Riveting, wonderful, funny at times, and gripping at others (The Long Winter is an amazing account of the killer winter of 1880-1881, and the chapter when Almanzo and Cap risk their lives to get enough wheat to feed the town and save it from starvation is edge-of-your-seat nailbitingly written).
I hated that scene. As I remember it (it's been a while), Almanzo and his brother had a whole lot of wheat stocked up to be seed for the next year. Almanzo was risking his life to save his next year's crop. Cap didn't know this -- Cap thought that there wasn't any wheat at all in town, and he thought he was risking his life to save the town. And Almanzo let Cap go along with him, even though he had to have known that Cap wouldn't have agreed to it if he knew that the Wilders had some wheat.
That's right - I have to say, I loved it when Pa Ingalls figured it out.
Back to Amy's tour of Awesomeness: I am attempting to get a friend intrigued enough to drive me to the event. Will see if it works.
LIW did shave a few years off of Almanzo's real age, probably to make it less skeevy when he started walking her home, considering she was 15 and he was 25 IRL, instead of the implied 20-22.
I never made that connection about Almanzo and Royal hiding the wheat. now I am retroactively annoyed at him, as Cap Garland was my favorite!
Craftlit which is a podcast which combines knitting with literature is going to be reading Dracula in October. (They're doing "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" right now.)
John Hodgman interviewed George RR Martin: [link]
So REAMDE landed on my doorstep yesterday moning, with a thud loud enough that I heard it upstairs, in the shower. Big book. Also big: the author's name. 2x the size of the title on the spine, bigger on the front cover. I'm having a hard time not re-seeing the title as "you'll buy anything by". OTOH, the first 80 pages have been pretty happy geeky reading.
I finished Ready Player One last week and liked it a lot. So, literary gameworlds, go!
ION, last night after all the dinner stuff and the homework stuff, all three of us ended up piled on the bed, reading for an hour. I am still smiling thinking about it.
I finished Ready Player One last week and liked it a lot.
What did you like about it? Genuinely curious because I spent probably 75% of that book furiously turning pages and cursing under my breath because I loathed the main character, and yet the plot was such a page-turner I couldn't put it down even as I was hating every page. (DH nicknamed it "Da Vinci Code for nerds" which I think is about right.)
And then in the end, the thing that had me literally throw the book across the room was the
reveal about Aech. What a load of self-congratulatory BULLSHIT that was. "Look, I put a queer black female character in! I'm so fucking enlightened! Except, man, it's so weird thinking about you that way - can I just erase your identity and think about you as a normal person instead, by which I mean a straight white guy?"
I am looking forward to REAMDE.
Jessica - I second the plot love and same for the pacing. I have a ridiculous, cartoony passion for the landing of the robots at the final battle and think he handled the movie-game concept and the dual-wage corporate setup well. The details won me over.
You know, I'm pretty neutral on the main character. I've met him, or someone a lot like him. That doesn't mean he was likeable, and I think his judgement calls were stereotypical. But I got all into the puzzle-solving and probably will read it again for the characters.
A hangup was Art3mis - specifically the fact that her character shifted to 'love interest, second class' when she seemed to have the potential to be so much more complicated. There were a number of places where things could have opened up dramatically and character-wise, and wrenches could have been thrown, but the safe plot option seemed to win out. I wished several times that he didn't need to overexplain everything. .
ETA: DaVinci Code for Nerds. HA. DH wins.
