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boxes, books, bother
Tuesday, 14 August 2007 09:26 amHow entertaining. Wrestling the techno-jinx this morning (random complete failure of campus login) I found lurking on our local directory tree a UNIT directory, no doubt top secret and classified and full of innocent, misdirectory gumph. I await in breathless anticipation (shared only by the very few total Dr Who geeks who actually get the reference) for the arrival of the strange blue box to take me the hell away from all this.
Finished Cassie Clare's City of Bones yesterday. Interesting read. She is, for the uninitiated, the A-list fanfic author responsible for both the Very Secret Diaries and the Draco trilogy (angsty H/D emotional slash which she has excised from Teh Internets on receipt of actual publishing contract). City of Bones is her original urban fantasy novel, YA slanted, first in a trilogy. I don't have a lot of affection for urban fantasy, mostly because it's very fashionable right now and I'm just a mite bored with all the vampires and werewolves and faeries, oh my, most of whom are unrelieved by any smattering of originality.
The first chapter of the novel is, alas, horribly clichéd - demon-hunters in night club - and gave me a bit of a sinking feeling when I read it. However, it picks up amazingly, and ends up proffering a quite intricately-woven and interesting conglomeration of people and plots. It shares with her HP fanfic a fascination with slightly over-emotional relationships and misunderstandings, lavishly decorated with pretty boys and pretty gay boys, and drove me demented at a couple of points by lifting motifs wholesale from the Draco trilogy. This lady singularly fails to lack imagination, surely she can do her published work the courtesy of not actually recycling stuff? Nonetheless, it's a surprisingly readable and enjoyable contribution to a subgenre in which I have no damned faith at all, so go Cassie Clare. I'll definitely acquire the rest of the trilogy.
Last Night I Dreamed: exhaustingly. As a fire-breathing entity of some sort, I was pursued through attractive fantasy landscapes by bad guys who eventually chained me to the ceiling. We escaped by emigrating to California, although without ever meeting up with our pre-escaped allies: I was somewhat miffed by the lack of closure supplied by the ending. Later, I masterminded a convoluted plan which entailed breaking into the lower levels of a giant, industrial research complex of some sort. While my ploy of dodging the laser security with split-second timing worked perfectly, the whole thing was sabotaged by the fact that I had to bring the whole research team with me. Mostly absent-minded professor types, they innocently stuffed the works by getting accidentally locked inside, leaving incriminating notes for each other, and trying to smuggle out radioactive tomatoes. In a series of poignant vignettes they then all committed suicide by leaping off tall buildings and into rivers. Gods, no wonder I'm zombified this morning.
Finished Cassie Clare's City of Bones yesterday. Interesting read. She is, for the uninitiated, the A-list fanfic author responsible for both the Very Secret Diaries and the Draco trilogy (angsty H/D emotional slash which she has excised from Teh Internets on receipt of actual publishing contract). City of Bones is her original urban fantasy novel, YA slanted, first in a trilogy. I don't have a lot of affection for urban fantasy, mostly because it's very fashionable right now and I'm just a mite bored with all the vampires and werewolves and faeries, oh my, most of whom are unrelieved by any smattering of originality.
The first chapter of the novel is, alas, horribly clichéd - demon-hunters in night club - and gave me a bit of a sinking feeling when I read it. However, it picks up amazingly, and ends up proffering a quite intricately-woven and interesting conglomeration of people and plots. It shares with her HP fanfic a fascination with slightly over-emotional relationships and misunderstandings, lavishly decorated with pretty boys and pretty gay boys, and drove me demented at a couple of points by lifting motifs wholesale from the Draco trilogy. This lady singularly fails to lack imagination, surely she can do her published work the courtesy of not actually recycling stuff? Nonetheless, it's a surprisingly readable and enjoyable contribution to a subgenre in which I have no damned faith at all, so go Cassie Clare. I'll definitely acquire the rest of the trilogy.
Last Night I Dreamed: exhaustingly. As a fire-breathing entity of some sort, I was pursued through attractive fantasy landscapes by bad guys who eventually chained me to the ceiling. We escaped by emigrating to California, although without ever meeting up with our pre-escaped allies: I was somewhat miffed by the lack of closure supplied by the ending. Later, I masterminded a convoluted plan which entailed breaking into the lower levels of a giant, industrial research complex of some sort. While my ploy of dodging the laser security with split-second timing worked perfectly, the whole thing was sabotaged by the fact that I had to bring the whole research team with me. Mostly absent-minded professor types, they innocently stuffed the works by getting accidentally locked inside, leaving incriminating notes for each other, and trying to smuggle out radioactive tomatoes. In a series of poignant vignettes they then all committed suicide by leaping off tall buildings and into rivers. Gods, no wonder I'm zombified this morning.
