Scriniary

Added an actual recipe to my food page: Pseudo-Asian Chicken with Soba Noodles

Brown, on both sides, some boneless skinless breasts in olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Meanwhile, boil water and add soba noodles and green beans. Also meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix about 1 cup chicken stock, several tbsp soy sauce, minced garlic and ginger and black pepper to taste. When the chicken is browned, dump the sauce on it and partly cover the pan. Add some sliced bell peppers. Let it simmer until the chicken is done.

I’ve been totally neglecting that page since I got the first inspiration for it.

Well, Friday, I made the above recipe. Today, I made “Kamut Spirals with Chicken-Artichoke Wine Sauce” from the March 2006 Cooking Light (They should pay me for the free advertising. I love this magazine.). I used whole-wheat spirals, though, because I had those, and I don’t know where I’d find kamut. The recipe calls for a *lot* of artichoke, but it’s not too much, though it seemed like it at first. It was a little bland, but I forgot the salt. More basil would help, too.

Filed by scriniary at 4:30 am under Food
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Can’t stop watching the Kaavya Viswanathan mess. Chip Scanlan’s column on Poynter uses it in a discussion of what to teach students about plagiarism. (Although he says he’s “not interested in piling on”, he does.)

I’ve got another book packaging idea for “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” Grind it into pulp, dump it in the trash and tell its young author to do it over. This time in her own words.

I still kinda wish I’d bought a copy of the book earlier. The description reminds me of people I went to high school with.

Filed by scriniary at 5:16 am under Uncategorized
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Very enjoyable. It was fun to watch all the quirky ideas come together. Every little detail seemed to have a reason for being, especially all the weird habits of the minor characters. They were enjoyable to watch, even though most of them felt like they were there to serve the plot rather than the other way around (which is my personal preference). But it was a good plot, lots of fun, and everything fit neatly into place.

I almost didn’t buy this when I saw it was about artists (I am burned out on urban fantasies about artists). I’m glad I picked this one up.

Filed by scriniary at 3:55 pm under Books
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Good book. This, along with the book I’m currently reading (Tim Pratt’s The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl), gives me another reason to not write urban fantasy: my ideas just aren’t weird enough.

And now my book posts are all caught up.

Filed by scriniary at 6:36 am under Books
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(belated post. spoilers behind cuts.)

This is the second book, following Ghosts in the Snow, in Tamara Siler Jones‘ medieval-type fantasy forensic mystery series. It’s a lot more gruesome than the first one, and just as much fun. The mystery plot was interesting, the various subplots fit in well, and the characters come across as very real people.

One of her names drove me nuts: Braoin, or Bray for short. Except I’d pronounce Braoin like “Breen”, so the short version would be Brie like the cheese. Not a big deal, and it didn’t come up much in the book anyway.

I did suffer a slight mental disconnect when the identity of the killer was revealed, because the visual image I’d had of the person turned out to be completely wrong. There were scenes with the killer in them doing the killing, and there were scenes with the killer in his normal life (not identified as the killer). The mental picture I’d built up in my head of those people was *completely* different, so that when I found they were the same person, I first had a moment of disbelief and then had to try to wrench my mental images into agreement.

Some time I’d like to go back through the book to the various scenes with those two personas, and look at what was actually described to see where my imagination had gone wrong. Or perhaps the characters hadn’t been described as vividly as I’d pictured them, allowing my brain to insert its own, incorrect, images. There’s a very interesting description lesson in there somewhere.

One minor quibble: I really didn’t think it very likely that the killer would have an adopted son, given that he’s torturing and sexually abusing teenage boys.

There was one plot event that I really felt was unnecessary.

(more…)

Filed by scriniary at 3:37 pm under Books
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(Belated post. No spoilers, but there might be some in the comments.)

I enjoyed this, though it’s not the sort of thing I usually read. Once I got into it, I kept going to find out how the world had gotten into the state it was in, rather than to find out what would happen to it or to the characters.

The world was quite refreshing: it’s not a white American based setting, and it felt very real.

As with most multi-POV books, there were some I didn’t enjoy as much as the others. I didn’t really get into the book at all until I hit the first “repeat” chapter (the first time there was a POV who had already had a chapter). I enjoyed deBrun and Oaxyctl (esp. the way O.’s plotline ended). The scenes with Dihana, the government’s leader, seemed important to the plot, or at least the background, but I didn’t enjoy reading them. The son’s chapters could have been left out entirely, in my opinion.

I am curious to get another peek at the world in about 50 years.

Filed by scriniary at 10:21 pm under Books
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