets entangled in a complex web of relationships between the town's other four midnighters: free spirit Jonathan, tortured soul Melissa, scholarly Rex, and mathematician Dess. I don't want to give too much away here, since half the fun is learning how the world works and the the secrets of the characters' lives, but I will say that Dess is my favorite. The darklings, humanity's ancient shapeshifting predators, can be fought with steel and thirteen-letter-words (it's a long story), and Dess builds and names the midnighters' weapons: hubcaps and crowbars and flashlights with names like Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations.

The ideas here are not new, but they're combined in new ways, so the effect is of rediscovering an old favorite: as if you're ten again and reading Danny Dunn, or sixteen and dashing home with the latest issue of X-Men.

This is a tremendously entertaining trilogy whose third volume I am awaiting with a "And then what happens" fervor surpassed only by the one with which I wait for George R. R. Martin's A Feast for Crows. Midnighters isn't especially deep, the images are generally better than the prose, and there are a couple of plot oddities which may or may not be ironed out in the third volume, but they have great narrative drive and provided me with the most pure sf-y fun I've had in quite some time.

Volume one is out in paperback and two in hardcover. I had already bought two before I read one, because the author was signing and it was the only one of his books that was available that I didn't already own. Normally I don't like to buy a second volume, especially in hardcover, until I know I like the first, but not since reading Dorothy Dunnett in Japan have I been so glad I had the next volume on hand. If this sounds at all like the kind of thing you might enjoy... go get 'em.

http://www.scottwesterfeld.com/

Gulp...

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/reports_analysis/weekly_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000964306

I'm bracing myself, since Kirkus hates everything. Kirkus called Robin McKinley's Deerskin "lurid, turgid fluff." (I didn't look that phrase up-- I'm not Robin McKinley, and that's still stuck in my head for all eternity.)

But hey, lots of books don't get reviewed in Kirkus at all, and that would be worse.

Gulp...

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/reports_analysis/weekly_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000964306

I'm bracing myself, since Kirkus hates everything. Kirkus called Robin McKinley's Deerskin "lurid, turgid fluff." (I didn't look that phrase up-- I'm not Robin McKinley, and that's still stuck in my head for all eternity.)

But hey, lots of books don't get reviewed in Kirkus at all, and that would be worse.