This is definitely an interesting take on vampires. They make sense, they’re reasonably well explained and they rather fit into the world, or at least some of them do. Neither the properly dreadful beasts of old nor the very differently dreadful modern take, Martin‘s vampires are refined ultimate predators that, like humans, can choose to use their abilities for good or ill, and in the end to obey or rebel against their rulers, however powerful they may be. In many ways, it can be said they’re similar to Anne Rice‘s, but in some other notable ones they’re different, plus that this book was published when only Interview with the Vampire was out and a certain other series of hers was quite some years away, which rather limits the odds of that being the inspiration for many of the elements seen here.
Otherwise, Martin was Martin even back then, with his detailed descriptions and explanations… Including of food, of course. Sadly, this book has an extremely narrow focus which impacts not only the way in which the world is portrayed but also the characters, as all but a few are developed poorly, if at all, and have little actual impact or significance. You’ll be able to “see” and, if you’re so inclined, properly understand everything the author deemed crucial and, depending on preference, either trudge through or delight yourself with quite a number of other little details that he for some reason liked to include, but everything else tends to get rather thrown aside with a shrug. And the final confrontation does require some suspension of disbelief.
That said, while approaching it with the idea that it’s written by the author of A Song of Ice and Fire will cause people to have wrong expectations and perhaps judge it unfairly harshly for that reason, it is a very good book that I’d recommend to anyone with any interest in proper vampires, steamboats or simply good stories with limited scope. I’d have wished for a couple hundred more pages if they’d have been dedicated to the other characters, perhaps to their personal histories, and to presenting a slightly wider image of the time and place, real as it may be, but what it’s intended to do, it does quite well.
Rating: 4/5
I’m sitting here struggling to even breathe, or at least feeling like I am, and thinking of everything I’m messing up, have messed up or may likely mess up, and about how I can only crawl out of bed after giving up on the thought of anything I may have planned to do that day and saying it’s just yet another day that doesn’t matter. But it’s been over nine and a half years of days that didn’t and don’t matter, and no end in sight of them. I wasn’t even 21 when she left, now I turned 30 in October and all this time in between, soon to be a third of my life, just didn’t matter, be it for myself or for anyone else.
Now I just realized I messed up with that book order as well, and no idea what I’ll do about it, since it’s definitely not their fault in the least if after asking about a certain edition I suddenly sent another message just when they were saying they’ll preorder both to say I found some information about it, writing as if it was definitely what I wanted but in fact pointing them to something entirely different, since I never realized I was looking at something else.
And now dad seems to be asking me about buying bottled water in larger quantities, even making a contract for it, and even sent me reports about the quality of tap water in Bucharest to analyze, and I have no idea what to say or do about that. What I know is that I just drink weak tea, usually making a liter at night and putting it in this bottle I have in my room to have the next day, and while I know there are plenty of potential issues that boiling won’t solve, I’m thinking that a water filter would do the job better and without the hassle or the environmental impact, due to transportation and plastic jugs, of buying this way.
And, of course, at the start of next week I’ll need to uninstall G DATA Antivirus, as that trial will be over as well, and install Emsisoft Anti-Malware to continue the tests. But that’s obviously a scary prospect, and while I’ll be quite glad to get rid of G DATA, as there are some compatibility and usability issues that make me say it’s not an option despite the fact that it seems to offer very powerful protection, I’m not sure how uninstalling will go, as it doesn’t seem to have a specialized tool available, and I’m sure not looking forward to needing to sort out who knows what mess or even to reinstall Windows.
Then, after that, I’ll need to seriously start looking into buying that new computer I’ve been planning. Talking of the, shall we say, temporary one which I plan to pass on to dad next year, when I’ll order a much better one for myself. But that will again mean exchanging many messages with stores, making decisions that will cost a fair amount of money, even if most components will be in the “office” range, and needing to sort out some things that shops may not be willing to normally do. Plus, some of the parts I definitely mean to buy are suddenly no longer available, at least not all from the same store, and the worst problem seems to be a legal copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit in English, as that definitely doesn’t seem to be available anymore. Of course, it wouldn’t be a problem for me, as I have a retail edition of Ultimate, but the idea was to temporarily give this to dad while I’ll use the one bought with the new computer, being OEM and tied to it, in order to be able to give it to him like that next year, so he’ll finally move off XP now and then stay off it without needing to go into territories even I won’t get anywhere near, by which I mean Windows 8 or newer.
And this was just sort of thrown here, as things like the choice of words, the lack of any links and the fact that it’s posted hours after another personal post should tell you. I was pacing around my room, feeling like I needed to explode but my skin, or my body in general, still somehow held me together, and that’s what came to mind, that I have over nine and a half years of days that didn’t matter, every single one of them. In a few cases, I may have briefly thought they may have some importance, but I was wrong, and now I know better. So, unless miracles will happen, I’m only getting out of bed after making sure I know it doesn’t matter… And yet I still end up like this even so, which shouldn’t really happen if nothing matters, should it?
Finished Fevre Dream last evening, and earlier that day I received what I had ordered from that other shop I hadn’t ordered anything from so far. In the end, that was Baptism of Fire, The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear and Winnetou’s Heirs, this last one being in Romanian and added since I did use to like Karl May way back and was looking for something cheap to get my order above the free shipping threshold. In addition, have an order for Blood of Tyrants from the shop I usually order books from, but since that needs to be shipped from abroad I’ll go pick it up later this month, since adding over 20% to the price by paying shipping for a single book didn’t sound like a good idea.
Was somewhat worried that this order that arrived yesterday will be at least delayed, since all books showed up as in stock and the first three were significantly discounted when I placed it, Sunday evening, but by Monday The Name of the Wind was no longer listed as in stock and I got no confirmation to state that this change was caused by the last copy being reserved for my order, which still showed up as pending. However, since the copy I received had a sticker with the full price on the back and a slightly dirty cover, I guess other orders placed before mine had cleared out any other copies they had and then they gave me the one they had on display in one of their bookstores, since they also have two of those, on top of the on-line one.
The only thing left now is the preorder for the paperback edition of Prince Lestat, which I mean to make in order to get the best price guarantee but which causes something of an issue because Books Express, which is this store I usually order books from, lists two editions and has strange information for one and next to no information for the other. They also weren’t able to tell me any more when I asked and it was only yesterday that I could find some more details myself, though those only confused me more. Still, being as nice as they usually are, they offered to preorder both editions, saying they should be easy enough to sell either way, and then ask me which one I prefer after they’ll arrive.
That’s the good part. The rest is about what you’d expect: Can’t even get myself to write a quick review for Fevre Dream, that review for The Witcher is still there waiting for me, untouched since I somehow managed to put those first two paragraphs together a week ago, even writing this personal post was a struggle that took me a couple of hours and in general the thought of doing pretty much anything makes me want to curl in a ball, whimper and perhaps simply vanish. Tend to only manage to drag myself out of bed after giving up on any plans I may consider for the day in question upon waking up.
Later edit: The information found last night about a certain edition of Prince Lestat was confusing because it was entirely wrong. I somehow spent probably about an hour gathering information about something other than what I meant to look for, writing a message about it and another to ask for more, and never realized I was looking at something different. And now that resulted in Books Express preordering the wrong edition for me, which costs more than twice as much as the one I was actually looking at, obviously through no fault of their own. Wonder how I’ll fix this now.
Since the next planned purchases are books and I bought the first one of them today, for a mere 10 RON ($2.45 or €2.26) from a former used books store that recently announced turning into a discount bookstore that I imagine can get away with such prices on books that aren’t used by taking overstock off the hands of others, it seemed only fitting to spend Earth Hour reading it by candlelight. Needing to sit still at the desk instead of pacing around the room or at least lying in various positions, likely changed every few minutes, in bed was a bit uncomfortable and I guess this may be a bigger part of why I have a hard time reading books on the computer than the fact that I miss holding and reading off paper and turning pages, but the candle offered enough light as long as I did, so that wasn’t a problem.
Now I guess I’ll have to figure out exactly what else to order, when and where from, because I asked about the availability of The Waterborn and The Blackgod and was told this shop I meant to purchase from will likely have an answer for me Monday, but then I happened to check another store and found that Baptism of Fire, The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, these last two being those I was considering replacing the two mentioned above with if they’ll still be unavailable, are significantly discounted at the moment and I don’t know whether they’ll remain so by then. In addition, ordering from this other store will mean adding something else, because the shipping is free for orders over 120 RON and those three books are 39.99 RON ($9.78 or €9.04) each at the moment, so I’ll pay shipping for being 0.03 RON under otherwise, and I’m not sure what to add, since Blood of Tyrants is not only somewhat more expensive there than at the first store but also, and more importantly, available only in a different edition and format, and so far I bought the previous seven in the series to match.
And I guess this counts as the week’s second post, though it is in fact the first one actually written this week. The previous one was also manually posted just seconds after midnight on Monday, not scheduled to show up at that time, but I had finished the initial version at 10:25 PM on Sunday, then previewed it and made a few small changes and corrections that way over the next hour, and then waited until that time to manually post it in order to make it count for this week instead of as a third for the last one, so it can be said that I rather cheated.
The plan definitely was to have my review for The Witcher done and posted by now, or at least by the end of the week, but I only managed to get myself to start it yesterday and got no further than the two paragraphs which may be the introduction, unless I’ll reconsider and move them towards the end instead, since they’ll need to end up there when I’ll edit it to match the MobyGames format when I’ll also submit it there anyway. As such, and seeing as I highly doubt I’ll be sitting down and writing all of it tomorrow, especially after waking up early to watch the race, it now definitely needs to be one of next week’s two posts. Though, of course, there’s no guarantee it actually will be.
If the previous such post covered no less than two and a half years, this one will cover a mere six months, but there are two reasons for that: One, on March 21 I finally switched to the new Analytics code, so it can’t hurt to have some final statistics obtained while using the old one. Two, this is post number one thousand on this blog at the moment. This includes the Books category going only as far back as May 2006, however, so there will be plenty more apparently posted earlier when I’ll finally copy all those old reviews here as well and even going by the post number may eventually give the impression that a little over 999 have been posted before this one if I’ll somehow get around to actually writing the few gathering dust in drafts for quite a number of years now. But at the moment it is post number one thousand, so I’m marking the moment in this manner.
The middle column in the table below will therefore cover the period between September 21, 2014 and March 20, 2015, while the first will obviously cover the entire time that passed since I launched this site, on September 21, 2010. The final column is the usual one I add at the end, covering the last month, so starting on February 21 and ending on the same day as all the rest. Once again, not that it should matter or interest anyone in any way, especially considering the small number of visits, but I’m adding all of this here for reference, just in case.
* Realized that, since the links to images in the fantasy art gallery are numbers that point to titles in an alphabetical list and, while very rarely and not recently, I did update that a few times, the statistics for these pages can’t be accurate. Also, using the page title option would be of no use as the titles are set through JavaScript and they’re often not picked up correctly, or at least were not picked up correctly until some time ago, as recently it seems better. As such, what’s listed is what the link points to now, with the numbers that show up for it, as there’s no way to sort this issue out.
** Also includes entries listed as iPhone, iPad and iPod. I’m not sure how right this is, especially since for all but a few of them the version is unknown, but I’ll go with it.
Once again, I was particularly thorough, putting together all the separate entries that actually referred to the same thing and separating a few that were wrongly counted as a single one in older reports. It is still possible that mistakes slipped in, especially since checking again after posting would require doing all the work all over again and I don’t care to do that, but these statistics should be at least as accurate as those included in the previous such post and far more so than any older ones.
And I’ll end this by saying that the records are unchanged, namely 169 visitors and 180 visits, set on the old site by that large spike on August 16, 2009, and 333 pageviews, set on March 3, 2013. Will leave the graphs out this time, since this post covers a rather short period and I’m thinking of posting another in another six months, to mark five years since launching this site, so I’ll be able to add those covering a period of one year at that point.
