Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

You're getting so many of these because I'm in A Mood and am working through my backlog of books I want to review/respond to.

Micah is a compulsive liar. She tells you so on the first page of the book. She also tells you that she's going to tell you the truth in this narrative... but whether she's telling the truth about that is up to you to decide. And that makes it hard to provide even the most basic summary of the book: which of the shifting mosaic of things-Micah-says do I pull out to try to describe the book? Because almost any of them could turn out to be untrue.

Start with this: I'm fairly sure that Micah is telling the truth about being a teenage girl living in New York. I'm fairly sure she had some kind of relationship, perhaps romantic, perhaps not, with Zach. I'm fairly sure that, when Zach disappears and then turns up dead, that it causes a crisis point in Micah's life. And I'm fairly sure that Micah is ill in some way, although whether the illness is the 'family illness' she describes or not is up to debate.

I'm not sure of anything else that happens in the 300+ page book, and that fact will give you a clearer idea of what the book's like than anything else I could say about it, I think.

I liked Micah, although after her introduction I didn't trust a single thing she said. She's completely unreliable, totally, because she's a compluslive liar, and if you're one of the people who are allergic to unreliable narrators, this book is not for you. It doesn't try to sell you on the idea of an unreliable narrator. Instead, it revels in the uncertain. I don't hate unreliable narrators, but I also am not particularly drawn to them, and Micah's story didn't bug me. But that may partly be the way I read it: on page one I decided that I was going to sit back and enjoy the ride, rather than trying to second-guess and predict what was true and what wasn't. I think I enjoyed the book more that way than if I was distracted looking for 'slips,' but mileage may vary.

I think this was a successful book, in that it appeared to be trying to do something tricky—create an at least somewhat sympathetic narrative about a compulsive liar, in which the reader can't ever be sure of anything, and yet still be emotionally satisfying—and, as far as I'm concerned, does so. It was a page-turner, but won't be one of my favorites, I don't think, just because the narrative was very uncomfortable. Of course, it was supposed to be uncomfortable, I think, which is why: successful book. But one I appreciate intellectually more than I enjoy or love.

Larbalestier has said that she deliberately wrote the book so that the ending could be interpreted at least two ways (or possibly three). Actually I can think of a dozen ways to interpret the ending without thinking very hard, and I'm sure I could come up with hundreds more if I tried. But I'm going to talk about that under the cut, because it's necessarily spoilery of a few major plot points to do so, and I think this is a book that ought to be read with as few spoilers as possible. (I was told, in fact, not even to read the jacket copy.)

( Spoilers below the cut )

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How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier

In the city of New Avalon, most people have a fairy—an invisible spirit or power or maybe just a chunk of free-floating luck that gives them a particular ability or advantage. Charlie's best friend Rochelle has a clothes-shopping fairy: when she goes shopping, she can always find something super-flattering that fits perfectly... and that is on extreme markdown. Charlie's mother has a Knowing What Your Kids Are Up To fairy, and always knows intuitively when Charlie's gotten herself into trouble. Charlie's classmate Fiorenze has an All The Boys Like You fairy. And Charlie, Charlie has a parking fairy. Charlie hates her parking fairy and wants to get rid of it, and she also hates the way Fiorenze's fairy is jerking around the boy she likes. But her plan to fix both of those things only makes everything worse.

This was a very fun book, very light. What I think of as a bathtub read. It reads very quickly; I finished it in one sitting. And I found Charlie very likable, even when I had those moments where I-the-reader realized that what Charlie was trying to do was very ill-advised. Like Charlie's envy of the All The Boys Like You fairy. I had enough perspective to realize that that would be more of a nightmare curse than a blessing, but it didn't make me see Charlie as an idiot for not realizing it, since I'm not totally sure I would have realized exactly how bad that could be at age 13 or 14. Similarly, at first I thought Charlie was being kind of whiny for wanting to ditch her fairy (a parking fairy wouldn't be my first choice, but it'd surely be better than no power at all?), but I became more sympathetic when I quickly realized that she kept being dragged along (and, in one case, actually kidnapped) on trips she didn't want to make because people wanted to take advantage of her power.

So, anyway, the book was very character-centric and the plot is almost wholly character-driven. Indeed, the 'external' plot, which involved betting on high school sports, seemed the weakest part to me; its most important influence was the way it affected Charlie, and the parts that didn't involve Charlie directly just seemed to fade off. That didn't bother me too much, because I read much more for character and worldbuilding than for plot, but it felt like that subplot was a bit of scaffolding that could have been excised without much detriment to the book. But that's minor. (Also minor: because I'm a worldbuilding junkie, I wanted more of an idea of what was up with New Avalon, its somewhat-unusual social structures, and why they had fairies when nobody else did? Or perhaps other people did but didn't realize it? But again, the book was so character-centric that I have trouble faulting it for not getting into more worldbuilding geekery.)

Anyway. Fast, fun, light read. Recommended, espeically for plane trips and rainy Saturdays. And bathtubs, if you're a bathtub reader like me.

( Some more thoughts, that are spoilery )

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Fire, by Kristin Cashore

In the Dells, there are two types of animals: normal animals, which behave as animals do in our world, and Monsters, who have the shape of animals but fantastic colors—and power over the human mind. A brown horse is a horse; a turquoise horse with a snow-white mane, that can snare you with its beauty and destroy you for its own purposes if it so chooses, is a Monster. Fire, named for her red-and-magenta-and-yellow-and-gold hair, is the last living human Monster, but her exceptional beauty and her power over men causes her considerably more grief than joy. Worse, the troubles in the Dells can be traced directly back to her Monster father, who was beautiful and sociopathic, and Fire's quest is as much about proving that she is not like him as it is about ameliorating the damage he did.

This book is both like and unlike Graceling, Cashore's first novel, a book that I recognized as imperfect but still loved. Both feature a superhuman protagonist, but where Katsa in Graceling was a perfect fighter and survivalist, Fire is perfectly beautiful and has powers over the minds of others. (If you want to be very, very overly simplistic about both the characters and gender stereotypes, you could say that Katsa has a 'masculine' power and Fire a 'feminine' one. But it's a whole hell of a lot more complicated than that.) The reason that I don't believe that Katsa or Fire are Mary Sue characters, though—despite the fact that, on the surface, you could make an argument for either one—is that the challenges they are faced with are proportionate to their skills... and their powers cause them as much difficulty as they do advantage.

(As a side note: I am increasingly frustrated with the label 'Mary Sue,' although I think there was some value to its original definition. I think its definition has slipped to the extent that it's now often leveled at any female character who is attractive, interesting or powerful, and I think that's a shame. But that's a rant for another day.)

In Fire's case, this difficulty is immediately obvious. Because of her beauty and her powers, men tend to find her attractive, often beyond their ability to resist... whether she wants them to or not. Anyone who has ever been the target of persistent unwanted attention can already see why this is a problem, but to spell it out: sometimes, yes, the men want to love and cherish her, or obey her, but sometimes they want to rape her, or hurt her or destroy her for not wanting them in return, or simply because they're angry that she has such power over them. And while some women are Fire's allies, others hate her for the way she attracts attention. There's a particularly poignant bit where Fire is traveling with an army, and the army's commander gives her a guard of about twenty people. Part of the reason for this is to protect her from opposing forces, and part of the reason is to protect her from animal Monsters (Monsters crave the flesh of other Monsters beyond all else, which seems to be the only thing keeping animal Monsters from completely overrunning the ecosystem), but she quickly realizes that her entire guard is made up of straight women and gay men, because their main purpose is to protect her from the very army she's helping.

And the funny thing is, this made me identify with her a great deal. I'm hardly such a raving beauty that I drive men insane and provoke fury in women, and yet I've had that experience, of the uneasy realization that someone has an interest in me that I don't reciprocate, and that I can't tell whether they will mean me harm or not, and that I have to be very careful. While Fire's beauty isn't something I can relate to my personal life, Fire's dilemma is.

The other thing about Fire that I like is that she has agency. The path she will take is not clear, and over the course of the book she decides it, figures out what she wants to do and needs to do, and does it, despite the fact that she has to go against the wishes of the other people in her life to do so.

My criticisms of Graceling were the prose and the worldbuilding; the former I found, not bad exactly, but flat, and the latter I found somewhat generic. They've both improved in Fire, but they're both still her weakest points; the prose is still clunky in places and the setting is still medievaloid. But they're also both improved, which is a good sign. I'm hoping that the trajectory continues and the prose and worldbuilding improve again for her third book, Bitterblue, which I'm very much looking forward to.

( Some spoilery musings under the cut )

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Windows 7 is very, very pretty.

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I know that, after the holidays and supporting Haiti and other charitable causes, a lot of people don't have a lot of spare cash right now. But this cause is worth a look, and you get goodies for your trouble. (Also a number of you are either in or from Los Angeles, and this is something you can do to make a real local impact.)

helptheproject is an auction to benefit the The Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go.

Due to budget cuts, unless we can raise $15,000 by mid-March, we will lose our centerpiece program, the One-on-Ones. In this program, professional actor/writers write a short play to act in with the kid they're paired with, rehearse it with them in a beautiful countryside summer camp, and then return to Los Angeles to put on a show. This program has been running continuously for 20 years - let's not lose it now!

Please help save the One-on-Ones by spreading the word, bidding at the auction, and/or offering something for people to bid on. Click on the "offered" or "seller" tags on the right-hand side of the page to see who's got an auction up and what people are offering. There's currently everything from baked goods to books to original fiction. And more.

I'm currently offering several things, including proofreading, a custom cookbook made to order, a Seattle care package, and mini fruit pies in jars.

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Catching up all the way back to early December. Lots of links beneath the cut.

( All manner of things. )

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Apparently, baking chicken with a sauce made of onion, garlic, orange juice and lime relish turns it bitter. (The relish, I mean.) In the future, just bake with the onion/garlic/orange juice and finish with the lime relish after the baking is done.

Still, it was entirely eatable!

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An experiment, in the hopes of using up the stuff in the crisper in a timely fashion.

( Cut to spare the flist )

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I still enjoy a lot of the cyberpunk I read ten years ago (I went through a cyberpunk phase), but I can't read, e.g., Neuromancer anymore without wondering whether Molly goes home and unwinds by watching pictures of cats with captions on them, or whether Case has ever indulged in a webcomic flamewar.*

I guess a worldwide computer network, like everything else, becomes drastically less edgy and cool when you actually put real people in it!

* - Yes, the memes of his future would not be the same as the memes of ours, but the general point remains.

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Is there any way to edit google docs via iPhone? I tried just navigating to the site and using the Google app, but no luck—both bring me to a mobile access page that appears to be read-only. And all the apps I could find are also viewers, i.e., read only.

I discovered this on Sunday when I made a shopping list in Google Docs and went to refer to it on my phone... and found that I couldn't mark what I'd already put in my cart in any way, thus removing a fair bit of the utility of having the list there.

Any thoughts?

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It's time for another round of Cora Dinner Theater! What should we have for dinner tonight tomorrow?

Poll #1517354
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

Main dish

Side dish

When I mentioned buying cranberry beans for my cranberry beans and rice dish, vom_marlowe asked for my recipe. So here it is! Coincidentally, I'm also making it tonight.

Beans and rice (of which cranberry beans is one of my very favorite variants, although you could sub in dried black or kidney beans if you don't have cranberry beans handy) is one of those dishes that I have made so often I can make it on instinct—my family growing up ate various bean and rice dishes often, since we liked them and they're inexpensive, and then when I was in college I made them whenever I had a stove, because, again, cheap and tasty and filling.

Because I've made it so often, it's also one of the dishes that I make without a recipe, by ear, adjusted for what I happen to have, or not have, in the pantry. So the recipe has a lot of 'if you happen to have this, then use it; otherwise, use this other thing.' It's a good recipe to play with to suit your own taste.

It can be made with meat (although the meat amount is pretty light even so) or vegetarian, or, as I am making it today, vegetarian with meat on the side, to be added by those who like it.

( Cranberry Beans and Rice )

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Food porn time!

I spent, oh... let's see: out of the past six weeks, I've been away from home for about four weeks. So I didn't do a lot of cooking and shopping in between, because it didn't seem worthwhile to buy a lot of food in order to watch it go bad while I was away.

Also, the last time the boy and I were at the liquor store was in preparation for the 2008 election night party, so it'd been a while.

So yesterday, we went to the liquor store. I now have enough kahlua and Irish cream to make legions of froofy coffee drinks, which is good, because we probably won't make it back to the liquor store until another year passes. ;)

And today, we went to the farmer's market! I am particularly pleased with the spoils of that quest.

In terms of meat, we got a chicken (which will be roasted for dinner), plus chicken feet and necks for stock; sweet Italian sausage (for a potato, sausage and onion fry-up sometime next week); and a keta salmon fillet, which I may glaze and grill or I may sous vide.

Veg was, of course, the largest haul: purple kale and curly green kale (one of which will be turned onto udon soup with kale); brussels sprouts (for warm shredded sprout salad); a mixed bag of root vegetables for braising or roasting (looks like a mix of carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets, and rutabagas); a huge bag of carrots; and a small bag of assorted mixed potatoes. Also, a bag each of dried chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, which I will combine with the fresh crimini mushrooms I have on hand to make a mushroom risotto.

We also got dried field peas (which I'm thinking of using in peas and rice, or possibly in soup); dried cranberry beans (definitely for beans and rice); and fresh wheat flour, by which I mean milled just last week. The wheat flour will be used to try to make a classic baguette, and I'm also using it to reboot my sourdough starter, which got a bit grim-looking after a few months of neglect.

Finally, a few treats: a gallon of Honeycrisp cider, a box of very gingery molasses-ginger caramels, a small round of camembert-style cheese.

Dinner tonight: roast chicken and vegetables, with an apple salad on the side. Tomorrow: vegetable-chicken soup with the leftover chicken, and fresh baguette. I'm also going to experiment with planning out a week's worth of meals, so we'll see how that goes.

Mmm. Now to clean the kitchen so I have room to put this all away....

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I am home again!

I got home around noon, went straight upstairs to bed, and slept until five. I think I needed it.

Tonight, I'm making dinner, since one of the things I miss most of all when traveling is cooking. While one of my goals for this year is to cook healthier food (we need to keep an eyeball on jmpava's cholesterol), since it's a celebratory meal, I'm making homemade macaroni and cheese. I'm using this Martha Stewart recipe: Perfect Macaroni and Cheese, but, because I'm me, I had to tinker; I'm using rigatoni instead of macaroni, I added shallots to the roux, and I'm using all cheddar instead of cheddar and gruyere. (We got a lovely five-year aged Wisconsin cheddar in the Cheese of the Month thing, which I'm supplementing with regular extra-sharp Tillamook.) Serving with a side dish made of caramelized onions, stewed tomatoes, and broccoli. With Syrah.

Linkspam later, probably, but I wanted to share this Threadless t-shirt that was recently reprinted: We've Got Some Work To Do Now. Recommended for zombie fans and anyone who thought Velma from Scooby-Doo was awesome. (My mom always said, "You know, the reason Velma always loses her glasses must be that, without handicapping her, she'd solve the mystery before Fred even realized there was a mystery.) I kind of want there to be post-apocalyptic Scooby-Doo fanfic now.

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I'm pretty happy with how my resolutions went last year, so that's good. But I don't think the yearlong goals is a paradigm that works all that well for me. For instance—my reading through the year lead me to the conclusion that one environmental place that I can make a difference is to reduce the nonsustainable seafood I eat, and replace it with sustainable seafood. But that wasn't in my resolutions; my resolutions focused more on the ethics of terrestrial meat products. Similarly, one of my resolutions was to finish several short stories and submit them to markets; instead, I wrote a YA novel. Which isn't a failure, just a misapprehension of what would be good for me to do.

So. Instead, this year, I'm making the following singular resolution:

Every week, I will make a list of sixteen personal things, small or large, domestic or artistic, that I want to accomplish that week. I will also make a list of sixteen work-related things that I want to accomplish during work hours. And then I will accomplish at least twelve of them. (Why sixteen and twelve? I like those numbers, and they're attainable. That's all.)

I may also make sixteen (total, not personal and work) goals per month, of a larger scope than the weekly goals.

This gives me a bit more scope than simply making daily to-do lists, but also gives me the flexibility to change from week to week and month to month.

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Lamb chops sous vide, browned in butter, are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

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Last fancy meal before travel... (Although I hope to make some of the Washoku New Year's dishes with rowr.)

Tonight, I'm sous vide-ing salmon to the 'rare-medium-rare' temperature of 110F, in the hopes of getting something between cooked and sashimi.

First I brined the salmon in a 10 percent salt solution for 10 minutes. (Well, no, that's a lie; first I sliced the skin off the salmon.) Then I drained and rinsed the salmon and sealed it in a sous vide bag with a drop of soy sauce and a generous pinch of grated pickled ginger, and put it in the sous vide machine at 110F.

Then I started a batch of sushi rice in the rice cooker. Yum.

Then I sliced up an acorn squash into chunks, reserving the seeds, and made a miso glaze for it. I combined red miso, ginger, sake, and rice wine vinegar with a little honey, tossed it with the squash, and baked it.

I also toasted the squash seeds in a little oil and salt.

Finally, I crisped the skin I'd removed from the salmon in a little oil. (OMG salmon skin. I had no idea. It's got the same crunch-savory thing going on as chicken skin.)

The final dish will be a bowl of warm sushi rice, mixed with wakame sushi and chopped acorn squash seeds, topped with miso-glazed acorn squash on one side and sous vide-ed gingery salmon on the other, and sprinkled with crumbled crisped salmon skin.

With apples poached in ginger sake for dessert.

I'll post pics!

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I confess: when rachelmanija first lent me the book, I was a little afraid that it wouldn't be bad enough to be enjoyable. But then I opened it, and on the first page—the first page, mind you!—I got this gem of internal monologue from Our Heroine:

Not even the breathtaking sights of man-engineered beauty of parades of lush palms, immaculate lawns and explosions of flowers and the nature-endowed magic of azure skies and golden sand-seas meeting at the horizon could ameliorate her irritation at having to succumb to this abuse of power.

And I thought, first, 'well, that clears up that!' and then 'Rachelllll what have you given me!'

After that, the driver of her car got run off the road by a sheik's entourage, she hauled the unconscious and hemorrhaging driver out of the driver's seat so she could drive 100+ miles an hour to catch up to the entourage so they could... help her get him to a hospital? Or maybe just so she could yell at them, I dunno. And then the entourage turns out to contain Our Hero (of course), who turns out to have basically an entire ER in the back of his limo (of course) so they can be all doctor-y together (with very specific terminology, although I have no idea if it's accurate at all).

Oh! And! They have incredible mutual passion for one another! Like this:

Eyes, the color of gold and the translucency of pure honey.

The captured hers, forbade her to see or sense anything else, even the person they belonged to. It was only when they finally released her in a sweep of thick black lashes to pour confusion over her that she was freed to take in everything about this man in one unmanageable gulp.

In her haste, she got glimpses of hair the deep glow of a raven's wing and the relaxed waves of a tranquil sea, skin of polished bronze, slashes and pains and hollows that were all assembled in a composition of -- of... wow.

If she'd ever had any concept of beauty, it had been before she'd seen this -- this... man?

Was he a man? Or a being right out of fable?

And this:

What was happening to her? She'd never reacted to a man, to anything, like that. The runaway reaction, suffocating in intensity, transporting in headiness.

And, from his POV, this:

He'd never known such attraction, so much so that at first he wondered if his exhausted mindhad been playing tricks on him. But not anymore. Not after the incredible experience of tending her injured driver with her, and everything that has come before and after it. Every word lashing him, every glance penetrating him, every breath singeing him. It was real. More than real.

The narrative has to remind me approximately every third paragraph that she thinks he's hot, and he thinks she's hot, because otherwise I MIGHT FORGET.

And despite all this, I'm still reading. Why? Well, given that they have unstoppable, undeniable, mutual OMGPASSION, of the kind that goes past hyperbole and on into the stratosphere, I am desperately curious what will drive them apart! Right now all there is is vague pride on her side and... uh, nothing on his side. Honestly, I am reading to find out why they don't just fall into bed in Chapter 3 and stay there through the end! Because there's got to be something to flesh this out to 187 pages, and I'm assuming it's not 153 pages of sex.

EDIT: I should probably also note for the record that I really like romance in books, both as subplots and in actual romance novels. Just... ones with a little bit more subtlety. ;)

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How bad an idea would it be for me to layer my hair like Boomer from BSG?

I can't do short bangs, because I won't get them trimmed enough to keep them out of my face. I just won't. But longer bangs, layered, to add interest...?

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I haven't done this in forever, and I suspect that I already posted this poem anyway, but, hell, I want to post it again. It's one of my favorite love poems ever. Maybe my favorite love poem ever.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

-- e. e. cummings

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