New Books at the Benton Library

Hey, all!  We got a slew of new donations over the winter break, including:

  • The Dresden Files books 1, 2, 3, 5, and 9.  For those who are not familiar with these, these books are the inspiration for the TV show The Dresden Files.
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
  • Marlfox, Outcast of Redwall, Pearls of Lutra, and The Long Patrol, all Redwall books.
  • Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

And many others.  Come check us out!  As always, we’re on the corner of Second and Winona.

Isis

A chilling retelling of the story of Isis and Osiris, set in Victorian England.

The book is written as if it were a Victorian novel, but with wisps of modern sensibility stealing in here and there.  Iris Villiers is a Gothic heroine with a touch of supernatural power who spends her days trapped on the ancestral estate with nothing to do.   When her beloved brother Harvey dies from falling out a window, she’s willing to pay any price to bring him back from the dead.

You might want to stop reading at the end of chapter seven and pretend that chapter eight doesn’t exist.  Left there, it’s a bittersweet tale of life and death.  The real ending is tragic.  It also wins a prize for scariest use of a locked container ever.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A Fantasy Joke

There’s an old joke circulating the trenches about General Zagin’s early career.  It holds that during the Third Darkling Rebellion, he was posted at a remote fort only a few miles away from enemy territory.  The Darklings kept sending hordes of necromantically-animated skeletons at them, and the men at the fort were getting slaughtered.

So General Zagin found the fort’s resident wizard and he said to him, “Why should the bad guys be the only ones who get to use soulless automatons?  Make me some golems so my men don’t have to get killed out there.”

There was plenty of mud lying around (the borderlands being a famously mucky environment), so the wizard did as he was told and had the golems ready by the next morning.  They failed miserably.  All they could do was walk in a straight line until they tripped over their own feet.

Zagin said, “Nice start, but I need these golems to be smarter.  Knowing how to shoot a gun would be good.”

The wizard was terrified of getting punished, so he worked long into the night making his golems smarter.  The next morning he put them on the battlefield so Zagin could see how they worked.  They were, indeed, smarter than the first batch of golems.  These ones could shoot, and if they ran into a wall they could go around it instead of standing there swinging their legs back and forth.  But they were still bleeding idiots compared to humans, and Zagin told the wizard so.

The wizard was getting excited about his work, so this time he put everything he had into making his golems smarter.  And the next morning, he proudly showed them off to the general.

The golems took one look at the advancing skeleton horde, threw down their guns, and ran away.

“What the hell, wizard?” said Zagin.  “What happened?  These golems are completely useless!”

The wizard turned to the general and said, “I think I made them too smart, sir.”

Avatar

No, not that Avatar...

That's more like it.

I had thought, since you can draw pretty much anything given enough CGI these days, that special effects wouldn’t impress me anymore.  After spending two hours and forty minutes with my jaw hanging open, I stand corrected.  Amazing aerial battles, emotionally convincing mocap, and 3D that works.  And the plot is fairly decent for an action/adventure movie.  It’s got slightly more to it than Indiana Jones, more on a par with The Matrix.

Some other notes:

  • Surprisingly fair portrayal of the scientist characters.  Nobody broke out into maniacal laughter once.
  • Dr. Grace (the Sigourney Weaver lady) mentions that she would like to take some samples when she visits the Tree of Souls.  I would like to say that that’s a stereotype.  But if I were in her place, I would have been thinking it pretty hard.
  • The pipettes in the labs are exact replicas of pipettes found in early twenty-first century biology labs.  Who’d have thought it?  Eppendorf must have reached design perfection around 2009 and never changed their products since.
  • Plausible space travel.  The P.A. system informs Jake Sully that he’s been in hibernation for five years.  Factor in the fact that that’s five years from the ship’s point of view, not Earth’s, and you don’t even need to invoke FTL to get to some of the nearby stars.
  • Humanlike aliens: not so plausible.  But they had a good artistic reason to do it – the audience is human, and we need to be able to empathize with them.  I left with the impression that the Na’vi were an ethnicity, not a species.
  • Jake falls in love with the chieftain’s daughter.  Didn’t see that one coming.
  • Colonel Miles Quaritch says something to the extent that “Our only chance at security is a pre-emptive strike.  We must fight terror with terror.”  And the disclaimer says that “All connections to real persons or events is purely coincidental.”  Really, now?
  • Alien invasion movies reflect the zeitgeist of the times.  Perhaps we’re feeling  a bit guilty about environmental destruction?
  • The Avatar system brings up some very interesting questions about the nature of the human soul.  The scriptwriters chose not to go there, but they so could have.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

A wordless graphic novel that seems to tell the story of an immigrant arriving on Ellis Island, except that this new country is like no place we’ve ever seen before.  Giant crockery dominates the landscape, trollies fly, and people keep strange animal hybrids for pets.  And yet the people in this alien landscape are familiar.  The Arrival is warm and human in the same way that impressed me so much with The Graveyard Book.  To use too many words to describe it would disturb its Zen-like quality; instead, see these excerpts for yourself.

The Arrival has won the New South Wales Premier Literary Awards’ “Book of the Year” prize and the Children’s Book Council of Australia “Picture Book of the Year” award.

Paradise Lost

The English-language literati have been reviewing Paradise Lost for centuries, so I won’t go into that here.  Is Satan a villain or a Byronic hero?  Did Milton intend people to sympathize with the Devil, or is it just a product of our modern anti-tyrannical sensibilities?  Was Milton using it as a vehicle for his anti-monarchist ideals?  It’s all been covered before, and by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Whatever your position on Christian doctrine, you’ve got to read Paradise Lost for the special effects.  The scope of the story is epic in every sense of the word.  It starts out in Hell as Satan escapes it and flies out into the Void that surrounds the different planes of existence.  It then swings backward in time to the War in Heaven, the creation of the entire universe, scoots past the apple incident, and then flashes forward to the history of all time until the second coming.  If Milton had only been born in the right historical era, Paradise Lost would have been a blockbuster movie with a multibillion-dollar budget, all-star cast, and directed by George Lucas.  It would have been awesome.

During the War in Heaven episode, Satan and his rebel colleagues invent gunpowder in order to take the other angels unawares.  They wheel out these huge triple-barreled cannons and flatten the loyal angels with cannonballs attached to chains.  What do these angels do after literally being made into pancakes?  They pop back into shape and keep fighting.  Because angels are just that cool. That’s not even the end of it – then they scale the war up a notch:

Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power,
Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!)
Their arms away they threw, and to the hills
(For Earth hath this variety from Heaven
Of pleasure situate in hill and dale)
Light as the lightning-glimpse they ran, they flew,
From their foundations, loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and, by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze,
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel Host,
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned,
Till on those cursed engines’ triple row
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep;
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed.

You read that right.  Those angels just picked mountains up and threw them at each other.

There are many reasons Paradise Lost would not be appropriate for a 12-year old boy, from its theological subtleties and dense prose, to Satan’s unconventional “family.”  And yet it’s got everything a 12-year-old would love: fire and brimstone, naked people, swords, space travel, God getting all Old Testament on people, and a cool villain.  All it requires to be complete is a cross-dressing sky pirate.

Peanut Butter, Banana and Chocolate Chip Bread

Recipe from Cookie Madness.  Here’s how it came out:

I played this recipe pretty much straight without adapting it.  I do quite like bananas, so I used 3 bananas instead of 2 and cut the milk down to half a cup.  This bread is very mild and sweet, not oppressively peanut-buttery at all, and is plenty moist since it has five wet ingredients.  It tastes very wholesome, that’s what.  It didn’t blow me away, but it’s something I’d like to keep in my recipe box.

Here’s another shot, to illustrate crumby texture:

And here’s the recipe:

Peanut Butter and Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 ripe large bananas, mashed (1 cup)
1 cup milk
3/4 cup chunky peanut butter
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray two 9×5 inch loaf pans with flour-added cooking spray.

Stir flour, sugars, baking powder, salt and cinnamon together in a large mixing bowl.

Combine mashed bananas, milk, peanut butter, oil, vanilla and egg in a second bowl. Add banana mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour batter into the two loaf pans and bake on center rack for 50 to 55 minutes or until a toothpick or cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool in pans for 10 minutes. Remove from pans; cool thoroughly on a wire rack. Wrap and store overnight before serving.

Grizelda Is Now Up on Smashwords

After a few technical difficulties, Grizelda is now available online as an e-book.  You can sample the first third of the book for free, and if you e-mail me and mention this blog, you can get a discount.  As always, the Podiobooks version is free.

Check it out here: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/margarettaylor

Here’s the Podiobooks version: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/grizelda