I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :) SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way.…
Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting. The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell (who, at 26, is not…
Ireland isn’t doing very well at spring this year. There was a week of warm afternoons a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been clear a lot, but quite cold. Today it seems to have moved directly into November, with wind and rain and 6°-that-feels-like-0° temperatures. On top of that, there’s a 48 hour bus strike going on in Dublin this weekend. However, it’s Free Comic Book Day, so I was determined that we were going to Get Out, and so Young Indiana and I went forth to have an…
Picoreview: A Little Chaos: Entirely fictional, but charming. I mean, entirely fictional: Kate Winslet’s character is an invention, no one like her existed at all, and…I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s like Disney’s Pocahontas: why drop a couple of historical names on top of characters who live lives completely unlike the real story? The answer, obviously, is because people recognise names like Pocahontas and Versailles and King Louis, which establishes the story, but…look, Belle was not an entirely accurate telling of Dido Elizabeth Belle, but it gets her story…
And very excited about it too. Very clear on YESTERDAY he was not yet five, even if we had a birthday party yesterday. (“My birthday celebrated!”) Definitely not five last week when I, being old, started saying he was five. “NOT YET. NOT FOR TWO WEEKS.” (We’re still a little unclear on time. :)) But today, oh my. Today the first words out of his mouth were, “NOW I’m five years old!” And indeed he is. :)