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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Review - Shadows of the Past by E.A. Jensen


Short review: Vampires and "ware"-animals are the good guys, the Church of Light are the villains. Kirsa is a child prodigy with issues and must solve a series of murders of paranormal creatures in her hometown.

Haiku
Vampire detectives
Paranormal mystery
Awful editing

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Shadows of the Past is a book that should have been much better than it actually is. The basic story - a paranormal mystery-romance with a modest amount of originality - is not too bad. But the simple truth is that this book needed serious rewriting and editing. Because of this, reading Shadows of the Past is a depressingly frustrating experience, not because of all the weak elements, but because those weak elements hinder and obscure what could have been an enjoyable book.

The fact that a book is self-published, as Shadows of the Past is, is not in itself a mark of quality or lack thereof. There is no particular reason for a self-published book to be good, or bad, or have any other particular characteristic. But the one thread that seems to tie most self-published books together is a lack of editing. And Shadows of the Past suffers terribly from this affliction. One thing that self-published authors need to realize is that a computer spell checker is no substitute for a good copy editor, or any copy editor at all. Shadows of the Past is riddled with the kinds of errors that show up when an author tries to use a spell checking program to catch the sorts of problems that a copy editor would find: homonyms used instead of the correct word, verbs conjugated incorrectly, words missing from sentences, and so on. These types of mistakes in the text won't be caught by a spell-checker, because the individual words in the book are spelled correctly. But when they are strung together, they add up to a mess.

But the problems with Shadows of the Past run deeper than simple grammatical mistakes and spelling miscues. The book itself needed an editor to go through it and suggest serious revisions to many parts of the story. The most consistent problem with the book is overly abrupt transitions as the story switches from scene to scene. For example, the action might switch from a couple of characters having a conversation in New Jersey to a a completely different character doing something completely unrelated in Germany with nothing more than a paragraph break separating the two scenes. These sorts of jolting transitions pull the reader out of the story as he has to stop and figure out what is going on, and whether what they are now reading has anything to do with what they read just a few sentences before. In many ways, the published version of Shadows of the Past reads like the first draft of a book that needed a couple of redrafts and at least one or two readings by a good editor. As it is, the book feels like a criminal waste of good potential.

I remember going to see A.S. King speak when she was in Alexandria. She said that she had written seven complete novels before Dust of 100 Dogs (read review) was published. She also said that despite the disappointment she felt at the time when those novels were not selected for publication, the time and effort spent writing those novels was a necessary learning experience for her on her journey to becoming someone who could turn out polished publishable material. In a way, the danger of self-publishing is that authors whose material is not yet ready for the public eye will bypass this sort of learning process and have works in print that will mark their career permanently, or even derail their career. To a certain extent, I think that Shadows of the Past may be a novel that E.A. Jensen will come to regret publishing in its current form. Not because the book is bad - even though it is - but because with more work, the book clearly could have been so much better.

E.A. Jensen     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, July 30, 2012

Musical Monday - A Friend Is a Friend by Pete Townshend


I spent my fourth and fifth grade years living in Tanzania attending the International School of Tanzania, a school run by British educators, originally intended to educate the children of British expatriates living there. By the late 1970s, when I was a student, it was open to pretty much anyone living in or near Dar es Salaam who could afford to send their children there, but it retained its distinctly British flavor. The influence of my tenure at the school is probably why I am always trying to stick a "u" into words like armor and flavor.

One of the things that I remember from my two years there was the practice of teachers reading aloud to the class. I only vaguely remember most of the books that we were read: one was, I think, one of Isaac Asimov's Norby the Robot stories, while another was about a boy living on a raft that floated on an underground river until he found a way to the surface and saw the sun. But one story that I remember clearly was The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, read by Mr. Bartlett when I was in fifth grade. I didn't much like Mr. Bartlett - he was the sort of person who I suspect was teaching in a small school in a third world country because he was too lousy a teacher and disagreeable a man to be able to secure employment anywhere else - but he did introduce me to this story, and for that at least I am grateful.

Years later, Pete Townshend, who was a friend of Ted Hughes, made a rock opera out of the story. Like most art projects, the resulting album was mostly ignored by the press, so I only found out about it via a fraternity brother of mine who was a huge fan of the Who and had acquired a copy. As soon as I realized that the musical was about the book, I had to get a copy of the recording for myself. I listen to the album regularly. No one I know understands why I love it. They usually like The Iron Giant, which is loosely based on the story, but Townshend's treatment of the material just seems to mystify most people I am acquainted with. I don't mind. I'll keep listening to The Iron Man and imagining that the whole thing was made just for me.

Previous Musical Monday: Lonely Like Me by The Doubleclicks
Subsequent Musical Monday: Storms by Fleetwood Mac

Pete Townshend     Musical Monday     Home

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Book Blogger Hop July 20th - July 26th: Five Different Superstring Theories Posit Ten Spacetime Dimensions

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: What’s the ONE super-hyped book you’ll NEVER read?

I always hesitate to say "never" about anything. I once said I'd never read a Danielle Steele novel, but then I did. But I can state that it is highly unlikely that I will ever read Fifty Shades of Grey or either of the two novels that follow it.

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Nigel Tufnel's Amplifiers Go to ELEVEN!

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - "68 Publishers" Was an Outlet for Exiled Czech and Slovak Authors


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Books Are My Reality and Concise Book Reviews.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Summer Reading. What was your favorite book that you were REQUIRED to read when you were in school?

My first choice would be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. There was just something about having Hamlet told from the perspective of two interchangeable characters who are casually condemned to an off-stage death while musing on the nature of free will and reality that fascinated my teenage mind. However, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play, and not a novel, so that may not be exactly what the question is after. If I am looking at novels that I read for school, I suppose I would say that my favorite would be As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I loved the rotating narrator and the glimpse into the competing motivations the various characters had for making the journey to deliver their dead mother to her resting place.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Sixty-Seven Is a Lucky Prime

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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Review - Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman


Short review: People are irrational but consistently so, and for somewhat explainable reasons.

Haiku
Tenerife air crash
The irrational explained
Human decisions

Full review: Why do people make seemingly silly choices, choosing to spend hundreds of dollars to acquire something that is declared to be worth twenty or less? Why do people maintain a commitment to wrong-headed decisions even after it becomes clear that are heading to ruin? Why do we allow worry about possible losses cause us to forgo easy gains, and even suffer losses? Sway is an exploration of these types of irrational behavior, and an attempt to explain why we do what we do. As an introduction to the ideas underlying behavioral economics, and the concept of predictable human irrationality, the book is decent. However, because it the treatment of the material is so superficial, for anyone already familiar with the basics of behavioral economics, this book will probably not be particularly valuable.

In the opening chapter, the authors give specific examples of "irrational behavior": Doctors pouring asbestos into the chest cavities of patients during open heart surgery despite the evidence that this was killing them, the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger despite the recommendations against it from the O-ring manufacturers, physicians repeatedly sending a child home from the emergency room without checking her because they had decided that her mother was just being hysterical. And so on. It is this impulse - the irrational attachments that humans have to decisions they have made - that sits at the core of human irrational behavior, and serves as the starting point for the book.

The authors use the Tenerife air disaster as their primary example of irrational behavior, trying to explain how an experienced pilot, the head of KLM's safety program, could make a series of almost inexplicably poor decisions that would lead to an on-runway collision costing the lives of hundreds of people, including everyone aboard his aircraft. This example is returned to several times in the book, as the litany of bad decisions illustrates each of the major causes of irrational decision making: loss aversion, diagnosis bias, group bias, and so on. By such disparate means as the egg and orange juice purchasing habits of American consumers, the relative playing time given to NBA players, the voting patterns of audience members in various versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and a number of other examples, the authors illustrate all of the various psychological forces that result in humans making seemingly stupid decisions.

Given the subject matter of the book, comparisons to Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational (read review) and The Upside of Irrationality (read review) are almost inevitable, and it is when viewed in this light that Sway comes up somewhat short. There is nothing particularly wrong with the book, but I suspect that the fact that the examples used by the authors to illustrate their points were almost all second hand accounts for it. In Ariely's books he discusses much the same psychological territory, but uses examples drawn from experiments that either he or graduate students under his supervision have conducted, which gives his books an immediacy that Sway simply lacks. This element also allows Ariely's books to be much more precise when illustrating particular quirks of human behavior, because the experiments in question were specifically designed to identify and test particular points. This does not mean that when the Brafmans cite the "love bridge" experiment to illustrate the effect that anxiety and adrenaline have on sexual interest that they are not making a salient point, but rather that because they are relating an experiment second hand, that it seems less compelling than if they were relating experiments that they had set up and observed directly.

The corollary of this lack of direct involvement is that the Brafmans seem less able to use their observations concerning human nature to make suggestions for possible uses for the particularly human idiosyncrasies that they identify and examine. Whereas Ariely's studies concerning the human propensity to cheat were driven by a desire to understand why the executives at Enron engaged in the behavior that led to the collapse of the company, and further to figure out what sort of system could be put in place to discourage such behavior in the future, the Brafmans seem to have no prescriptive suggestions as to how one might prevent a recurrence of the Tenerife disaster, and don't even seem to think that such suggestions might be important or interesting to the reader.

Even so, the strange patterns that the authors identify are interesting and carry the book, especially in the latter chapters where they focus on the psychology of group behavior and the distinction between social and economic decisions (and the impossibility of the two to function in conjunction with as opposed to in alternative with one another). While Sway doesn't break any new ground, or offer any new insights to anyone who has had contact with the field of behavioral economics and the study of decision-making, it is a well-written and very readable introduction to those fields.

Ori Brafman     Rom Brafman     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, July 23, 2012

Musical Monday - Lonely Like Me by The Doubleclicks


Usually when I post a Doubleclicks video it is because their song is reflective of how I am feeling. There is something about their songs that very often seems to capture my moods. Today is only partially one of those days. It is not Valentine's Day and I am not lonely. Otherwise, this song is dead on.

One aspect of the Doubleclicks that has been present from the outset, even when they were still limited to songs like this one (which, by the way, does not seem to have made it on to any of their CDs, and appears not to be available in any format except for this YouTube video) is their ability to capture what it is like to be a nerd on a visceral level. There are many artists who capture the fun and oddity of the nerd world, but no one seems to share their ability to get to the emotional core of nerdiness the way Angela and Aubrey can.

As an aside, my favorite parts of the video are the line about vomit and Aubrey's reactions to the lyrics.

Previous Musical Monday: The Greatest Show on Earth by Symphony of Science
Subsequent Musical Monday: A Friend Is a Friend by Pete Townshend

The Doubleclicks      Musical Monday     Home

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Review - Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik


Short review: The British crown decides to stop wasting a valuable asset and reinstates Lawrence before sending him to South America where the price of European arrogance has come due.

Haiku
Sail the Pacific
Offend the Incan ruler
Piss off Portugal

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Crucible of Gold is the seventh book in Naomi Novik's Tremeraire series, following upon the somewhat disappointing Tongues of Serpents. Captain Lawrence, Tremeraire, Granby, Iskierka, Demane, and Kulingale all return to action and leave Australia behind for more adventures, called upon by the British government to aid its Portuguese allies in South America in a trek that results in a variety of twists and turns. Unfortunately, this installment of the series continues the foundering that afflicted the previous book, and although the story is diverting, and at times interesting, one gets the impression that Novik is just filling pages at this point without any real idea of where the story is going. Despite all of the motion that takes place in the course of the book, one feels as though the plot has been running the Red Queen's race, ending up in more or less the same place that it had started the book in.

The book opens with Lawrence and Tremeraire cooling their heels in Australia, living in exile following the commutation of Lawrence's death sentence in Victory of Eagles. At the outset of the book Hammond arrives, interrupting Tremeraire's ongoing construction of his pavilion, bearing a letter reinstating Lawrence as a captain in the British air corps and directing him to take Iskierka and Kulingale to Brazil and aid the Portuguese there. It seems that Napoleon had allied himself with the Tswana, last seen in Empire of Ivory, who are quite understandably a little upset that the Portuguese have made a habit of taking the inhabitants of Africa and transporting them to South America as slaves. Whether Napoleon cares about the concerns of his allies or not is unclear, but he has opportunistically used his transport ships to move several of the Tswana ancestor dragons to Brazil in order to knock these allies of the British on their heels.

This development brings to the fore two of the themes that Novik has inserted into the series: the issue of slavery, and the alteration to the balance of power engendered by the presence of dragons in the world. In actual history, the idea that Napoleon would ally himself with the African nations and transport and army to Brazil in an effort to discomfit the Portuguese would have been laughable. Not only would Napoleon have never given the inhabitants of the Dark Continent a second thought, but moving an army of natives to attack Rio de Janeiro would have been a futile and counterproductive gesture, probably only serving to provide the Portuguese with additional forced laborers for their plantations. But with the changed balance of power this threat is very real. And by having the Tswana target the Portuguese, Novik homes in on the lead slaving nation in actual history - at one point slaves in Portugal outnumbered free people - and highlights the growing sense that Britain, a nation that condones slavery and allies itself with slaveholding nations, may not be the right side to root for even though it is the side that the protagonist of the novels serves.

As if to punctuate this point, Lawrence, Tremeraire, and the rest of the expeditionary force set out for Brazil aboard the Allegiance, commanded by the pro-slavery Captain Riley. The voyage is cut short due to the drunken misadventures of some of the ship's crew, and in a sequence of symbolic significance, the dragon transport and the slave-holding Captain Riley sink into the sea. This symbolic shedding of the pro-slavery character in the story is somewhat tarnished by the stereotypical class prejudiced means by which that plot development is presented. The sinking of the Allegiance exposes just how vulnerable dragons are when transported this way (and exactly how much disregard for their welfare the European powers must have to load them into ships) and puts into motion the remainder of the plot, as Lawrence leads the dragon wing on a desperate flight across the open ocean to try to find a place to land.

On their last legs (or, more accurately, wings), the dragons run afoul of the French and find themselves stranded on a desert island where the dragon crews and the remnant of the sailors saved from the Allegiance must eke out an existence heavily dependent upon the fishing skills of the dragons. It is at this point that the stupidity seen in Tongues of Dragons returns as the shiftless navy men try to rough up Lawrence and the other dragon captains in an effort to somehow make the dragons do what they want them to. Given that the dragons are exceedingly protective of their captains (at times to the point of suffocating them with affection), threatening the object of these men seems like an exceedingly hazardous thing to do. One might imagine that for a brief period of time one could get a captain's dragon to go along with your desires via blackmail, but you would still have a very touchy multi-ton winged creature with huge fangs, claws, and possibly acidic or fire breath who was angry with you. This seems like a suboptimal situation to choose to place oneself in. This is yet another example of the British characters in the book behaving as if they exist in a world in which they are unfamiliar with dragons. Everything in the world has changed by the introduction of intelligent engines of destruction, and yet time and again, the British inhabitants of the world behave as if they are living in a world that is exactly like our own late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

Eventually, serendipity raises its head and Lawrence is able to lead the dragons and a portion of the remaining crewmen to the South American mainland where they stumble into the Incan Empire. Or rather they stumble into a deserted fishing village sitting in the middle of deserted countryside. It seems that even though the presence of dragons has changed the balance of power in the world, what has not changed is the effect that bringing Old World diseases to the New World has on the native inhabitants. So what Lawrence and Tremeraire find is a land depopulated of humans by disease and a nation of dragons bereft of their cherished pets. It seems that while the Europeans treat dragons as intelligent livestock, the Chinese treat dragons as fellow members of society, the Tswana treat dragons as their tribal ancestor gods, the relationship between the Incans and their dragons is not how humans treat the dragons living among them, but rather how dragons treat the humans living among them.

As usual, the British blunder about without any real understanding of the native culture of the land they are invading and manage to offend the local dragons. They are saved by Iskierka's fighting skills, and end up in Cusco before the Sapa Inca where they discover that the nation is in crisis due to the plague induced depopulation of the land. The inhabitants are organized into allyu, each presided over by a dragon who is responsible for their care and protection, but to whom they are bound to service much like serfs. This leads to some discussion concerning the nature of freedom, slavery, and the duties of citizenship, once again exploring the question of the slave culture that exists in Europe, and the status of dragons in Britain. The Sapa Inca is a woman, the male heir having died before British arrived in Cusco, which when coupled with the revelation of Iskierka's rather unique talents results in Hammond attempting to arrange a political marriage between the Sapa Inca and Granby, a prospect that Granby dreads but which Iskierka is wholly in favor of as it will make her captain a prince, and elevate him to equal status with Lawrence.

After much maneuvering that involves the defections of mutinous naval crewmen to the Incan allyus and revelations concerning Granby's sexuality that seem to be taken remarkably in stride by Lawrence (especially given the Victorian social standards he anachronistically seems to apply to the female aircrew he travels with), Napoleon arrives on the scene with Lien to propose an alliance by marriage to the Sapa Inca, offering himself as the bridegroom. This foils Hammond's plan but not before Tremeraire and Iskierka come to realize that what they want for their captain's may not always coincide with the desires of their partner, providing yet more commentary on the nature of interpersonal interactions and the concept of ownership of humans. The tables turn quickly, and Lawrence, Tremeraire, and the rest find themselves on the run again, which luckily seems to drive them back to their original mission of helping the Portuguese in Brazil. Eventually they wind up in Brazil where they find the Tswanan dragons swarming about with thousands of escaped or rescued slaves under their protection, and the Portuguese holed up on plantations holding their remaining slaves hostage in an effort to ward off Tswanan assaults. Before too long they are joined by Lily, Maximus, Messoria, Immortalis, Dulcia, and Nitidus, the British air corps apparently having been heavily depleted to send aid to the Portuguese.

But the evolution of the story doesn't permit Lawrence to actually fulfill the desires of his Portuguese allies, as he cannot in good conscience expend the lives of his dragons and crew in a futile effort to defeat the Tswana so as to allow slavers to hold humans in bondage. Instead, he forces a compromise with the Tswana upon the Portuguese, seizes the French transports, and sets out for China. In the end, after all of the gyrations of the story in Crucible of Gold, the situation is more or less the same as it was at the outset. The Portuguese are deprived of their slaves, although now it is because they are being monitored by the Tswana rather than ransacked by them, although that situation could have been resolved without Lawrence's involvement at all, making his perilous journey across the Pacific and South America somewhat pointless. The the political situation for the British ends the story as it began, with the only real political development being that Napoleon has neutralized the Inca as a possible British ally. But given that the idea of an Incan alliance was not even seen as a possibility by the British at the beginning of the book, having it neutralized isn't really much of a plot development. In short, nothing of any substance relating to the wider war against Napoleon happens.

In the end, for all of the motion that takes place in the book, nothing of any importance seems to have taken place. Despite all of the sturm und drang, all that really happens in the book are baby steps of character development and tiny tidbits of dragon-related information, relayed in an almost off-hand manner by Lien. Despite the fact that Lawrence, Tremeraire, Iskierka, Granby, and the remaining characters remain likable and, to varying degrees, interesting, the series seems to have stalled out, moving forward inch by painful inch. And while the end of the story had our heroes heading back to China in response to an imperial invitation, given the way the last two books in the series have gone, one expects that the next book will have them taking a long circuitous route to get there, followed by not much of anything happening. Though Crucible of Gold is a pleasantly diverting way to spend an afternoon, the Tremeraire series as a whole feels like a rudderless ship that is drifting aimlessly.

Previous book in the series: Tongues of Serpents.

Naomi Novik      Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, July 16, 2012

Musical Monday - The Greatest Show on Earth by Symphony of Science


Every now and then I encounter creationists, intelligent design advocates, and other special creation proponents on the internet, and I am always amazed at the insipidity of their arguments. The simple truth is that science works, the theory of evolution by natural selection is backed by decades of research and mountains of evidence, and the panoply of of life is the result of natural processes. This is a reality that is so much more amazing than the mythology and self-deception of creationism, and as David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins point out, it is the greatest show around.

This song is unavailable on Amazon, but you can acquire it for free (or a donation of your choosing) on the Symphony of Science Collector's Edition.

Previous Musical Monday: Game On by The Guild
Subsequent Musical Monday: Lonely Like Me by The Doubleclicks

Symphony of Science Playlist     Musical Monday Playlists

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Friday, July 13, 2012

Book Blogger Hop July 13th - July 19th: The Nine Muses Are Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: How long does it take you to read a book?

Generally between a day and three days, depending on the book and my schedule. I usually read on the bus and train when I am commuting, but if I get a chance I'll try to sneak reading time in anywhere I can, and if I do, that usually speeds up my reading pace. Also, some books are just quicker reads than others. Averaging it out, I figure I read three or four books a week.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Eight Is the Second Magic Number in Nuclear Physics

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Sixty-Seven Is a Lucky Prime


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Vivaciously, Vivian and A GREAT Read.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What drove you to start book blogging in the first place?

Bad memory. Seriously. I have always read a lot, but a couple years ago I realized that I wasn't remembering the books I had read the way I wanted to. At about the same time I also realized that if I wrote about a book after I had read it, I would remember it much better. There is simply something about writing that seems to lock information into my memory. So I started writing reviews for everything I read. At that point, I was already writing about the books I read, so I started to post them. The end result: this book blog.


Follow Friday     Home

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Review - The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt by John Bellairs


Short review: Johnny Dixon deals with family troubles and tries to uncover the mystery of a long-lost will to claim the reward. Standing in his way is a witch and a powerful guardian who don't want him to find it.

Haiku
A sick grandmother
A missing dad presumed lost
A mystery solved

Full review: The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, set in New England during the Korean War, is the second installment in Bellairs' Johnny Dixon/Professor Childermass series of mysteries aimed at young readers. The book's cover bills it as "the sequel to The Curse of the Blue Figurine", and given that the first book had an Egyptian-tinged mystery, one might think that a book that features a mummy in its title might be more of the same. However, this is not the case, the only real relationship between The Curse of the Blue Figurine and The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt is that Professor Childermass, Johnny Dixon, and Johnny's family are in the book: the mystery is entirely unconnected to anything that happened in the previous book.

In many ways the mystery in the book is secondary to the story of Johnny dealing with loss and isolation. Johnny does join the Boy Scouts and participate in a scout outing, which garners him a friend: the athletic but intellectual Byron "Fergie" Ferguson (who will remain a character through the rest of the series). However, Johnny must deal with his grandmother's life threatening illness, and the fear that if she dies, then his grandfather will quickly follow her, leaving him alone. This fear of being left alone is made all the more real due to the loss of his mother. Finally, Johnny's worst fear is realized when he learns that his father's plane has been shot down and he may be dead as well. This, to me, is the scariest part of the book, playing on the very real fear a child might have of being left without a family. Johnny does consider that he might live with Professor Childermass, but discounts it on the grounds that the Professor lives alone and probably wouldn't want anyone to mess up his bachelor existence. In the end, it is the fear of being left alone that places Johnny in danger, as he is driven to do some rather foolish things.

Those foolish things are related to the Gothic horror portion of the book: it seems that an eccentric millionaire cereal magnate who dabbled in black magic named H. Bagwell Glomus hid his will and left cryptic clues as to its whereabouts. Johnny becomes fascinated by the mystery, more so when the scout trip he is on takes him near an abandoned estate owned by the Glomus family and he has a flash of insight in which he figures out what the first set of clues mean. Johnny recruits his new friend Fergie to make a midnight hike to the estate where encounters the creepy Chad Glomus (who promptly mysteriously disappears, but not before revealing the existence of a magical malevolent guardian and showing Johnny the requisite hidden passage onto the estate). Driven by a $10,000 reward offered by the Glomus family to whoever can find the will, and believing that his ill grandmother needs the money to pay for her treatment, Johnny becomes obsessed with the puzzle, and eventually runs away from home to the Glomus estate to find it. For the most part Bellairs plays fair with the reader, giving the clues necessary to figure out the mystery, with only one big exception where he holds back information that the characters have. Overall, the mystery is fun, but ultimately secondary to the story.

In the end, the mystery of the missing will is solved, although not in a way that one would expect. Johnny learns that many of his fears had been unfounded, mostly because he jumped to conclusions rather than asking questions. Johnny also learns that he should not underestimate his friends, breaking down a little bit of the isolated loner personality that had been established for the character. Unlike most of the other Johnny Dixon stories, The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt is more about Johnny growing up than it is about any kind of Gothic mystery (although the mystery is well done, and fun to follow). Any kid who has ever felt left out, isolated, or alone will probably empathize with Johnny. Any kid who likes mystery stories mixed with a little bit of magic will probably enjoy this book, and might pick up a few useful lessons on the value of asking questions and trusting your friends to do the right thing.

Previous book in the series: The Curse of the Blue Figurine
Subsequent book in the series: The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull

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Monday, July 9, 2012

Musical Monday - Game On by The Guild


Before they made I'm the One That's Cool, but after they made Do You Want to Date My Avatar, Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, and the rest of the cast members of the Guild made what I consider to be by far their best video: Game On. In the video, Zaboo tries to convince Codex to play their MMO via the magic of a Bollywood style musical number complete with an enormous chorus of singing and dancing assistants.

Among the highlights in the video are Zaboo's heroic fight against Real Life, a gold painted Amy Okuda dancing, a six-armed Jeff Lewis speaking in tongues, and Vince Caso singing while superimposed on the screen. The gold genie lamp video game controllers that are presented to Robin Thorsen and Vince Caso are a somewhat subtle and yet still funny element as well. The fake, yet still convincing elephant is also hilarious, as is Felicia Day's awkward but adorable dancing. The song and the entire video is silly, surreal, and fun.

Previous Musical Monday: We Are Star Dust by Symphony of Science
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Greatest Show on Earth by Symphony of Science

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Saturday, July 7, 2012

Review - The Testament of Jesse Lamb by Jane Rogers


Short review: The population of the entire world is stricken with a disease that causes pregnant women to die horribly, but the most important thing to focus on is the adolescent angst of sixteen year old Jessie Lamb.

Haiku
Pregnant women die
Teenagers are activists
Suicide by birth

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: The Testament of Jessie Lamb was the winner of the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award and was also long-listed for the Booker prize. It features a near future story in which the entire world is stricken by the boringly named "MDS" (for "Maternal Death Syndrome") a bioengineered disease targeted at pregnant women that proves to be 100% fatal to expectant mothers. Needless to say, this is a crisis of epic proportions and heroic research efforts are made to try to keep the human race alive. Despite the momentous events that form the background of the book, the entire story is told from the perspective of an attention-seeking self-absorbed sixteen year old as she agonizes over which meetings to go to in order to best reduce her carbon footprint. After reading this decidedly uninspiring book, I can only conclude that 2012 was a weak year for British fiction.

The story is set in a very near future Britain which is essentially the same as current Britain except for the introduction of the MDS virus. MDS has spread throughout the world and infected everyone on the planet. When a person is infected, the disease lies dormant in their system until they become pregnant (hence, the disease is harmless for men). Once pregnant, a woman's brain begins to disintegrate, at one point an affected expectant mother's brain is compared to Swiss cheese. Once triggered, the affliction is irrevocable, not even termination of the pregnancy can save the victim, and the end result is always death. Understandably, this makes women reluctant to become pregnant, and because the mother dies well before delivery of the baby, if MDS is not cured or otherwise dealt with, the run of humanity will come to a close with the current generation.

Having set the stage for the destruction of humankind, Rogers decides to focus on a petulant, self-absorbed teen who feels smugly superior to her parents because she attends political meetings at which she and a collection of other adolescents can voice their concerns about global warming and animal welfare. With millions of women worldwide dead from their brains turning to mush as they gestate, Jessie and her friends spend their time worrying about whether or not their parents recycle enough. When faced with human extinction, I suppose that some people would choose to focus on tertiary concerns such as these, but why anyone would think that this would be the compelling story to tell is somewhat mystifying.

The first half of the story meanders through Jessie's adolescent angst, her struggles with her parents, the mind-numbingly numerous political meetings she attends, and the supercilious arrogance she displays. Interwoven with this tedium are some snippets here and there that give frustrating hints of the much better book that The Testament of Jessie Lamb could have been - Jessie's struggles with her budding sexuality in a world where an unintended pregnancy is not merely a social faux pas, but a death sentence. The reaction of the world to MDS, and how it affects perceptions of sexual interaction. The research attempting to find a cure, or find some non-deadly way to bring babies into the world. The religious hysteria sparked by a species-ending plague. But all of these elements are cast in the background of the trivial doings of a teenager.

The second half of the book takes a left turn into bad science and lunacy as the interstitial pieces that have been woven through the book are explained and the central choice in the book is revealed. It turns out that while Jessie has wallowed variously in perpetual youth activist meetings and self-pity engendered by her parents marital difficulties, her father and other researchers have been working on finding a solution to the difficulties posed by MDS. We find out that they have created a vaccine for MDS, but because everyone is already infected the only potential recipients of the vaccine are frozen embryos. This seems to be one of the developments that makes it appear that Rogers grasp on the science that she has used as a vehicle for her story is kind of weak, because one has to wonder why anyone would actually be working on producing a vaccine under the conditions Rogers has established. It seems almost like Rogers thinks that scientists throw a bunch of effort into a big bin called "research" and out pops random discoveries.

Another development explained in the book is the development of "sleeping beauties", the nickname given to women who become pregnant and who are placed into a medically induced coma and kept alive on life support for the duration of their pregnancies. This process allows the child to be brought to term, but normally the child is already infected upon conception, having gotten the disease from its parents. Marrying these two possibilities might allow for children free of the disease to be born, but at the cost of the lives of those women who become surrogate mothers to bear them. And the younger the "sleeping beauty" is, the more successful the process is. Which leads Jessie to conclude that she wants to kill herself and have a baby. (In another example of a weak grasp of science, Jessie is concerned over who the sperm donors are for the frozen embryos, and figures out that one is her father, who works at the clinic. But if the embryos were frozen as embryos, then they don't need sperm donors, and if they had sperm donors then they would become infected with MDS. This entire plot thread makes no sense when one stops and thinks about the science involved, which is yet another example of a "mainstream" author dipping their toe into science fiction and discovering that it is not quite as easy to write as they might have thought).

In some ways, The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the misogynistic antithesis of Margaret Atwood's story The Handmaid's Tale. While Atwood's protagonist Offred was struggling against a system that saw her as nothing more than a baby-making machine, with hopes, dreams, and aspirations that were crushed and swept aside by a patriarchy that devalued women, Jessie seeks to throw away everything except her potential as a donor uterus. Those around Jessie push her to realize more than pregnancy and death - her father suggests that she continue her apparently promising study of biology and join in the effort to find a real solution to the MDS problem that doesn't involve sacrificing the lives of women. But unlike Offred, Jessie doesn't want to be more. She aspires only to have her womb filled and put to sleep. She has adolescent fantasies that her child, who she names "Rae" or "Ray" will be adopted by her parents, who will love her child and think she made the right choice. Her fights with her parents make her choice seem like a way to gain petty retribution against her parents, and also a childish fantasy equivalent to writing "Mrs. Jessie Bieber" on her notebook with hearts over the "i"'s. One might expect that an adolescent's motivations would lurch back and forth like this, but in Jessie's case, her justifications for her suicide are so shallow that one wonders why we should really care about her.

And the main failing of the story is just how shallow so much of it is. The culmination of Jessie's exploration of her own nascent sexuality is a meaningless encounter with a boy she has had a crush on, whereupon that thread is abruptly dropped. The resolution of the evolving societal attitudes towards sex is the gang rape of one of Jessie's friends, or rather alleged friends, since Jessie more or less decides that her friend had it coming. Her friend then joins FLAME, a radical feminist group that is protesting the use of women in the "sleeping beauty" process and demanding that alternatives be found. But because FLAME takes a number of somewhat extreme other positions, the entire agenda of the organization is dismissed as the ridiculous ravings of lunatics. Once again the contrast with The Handmaid's Tale is stark: in Atwood's fiction FLAME would have been used as a vehicle to highlight the injustices towards women. In Rogers fiction, they are treated as the moral equivalent of ELF, and women are treated as the moral equivalent of sheep.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a deeply flawed book that could have been a much better book with more attention to detail, a more sympathetic and less self-absorbed and childish protagonist, and a protagonist that didn't extol the virtues of treating women like mindless wombs. Rogers does manage capture the struggle of growing from childhood to an adult perspective, but then throws away all of the worthwhile elements of the book by having her allegedly grown up main character throw her life away based upon childish reasoning. Not only that, the entire book has a strange myopia in which the only research that is apparently happening, and the only political upheaval that is apparently taking place is in Britain. We never get a glimpse of what is happening elsewhere, or what effects this worldwide crisis is having outside of Jessie's immediate neighborhood. Her father never comments on research being done elsewhere, and when FLAME and ELF protests the various efforts being made, no one ever notices that even if such research is stopped in the United Kingdom, that it will probably still take place elsewhere. In short, while Rogers probably did succeed in telling the story she wanted to tell, the story is so incomplete, and so frustratingly tied to a childish vision of the world that it simply doesn't rise above mediocrity.

2011 Arthur C. Clarke Winner: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
2013 Arthur C. Clarke Winner: Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

What Are the Arthur C. Clarke Awards?

Arthur C. Clarke Winner Reviews

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Friday, July 6, 2012

Book Blogger Hop July 6th - July 13th: Eight Is the Second Magic Number in Nuclear Physics

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: If you could be a character from any book, who would you be?

Dominic Flandry. He's a swashbuckling secret agent in a science fiction future defending the Terran Empire against the Merseian threat. Being Flandry, I'd get to range across the galaxy having adventures, foiling villains, rescuing the damsels in distress, wooing exotic alien princesses, flying spacecraft, and then at the end of the day, having access to advanced medicine and other technology. Sounds just about perfect to me.


Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Order 66 Directed the Clone Troopers to Kill the Jedi


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Reading and Writing Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and The Paperback Princess.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Jumping Genres: Ever pick up a book from a genre you usually don’t like and LOVE it? Tell us about it and why you picked it up in the first place.

First I guess I would have to identify a book from a genre I usually don't like, which is a little more difficult than one might think, because I read books from such a wide variety of genres. I suppose Christian fiction would be a genre I don't like, but I have yet to read a book from that genre that I didn't find to be awful. I guess I could go with romance as a genre I don't read, but the best I could say about the books in that genre that I have read is that some of them, such as Danielle Steele's The Ring (read review), were adequately entertaining.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The U.S.S. Enterprise is CVN-65
Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Sixty-Seven Is a Lucky Prime

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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Review - Gaelen's Gold by M.K. Flowers


Short review: Gaelen accidentally becomes a wizard in a land in which magic use by humans is banned and high elves are the villains who ruthlessly enforce this rule.

Haiku
A long ago war
A ban on human magic
Gaelen's a wizard!

Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Gaelen is a sixteen year old girl with problems. The only human in a dwarven village, she is hounded by bullies who torment her for merely existing. She is supported by her adoptive dwarven parents and brother Torar, but chafes under the restrictions she must live under as the result of prejudice against humans and the onerous restrictions imposed upon everyone by the high elves. It seems that several centuries earlier human wizards and the high elves went to war against one another, a war which the humans lost. Consequently, the high elven council imposed restrictions upon the use of magic, including a complete ban upon the use of any kind of magic by humans. Gaelen is jealous that her father and brother are allowed to craft magical items in their work at the family smithy, and longs to make herself a magical sword. Eventually Gaelen attempts to secretly fulfill her ambition, but things get out of hand, she accidentally becomes the most powerful wizard in history, and events take on a life of their own that permanently changes her life and the lives of those around her.

Gaelen's Gold is, in many ways, a very stereotypical young adult fantasy, complete with tree loving elves, industrious dwarven craftsmen, vile goblins, and a plucky teenage protagonist.  But although the start of the story seems to be headed into a fairly tired direction, the authors show that they are intent on subverting expectations before too long, making the book much more interesting. However, the interesting nature of the story is somewhat hampered by some fairly weak storytelling devices, frequent pauses in the action so that characters can deliver background exposition, and the fact that too many of the characters are entirely too reasonable despite living in cultures that should mire them in prejudice and mutual hostility.

The most obvious subversion, and the novel's strongest point, is the characterization of the various fantasy races that populate the setting. High elves, commonly depicted since Tolkien as aloof and haughty, but ultimately good and decent, are here arrogant and hidebound, enforcing a draconian order upon everyone around them with a ruthless zeal. Around them are the "common" elves and dwarves, reduced to second class status, with their town sizes casually regulated by the high elves, who dictate how big their settlements can be, where they can gather resources, where and what they can hunt, and so on. On the lowest rung of normal society are humans, prohibited from using magic due to the alleged misdeeds of wizards from hundreds of years before. But outside this society are the stone giants, also called trolls, who are presented as oppressed outcasts, persecuted and hunted by the high elves, and given an entirely sympathetic portrayal in the story. Oddly, although the story includes goblins, they are presented as essentially faceless cannon fodder to be mowed down in large numbers by the heroes. This is disappointing after the rather interesting variants on the standard portrayals that the authors provided for the other races depicted in the book. Given that this appears to be the first book in a series, one might hope that at some point in future volumes the goblin culture will be explored more fully and given greater depth. However, given that Gaelen refuses to kill many of her other opponents out of a sense of humanity, but happily slices goblins in half without a second thought, this may be a forlorn hope.

One somewhat less than believable element of the book is the sheer amount of serendipity that is required to keep the story moving. It is not implausible that the elf Elaeh would find the container holding the infant Gaelen. And it is not entirely implausible that Gaelen would later stumble across one of the last living dragons in the world. or that they would find the secret hall of knowledge of the long-dead wizards. Or that Galen, Torar, and Elaeh would come across the last living wizard. Or even that Torar and Elaeh would meet and chat with the oldest living elf Llanowill. Any of these events would be more or less unexpected, but would not stretch credulity. But when they are all added together along with the numerous other random happenstances upon which the plot hangs, the whole edifice of the story simply seems too built upon random coincidence to stand up. Building on this implausibility is the information Llanowill provides to Torar and Elaeh about the "oldest and most important prophecy of the dwarves". One has to wonder why, if this prophecy is so critical to the dwarves, why it comes as a complete surprise to Torar, and why he needs an elf to tell him about it.

Another quirky element of the story is that despite the fact that Gaelen's Gold features a human protagonist, and the war between the human wizards and high elves serves as the central historical event that shapes the book's entire plot, the reader never really gets a view of human society. Gaelen is brought up by dwarvish parents. The only other humans we meet are consist of a reclusive wizard hiding from the world, a couple of men caught illegally logging who are almost immediately summarily executed, and an innkeeper and his wife who serve as nothing more than set dressing for a chance encounter that Torar and the Elaeh have with Llanowill. We never get to spend time in a functioning human village or a get any kind of real sense of what life as a normal non-magically inclined human is like in this world. Despite the centrality of humans to the conflict that drives the plot, humans are almost entirely absent from the book.

But what the book does have in abundance are chance encounters that result in fast friendships and lots of exposition. At several points in the story a new character shows up, is initially hostile to or wary of the protagonists, but is won over by some reasoned arguments, and then becomes a steadfast ally. And usually also brings the story to a screeching halt for a bit while they deliver the expository information they were introduced into the story to hand out, typically by means of a rambling tale or two that fills in a little bit more of the history of the fantasy world surrounding the Emmerlee Forest. Even characters that are supposed to be antagonists to Gaelen, such as the elven team sent to apprehend her for unauthorized magic use and return her to the high elven council for trial and execution, many of whom are quickly swayed to sympathize with her. And of course, when the elven team sent to arrest her and escort her to her death show up, Gaelen doesn't use her magical sword, or her overwhelming magical prowess, or even her pet dragon to escape. Instead, she decides that her best option is to go along with the elves to plead her case before the high council - a high council that she has been repeatedly informed ruthlessly killed every single other human wizard they could get their hands on including a young boy who wielded magic entirely by accident. Of course, since almost everyone else she has met has been entirely open to reasonable arguments, the intractability of the high elven council may simply not register with Gaelen, but it seems foolishly optimistic of her to expect they will be amenable to reason, which I suppose is just another in a long list of things that Gaelen is foolishly optimistic about.

And this leads to another weakness of the book: the characters never seem to change or grow through the novel. This might be expected of characters like Llanowill or Rommenstein, who are supposed to be mature adults when we first meet them, but for characters like Gaelen and Torar this seems both unbelievable and a missed story-telling opportunity. When we meet Gaelen (leaving aside the brief interlude in which she appears as a newborn infant), she is a happy, friendly, optimistic young woman who believes the best about everyone she meets. As the story closes, Gaelen can wield magic with a power so great that none can rival her. But does this new-found power change her in any way? No. She is still a happy, friendly, optimistic young woman who believes the best in everyone she meets. Similarly, Torar starts the tale as Gaelen's steadfast, honest, and dependable younger brother. And like Gaelen, at the end of the book he is exactly the same as he was when we first met him. Even the characters who "change" don't really do so. The high elves who have misgivings about the draconian rule enforced by the council at the start of the book but are unwilling to openly turn against it end the story with those same misgivings and the same unwillingness to turn against a regime they think may be unjust. And so on.

Her perpetual cockeyed optimism aside, Gaelen is a fundamentally likable character, and that fact saves the book from the long winded exposition, the determined reasonableness of characters who are supposed to be horribly prejudiced, and the more or less unbelievable collection of coincidences that pepper the story. The reader wants Gaelen to succeed, even though her Pollyanna routine does get a little cloying at times, and consequently, you keep turning the pages to find out what she does next. In addition, the slight subversion of the usual fantasy tropes adds a bit of spice to what would have otherwise been a fairly bland story, which makes Gaelen's Gold generally an enjoyable if unspectacular read, and gives hope that the authors will build on the framework they have started and improve it in future books in the series.

M.K. Flowers     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, July 2, 2012

Musical Monday - We Are Star Dust by Symphony of Science


One of the most magnificent truths revealed by science is that we and the universe are one. We are made of atoms that once were in the hearts of burning stars, and which then died and spread their contents into space as dust. In We Are Star Dust, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, and Richard Feynman ponder the enormity of our origins and the tininess of ourselves in the vastness of the universe. In an interesting aside, I recently found out that physicist Lawrence Krauss is the younger brother of my favorite professor from law school. I wonder if I can wrangle getting a book or two of mine signed out of that connection.

This song is unavailable on Amazon, but you can acquire it for free (or a donation of your choosing) on the Symphony of Science Collector's Edition.

Previous Musical Monday: Magic (MTG): The Rap by Remy Munasifi
Subsequent Musical Monday: Game On by The Guild

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