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I was able to perform a feat of awesomeness to celebrate the IDoA: I volunteered to help a friend set up a website so he can share his valuable and esoteric knowledge about keeping a home aquarium with the world. Woo! Look for a link here once he’s got it set up.
This book is a strong follow-up to the previous two novels in this series (Resenting the Hero and The Hero Strikes Back), as engaging and unpretentious as its predecessors, though not, in the end, as good as either. I have to say, though, now that we’ve hit the third novel in the series, that it feels like the story is floundering a bit. Or maybe that’s my frustration talking.
I say that because the author is letting several tantalizing hints of a potential overarching plot slip in every novel, and it feels like they’re either coming to nothing, or she’s just teasing us in preparation for a big reveal later on. I sincerely hope it’s the latter.
If it was possible to give Iron Kissed higher than the highest rating, I would have. I loved this book. As one reviewer said, this series just keeps getting better and better. Before reading this series, I wouldn’t have counted Briggs among my favorite authors, but her masterful execution of this novel has ensconced her firmly within the upper echelons of my personal hall of fame.
This book has it all: fiercely engaging characters, tight, tight plotting, and a breakneck, hold-your-breath-till-the-last-page pace. What I love best of all is the way she is weaving the complicated tapestry of a bigger story from seemingly disparate threads without ever letting up on the tension of the immediate narrative (something the Heroes series does not do nearly as well, though it has the potential to). This kind of skill is something I had previously only associated with epic fantasy, with authors like Michelle West and Guy Gavriel Kay and George R.R. Martin, and this series of books is not only the best example of urban fantasy I’ve ever read, it’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite series ever. It’s that good.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Big surprise here. But what can I say? Huston is scarily perfect and delivers again. He aims for the jugular and never misses.
Had I ever harbored any doubt that the Joe Pitt casebooks were horror stories, those doubts have been laid to rest: Half the Blood of Brooklyn is violent, bloody and glorious. Huston ratchets the tension impossibly higher—never forgetting to give the story as much heart as it has pyrotechnics—and by the end of the book you’re all wound up waiting for the shitstorm that will descend in the next installment. So good!
The Economist, which you may have heard me say before. Now, they call themselves a weekly newspaper, which is a more accurate description than the word “magazine”.
What I love about this publication is that they make no bones about including opinion with the news, something which many major newspapers do not do, instead professing to take a scrupulously just-the-facts-ma’am approach. I use the word “profess” there because the opinion is included in the news anyway, just in a more insidious manner: through how the news is reported and what indeed is chosen to be reported on, not just in what they call the Opinion section. I’d much prefer—and I know you’ve heard me say this before—that they just gave up on this weak illusion of neutrality (try reading articles on the same topic in the New York Post and the New York Times sometime and you’ll see what I mean) and came right out with what they think.
The Economist does exactly this; their articles usually take the approach of saying “this is what happened, and this is what we think”. Which is a lot more genuine and trustworthy.
What I hate about this publication is that they come out with more than 100 pages of great content per week, and I’m lucky if I can make it through 20. If The Economist was the only thing I read—and you know that’s never going to happen—I’d have trouble keeping up with it, but as it stands, weeks go by and I don’t read much more than one article, or any at all. And that makes me sad.
But you know all this already. What you may not have known, and which I discovered just recently, is that The Economist offers, in addition to their weekly podcasts (more great content which I don’t even maintain the pretense of keeping up with), an audio edition of their print magazine. That’s right; professional newscasters and actors record the magazine, word for word, and the audio is available for free to subscribers (I have an online subscription so I won’t feel bad about throwing away mostly unread print copies of the magazine). How awesome is that? These guys celebrate the International Day of Awesomeness everyday.
So since I moved recently, I’ve had decorating on the brain, as I decided to dip into my savings a bit in an attempt to de-Ikea my place and invest in some furniture I’d like to keep long-term. So in addition to poring over the Crate & Barrel, Room & Board, Design Within Reach (whose reach?!), etc. catalogs, I’ve been getting various home magazines and in general seeking out design resources on the web and in print to try and get inspiration for how to put my space together.
And as a result, I’ve become a bit more conversant with design trends and big names in the industry, specifically having to do with the mid-century modern aesthetic (think the Jetsons’ living room) that’s enjoying a powerful, pervasive resurgence these days. If you’d asked me a month ago who Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen were, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea. Now, I not only know who they all are, I can also identify pieces they’re known for (the Eames molded plywood chair, the Saarinen Tulip table).
Now, I like mid-century modern, but I prefer a more timeless look in my own place, so what I’ve cobbled together, while it’s definitely modern in feel, has touches of mid-century modern, deco, and the nameless aesthetic popular in recent years that I will call American modern, which puts an emphasis on rich textures and colors combined with clean lines.
One unexpected outcome of all this research is that I have a new favorite magazine: dwell*. While it’s concerned less with interior design and more with architecture and trends in building technologies, it’s a very well put-together publication and holds my attention cover to cover. So now I have a subscription.
I have to say I really enjoy reading these more obscure magazines, the ones that assume a certain knowledge that laypeople may not have, because it opens up a whole new world of concepts I’d never previously thought about. Fascinating stuff!
*I would have said Blueprint, hands down the best lifestyle magazine I’ve ever read, but I found out after I picked up the January issue that it would be the last one ever published, as Martha Stewart Living (its parent company) was going to stop publication in order to focus more on their Weddings magazine. I think that sucks.
March 10 is the first-ever International Day of Awesomeness (tagline: “No one’s perfect, but everyone can be awesome.”). Make sure to celebrate it by performing feats of awesomeness. Or if you aren’t ultimate enough for that, write a blog post on others who are.
As for me, I am not sure yet what I will do to celebrate, but I am fairly certain that it will involve a cape. And possibly a heroic pose.
doing something a bit odd: I went to a concert. By myself. But before I get into that story, let me give you a bit of background.
Even if you know me, you may not know that I’m a big fan of Latin jazz/mambo music, while at the same time being a complete neophyte. I don’t own much of it, but I love it, and know just enough about the genre to recognize the big names in the field: Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, to name a couple.
Another luminary in Latin jazz, Arturo Sandoval is an enormously talented trumpeter, one often mentioned in the same breath with such greats as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. And when I found out that he and his band were playing a week-long engagement at Yoshi’s Jazz Club here in San Francisco, I flipped out. I’d been looking for an excuse to go to Yoshi’s here or in in Oakland for a while, and this was the perfect one.
Unfortunately, of the six friends I asked to join me, all were either uninterested (?!) or unavailable. But as I wasn’t about to let a little thing like that cheat me out of the chance to go see a living legend in person, I decided to go anyway. And the show was worth. Every. Penny.
Live music is always better than recorded music, but the improvisational nature of jazz lends itself uniquely to the truly great live music experience, which this was. Sandoval was spectacular, and was playing with a truly gifted group of musicians—each backup trumpeter was a master in his own right, and the saxophonist! There are no words.
Now, I knew going in that Sandoval was a great—some would argue the greatest—trumpeter, but what I didn’t know was that he’s a hell of a pianist as well. Other than his final number, a gorgeous rendition of Mambo Caliente, which he composed for the Mambo Kings soundtrack (the record that seriously got me into all this), the highlight of the evening was him sitting at the piano performing a piece he wrote and dedicated to recently deceased piano legend Oscar Peterson. If I hadn’t heard him bring the room to its feet with his trumpet just minutes before, I would have thought he’d devoted his whole life to studying the piano—he was that good.
The show was just phenomenal. Loved it loved it loved it.