Didn't Rain on Our Parade

Although Lord knows it tried. The start time was shifted by 30 minutes, and once things got really rolling, the rain stopped and the sun came out.

Here, have our local Zydeco Cowboys:

A Miss Is as Good as a Mile ... Unfortunately

Damn, I keep missing people's (and communities') posts on LJ/DW! I can't really figure out why, either. They have both slowed down enough that it should be easy to click through a day's posts.

I think part of the part of the problem may be the behavior of the things I have as feeds on the two sites. Sometimes they won't post for a day or two, and then they'll dump a lot at once. The result is I'll be flipping through my reading list/friends feed and hit something I know I've read already, and then I'll stop. And in some cases, I've read it already at the source blog or site itself (like Scalzi's Whatever) instead of on LJ/DW.

I'm going to try to do a better job of combing though these things more carefully. I keep missing beta requests on Fan Grammarians as well as posts on things like the Weiss v. Saiyuki writing challenge comm.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Hugo Award Nominee

Maia Drazhar is the youngest son of the emperor of the Elflands, but his mother was a goblin princess whom his father married for diplomatic reasons. He has spent all of his eighteen years in exile, first with his mother but most recently alone except for his guardian, an embittered drunkard. But then Emperor Varenechibel IV and Maia's three older half-brothers all die in the same airship accident, and the unwanted boy wakes up to find that he has become the emperor.

The outline of the story is a classic fantasy trope, but Maia never obtains a magic sword nor leads a troop in battle. He finds the imperial palace to be every bit as lonely as the dreary manor house of his exile, at first, and his deprived upbringing has left him ill-prepared for the task of ruling a large, complex empire on the verge of an industrial revolution. And that airship accident? Wasn't an accident … .

On the basis of my own reading and the writeups I've seen from others, your enjoyment of this book will depend a lot on whether you can deal with a lot of (fairly well done) antiquated formal language in your dialogue and whether you would like something that "fulfills … wishes about nerdy, bullied people achieving great things through peaceful means" (to quote writer/editor Nick Mamatas, who did not find the book to be his sort of thing at all). I enjoyed it enough that it's already become a comfort read.

( Cut for more, including some spoilers )

Note: Katherine Addison is a pseudonym of Sarah Monette, a/k/a truepenny.