Chasing the Bard

Ahhh... the wonderful world of podcasting. May I direct your attention to the side of the screen, to all those lovely little pictures? Linkage, because I love them all. But I am commanded by the Dark Goddess Sive the Shining for a bit more attention to be directed towards the realm of the Fey. Yes, Sive from Chasing the Bard. Heard of it? Good, awesome podcast that everyone should listen to.

Excuse me for a minute...

(Yes Chris, I will blog about Metamor City for my 4 or so readers when the episode with me is posted! Then it will be all special-like.)

And I'm back. Miss me? No? Whether you are among those that missed me or not, I have cookies. Yes, cookies. Ha. Don't worry, random tangent is over... back to Chasing the Bard by Philippa Ballantine.

First and foremost, Philippa Ballantine is awesome. Philippa has lent her voice talents to the podcasts of Murder at Avedon Hill, Morevi, and Metamor City. Granted, her voice is probably in other podcasts across the world wide web, but these are the podcasts I listen to and know of. A voice like hers is hard to miss or be mistaken on. Chasing the Bard is a bit ahead of the other podcasts, as the narration is done by Philippa herself in a gorgeous New Zealand accent.

Now that my love for accents has been taken care of, onto the story itself. Chasing the Bard is based back in the time of William Shakespeare and in the realm of the Fey. Sive finds the young baby Shakespeare, filled with bardic art, noticeable even at such a young age. Shakespeare is placed under the protection of the trickster Puck, so full of wit and humor that brings a smile to anyone's face. To know more, you must listen. Not only will listening get you a sneak peek into the Fey realm, but a bit of time travel back to Shakespeare's world.

I am only on Chapter 9 at the moment, but my favorite character is Puck by far. I'm slowly making my way through as I find the time, so that could very well change, even though Puck is too impish to have favorite character status taken away from him easily. This story isn't fully done out in podcast yet, but is available in book form and the sequel, Digital Magic, will be out in August.

Garlic Garlic Garlic

Yes, Garlic Garlic Garlic is a cookbook, 200+ recipes of garlicky goodness, including 3 garlic desserts! Other than cheese, garlic is my favorite ingredient in most dishes. I’m not hardcore enough to really think about making a garlic ice cream. When my boyfriend was planning on making dinner for me, he called me up and asked what I wanted. My response was “Something with garlic.” I ended up enjoying homemade lasagna, garlic bread, and a beautiful Caesar salad all with my requested ingredient. Thankfully, the lemon-strawberry sorbet had no garlic in it whatsoever.

Going back to the book, Garlic Garlic Garlic is a bit more than just a mere cookbook. In the beginning and then scattered throughout the rest of the book is fact and folklore about garlic. Hardneck garlic, softneck garlic, garlic chives, elephant garlic… all are here. While I had no clue there was a difference between hardneck and softneck garlic, apparently most of what we purchase in a local supermarket is the softneck variety. I had no clue that there were garlic chives, or that elephant garlic isn’t really garlic, but closer to a leek.

Obviously, the point of a cookbook is recipes, recipes that one might find enjoyable, delicious and easy to make. Out of the 200 something recipes, I picked out 20 that I want to make, and some that I will never ever make or even try. No garlic ice cream for this girl, no way. While Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic has its merits, if I wanted to wield a deadly weapon, I’d use a gun instead of my breath.

Now I haven’t had the time nor kitchen space to try any of these recipes yet, but they look yummy. I definitely want to try a Chinese night with the Vegetarian Spring Rolls and Kung Pao Chicken recipes that I found in this book. Next I’ll need to find a recipe for Egg Drop Soup to go along with the rest of the Chinese dishes, as no Chinese takeout is complete without the soup.

The Angel of Darkness

The weather in Michigan finally warmed up these last 2 weeks, going from 40 degrees to 70 in a very short period of time. The pool needs to be opened, grass needs to be cut, and a multitude of other yard projects keep cropping up. With all these outdoor plans using up most of my time and a sunburn to keep me from sleeping too well, time spent with books or teh interwebz has been non-existent. I'm working on remedying that even though the school behind my house has been blasting pop tunes all day. If I hear Soujia Boy, Macarana or Hokey Pokey one more time, someone might die.

The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr is a work of historical fiction taking place in New York at the end of the 1800s. Now the prequel to The Angel of Darkness is The Alienist, but doesn't need to be read first. In fact, as the characters in The Angel of Darkness are introduced and go up to Number 808, they each have their moment of hesitation and dread, reflecting back a tiny bit on The Alienist. While I don't need to have read The Alienist to full understand The Angel of Darkness, I'm very much inclined to read it now.

Caleb Carr does a wonderful job of using his entire cast of characters to their fullest potential, trying to find enough evidence against their villain for a trial. I honestly don't know what else to say about this book. I liked it, it had forensic mixed in with a good story and you even get to see Roosevelt. My brain is literally fried, apparently too much sun does that.

Sims

Sims by F. Paul Wilson has nothing to do with Sims the computer game, so breathe your sigh of relief now. Instead of wandering around a very small town and having people with green diamonds floating over their heads, Sims takes us to Westchester County, NY following the lawyer Patrick Sullivan.

Patrick Sullivan starts out at a golf course with one of his clients. There are no hovercraft or anything more sci-fi than our current world today. Except for the sim caddie, an altered chimpanzee to be less ape and more human, a product of SimGen. Leased as unskilled labor, sims gave America the ability to compete against Asia in the textile markets.

Back at the golf course, Patrick Sullivan is with his client and approached by a sim cabbie, Tome. Tome is after the unionization of the caddie sims. Their only demand is the sims are like a family and they want to keep that family together. As leased sims, a sim at any moment can be traded in for a different 'model'. The returned sim is then sent to a retirement home in Arizona.

Sullivan agrees to help the sims, against the force of SimGen. If sims can unionize, how far are they really from people? The scariest part of this entire book is summed up nicely in the author's note.

"Sims takes place just around the corner, timewise, in your town, your country, your world. It may seem like science fiction, but it isn't. For right now, as you read these words, someone somewhere is altering a chimpanzee's genome to make it more human. Right now. So it won't be too long before we all come face-to-face with the same issues challenging the characters in Sims..."

A major possibility. We had Dolly, the sheep, already as well as various other animals. Granted its cloning as opposed to manipulating chimp and human DNA to produce a different breed of the ape-man. However, theres also been human cells mixed with a cow's egg to harvest stem cells. Seems to me the world of the Sims isn't too far off. I'm sure you're thinking to yourself that laws will be passed against anything like sims well before any of them could be made and commercialized. Not necessarily true, considering how SimGen managed to keep ahead of the game.

"The Bush administration, wrapped up in seemingly endless war on terrorism, failed to pass any regulatory bills."

F. Paul Wilson definitely knew how to strike a chuckle with me, and if any administration would let something slip, it would be the one led by George W.

Sims is a great read, a genetics mystery thriller that leaves you guessing up until the end. Reading Sims will make you think twice when a cloning or DNA manipulation bill comes up for vote. With how the book ended, I don't see F. Paul Wilson being able to make a sequel, or at least not one that can compare in any way. It's a bummer, as I really enjoyed the characters introduced into the story. But as the review on the front cover states...

"Sims is... disquieting, and I'm glad it's only fiction...." - Brian Lumley

I second that statement.

Lord of Light

I finished reading Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny early Sunday morning and I'm just now getting around to posting about it. Part is blamed by Prince Caspian coming out in theaters and Eddie Izzard being the voice of Reepicheep, and subsequently, the amount of Eddie Izzard I've watched in the past 2 days. The other part of my lack-of-postness is because I had no clue where to start on this book. None whatsoever.

I made the mistake of picking up the book, getting through the first 2 chapters, and having to set it down. The beginning chapters is the end of the tale and it isn't that apparent. The other mistake I made in regards to Lord of Light is by not reading the back of the book first.

"Earth is long since dead. On a Colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rules their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons. Lord of Light"

Yes, there is technology present all throughout the book, but I'm apparently pretty dense this week as I didn't realize until halfway through that the gods were ruling with technology alone. That it was the technology that made them gods as opposed to actual god-powers, whatever that is. Gods made themselves immortal by machines constantly placing their lifeforce into new bodies, much like in Biting the Sun.

Once I sat down, restarted Lord of Light and really focused on the book itself, I enjoyed it. There is a huge cast of characters to play in this book, all which can reincarnate through technical means. Not to mention if certain gods aren't reincarnated, their co-gods fill in. So God A dies, God B changes bodies and names to be like God A, and yet still has the same personal interaction as God B originally did. This book is not straight forward whatsoever. Its not the smoothest read either. Zelazny goes off on random tangents. One such is about a rajah and how this particular rajah collects taxes, and the only part of that tangent that holds anything relevant to story line is that the rajah rules the city which is a 5 day journey from the mountain named Channa. Pardon the mini rant, but it irked me slightly.

The beginning isn't too straight forward, theres a bit of confusion with all the body switching, and a couple of detours. The war between the gods though, awesome. Each one has their own cool superpowers, and your archivist gets turned into a monkey. There are a couple of good quotes in there as well.

"For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard On High."

The above quote seems to be out of the geeks version of the Bible. Off to read something else, as since watching Eddie Izzard on Youtube was too addicting.

Biting the Sun

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee is 2 books, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, republished as 1 novel. Unlike On Her Majesty's Occult Service that I posted about before, it seemed like one book. There were no random jumps to different mini stories that kept me thinking I was in the second half, in fact, if there wasn't a page dedicated to the title of the second half, I wouldn't have noticed. The 2 stories connected so well, it was a seamless transition. On an flip side though, if I read Don't Bite the Sun without the Drinking Sapphire Wine, I doubt that I would've picked up another Tanith Lee book for a bit. Perhaps its just me, but the first have really had no ending, no climax to build up to and resolve. It laid awesome ground work for the second book, which I truly enjoyed.

In truth, I almost set the book down after the first 15 or so pages. I think only once have I never finished a book that I've started reading.

"Although I have put the Four BEE into equivalent modern English, the Jang slang vocabulary which the writer uses pales in translation. I have therefore left the sixteen or so odd words she employs untouched, and included on the following page a glossary, which provides an adequate, if imperfect guide to what they mean."

Irritating. So irritating. Yes, by the end of the book you have most of the memorized. Until the words are memorized, having to flip back and forth to the beginning is annoying as all hell. Lee uses less and less of the 'Jang' words as the book progresses, but they are extremely common in the beginning. In my opinion, to put normal English words in would've been an improvement to the books ease of reading. For example...

attlevey - Hello
derisann - Lovely, Beautiful
ooma - Darling, honey
tosky - Neurotic

All of those words, plus the others listed in the 'Glossary of Jang Slang' really do not make much of a difference to be in Jang, as opposed to actually using the English word. Our brains, after flipping through the book back to the beginning, would just substitute the English word back into the sentence anyways. There are a couple of swear words that are in Jang, which I can understand - much like the Chinese phrases that aren't translated in Firefly and Serenity, the tone and sound leave you with building your own meanings. The swear words are particularly easy to figure out. But no, instead we're left with normal boring words that should've just been translated originally.

I believe the intent of Lee was to show how the main character is growing out of her Jang stage, which is approximetly 50 years, to the Older Person stage of her/his life. I would tell you the characters name, but I'm not sure its ever mentioned in the book.

Life in the Four BEE, a city with sister cities named Four BOO and Four BAA, is extremely easy. Androids run the government and shops, providing everything for the humans. No one works because the cities run off energy, and if you require anything, your payment is a show of hysterical thank yous that is then siphoned off to the city's energy banks. There are no deaths in Four BEE (or Four BOO or Four BAA) as each human life spark is picked up by androids as soon as death occurs and put in a Limbo tub, awaiting a new body. So if you don't want to wait the required 30 days for a new body, you merely open your bubble underwater and drown, or crash your bird-plane into the Zeefahr Monument.

There are no responsibilities, at least until you're an Older Person, then if you so choose, you can be a Maker and have a child. But for your Jang life, you can do anything irresponsible that you want. In fact, its expected of you. Any Jang not acting as outlandish as the Jang lifestyle dictates is frowned upon by the androids in the Committee. When doing whatever you want finally gets to be boring, and your life isn't as fulfilling as it should be, then you're at the starting point for Biting the Sun.

God's Demon

To go from seeing the splendor of God to descending into the pit of Hell would be an eye opening moment that I would wish upon anyone. The image of Hell that is conveyed in God's Demon is so horrible and twisted, but it seems so architecturally beautiful at the same time. The story is written by Eligor, Captain of the elite squadron of the Flying Guards. His story begins from the point of the Fall from Above, the costly mistake of choosing to side with Lucifer in the battle against God.

Eligor rose up from the field where he fell, next to Sargatanas, a seraph now turned Demon Major. Sargatanas as the Demon Lord of the area, with Eligor and his squadron as his personal flying guards, they begin building the city of Adamantinarx-on-the-Archeon. The palace was built using the earth they had landed on, but the rest of the buildings and roads were made of soul bricks. Soul bricks, humans who had fallen into Hell, the pond scum under the hooves and talons of their demon masters, formed into bricks, still alive and ever aware with their eyes watching and blinking. The souls were also skinned for their hides, and fashioned into demon clothing. Other souls become books, when their glyphs were activated, they recited the contents of the pages within.

Sargatanas was the most angelic of the Demon Majors. While he conformed with the rest of Hell, Sargatanas treated his minions with more respect and dignity than the other Demon Majors, especially Beelzebub. Prince Beelzebub, The Fly, is the Lord of Dis and ruler of Hell in Lucifer's absence. Sargatanas, remembering his time spent Above, is against all the pain and anguish Beelzebub brings, and grows restless in his position in Hell. Then the decision is made to see if God can forgive even a fallen angel, and Sargatanas will bring about the rebellion in Hell to see Beelzebub destroyed. Even the very bricks themselves will fight for the cause, for it brings the possibility of going to Heaven.

Wayne Barlowe does such great imagery in God's Demon, Hell is the most hideously beautiful place. I would never want to live there, or even have a summer home there, but to immerse myself in Hell through Wayne Barlowe's words for a small fraction of time was quite nice indeed. There are 2 minor points that slightly irritated me though. In the first several chapters, the passage of time is slightly confusing. What seems like a week or a day in the beginning is actually centuries. Shortly into it the timeline does even out and we're not skipping years upon years at a time. Also here are 3 or 4 'A' names that are so similar in text that if you're not careful its easy to get them confused. I did google Barlowe to see if theres another book after God's Demon. Instead I found this, artwork depicting the images he set forth on paper. Enjoy.