misc reviews

The Hobbit movie part 1 - some good bits, but a somewhat unsatisfactory ratio of good bits to unnecessary bits. More singing, less battle pls.

Hereville comic volumes 1 and 2 - I'd read the original story on the web, but the print volume 1 has some significant changes (for the better), and volume 2 was all new to me. Fun, recommended.

Unveiled, Unclaimed, and Unraveled, three romance novels by Courtney Milan - very good! Not so great that non-romance readers should read them, but if you like Mary Balogh, you'll like these. I found the beginning of Unveiled pretty off-putting but it got better further on, ( spoilers )

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel - recommended somewhere as a Leviathan readalike, which is fair enough. Oppel's writing doesn't quite have the vividness of Westerfeld's, nor did I fall in love with the characters, but it's reasonable-quality airship porn and a good adventure story. Also, hilariously, I *swear* I had never read this book when I wrote my one-shot three years ago with the airship pirates and the secret volcanic island base with the helium mines, I guess it's just a really good set of ideas... (Confidential to my former players: no, you never made it to the helium mines, I believe you got the airship turned around before you ever got to the island, plus we ran out of time.)

sexism: books for tinies edition

Someone (who is hopefully not reading this) gave us a "Baby Einstein" book for Christmas (of the "press buttons and play annoying sounds" type, which is on the one hand annoying but on the other hand successfully enticed Q away from a power cord earlier this evening, so hey. But that is not actually what I am writing about.) What struck me is that it features five little animals, Baby Galileo, whose (trite and poorly-scanning) rhyme mentions the stars, Baby Mozart, who plays a flute, Baby Monet, who sees colorful flowers, Baby Vivaldi, who is taking a bath... and Mimi, who is eating breakfast. Now, setting aside the question of why Vivaldi is taking a bath, one of those names is not like the other ones. I couldn't come up with any cultural reference for Mimi - Wikipedia suggests the heroine of La Boheme, but a) I've personally seen Boheme three times and I didn't think of that, so I just don't think she has the same level of name recognition as Mozart or Monet, and b) she's a creation, not a creator. I really can't think of another explanation here besides "someone pointed out that there were no women in this book, so they stuck one in in the most half-assed way possible". Which is all a slow build to my actual point: what female "culture hero" *should* they have name-dropped (and if we can't come up with one at the Mozart/Monet/one-name-famous level, how fucked up is that?)?