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Timony & Hobb
Sep. 15th, 2002 08:46 pmI seek playlists while I organize my iPod-based music collection, currently just under six gigs. All the tracks that N&M ripped via Andy's old scripts don't always play nice with Apple's stuff, mostly because they don't make full use of the MP3 files' ID3 header information tags, instead storing musical meta-information within separate files. I think that iTunes is actually able to parse these files and mark up the MP3s appropriately (making an assumption here that these ID files are some obscure standard and not something Andy made up), but at any rate the tracks end up with incomplete information. Some of them lack proper artist and album title information, and none of them have track order information, which causes iTunes (and iPod) to play an album's tracks in alphabetical order, which stinks.
Nice feature that iPod has that I haven't seen elsewhere (not that I've looked a great deal): Shuffle Album. When set, it will randomly choose an album from its library, play its tracks in order, then randomly choose another album, on and on, until you tell it to stop. Pretty good. I think I prefer this over the whole-library shuffle-play that I have usually used with every other player in the past.
I'm at the point where I flip through my CDs, and everything that I haven't ripped yet doesn't immediately strike me as being worth the effort ripping (i.e. sliding into my iBook and then hitting a button. Well, and then waiting for the rippage to to complete, plugging the iPod in, dragging the imported tracks over, then deleting them from my laptop's space-starved hard drive).
Dear Robin Hobb: I do not think that the word sirrah means what you think it means. This doesn't bother me in the same way as, say, using "its" or "their" incorrectly does, since it's an archaic word and hence I'm more prone to forgive inappropriate usage, but still.
Also, if you're going to describe a household that includes a grandmother, as well as children who say "Mama" and "Papa", please don't name an unrelated serving girl "Nana", leaving readers vaguely confused until they figure out halfway through the story that she and the grandmother are separate people.
Also also, it's typical and acceptable to have fantasy-novel characters whose names are all a phonetic tweak or two apart from common, real-world Western names, but be consistent about it, taking care not to form other, valid words and sending your readers to hunt down symbolism that doesn't seem to be there. See esp. "Davad Restart".
Your work is damnably addicting despite these quibbles.
Actually, I feel Ship of Magic could be quite a bit shorter, and wonder if the editorial weight on her lessened between the Farseer and Liveship trilogies. There's quite a bit of unnecessary and maybe unintended repetition, both in local and global scopes. For example, she successfully shows us that a particular character is an overbearing jerk, and then she just keeps pushing it, page after page. There is at least an entire scene or two involving this character that I would have been happy to read after it was rendered down into a sentence or three, part of another character's internal monologue, perhaps.
On the smaller scale, there are several instances of characters repeating their thoughts, words, or actions in different paragraphs across a single page. It seems far too jarring, like poorly spliced film, to be intentional. This more than anything suggests cursory editing, to me. Too bad.
There is the separate matter of a real freight train of a plot complication that she sets up early on, and which has been screaming down the tracks for the last 200 pages or so: the point at which the two most disparate plot threads are going to intersect is as obvious as a pirate hoisting the Jolly Roger, if you catch my meaning. The thing that irks me the most is that I'm not sure if it's supposed to be so bloody obvious. Maybe I'm dense, but if there's foreshadowing, I don't see it. Instead she gives us the setup on both ends and lets them both simmer slowly, apparently hoping that we the readers will forget by the time it all collides. Which, I bet, will happen at the very end of this 700-odd-page monster. Which I will reach soon, and then I'll reach for the remaining 1400 pages, no doubt about it.