Survived Parent/Teacher conferences, survived a deeply stupid district PLC meeting today, stamped 200 postcards, and I have a tattoo appointment tomorrow. And now I’m going to bed early.
Month: October 2024
#REVIEW: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
I have, I believe, read everything Shannon Chakraborty has in print, or at least the three major novels and companion novella in her Daevabad Trilogy; if she has anything else out there other than maybe some short stories here and there, I’m not aware of them. I liked the Daevabad books enough that I read all of them, of course, but I’d characterize all of them as slower reads; her books have always taken me longer to read than pure word count might indicate, and something about them never quite fully clicked with me. If someone asked me about the series, I’d say something sort of generically positive rather than jumping in with both feet.
I had no idea that she had The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi in her.
I am writing this at work in between bouts of having Things to Do, as I wasn’t able to finish the book until last night, although I feel like this is substantially the exact same review if I had written it a couple of days ago when I had 200 pages left. This is another “take a look at that cover” book. See the pirate ship? Being attacked by something huge and tentacular? Okay. It’s that book. Amina al-Sirafi is a pirate. Retired, at least at the beginning, but a pirate. She’s a mom. She only sorta gets along with her mom. And then she gets handed a job: rescue the daughter of a local noble from her kidnapper, with an enormous reward at stake, and it’s time to put the band back together and go unleash hell.
God, I loved it. I loved every page. This book puts its foot on the gas at about the 100-page mark and it just absolutely does not let up until the very end, and there are pirates and sea monsters and other pirates and magicians and sea monsters and rakshasha and a couple of wry references to Daevabad— the book is technically set in the same universe but 1000 years earlier, and you absolutely don’t need to know anything about Daevabad to read it– and more sea monsters and zombie-things and magic pearls that aren’t pearls and gods and goddesses and celestial bird-thing courts and it is probably not literally a perfect book but it is definitely a perfect book for me and it’s going to be very high on my top 10 list at the end of the year.
Go read it right now.
#REVIEW: Of Blood and Fire, by Ryan Cahill
Let’s be clear here, and not bury the lede on this review: You have read Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire before. No, really, I promise you have. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or Dragonlance, or The Sword of Shannara, or the first book of The Wheel of Time, or John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen series, or especially if you’ve read– gag– Eragon, you’ve read Of Blood and Fire. The book’s biggest weakness is that in its nearly five hundred pages there is not a single original idea. It adheres to the dictates of classic fantasy with near-perfect fidelity, from the main characters hailing from a small town suddenly infringed upon by the evil of the outer world to suddenly dead parents to one of the three main characters being The Chosen One to parents and authority figures with a Secret Past to dragon riding to elves and dwarves and orcs, here called Uraks, to a distinct lack of female characters. Hell, all it needs is “A Noun” at the beginning of the title and even that feels ripped off.
There is a human king named Arthur and an elf named Ellisar, for God’s sake. I’m not going to bother to tell you what the book’s about. You already know. Again, you’ve read this book before.
And yet this is not going to be a negative review, because originality isn’t everything– hell, this book manages to rip off two or three books that were themselves massive ripoffs of earlier, better books– although I would neither blame you nor be particularly surprised if that first paragraph keeps you from picking it up. Somehow, despite being an utter pastiche of a ton of stuff that came before it, it’s a competent pastiche, and frankly it’s a pastiche of a genre of book that I have been a big fan of for my entire life. It’s a cheeseburger and fries. You know what a cheeseburger and fries is going to taste like before you pick it up, and you don’t necessarily need anyone trying to get super creative with a cheeseburger and fries, right? It can taste like three thousand other burgers so long as it does being a burger correctly, and, well, this does being a burger mostly pretty well.
(Why mostly? This is self-published, to boot, and there are signs of occasionally needing maybe one more editorial pass. The book begins with someone telling someone else they’re going to ask them Four Questions, and it’s said like that where you want to add capital letters, and then they ask them at least seven questions. Shit like that.)
I dunno. I four-starred this, and at least one of those stars was for the exceptional quality of the hardback– this book is an absolute pleasure to hold in the hand, with a pleasant heft and exceptionally smooth, creamy paper, and if you buy books for their qualities as physical objects you definitely want to own it– and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels, but it is absolutely McDonald’s fantasy fiction, to be even more specific with the “cheeseburger” metaphor. You’ve had this before, and sometimes you get a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that was just made perfectly, but it’s still a DQP with for all that. That’s what this is. I’m in for more, but maybe you don’t like fast food, and that’s okay.
#REVIEW: In the Hour of Crows, by Dana Elmendorf
A touch of housekeeping first– I have parent/teacher conferences after school tomorrow and Tuesday, and am expecting to get home a shattered wreck of a human being both nights, so I’m going to do my damnedest to get three book reviews written today so that I don’t have to get home and scribble something down after 13-hour days at work. In accordance with prophecy, this means that I absolutely will get home and scribble something down after both of those 13-hour days, but still.
Dana Elmendorf’s In the Hour of Crows is one of those books where I heard about the premise and then suddenly had the book; I don’t recall spending money or making an active decision that I needed to own it, but I heard “Appalachian gothic horror about a young woman who can raise the dead” and then it was on my unread shelf somehow. It’s a quick read at only 288 pages, and I started it before bed one night and finished it the next morning. The main character, Weatherly, has the ability to raise the dead by “talking the death out of them,” which I can imagine being the premise for something utterly ridiculous and instead ended up being this cool Christian/aboriginal syncretistic thing where she starts by whispering secret Bible verses into a dead or dying person’s palm and ends with her absorbing their deaths and literally spitting the substance of their deaths out into a nearby vessel, one that can never have contained alcohol before she uses it. She can only do this once for any person; if she tries it again, it won’t work, and her powers must be deliberately passed on to someone else before she dies.
Like, right away, yup, I’m in, and let me remind everyone again that part of the reason I like most of the books I read is that I have years of practice in determining what I like to read and what I don’t. And I was utterly on-target on this one; between the setting, the approach to magic, and the characters (Weatherly’s grandmother, who despises her, is a standout) I ended up really enjoying this one. The book actually ends up being a murder mystery, as Weatherly attempts to save someone and fails, leading everyone to assume that she did it on purpose, and her cousin Adaire’s death in a car accident ends up being wrapped up in that death. Weatherly herself is a bit of a hellion, or at least recovering from her hellion years– she’s in her early/mid twenties in the “now” of the book, but it jumps around in time quite a bit– and her utter lack of concern for what the law might want in any particular set of circumstances is occasionally kind of hilarious. Pretty much every move she makes makes her look more guilty of murder, and she … just does shit anyway, because she wants to. She’s great.
The book also features the single most disrespectful and petty funeral service I have ever seen in print; it’s probably only a couple of pages in total, but it’s the thing I’ll remember the most about this book after the details have faded on the rest of it.
I think this is Elmendorf’s debut, and I kind of hope she stays with this wider setting and style of book in the future, as I’d love to read more of it. More books about Weatherly probably aren’t super likely, but if she wants to write an actual sequel of sorts, I’d love to see something about the grandmother. Definitely give it a look.
In which the day got away from me
Let’s see: I spent a couple of hours hunting down bosses in Black Myth Wukong’s final level, which inexplicably transitions into an open world map but doesn’t actually provide you with a map, meaning such concerns as “north” and “south” become way more complicated than they ought to be. We went out to dinner at a local Italian place, the one with the really good bread, although I’m starting to suspect that they’re using genuinely stellar bread to cover up for mediocre entrees. We finally took down the utterly terrible curtains that have been hanging in our dining room since we bought the house and replaced them, and the hardware, with something not filthy and disgusting, and we went and bought paint for the entryway to the house, a decision that I think we’re going to live to regret, but my wife thinks otherwise, and she’s usually right about these things.
I don’t feel like that gets me to 9:00 PM, and I’m not sure where the several other hours of the day have gone, and I’m rather disturbed by my inability to account for, like, half the day. The boy is at a lock-in at school right now (I have done one of these during my career, and I will never do another) and you would think having the house to ourselves would lead to something exciting, but instead we’re going to watch one (1) episode of Great British Baking Show and then go to bed.
Adulthood’s exciting, innit?
UPDATE: I need sleep and video games
and someone needs to figure out a way I can do both at the same time. It was actually a pretty good day, but I’m thoroughly tapped out nonetheless. Be good to each other.
In which c’mon, Medcline, help a blogger out
Any of y’all have any pull with Medcline? I wanna try out their shoulder pillow. The CPAP means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore (well, okay, the sleep apnea means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore) and I’m tired of shoulder pain and waking up with my hands asleep. I’m sleeping a thousand times better than before I had the CPAP but I feel like there’s still room for improvement. That said, I’m not willing to drop the kind of money they want for their system on something I can’t see or touch before I buy it. Therefore they have to respect my status as an Internet Influencer and send me one for free. I have prior experience with reviewing pillows! How many Important Influencers can say that? Not many, I tell you.
So, yeah, get on that, y’all. I’m 5’10”, by the way, since that appears to matter.
There will be no ranting about postcards tonight, because I’m taking the night off, and no ranting about school either, because the boy is still sick and I ended up having to stay home with him today since my wife had unavoidable commitments at her job. He went to urgent care on Monday and was greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him to his regular doctor if he’s not better in a few days.” Today we took him to his regular doctor and were greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him back if he’s not better in a few days.” All I know is the kid’s been sleeping 20 hours a day for a week and a half but that doesn’t seem to be helping anyone find anything actually wrong with him.
Anyway. Another part of the reason I’m not doing postcards tonight is that it’s somehow 7:00 already and despite being home all day I don’t have anything ready for tomorrow yet. The fact that I spent the whole day screwing around on BlueSky might have something to do with that, I suppose. (Follow me on BlueSky, while I’m begging for stuff!) So I probably ought to go do some lesson planning now, I suppose.
Christ and fuck ENOUGH
So remember last week, where two days in a row I had “man, today was a long week” posts?
I wrote up eight kids today– at least one in each class except for first and fifth hour, including four in sixth hour, and let’s be real, the only reason I didn’t write anyone up in fifth is because my chief shithead had gotten suspended earlier in the day– and in between fourth and fifth hour I broke up a literal fucking stampede of probably a hundred adolescent assholes by shouting “Get your asses back to class” so loudly that I think I damaged a vocal cord.
I wonder if that counts as a workplace injury?
It was not a good day, and if tomorrow is remotely as shitty as today was, there is a very real chance that I’m not showing up for work on Friday. I have four more days of teaching between now and Fall Break. Unfortunately, I also have twelve hours of parent/teacher conferences between now and then, during which, in accordance with prophecy, I will see none of the unconcerned, uninvolved, negligent-ass, ignorant-ass, broke-ass useless parents of my shitheads, and only parents of kids who I have good things to say about.
I literally told one of my APs today that we could drastically improve the building if we just expelled about twenty of them on the spot. Their parents think we’re babysitters. You know what babysitters can do? Quit.
Fuck teaching. I’m going to go write some fucking postcards.
EDIT: What the fucking fuck, WordPress?
I mean, okay, I put “assholes” in the tags, but still, are you fucking kidding??
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