Paranormal Romance

This genre name is somewhat apt, but totally embarassing when you say "ah, yes.. I am quite familiar with the popular paranormal romance books". Of course, the HBO series TrueBlood totally helped to make it more well known. New Moon made it a teeny-bopper film fest. Of course, the New Moon books were too, and I would never admit that I read all of them -- but before the film was ever done.

Last night I finished reading Magic in the Shadows: An Allie Beckstrom Novel by Devon Monk. It was the (3rd?) novel in the series, and that was a pretty good one.
I don't think it really is a paranormal romance -- I mean sure, the main character is a "tough chick" who has a love interest that makes her lip quiver, but that's not the main focus of the book, right? As a male reader, I tend to gloss over the lovey-dovey bits (fully validating their presence) and remember the action parts of the story more.
I liked the world that the author creates because she does not immediately fall into the now-formulaic vampire/werewolf love triangle where there heroine is short of stature and torn between her two Greek gods, who are night and day (literally). In the Allie Beckstrom novels, magic was "allowed" to be "discovered" after a safe way of harnessing the flow of it was devised by her father. I won't tell anything more about it here because then I just start running into the various blurbs about the book that you can read elsewhere.

A lot of these stories, for some reason, are located in the Pacific Northwest. I get that it's handy for vampires with all clouds and rain (a la New Moon), but I think it's interesting that so many of them take place there, with exceptions like the Sookie Steakhouse series by Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (St. Louis?), and.. well, now I'm starting to rattle off more than one or two :)

Some authors are my current favorites and I tend to be willing to pay the full Kindle price for their books (or even pre-order them). The ones mentioned above, of course, and a few I'm listing below, although Jim Butcher's publishing company was a bit slow about the Kindle publications and like to put them over the $9.99 price point.

Kim Harrison: the Hollows series, although I have read a few others
Patricia Briggs: Mercy Thompson series or the not-modern fantasy Raven series

Some people may wonder why I don't go on and on about Laurell K. Hamilton or Stephanie Meyer.

I read Hamilton's her Anita Blake series long ago and enjoyed them up until they became all-uncontrollable-sex. I think that her series was the first major gain in the genre, that Anne Rice made famous with her Lestat series. Up until then, there were not a lot of vampire-friendly novels out there, although I can name a few.

In the I got very tired of Hamilton's main character reminding us that she is short, and that her blood looks just as good on black marble as on whilte; and that her male characters always have luxirously long hair that the aforementioned main character likes to nap in because it goes to their ankles.
I liked the world a lot, but when it started to be a bit rote / rinse-and-repeat I started to lose interest, but I just noticed that Divine Misdemeanors: A Novel (Meredith Gentry, Book 8) is out, so I might give a sample a try to see if she's out of her rut :)

Twilight Saga gets a lot of its own hype so I'm not touching it. I think that the films they made out of it are palatable for the male viewer, although they are totally borderline chick-flick / date films.

What I hope is that Ms. Meyer decides to do more like The Host, which I found to be an interesting sci-fi experience, completely ignoring that iw as a bit of a reminder of the Goa'Uld from the Stargate SG1 series.

Long weekend!

I just read the sample of Acacia: The War with the Mein (Acacia, Book 1) and it looks pretty engrossing to me! I might just go ahead and buy it, but I still have a few other free books lying around :)

The plan for this weekend is to do a bit of regular reading and to get past page 1 of 1q84. It's kind of funny how this book is being so widely discussed here. I guess that Haruki Murakami's approach of not actually publiczing the book has really taken off.
One of my classmates at the Japan Society is looking into doing a translation of it, but translating a novel is incredibly difficult because of the many nuances that the author might have that you need to convey in the target language. IMHO, you have to be near native in the source language to be able to do it.

Maybe instead I should be working on a kid's book, although I think traditional stories can be much harder for a non-native speaker because -- well, how often in the modern world do we talk about going down to the river to do the washing? (Bad example because Momotarou is actually much easier to read than some).

I'm currently at 992 of 5288 flashcards due to review in Anki. I've been taking a few weeks off / slowing down my pace. The rough part is that my cards that are at a 1-year cycle now because I basically know them are all coming due!
I had been using Mnemosyne for a long time. It was nice, but not as extensive and extensible as Anki is. Of course, I started with a deck of about 1k cards. I've been adding a lot as I come across words in class, reading, or skimming a news article.
In news, I'm still at the stage where I pick out words I've seen a few times or that are sure to have future articles: 火災, 死亡, 大統領. I'm very glad to have the Rikaichan plugin for Firefox. Huge time saver. 
Of course, I still end up going to http://jisho.org/ constantly to look things up.

Kindle reading: Warbreaker

I bought my Kindle soon after Amazon came out with the device, and made the promise that I would only read electronic books. With the discount of buying it electronically, I was certain that I would save a lot of money.
I kept my promise, but I think that I probably read a lot more now than I did before!

I had been waiting for  up Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker to drop in price, but this week I decided to buy it. I had already read his Mistborn Series in anticipation of the final set of books for the Wheel of Time Series. Since he was co-writing (The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time)) after Robert Jordan's death.


Warbreaker was worth the time spent reading, although I could see that some hard core people might not like the a few of the characters.
Considering some of the "trash reading" I do across multiple genres, my reactions might be skewed, but I definitely enjoyed it.

Blogging

With the January blues kicking in, I decided that I needed to get started on something new -- partially to procrastinate on any other productive stuff and partially to just get through the month of January.

My friends Oliver & Elke maintain a blog, and his post on New Year's for My 2009 Favorites inspired me to pick up the blog pen again.

I had created this entry in 2005, when my Mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. I had planned to use it as an outlet / log for the things that my family was going through. When she died in within a few months of the diagnosis, I wasn't inspired to continue and didn't even want to look at the recent posts.