colleen the convivial curmudgeon > Recent Status Updates

One thing I really miss when reading an e-book is that physical awareness of how far you've gone in the book...

"...a good actor of any stripe, really, doesn't just say words, he feels them. We felt all the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character's emotions don't cancel out the actor's-instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which."

"... lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before."

"Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster. "

"And, of course, very few people do know how Tradition is supposed to go. There's a certain mysterious ridiculousness about it by its very nature - once there was a reason why you had to carry a posy of primroses on Soul Cake Tuesday, but now you did it because... that's what was Done. Besides, the intelligence of the creature known as crowd is the square root of the number of people in it."

"...the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us."

"...he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people..."

"Gentlemen, please," said the Patrician. He shook his head. "Let's have no fighting, pease. This is, after all, a council of war."

"You poor pedantic thing. Your science can save a man's life, but imagination makes it worth living."

After a sloggy middle, with boring descriptions about boring raids... and far, far, FAR too much time spent on the weird love triangle and Harker's childish pining...

We finally seem to be getting to the meat of the finale, and things are looking good. Hope it's a good pay-off, since the middle was rather a chore.

I'm guessing Corporal Schreck is an homage to Max Schreck...

The writing is uninspired, but the story, while familiar, is pretty good.

"*Almost* spring was the worst - the last cold and wet of winter when you were dying for bare arms and sunshine."

Short stories are always hit or miss for me, but I almost always enjoy Gaiman's voice.
I'm enjoying this much more than Unnatural Creatures, which I stalled out on - though that's partially my fault as I was under the impression that was also a collection of Gaiman's work, and not just edited by him.

Bit slow going, but I'm liking the development of the characters and the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire.

"I ain't against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they've got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take 'em to bits for the parts when we don't need 'em anymore, see?"

Finally getting to the final showdown - I feel like a lot of the battles in this book could've been cut. I never feel any real sense of danger for the main characters... But, then, it could partially because I'm just not invested enough to care, overly.

"Some people might say this is important."
"No. It's just personal. Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is."

"... You can't say 'If only I'd...' because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you'll never know. You've gone past. So there's no use thinking about it. So I don't."

"It didn't happen. But the point is, it might have happened. You can't say 'if this didn't happen then that would have happened' because you don't know everything that might have happened. You might think something'd be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible... "

"The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning."

"But it was the nature of nations, he had observed, to act as if their existence had some objective, intrinsic value and meaning. And corporations, that relatively new colonial excrescence, did not bode to develop any better."

I'm wanting to like this book more than I am.

The world and the story is interesting, but the writing and the characters are kind of flat.

It's not bad, but it could be better...

I've commented, in the past, about how annoying I find Percy's continued power of being "thick as a brick", but I don't think I've ever mentioned how annoying I find Annabeth, too.

She especially irritates me with the whole jealousy of Rachel thing. I mean, you're so jealous to the point you're not going to listen to and dismiss potentially important prophetic type information? Ugh!

"That's the only thing they could agree on. We needed to help you or you'd mess things up."
"Nice that they trust me so much..."


But you DO always mess things up, Percy.

Looking forward to the finale. It's promising to be intense and exciting.

That said - there's a fine line between sweet and saccharine, and I may develop cavities from some of these passages...

Third verse, same as the first...

Percy is a petulant child (though, in fairness, they all are... and they are mostly children, so...)

Percy is also thick as a brick and needs everything explained to him.

Monster attacked, rinse, wash, repeat.

People expect a 13 year old girl to make a decision which will affect the rest of her life, and her brother's life, in 5 minutes...

"The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues. "

I started reading this as a gym read the other day, for lack of anything better to read, tbh.

Luckily I am liking it a bit more than the first. It's at least moving along at a good clip.

On the downside, I see Percy is as thick and as slow on the uptake as ever. It's really annoying when people say he's clever when he's a giant dolt.