looking to the side at someone else behind me.
I am alive! Looks like the worst of the wind missed us, possibly because we're in something of a valley, even with our house on the side of a hill; it rained from about midnight to late Sunday afternoon, with continued drizzle that evening, and we lost power for maybe seven or eight hours. The dams on the Connecticut seem to be doing their jobs, but parts of New Hampshire that I drive through to get to work were flooded this morning - I ended up having to turn around and take an alternate route at one point, and at least one mall that I passed on the interstate had a parking lot that was covered with water. (Unsettling, but not a huge surprise, given that the major shopping areas in West Lebanon are on a floodplain. Hopefully the damage is relatively minor.)
For us, it was a fairly quiet day. We watched the weather on the TV until the power went in the early afternoon, and then read until dinner, when we fled to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
idriya's apartment - she still had electricity. We got back and I broke out the candles to finish a book, and then the power came back just in time for me to brush my teeth.
The book was Guy Gavriel Kay's Song for Arbonne, about which I have mixed feelings. :/ I didn't hate it, it was a decent enough book, but, fair warning, I'm going to talk mostly about the things I disliked, and as always, YMMV.
I enjoyed Under Heaven a lot, but I think he wrote Tigana and Arbonne much earlier, and I like them correspondingly less. Partly, I admit, this is a style issue - I don't think he did this in Under Heaven, but in Tigana and Arbonne both there are no commas where I think there should be commas, he changes POV mid-passage with no scene break, and he changes tense sometimes when he changes POV, which would not be an issue except for that no-scene-break thing. I like tight POV better than a third-person-quasi-omniscient that ambles around with no scene breaks, but I could handle the ambling without the tense changes, or the tense changes without the ambling. It's the combination that breaks me.
Content-wise, in Tigana, I got pretty tired of being told how awesome Tigana was; and in Arbonne, I got pretty tired of being told how awesome Arbonne was. Particularly because the contrast this time was between "woman-ruled" Arbonne and the disgustingly misogynistic Gorhaut - not that I am on Gorhaut's side, here, but the faint proto-feminism of Arbonne did not exactly blow me away. For me, it was a contrast between a vaguely misogynistic place and a really misogynistic place, and so all the harping on how fabulous Arbonne was about its treatment of women really got on my nerves. Like, oh, you don't have women stripped and beaten in the street? Congratulations. And, oh, the dudes at the end commiserating about how it was okay to be murderously angry, because the other army had burned women alive - how could they control their manly outrage? Classic manpain.
More generally, I don't much care for books that seem to be trying to sell themselves as really complex and then have a human villain who's a creepy sadist. Wow, thanks for taking a stand against a guy who likes to slaughter unarmed civilians and gouge their eyes out and rape women and torture animals. That made it really difficult to pick sides in the conflict. (Obviously this doesn't apply to something like Lord of the Rings, where the enemy really is pretty much evil incarnate; and, to be fair, Tigana was much less anvilicious in this respect.)
Also, if Blaise drank in Ariane's cool refreshing beauty like cool refreshingness one more time, I was going to punch something. But I did finish it! And I ordered myself three new books as a reward. :D
Here's hoping the power's still on when I get home this afternoon.
For us, it was a fairly quiet day. We watched the weather on the TV until the power went in the early afternoon, and then read until dinner, when we fled to
idriya's apartment - she still had electricity. We got back and I broke out the candles to finish a book, and then the power came back just in time for me to brush my teeth.The book was Guy Gavriel Kay's Song for Arbonne, about which I have mixed feelings. :/ I didn't hate it, it was a decent enough book, but, fair warning, I'm going to talk mostly about the things I disliked, and as always, YMMV.
I enjoyed Under Heaven a lot, but I think he wrote Tigana and Arbonne much earlier, and I like them correspondingly less. Partly, I admit, this is a style issue - I don't think he did this in Under Heaven, but in Tigana and Arbonne both there are no commas where I think there should be commas, he changes POV mid-passage with no scene break, and he changes tense sometimes when he changes POV, which would not be an issue except for that no-scene-break thing. I like tight POV better than a third-person-quasi-omniscient that ambles around with no scene breaks, but I could handle the ambling without the tense changes, or the tense changes without the ambling. It's the combination that breaks me.
Content-wise, in Tigana, I got pretty tired of being told how awesome Tigana was; and in Arbonne, I got pretty tired of being told how awesome Arbonne was. Particularly because the contrast this time was between "woman-ruled" Arbonne and the disgustingly misogynistic Gorhaut - not that I am on Gorhaut's side, here, but the faint proto-feminism of Arbonne did not exactly blow me away. For me, it was a contrast between a vaguely misogynistic place and a really misogynistic place, and so all the harping on how fabulous Arbonne was about its treatment of women really got on my nerves. Like, oh, you don't have women stripped and beaten in the street? Congratulations. And, oh, the dudes at the end commiserating about how it was okay to be murderously angry, because the other army had burned women alive - how could they control their manly outrage? Classic manpain.
More generally, I don't much care for books that seem to be trying to sell themselves as really complex and then have a human villain who's a creepy sadist. Wow, thanks for taking a stand against a guy who likes to slaughter unarmed civilians and gouge their eyes out and rape women and torture animals. That made it really difficult to pick sides in the conflict. (Obviously this doesn't apply to something like Lord of the Rings, where the enemy really is pretty much evil incarnate; and, to be fair, Tigana was much less anvilicious in this respect.)
Also, if Blaise drank in Ariane's cool refreshing beauty like cool refreshingness one more time, I was going to punch something. But I did finish it! And I ordered myself three new books as a reward. :D
Here's hoping the power's still on when I get home this afternoon.