The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

And I mean LOST. If you like urban fantasy or you’re willing to try fantasy but you’re not big on monsters or you just really want something to completely suck all of your time and existence for about a week, you really need to read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. It came out about a year and a half ago, and I just read it on the rec of one of my ex-students and wow. SO good. The only problem with it, is that it’s 688 pages.

And it’s the first book in a trilogy.

And you won’t want to stop after the first one.

So I’m almost done with book 2 Shadow’s Edge (which is also well over 600 pages and I started last night immediately after turning the last page of TWoS and will finish before I go to sleep tonight and, I’m sure, start book 3), and I’m shocked I got my nose out of the book long enough to write this. It has one of the COOLEST protagonists I’ve read in a looooong time. I am completely lusting over Kylar Stern, and this isn’t even vaguely a romance novel – it’s a fantasy about assassins in a fictional world called Midcyru and awar that is raged between a mafia run country and the invading barbarians from the north with their goddess of death. So wicked awesome (and does at times require a pretty strong stomach).

This book has also made me think about a lot of writing type things and what is Weeks doing so right.

This book is a great study in the power of secondary characters. If I had one issue with this book it’s that I wish I’d written down a list of characters as I encountered them because omg there’s like five million. And I should have crossed them off as they die (which would be most of the list, but you know, that’s apparently the way of fantasy now… Thank George!).

But from a writing perspective, he’s done a great job of giving them the work of making this gritty world real – so that even when our assassin hero does crappy things, he is still a hero compared to the rest of the world. And I can’t BELIEVE how much I let the main character get away with… and I still, as I’ve mentioned, love him. He’s a freaking assassin, for crying out loud. I have never in my life thought that was a profession I’d get behind, even fictionally.

But the secondary characters can do… anything. They can be depressingly hopeless… and teach the hero a lesson. They can make the completely wrong decision… and then when the hero goes with them out of love or loyalty, it’s no longer the protagonist’s fault for being too stupid to live, it’s his strength for being so connected. They are so useful to a writer. I need to think and concentrate on that. I guess in my writing world we’re so encouraged to have the hero and/or heroine on every page that it’s hard to give secondaries their glory.  But dang, Weeks does it. And I’m always excited to see the protagonist again… but I’m not sorry when I’m involved with somebody else, like I so often am in other books.

I’ve rarely read a book with so dern many well fleshed out, fascinating secondary characters. Like, I need a map with all of them sometimes, but once I remember which one this guy is again, it’s awesome.

So… if you have a reasonably strong stomach, read this book!

The Good and the Bad

Jamie Oliver (the good) started a show called Food Revolution that’s on ABC Friday’s at 8:00 (or… Hulu for those busy on Friday night). It’s about changing the way people eat, particularly in school cafeterias (the bad). In a long ago blog that has since been deleted, I whined endlessly when the Texas government unveiled their new health food policy for schools. It meant I couldn’t offer my kids a peppermint before a test… but the cafeteria could still consider french fries a vegetable. Seriously. My 25 calorie good luck peppermint was doing soooooooo much more damage than the chili-cheese fries half the cafeteria ate for lunch.

Parents, watch this show. See what your kids are eating for lunch. What he’s showing is not exclusive to this one school in this one town. The government is feeding your kids crap based on an outdated food pyramid… and budgetary constraints, but really think about this. What’s more important, a computer or a long, healthy life? And if this is a tough debate in your mind, what is that saying about us as a society and the way we value human life? The way our children eat is a huge part of why our nation is so dangerously overweight. Heck, even if you’re NOT a parent, this is still a big concern because YOU WILL BE PAYING THE HOSPITAL BILLS for these people when they grow up and have diabetes at 25 and heart failure at 40.

Some stats quoted from his research (opens a pdf with the rest of his stats; this is just a sampling):

• Obesity accounts for nearly 10% of US healthcare spending. This amounts to $147 billion annually. Smoking, by comparison, costs only $96 billion.
• The federal school meals budget is $11.9 billion a year. By comparison, healthcare spending on obesity is already $147 billion.
• After smoking, obesity is America’s biggest cause of premature death .
• It is also a major contributor to the health problems which are the leading killer diseases: it’s linked to 70% of heart disease; after smoking, it’s the biggest cause of cancer; and over 80% of type 2 diabetes is related to being overweight.
• Type 2 diabetes… used to be an adult disease, appearing over age 40, but it is increasingly being found in teenagers, even children as young as eight.
• Nearly one in three (32%, 23 million) American children are obese or overweight.
• Today’s generation of children are predicted to be the first which will die at a younger age than their parents due to obesity-related bad health.

Jamie Oliver won the Ted Prize for his work. If you’ve got some time, check out the video of his speech. It’s thought provoking and something I really hope people listen to.

Convinced? Check out his site and sign the petition to provide healthier food for children in schools!

The Arrogant

On a completely different note…

I shouldn’t be snarky about an author. It’s unprofessional and bad form. So I… won’t. But if you want to see somebody ELSE be snarky, well check out this interview with Nicholas Sparks (who I agree with completely when he says he doesn’t write romance novels. In a romance novel, the main character never dies of a shipwreck or cancer for the deep literary purpose of inducing a hanky-grab. That being, as he says, his claim to literary fame as opposed to him being a common genre novelist, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in his books. Cancer or a shipwreck. Oh, no, wait, he’s genreless unless, like him, you consider Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Hemingway to be a single genre that he’s a part of. Yes. He says that in the interview.) (Dang… was that snarky? Bad Garren… But it was pretty much all quotes from him.)

USA Today interviews Sparks and Cyrus regarding “Last Song”

Cracked, love that site, has it’s take on the interview.

Saw it during the Olympics last night, and Scott and I about died laughing.

In a New York Times article from awhile back (like May), Steve Jobs said in regards to the Kindle:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

I didn’t realize that I didn’t read anymore.  But now I’ve been reading about the iPad (and I’m really going to resist commenting on the name, other than this aside in which I remind everyone that the name is infinitely commentable) and the pricing wars between Amazon and Mcmillan, and have decided that the modern world of book publishing, particularly in regards to the e-book market, is all fascinating and somewhat confusing and frustrating.

I own a Kindle. I love it muchly; it’s easy to use, carries more books than even I can read on vacation, is lightweight and very portable, and I was shocked by how much I just didn’t miss trying to read paper books in which the type was so close to the spine I had to practically rebreak the cover every time I turned a page. If, on the Kindle, I could organize my books into digital bookshelves (like I do at home – I have my own whacked out system that they will not come up with on their own), loan the books to friends, flip to other pages easily, and see the covers (and no, Nook’s “if I squint I can almost tell what that is” inch tall cover display doesn’t count), it would be perfect. Oh, and if I didn’t have this sense of impending doom that eventually I won’t be using a Kindle anymore (either because of tech envy or Kindle just goes the way of the 8track) and I will have lost a few hundred books that can only be read on an obsolete device. But, in the meantime, my bookshelves are staying at a comfortably groaning stasis, which makes my marriage a far better place to be. So the Kindle will stay.

Who knew? Technology and literature together make a powder keg. Oh. Wait. They always have by themselves; why would conjoining them make a difference?

I’m about half way through, and haven’t had this much fun reading in… well, in many many novels. Example line that made me put the book down I was laughing so hard:

“He tore his eyes away from the tops of those remarkable breasts of hers and tried to think unpleasant thoughts of particularly horrible things, like overcooked vegetables and cut-rate wine.”

See? You can’t not laugh. Or, at least you can’t if you think Victorian England, gastronomy, dry humor, and urban fantasy are some of life’s greatest wonders… but didn’t think you’d ever get them in one book. And since those are four of my favorite things, it was like Ms Carriger wrote this book for me.

It’s fabulous! Go buy this book! You need it!