![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm about halfway through Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - not because it's a hard read, but because I find little time *to* read. Today, for example, I have been back to the Book Thing and Community Forklift, and now I'm on a self-prescribed hiatus from the Thing for about 6 weeks, mostly because I broke the trolly I use to haul books while hauling bricks from the Forklift.
Okay, that and I have adequate stock for the Little Free Library AND ridiculous amounts of books to be read AND a quantumly increasing cookbook collection*.
But I digress. I can see why the reviewer on Amazon complained, though - it's a gentle, sweet, and most importantly, not-very-demanding love song to codes, codebreakers, and most of all D&D geeks via the medium of books and computer languages. (I actually want to go out and learn Hadoop because of this book.) Dan Brown, Indiana Jones, and the National Treasure franchise have taught people that it's not REALLY super-secret forgotten knowledge unless that super-secret forgotten knowledge hasn't been forgotten by at least one still-active, homicidally minded, large-membership cult... and also every single architect, composer, and artist of the Renaissance and Federal periods, who inevitably hid the hidden in plain sight all the hell over.
I'm also impressed that a book could talk for two pages about tits without tipping straight into misogyny. There's a character who designs software to get the right bounce on computer boobs; the two pages discuss his company (it sells to game designers mostly). Which I hit and thought "Okay, this is going to get really skeevy really fast." Until said character met up with the heroine - and what does he do?
Discuss her work and New York city. Not ONE glance to or even mention of her body in relation to his work even when she's offscreen; he accepts her straight away as an equal human being and confines his researches to classic sculpture and movies.
In a week when Jim Hines' cover pose project has made BBC news, I would not have thought that a male author could make a male character a mammary maven and then leave that as a throwaway bit while treating the female lead as a complete human being.
____________
*Including scoring one today that I once saw in passing and have never found since: Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. There are recipes. I'm going to park it next to Beyond Delicious, in which a self-proclaimed medium proclaims that these are the recipes the owners didn't want to die with them.
Okay, that and I have adequate stock for the Little Free Library AND ridiculous amounts of books to be read AND a quantumly increasing cookbook collection*.
But I digress. I can see why the reviewer on Amazon complained, though - it's a gentle, sweet, and most importantly, not-very-demanding love song to codes, codebreakers, and most of all D&D geeks via the medium of books and computer languages. (I actually want to go out and learn Hadoop because of this book.) Dan Brown, Indiana Jones, and the National Treasure franchise have taught people that it's not REALLY super-secret forgotten knowledge unless that super-secret forgotten knowledge hasn't been forgotten by at least one still-active, homicidally minded, large-membership cult... and also every single architect, composer, and artist of the Renaissance and Federal periods, who inevitably hid the hidden in plain sight all the hell over.
I'm also impressed that a book could talk for two pages about tits without tipping straight into misogyny. There's a character who designs software to get the right bounce on computer boobs; the two pages discuss his company (it sells to game designers mostly). Which I hit and thought "Okay, this is going to get really skeevy really fast." Until said character met up with the heroine - and what does he do?
Discuss her work and New York city. Not ONE glance to or even mention of her body in relation to his work even when she's offscreen; he accepts her straight away as an equal human being and confines his researches to classic sculpture and movies.
In a week when Jim Hines' cover pose project has made BBC news, I would not have thought that a male author could make a male character a mammary maven and then leave that as a throwaway bit while treating the female lead as a complete human being.
____________
*Including scoring one today that I once saw in passing and have never found since: Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. There are recipes. I'm going to park it next to Beyond Delicious, in which a self-proclaimed medium proclaims that these are the recipes the owners didn't want to die with them.
