LIBR 203 Assignment

Originally I wrote a post about Good Reads for my LIBR 203 assignment and why I find it to be superior to Library Thing and Shelfari. I spent quite some time writing this post...apparently too much time. When I clicked the button to preview my post I got a message saying that the connection had timed out and I had to log back in. When I did so, the post was lost. That's what I get for cheating on google. I had been spoiled by blogger automatically saving my posts every few seconds. Like most of google's products Blogger has a an easy interface and is user-friendly with ridiculous amounts of storage space so that you don't have to delete items that you later need and you never lose more than a few seconds of your work. I use gmail, google reader, blogger, google docs, and the calendar among others. They all work together so that when my boss e-mails an event from his computer using outlook to my gmail account it automatically updates my google calendar. I can also check all of these easily on my google homepage, which also has useful tools like weather forecasts. I like to have the forecast for both my hometown and the town that I currently live in because I like to torture myself over why I moved away from a place with such idyllic weather.

Well google, I've learned my lesson, and I promise it won't happen again! I'm currently writing this on my blogger account: sassyshelver.blogspot.com I suggest that you write your posts somewhere that saves automatically as well, such as a word document, and then copy and paste it to the SLIS life blog when it's done. Please, learn from my mistakes.

Comic Con '09 Saturday

Saturday we got at the convention center a little before nine. The convention center hadn't opened yet, so we were sent up an escalator where we were told we could find a line to get in to the exhibit hall. We then narrowly avoided being sent into a line for the Masquerade, and were then directed back down some stairs to outside the convention center, where we were told to wait until the exhibit hall opened. Yes, this was only a spot a few yards away from where we were originally instructed to head up the stairs. When we found someone with a fancy-schmancy walkie-talkie who seemed to know what she was doing she received several garbled and confused responses and told us that we were sent back down in error, but by that time the exhibit hall was so close to opening we might as well just wait where we were. I think it was, in reality, about another half hour before we were let in, but at least we weren't technically spending a third morning in line--technically we were waiting in a blob.

When we got in we high-tailed it to the WB booth where we obtained one of the coveted WB bags that are about as big as I am with a fancy extra hole for posters. They were actually the least exciting WB bags of the whole week, but my sister seemed excited just to possess one of these badges of honor.

We wandered the exhibit hall for a bit longer collecting freebies and checking out the merch. I went to David Malki's booth, where I got him to do a free sketch for me and bought copies of his Wondermark Manor books, which he signed for me. I will review them when I finish, but I have already read a some snippets and love it so far. After all, my love of victorian literature is only surpassed by my love of parodies. I had already bought a steam-powered heart shirt from him on preview night for the guy I got to cat-sit for me while I was in SD. It was well-recieved when I returned.

After wandering the exhibit hall Laura and I showed up early for the James Jean panel. Apparetly we were too used to waiting in line for Hall H because there was no line and we ended up getting there a panel and a quarter early. So we sat through the end of a panel on the latest Dune book during which we discussed how authors who don't actually come up with any ideas of their own and merely piggy back on the works of others are the parasites of the writer community. Unfortunately they are also among the better paid of the writer community because people love the familiar and are reluctant to leave their favorite worlds even when they go downhill faster than a Jamacian bobsled team.

Next was a panel on cartoon syndication that was atually pretty interesting. Stephen Pastis was one of the panelists, and I love him because he is punny. Someone asked him about his occasional use of characters from other strips during the panel, to which he was able to respond that during the time he spent as a lawyer before becoming a cartoonist he learned a little something about fair use. Although the panel was interesting and funny at times I still don't see why more cartoonists don't just go the online route, especially considering the statics they cited during the panel with syndication companies getting thousands of applicants a year and only one or two being picked up a year. One or two a year! Then again, I've probably just been listening to webcomics weekly for too long. I don't actually read newspapers any more anyway.

The panel on James Jean was wonderful. He showed us a power point presentation of over 200 slides includin pictures of him as a little kid and works in progress, etc. He was very frank and open, but he still seemed a bit shy. Someone asked him about how he balances a social life with his painting and he replied that his house is known as a productive place among his friends and they'll come over and hang out and paint etc. He said that this works pretty well, although he said that he certainly doesn't spend his time clubbing.

Next up was the Ray Bradbury panel. We go there early, of course, and ended up sitting through a panel on Green Lantern: Blackest Night. I'm not even going to try to talk about it here because I know if I do somehow one of the people who waited in line to ask ridiculously detailed questions about the DC cannon will find my blog somehow and correct anything I write. While the panel was a bit interesting it was not altogether enjoyable as a couple that was fond of pdas and eating smelly tuna in crowded spaces with poor ventilation was sitting next to me.

The Ray Bradbury panel started off a bit slow as Bradbury's friend and I assume PR person took over and made a bunch of annoucements about things that Bradbury is supporting right now while Bradbury sat there mute. Luckily that didn't last forever and Bradbury had brought a tape of him being interveiwed by Walter Cronkite on the night of the moon landing. He was apparently scheduled to be on another show that evening, but he felt that the host wasn't honoring how important the night was and was filling it with cheap entertainment and jokes instead. When he finally heard the host introduce the next guest as one of America's cultural treasures (or something to that effect) he thought he was being called up, but the host finished with Englebert Humperdinck. Bradbury had enough at this point and walked right out of the studio and apparently defected to Cronkite. After the interview he was so excited that he just walked back to his hotel all the way across London looking up at the sky, an activity that took most of the night. When he saw the tabloid that morning it read: Man walks on moon at dawn Bradbury walks at midnight.

The panel continued with questions and answers which resulted in more wonderful anecdotes, that weren't always entirely on topic. However, Bradbury's official biographer was there and was sure to step in with precise answers to questions when this happened. My favorite anecdote was one towards the end when someone asked Bradbury for advice for writers. Bradbury replied that you should only write what you want to write. He then told a story about when he wrote the screenplay for his first movie. The studio wanted him to take the story in a direction different than the one he wanted to go. Bradbury replied that in one week he would give them two scripts, one the way he wanted it and the other the way they wanted it and they could choose the one they wanted. He told them that if they chose the wrong one they could go to hell. A week later they chose the right script and as Bradbury says it wasn't a great movie, but it was a good movie, and it was the story that he wanted to tell.

We stayed in the room because Myth Busters was going to be there that evening, and we wanted to have good seats for it. We saw the Human Target panel and the Vampire Diaries panel as we waited. Both consisted of the first episode and a Q & A. Human Target looked good, but I'm not a big action fan, so it wasn't my thing. The Vampire Diaries panel spent most of the time emphasizing the fact that it is based on a book series that came out before Twilight, which I can understand because there were certainly a lot of similarities. We were sitting in a group of people waiting for the Watchmen screening after Myth Busters, so we mostly just laughed at the capmy lines and made snide remarks. It turned out to be fairly entertaining making fun of it with these strangers. My sister told me that there were actual fans of it in the back, though. Then again, the show does seem to be aimed at pre-teens, so it's not surprising we found it a bit immature.

The Myth Busters panel was a lot of fun, and the crowd response was amazing. I was excited to see everyone else so excited about a skeptical show like that with at least some basis in science. Then again the crowd at Comic Con isn't exactly representative of all of America. The people who asked a question got a signed roll of duct tape. This wasn't announced, but I was sitting next to the question-asking mike. I don't remember much else about the panel because I was pretty tired by that point. I need to find a quiet corner somewhere where I can take a power nap midday during a lull in panels to maximize my Comic Con endurance. It's not my fault...I blame genetics!

Comic Con '09 Friday

Friday we showed up at around the same time we had the previous day to wait in the line, but we were able to get in easily despite the fact that the first panel on Friday started one hour earlier than it did on Thursday. It's amazing what a difference a lack of a Twilight panel made! This meant much less sun-burning from waiting in line, which is always a plus.

The first panel was Warner Brothers, which included a wide variety of films. The first one was Where the Wild Things Are. The clips that they showed us looked pretty good, and the kid that plays Max showed up. He was adorable! It was his first time at comic con, and the kid did pretty well-6500 people can be intimidating for Hollywood actors that aren't actually used to a live audience. Actually he handled it much better than many of the adult actors I saw. He read notes off his hand and told a couple of cute anecdotes. The first was about a phone conversation he had with Maurice Sendak on his birthday where Sendak told him that he thinks the movie turned out pretty well and that he hopes everyone likes it and if they don't they can "go to hell." The way this kid said it was pretty cute. The second was about how the director likes to try to get actors to show "real" emotion instead of acting (cough because Hollywood actors are spoiled and hired for their looks rather than acting abilities cough) and I guess in one of the scenes this kids was supposed to be surprised. So, without warning the kid the director arranged for a giant flame to shoot up during the shot to get a genuine reaction out of the kid. I'm not sure how I feel about these methods, but the story was amusing regardless.

The next movie was The Book of Eli. The movie didn't particularly interest me because I'm not a huge fan of the action genre, but Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman showed up for the panel and they were hilarious! At one point they made a joke involving role playing with each other, I'm just going to leave it at that. You could tell that they were both fairly intelligent and really believed in the movie and had fun working on it with each other. It was a huge contrast from the New Moon panel.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was next and the guy who played Rorschach is playing Freddy in this new version. The old Nightmare is actually one of my favorite horror movies along with Scream because I love the sense of humor that Wes Craven brings to these movies. They have enough scary points to make it fun to watch at a sleep over and scream with your friends, but there's comic relief in there as well and it creates a nice balance. Freddy scares you, but he can also make you laugh, and that's why I love him. Plus, the original has Johnny Depp, which can only be a plus as far as I'm concerned. I was disappointed to hear that this new movie is going to take out the comedy element, according to the panel, and make it more of a straight horror movie, although at least they said that there weren't going to make it another gore fest.

The Box was next, and it looks pretty good. It's directed by Richard Kelly, who directed Donnie Darko, and it stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. All three of them were there for the panel. The plot of it is what really piqued my interest. It's based on a short story by Richard Matheson and basically what happens is that a couple is presented with a box with a button on top. They are told that if they push the button, two things will happen: they will get a million dollars and someone, somewhere, who they don't know, will die. It's the simplicity of the premise that I love. There's so many ways to justify something like that, I mean there are billions of people on Earth and at any moment a lot of them will be dying anyway, you could easily convince yourself that one more won't matter and that you'll give part of the money to charity so that some good comes out of it to justify it. But in the end, you are responsible for a person's death and it seems to me that it would almost be worse if you didn't know who it was because then whenever you hear about a person dying that day you won't know if that was the one you were to blame for. I would imagine that a million dollars can disappear surprisingly quickly as well and with that button still there, would you do it again? All of this is just speculation based on the simple premise they gave us, but I love the fact that even without seeing the movie I already have this much to think of and debate!

Jonah Hex was next. I was not very impressed with it mostly due to the presence of Megan Fox. She broke the trend of most the actresses who had shown up to panels of not wearing much make up and dressing fairly casual. I almost felt sorry for her because some of the guys who asked her questions were pretty obnoxious, but she seemed to be eating it up. I guess it could have been an act, but she kept rubbing her arm and fixing her hair and stayed for photos longer than the rest of the cast, so if she was acting it was the best performance I've seen her give. I took this opportunity to use the restroom.

The last movie in the Warner Brothers panel was Sherlock Holmes. As much as I feel reticent about the amount of action this movie seems to have versus the amount of logical deduction based on the trailers let's face it: with Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. I'm going to see it anyway. Robert Downey Jr. actually showed up to the panel and he was wonderful! Rather than having some one from the studio come out and introduce the clips at the beginning and then bring the actors on one at a time afterwards Downey just walked onstage at the beginning of the panel without any introduction and set up the clips himself. Afterwards during the Q & A he seemed to take on the role of moderator and he definitely stole the show. He was able to turn even the most inane question and comments into something entertaining. His wife is one of the producers, and you could tell that they both really believed in the project and did a fair amount of research on it. Rachel McAdams showed up as well and I enjoyed her on the wonderful Canadian TV series "Slings and Arrows" (which you should watch if you haven't already) and I'm also excited about her upcoming role in Time Traveler's Wife because I loved that book. Overall I felt pretty jazzed about this movie by the end of the panel.

Next was the Disney Animation Panel. They showed us a teaser for Toy Story 3 and announced that they'll be coming out with Toy Story 1 &2 as a double feature in 3d and that sounds pretty good. I am a Toy Story fan. I was even more excited that they'll be coming out with Beauty in the Beast in 3D on valentine's day 2010. I realize that they're milking the 3D craze for all it's worth, but I don't care. Even though 3D doesn't do much for me because I am so not a visual person I'm excited just to get to see it in theatres again. The first time I was pretty young and inconsolable after the Beast turned into the Prince. To me the prince was a spoiled brat and at that age I didn't understand why Belle might prefer someone a bit more her species. I saw it at a mall with my family and my Aunt and Uncle from out of town and they tried everything to get me to calm down, even bringing me into the toy shop and I just could not be mollified. They showed us the entire first song at the panel in 3D and I was excited, although a bit sad that this wasn't a sing along panel as well.

The new movie announcement was for The Princess and the Frog. I wasn't excited about this movie before the panel, but I am now. Apparently this movie marks Disney's return to hand-drawn animation as opposed to computer as well as the return of the Disney musical! I love musicals! They showed us some clips from the movie including a song and it really did have an old Disney vibe and I'm very excited about that.

I have a lot of friends who hate Disney because it "ruined" whatever treasured fairy tale from their childhood, but these are often the same people who love Gregory Maguire. Hypocrites the lot of them. Robin McKinley or Maguire will put their own twist on a fairy tale and everyone says how wonderful and there's even a fairy tale retold genre out there, but for some reason Disney can't put their own style on it. These are fairy tales people even among the written versions there are huge differences between say Perrault and the Grimm brothers telling of a story, and thousand of more versions that weren't written down. They are fluid. There is no one "correct" version. That's why I love them so much, and I think that's why a lot of people love them, including the ones who hate Disney for "ruining" them. Let me tell you these stories have been used by so many authors they don't have any virtue left to protect. Yes, they do put happy endings on the end and cut out the part where Sleeping Beauty is raped, but these are made for kids, and kids should be able to believe in happy endings-they have plenty of time for cynicism when they grow up--trust me. In my opinion the mark of any great artist is that they do have their own distinctive style. You can say that you don't like that particular style and that's fine-it's personal preference, but Disney did not "ruin" these stories. If you want to hate Disney there are far better excuses that you can come up with.

The last movie on the Disney panel was Ponyo, which I am the most excited about because I love Miyazaki--and he was actually there! He spoke through a translator, so it took a bit of time to do the Q & A with him, but he made it worth the wait. My two favorite answers he gave were to the girl who asked him why he has so many female leads in his movies, to which he responded "Because women are strong and beautiful" Oh you silver-tongued devil! The other was his response to the obligatory "where do you get your inspiration from?" question to which he responded: "I'd tell you, but after each time I forget" He won the inkpot and was presented with it at the panel, and that was nice to be able to see. He asked if he could actually use the ink in it.

The next panel in Hall H was for the movie 9. Tim Burton showed up because he's producing it. Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly are doing voices for the movie, and they were there as well. During the con this movie had a cute promotional gimmick where they had girls (and one guy that I saw) pass out post cards containing pictures and bios of all 9 characters. Each girl only had cards for one character, and they had that number on their back, and they wandered the con passing them out so there was a bit of the collector's vibe to it, which is a smart way to go at comic con. The movie itself looked really good based on the clips because everyone loves a post-apocalyptic flick, and I love the idea of "stitch punk."

After the 9 panel we wandered the floor a bit, picked up the goodie bags that we got tickets for at the WB panel from their booth, and went home. We were pretty tired already and knew we had more long days ahead of us, and none of the remaining panels particularly interested us.

Review of Comic Con '09: Thursday

My first trip to comic con I only went because my then-boyfriend bought me a ticket. I didn't think I'd find anything that appealed to me, but boy was I wrong. Every year since then I have found more things to love about comic con, and every year has been a completely different experience.

To adapt to the increased popularity of comic con in recent years my plan of attack was to try to find rooms that would offer several panels that I would enjoy in a row so that if I had to wait in line for a room for hours, at least I'd get more than an hour of entertainment for it. I think this plan worked pretty well.

Before I can discuss Thursday at Comic Con I want to address the whole Twilight scandal. In case you are unaware of the situation many twilight fans started waiting in line for the New Moon panel the night before, and many more showed up ridiculously early in the morning. None of this would have been a problem, except that said panel was scheduled to take place after the Disney 3D panel which included previews for Alice in Wonderland and Tron. As a result the room was filled with Twilight fans who got in line so early that regular comic con attendees who aren't used to showing up so early for panels were unable to see the panel.

I was one of the people waiting outside who didn't get in to see the Disney 3D panel even though I started waiting in line two hours before it started. I was pretty upset, especially when I found out that I had missed seeing Johnny Depp, but I don't think blaming Twilight fans is fair. True it's easy, and entertaining, and Twilight is a horribly-written series that is casting abusive relationships in a positive light to the tween girls it is aimed at, but Twilight fans were not to blame for this, they were just an easy scapegoat.

If anything I think it was poor planning to put the Twilight panel second when so many of the fans were not interested in the other panels and would have left afterward to clear it up for Disney fans. Still, Disney is a big name and I can understand why the planners of Comic Con would think to put it first. They simply underestimated the obsessive nature of some of the Twilight fan base. Not all Twilight fans are crazy obsessed teenagers, however. Many have a sense of humor about it, like the two ladies line in front of us.

The most common complaint I heard was that Twilight fans filled up the Tron panel when they couldn't care less about Tron, but in a twist of irony I heard this from Watchmen fans who were sitting through a Vampire Diaries panel that they couldn't care less about so that they could get good seats for the director's cut. My point is that with the way things have gone recently you HAVE to occasionally sit through some panels you don't particularly care about if you want a good seat for the panels you DO care about. For people who don't like that, tough cookies. You should have showed up earlier.

If nothing else you have to admire the commitment of fans who are willing to spend the night outdoors waiting in line for an hour long panel that wasn't actually very exciting. Compared to many of the other panels I attended the answers of the cast were rather lackluster, with the director's responses being the most entertaining, though I'm surprised Robert Pattison even returned after last year's experience, he seemed to survive this year by exuding an aura of distaste for everything around him and answered every question directed towards him with I'm not even in most of this movie except as a figment of Bella's imagination. You could tell what he was thinking while he said that "Why did they even make me come this year?" The actress who plays Bella was either in some sort of zombie-themed comic con attire or on drugs, and she definitely seemed to be lusting after the brains of the actress who played Alice. The actor playing Jacob was by far the most personable because he only recently beefed up and still seemed dazzled and flattered by the fan adoration. I bet by next year he'll be skulking with Pattison trying to avoid the crazies. At least the studio picked the clips well.

The first clip pictures Jacob teaching Bella how to drive a motorcycle because Bella is trying to put herself in danger so that she can imagine the jerk that dumped her telling her to be safe. Bella hits her head and Jacob takes off his shirt to dab rather ineffectually at her wound.

The second clip is of Edward trying to commit suicide by glittering. I kid you not. For those unfamiliar with the book Edward's psychic sister sees Bella jumping off a cliff and thinks she's committing suicide. Edward discovers and immediately tries to kill himself as well, except apparently vampires are incapable of killing themselves. So naturally, he goes to the vampire mafia in Italy and asks THEM to kill him. They deny his request because apparently he's to pretty to die. He then decides to take matters into his own hands and reveal the vampire secret to humanity so that the mafia will be forced to kill him in retribution. He decides to do this by stepping out in the full sun at a big event in Italy and glittering in front of everyone. Now, if I saw some shirtless guy looking like Edward with lots of glitter on I'd just assume he was gay, but then again I'm a theatre student in the Bay Area. Maybe Italians would know to run away in fear from the glitter terrorist. At any rate the clip shows Bella running up trying to stop him as he slowly walks out of an alley while unbuttoning his shirt. The screaming this incited in the audience was painful.

After the Twilight panel came the panels that my roommate and I were interested in because we suffered through the Twilight panel to hear about Avatar and Terry Gilliam. We're rebels like that. The Avatar panel was exciting. Sigourney Weaver was there and we saw 25 minutes worth of clips from the film. It looks good. Interestingly enough you can see the effect of James Cameron spending all that time doing sea life documentaries in the fantastic characters in the film. I still maintain that the depths of the ocean probably hold far more fascinating and bizzare creatures than we will ever find in space.

The Terry Gilliam panel was delightful. The Imaginarium of Dr. Panassus looks good, and I'll be seeing it even if it didn't just because it will be so full of hot (it has Heath Ledger, Collin Firth, Jude Law, and Johnny Depp.) Gilliam said that what inspired him to make the movie was all of his recent flops. He started feeling like people didn't want to watch the kinds of stories that he wanted to tell any more. He then proceeded to make a movie about an old man who is part of a failing traveling show. Part of it takes place in the real world, and part of it in the fantasyland behind the mirror and Gilliam quipped that he hoped that would help to keep his audience's attention. I just hope that Gilliam hasn't made a deal with the devil to achieve eternal life so long as he gives up all of his children on their 16th birthdays like Dr. Parnassus. Verne Troyer appeared at the panel as well because he's in the movie.

Terry Gilliam was also very good at answering the mainly inane questions that were asked. You can tell that he's used to answering stupid questions. Hall H, which is where all of these panels took place, holds 6500 people, and it appears that some people will wait in line to ask questions just to be on the video screens in front of so many people. There were three guys that seemed to just wait in the line to ask questions all day, and many didn't even seem familiar with the work beyond the clips just shown to them. There were at least 3, usually more, variants of the question "Where do you get your inspiration from?" PER PANEL. Gilliam handled one of these asking specifically about his Monty Python work candidly and with humor when he replied that part of the inspiration for the crazy designs were all the all-nighters he pulled to finish it. He joked that when he is running low on ideas he'll still just not sleep for a while and then ideas will come.

After this panel we went to a small panel on comic podcasting because my uncle was one of the panelists. My roommate and I met up with my sister and cousin there and went to wait in line for Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. We only got in line about an hour beforehand, so the panel had already started by the time we got to the head of the line. At this point some rather rude employees started ordering everyone to get out of line because the room was full and no one else was going to get in. This got us about a dozen spaces closer as the quitters abandoned the cause. We remained steadfast and ignored the yelling employees because really, if a bunch of middle-aged men tried to lay hand on us, a bunch of 20 something girls, we could sue them from a pretty penny. We also knew that some people always stay in the room to see if something good is coming up. We knew many of these people would leave the moment everyone in the room began to sing. As much as I love sing-alongs, they aren't for everybody. We were right, of course, and we got in during the first musical number when the people who had stayed from the last panel started to leave. I'd feel sorry to the people in front of us who left after waiting an hour when they could have got in if they'd waited another ten minutes, but hey, that's what happens when you quit.

In the panel they passed out books with lyrics and call backs written in, which was smart. It was much more successful than the attempted Pirates call back I attended a few years back at the con because people forgot when they were supposed to do what. With people following in the book anyway for the lyrics it was easy for people to do the call-backs as well. It was a lot of fun overall, and it was the first time I had heard commentary, the musical, which was hilarious. I wasn't going to sing because I obviously didn't know the tunes, but the guy sitting next to me goaded me into it, and you don't have to ask me twice to sing. This is because once I open my mouth to sing people usually don't ask me to sing ever again, so I've learned to take them up on that first, naive request. I went home exhausted, but jazzed.

*In case you can't read the fine print on the lovely pink hammer in the last picture, it says: "The hammer is my penis"

Crow Road

The Crow Road by Iain Banks begins with the memorable line "It was the day my grandmother exploded." This line is, in fact, a good indication of the rest of the novel. This novel is full of similarly pithy one-liners and hooks (another good example being the start of chapter five: "Right, now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but...I was in bed with my Aunty Janice.") but unfortunately aside from amusing me with the occasional one-liner the book didn't do much for me.

At first, due to the vertiginous style of narrative and its constant switches in time and focus it is hard to pin point any one main character or plot except that all the vignettes center around one family. With time, however, it becomes apparent that novel is following a main character, Prentice, through a fairly linear plot with the rest being flashbacks and the like to relevant scenes in the history of his family, whose sordid past he uncovers throughout the novel.

The history of the family seems to be more eventful than the average one, but not to an unrealistic degree. The novel begins at Prentice's Grandmother's funeral where we meet the family. In order of appearance, more or less, they are Uncle Hamish, who is possessed of several peculiar ideas about religion and how one's life is tallied up after death; Prentice's father Kenneth, a devout atheist who Prentice is currently not speaking to over religious differences; Prentice's little brother James, who spends most of the novel in Australia and doesn't appear to do much worth mentioning in the novel other than being moody and listening to his Walkman; Prentice's mother Mary, who is generally warm and loving and motherly; Aunt Ilsa the world traveler, Uncle Rory who rode off on a stolen motorcycle years ago and hasn't been heard from since, Prentice's older, and if you ask Prentice smarter, funnier, and all-around better, brother Lewis; Uncle Fergus, the widow of Prentice's Aunt Fiona and father of twins, he is also the richest and most powerful man in town and the uncle of Verity whose beauty is matched only by her poor taste in men and who has won Prentice's heart. Last but not least I'd be remiss if I did not mention Ashley, who is not a member of the family, but is rather a family friend. Prentice didn't get along with her much during school and in fact broke her nose with a snowball containing a rock. Despite this fact she spends a fair amount of time in the novel taking care of him while he blubbers drunkenly.

All of these people and more populate the novel following a rather predictable path based on the introductions given at the beginning of the novel. I don't recall being surprised by any incident in the novel, which is saying something for a novel that mostly just bounces from incident to incident. A large number of said incidents seem to involve sex or large amounts of alcohol, or both. At what might be called the climax of the book (pun totally intended) a very controlled movement of certain muscles in a pulse-like fashion leads to one character confessing their love to another in Morse code.

Overall the novelty of the bizarre incidents and one-liners wore off pretty quickly and I didn't find anything particularly deep to sink my teeth into. The only part of the book that was even remotely challenging was the non-linear plot structure, but after latching onto the one main through line even that was relatively easy to deal with. There were a couple interesting bits contemplating religion or death, but overall nothing that I haven't seen said before and said better. When I finished the novel there wasn't any issue that I was left pondering or anything at all that really stayed with me. The main thought that went through my head at the end was a vague feeling of disappointment that it ended in more or less exactly the way I had predicted at the beginning.

To be fair I'm not a fan of strictly realistic fiction. A second fact that might bias me against the book is that it contains a lot of contemplation on religion and despite the fact that it is of a mostly atheistic bent I just don't find religion to be quite as interesting a subject for infinite contemplation as most people seem to. With those disclaimers in mind I'd give the book three stars out of five.

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots, they can be politicians and idiots…in fact I think they have to be…a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement. Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“Fairness is something we made up,” he said. “It’s an idea. The universe isn’t fair or unfair; it works by mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry…Things happen; it takes a mind to come along and call them fair or not.” Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“Prentice, have you been reading crime novels instead of your history books?”

I gave a small laugh. “No. The worst crimes are always in the history books, anyway.” Iain Banks, The Crow Road