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I know, I know, I’m a bit behind on the times, but I finally got around to reading Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker.

Abarat is extremely vivid, but not particularly cohesive. It’s a good read, but it reads like Clive Barker had a bunch of disparate ideas that were really cool and then had to find a plot to somehow connect them all. Although most of the characters have fascinating descriptions, they by and large don’t have much depth.

Still, well worth reading if you like fantasy, and particularly if you’re in the mood for some vividly imagined environments and creatures.

I’ve expressed my appreciation for Nightwatch already. Daywatch (its sequel) was pretty good, but a little inconsistent. Fortunately, Twilightwatch, the third in the series, is excellent. Not as good as Nightwatch, but it’s still well worth reading Daywatch to get to Twilightwatch.

I particularly love how Sergei Lukyanenko keeps redefining good vs. evil. It’s a great series.

The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick is possibly the best adult fantasy that I’ve read in the recent past. I highly recommend it. The setting is an intriguing mixture of technology and fantasy, and although the book has some minor failings it is still well worth buying. Literary fantasy done right.

Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko (trans. Andrew Bromfield) is excellent. Buy it. Read it. Love it. I should have picked this book up months ago when I first noticed it, but I was leery because I keep getting burned by good-looking fantasy and urban fantasy that turns out to be total crap.

Bastard publishers have been dressing up some really cheap whores of books in diamond dresses. But Nightwatch is a classy Russian lady.

(By the way, I’m going to start using Amazon.com affiliate links for products; I hate the thought of ads on Beckism.com — it’s never had them — but hosting doesn’t pay for itself.)

Two of my favorite authors have released books within the last three days (within the last two hours for one of them):

Robin McKinley just released Dragonhaven, and Terry Pratchett just released Making Money. I haven’t read either one yet, but both are in the mail. Hot dang!

Also, I just discovered that Robin McKinley has a blog on LiveJournal. And I thought life couldn’t get any weirder.

In other news, Okkervil River’s new album The Stage Names is amazingly good, as is Stars’ new album In Our Bedroom After the War (both links lead to the iTunes store, but both albums are also available from eMusic; the bonus track on The Stage Names from eMusic is a great song, too).

I’m surprised how much great stuff has been coming out recently by authors and artists that I love. I’m behind on the times.

Lost Dog by Bill Cameron is a very good book. I don’t read much crime fiction, but I hang around a forum where the author has been known to post and when other forum-ites said they really liked I picked up a copy.

It lay around on my bedroom floor for a while, until last night before I went to bed I decided to read a chapter before sleep.

Needless to say, I’m completely sleep deprived today because I was up until 4:00 in the morning reading it. Character-driven, action packed, and with a wonderfully twisted villain, Lost Dog is an amazingly fun read. I highly recommend it. My only quibble was that there weren’t any elves.

I really missed elves.

Look out; this update’s a doozy. I haven’t written anything for a blog in a long while, and surprisingly there’s a fair amount I want to write about. So Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

I watched Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (still not sure why it’s called that instead of Prince Ashitaka, but whatever) last night, and it certainly surprised me. Here I was expecting something along the lines of Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, or perhaps Spirited Away and what I got was a bloody, dark story with complicated characters and a much deeper look at the standard evil vs. good, nature vs. industrialization conflict than is normally portrayed. I was pretty shocked, and mildly disturbed (mainly thanks to my expectations going in; I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of death I was getting myself into).

So since Alan has yet again retreated from the hideous cat-caused stench in his room to Ariel’s, I watched it again tonight with the dubbing instead of the subtitles. Normally I’m really anti-dubbing, but I wanted an excuse to watch it again, and I did some casual computer work while it was running so most of the time I didn’t have to watch their mouths not quite line up with their words. Plus being animated it wasn’t really that much of a problem. Of course some of the voice acting was pretty hilarious, but what was really interesting was that the dubbed version was actually easier to understand than the literal translation of the subtitles (changed things like “Deer God” of the subtitles to “Forest Spirit”, which made much more sense in the context of the story).

But yeah. Very, very pleasantly surprised. Normally Miyazaki films leave me feeling kind of “meh” (although I enjoyed Spirited Away a fair amount). This one had me up stalking around the living room imagining dark fantasy scenes of my own, which is always a good sign that a story has done its work and really gripped me. My only regret is that I gave into temptation (and a desire to see something on the shelf that I hadn’t seen, which makes for slim pickings since a lot of Laurel’s other movies that I haven’t seen are–sorry Laurel–not anything I’d want to see) and watched it without Valerie. I’d been putting it off because I know she likes anime, but since I enjoyed it so much maybe I’ll watch it with her sometime anyway.

In other news, as I mentioned before Alan hasn’t been spending much time here in the evenings, so I’ve pretty much been alone in the house (Ross is at home this week right now). On the one hand, I get to play my music loud-ish over my speakers as late as I want, and I can sing along full voice instead of quietly (I do so love singing along to my music while I work; I went in to work in the office adjoining the Communications office on campus for a while, and it was painful not be able to boot up iTunes and break into song). On the other hand, it’s lonely.

Of course, it looks like I may very well have a few extremely non-lonely nights coming up in the next few months, because I’ve somehow managed to get myself an actual, hourly job that asks for some interesting things. I’ve been hired by a local place in Walla Walla that serves developmentally disabled adults. I’ll be starting a two week orientation on the 19th, and then after that I’ll have a variety of possible duties that apparently could range anywhere from spending a couple of hours with a given person in a day to help them function/learn how to function better to what they call 56 hour shifts, which are basically living with a person for two straight days.

So not so lonely there. I have kind of mixed feelings. I really wanted this job, and am kind of glad that I got it, but it’s going to be quite the experience and I got a lot more web design work than I was expecting.

On the other hand, the web design thing is mostly nebulous and could easily dry up, whereas this job is something that I’ll likely be able to do through the school year as well in a part time evenings and weekends capacity.

On to the happy news of the day: The King of Attolia arrived! I wouldn’t even have known that this book was out, but Valerie gave me a gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, and I stumbled across this book. I read it in a single sitting starting within thirty minutes of its arrival (had to eat breakfast first). It made me very, very happy. For those of you not up on this series, it’s by Megan Whalen Turner and started with The Thief, a book that won a Newberry Honor and was (I believe) meant to be a stand-alone story. I loved The Thief, but wasn’t expecting a sequel until I stumbled across it shortly after it came out in a bookstore while on a vacation with my family. I bought the sequel, The Queen of Attolia, on the spot and devoured it. Then I find this unexpected third book, and while the book wraps itself up well there was obviously a series in Turner’s mind while writing this one. This makes me extremely excited. I think I might actually post a little mini review/rave about King of Attolia and the rest of the series over in Commentary, actually. I really liked this author to start, but now I love her.

Not like I want to have her children or anything, but I’m continually impressed by her decisions. So many fantasy authors fall victim to characters who drift flatly to the extremes of good and evil or just get stuck in a rut of one kind or another and fail to get out. Turner has turned out three very different books with flair, and I’m really looking forward to whatever she does next. She is truly one of those hidden fantasy gems and I don’t understand why her name isn’t as well known as J.K. Rowling. I suppose Queen of Attolia might not be for everyone, but I think it may be my favorite book in the series so far.

In still other news, what also came in the mail today was a splash cymbal from Mom for my birthday. Granted, she didn’t know to buy one part (have the boom stand, don’t have a way to attach it to anything yet), but I’m still ridiculously happy. I don’t play my drumset all that much currently, but I’ve always wanted a splash cymbal; they’re so much fun.

And I think that it might finally be time to end this ridiculously long post and go to bed. Kudos to those who had the persistence to actually read the whole silly thing.