Over the weekend, I finished Pirate Latitudes, the posthumous novel by Michael Crichton.

Pirate Latitudes, and another novel, were found as completed manuscripts on Crichton's computer after his death.   I don't think it is known why it wasn't published - if it was held back for a reason or just hadn't reached publishing.

It's a good novel, more similar to his earlier works like The Great Train Robbery, than his later techno thrillers.  The first few chapters are a little annoying as they constantly and blatantly throw in facts about the time when the novel is set to correct assumed misconceptions in the readers.  After that, it settles down into a nice nautical tale of English versus Spanish in the New World.

A few days ago I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

At the start, I was a little disappointed with this novel, but through no fault of the author.  I had heard about this great new historical novel about Cromwell, and assumed it was Oliver Cromwell, England's so-called Lord Protector.  Turns out, I was mistaken.  This book is about Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII.

I had hoped for a book about Oliver Cromwell because he is part of a period of English history that hasn't been as well covered in fiction.  In contrast, Thomas Cromwell is part of the whole Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, divorce, etc. story told in many different forms over the years.

Once I got past that, it is a well written book, although very dry and slow.

I just finished The Hammer and the Cross by Harry Harrison.

I guess it's an alternate history, rather than a straight historical novel, since the premise is based around the Vikings resisting the spread of Christianity through Europe.  The main character, Shef, is English but falls in with Vikings and helps them against the English, and the church's forces that work with them.  The medieval Christian church is portrayed, probably fairly accurately, very harshly - mostly money grubbing, cruel and aloof.

It's an interesting book, though the inventiveness of the main character seems a little ahistorical at times.

A few days ago, I finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, winner of the 2010 Hugo for best novel.

The Windup Girl is a dystopia set in Thailand, after a collapse due to the end of the petroleum age and then a second collapse caused by plagues of mutated genetically engineered crops.  The narrative is split between four characters, a North American businessman in Thailand to undermine the government and get access to the Thai market for his companie's crops, a Malaysian refugee trying to survive in a country hostile to foreigners, a soldier of the enforcement arm of the Thai government's environmental ministry, and the titular windup girl - a genetically modified human abandoned by Japanese businessmen.

It's hard to find anyone to sympathize with.  The windup girl herself is an innocent, abused horribly throughout the novel and constrained by her breeding and training, but is so helpless through most of the novel that it is hard to identify with her.  The businessman is amoral and thoughtless.  The refugee is scheming and dishonest.  The soldier is a bully and a proto-fascist.

I suspect the author wants us to sympathize with the latter character, and his lieutenant who takes over the narrative part way through, due to his efforts to protect the local environment and loyalty to the Thai government, but this is hard to go along with given the obvious comparisons between his "white shirts" and the historic "black shirts" or "brown shirts".

Even with the lack of a sympathetic protagonist, the book is still well written and compelling. 

I just finished The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

This is the basis for the movie of the same name.  There's no way I'll be able to avoid SPOILERS in this post, so reader beware...

I saw the movie version of this story years ago, and enjoyed it as one of the most intelligent movies of the time.  The book is equally good, though different in many ways.  Both are built around a feud between two magicians, Borden and Angier, ultimately ending in tragedy, but the differences are striking, and are mostly improvements in the film version.

The novel is book-ended by modern scenes involving the magician's grandchildren that don't feel necessary to the story, and the film wisely gets rid of them.  In the novel, the fact that Borden is actually a twin is strongly hinted at from early on, and is even investigated by Angier before being dismissed.  The movie avoids any hints of twins, and depends on the impression created by only showing one Borden, to keep the audience from suspecting it as well.  This strengthens the contrasts between the two magicians and the irony of Angier making the Tesla device work.  In the book, the device leaves behind a copy that is not fully alive (referred to by Angier as the "prestige materials", which explains the title, something the movie never really does), while the movie Angier is actually actively killing the duplicates left behind, a much more intense, almost melodramatic, emotional choice.  The movie also makes the feud between the two stronger, tying it to their actions while working together and making their acts of sabotage more concrete, while the novel keeps the two very seperate, and their feud is almost abstract.

Overall, the novel is still a very good read and recommended.

Every year I come up with some overly ambitious ideas for Halloween costumes, and end up not having enough time to actually do anything about it or, like last year, can only do a half assed job.

This year, I came up with the idea, and found time to work on it, early enough to test it out and refine it before Halloween.  The idea was Odin, the Norse god.

Some parts of the costume were easy - I bought a wizard's rob and wig/beard - since Odin was the original inspiration for the look of Tolkien's Gandalf - and a pirate's eye patch.  The beard that came with the Merlin beard/wig set was way too much, but I came up with a last minute substitution.  I've got a pretty good Van Dyke beard going, and it's a little overgrown right now.  I combined that with the hair whitening makeup I'd bought for my eyebrows, and it worked pretty well.


For a prop,  I wanted to carry Gungnir, Odin's spear, but none of the commercially available spears were appealing.  I ended up making it myself, out of cardboard tubes, paper mache and acrylic paint, with some glow in the dark runes added for affect.


One part of the costume never came to fruition, and I might try to add it in the future.  I'd like to have Hugin and Munin (Odin's two ravens) props on my shoulders, but I couldn't find anything the right size to carry around.

I think it turned out pretty well.  No one at the party I went to had any idea who I was, but I didn't expect any different.  If I'd run into any experts on the Norse pantheon, I think they would have figured it out.

Odin

I just finished Djibouti by Elmore Leonard.

Going further afield than Leonard normally does, Djibouti is set in the Horn of Africa area, and involves filmmakers, vigilantes and terrorists with his usual tough guy bravado throughout.

It also has him doing something else unusual, playing with the narrative structure.  Part of the novel is told in pseudo-flashback form, as the filmmakers review some of their footage and Leonard weaves in the events that were going on around the time the footage was taken.  This gimmick doesn't work very well, just creating confusion about where/when the narrative is, and Leonard abandons it after a few chapters.

Leonard's usual distinctive dialogue also doesn't work as well here.  Usually Leonard's dialogue, like that of David Mamet, feels real even though it isn't realistic at all.  In the beginning of this book, it doesn't feel real at all.

By the end, Leonard is more in his comfort zone, as various tough guys confront each other, and the novel is much stronger and more interesting, but the trip to get there isn't very interesting.

I just finished The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman.

This is the fourth book in the Sally Lockhart series, even though Sally only appears in a few cameos.

It features the return of a character from The Ruby in the Smoke, Adelaide, who was presumed dead.  She's reunited with Jim, and then becomes the princess, then queen of a small European country caught between Germany and Austria.

It's a worthy sequel, full of the same great characters and conflict as the other books.

Yesterday I finished The Knights of the Cornerstone by James Blaylock.

Blaylock is one of my favourite authors, based on his books like The Last Coin and The Paper Grail.  He dropped out of site for many years, not publishing any novels for ten years before this one.

It's a good book, probably not as good as the two above, but more enjoyable than his last few.  He has a nice way of mixing the real world with odd human behaviour, and the mysterious spiritual world, different from any other author I've read.  His protagonists are not easily distinguished from each other, but they still work in context.

I just finished Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles de Lint.

Normally I don't like short story collections, but I was craving some de Lint that I hadn't read, and this was the only one in my local library.

I've always liked de Lint's writing, and his take on the urban fantasy field. I think of Charles de Lint as an early practitioner of urban fantasy, but one very different from what has come to dominate that field.  Most of the current urban fantasy is more derived from the works of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels and involves a lot more sex, violence and action than de Lint's stories.  His are more contemplative, personal, spiritual and filled with a sense of wonder.

This set of stories is pretty typical - a mix of minor and major interactions between the characters and the fantastical, featuring some of his standard Newford characters.  Not as good as a full length novel, but still very enjoyable.

I just finished Sourcery by Terry Pratchett.

Sourcery is the fifth Discworld novel, before Pratchett really worked his way into the current plot skeleton of adding some modern item to Discworld, with a magical spin.

It's a Rincewind novel, and features him saving the world from magic after a new kind of wizard, an eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth is born and greatly increases the effectiveness of magic.

Like all the Discworld books, it's a fun read. 

I just finished Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

LtGWS takes place mostly in New York, though it opens in Ireland.  In New York, it follows an interconnected group of people before, during and after Phillipe Petit did his famous tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

It's an enjoyable read, which felt to me a lot like Maeve Binchey's writings about intertwined lives, but I'm not sure if it left me with much afterwards.

I just finished Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

Altered Carbon is a science fiction noir novel, where an investigator with little power tries to find the truth while battling against entrenched, corrupt and usually perverse, powerful people.

In this case, the investigator is a an ex-super soldier, ex-crook brought to Earth to investigate the death of a wealthy man which might be murder and might be suicide.  This is complicated because people have their personalities stored in chips or backed up and can be housed in any body, so the man has been brought back to life, and the protagonist has been "sleeved" in an ex-cop's body.

It develops in pretty predictable ways, but is a decent read.

I just finished Hrolf Kraki's Saga by Poul Anderson.

Based on the historical saga of the same name, Anderson's version sticks pretty close to the events but adds a little bit of additional colour and character development.  The characters are still thin, in terms of emotional depth, like the original sagas, but are a little more readable for modern audiences.

The result works quite well, keeping the quick moving nature of the sagas but drawing in this modern reader.  Quite enjoyable.

I just finished Wilderness of Mirrors by David C. Martin.

Wilderness of Mirrors loosely follows the careers of James Angleton and William Harvey, and the respective effects they had on the fortunes of the CIA during the Cold War.



It's a very loose book - very anecdote based, but the anecdotes are quite interesting, so it works out.  It's interesting that a lot of the Cold War mysteries about which defectors were double agents and which ones were genuine still haven't been settled.

Over the weekend I finished Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.

Basically an excuse to combine two popular memes - zombies and steampunk - Boneshaker is set in an alternate Seattle where the core of the city was undermined by a giant digging machince called the Boneshaker.  This digging also released some poison gas that continues to seep out and turn people into zombies.

The book follows the son and wife of the man who built the Boneshaker as they venture into the sealed city and encounter various of the denizens, and get involved in the political struggles inside.

It's an OK read, but I'm not sure why it is getting the rave reviews and awards nominations (including a Hugo nomination).

Here are the books I finished while on vacation -

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.

This is a really enjoyable book, and a great resource.  It lays out a very strong case for the theory of evolution, starting with why the complaint that it is "just a theory" is silly, and moving through a variety of the strongest evidence, from historical to genetic.

Crown of Stars by Kate Elliot.

For a number of years, this series has been one of my "airplane" series.  Usually epic fantasy books that are large enough to last me through a flight or two, but also disposable in case I want to toss them while travelling.

This one wraps up this series, but in an almost half hearted way.  All the various plot lines and characters are dealt with, but none of the revelations or twists at the end seemed to add up to much and it felt more like an exercise in wrapping things up rather than an exciting conclusion.

Peru Trip Diary

Aug 27th.

Flight from SFO to Miami was delayed. First delay made it difficult to make connection. Second delay (to manually start an engine) made me miss connection for sure. AA put me up in a Doubletree hotel overnight. Miami was shockingly hot and humid - my glasses fogged up when I walked outside.

Aug 28th.

Flight to Lima was also delayed by a couple of hours. Got into Lima about 16 hours later than schedule. Met up with Stacey at Hotel Antigua Miraflores. Lima looks very poor, particularly the slums that are near the airport. The next day, we walked around the Miraflores neighbourhood. Saw ruins at Huaca Pucllana, then had a nice lunch of ceviche at La Mar.

Then walked over to see a neat shopping center built into a cliff over looking the sea, then back to the hotel to get our bags and a taxi to the bus station. Caught an overnight bus to Arequipa. The bus station and bus itself were a lot safer seeming than what you read about. But the trip itself was rough. Sleeping on a moving bus, with turns, rough roads and stops is difficult.

Aug 30th.

Arrived in Arequipa and checked into Casa Andina Classic hotel. Very nice hotel with a huge room. Went out and had lunch at a local restaurant then walked down to the plaza and checked out two nice churches. Hung out in the plaza a little and then had nice diner at ChiCha. Back to hotel to write postcards.

Aug 31st.

Checked out the huge Monasterio de Santa Catalina.  Built to house numerous nuns, it's like a little town of its own. Had crepes for lunch , did some alpaca shopping, then saw "Juanita of the ice" at Museo Santuarios Andinos and an art exhibition of all bullfighting pictures. Also saw Casa Moral, a restored colonial house, then a little more shopping before picking up our bags and catching the overnight bus to Cusco.

Sept 1st.

Arrived in Cusco after another hard bus ride. Another nice hotel - Rumi Punku, with an original Inca doorway.  Outside the classic core and tourist neighborhoods, Cusco looks very poor. The tourist neighborhoods are like old parts of Italian cities, with narrow cobblestone streets and old construction. Lots of churches. We saw five - La Catedral, Capilla de Sagrada Familia , Capilla de Triunfo, La Compania  and Templo de San Blas. Had a nice guide for four of them and a good audio guide for San Blas. Did some alpca and silver shopping and looked at all the remaining Inca walls. Out for supper to Limo, a very nice fusion style restaurant on the plaza.

Sept. 2nd.

Up very early to catch train to Aguas Calientes. Train ride very nice and scenic, with a fashion show and folk dance routine, but ran a little late due to a blocked track. In Aguas Calientes, we got into our nice hotel Rupi Wasi. Amazing accommodations with great views. We walked around the small town a little, getting Machu Picchu tickets, etc. Had an OK lunch at Indio Feliz but terrible service  We were going to go on some smaller local hikes but it started to rain pretty hard.   We tried to wait it out for while but when it looked like it wasn't going to stop, we went out to get rain ponchos. By that time, the hike we were going to do was going to get us back too late for the cooking lessons we had booked at the gourmet restaurant attached to out hotel. The cooking lessons were given by the head cook at the restaurant and were excellent. The first dish we made was chupa , a soup made with red onions, yellow peppers and quinoa. Very nice but mostly demonstration. The next dish was quinotto, quinoa based risotto with a grilled chicken breast. We got to make the risotto ourselves , mixing red onions , chopped yellow peppers, quinoa and a large amount of cream. Both were delicious.  Afterwards the rain had stopped and we walked around the two main streets in Aguas Calientes.

View from our hotel

Sept 3rd.

Decided not to get up early because we expected it to be cloudy. Turned out to be wrong and it was a bright sunny day. Caught a bus up to Machu Picchu around 8am. Got a guide to show is around. The whole thing was amazing.

Got back around 2pm and got ready for train back to Cusco. Train ride back was more boring. It was dark for part of it, so no scenery to see and the scits/shows were the similar. Got checked into hotel (Casa Andina Classic Cusco) and went out for dinner at Patchapapa, a San Blas restaurant focusing on local cuisine. Afterwards, there was a dance class or something going on in the San Blas square. Looked like all locals doing some kind of line dance with a few live musicians.

Sept. 4th.

Slept in a little. Had breakfast in hotel then off to check out Sacsayhuamán, the ruins of the Inca fortress on the hill over the town. The walk up was long and steep with some good views along the way.  The remaining walls of the fortress were very impressive, huge pieces of stone fitted together without gaps. Then back down to San Blas area to have lunch at Patchapapa, but it wasn't open yet and we didn't have time to wait so we ate at the Meeting Place, a cafe ran by American ex missionaries who have moved here. Nice food, but lacking any local character. Checked out some of the street fair going on the San Blas square before catching a taxi to the airport for the flight to Lima.  After flight and hotel check in, we went out to a local organic, vegan restaurant Stacey had discovered on her first day here alone - Alma Zen.  Great food, and extremely nice people.

Sept. 5th.

Decided to check out a few of Lima's museums.  First we went to Museo Larco, which has a lot of great pottery and other pieces from pre-Inca Peru, including an amazing erotica pottery collection.  Then over to the Museo de la Nación, which was much less interesting and under renovation.  Getting there also involved the only time in Peru that I felt less than safe.  The cab we got into was on its last legs and I was just happy to get out of it without crashing or getting carbon monoxide poisoning.  After that museum, we walked around Miraflores a bit more, had dinner and then headed for the airport to fly home.

Overall impressions:
- Machu Picchu is a must see.  Simply amazing.
- Peru is great value for the money.  We stayed at reasonably priced, very nice hotels in every city.  Food was also very affordable.
- Contrary to all the warnings, we never felt unsafe in Peru.  And the people, with the exception of the occasional cab driver, were very, very nice.

I'm running a little behind.  I blame it on over work, and doing a little less reading.  You can also see some of my other activities at my new blog, Adventures In Blacksmithing.

Here are two books I didn't talk about:

I finished The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

I like almost everything Gaiman has done, and this is not an exception.  It's a well written variant of Kipling's The Jungle Book, if you substitute "graveyard" for "jungle".  It's probably intended partly for a YA audience, but I enjoyed the story as well.













I also finished Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy.

I'm also a fan of Ellroy, but this book didn't work for me.  Ellroy's sparse, intense style has gotten so concentrated in this, and his last book, American Tabloid, that they are almost un-readable.  The characters come off as minor variants of misogynist, racist thugs and the usually thrilling plot twists are obvious and over set up.  I saw him do a reading last year, and it was amazing, but I hope he follows his promise to move on from his current style and do something different with his next book. 

On Sunday, we saw Agora, the 2009 Spanish film starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, the philosopher and mathematician.

Overall, quite enjoyable.  It's set in an interesting time, when the Roman Empire is transitioning from being pagan dominated to being Christian dominated and the film highlights the clashes between those groups, and the Jews who also lived in Alexandria.

The movie isn't really historically accurate, since it pushes the Library of Alexandria forward in time so that it can be sacked during Hypatia's lifetime, and has everyone dressing in stereotypical classical Greek/Roman outfits rather than after 3rd century garb, but it nonetheless gives a strong feeling for the difficulties of the time.

Some have criticized it for the portrayal of Hypatia, saying that it bought into the myth of her as a martyr to science, but they seem to have been watching a different movie, or just going off press clippings.  In this movie, Hypatia's death is clearly the result of political struggles between Cyril, bishop of Alexandria and Orestes, the prefect.