Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.
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Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:
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06:27 pm
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BOOK LIST: Dragons in urban fantasy
Early in November, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kistaro asked: "Looking for a good urban fantasy novel with a dragon as a major (or main, even better) character. Any recommendations?"
I was a little thrown to see the paucity of recommendations. A month later -- even fudging on some of the criteria -- the number of "good urban-fantasy novels with dragon characters" is still small. As such, I'm making this post as an attempt to compile a definitive list. ( ... ) Please speak up in comments if there are other items that should be added in!
LAST UPDATE: 2009/12/17
Series
( books )
Individual Novels
( more books )
Not-Quites
( even more books, in sub-categories )
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Music: Boom Crash Opera, "Too Hot To Think"
Tags: books, draconity, requests, reviews
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04:42 am
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Books vs. films
A peaceful Saturday filled with roleplaying; and a lazy Sunday filled with ... well, basically, laying in bed until sunset. Nice to have a down day once in a while.
I had intended to do a fair amount of fiction writing. Didn't get around to any of it. But I did respond to everyone who asked for an inner-animal guess in my previous thread, which is a good feeling; and I read through the novel The Prestige, on which last year's movie was based.
It was a good reminder of why movies will never be able to fully replace books.
Prestige: The Movie and Prestige: The Book diverge fairly radically from each other. I didn't understand why until I was more than halfway through. Because Prestige: The Book is in itself two separate stories. The actions of the two magicians are told twice, and exactly twice -- once from the point of view of each rival.
It's a book that you cannot read in a linear fashion. Once you reach the second half, you have to read it in parallel -- constantly flipping back and forth to contrast the two retellings of the same scene. You begin to notice that even the dialogue differs when the two characters interacted directly; and it's strongly hinted that, through editing or omission, not one but both of the characters are unreliable narrators, twisting the truth to paint themselves in a better light.
There is no objective or omniscient view of the characters' conflict. You only have their words against each other; and it's that tension that gives the book its impact.
I don't think you can do that in a movie.
There's something about a visual image that forces a certain omniscience. The camera is itself a character in the scene; it observes impartially, it records accurately. To do otherwise -- to have what's on screen be an inaccurate representation of the film's events -- would break cinematic expectation so badly that no major studio would touch such a film with an eleven-foot pole.
The counterexamples are probably few enough to be listed by name; and the only one that comes immediately to mind is Hero, in which certain scenes are later revealed in a plot-important way to be complete fabrications of their narrator. But to have a clearly demarcated wavy-lined flashback be overturned is one thing; to have the central events of the film later called into question is a recipe for audience confusion.*
(Edited to add: "Rashomon" and "The Usual Suspects" have also been cited in multiple comments. It's interesting to note that, so far, every one of these movies is about character(s) telling a story. That extra layer of abstraction is necessary to hew away the instinctive rules of cinema.)
The implicit rules are different in a novel. There is no camera to provide a single, omniscient vision of the plot; there is only a narrator (omniscient or internal) retelling it. There is more freedom to play meta-games.
There's an extra investment to taking stories from the written word, but there's also a richer payoff.
--
* This isn't to say the dramatic reveal can't be done well; cf. The Sixth Sense. But that's not seen events being redefined; that's context being added to chilling effect.
Current Mood:  insomnia
Current Music: "Still Alive (ending credits)" - Portal OST
Tags: books, films, writing
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01:16 pm
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The Men That Don't Fit In
I'm reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood while laid up at the ranch. Never having read Capote before, I'm getting an introduction to his writing style (which I have to admit I'm finding disjointed, a frustration) as well as to his story. In Cold Blood is non-fiction, an account of a multiple murder in Kansas in the 1950s. It's somewhat slow reading (which isn't helped by his writing style), and crime dramas aren't really in keeping with the spirit of the trail, but I guess at least it's giving me something to do.
From a thru-hiker perspective, there was one extremely interesting passage in the middle, though. One of the perpetrators, in a letter to a woman he's walking away from a relationship with, writes the following poem (which in the book is identified as being a quote of someone else's work, but is unattributed):
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
"Sweet!" I thought when I read that. "I've got to go source that on the Internet."
It turns out that it's from "The Spell of the Yukon," by Robert W. Service. And I found the entire poem out on the Web.
Having read it, I can sure see why the quote stopped where it did.
Current Location: Muir Trail Ranch
Tags: baxwalk pct, books
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11:51 pm
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Book review: "A Walk In The Woods"
I ran across Bill Bryson's "A Walk In The Woods" in much the same way Bryson ran across the Appalachian Trail.
"Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town," his book starts. From there, he gets the whimsical idea to hike the whole trail -- which, at over 2,100 miles, is the eastern equivalent of the west coast's PCT.
I hadn't thought of reading the book prior to my own hike, although many people had recommended it. What did get me to run down to the library and pick it up was reading kadyg's bedside copy of Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything," an overview book on our current scientific knowledge, which I devoured in a day or two before realizing "Hey, this is that guy who also penned that AT book. He's a good writer."
How did his trip go? Well, worried about bears and other trail dangers, he convinces the "gloriously out of shape" Stephen Katz to travel with him. They reach the trailhead in below-freezing weather and Katz throws out half his gear in a fit of rage in the first seven miles. This is just the beginning of a comedy of errors and reality checks that follows Bryson up the trail and leads to them bailing out of the trip in northern Virginia. From there, Bryson tours some of the trail's highlights by car -- and the book turns into a different sort of travelogue, with a solid sprinkling of natural history and trail history. The pair gets back together for one final hike through Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness ... and through it all, in half a year of effort and sweat and discomfort, Bryson walks for 890 miles, or only about 40 percent of the trail's length.
Needless to say, this book was not a thru-hiker morale boost.
What it was: Entertaining, funny, and highly memorable. Not just funny -- consistently hilarious. The book is the chronicle of an often disastrous trip, but he laughs at it along with us, turning the hike into the mother of all "This one time at band camp" stories (minus the band). Their hiking companions and other human encounters are colorful beyond all reckoning -- he introduces their first hiking companion with the declaration "I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on Earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared." Meanwhile, Bryson and Katz bicker and banter, share fear and worry, struggle and savor small triumphs, and in the process illuminate the grind of distance hiking ... as well as its simple and unexpected joys.
Bryson is in top form when describing the magnitude of his accomplishment (even though he didn't finish a thru-hike, he still walked several hundred miles, which is not to be taken lightly) and the ways that the thru-hiking world is different from the one we live in. You can't deny his turns of phrase: "When, after ages and ages, you finally reach the telltale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the vegetation is gnarled and tough and wind bent, and push through to the mountain's open pinnacle, you are, alas, beyond caring. You sprawl face down on a sloping pavement of gneiss, pressed to the rock by the weight of your pack, and lie there for some minutes, reflecting in a distant, out-of-body way that you have never before looked this closely at lichen." I found myself nodding in recognition at many of his trail trials; for those of you who haven't ever attempted anything similar, this gets across a good deal of the flavor of the routine I'm setting myself up for.
On the other hand, the book loses momentum as Bryson does. Part 2's more traditional travelogue, after he and Katz abandon the trail and Bryson travels around the East Coast by car trying to get a flavor for the rest of the AT, struggles with a shift in tone and the loss of the high adventure of the hike. There's a great deal more of natural history (much of which, incidentally, is repeated almost word for word in A Short History of Nearly Everything). The book is also scattered throughout with environmental wake-up calls -- which are appropriate and necessary, considering the changing face of the wilderness, but sometimes come off as strident. The book picks back up again near the end, with some northeastern hiking and an appropriately climactic final trip.
On the whole, it's worth reading. You'll learn plenty (the average American only walks 1.4 miles per week) and you'll be entertained. Four stars out of five (mostly because Part 2 drags so much; the first half is stellar).
I hope I make it farther than Bryson did. But failing that, I hope I can write about my trip with as much awe and wit as he did.
Speaking of things to read ... tomorrow's Friday. It's been two weeks since my snow-camping clinic. In order to offer some taste of my own adventures, I'll post my trip journal from that experience over the next four days, in "real time" (with a 14-day delay in case the FCC makes me bleep anything), one entry per day. You'll learn about my new trail name, hopefully see some pictures, and vicariously experience the joy of taking a crap outside in a snowstorm.
Current Location: T-minus seven days
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Eclipse," Pink Floyd
Tags: baxwalk pct, books, reviews
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