Today’s randomly chosen book is Educated, by Tara Westover. I was going to flip through it to refresh my memory, but I can’t find it anywhere.
There are a lot of books that I can’t find. I’ve been messaging Alex to see if maybe he accidentally took them with him when he moved out, but I know there’s no way he has them. I texted Evelyn and Phoenix and neither have it. I must have books somewhere else in this house. Where, though?
Westover was raised in a strict Mormon family in Idaho and grew up helping her mother create herbal cures and her father at his scrapyard on their property. Since her father distrusted the public education system, her parents considered themselves homeschoolers. The schooling that Tara received was sporadic, at best.
After years of conflict and drama, her elder brother Tyler encourages her to take the ACT (a college entrance exam) and go to Brigham Young University. She gets a good enough score on the ACT to get into Brigham Young, but she feels that she doesn’t fit in.
Despite this, she finally rose above her upbringing and the neglect and abuse she suffered and earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge.
All in all, this is an excellent book and it deserves all of the praise it got.
Here’s the world’s shortest book blogger entry — my thoughts on a 16-page board book that I bought for Alex when he was a baby.
I love Hippos Go Berserk! I used to sit in the glider rocker with him when he was a baby, reading this to him and I can still recite big chunks of it from memory.
The plot, such as it is, is about, well, hippos. And counting. “One hippo, all alone, calls two hippos on the phone,” it starts. Our “one hippo” is having a party. We collect a total of 45 hippos in groups of, well, two, three, four, etc. Then in the morning, after the party, the hippos return home in groups of nine, eight, seven, etc.
And since it’s a Sandra Boynton book, the illustrations are friendly, lively, and full of details.
Gee, I love this book!
I leave you with Sandra Boynton and Yo-Yo Ma with special guest Weird Al Yankovic: Chanson Profonde
Solutions and Other Problems took seven years to write. Well, it took seven years to publish. I attended a virtual book tour for Solutions and Other Problems which was attended by Brosh’s mom and her mom said that the book took much less time to actually write, but getting up her courage to send it to the publisher took longer.
And that makes a lot of sense. Brosh went through a lot in those years. She took a long sabbatical from her blog not too long after publishing a two-part cartoon on her fight with depression. During those seven years, she also lost her sister and got a divorce. Her parents split up at some point during those seven years as well.
Hell, I haven’t gone through anything like that in the last seven years, and I’m still having trouble getting my courage up to put myself out there.
Brosh has a wonderful sense of humor and she’s an amazing artist (she actually works hard to make her pictures look that amateurish). Solutions and Other Problems is largely about how weird and maladjusted Brosh is. In showing us how weird and maladjusted she is, though, she shows us how weird and maladjusted we all are.
So I was coming out of the shower today and it hit me . . . .
1863 lithograph of Lookout Mountain.
Okay, so they definitely seem to be hinting that Nynaeve is the child of Aemon and Eldrene, the last king and queen of Manetheren. The last thing that Nynaeve remembers her parents saying to her is the last thing that Aemon and Eldrene said to their children . . . ?
Now, maybe this is a red herring, but I think that might be where they’re going. Additionally, I’m pretty sure that if they did, it would be a way to make Nynaeve *way* stronger in the Power than any other woman in the modern era.
In the books, the number of novices is dropping significantly and modern channelers are way weaker than in the past. I believe it is Verin who suggests that the way things are working now, they may be culling the talent out of humanity. Or, at least, the parts of humanity that they’re in touch with.
Verin, or whoever, says that (a) Aes Sedai rarely marry and almost never have children, and (b) they gentle all of the men who can channel that they can find, and most of them end up committing suicide. I don’t remember if Verin actually follows the chain of thought so far, but probably the only people who can channel who reproduce are men and women who can be taught to channel or who are born with the spark but are so weak that it is never caught. *
There are other channelers, such as the Seanchan, and the Kin, but a similar thing applies there. The Seanchan clearly don’t allow their Damane to reproduce, and so the only channelers that can reproduce, again, are the Sul’Dam, the ones who can be taught. I’m surprised by how strong the freed Damane end up being, because the same thing should have happened in Seanchan.
And I don’t remember the Kin having descendants. They try to live by what they think of as Aes Sedai rules, so I’d think that their rates of reproduction should be pretty low. Also, the Kin are women who were put out of the tower, largely because they were too weak to advance. Some of the stronger of the Kin are ones who balked at the testing, but most of them learned just enough channeling not to hurt themselves and then they were sent away.
So if only weak channelers reproduce, the talent will get weaker.
If they want Nynaeve to be a valid option for Dragon Reborn, she would need to be incredibly strong. Like, up by where Rand is in the books. So, having the solution to the mystery of Nynaeve’s parentage be that she’s Aemon and Eldrene’s daughter would make her naturally way more powerful than the rest of the current Aes Sedai. She dates from an era when they weren’t culling their channelers.
As for how Nynaeve ended up so far in the future, maybe Eldrene had Foretelling as one of her Talents and she knew that Nynaeve would be needed, so she sent her to the future or put her in stasis or something?
It’s possible that I’m overthinking this, but Judkins is also a fan of the books, so maybe I’ve overthought this just the right amount. We’re going to find out who the Dragon Reborn is in Episode 8. It’ll probably be Rand, but you never know.
*D’you suppose there are men who are so weak that it just looks like, like, luck or skill rather than channeling? A silversmith who becomes rich and famous because he can make silver do things that silver just shouldn’t do? A trader whose ships just narrowly avoid the kinds of hazards that nearby ships get caught in? Would they also be affected by the taint, or is the amount of mental illness proportional to the amount of Saidin used?
As always with these posts, there will be spoilers for the episode and also for just about any point in the book series. If you don’t want to be spoiled, just move along.
Today’s spoiler space image:
Cincinnati, August 1987, taken from across the Ohio River, in Covington, Kentucky.
Two of our three groups, Egwene and Perrin and Mat, Rand, and Thom (I’ve decided to list groups alphabetically) are still on the move.
Egwene and Perrin are with the Traveling People, who are traveling east. When they make camp for the night, Egwene dances with Aram after failing to convince Perrin to dance with her. Perrin gets the explanation of the pacifist Way of the Leaf that the Traveling People follow from Ila and this scene is one of the most beautiful scenes so far.
Ila explains that she follows the Way of the Leaf not because it will benefit her or even Aram, her grandson, but because someday her late daughter (Aram’s mom) will be spun out by the Pattern again and she wants to leave a better world for her.
Mat, Rand, and Thom spend the night at the Grinwell family farm. After Dana said that the fastest way out was a riverboat, and we established that they have money, I was expecting to meet Bayle Domon. Surprise! I guess.
Instead of being a boy-crazy teen girl, Else is a little girl who reminds Mat of his sisters. Thom tells Rand that he thinks that Mat might be able to channel because Thom’s nephew Owyn got surly like Mat is after the taint on Saidin got to him. Neither knows about the Shadar Logoth dagger.
The Grinwells are attacked by Trollocs and Mat and Rand escape with their lives. The last we see of Thom, he is fighting off a Fade with his knives, just like in Whitebridge in the books.
Don’t tell me we’re going to skip Whitebridge! OMG. It’s Whitebridge!
Based on the books, which is no guarantee, we won’t see Thom until next season now, since he rejoins the story in The Dragon Reborn*. Maybe Judkins et al. are still in negotiations with John and Taupin.
Okay. Now for the exciting part. Lan, Moiraine, and Nynaeve. First, just to throw this out there. We meet Alanna and she is very strong. I still don’t like her. I have my reasons.
We see the first real sign of the Lan/Nynaeve romance here. She catches him praying for Malkier and she shows him her ritual, the last words her parents spoke to her. They are in the Old Tongue, which she doesn’t speak. Lan tells her that the words she spoke are the words that the King and Queen of Manetheren told their children before they left for their final battle.
Are they telling us that Nynaeve is the rightful ruler of Manetheren? Has she been frozen in an iceberg for hundreds of years? How will this work out?
And then there’s the real spoilers. Like, Turn Back Now. I almost want to throw another spoiler space photo in here.
Moiraine takes a turn shielding Logain so she can see how strong he is, so she can hopefully eliminate Logain from the running as the Dragon Reborn. It turns out that he is very strong indeed, but not as strong as the Dragon Reborn is supposed to be. And she tells him so.
Then Logain’s followers attack the Aes Sedai camp. Logain uses the distraction to break free of his shields and everyone except Nynaeve dies. Lan’s death makes Nynaeve angry, and, to paraphrase David Bruce Banner, you wouldn’t like Nynaeve when she’s angry.
I half expected this to be the big balefire scene, replacing the one where Rand balefires Rahvin in The Fires of Heaven. And I’m thinking, what will happen to the Pattern if Nynaeve erases Logain from the timeline?
Instead, she heals everyone. So I guess she can heal death after all. Okay.
Logain decides then and there that Nynaeve must be the Dragon Reborn. O. Kay.
After they recover from their deaths, the Aes Sedai do an extrajudicial gentling of Logain.
The usual disclaimers apply to this post. Spoilers for the series up to and including this episode are certain. Spoilers for any and all of the books are likely.
The episode titles so far have all been chapter titles that pretty much matched the events of the episode. This one, however, is not a match and, well, I guess . . . Okay, that belongs below my spoiler space image. Speaking of which . . .
Look! It’s my original header image. I still love this panorama. It just didn’t fit the aspect ratio for the header image in this theme. This is San Pedro Park in San Antonio.
We start with two of our three groups, Rand and Mat, and Egwene and Perrin, haring off into the unknown. I believe they’re both heading east towards Tar Valon.
Our third group, Moraine and Lan? Are now a trio with the addition of an absolutely furious Nynaeve. We see flashbacks of how Nynaeve escaped the Trollocs. The Trollocs got to fighting amongst themselves and she made her escape. I swear that happened in the books at some point, but not here. I’ll have to think about it. Once I hit that point in my audiobook reread, I’ll try to remember to come back and edit this post.
We finally meet Thom Merrilin. I wasn’t expecting him this early in the series, since Judkins doesn’t want characters showing up and then going away. Thom disappears, presumed dead, after Whitebridge in the books and we don’t see him for, like, a book’s worth of pages (from the middle of The Eye of the World until the middle of The Great Hunt*) and then it takes still longer for him to become a major character again. I don’t know. I just work here.
I’m also a bit nervous about Thom’s portrayal. As Fred Clark says about Buck Williams in the Left Behind series, it’s difficult to include the greatest writer in the world as a character in a book, because the reader will expect to read the greatest writing in the world, and the writer will fall short. Thom is an amazing musician, we’re told, who has the greatest works of music committed to memory and used to be the court bard for Morgase, Queen of Andor. I hope they have Elton John and Bernie Taupin on payroll here, because the readers of the books will be expecting something amazing and I’m afraid that it’ll be a letdown.
The only characters who actually do reach a place of safety in this episode are Egwene and Perrin, who meet the Traveling People and stay at their camp. They haven’t introduced Elyas, so they did a workaround on the greeting that the Traveling People use by having Aram coach them on what they are to say. It was a little bumpy, but it works in the context.
I was expecting to watch Episode 4 today, but instead I went for an 8-mile walk on the River Walk. Not so much television watching (or, unfortunately, writing), but it was nice to go out and clear my head.
I’ve always loved science fiction and fantasy. I discovered Narnia when I was 10 and then Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Greensky trilogy when I was, oh, 12 or so. So L’Engle’s Time Quintet should be right up my alley, no?
And, yes, but also kind of no. The no is for whoever at Dell Yearling came up with cover the book had when I was its target age group. Like, what part of a bloated blue man with rainbows sticking from his shoulder blades floating above weird, deformed flowers with a large bug on one of the leaves says, “Read me!”?
Over the years, I became maybe a bit more receptive to the possibility of reading A Wrinkle in Time.* Then in 2019, when I was shopping for my annual Christmas book at our local Half Price Books, I saw a copy of the movie tie-in version and while I wasn’t real sure what the palm trees had to do with anything, since the Murrays live in New England, I figured sure.
And it really is an excellent book. We start out in the home of the Murry family. The father, Alex Murry, has been missing for years. He is a scientist who works for the government in some secret role. The mother, Kate Murry, is also a scientist.
The Murrys have four children, Meg, twins Sandy and Dennys, and Charles Wallace. Our protagonist is Meg.
Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keeffe travel to a world called Camazotz where everyone is exactly the same — the kids play outside of their houses bouncing balls at exactly the same time and then their moms come out and call them all in to dinner at exactly the same time. This is the result of the influence of “The Black Thing,” the source of evil in the universe. The kids achieve what they need to while on Camazotz and apparently they never go back. I like to think that’s an effect of the time in which the book was written and that if it’d been written nowadays, we’d revisit Camazotz towards the end of the series.
I hate to admit it, but I still haven’t read the other books in the series. They’re on my list, but I have hundreds of unread books, and dozens of books that I’ve read and that don’t have read dates on my Goodreads page, so I probably won’t get to them until much, much later.
I think that Thomas picked the first book of this series, Dragon Wing, maybe even at the same trip to Bookstop where I got my copy of The Eye of the World. It was at about the same time, I know. It was all part of the fun of not having a main antenna at our apartment complex and not being able to afford cable. We did a lot of reading.
The Death Gate Cycle is fantasy set in the far future of humanity. Humanity has destroyed itself in some kind of global cataclysm (most likely nuclear war) and the elves and dwarves emerged from wherever they’d been hiding for the last hundreds or thousands of years. Soon two groups of humans came to light who were able to control magic (they call it the “Wave,”) and these two groups get into a huge war.
Eventually, one set of wizards, known as the Sartan, take it upon themselves to break the world up into four separate worlds, based on the four classical elements — in the order we encounter them in the series, air, fire, earth, and water. There is a fifth area where the Sartan have the other wizardly race, the Patryn, contained. This is called the Labyrinth.
Our antihero is a Patryn named Haplo who was sent into the other four worlds by a Patryn known only to us as his master for a long time. Haplo’s goal is to foment chaos so that his master can take control of all of the worlds. We explore these worlds with Haplo and see how he grows as he learns more of the four worlds that the Sartan created.
One of the points of NaNoWriMo is to just let go and write.
So, since I’m out of ideas today, I figured I’d just blather on for a couple of hundred words and see what happens.
I think I mentioned here that I recently lost Deimos. He had a tumor in his abdomen and it started hemorrhaging and we had to put him down. So, aside from Mila, who is living with a foster mom, I am out of furry critters. I certainly don’t have any living with me. I think I’m going to take this time to clean up. My carpets, which weren’t in such great shape when I bought this house, look clean, but I think there’s an infinite amount of loose fur buried in them. I’m also working on getting rid of the oil marks from where my five cats rubbed their faces into the door jambs.
I’m also wondering if, when I get a new cat, I can train him (I’m allergic to female cats) to travel with me. I know that I’d have to get a young cat and train him that this is just what we do in our family, and he would have to get along with Mila enough to travel with the two of us.
I was going to watch the second Wheel of Time episode tonight, but when I got home from work, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I took a nap until 10:30 and then got up and stared at my blog for a while, then started the process of trying to get my old oDesk (now Upwork) account up and running again. It took a while to find the live chat, since I haven’t been able to access that old account. Then I decided to just write about whatever to get *something* written for today and here we are.
Oh, and I’ve given up on all but the Brilliant Events and 20s events in Wizards Unite and am focusing on leveling up as high as I can before they cancel the game. I’d do the Adversaries events but the only one I finished, I ran out of spells and Exstimulo potions and the new set is supposed to be harder than that. So. Nope.
Instead, I run a Baruffio’s Brain Potion and a Tonic for Trace Detection and just catch as many foundables as I can in that half hour. I’m almost to Level 42.
I think I’m going to have to try the walk-and-dictate thing tomorrow and maybe Sunday. I’m behind on both words and steps.
I wonder if I could export my “read” books list from Goodreads. I was thinking that picking a random book and spending a couple of hundred words on it might be a good way to build a few more posts. Ah-ha! Yes, you can. And yes, I have. Starting tomorrow (or later today by now, I guess), if I hit a block, I will randomly choose one number between 1 and 656 and write for a while on that book. Then I will delete that line and next time choose a number between 1 and 655 and repeat.
Maybe I’ll do this once daily even if I’m not blocked. I need more than 2,000 words per day to win NaNoWriMo at this point.
It’s Gratuitous Amazon Link time. We were in the middle of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, so up next is The Battle of the Labyrinth. I subscribed to Audible for a couple of months while I get all of the Wheel of Time audiobooks and now that I’ve done that, Amazon.com defaults to the audiobook instead of the Kindle book. I may accidentally link to the audiobook for these sometime in the future.
This will contain spoilers. So many spoilers. It’s downright spoiled. If you haven’t watched the first episode of the Wheel of Time and read all of the books, beware!
I’m also assuming that you know basic terminology like Aes Sedai, Ajahs, etc.
I need images to build up a bit more spoiler space, so I’m going back through my old photos in chronological order for now. I may take some new pictures over the next weekend. This is Vesuvius from 2014.
First off, I wasn’t expecting to spend so much time with the kids from the Two Rivers. Things people said about the focus of the first episode being on Moiraine and being about the rebirth of the Dragon Reborn, I was expecting more New Spring and less Eye of the World in the first episode. And, instead, the New Spring-y stuff is limited to the first few minutes. Then we get Moiraine and Lan watching a bunch of sisters of the Red Ajah catching a man who can channel (was that Logain?) and when it turns out that he isn’t the Dragon Reborn, Moiraine leaves for the Two Rivers.
Rafe Judkins, creator of the television series, is attempting to obfuscate who the Dragon Reborn will turn out to be in part by saying that the Dragon Reborn can also be female and making Egwene or Nynaeve (or both?) ta’veren as well as the three boys, to which I say, “about damn time.”
There’s a lot I liked about Jordan’s attempts at egalitarianism. I liked the fact that so many of the countries of Randland have female rulers, for example. But as with everyone, Jordan had some blind spots. Channeling is stereotypical and, kind of kinky. Men are more powerful and they take an active role in channeling. Women are weaker and channel by surrendering to the Power. The balance for men being stronger is that women can join their abilities together, while for men, they can only join together if there’s a woman in their circle. See? Kinky.
In one big departure from the books, it seems clear to me that Nynaeve knows that “listening to the wind” is channeling. She doesn’t know who her parents are (which is odd. Where is that going?) and she was raised by the former Wisdom of Emond’s Field (a name that I don’t think I’ve heard in the series yet, so far they’ve just called it The Two Rivers), who could “listen to the wind” and went to Tar Valon to train to be an Aes Sedai and was refused because of her ragged clothes and her “peasant accent.”
As part of the attempt to make it uncertain who will be the Dragon Reborn, we also see way more than we do in the books. We see the ceremony where the Women’s Circle braid’s Egwene’s hair and we see the events of Winternight, rather than just seeing the destruction afterwards, which was nice. Well, watching the people of Emond’s Field be slaughtered by Trollocs wasn’t nice. But having those blank filled in was nice. Oh, you know what I mean. I think.
Now for the biggest, most spoilery, question, was Laila fridged? For those who have never heard the term “fridge” used that way, it’s based in a Green Lantern comic book featuring the stupidest Green Lantern of them all, Kyle Rayner. The villain Major Force kills Kyle’s girlfriend, Alexandra, and sticks her in the refrigerator. This leads Kyle to develop as a character. It has come to mean any time a female character is sacrificed (to death, or to incapacitation or whatever) to advance a man’s storyline.
Now, at first glance, Laila’s accidental death at Perrin’s hands (or axe, I guess) does look like fridging. Perrin will change and grow or otherwise develop (maybe in a maladjusted way) to this trauma. I hope that they find a way to subvert this trope in further episodes, but if that’s the only major problem I have with the show, then we’re doing pretty well.
Mega Spoiler for a book that won’t be adapted until season 3, I think, follows:
And what will happen when Perrin returns home with Faile after leaving town before Laila’s funeral? I suspect we may not have the happy Emond’s Field wedding of the book series.
