Books Lying Open
¤ Dark Tower VII, Stephen King
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Ouchies that can not be kissed better.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because tiger's eye is both cheap and shiny.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your nighttime writing costume become ever-bulkier.

fter an enjoyably-intense Kali class Thursday night, here I sit to type with two new blisters and several hardened calluses to show for all the stick work we did.  None of the blisters effect my typing, fortunately. We also purchased a couple of new sticks for Kali; I'll have to take some pics of them at some point, when I do some archive pasting and get a proper Martial Arts article page online and.

Funny coincidence time; a long time site reader recently started Kali after hearing me talk about it so much, mentioned it to me in an email this week, and he's enjoying it thus far. The odd part is that he's in Eastern Europe, which is not exactly where I would have expected him to find a teacher of a Filipino martial art. The coincidence is that yesterday night in class we had a first time student join us, a guy who is in the US to work on some post-grad college, and had taken three months worth of Kali in his homeland. True, there are probably over 100m people living in the two countries these guys represent, but given the relatively small number of long time BlackChampagne site readers, and the handful of people I see weekly in my martial arts class, the odds of these two coincidences overlapping within a three day period are pretty low.

And yet they did.

It's the invisible hand of fate! Conspiring to um... well, conspiring to nothing; neither of the two events have changed my life in anyway, other than briefly stimulating my mental processes and giving me something new to email an online friend about.

Moving right along, here's a bit of baseball, a weird link, then some semi-news, before we get to the long-promised book reviews.

Despite my frequent protestations of boredom, I did end up watching some of the baseball playoffs, as the Red Sox pulled off the biggest comeback in baseball history. And better yet, as the Yankees pulled off the biggest choke in baseball history.  I don't think I give a damn about the world series, and I'm not sure the Red Sox do either; beating the Yankees in that fashion was more satisfying than any ultimate title will be, and I frankly doubt they'll win it, given that Saint Louis has better hitting and Boston's pitching is pretty much in a shambles after gutting out their Yankees victory. Wakefield is unpredictable, Lowe is even more so, Pedro hasn't really had it in three years, and Shilling's lucky to be walking on his stapled ankle.  On the other hand, I couldn't name a Cardinals pitcher other than Woody Williams, and I only know him because he was on the Padres a few years ago when I still worked at the stadium in San Diego.  I bring this up both to highlight both my lack of interest in the sport and the fact that none of the StL pitchers are good enough to be famous enough to penetrate into my very idle baseball fan mind.

So I'll say StL in six games, but I really don't know and I really don't care. In fact, the only World Series preview article I have/will read is this one, about the frenzy to get tickets for any of the Boston games.  The Red Sox's stadium is the smallest in all major league baseball, they sold out every home game this year, and they have a huge and ravenous fan base. Add that up and you get some pretty high ticket prices. How high?

Better yet, since the teams wear the same colors, you can fly to StL and wear your Red Sox gear without needing body armor beneath it, as you do in New York.

As an added bonus, with the Yankees grudge match over with for this season, The Sports Guy might slow down on his all Red Sox all the time article binge and write about something I'm actually interested in. 

It's 15 minutes long and clinically-thorough, and I'm mostly left wondering what they did to get the patient to go along with it. She doesn't seem to be studying medicine or getting off on some sort of medical fetish, and she's definitely not some porn star they hired for the procedure. Just an ad in the school paper? Whatever they did, I hope there was some sort of payment offered in exchange for filming and posting her entirely-average white girl vagina on the internet.

I would also imagine you could hunt around the Harvard medical site and find other such things; breast exams, penis exams, etc, if you were interested enough to do so.

¤ I've seen this mentioned several times in the past couple of weeks, and it seems a bit odd. To quote from Daily KOS:

AP Poll: Bush, Kerry in Dead Heat
[...] In the AP-Ipsos Public Affairs poll, the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Sen. John Edwards got support from 49 percent of those who said they were likely to vote, and the Republican team of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney got 46 percent, within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Reuters Poll: Bush Grabs One-Point Lead on Kerry
President Bush opened a slight one-point lead on Democratic rival John Kerry in a tight race for the White House, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Note the numbers? A 1 point lead for Bush is mentioned as a lead, but a 3 point lead for Kerry is a "dead heat." Now technically, both are dead heats, since they fall within the margin of error for the poll. But I've seen links to half a dozen examples of this, where slight Bush leads are mentioned in the article headline, and slight Kerry leads are called ties, and I have not seen any headlines like this with the names reversed.

Perhaps that's just because most of the political blogs I look at are pro-Kerry? Perhaps the incumbent is always seen as the favorite so he's given the benefit of the doubt in close polls. Perhaps there are identical examples of this with Bush and Kerry's names switched. But I've seen several examples of this in the national media, and it's enough to make you wonder just who is trying to skew the news headlines as they want them to read.

¤ In further fishy information, here are some notes the Kerry campaign released about Condi Rice's recent whirlwind of public appearances and speeches.

Shouldn't the National Security Advisor be busy working on um... National Security? It's not as if Bush doesn't issue daily reminders that America is under constant threat of terrorist attack as the primary reason to re-elect him.  Apparently it's not a serious enough threat that one of the very top level cabinet officials needs to stay in Washington and keep her nose to the grindstone.

Of course if you believe Bush is useful as president, then you will immediately excuse this unprecedented mixing of security with campaign politics since after all, anything that convinces 'Merkuns to vote to keep him in power is a good thing.

 

The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Plot: 5
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 9
Humor: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 8
Overall: 6

This is the second Pratchett novel I've read, after starting off with the 26th book in his Disc World series a few months ago.  My review of that novel, Thief of Time, can be seen here. I gave it a 7.5 and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I didn't like this one as well, obviously, but it was still an entertaining read.  In a strange sort of reversal, I would probably have given this one a higher score if I had not read Thief of Time first.

The logic behind that statement is that much of my score for Thief of Time was based on it coming together in the end. It's cleverly-written, full of satire and humor and wild plot twists and outlandish characters, and that's all I thought it would be, in the end. Just a series of wacky events, with no real way to tie them all together. And then the last 50 pages of Thief of Time proved me wrong, when, despite an overlong action digression in the climax, all the loose threads came together, everything made sense, and the novel actually had a larger plot than just the petty squabbling of the principle characters.

The Color of Magic is a very different novel than Thief of Time was, and it's much more conventional in some ways, while still being very funny and inventive. But the main reason I didn't give it a higher score was because it was basically just a long series of satirical events set in the world of fantasy, with no larger theme or even a plot that pulls disparate elements together for a big finale.  There is a sequel to this first Discworld novel though, The Light Fantastic, and it apparently picks up shortly after the first novel ends, with the continuing adventures of Rincewind the inept Wizard.  I do not know if the books are companion pieces, sort of like the 3 volumes Lord of the Rings was published in, or if they're really free-standing separate titles. I bring this up because I didn't think Color of Magic really wrapped up very well; just sort of ending in the middle of yet another manic fantasy adventure, but if the 2 novels can be read back to back to form a longer and more cohesive whole, that would possibly boost my score for both books.

It's a bit like the situation I found myself in when reviewing A Game of Thrones, the first novel in George R.R. Martin's brilliant and on-going fantasy series.  It's a pretty good book, but it's just the first 800 pages in his overall story, and it could have ended 200 pages sooner, or 200 pages later with no real difference in the overall tone of things. Since I wrote my review of A Game of Thrones after I'd read the first three books in the series, it was hard to review since my scores for the 3 books together would be 9s and 10s, but since much of the first book was just introducing characters and setting the stage for the awesome stuff that comes to pass later on, I had to score it by what it was, rather than what it was going to become.

And if the 2nd Discworld novel continues right where book 1 left off and more of the faint plot threads develop and the whole situation turns into something larger than just the wacky adventures of Rincewind, Twoflower, and his sentient luggage, I'd view Discworld #1 more favorably than I do now.

As for Color of Magic itself, I enjoyed a lot of it, and only the lack of anything bigger than just the point A to point B to point C adventures kept me from scoring it higher. It was fun, it had great characters, but it took me a week to read since there wasn't really any ongoing narrative pull or rising action. That's the problem with most comedies though, movie or book; it's really hard to string all of the amusing comic scenes and situations into a cohesive whole. Most comedy films are a series of short skits starring the same characters, and that's pretty much how most of Color of Magic felt to me. Except that the skits often star new characters, introduced just for that segment and the wacky interactions they're going to have with the main characters.

They are very funny skits though, and the whole book is basically a big satire of every convention of fantasy literature. Treasure-grubbing super strong barbarian heroes, wizards who  can't actually do anything but pretend to be mystical, thieves who all end up killing each other trying to steal a great treasure, unkillable demonic monsters with ridiculous Achilles' heels, scheming princesses and dying kings, magical dragons viewing their situation with logic and objectivity, gods watching the struggles of men and interfering for their own amusement, and on and on. I won't detail the gags since that would spoil the novel, and honestly I couldn't do them anything resembling justice with a short description here. They'd sound silly and trite in synopsis, since it's really the way Pratchett sets them up and turns the conventions upside down that makes them so funny in the novel. You've got to read it, and since your local library almost certainly 

Overall, Discworld #1 reminded me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe #1, which basically satirized Sci-Fi clichés the same way Color of Magic satirized Fantasy clichés. I liked Discworld more, but how much of that is just due to me liking fantasy more than scifi? Hard to say, but I was fine not reading any other Hitchhiker novels after the first one, while I am interested in reading some more Discword novels. I've got #2 on my library book list, and will pick it up at some point. 

My second book review of the day is a very different style of novel.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Plot: 7
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 9.5/9
Characters: 8
Humor: 6
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 7
Overall: 9

Right up front I'll say it. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and it's easy to see why. It is one of the very best-written novels I've ever read, and it probably did have the best prose in any book I've ever read. Only the fact that the story dragged a bit as it went on, and the early transcendent chapters of lyrically-beautiful prose began to seem sort of wordy and somewhat unnecessary past about page 300 kept me from awarding several 10s in my categorized scoring.

I don't like to recap the plot of books or movies when I review them, since I figure you can read an online blurb or the dust jacket for that. But since the plot of this one is so unusual and the structure so interwoven, I'll recap a bit, without dropping as many spoilers as the blurbs I've seen on Amazon.com and elsewhere do.

Middlesex is written as a memoir by Cal Stephanides, a fictional second child of second generation Greek immigrants (Cal's grandparents emigrated during the first World War). The book is written in first person, and the chapters typical begin with a short passage from Cal's current life, then flash back to some formative event in his life, or the life of his parents or grandparents. In this way we keep in touch with modern day Cal, living in Germany and working for the US embassy, while being filled in on pertinent biographical information about Cal's grandparents and parents through the last 80 years.

The big twist of the novel, and you find this out immediately so it's not a spoiler, is that Cal is a hermaphrodite. She appears to be a girl externally, and is raised and lives as one until she hits puberty, at which point various physical changes and an emergency room visit result in the shocking (to Cal and everyone else in the story, but not the reader since we've known for hundreds of pages) discovery of a penis-like organ, undescended testicles, and a vagina that is far from fully-functional.

The history of Cal's ancestors is fascinating, funny, heart-breaking, surprising, and and everything else you want from a great novel, but it's when Cal finds out what she/he really is that things really take a turn for the weird. And since that discovery is far from the conclusion of the novel, I shall say no more about it.

Since I don't have anything to compare this one to, I'm going to spend a few paragraphs explaining my scores, rather than talking about the book in general as I did in today's other review.

Plot: 7
Brilliant plot, well-structured, exquisitely-layered and written... but ultimately lacking in suspense, since we know so much in advance. This was unavoidable with the novel's structure, and there are plenty of twists and turns along the way, but I kept reading since it was so well-written and interesting; not because I was dying to find out what happened next.

Concept: 9
This might deserve a 10, since the concept is brilliant, and it's executed so well throughout.

Writing Quality/Flow: 9.5/9
I'd give it a 10/10, but I got bored with the verbosity at times. The novel is 544 pages, and I think 400ish would have been fine. And yes, I'm a complete hypocrite for criticizing it over this, given my recently-rewritten and still insanely-bloated 162,000 word chapter two.

Characters: 8
Cal was unique and fascinating, as were a lot of others. Not all others though, and some of his older Greek relatives were a bit too stereotypical to swallow completely.

Humor: 6
It's not written as a comedy, but there were numerous scenes that had me laughing out loud, more at the absurdity of it than due to any actual jokes.

Fun Factor: 5
It's certainly interesting and fascinating, but fun? Not really. It's not a light read or a quick read, at least not if you want to appreciate the best qualities; how well it's written and how well it flows.

Page Turner: 5
Not so much. I ended up taking this one back to the library over two weeks late since I spent the first three weeks reading it just a few pages at a time in the bathroom, and only picked up the pace and dug through the last couple of hundred pages when the prospect of paying $.25 cents a day for the privilege of looking at it on top of the toilet basin began to annoy me.

Re-readability: 7
I don't see myself ever rereading the entire novel start to finish, but when I one day own the book I could definitely pick it up for a chapter or two any time, just to appreciate the beauty of the language and how well it's all put together. It's like a dessert wine; meant to be sipped and savored, rather than sped through.

Overall: 9
It deserves 10s in a few areas, and even though I didn't give it any of those, and gave it numerous 5s, 6s, and 7s, the overall package was too beautifully-done to score it less than a 9.