Silly customer, you cannot hurt a Twinkie.
May. 4th, 2010 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarea
I don't feel good today. It kind of hit me all of a sudden, I feel kind of nauseated and slightly headachy and I just want to lie down. Unfortunately I rode the bus today so I don't have my car and can't lie down in the backseat, which sounds like HEAVEN right now.
I'm still kind of grumpy about the weather ... I had to turn on the heater in my room last night because my nose was getting uncomfortably cold. That's a good indicator of when the heater needs to come on. I brought in my seedlings from the other room so they could be in the warm room, too. They are doing REALLY well. Okay, they might be slower than those Florida kids, but they're beautiful. Some of them have multiple leaves and are growing tall and strong. The trouble is, they are mostly all tomato. I thought some of them were rosemary, but I was wrong. It's like 5 cauliflower, 2 basil, and then the rest are tomatoes, lol. That is WAY more than I can plant. K. says that her daughter's preschool is asking for tomato starter donations (they have a little garden that they tend with the kids), so I am going to donate some of my seedlings to them. I'm glad they'll be going to a good cause/home, but I'm still wibbling about which ones to give away. If only I knew which variety was which! Damn my lack of labeling! I don't want to accidentally give away all of one kind. Sigh.
I finished Throne of Jade.
I really enjoyed reading about their trip to China and all the details of how dragons are raised and incorporated into society there. However, I thought, given all they had been through, that the ending was rather abrupt. I mean, Temeraire gets himself a girlfriend, starts to have revolutionary thoughts about the way dragons are treated in China vs Britain, Laurence gets adopted by the Emperor of China (which is both ridiculous and wonderful), Temeraire barely starts to get to know his mother (and twin!), and then just suddenly, they're going back to England? I mean, obviously, Laurence needs to go back eventually and I didn't actually think they'd stay in China indefinitely. But the conclusion Temeraire comes to, to go back, when real issues have barely begun seemed really rushed and slightly unbelievable. His stated intentions, totally believable. His willingness to abandon all he's JUST gotten to know, not so much. After all, it's not like they couldn't stay there a few more months or even a year, as Laurence suggested; they didn't have to leave when the Allegiance left. Anyway, that was my only nitpick, as the rest of it was wonderful.
I really love Naomi Novik's ability to portray realistic human relationships/personalities. Too often, characters in novels tend to wear their personalities on their sleeves, so that the protagonist can easily tell whether someone is trustworthy or not (say, Harry meeting Draco). Real people and their relationships with each other are far more complex. People aren't usually all bad or all good. They're flawed, and experience and circumstance decide whether people become friends, even despite personality differences. We've seen that happen -- believably -- several times in the two Temeraire novels I've read, with Granby, Hammond, and Rankin (btw, how much did I CRY when Levitas died???) most especially, and also some of the Chinese characters (though in a sense that's to be expected given the language/cultural differences). I'm also impressed with her knowledge of ships and her ability to believably recreate formal British speech patterns from that era (well, you know, believable to someone who isn't British and didn't live during that era), especially considering she's American herself.
Oh, and I just have to mention ships -- the romantic kind. So far, in terms of fandom ships, I can't imagine that people don't ship Laurence/Granby (hopefully not Laurence/Temeraire, even though sometimes the books themselves feel on the verge of going there). Canon wise, this doesn't actually seem likely, both because Laurence seems to prefer heterosexual entanglements and because of the time period in which this is set; it'd be hard to go there without creating a whole other set of issues for the series that I doubt NN intends to get into. In canon so far there are 3 women who are prominent in Laurence's life who can be considered: Edith, who's become engaged to someone else, and who we barely know, and whom Laurence doesn't seem to miss all that much; Jane Roland, who's Laurence's fuck buddy, but the arrangement just seems to be convenient to them both and doesn't seem inclined to turn more romantic in nature; and Harcourt, who I initially thought was being set up to be a romantic interest for Laurence, but so far that hasn't happened the least bit, and actually might be kind of too cliche. So I don't know. Not that the series needs Laurence to develop a true romantic attachment to anyone; but I can't help but consider the possibilities.
So Peter Jackson has optioned the rights to the books, eh? I think I read somewhere that he wanted to make it into a mini-series instead of a movie. Makes sense to me because I'm not sure there's actually enough *plot* in each book to make a good movie; it's more rich in detail and interpersonal/interdragon (?) relationship development, and the other stuff just sort of happens all at once.
I'm still kind of grumpy about the weather ... I had to turn on the heater in my room last night because my nose was getting uncomfortably cold. That's a good indicator of when the heater needs to come on. I brought in my seedlings from the other room so they could be in the warm room, too. They are doing REALLY well. Okay, they might be slower than those Florida kids, but they're beautiful. Some of them have multiple leaves and are growing tall and strong. The trouble is, they are mostly all tomato. I thought some of them were rosemary, but I was wrong. It's like 5 cauliflower, 2 basil, and then the rest are tomatoes, lol. That is WAY more than I can plant. K. says that her daughter's preschool is asking for tomato starter donations (they have a little garden that they tend with the kids), so I am going to donate some of my seedlings to them. I'm glad they'll be going to a good cause/home, but I'm still wibbling about which ones to give away. If only I knew which variety was which! Damn my lack of labeling! I don't want to accidentally give away all of one kind. Sigh.
I finished Throne of Jade.
I really enjoyed reading about their trip to China and all the details of how dragons are raised and incorporated into society there. However, I thought, given all they had been through, that the ending was rather abrupt. I mean, Temeraire gets himself a girlfriend, starts to have revolutionary thoughts about the way dragons are treated in China vs Britain, Laurence gets adopted by the Emperor of China (which is both ridiculous and wonderful), Temeraire barely starts to get to know his mother (and twin!), and then just suddenly, they're going back to England? I mean, obviously, Laurence needs to go back eventually and I didn't actually think they'd stay in China indefinitely. But the conclusion Temeraire comes to, to go back, when real issues have barely begun seemed really rushed and slightly unbelievable. His stated intentions, totally believable. His willingness to abandon all he's JUST gotten to know, not so much. After all, it's not like they couldn't stay there a few more months or even a year, as Laurence suggested; they didn't have to leave when the Allegiance left. Anyway, that was my only nitpick, as the rest of it was wonderful.
I really love Naomi Novik's ability to portray realistic human relationships/personalities. Too often, characters in novels tend to wear their personalities on their sleeves, so that the protagonist can easily tell whether someone is trustworthy or not (say, Harry meeting Draco). Real people and their relationships with each other are far more complex. People aren't usually all bad or all good. They're flawed, and experience and circumstance decide whether people become friends, even despite personality differences. We've seen that happen -- believably -- several times in the two Temeraire novels I've read, with Granby, Hammond, and Rankin (btw, how much did I CRY when Levitas died???) most especially, and also some of the Chinese characters (though in a sense that's to be expected given the language/cultural differences). I'm also impressed with her knowledge of ships and her ability to believably recreate formal British speech patterns from that era (well, you know, believable to someone who isn't British and didn't live during that era), especially considering she's American herself.
Oh, and I just have to mention ships -- the romantic kind. So far, in terms of fandom ships, I can't imagine that people don't ship Laurence/Granby (hopefully not Laurence/Temeraire, even though sometimes the books themselves feel on the verge of going there). Canon wise, this doesn't actually seem likely, both because Laurence seems to prefer heterosexual entanglements and because of the time period in which this is set; it'd be hard to go there without creating a whole other set of issues for the series that I doubt NN intends to get into. In canon so far there are 3 women who are prominent in Laurence's life who can be considered: Edith, who's become engaged to someone else, and who we barely know, and whom Laurence doesn't seem to miss all that much; Jane Roland, who's Laurence's fuck buddy, but the arrangement just seems to be convenient to them both and doesn't seem inclined to turn more romantic in nature; and Harcourt, who I initially thought was being set up to be a romantic interest for Laurence, but so far that hasn't happened the least bit, and actually might be kind of too cliche. So I don't know. Not that the series needs Laurence to develop a true romantic attachment to anyone; but I can't help but consider the possibilities.
So Peter Jackson has optioned the rights to the books, eh? I think I read somewhere that he wanted to make it into a mini-series instead of a movie. Makes sense to me because I'm not sure there's actually enough *plot* in each book to make a good movie; it's more rich in detail and interpersonal/interdragon (?) relationship development, and the other stuff just sort of happens all at once.
