Judith Proctor's Journal

 I've just got around to reading 'The Dark is Rising', a classic Young Adult fantasy series by Susan Cooper.  I know a couple of my friends like it a lot, so I decided to give it a try.

My overall verdict is that the quality of the writing is excellent.  Cooper has a way of writing magic so that it simply happens.  There are some lovely descriptive sequences that really catch the imagination.  

However, the series has one really big drawback: the plot is like a bad D+D scenario.  All magic items were created in the ancient past, but there's no sense of how they were made or why, or why they can't be made again today.  Each magic item or prophecy is basically a plot token. You have to collect plot token A, then you need token B to decipher it. Plot token C is required to enable you to get token D. Token D, when used in the correct time and place will allow you to collect prophecy E, etc.

The quality of the writing kept me going through all five volumes, but the lack of  a cohesive sense of plot means that I won't read it again.

If anyone wants the five volume set, then it's yours for the cost of postage.

 I've been loaned 'The Beiderbecke Affair', 'The Beiderbecke Tapes' and 'The Beiderbecke Connection' by a friend and greatly enjoyed them.

It's quite an old series, filmed back in 1985, but benefits greatly from slow pacing and a very dry sense of humour.

It took me a couple of episodes to get into it, but I was a total convert by the end.

It's essentially a slow-burning romance between a moderately unlikely couple.  Everyday, Mr Chaplin the woodwork teacher gives Mrs Swinburne , a divorcee, a lift into school.  There's a detective plot as a background framework to everything.

He's a mild-mannered jazz fan, fairly set in his ways, who takes a relaxed attitude to life.  He's also middle-aged, definitely not George Cloony and has hair that's thinking about receding.

She's an English teacher, deeply into feminism, saving the planet and any left-wing cause that comes along.  She's also good-looking.

The relationship between them grows and develops over the series.  They have some great dialogue - especially if you like Yorkshire, and there is a supporting cast of various eccentric characters.

What I like most though is the relationship between the leads.  I don't think they ever so much as kiss onscreen (in spite of having conversations in bed), but there is an affectionate chemistry and the kind of dialogue that shows how well they know one another. 

It's nice to see the way their relationship grows and develops over time (and to understand what makes it work so well).  Trevor, Mr Chaplin, has a definite inner child - in the best of ways.  He's a happy, non-bossy person, and can make friends in about ten seconds with any fellow jazz fan.

 I really like Trevor.  He's not the kind of man you gush over on screen, but he's the kind of man you find in happy marriages (reminds me a little of my husband).

You can see the 

 (and probably more) on You Tube.

Or you can find the whole 'Beiderbecke Trilogy' (search for that title) for about £15 on ebay.

 An Avengers movie fic written with all the characters as chefs in restaurants.

Gen, great fun to read -highly recommended.

  This was the first library book I borrowed on my Sony ebook reader. (and I'm waiting to see if Amazon censor that line from my book review...)

Set in a future where the British Empire rules a good chunk of the stars, the book gives us an Empire with 1970's entertainment, pseudo-Victorian morality for the Empire and technology that feels like a second-hand car.

Captain Smith and his motley crew face the evil Ghasts and overcome them by plenty of derring do and stiff upper lips. There's not much in the way of character development.

You'll need to have seen things like Bladerunner and War of the Worlds to get all the jokes.

There were some annoying point of view shifts in mid-paragraph - I suspect that's partly due to this being the writer's first book.

I found the book entertaining enough to read to the end, but not interesting enough to want to read the next one in the series.

'No Present Like Time' is the  second book in Steph Swainston's 'Castle' series.  It's a lot better than the first one.
Most of the things that annoyed me in the first volume are absent now.  It's much better plotted, characters are introduced in a more organised manner, the lapses into present are almost (but not entirely) eliminated.

Without these annoyances and distractions, the writer's talent for language can show forth to much better effect.  Swainston has a real gift for descriptive language and a delight in playing with words.  In the 'Shift', the alternative world that Jant reaches under the influence of drugs, many of the strange beings there have names that are puns or clever plays on word meanings.

Sadly, there were still a few minor things that threw me out of the text.  It's usually the bits that the writer adds as almost throwaway afterthoughts that tend to spoil the book for me. A description of a hurricane has windmills rotating so fast that 300 catch fire and burn.  Clearly the writer doesn't know that any miller worth his salt will take the canvas off his sails and lock the sails in position at the first sign of really bad weather.

And Tris, which ironically has no need of a long-distance communication system, turns out to have the semaphore towers which were lacking in the Fourlands - which did need them.

Still, overall, a well-written book and one that encourages me to continue with the series.

 A well-told tale that starts gently with a fairy story that starts reaching into the past and gradually becomes a mystery story as Becca searches for the tale of her grandmother's early life.

Although we realise fairly early on that the story will link back to the Holocaust, it's still shocking to be reminded of the bare facts of the era. Yolen handles this well, making us feel the horror, but without giving you nightmares.

There's a careful understanding of human nature, both of the way the partisans dealt (or didn't deal) with their inability to make an impact, and also the inescapable fact that there were people who accepted and even approved of what was happening.

I like the way Yolen gives and ending that allows us to understand that a person can be happy even without the traditional 'happy ending'.

I'd definitely recommend this book, though I'm not sure that I'd want to read it twice - the story will linger in my mind for a long time.

Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell

A gentle book in which nothing much happens, but which happens in such minute detail that you end up fascinated by the social mores of who will condescend to speak to whom in a tiny English village.

These are the upper class women who didn't find a rich husband, and are trapped by poverty and social convention into a genteel poverty that seeks desperately to convince itself that any sign of wealth would be ostentatious in any case.

Yet, even in this stilted social setting, the people are still capable of quiet acts of kindness (and have the understanding to conceal their help so as not to burden their friend with the need for gratitude).

This is a book that I'm sure I'll read again.


Sheepfarmer's Daughter - Elizabeth Moon

I really enjoyed Moon's Serrano Legacy SF novels, so I was looking forward to her fantasy series, The Deed of Paksenarrion.  However, although the background of the mercenary troop conveys a knowledge of the military (Moon was in the US Marine Corps), there's no darn plot!  I got nearly half way through the book before giving up in disgust.  There was what appeared to be a plot thread at the start, but it petered out into nothing and the 'story' just becomes endless bits of marches and combat practice.

The background is detailed, but I need more than just  background to hold my interest.  I can survive without plot (Cranford has almost no plot), but for that to happen, I need characters I can relate to - and Paksenarrion fails the test.  Looking at Wikipedia, I see that this was Moon's first novel.  Perhaps that explains why I like her later work better.

I was given this as a promotional book at an SF convention (LX) and wasn't expecting to like it, as urban fantasy isn't a genre I normally read.  I don't normally read erotic romance either - nothing against the genre, more a feeling of 'been there, written that'.

However, I got a lot of pleasure from reading the book and found myself keeping coming back to read the next chapter when I really had other things I should have been doing...

The characters are well written and I fell in love with Seth, the shy, geeky writer.

The plot is engaging and the dilemma of the succubus (anyone she has sex with will end up giving her their life energy, and the more good/genuine the person is, the more they will lose to her) means that she can't have sex with any man whom she really likes and respects.

There's also some good minor characters who are more than just background cutouts.

The promotional book seems to have worked.  I've just bought the next one in the series...

I'd almost forgotten what 'hard' SF was really like until I read Rendezvous with Rama. It was wonderful to have a story where physics is integral to everything, where speed of light limitations are woven into the story, where the alien artefact has a design that takes physics into account (I'm still pleased that I managed to predict one minor plot element by recalling one of the physical properties of water.)

And how can I fail to love a story that actually takes Coriolis force into account?

The strong grounding in reality makes the whole story feel so much more real. You believe in the characters and in the dangers they encounter, because you know that no 'magic' will be used to rescue them if they get into a tight corner.

Another good point about the focus on hard science is that the book hasn't dated. There were only two small moments when I realise how long ago the book was written. One was when the shape of Rama was compared to a domestic boiler, and the other was a reference to the steady state theory. Apart from those two minor points, the book could have been written yesterday. The laws of physics don't change with fashion.

Clarke can't write in depth characters, but they work reasonably well in this book, and the setting of Rama itself makes the story live.

This was a 9/10 book for me and I'd happily recommend it to anyone.

If you'd like a selection of traditional carols (including the Ilkley Moor version of 'While Shepherds Watched'), then you could do a lot worse than order Christmas is Come In (if you know birdsedge then you'll already know the excellent quality of Artisan's singing). It's got a lovely collection of folk carols as well as better known ones like Silent Night and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (the latter was a folk tune originally, of course!) Artisan sing acapella and I've loved their music ever since I started going to folk festivals.

This book really annoyed me. Like the writer, I believe that many nursery rhymes have older origins, but Iles goes way too far into conjecture. His 'research' never goes back to original sources; his reconstructions are mostly conjecture and his only real aim appears to make a book that will sell well.

Knowing the habits of modern day filkers, and having rewritten many songs myself, I know that songs can be altered dramatically with no intent to suppress the original version. I also know that songs that start clean can acquire extra verses that are decidedly unclean.

As Iles's entire approach is based on the premise that the songs were all originally sexual/pagan in content and that this was edited out and changed by clergy or song collectors, I have to disagree with most of his book.

I could easily believe that many traditional songs started clean, acquired extra smutty verses that were sung in the apropriate places and that these verses (sadly) were often not passed onto collectors. This does not, however, invalidate the collected song.

(Iles's approach is a bit like assuming that "While shepherds washed their socks by night" must be the original version because the church would clearly want to suppress it.)

The whole book is even more frustrating because now and then he makes a case that does stand up to inspection. It's just that you have to wade through too much supposition and conjecture to get to the useful bits.

Rarely do I shout out loud in protest while reading a book - this one had my family getting inundated by irate comments.

I had to go away and read some Ronald Hutton to remind myself what research into folk traditions really means.

If anyone wants this book, just ask (but you'll have to remove Hutton from my cold, dead hands)...

Having just escaped from a long argument in another LJ with the kind of person who valued opinion over fact (and refused even to state her opinion half the time - for reasons that were dead easy to spot - she was the kind of person who called the UK out for not treating babies born so premature that the had no real chance of survival, but was naturally opposed to spending state money to save poor American babies), it has been a real relief to start reading a book by Jeff Gillman, an excellent American writer

"The Truth about Organic Gardening" is a book that deals in facts. Gillman isn't partisan - if an organic practice is good, he'll say so. If a non-organic practice is good, he'll say so. He's a solid background in teaching and researching horticulture and if he says something, it means he's checked it out and isn't just saying it because he wants it to be true. For instance, when looking at herbicides and pesticides, he considers them on their individual merits. He points out that some synthetic pesticides are very dangerous and some are very safe; likewise organic pesticides vary in their safety (he considers rotenone to be very dangerous).

'Natural' does not mean 'safe to humans'.

Gillman also discusses other methods of pest control - his favourite approach of standing back and doing nothing has a lot going for it. He points out that if plants are well watered and fertilised, then they can afford to lose about a third of their leaf area without suffering great harm and that their natural resistance is higher when they're well looked after.

He's got a good sense of humour. When he talks about controlling Japanese beetles (an American pest, so not directly relevant to the UK, but still interesting to read about), he talks about pheromone traps. He rates them as ineffective - because there are so many of the beetles, even though the trap kills a lot of them it also attracts more into the neighbourhood. He suggests giving a trap to someone you dislike and watch as their garden fills up with beetles!

The book looks at many areas of organic practice (and Gillman is fair to point out that some of these techniques are used by non-organic gardeners as well) from green manures to bird control.

For each practice/technique, Gillman spends a page or so discussing it, then neatly sums up the pros and cons in bullet points at the end. It's a very good format for dipping and browsing and easy to read/extract information on.

He also understands statistics. (You wouldn't believe how rare this is) When discussing the results of a study, he'll point out how much confidence can be placed in the result. (eg. if 4 out of 500 people get cancer during a study of a weedkiller, what is the likelihood this could have happened by chance? Low numbers are subject to wide fluctuations. ie. 4/500 is a lot less reliable data than 16/2000)(and indeed, a later study with 54,000 people did not show any increase in cancer at all for that particular weedkiller). He's also concerned that studies are often not carried out on organic pesticides/weedkillers because they are assumed to be safer. But rotenone (which is natural) kills just as many fish and frogs as glyphosphate (which is synthetic).

I'd recommend this as an interesting book for anyone who wants to know the pros and cons of different gardening techniques and likes to have some data to support the opinions of the writer. This is NOT a 'how to do organic gardening' book, but it is a good unbiased study of what works and what is safe.



Where do I stand on the organic front?

I garden organically to a large extent. I do this to minimise the harm to wildlife and also to maximise my crops. I won't use slug pellets of any kind becasue they kill thrushes. I don't use pesticides because I'm wary of spraying anything that I might breathe. I quite enjoy weeding (It's relaxing) but I use glyphosphate on bindweed because there's no other way to kill it and glyphosphate is inactivated when it hits the soil. I add compost and manure in large quantities to my soil (You should see this year's leeks! They got the compost heap added to the patch not long before we planted them.)

In short, I'm an organic gardener, but not to the point of fanaticism.  There are some 'organic' products containing copper that I'm not very keen on, but there are some organic practices - like watering with dilute urine - that I've had really good results with (excellent onions this year) and I'm positively evangelical about.

I picked up a book while on the canals that no one else on Library Thing owns!

Mind you, it's not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped.  It needed a good editor, but canal biographies are probably a small market.

Still wobbly. Reading and cross-stitch seem to be among the few things that don't make me feel worse, so I'm doing a lot of both.  (computer use is generally bad, so I'm getting very little done on that front and email is just having to wait most of the time)

Just finished an early Heinlein: 'Starman Jones'

Still a surprisingly good read in spite of being written in 1953.  The computers only take binary input and decimal to binary conversion is done on spaceships by looking up the conversion in reference books - and I still enjoyed reading it.  The story survives the dated stuff by still feeling good with the stuff that hasn't dated - and it's a cracking good 'boy's own' adventure story.  In essence, farm boy with a desire to go into space takes his uncles astrogation books and saves the day.

Went to see the new Trek movie for the third time yesterday. This is a record for me.  I don't think I've ever seen a movie twice before, yet alone three times.

I'm hoping lots of my friends have seen and enjoyed it, because I think this is going to become a new fandom for me, and I'd hate to be there without the rest of you.

I'm trying to work out why the movie works so well for me.  I'll ponder non-spoilery stuff and then do spoilery stuff behind a cut tag.

Captain Pike - Bruce Greenwood does an excellent job.  In the original series, Pike was the captain of the Enterprise before Kirk and features in the episode 'Menagerie'.  He's a much more interesting and well-developed character in the movie and I like attractive older men.

Having said that about older men, I have to add that Chekov is cute beyond belief and Kirk (Chris Pine) is virtually jail bait.

Uhura is strong-willed and intelligent and speaks all three dialects of Romulan.

McCoy is wonderful.  Karl Urban is McCoy to the life.  He feels like DeForrest Kelly.  He has the mannerisms, the dialogue and I love him.  His relationship with both Kirk and Spock is spot on.  And the script-writers have given him some lovely classic lines: "pointy-eared, green-blooded hobgoblin"

Zacchary Quinto does an excellent Spock - very close to Nimmoy's performance (there are moments when you could almost swear he was Nimmoy), and yet, perhaps because he isn't Nimmoy, he isn't my favourite character from the film.

Sulu was the only one who didn't really grab me.  Nothing I can fault, but I definitely preferred George Takei's version.

Scotty took a while to grow on me. He feels least like the original character. However, by the third watching I'd become a convert. I like his sense of humour.  At one point, viewing a scene of complete chaos on the bridge, he just stands there watching and says: "I *like* this ship."

Pine's version of Kirk really shouldn't work, except that it does...  If you had told me that Kirk would be my favourite character, I'd have laughed in your face:--( Read more... )