[  Mood: Silly ]
[  Currently: Listening to My son object to having a toothbrush taken away. ]
As a teacher, I have read a lot of dreck. Much of it seems to come from the teen romance genre. It pretty much sucks. Trust me.

Not so with The Luxe. The book tells the tale of young socialites in New York in the late 1800s. Our main character is Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of an old money family, who finds that due to diminished circumstances, she must marry wealthy ner-do-well Henry Schoonmaker. Nevermind that she is in love with her childhood friend (and family coachman) Will. Nevermind that her best friend, Penelope (who is from a new money family and is a little bold, our bad girl as it were) has her sights set on Henry. Nevermind that Henry seems to be falling in love with Elizabeth’s sister Diana. One thing Elizabeth knows she must do is her duty.

Or does she?

Author Godbersen has created a rich, meaty, historical romance for the YA set that is full of gossip and backstabbing. But this book owes more to Jane Austen than Gossip Girl, and that is a good thing. Slow to get going, once this book hits its stride you can’t put it down. Godbersen has also done her research, giving the story a rich backdrop full of fancy dresses and disreputable New York neighbourhoods. She has also been careful to weave in the story of the underclasses, with the characters of Will and Lina (Elizabeth’s maid) woven into the story as more than spear carriers.

I recommend this for the young woman in your life who loves reading, but for some strange reason isn’t really into genre fiction.

[  Mood: Fed Up WIth Life ]
[ Currently: Editing a podcast while my son plays. ]
As the author of the Uglies series, Scott Westerfield is a YA publishing superstar. His books have sold millions of copies, an justifiably so. His Uglies series is easily one of the best bits of sci-fi written in the last five or ten years. Adult, YA or kids – that was a good sereis.

Leviathan is the first book of his new steampunk trilogy and it is a solid outing. Set in WWI Westerfield’s vision pits the traditional machines of steampunk against the invented life forms of gene manipulation. The Darwinists are the latter, and they have mastered genetic science in a way we only dream of. This has allowed them to create life forms that take the place of machinery. Instead of zepplins, they pilot giant hydrogen inflated relatives of whales that themselves host a complete ecosystem of hydrogen sniffers and glow worms. The Darwinists make up the countries that we know as the Triple Entete, Britain, France and Russia.

The countries that are using the advanced machines are known as the clankers and they make up the Central Powers or Triple Aliance, specifically Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

In this world we meet Alex, the sole heir to Franz Ferdinan, yes, that Franz Ferdinan, who is suddenly thrust into the world of politics when his parents are murdered. He flees to Switzerland with a small group of tutors and loyal retainers. On the British side, we meet Deryn, a young woman who desperately wants to be an airman. The only problem, girls are not allowed. So Daryn becomes Dylan and joins the air service, working as a midshipman on the flagship of the British air service, Leviathan. Their two worlds collide when the Leviathan crashes in the valley where Alex is hiding. Both young people are pulled into the murk that is WWI.

Westerfield has created a masterful tale that weaves together history and an inventive twist on steampunk. I am sure someone will correct me, but I have not seen a lot of genetic manipulation in steampunk. This may be the invention of a new subgenre. What should we call it? Genepunk? Clonepunk?

Go get this.

I certainly hope you’ve seen this already, but if you haven’t, you really should check out the Symphony of Science project that autotunes Carl Sagan to create a truly magnificent video, A Glorious Dawn.

I’m not going to lie to you, I cried a bit watching that. Of course I also cry when I hear the music from Gojira.

But before you listen to Carl’s song, I want you to recall the stopsign solar system project I did earlier.

As it turns out, I wasn’t entirely correct in some of the details. As a recap, if the sun were the size of a stopsign, then the Earth would be about a block and a half away, and the nearest star would be on the other side of the planet, somewhere in China.

Here’s where I was wrong: Alpha Centauri is not the nearest star to Earth. It is the nearest star system. Alpha Centauri is, strictly speaking, three stars, or a trinary system. If I were to make a scale model of Alpha Centauri out on Clarkson Rd. and 53rd St., I would have two suns, each slightly larger than a stopsign, one of which would be at Clarkson Rd. and 53rd., and the other would be roughly the distance of Saturn’s orbit, or down near 49th Street. These two stars orbit each other roughly every 80 years, but for the microscopic humans living on the lima-bean-sized Earth over in China, these two suns (Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) would look like a single, reasonably bright star in their sky.

The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, the supposed companion to Alpha Centauri A and B. Proxima Centauri is about 12,000 AU away from the other pair, so by the stopsign scale it would be out by Birmingham, Alabama. A significant distance, but hardly China.

Now here is why I brought this up. This next piece of information is going to help you put the universe into a still more accurate perspective, thereby allowing you to appreciate Carl Sagan’s autotuned lyrics that much better. Here it is, the core concept:

The nearest star to Earth is not visible with the naked eye.

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, a relatively small and cool star. Red dwarf’s are some of the oldest stars in the universe because they’re so small. The hydrogen convects throughout their mass, fusing into helium in a slow and even manner that will gently smolder for billions upon billions of freaking years. Essentially until something really horrible happens to the universe in general.

It’s believed that red dwarfs make up the majority of the universe, but they only say that because we see a good deal of them in our immediate stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs are too dim to be seen at any large distance from Earth, even with the most powerful telescopes, so it’s just a reasonable guess that they’re everywhere.

You may have heard the theory of the Nemesis Star. It’s possible that our solar system has a red dwarf companion the same way Alpha Centauri does, a star somewhere beyond the oort cloud that causes periodic showers of extinction-causing comets. Now you’re probably thinking, how could there be a star out by our stellar Birmingham, and nobody knows about it? Well, think about it, you’re the size of a microbe and you’re standing out on Clarkson, looking in the direction of Birmingham, or even just Bastrop. You’re only going to see something half the size of a stopsign if it’s pretty damn bright.
Question of the day. What’s the most famous recurring comet we know of? It’s Halley’s Comet: http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery/is-seeing-a-comet-like-halley-s-a-once-in-a-lifetime-event/

But that’s why we have powerful telescopes and sky mapping software. If there is a Nemesis Star, it’s already been mapped and recorded. We just don’t know how far away it is. With red dwarfs it’s hard to calculate their distance because of their low luminosity. The Nemesis Star could have fallen between the cracks. A star in a haystack of stars.

So I hope that gives the universe a little more depth. Now go and listen to Carl Sagan, and when he mentions the galaxy-rise of 400 billion stars, remember that most of those stars are so dim that their light was lost in the great darkness before even their closest neighbors could see it.

[  Mood: Hypnotized ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
As I have said before, my grandmother had a name for work like Evanovich’s; toothache books. They aren’t going change your life or even make you think too deeply, but you will chuckle and, occasionally, guffaw.

This "in-between the numbers" book finds Diesel reappearing in Stephanie’s life, this time after a man named Wulf who is working with one of Stephanie’s FTAs. Only problem, Wulf seems to be able to shoot electricity out of his hands and dissappear at will. Stephanie reluctantly agrees to work with the hunky Diesel, if only to get his help out capturing the missing FTA . . . and get him out of her apartment.

This is much better than her last book, Finger Licking Fifteen, as Evanovich has be judicious in her use of Lula. Just enough for the humour, but not so much as to be annoying. Plum Spooky also differs as, like the other "Between the Numbers" books, it has a supernatural element. Not a heavy supernatural element, Diesel can open doors and start cars without a key. This is a great way to spend unwind when you are stressed and just need some brain candy, but nothing more.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Dealing with a son who doesn’t want to sleep in his bed ]
With her Enchanted Forest series, Patricia C. Wrede is already a children’s fantasy star, so any book of hers is eagerly anticipated by her fans. I, however had never heard of her. (Another party I was late to.) Instead it was the plot description that drew me to this book.

The Thirteenth Child tells the story of Eff Rothmerr, appropriately, a thirteenth child. According to superstition, she doomed to bring bad luck to all those around her. Added to her pain is the fact that her twin, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This means the same tradition and superstition that has handed Eff the place of pariah, has handed her brother a place of power and prestige.

EFF and Lan’s parents, aware of this contriversy, move their family to the frontier, just behind the great barrier. There Eff is away from the daily taunting of her cousins and the accusation of her aunts and uncles. But life on the frontier is not perfect and when Eff moves beyond the barrier to help investigate what a new type of magical creature is attacking settlements, she discovers how powerful her magic really is.

Excellent fantsy story that owes a great deal to Frank L. Baum and Laura Ingals Wilder. And like the works of Wilder, much of the story is focused on the mintia of Eff’s life growing up from 5 to 18. But don’t worry that the focus on chores and school will make this a boring read. In fact, good characters and pacing make this a joy to read. The author has also created a unique maguc system to go along with her fabulous storytelling.

My only criticism is that it wraps things up a little to quickly by using some Deus Ex Machina to deal with the human villain of the story, but hopefully Wrede will correct this in the other two volumes that are set to follow this one.

Rant time: This book has stirred up controversy because Wrede has deliberatly chosen not to have Native American characters. Her reasoning was that she wasn’t satisified with either of the two stereotypes that were emerging in her writing. So she chose neither.

She has been vilified for this choice by the blogosphere. And I wonder why. As I see it, this is a work of fiction. By definition that is made up. Plus it is fantasy, so expecting it to adhere to historical fact is a little ridiculous. I have seen historical fiction that has less historicity than this book. Why isn’t the blogosphere riled up about those?

Second, anyone with a passing knowledge of American History can tell you that even if there were Native Americans in Wrede’s Columbia, by the time of Eff’s family moving west (to what is essentially Missouri), many of those had either been massacred by the army, succumbed to disease or had been rounded up and shipped to reservations. A middle class girl like Eff would not have come into contact with them in any significant way. Look at the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which take place at about the same time. Where are the natives?

Third, and final, this is Wrede’s book. She can do whatever she wants with the characters. If people object to that, they should write their own book.

My take on this, ignore the fuddy-duddies who are whining that are whining in this book. This was not done out of racism. One look at the respect author Wrede has for African (she spells it differently) magic and the Rationalists(who don’t want to use magic) makes it clear that Wrede is not a flaming bigot.

Go get this book. It is worth it. It will be in the next "What to Read After Harry", which is coming as a supersized holiday spectacular in early December.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Watching My Son Sleep in My Lap ]
A lot of people want to live in the past, enchanted by the romance. A lot of them have written fanciful, romantic stories about travelling back in time. 1632 is not one of these.

The small town of Grantville, West Virginia has been transported back in time to 1632 (hence the title) due to a side effect of an alien tecnology. They are deposited into the middle of the Thirty Years War in the German province of Thuringia. (That’s in the middle part of Germany, in the mountain forrests)

Exploring their new environment, some of the townsfolk stumble across war attrocities in the making. Specifically the rape and torture of peasants. Rescuing some of the locals, the Americans quickly realize that they need to band together if they have a hope of survining. They also realize that their current level of technology is not sustainable, that they have to "gear down" as it were.

The residents of Grantville are also faced with the realization that, in order to survive, they need to get involved in what is going on around them. This means takinging in the refugees that are hiding in the forrest around the town, as well as showing the various military forces that the Americans are a force with which to be reconned.

Author Eric Flint has struck a perfect balance between historicity and fiction. There are overwrought moments of American patriotism and pride (I found myself mentally chanting USA! USA! a few times.), but there are also uniquely human moments that make this alternate past seem so real and engaging.

I must also stop and compliment Flint on his remarkably strong female characters. Of particular note is Gretchen, the printer’s-daughter-turned-unilling-camp-follower-turned-Grantville-citizen. Strong, practical, but completely human, Gretchen is compelling and real. You want to spend as much time with her as possible. This holds true for many of the women that Flint has created.

If there was any fantasy book that should be optioned for a TV series, this in one. Showtime, HBO listen up. A rich series, full of lots of interesting characters, thrilling battle scenes and love, lots of sweet love. Think of it as Jericho meets the Tudors. AWESOME!

[  Mood: Sick ]
[ Currently: Drinking my Baked Apple Black Tea ]
The Mortal Instruments trilogy tells the tale of Clary, a young woman whose world is turned upside down when her mother suddenly disappears. She discovers that she and her mother are Shadowhunters, descendants of Angels who fight demons.

City of Ashes, the second instalment in the series, finds Clary struggling with her emotions for Jace, given the revelation that he is her brother. Add to that the arrival of an Iquisitor who is convinced that Jace is guilty of working with their father, who is trying to bring down the clave, and you have an excting story.

Author Cassandra Clarke continues her creative world building with reinvisioning of the vampire, wereworlf, fairy and warlock mythos stirred in for levening. There is also an exploration of the real meaning of parenthood, as seen through Jace’s relationship with the Lightwoods who raised him and Clary’s relationship with the Shadowhunter turned wereworlf Luke. Worth the time.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
Janet Evanovich has been at the Stephanie Plum series for awhile. This installment finds Stephanie split three ways. She is helping Ranger hunt down the person (or persons) who have been burgling clents of his security business. Lulu has also witnessed a murder and needs Stephanie’s help hiding from the perpetrators. Meanwhile, Stephnaie still works for her cousin Vinnie’s bond business and she has skips to catch or he will replace with her arch-nemesis, Joyce Barnhardt.

As the title says, this is installment fifteen of the series, and while Stephanie is still fresh, some of the secondary characters are getting past there best before date. Lulu is especially getting dated. A charactature to begin with, she has devolved into stereotype, and not a flattering one at that. It is really time for Evanovich to retire Lulu for a few books, or maybe have her evolve and grow a bit. Ethier that or kill her, cause she is beginning to rub the wrong way.

And that is what makes this novel less entertaining than it should be. By giving Lulu such a parominent role in the plot, Evanovich has really shoved her in our face. She is always there and we get sick of her. Given that these books are supposed to be comedic mysteries, having a character that gets on your nerves takes way from the laughter.

[  Mood: Shocked ]
[ Currently: Getting ready for bed. ]
So I feel the need today to drag out my little soapbox and take a little stand.

I really don’t care who you are or how creatively brilliant you are, drugging and raping a 13 year-old girl is not excuseable.

And you think that this would be something that we as a society would be clear on, but I am shocked to see the literati of US, French and Swiss society defending Roman Polanski.

Whoopi Goldberg says it isn’t "rape-rape". Good to know that there are some types of rape that are less traumatic than others, Guinan. I’ll make sure to get that list so I know when I have a right to be outraged when I hear someone is violated.

And Deborah Winger says "[The arrest] is based on an…old case that is all but dead but for minor technicalities," Really? I look forwad to seeing Ms. Winger making similar pleas for other confessed child molestors.

Woody Allen has spoken out in favour of Polanski. Now there’s someone you want in your court when you are accused of child rape. A man who married and had a child with his step-daughter. He’s someone we all should choose as our moral compass.

The facts are Polanski ran away from a plea bargan deal that would have seen him spend 48 days in jail for drugging, raping and sodimizing a 13 year-old girl. He later agreed to pay the victim (cause that’s what she is) $500,000. He may, in fact, never have paid it. And yes the victim has forgiven him and moved on, but that is not the point. He agreed to serve the time (a very small amount given what he did) but then like a coward, he bolted.

If Polanski is not brought to justice for this crime it will be OJ all over again, where if you are wealthy and famous you can pay your way out of jail.

And is that a justice system we really want to have?

Getting down off my soapbox and going to bed.

[  Mood: Distorted ]
[  Currently: Watching Flash Forward ]
I am trying something new, the Library Loot post. Invented by Eva and Marg, this is a way to let people know what you brought home from the library that week.

My Loot:

Yup – another in the Open Court Philosophy and Pop Culture series. Bathroom reading!

I have taken to taking cookbooks out of the library to preview them before I buy them in order to determine if I should buy them.

The third book in a series that I am enamoured of. I have been waiting for this for a while.

Met the author at Polaris and am excited to read the book as it sounded cool.

My bathroom reading right now. It is the last of the current FoxTrot omnibuses, so I don’t know what to read after that is done.

That’s not all of the books as I have a shoking 92 out right now. Yup. That’s right. 92.