A Year in Cultural Consumption

My answer to all the year-end lists coming out right now is one of my own, and yet chunky with paragraphing.  Here is my review of one librarian’s year in cultural consumption, encompassing my major food groups of media!

(And remember, like carbs, sugar and fat, TV and movies are not inherently bad for you, and can even be good for you as part of a balanced media diet that includes plenty of fresh books, graphic novels and more.  I feel like Tumblr is with me on this, but some librarians persist in being kinda snooty on this point…)

• 2013 TV-in-review
• Scandal
• My favorite new show of the year.  It started in 2012 but I only just got on the bandwagon when I saw a nice-looking young woman tricked into poison-needling an innocent security guard to death, then all the business with the VP, and OMG I started Netflix bingeing and the Defiance scandal and and rich frat boys and spygames and the president isn’t as bad a guy as the critics like to say and holy heck, and Cyrus, my goddess CYRUS this is an awesome show.  Its protagonist, Olivia Pope, belongs to the school of “If you don’t do what I say I’ll repeat it louder and slower” AND. IT. ALL. WAYS. WORKS.  Love her.  This show combines my love of the fast-paced political action of The West Wing with the bare-knuckled intrigue of Game of Thrones.  Speaking of which...
• Game of Thrones
• Another strong season for my favorite show on television, based on some of my favorite fantasy books.  I believe that spoiler-sensitivity should stay in effect for decades after initial publication but suffice it to say that Thrones successfully delivered a much-anticipated, roundly dreaded gut-punch of a scene this season.  I only wish it had been built toward a little bit more. Other storylines were equally effective, particularly beyond the Wall and in the Riverlands.  King’s Landing was a bit light this year, hopefully in preparation for a return to the limelight in 2014….
• Sleepy Hollow
• I’ll join the chorus of those for whom this makes for a light, fun, oddly sentimental Monday evening.  Ichabod Crane’s awkward transition to the 21st century is a goofy joy to watch, and, every episode, like clockwork, there’s a self-consciously “aww”-inducing moment of emotional catharsis between him and his hard-bitten companion, Police Lieutenant Abby Mills.  It’s like a grown-up version of the Full House “lesson of the day” moment, with a treacly but nice soundtrack cue taking the place of the canned audience’s sigh of appreciation  I love it.  Oh, there’s always some paranormal A-plot too, but I tend to zone out during that part.

• Revolution
• I hope this show doesn’t fade away--I hear the ratings for season 2 aren’t so good.  I rather liked the conceit of this season, with the pursuit of restoring the world’s power from season 1 given an effective payoff without ruining the show’s premise.  I’ve loved seeing geeky Aaron deal with the rise of strange new abilities and puzzling out how they work (okay, it wasn’t that hard). And the show in general has done an almost Thrones-level job of getting us to sympathise with unsavory characters, like fallen military dictator Bas and barely-hanging-on-to-sanity, guilt-wracked Rachel.
• Revenge
• Thank goodness for a return to form in this season’s storyline, after S2’s confused devolution into shady extra-corporate conspiracy shenanigans.  I thrilled at the return of Emily Thorne’s photo and red sharpie!  Now the moment we’ve been waiting for has come and gone--the big wedding--leaving the future interest of the show in question.  I‘ll see out this season and then we’ll have to see if it’s worth continuing.

Sooooo satisfying

• Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD
• I’ve consistently enjoyed this show for its character dynamics while praying every week for more connections to the Marvel universe--see my post here.  The good news is that it has made some strides in that direction, with visits from Graviton and Scorch and two tie-ins to the recent Thor sequel.  There needs to be more, more, more, though.  I’ve heard that Arrow features all kinds of DC properties--why no you, Marvel??

TV Resolution: Make full use of Netflix to catch up on hits I’ve missed

• 2013 Movies-in-review
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
• Off-the-cuff observations in no particular order: I’m the only person with an opinion to be largely ‘meh’ about the movie as a whole but ‘right on!’ about the jarring ending (the point is, after all, to make it feel impossible to cope with the wait for the next one).  Tauriel is a strong addition but the love triangle is largely pointless--can we not have movie-relationships based on mutual respect and the jealousy that can sometimes form in such cases just as easily as in romances?  The over-powering of Gandalf and magic in general continues, with the mysterious eruptions of natural phenomena seen in Lord of the Rings replaced by visible, controlled, and thus diminished exertions of DnD style spells.   In all, the movie struggled to hold my attention, but became brilliant as soon as Bilbo and Smaug begin interacting.  In the end, I think that these films should never have been branded The Hobbit at all; let them be a series of further adventures in Middle-Earth, with a rough through-line of a Hobbit adaptation as one of the many plot-threads, but with Jackson allowing himself to go full-bore in his own envisioning of Tolkien’s material.  Purists would still grumble, but they’d have less legitimate fuel for their arguments that Jackson is appropriating the Hobbit’s good name and making it a vehicle for his own ambitions.  (For the record, I believe Jackson has nothing but the fairest of intentions, but he lets his abilities and enthusiasm get in the way of just adapting a children’s book.)
• Iron Man 3
• What more can be said?  Robert Downey, Jr. embodies Tony Stark.  A new Tony Stark who is more interesting than he ever was in the comics.  Not a huge fan of the treatment of the Mandarin, but I’d rather the MCU have the guts to stick with it rather than handwave it away in the face of angry Internets...
• The Wolverine
• I liked it.  The Silver Samurai was pretty cool, visually.  I’m a fan of plots that render immortal characters mortal for a while.
• Man of Steel
• Did anyone else have as big a problem as I did with Superman killing so many people?  How, exactly, is Metropolis still a functioning metropolis after that drubbing?  Ruined the fantasy for me.
• Thor: The Dark World
• I loved the first Thor film, and I loved this one.  See my previous Thor-centric post for proof.  I love that each Marvel movie has its own genre and is unafraid to inhabit it fully--in this case, a unique fantasy-cum-oblique-sci fi.
• Hunger Games/Catching Fire
• I saw both films this year, after a friend got me hooked through the books.  The first was disappointing, but the second blew me away.  This movie does everything right, and it’s devastating.  I love when my bias in favor of middle installments is confirmed.  (Yes, I will consider this the middle, even though we have two films to go.  And yes, I am mad at Smaug for not confirming my middle installment bias.)

"Katniss...*I* am your father!" (Note: That does not happen in this movie.)

• World War Z
• I liked it alright. Feel no need to ever see it again, though I am excited for the book. I know it’s a different animal--that’s why  want to read it.
• Cloud Atlas
• Not one of this year’s, but I’m so glad my best buddy convinced me we should rent this under-appreciated 2012 gem.  Hard to describe.  Go rent it.
• The Conjuring
• An effectively chilling horror movie.  Supposedly a true story--I love the vintage ghost hunting touches, like cameras on tripwires connected to spooky moving doors.  Devolves into SFX schlock towards the end, but it’s a rare horror film that makes you care about the characters as people and not just victims.  The wife in the married ghost hunter duo avers that their clients are a “nice family” that they want to help.  That makes two of those in this movie.

Movie resolution: See a few more in the theaters this coming year.  And maybe make sure a few of them aren’t genre-heavy.  But boy,  I am looking forward to Captain America, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Hunger Games part 3...

• 2013 Graphic novels-in-review
• Boxers and Saints
• A bit of a letdown after Yang’s sublime American Born Chinese, but a good portrait of an interesting time in Chinese history nonetheless  The art is bright and detailed and gorgeous.  Sadly, though, I’m not a fan of the divided structure that everyone else seems to universally praise.  On the face of it, I like the idea of two plots connected by historical context and two brief cheek-to-cheek narrative moments, each giving the other some propulsion, but otherwise developing in isolation--it’s a very Sondheim-like conceit.  And I get all the comparisons of motivation and consequences that this approach engenders.  But I just feel like one of the stories comes off as rather slight--it’s significantly shorter than the other, for one thing, which is a sign.  It just doesn’t pack the same wallop.  And I just don’t see what was gained by isolating the stories that wouldn’t have been surpassed by interweaving them.  I’m not the author, so I shan’t throw stones, but it didn’t work as well for me as I’d hoped

• Persepolis
• I found this book to be largely ‘meh.’  It provides interesting historical data with a human context, but the art and writing just didn’t do it for me--generally not a fan of the more ‘cartoony’ style, even when paired with serious material like this.  Maybe when I’m in the right mood. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone with an interest in Iranian history and culture, though.
• The Bloody Benders
• I love these “Treasury of Victorian Murder” titles, and this one, idly picked up while waiting for a friend at the Ithaca Public LIbrary, did not disappoint.  The mystery of this family of brutal serial killers disappeared into the ocean of the unsettled Great Plains, their fates and true identities never to be revealed.  There’s nothing more enticing than that!  Pick up anything by Frank Geary and shiver away.
• The Young Avengers Ultimate Collection
• The only new superhero title I read this year, and it was very enjoyable.  The diversity of the cast is great.  I’m generally not a fan of too many stretches of issues that combine to cover a single event with no sense of time passing, but I can forgive it in what is essentially an extended limited series.  I look forward to catching up with the rest of this team’s adventures.

Resolution: Read more LGBTQ themed titles in support of my research interests.

• 2013 Books-in-Review
• I read too many this year to treat each individually, so I’m going to rank them into groups, starting with the best of the year and moving on from there.
• Tier 1: Highly recommended for all to read immediately (assuming you’ve read preceding material, where applicable), regardless of interests:
• A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
• The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Some short long fiction (“The Emperor’s Soul” by Brandon Sanderson, “River of Souls” by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan, and “The Princess and the Queen” by George R. R. Martin)
• Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe
• Tier 2: Recommended for fans of the authors, genres, and/or themes, or if you are open to a good general read:
• The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
• The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
• The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
• Gaiman (Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book,The Ocean at the End of the Lane)
• The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
• Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
• Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
• Tier 3: Recommended only if you’re in the right mood (i.e. for stilted historical fiction, child rape, and on-the-nose sci-fi satire and metafiction):
• Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Redshirts by John Scalzi
• Tier 4: Not recommended:
• The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
• Those Rothfuss books.  

Resolution: Read more non-fiction and works by women.

So there’s 365 days of information absorbed, minus TV cooking and paranormal ‘reality’ shows, stuff encountered for work, re-reads, and things too embarrassing to be mentioned.  I’m looking forward to an increasingly ‘tamed’ influx of art and culture in the coming year, as I use Goodreads, GetGlue and other sources to keep track of what I consume and my thoughts on same.  It’s never been easier to be the intellectual property equivalent of a hoarder!

Happy New Year!

ADDENDUM: My top-viewed posts of 2013.

Guns in libraries

The David A. Howe Public Library

A Policy of Kindness

Something to Think About

Cutbacks on Prime Temporal Real Estate and Toward the Future of Asgard! (tie)

Diary of an Underemployed Librarian

I feel bad for my long absence from my blog!  Believe me, I have not let this project fall by the wayside for good; I've just been very busy the past few weeks, making progress on some other efforts I've been making lately.  That's always a good thing!  For lack of energy to come up with some deep insights this week, I'll just give you a few brief updates on My Librarian Life.  (Because I'm sure you are all clamoring to know how a mostly-unemployed librarian keeps himself feeling sharp!)

First, of course, I am still "mostly unemployed."  I continue my work archiving the papers and documents of the Urban Design Project at UB, but lately I've only been able to get up there one day a week, so it doesn't really feel like a job of any sort.  Compounding that sense is the fact that I haven't gotten paid in a month due to some internal issues in the Architecture department.  Sigh.  Not the most encouraging part of life right now.

Other things are better though!  For one, I've been following along with a MOOC (that's a Massive Online Open Course, folks) all about metadata, which has been offered by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Now I already had a pretty good grasp on metadata from my studies at UB (thanks in particular to Dr. Valerie Nesset and Dr. Brenda Battleson!), but I found the first week of the course a good review, and the second week drilled down into the history and function of the Dublin Core schema, which is always appreciated.  And next week we get into something I've never heard of.  Boldly going!

(I have fallen behind on the numerous webinars I tend to sign up for, but the archived recording s have been piling up in my inbox, so I will get to them.)

Volunteering at the local Dunkirk Free Library continues to keep me feeling connected to the public work I hope to make my career doing.  Recently got the greenlight to work on drafting an Internet and social media policy for the library, and I'm helping out with Library Card Month and Banned Books Week activities.

I've been cataloging my comic book collection.  It feels like really simple copy cataloging, so it's only tenuously beneficial to my life as an information professional, but getting myself organized and generating a searchable database of my comics makes me feel a little more respectable.  If any of you have a collection of comics you'd like to corral, I highly recommend Comic Book Database, which allows you to build a personalized collection from the titles you own!

Last and somewhat least, and as a followup to my previous post (my perhaps over-intense review of/rant about Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind), I read the second volume in "The Kingkiller Chronicles," The Wise Man's Fear.  It was a better experience than book 1.  Kvothe is still insufferably competent, but this one shows a few cracks in his veneer.  Seems a bit like a lot of wheel-spinning, though; I probably would have made some structural changes to the end of book one and the beginning of this one.  Not sure how Rothfuss plans to wrap it all up in one more installment.  Now I'm almost done with Redshirts by John Scalzi, another book with a lot of hype that I find over-inflated.  Perhaps more on that later.

That's all for now.  I'll try to be back with a more substantial post sometime this week!

Get Over Yourself, You Overgrown Damaged Adolescent: A Non-Spoiler Review of Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind

Bonus post!  I just wrote this over at Goodreads and thought I'd share my salty mood with you all today.  And okay, sure, there is maybe one very mild spoiler, but it doesn't really reveal anything.  Read on!

There's nothing worse than a good story poorly told, unless it's a mostly good story mostly poorly told.  I'm not sure which this book is, but either way it's bad news.

Image taken from www.goodreads.com

I've seen Rothfuss and his work ballyhooed for some years now and was really looking forward to the chance to get into the first book of "The Kingkiller Chronicles."  By all accounts, it seemed to be a genre-mover, an epochal work that moves the boundaries of fantasy forward while paying homage to the best of what came before.  I was intrigued by the promise of a frame narrative, of a famous man mysteriously brought low, and of a creeping, misunderstood, demonic threat.  There seemed to be echoes of my loves, "The Wheel of Time" and "A Song of Ice and Fire" in the promised themes of real-world events turning to legend and myth before our eyes and of the meaning made by stories determined by the skewed perspectives of the individuals through whose eyes the stories are experienced.  It all sounds so good!

Sadly the book does not deliver.  Or it only delivers up to a point, which makes it supremely frustrating rather than just bad.

First of all, Rothfuss' work needs to come with a trigger warning for grammar-lovers.  Seriously, how did this book get past first draft like this?  Who is this guy's editor?  He or she should be canned immediately.  Small but noticeable problems abound, the most frequent being an inconsistent and maddening lack of facility with the conventions of dialogue and tags.  "'I think,' he said. 'That you are pretty.'"--that is NEVER RIGHT.  (Okay, it's right if your character hesitates and makes the statement into two sentences.  But if that's the case you should let us know that that is happening.  And I know, Patrick Rothfuss, that you were just doing it wrong, because you did it 50-75% of the time.)

Sorry.  I feel strongly that writers should know how to write.

The next big problem: the main character, Kvothe, is a baaaad example of whatever the male equivalent of a Mary Sue would be called.  Let's say a Marvin Sue.  (Oh, I guess some people say 'Gary Stu.'  I like mine better.)  The point is.  Kvothe is perfect perfect perfect, he was better at everything as an 8 year old than you will ever be at your one passion in life at age 30, he runs rings around the authorities, and everything bad in his life is inflicted upon him by his enemies and/or his cruel destiny, boo-hoo for Kvothe, but wait, thanks to his daring and cunning, he always gets his way in the end!  This human being is SO. DAMN.  FRUSTRATING.  And yes, he's charming, and occasionally shows some sensitivity, just enough to get you to want to follow his story and feel bad for him.  But his entire personality is so much revenge porn for the downtrodden nerdlings of the real world, and, speaking as one of them, I feel like we deserve better than that kind of pandering in our fiction.

(To say nothing of Kvothe's supposedly rapier-sharp wit.  Seriously, he talks like the picked-on kid in the schoolyard who hasn't yet come up with any better coping mechanisms.  But Kvothe is rewarded with gales of laughter at every turn.  Sigh.)

Then there's this authorial tendency throughout the text to seem tragically holier-than-thou compared to all that *snooty voice* run of the mill fantasy.  We're constantly reminded how real life isn't like the stories and Kvothe has to work so much harder than the heroes of his world's folklore and mythology because god damn it there is no God or Narrator who's just going to hand us a win.  Rothfuss makes such a point of it that it's obvious we're supposed to perceive Kvothe's story as this somehow rarefied, uber-realistic version of fantasy that, aside from magical metaphysics, abides by real-world laws of cause & effect and rationality and whatnot.  At one point, he says something very much like, "I wasn't going to find their plans written out on an accidentally-discarded piece of paper!"

A few pages later, enter the convenient plot swineherd.  He only travels this remote area once in a while, but he happens to be here at the same time as Our Hero, with not only the info Kvothe's looking for but also additional intelligence to propel the plot forward.

Look, I'm all for dissecting fantasy tropes and realism now and then.  But don't preach about it and then substitute the deus ex machina you just had your character basically decry as lazy writing with another one that you hope your audience won't notice (or perhaps that you, yourself, did not notice).

The sanctimonious attitude gets old, and it extends to Kvothe's rhapsodizing about music, about how non-musicians just can't understand beauty and love and perfection.  Oh, God's body, get over yourself, Patrick Rothfuss, you overgrown damaged adolescent.

And yeah, now I'm reading book 2.  That's the most frustrating part.  I almost feel as though Rothfuss structured his story as cynically as possible, knowing that no matter how disagreeable readers find the first volume, they will want the full story on all the hints and clues and intriguing bits seeded throughout.  I feel manipulated, and I'm 7% in and grinding my teeth at the same old usage errors, but I'm not stopping.

And yet this book is as highly-rated as I've seen anywhere.  I don't get it.  I honestly don't.  I'm usually fine letting people have their taste and enjoy their enjoyment ("I don't want to yuck your yum"), but this book violates the various laws and maxims and pet peeves that I've seen cited by numerous readers complain about OTHER books.  (Poorly written--check.  Mary Sue--check.  Sanctimonious underpinnings--check.  Manipulative--check.)  And everyone is eating it up.  I am saddened.

Maybe this will convince you to trash this book: Rothfuss writes "make do" as "make due."  Twice.

*cheery smile*  I hate what you've done to us, Patrick Rothfuss.