While I'm on the subject...

I will be doing what has become my annual reading for the Speculations Reading Series at DreamHaven Books & Comics on Friday, Dec. 11th at 6:30 PM.  From CryoBurn again, probably, though I will likely take a vote, and if everyone there has heard Chapter One already, have something else up my sleeve.

http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com/

A reminder, DreamHaven usually has or can get signed copies of most of my titles for mail orders.

Ta, L.

Ah ha --

I see Barrayar is now officially out from Blackstone Audiobooks:

http://www.blackstoneaudio.com/audiobook.cfm?id=5239

It doesn't yet list the digital download as being available -- there is frequently a lag time on that ranging from a few days to a few weeks, but it should be along soon.  Something like 95 - 98% of my audiobook sales are through MP3 file downloads over the internet, my latest royalty reports reaffirm.

So, while Audible.com doesn't offer Barrayar yet, it does offer Falling Free, which while a Blackstone production does not appear on the Blackstone website, though I'm given to understand there may be some physical media later.  Given that my physical media sell in tiny numbers, this is not an issue, except that perhaps a little cross-selling ad might let browsers know the book's MP3 file exists.

Also, a whole box of my author's copies of GURPS Vorkosigan, officially titled Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game (Vorkosigan Saga for short, apparently) arrived this morning via FedEx, so the print run shipment has definitely reached these shores and should be wending through the distribution system to folks even as I type.  (Where does one buy such books, anyway?)  Nine years of patience pays off.  Yay!

Ta, L.

Some of you may know this site already, but it bears revisiting:

http://thereifixedit.com/

Ta, L.  (Related to engineers.)

OK...

So, Netflix did not lie: Krrish really was the sequel to Koi... Mil Gaya.  It's... almost impossible to describe, and I just watched it.  First half, bucolic love story with a touch of George of the Jungle set in gorgeous northern Indian scenery; second half, part martial arts flick part superhero action flick part The Princess Bride, set against the backdrop of modern Singapore.  "My name is Krishna Mehra, you killed my father, prepare to die..."  And more love story, and the requisite number of brilliantly colorful musical production numbers -- my word, but the boy can dance.  (And act, as one notices especially during the sequences where he's playing both our present hero and his aged and ill nerd father.  Simultaneously.)  Cheese, or should I say paneer, as only Bollywood can deliver it, to the max, but really high-end cheese -- budgets and production values are plainly going up over time.  I also suspect many embedded glancing references to Indian mythology that I perforce missed.  Just go rent it, it will save me gibbering around trying to describe it.

But watch the other one first.  This will make ever so much more sense... this one will have more comprehensible continuity if you do.

The subtitles were offered in ten languages.  I wonder how much the very broad style of Bollywood films is due to the recognition that they're going to have to struggle across many language barriers?  I inadvertently rented one last year that came without English subtitles, an older piece, and I had no trouble following the gist of the plot even though I speak not one word of Hindi.

Also read Unseen Academicals, the new Pratchett, in which Sir Terry takes on football, or as we Yanks would say it, rugby [*later: I sit corrected, soccer], with an Ankh-Morpork spin.  The Unseen University fields a college team, Gown against Town.  Pretty Good Pratchett, which is pretty amazing under his current circumstances; not as brilliant as, say, Thief of Time, but the latter did have all the earmarks of being one of those books where the Holy Spirit descended without warning, and all the writer could do was scramble around with a bucket trying to catch as much as possible before an equally unheralded lift-off.  Those moments don't come to order, alas.

Am typing this from a corner of my dining room.  Finally dealt with my disinclination for doing my between-books office cleaning by the drastic step of hauling everything out to the bare walls and having it repainted.  In some color other than the ceiling white I've been living with for the past 14 years.  We'll see how that goes.  It will at least force me to go through every blighted piece of paper in there... why did I think this was a good idea, again...?

Ta, L.

An unexpected note --

I am informed I am to be this year's recipient of the Minnesota Fantasy Award, which was created by and is maintained under the auspices of the long-running Twin Cities dark fantasy convention Arcana.  http://arcanacon.com 

From the Wikipedia article:

"Minnesota Fantasy Award I will be at Arcana (which is held at Best Western - Bandanna Square, St, Paul, MN) on Saturday, October 17, 2009, and will give a reading at 3 PM and attend the award ceremony etc. at 7:30 PM.

I still feel a little like an immigrant to Minnesota, even though my ties to Ohio are fading into the mists of time, but I guess it has been fourteen years since I moved up to the Twin Cities.  Man, that time has gone by fast!

bests, Lois.

I found this film on a rec from a Texan friend, who'd first seen parts of it on an Air India flight back from her son's wedding in Hyderabad to a beautiful doctor.  (I wish my son would... never mind.)  Since my friend blew out her sciatic nerve on Day 2 of the week-long festivities, she also was watching it tanked on painkillers, an experience that must have been downright hallucinogenic.

The Netflix description is very misleading, as it only touches on the prologue.  Bollywood science fiction, a mash-up of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Flowers for Algernon, The Goonies, and a passing salute to Fred Astaire.  Including a love story, a first-encounter adventure, five musical production numbers, an entire basketball game, and dear God whoever introduced disco to India has much to answer for.  You can't say Bollywood doesn't give good weight.  It also has a mother character who is actually alive and active and gets some quite fierce dialogue, wow.  I invited a couple of friends over and we had carry-out from my favorite Indian restaurant, to get in the mood and fortify ourselves for the the three-hour extravaganza, which worked a treat.  Go thou and rent.

I haven't done this much cultural cognitive torsion in one film since Princess Raccoon, although Onmyoji and Onmyyoji 2 gave that one a run for its money. And in looking up the date (2003) I also discover Koi... Mil Gaya has a 2006 sequel, Krrish, now in my queue, heh.

If you've never seen a Bollywood film, I recommend starting with Bride & Prejudice, which is sort of Bollywood-lite, adapted to the Western audience.  Then go on to Kandukondun Kandukondun, subtitled from the Tamil, which (graduating you gently from the first film, which is of course an homage to Pride & Prejudice) puts the spin on Sense and Sensibility, set in modern Madras.

Anyone got any recs for Bollywood historicals?  (Comedic or at least upbeat tones preferred to drama/melodrama/rivers of blood.)  I suspect those could be a lot of fun.

Earlier this week, I also watched Paris When It Sizzles (1964).  Stars William Holden as a scriptwriter who had been swanning around Europe on his producer's dime for a year, and who now had three days left to come up with the promised script, and Audrey Hepburn as the typist hired to assist him in his self-inflicted emergency.  Hijinks ensue.  Some good writer jokes, but my word, filmmaking certainly came a long way between this and Stranger Than Fiction.  Interesting time-capsule values.

Ta, L.

   

So..

I am informed that the final full-color version of GURPS Vorkosigan has at last been printed, and the print run is, even as I type, in a shipping container somewhere on the high seas, slogging toward the warehouse Stateside.

Anyone else here ever read Donald Westlake's A Likely Story...?

Just sayin'.

Ta, L.

Lots of airplane reading this month...

Bogging partway through The Worm Ouroboros, I switched to YA romance for a bit, as the most opposing antidote I could think of.  I had borrowed a copy of Circus of the Darned (2006) by Katie Maxwell from a friend only to find it was book #2 of a series, so hit the library for its prior volume; while waiting, picked out several other titles by the same author.  The Year My Life Went Down the Loo, reviewed here a few weeks back, was a hit; its sequel They Wear What Under their Kilts? (2004) was almost as good.  The heroine Emily is emerging as a very much a spiritual grandaughter of Austen's Emma, I think, possibly deliberately so.  Will continue to see how it develops.

The first book of the other Maxwell series, Got Fangs? (2005), was coughed up by the library at last.  I read it and am now partway through its sequel, the original trigger for this exploration.  Not as good as the non-fantasy series, alas.  Looks like market bandwagoning, in train of the paranormal romance boom.  Amusing but slight.  I will finish Circus of the Darned, but probably won't continue. 

I then tried one of the author's adult romances, written under the name Katie MacAlister, and was sadly disappointed.  An attempted Regency, The Trouble With Harry (2006) had unconvincing plot, setting, and characters.  The usual complaint for this sort of thing is that it plunks modern-minded characters down in period costume, but I don't think I would have believed these characters in modern dress either.  Ordinarily it would be three strikes and you're out, but since the library already has it in transit, I'll try one of her contemporaries and see if it works better.  One sample is not enough to conclude "she writes better YA than adult", but it's certainly a working hypothesis at this point.

Also wonder if her later books are suffering from that lethal Romance genre market pressure to write insanely fast...

Am also halfway through (the flight ended before the book did) The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) by Simon Critchley, a non-fiction overview of 2500 years of philosophy via thumnail sketches of the deaths of various famous philosphers, in chronological order.  Extra points, plainly, for those who died strangely, which seems to be a disproportionate number of 'em.  I'm not sure where he's going with this, as I'm only up to the end of the Middle Ages so far.  Will continue, but doubtful whether to demote it to bedtime reading.  Being episodic and put-downable, it wouldn't further disrupt my upwhacked sleep schedule, but I don't know what it would do to my subsequent dream sleep.

Makes me wonder what a parallel account of the births of dead philosophers would look like... a much shorter volume, I suspect.  Deconstruction left as an exercise for the bemused.

I suspect Critchley's book reads more lucidly when one already has the basic framework of world history fixed in one's head upon which to hang it than it would as a first taste of the subject, though it is certainly a sampler platter.  I am also forcibly reminded of Daniel Nettle's crisp summation, in his Happiness: the science behind your smile, of this dire collection of grumpy old men as "happiness pessimists".  The two books reflect interestingly upon each other, anyway.

I ran across a brilliant little blog post this morning which, paraphrased, noted that at first all stories belonged to the warrior Tiger, but were subsequently hijacked by the trickster Anansi, to the benefit of us all.  Ouroboros is definitely a book belonging to the Tiger, methinks.

Ta, L.
 

Huh.  This one snuck up on me...

http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?productID=BK_BLAK_003440&BV_SessionID=@@@@0764107899.1253764517@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccchadeigjdihmhcefecekjdffidffg.0

Ta, L.  (Just now home from FenCon, playing catch-up.)