Rat Creature's Journal

My copy of Victory of Eagles arrived today, and I just fetched it from the package storage. Finally, after waiting forever to see the cliffhanger from the last volume resolved!

So, I started reading the second part -- though I'm not that far along yet -- and I really don't get how this vampire reaction to blood is supposed to work. Apparently even a little blood, like from a paper cut, taxes their control, unless they have lots of practice like Carlisle. Okay, whatever.

But how does that work while they are in a school where half the students will bleed three to five days per month?? Granted, it's not a lot of blood, but more than from a paper cut, so they must smell that. And it's not like they growl a lot at random girls from what I gathered. Is this explained somewhere? Did I miss something? Does menstrual bloood smell icky? What? I don't get it.

I've just finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I picked it up because I was looking for something to read in the library, and I recognized the title because a couple of people on my f-list had mentioned the series. Also I have a soft spot for emo teenagers (I mean, I liked Roswell, and Everwood for example). Though I think this is the level of OTT teenage angst where even I get annoyed with the protagonists.

I'm actually not decided on what my final verdict on this book is. On the bright side, considering how little actually happens over the 500 pages, it is a fast and pleasant read. Not great with the language or anything, but it kept me reading well enough. Even though, like I said, almost nothing really happens. Granted, the print wasn't small and there was good amount of white space so you could probably have fit it on fewer pages but still. Barely any action and the heroine/POV character Bella tends to faint through it, so we miss it. Instead we get teen angst (more or less variations on "wah, he's so much more beautiful and graceful than ugly, clumsy me! how could he possibly like me? *sob*") and crying.

And as you might have gathered from my previous paragraph I wasn't that thrilled with the narrator Bella, and Edward -- the gorgeous vampire who likes Bella because she smells tasty, and more or less seems to angst over not eating her, while she angst over him being out of her league -- frequently annoyed me as well.

And yet I'm considering whether to read the sequel, so I can't honestly say that I disliked it. >.<

It's baffling.

My to-read pile of actual books is getting rather smallish. I mean, I still haven't read Water Logic by Laurie Marks, and Amazon assures me that my copy of the newest Dresden Files will get to me in the near(ish) future, but I'm looking for recommendations what to read after that. And since my f-list is much more widely read than me, I thought it can't hurt to ask.

As for what I'm looking for, the most important thing for me to enjoy a book is that there is at least one likable main POV character to identify with. Generally I can't stand books where the hero is a jerk, or you end up hating everybody. I also dislike ambiguous endings. There are exceptions to that, but in general I prefer plots to be resolved when the book ends, unless it's setup for the sequel. Also, I prefer there to actually be a plot with stuff happening rather than all internal and relationship conflicts. And for the plot to make sense and have not too many holes. OTOH I can overlook slightly clunky language (see the above example of the Dresden Files, though the later novels aren't quite as bad as the earlier ones). I guess I'm rather lacking in avantgarde sensibilities...

As for genres, I like sf and fantasy, unless the worldbuilding sucks, but I also like mysteries, though not so much the serial killer genre. Thrillers rarely do anything for me, nor does romance as the main plot. Another of my quirks is that I don't cope well if a ton of characters are introduced in quick succession. I have nothing against an epic scale in principle, if characters are added slowly, but I don't remember names easily, something which results in me being confused a lot with a certain kind of mystery for example, where you'd be introduced to a dozen people over a few pages.

So do you have any suggestions for me?

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Drawing and Painting Fantasy Beasts by Kevin Walker from my library (or rather the German edition of this), and I found it quite useful and interesting overall. Basically it's just a bunch fantasy creatures drawn as examples, but each creature comes with about four pages of step by step process description of the techniques used, and the different sketches and stages that went into the final work.

Initially I got it because I had never painted with acrylics, but generally found hobby painting books about acrylics my library had rather useless and boring. I mean, it's not that painting with some new medium was like repairing a motorcycle or any of the other things for which you really need either instruction or a book rather than just muddling along, and there's only so much variation to the theme of "you put color pigment on a surface" anyway, but this book has a neat introduction section that just lists different techniques with a little picture of how it looks, which makes it easier to try things than unguided trial and error and I'm lazy like that. Also I wanted to do dragons anyway, and this has examples of fantasy art done with acrylic paint (other techniques too) with step-by-step pictures, so that seemed like a good match.

The first part of the introduction is just the usual list of drawing and painting materials, and rather pointless. Frankly I wonder why nearly every such book feels the need to recap materials in a generic manner at the start. I mean, if you pick up a specialized drawing book you are most likely aware that there's a difference between watercolors, gouache, acrylics and oil paint, and that pastel chalk is different from oil pastels and so on. It's not that I haven't picked up some useful general info from skimming these chapters, because every now and then one will mention something I hadn't know of before, but overall I find them superfluous. Still, the list introducing the materials used is only four pages in this book, so it doesn't dwell, and then the introduction gets more specific with the neatly ordered examples of actually using the materials.

The main part is sections with fantasy beasts sorted by regions in which they supposedly live, and realized in a variety of techniques, both traditional and digital, though most involve acrylics or acrylics mixed with other media. I suspect that if you are already really experienced this book won't tell you much new, but since I've only started using acrylic paint it was useful to have illustrated examples like this for achieving different effects and textures, and getting ideas on what to do, though I have only tried a couple so far.

I've scanned a couple of pages to give you an idea of the way the process descriptions and illustrations look like, though obviously if you don't speak German the text of these scans that explain what was done in each step won't do much for you.
( a few example pages behind the cut )

So I got The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards out of the library, because of my vague intention to draw more this year, and look for exercise ideas. Well, actually I got the German translation which doesn't have anything about brain sides in the title (and I wouldn't have borrowed it if it had, frankly).

Anyway, my overall impression can be summed up as: "Wow, that's a lot of pseudo-scientific 'wawawa wawa' (you know, like the adults go in the Peanuts?) for a couple of simple drawing exercises." Seriously, I skipped most of the endless and idiotic "brain modes" talk (or whatever it's called in the original) about supposedly "tricking" your brain into something to browse for the actual drawing stuff, and it still grated on me.

Some of the exercises sounded okay for drawing practice, but you could have probably cut about 200 pages of mumbo-jumbo from the total 300 pages without loosing any significant drawing content.

The memes where people list what books they've read the past year always end up really pathetic looking for me, because the bulk of my reading is fanfic, not actual books. So there's never much to show off. This year the handful of dead-tree fiction I've read was:

All nine volumes of the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, i.e. Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, and White Night

Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik (and I've reread the previous parts, i.e. His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War)

Tintenherz, by Cornelia Funke

Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman

The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I've also reread Dune again.

I started reading The Years of Salt and Rice, by Kim Stanley Robinson, but for some reason I put it aside (iirc it started slow? I don't really remember), and then I couldn't extend the time I loaned it from the library because someone else had reserved the book, and so I never finished it.

And I read three SGA tie-in novels, though I'm not sure whether those don't count more as fanfic:
The Chosen, by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen
Entanglement, by Martha Wells
Exogenesis by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen

Right now I'm in the middle of Fire Logic, by Laurie J. Marks, so I expect I'll finish that this year as well.

OTOH using my del.icio.us bookmarks, which overwhelmingly are just a log of my fanfic reading (though some are tagged as "to read"), to estimate the number of fanfics I read this year, that comes up to well over a thousand. Okay, so most of those are short stories, but some were awesome novels and novellas. Most recently Judas Doesn't Answer by Auburn (ca. 75,700 words), which is a gripping SGA/SG-1 mystery/suspense story I can definitely rec.

I've finished reading the SGA tie-in novel Exogenesis by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen, and I mostly liked the action-adventure part, though I keep getting surprised by just how more creepy and morally corrupt the Ancients are in the tie-in novels even compared to the series where they are of somewhat dubious character to begin with. However the strong presence of emotionally damaged woobie!Rodney really wasn't my thing. Also, I continue to find the way the expedition treats the Athosians when the former once again triggered a disaster that affects everybody disturbing.

So, like many other people I spent much of today (well technically yesterday) reading the new Harry Potter book.

( spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows )

After seeing a rec by iamza I've now read Entanglement by marthawells. It's a fast-paced action-adventure set in the second season shortly after Ronon joined the team, with an interesting plot involving Wraith, Ancient tech, and some history of the Ancients leaving Pegasus, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. I think I would have like it even better if Teyla had had more to do (but then I think that of the show a lot as well), but plenty of Sheppard kind of made up for that to me. Anyway, it was fun to read.