Off the Cliff

Inspector Yashim has a habit of taking caïques. In the current book a character compares them with gondolas, to the disparagement of the latter. I thought gondolas were pretty slim and light for boats, but evidently caïques are slimmer and lighter. ( Cut for wikipedia on same )
Picture of imperial caïque to be found here. Three feet wide, though? That's worse than a canoe. I see why he said that if you stand up in a caïque you have three seconds before it tips.

In other news, Mieville's imagination makes me feel grubby no matter what he's writing. When he's writing worshippers of the giant squid it gets worse. And he still has this obsession with turning people into machines, if not actually Thomas the Tank Engine.

"The best thing for being in a foaming fury", Merlin said, "is to clean something." (I was in a foaming fury for the usual RL reasons, boosted by my body's best efforts to lay me low with oh I dunno-- the usual December sinus infection, I fancy. Some things mindfulness meditation has no power to cure.)
( Read more... )

Finished Un Lun Dun which was nice enough in an 'I saw what you did there' way; and I mean, am glad he did do it, but there should be more at the end of a door stopper book than just that. At least it's not (quite) the downer Perdido was. I feel like I've read the 21st century version of The Phantom Tollbooth, and it's a nastier world than Norton and Feiffer's.

Otherwise will note two suspiciously thorough fires in the neighbourhood in the last three days, within 150 ft of each other (something less than 30 m). Not reassuring at all.

So now I know about e-bank transfers. I don't trust technology, and there seems something scary about providing an email address and suddenly having money sent to a bank account whose number I have *not* disclosed. So when someone says last night at ten 'I'm sending it now, you'll see it inside 30 minutes' and I don't, not then and not this morning and not this afternoon either, what am I to think but that my money has vanished into the ether? (This is how the Midnight Mayor makes his salary, I'm sure-- the Angels grab the bank transfers as they fly through the phone wires in a stutter of bytes.)

What I should have thought, and what I would have thought had I not been paralyzed by technophobia, is 'If an email fails to appear, check your spam filter.' So all's well that ends well, but the whole process makes me wibbly.
( As for Weird London reading )

Why did I think her name was Constance Webb? Some mnemonic confusion of Mary Webb (Gone to Earth) and Constance Garnett (translator of Dostoevsky and mother of Bunny) who have nothing in common except for living in the same time period. Is why I need a smart phone, or at least a notebook, because I'm hopeless with both names and mnemonics, and go blank the minute I walk into a book store.

But once established that it's Catherine Webb, I had no little difficulty finding a copy behind a bunch of other books on the lowest shelf of the YA (used-not-new) section at Doug Miller Books. (If I ever win a lottery, one thing I'll do is find Mr Miller larger premises. All those unseen books in boxes and double piles at the back where there's no light frustrate me in the extreme; besides which, if there are three people in the place there's no room to move.)

It's also signed. So go me.

Women of 54 are not old women. No, no matter how many times you call them 'old'. No, even if they're working-class immigrant widows who've had hard lives. Look at your mother, for heaven's sake, supposing your mother isn't still in her forties.

Also I'm sensing a certain retread of a certain schtick from Minority Council. Agreed, it delighted me in Minority Council, but not if it's going to become a default.

Otherwise I have taken half a percocet and am waiting for the blissful cessation of body ache and/or the beginning of hallucinations, whichever.

Thank you, Kate Griffin. Urban uh 'fay' vampires who floss before every meal, vet the plat de jour via questionnaires ('HIV status, communicable diseases, and of course blood group'), and kvetch about the diets of their food these days ('Not enough leafy greens') are exactly what I needed to counteract Suzanne McLean. *That's* what urban fantasy is all about, not picture perfect studly studs.

Which said-- barely does Matthew Swift appear on the scene than he's advising someone to run. There's these things that my Dutch friends call stop words (and called them that in the 80s at least, long before search engines, but maybe from early programming languages?) It's 'the thing someone always says.' 'Run' is Matthew's. Perhaps he should swap it in for 'think'.

The Sweet Scent of Blood.

Suzanne McLeod was another of those reminders that however original you think you are somebody else has already arrived and grabbed all falafel off the buffet table. Although in Suzanne's case she ran off with the kitchen sink as well.

No, she *threw* the kitchen sink into the book. This is fantastic London with fae and vampires and satyrs and brownies and vampires and goblins and (healer) dragons and vampires and witches and selkie and vampires and naiads and Sidhe-- but only one Sidhe in the whole of London, our heroine, because the Irish evidently don't come to England unless they're vampires, and in that case we have three of them, all speaking stage Irish, as well as their blood-bonded leprechaun. In a charming hommage to Pratchett, we have concerned fatherly troll policemen, plural. Also vampires. Did I mention the vampires? There are blond English vampires who are real lords and dark-haired eastern vampires who taste of Turkish Delight and French vampires unfortunately called Louis who speak stage French. And goth vampires and thug vampires and even zombie vampires dear god; and all of them want our heroine because she's sidhe- well, half-sidhe-- and sidhe taste so much better than humans.

Alas, our heroine is a ditz. Her identifying verbal marker is '*So* not a good idea' or '*So* not what I wanted.' Ditz is supposed to be able to handle trouble, but any vampire can make her sag and swoon and melt with lust. I'm told this is a mark of vampire novels, which reminds me why I don't read vampire novels. Though now I see *why* there are vampire novels-- romances are no longer allowed to have heroines who are putty in the hands of violent and abusive men. But with vampires, hell, it's not their fault, right? It's the vampire venom wot done it.
( Cut for howl howl howl howl howl )

(Yes, it's a pun.)

First off, Phillip Rickman, The Cure of Souls. Aaronovitch says

I heard about Phil Rickman's rural fantasy/mysteries when his agent rejected me and cited him as the reason. They said that they already had their supernatural mystery writer, thank you very much, and wouldn't be needing another.

Silly silly agent. There's no overlap at all between a male copper/ apprentice magician in London and a female Anglican priest-cum-exorcist in Herefordshire. There isn't even a magic *system* in Rickman.
( What there is... )

I went to the ears nose and throat specialist about my swollen eustachian tubes and the chronic blockage therefrom. Specialist says my ears, like my hearing, are just fine. Swelling comes from grinding of teeth at night. Night guard is not doing its duty. Oh woe is me.
( Cut for reading natter )

Oh yes, alright. Here we are, p.28 of Moon Over Soho, Peter talking of course:

And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn't also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England.

Clearly the French publishers had reason. But since the end of the book alters the state that obtains at the beginning, I *still* think they could have called it something else.
( Useless lj-cut; reasons why within )

This evening in 1990 I was coming back to Nagoya from a day in Ise. This evening in 2003 I was writing Gouen's poem to Pipang. This evening in 2006 I was reading The Well-favored Man in the Gateway Hilton, after the morning's brunch with paleaswater and her new husband and mvrdrk. Thus time flows.
( Cut for September reading )

Pratchett, Nation
Gaiman, American Gods
Powers, The Drawing of the Dark

-- so three of the Big Names in SFF. And generally all very well, but give me the 100% Brit over the expat and the American. He passes the Johnson test at least, and possibly the Bechdel but I'd have to check.

McKillip, The Changeling Sea
-- a non-twee McKillip. How wonderful.
( More )

So if one were going to write an AU set in a land of flying mermaids and subway wild hunts aka Turkey, obviously it should be in Griffinverse Istanbul. But I don't know Istanbul. Maybe Neverwhere? Mh. Maybe AU Somewhere Else Entirely?

But for research purposes I took A Madness of Angels out from the library and may peruse it desultorily this weekend. I wish someone Japanese would write a Griffinverse Tokyo so I could know what the real spells and bounds are, from an insider's pov.
( Anent which )

FFL was all about Margaret Mahy when she died, so I got The Tricksters from the library. Couldn't keep anyone straight in it, quite apart from wanting to kick certain characters very very hard. Skimmed the last twenty pages and took it back.
( August is just a Bad Reading Month )

I tend to grab odd recs from the FFL, which is why I went to the library Friday to see what Tim Powers was available and wound up with a battered copy of The Anubis Gates that the online catalogue had said was still on loan. TAG is one of those books I come across in lists of must-read SFF-- in this case I think it was a list of classic steampunk works-- so I was glad to find it and am glad to have it read. It's still a messy mess: reminds me of the manga (which will remain nameless) where I was never sure who was who now, ie who is in whose body doing what at the moment. Manga is permitted to be a mess: novels rather less so. But it's rather manga-like in its jumping from place to place, and time to time, and high scene to high scene, ignoring connection and explanation along the way. The fact it was written 20 years ago may account for it not being the bloated trilogy it would be today, where everything is connected and explained with excruciating precision.
( Read more... )

Good: finished Toujin Yashiki, Hatsu Akiko's strange Chinese tales set in NY and England (though the dragon king's daughter's pool isn't connected to her father's sea, so he doesn't come visiting. I think that's in another collection.) Pleasant resonant fluff, as Hatsu often is-- though maybe that's a gaijin's POV, and the very lack of there there is what one should prize about her works.

Bad: am finding Fly-by-night slow and uneasy-making, or possibly slow because uneasy-making. I have no guarantee that horrors will not abound in the present as they have in the past. But I can't stop reading. People who go to suspense and horror films invite this kind of experience, but I could never see what the fun of it is.
( Continuing )

I wanted Ackroyd's London Under last January, to see if it would shed some light on the lost rivers of London. I have it now. It has a chapter or two on buried rivers, but the detail (such as it is-- a thin volume, this) is saved for sewers and train tunnels. It thus perfectly complements Whispers Underground. To say nothing of A Madness of Angels. And probably the last Felix Castor as well, but that one I've already forgotten. However it doesn't tell me nearly enough about those dead and buried rivers, and neither does wikipedia. I want something with maps, and a lot more pictures than Ackroyd provides.

Frances Hardinge's Verdigris Deep (aka Well Witched) is not supplement but synchronicity. Its atmosphere puts it with 100 Demons, even if Ackroyd also has a chapter on wells and Ima does not. Or not in 21. She *must* have done a well story, in fact, but all I can recall offhand is the house with the telephone cord that goes down a trapdoor. Which I should reread because I've forgotten what the point of that story was. Felonious and homicidal relatives, wasn't it?

1. The thing about last week's heat is that it was erratic-- every other day, for no discernible reason. Mon Weds Fri infernos; Tues and Thurs pleasantly seasonable, and in the latter case cloudy too, so the kids went out without hats. And now we're set for a moderate week. More rain would be appreciated. Though across-the-street neighbour, a porch-sitting 91, says people aren't watering their lawns this year, and ascribes it to the city having replaced all the water meters last year. Do not see the logic myself, but there may be something in it.

2. I have a new philodendron plant! Nobody sells philodendrons-- the last one I saw was four years ago, and someone else nabbed it before I could buy. This one is young and green and bunchy. I like philodendra because they're the one plant I can't kill. Still have a descendant of my first, from 1985, long and stringy and stretching towards the sun in my dining room, but alive. Need to find exactly how much sun these guys need, because it always seems either too much or too little.
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Thank you, Ben Aaronovitch, for setting your latest episode in a London winter.

Even if the police action and acronyms are impossible to follow.

Happy Beaver is good hot weather reading. It passes the time, keeps the attention focussed, and leads nowhere in particular. For a London-set series, it reads unnervingly unEnglish. Aaronovitch and Griffin present me with what feels like Londoners, however urban magical they may be; but Carey's people seem to belong to some generic and semi-American series. The way they talk, the things they feel, the amount of time they spend in cars, all negate the place names that were so grittily and grottily London in Griffin's books. Nor is there any of that half-feyness or slight battiness that Aaronovitch's Peter doesn't even know he possesses. (True, Felix is supposed to come from Liverpool. That only makes it worse. Am trying to hear his lines in a northern accent and not quite succeeding.)
( We won't mention his manners, because he has none. )

So Ben Aaronovitch mentions the Happy Beaver (ie Felix Castor) novels as works that did not, in fact, influence Rivers of London. Hm, said I, exorcist in London Town, sounds good. Biked to the irritating Sanderson library down Bathurst (irritating because it sits on a very large corner lot and its front entrance is both cunningly hidden and quite unmarked, so one tramps a fair ways in blistering sun trying to find it) and got vol 3, the only thing available at any nearby library. Read some in UofT's Starbux, then went to Bakka and got vol 1. Not that it's as riveting as Rivers or Angels at first glance, but it seems to be set in the same universe more or less and I think will repay investigation.

Then, because I am nothing if not perverse, went on reading The Paths of the Dead. Heat should break some time tomorrow and I too shall break out of the paths of least resistance reading.

Reading The Agency and wondering-- well, not how authentic it might be, but how far it strays from authenticity. Then Aaronovitch provides a corrective: 'the shocking conclusion of the 1851 church survey in Britain' revealed that 'less than half the population had attended church at all and of those that did less than 20% went to an Anglican Church.'

Maybe there was a religious resurgence in late Victorian times? Because I distinctly remember the scandal that would ensue if EM Forster's Maurice stopped taking Communion at *his* Anglican church. Like, yanno, everyone was watching who did and who didn't? which sounds so small town Anglo and Anne of Green Gables-y I can't stand it.

Have finished Tiassa. This is not, repeat not, the signal to read The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, or The Viscount of Adrilankha. Well, maybe The Viscounta because I was punchdrunk when I read it last and remember nothing of what happened.
( Neighbourhood thieves )

I know we had no rain to speak of in May, but did we have to make up the deficit all in one day? With umbrella-twisting winds and floods in Union Station?
( May reading-- all fantasy all the time )