E.M. Epps's Blog, page 2

Review: "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Sydney Padua

Thumbs up for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua. Graphic novel/historical fiction.

So Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage were real people, back in The Day, and Babbage designed the first computer but didn’t build it, and Lovelace wrote imaginary programs for it, and they were BFFs until Lovelace died way too early. Much more recently, Sydney Padua wrote a short webcomic about them concluding with a joke ending that posited an alternate universe in which Lovelace lived and THEY FIGHT CRIME. She had no intention of writing the rest of it, but the Internet made her do it; and thank you Internet, because this book is absolutely magnificent. If you have any interest at all in (choose any one or more of the following): computers, Victorians, graphic novels, women’s history, laughing your ass off, or footnotes, stop what you’re doing right now and go read it.

16. Babbage and Lovelace were often paired in period anecdotes, some of which you can find in the appendix. They had similar personalities—egocentric, naive, enthusiastic, and obsessive—and never quite fit in with stuffy Victorian society. So they were bound to either kill each other or become each other’s biggest fans. Some may wonder—was there anything romantic between them? There’s a good reason to think that there was, and that reason is, it’s extremely fun to think about. Sadly that’s the only reason, as there isn’t a hint of romance in any of their correspondence with each other, and they weren’t exactly the subtlest people in the world. Of course, there was that time Babbage wrote to her that he would visit her and her husband and ponder “that horrible problem—the three bodies,” but even I think that’s a stretch.

Review: "The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain

Neutral rating for The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. Historical fiction.

You know the story. It did have some moments. Overall, rather tedious. I’m glad I read Connecticut Yankee first or I never would have gone on with the Twain.

Our friends threaded their way slowly through the throngs upon the bridge. This structure, which had stood for six hundred years, and had been a noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was a curious affair, for a closely packed rank of stores and shops, with family quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it, from one bank of the river to the other. The Bridge was a sort of town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets, its manufacturing industries, and even its church. It looked upon the two neighbours which it linked together—London and Southwark—as being well enough as suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important. It was a close corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them—and all their little family affairs into the bargain. It had its aristocracy, of course—its fine old families of butchers, and bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for five or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way. It was just the sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited. Children were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old age, and finally died without ever having set a foot upon any part of the world but London Bridge alone. Such people would naturally imagine that the mighty and interminable procession which moved through its street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and its muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in this world, and themselves somehow the proprietors of it. And so they were, in effect—at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and did—for a consideration—whenever a returning king or hero gave it a fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching columns.

Review: "Saga, Vol. 5" by Brian Vaughan

Thumbs up for Saga, Vol. 5 by Brian Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples. Graphic novel/fantasy.

What can I say? Still good.

Review: "Blacksad" et al. by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

Thumbs up for Blacksad; Blacksad: A Silent Hell; and Blacksad: Amarillo by Juan Diaz Canales, illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido. Graphic novel/mystery.

A little more noir mystery to go with The Postman Always Rings Twice. But this is noir in graphic form—with some of the most gorgeous watercolor illustrations I’ve ever seen. The stories—featuring John Blacksad, a private eye who’s an anthropomorphized cat—are excellent (even if they don't always make sense), but it’s the art that has made these a permanent part of my library. If I could draw or paint two square inches that were as good as anything in Blacksad, I’d cry.

Sometimes, when I walk into my office, I get the feeling that I’m walking among the ruins of a lost civilization. Not because of all the reigning disorder, but because it all seems to be the remains of that civilized person I used to be.

Review: "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain

Thumbs up for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. Fantasy.

It’s a shameful thing for an American to admit, but I’ve never much liked Mark Twain. While I sometimes find him witty, I haven’t much found him entertaining. (Except for his essay “The Awful German Language,” which never fails to make me howl with laughter.) Still: the man wrote a lot of things, and I haven’t read most of them, so I thought I should keep trying. Well, I finally did better with A Connecticut Yankee. It is 90% entertaining, and a lot of the rest is interesting, being as it consists of Twain’s no-holds-barred rants (via his narrator) on the evils of the Church, the evils of feudalism, and the cockeyed stupidity of people who have never known anything different. Tell us how you really feel, Sam! If only Twain were alive today; it would be so much fun to watch him let loose on modern politics.

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and "Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. "And as a rule," said he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever.... Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow—fzt!—wow!"

Review: "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain

Thumbs up for The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Suspense.

The sort of book that couldn’t be written now that divorce is easily available. If you like noir, though (which I do sometimes), this is a requisite read; it has a dark sparkle like nothing else.

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

Review: "Waterways" by Kyell Gold

Thumbs up for Waterways by Kyell Gold. Young adult romance.

Sometimes I think I follow my own reading taste in the exception rather than the observance. See, I was at Worldcon and I ended up at a panel for Furry writers...this would make sense if I were a fur but I’m not, long story tell you later...and the moderator spoke glowingly of the works of Kyell Gold, specifically this book. Five stars from 88 reviews on Amazon further intrigued me. Yep, so I ended up reading a novel about forbidden love between a seventeen-year-old anthropomorphic otter boy and his gay sweetheart who is a black fox. (The problem is the gayness, not the species difference, to be clear.) And you know what? It was engrossing and I was sorry to see it end. If you are in the mood for a sweet coming-of-age love story, I recommend it as a bit of charming fun. Or—if other reviews are to be believed, and I see no reason why not—if you are a young person questioning your sexuality, I highly recommend it as something that might speak to you.

He noticed that their TV was off. Meth, he thought, and almost giggled. “I’m not doing meth, Mom.”

Review: "Daughter of Mystery" and "The Mystic Marriage" by Heather Rose Jones

Thumbs up for Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones. Fantasy/romance.

It is safe to say that historical fantasy lesbian romance is not my genre. So why did I read these? Because the author said something intelligent (I don’t even remember what, now) in response to one of my tweets. Empires are built on less, my friends. I downloaded a sample of Daughter of Mystery, said “hm, interesting, not my thing”...and then I kept thinking about it. And thinking. And then I broke down and shelled out $10 ($10! for an ebook! Oh the humanity!) and by the time I was 3/4ths of the way through I had ordered a paperback of the next book and signed up for a kaffeeklatche with the author at Worldcon. The characters! The worldbuilding! The derring-do! The alchemy! The interesting magic system! The romance! (Neither sappy nor over-eroticized, bless you Ms. Jones.) Even the Alpennian language was well-thought-out! I DREW FAN ART, OKAY? I’m not going to pretend they are paced like lightening, but I couldn’t put them down. If you’ve ever enjoyed Austen or Heyer or Susanna Clarke stop reading this blog and go buy the first one right now. I don’t care if you’re not a lesbian; I’m hideously straight and it didn’t matter. JUST GO.

Barbara pointed to a phrase where the glosses in the margins ran several layers thick. “He doesn’t exactly claim that. Remember that he was constantly dodging accusations of heresy, so he wrote in such a way that nothing he said could be pinned onto his own beliefs. Everywhere it’s ‘were this the case’ and ‘it emerges in consequence’ and ‘it would need to be concluded that.’ I think there’s one entire chapter where every single verb is in the subjunctive. But what he says here is that if you observe the nature of miracles and that if logic is applied to those observations, then if it were the case that God’s laws for miraculous events are not capricious and arbitrary and that God has not chosen to garb a capricious and arbitrary world in the garments of law and logic, then certain patterns regarding the nature and manifestation of miracles emerge.”

Review: "Modern Romance" by Aziz Ansari

Neutral rating for Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. Sociology.

The title accurately represents the topic. I did enjoy reading this book, but it fell flat for me personally because, as a sociology book written by a humorist, it wasn't that funny (not Mary Roach-funny), and I was already familiar with a lot of the research presented. Two things I learned: Tinder is more sensible than it seems; and we should probably, as a society, take another look at the assumption of monogamy, because smart people should question the validity of any rule that is practiced more in the breach than the observance.

In this sense, Tinder actually isn't so different from what our grandparents did, nor is the way my friend used online dating to find someone Jewish who lived nearby [by typing Jewish and his ZIP code into a dating site]. In a world of infinite possibilities, we've cut down our options to people we're attracted to in our neighborhood.

Review: "Shadow Show" by Neil Gaiman et al.

Thumbs up for Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Neil Gaiman et al. Fantasy/graphic novel.

You would expect a collection of graphic stories in tribute to Ray Bradbury to be diverse, poetic, weird, and sometimes horrific. You would be so right. You would think that, being a collection, some of the pieces would be great and some would be pretty ho-hum. You would be wrong. They are all really damn good.

"I worry I was keeping [the stories] alive. I think it's God’s fault. God can't be expected to remember everything. Perhaps he delegates things, just goes, 'You! I want you to remember the dates of The Hundred Years' War. And you, you remember Jack Benny...'"
—from "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" by Neil Gaiman