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Angela Korra'ti

Books

Book roundup, special bilingual edition!

Picked up in print, as of today, ordered for me courtesy of the awesome userinfocow:

  • Bilbo le hobbit, the French-language edition of The Hobbit
  • Avis de tempête, the French-language edition of Storm Front, the first book of the Dresden Files!

Meanwhile, from Barnes and Noble, I grabbed the ebook editions of all my previously owned X-Files novels:

  • Whirlwind, by Charles Grant
  • Antibodies, by Kevin J. Anderson
  • Skin, by Ben Mezrich
  • Goblins, by Charles Grant
  • Ruins, by Kevin J. Anderson
  • Ground Zero, by Kevin J. Anderson

I also have grabbed three more books from Carina Press, to wit:

  • Altered Destiny, by Shawna Thomas. SF/romance, it looks like.
  • Rulebreaker, by Cathy Pegau. SF. Grabbed this one very, very specifically because it’s an F/F story, and those are so thin on the ground outside of specifically LGBT presses that it ain’t even funny! If you’re looking for F/F SF (with a likely heap o’ romantic interest on the side), I’d encourage making a point of checking this one out so’s to encourage Carina Press to sell more.
  • Dangerous Magic, by Alix Rickloff. Historical/paranormal romance. The heroine’s a witch, and she’s rescued a smuggler with the intent of convincing him to father her a child. Hoping it’ll be fun!

Here’s a freebie I snarfed the other day without remembering to attribute it before–got the heads up about this one, I think, from the Smart Bitches:

  • The Inconvenient Duchess, by Christine Merrill. Historical romance. I have no idea if I’ll like it, but hey, it was free!

Last but not least, the aforementioned 501 French Verbs. The 3rd edition was the version in print that userinfomaellenkleth sent me, and the 6th edition is the one I’ve bought for the Nook!

Counting the verbs book twice for two different editions, that’s 216 for the year! J’ai lu un nombre ridicule de livres, indeed!

October 24, 2011 by
Music, Quebecois Music

Session tunes status check!

As of this post, I appear to be able to pull “Si Bheag Si Mhor”, “Road to Lisdoonvarna”, “Swallow Tail Jig”, “Morrison’s Jig”, and “Banish Misfortune” out of my brain and into my fingers, at least on the piccolo, without resorting to sheet music. I can’t do them (well, the latter four anyway, as Si Bheag is played slowly) at speed, and I can’t do them reliably–but they’re in the fingers now. Practice will make them stronger.

“Blarney Pilgrim” is on the way. I’ve got the A part in my fingers, though I don’t have the B and C bits down yet.

I think my next direct targets are going to be “Apples in Winter” and “Cliffs of Moher”, as the latter is in Matt’s handy tunes PDF and the former, pulled off of TunePal, is frequently paired with session. Meanwhile, in terms of tunes I TOTALLY want to learn just because of all the Quebec music I’ve been listening to, “Jig of Slurs”, “Irish Washerwoman”, and “Atholl Highlander” are now all on my radar because La Volée does such an awesome set of them on their live album. And, I have discovered to my glee that several tunes of Quebecois derivation DO appear to be in the TunePal database–all I had to do was search for “le reel” and “reel du”, and I got several hits of tunes that are all over my La Bottine albums.

My advanced homework remains parsing the nameless tune of M. Demers’ in “Lanlaire”, though! 😀 And other advanced homework will be starting to try to think about not only what tunes I like the sounds of, but also which ones might go together amusingly in combination. One of our experienced session players is strongly in favor of not chaining too much E minor together, which makes me want to think about what transitions of keys are good. There’s also the question of figuring out if a jig-jig-reel combination would work. A lot of instrumental tracks in my collection do that and it would serve me well to emulate their example.

October 21, 2011 by
Book Log

Book Log #16: Just the Sexiest Man Alive, by Julie James

Just the Sexiest Man Alive

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The fine ladies at the Smart Bitches site periodically do a Save the Contemporary campaign featuring, as you might guess, contemporary romances. And not too long ago, they played up the author Julie James, who at that point had released a total of three novels. I was interested, so I went ahead and bought all three of the titles. Just the Sexiest Man Alive was the first of these.

And, unfortunately, it was the one I liked the least. I do not read as much comtemporary romance, in no small part because that’s the romance subgenre most likely to remind me that in many ways, I’m just not the target audience for the standard heteronormative relationship story. I need something else in the story to hold my interest, which is why I like historicals, paranormals, or romantic suspense more. In this particular case, we’ve got lawyer Taylor Donovan assigned to give legal coaching to the actor Jason Andrews for his upcoming courtroom thriller–and while I might have had fun with this as a plot concept, it fell over hard for me for one simple reason.

I.e., I found our hero Jason to be a self-centered jackass. More than once he pulls selfish crap on Taylor that made me want to haul off and punch him one, and left me wondering what she could possibly see in him. That he ultimately does something less selfish for her, supposedly a sign that he’s having a change of heart, doesn’t play well since I don’t buy that he’s genuinely learned from his mistakes. I never got any sense that he realized “I’m being a selfish prick here and I should stop it”, much less “I’ve got to tell her I’m sorry”.

It’s a shame, too, because James’ writing is not bad. I am happy to say that I did like the books after this one better. For this one, though, two stars.

October 21, 2011 by
Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood

Closure of Drollerie Press

Sadness. My editor Deena Fisher has now officially announced the closure of Drollerie Press. I’ve already been working with assistant editor Selena Green on the reversion of rights for Faerie Blood, so this comes as no real surprise. But still, it is a moment of sadness.

I’ve been off of Amazon for a bit already, but I’m seeing now that I’m off of B&N’s site and off of Google’s ebooks site as well. Fictionwise and Mobipocket and Scribd and eReader.com still have me, but I expect I’ll be vanishing off of them eventually. Moving forward, I will be willing to direct-sell copies of Faerie Blood to interested parties until I find it a new home. For now I’m not going to repost it anywhere myself. Once the reversion of rights is complete, I do want to re-query it to what markets are still available, most likely in conjunction with Bone Walker once I finish writing that. So until that time, if you’d like to read it and you haven’t already, please feel free to contact me directly and we’ll talk.

And if you know other Drollerie authors, especially if you’ve purchased their work, please consider giving them virtual hugs–and express to them that you did in fact buy and enjoy their work. Drollerie authors have written some wonderful things, and I hope that all of us will be able to find good places for our work in the future.

Most of all I’d like to express my appreciation for the work Deena has done, as well as Selena and JoSelle who have worked tirelessly with us authors to try to get all of our books back into our hands. As one who has suffered her share of medical difficulty, I very much feel for how Deena’s health issues have impacted her, and I am hopeful that she will have as easy a recovery as possible.

As always, thank you all for your support!

October 21, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Quebecois band recommendations: La Bottine Souriante!

Last but OH MY definitely not least in the slightest, we come to La Bottine Souriante!

Of all the groups I’ve been getting into, La Bottine is the oldest, and as near as I can tell they are pretty much the modern Quebecois trad version of the Chieftains. They’ve been around since the late 70’s, and became famous for taking the folk melodies and slapping a lively horn section on top of them. That, combined with the showmanship of lead singer Yves Lambert, made La Bottine a phenomenal live band during their earlier heyday. As I’ve posted before, I had the fortune of seeing them perform at the same Celtic concert where I first saw Great Big Sea, and I’m here to tell you–they WERE awesome. Monsieur Lambert had an amazing rich, round voice that hit my ears like 900-calorie cheesecake, and their horn section was laying down a wall of sound that steamrollered the audience.

So yeah, when it comes to modern Quebecois trad, La Bottine are the giants on whose shoulders everyone else after them are standing. If you want to get into this music at all, you cannot do wrong at all if you start with La Bottine. Even their name, “The Smiling Boots”, sums up why I love this music so much–not only because of the podorythmie, but because of the lively, upbeat energy. Well, that, and the aforementioned wall of sound from the horns, which do yea and verily ROCK.

Be aware that since La Bottine has been around for so long, they have gone through a huge number of membership changes over the years. This will therefore impact what level of awesome you get from one of their albums, depending on where in the discography you’re looking. I have only five of their many albums myself, and all of them are in the earlier stretch of La Bottine’s long range of activity: Chic & Swell, En Spectacle, Jusqu’aux P’tites Heures, Les Épousailles, and Rock & Reel (which has the distinction of being the only La Bottine album released in the States). Of these albums, I would most recommend either Rock & Reel or En Spectacle, which is a live album–either of these will give you an excellent introduction to the band’s canonical sound.

A big difficulty here though is that La Bottine’s albums are hard to find. Since Rock & Reel is the only one that was ever released in the States, and since a lot of the places that historically have sold music have been losing out to online distribution sources, even that one will be hard to find outside Canada. And very few La Bottine tracks, sadly, are available electronically! The US iTunes store, for example, has only a small number of La Bottine tracks, and all of them are single tracks on compilation albums. None of them are on the band’s own works.

The one electronic recommendation I can make is that La Bottine appears on the Chieftains collaboration Fire in the Kitchen. Great Big Sea fans will know this album well, since it’s got a GBS track on it, a take of “Lukey”. However, the La Bottine track on it, “Le Lys Vert” is very strong. This album IS on iTunes, and you should get it if you can–not only because of GBS and La Bottine being on it, but also because it’s a great overview of Canadian folk.

If though you want to find their albums, Amazon.com has them all (I think all, anyway) here. Amazon.ca represents over here. Archambault.ca, here (and they DO have La Bottine available as MP3 downloads, but again–only for Canadian customers).

YouTube-wise, there are a LOT of La Bottine vids of various quality, and most of them appear to be either older songs with static images, or else live performances involving the current-day members. Of these:

This one is the studio version of “Le ziguezon zinzon”, which goes clear back to the early album Chic & Swell, which is early enough that André Marchand–now over in the Charbonniers–is still in the band! And I think this may in fact be M. Marchand singing lead on this track; I’m not quite sure.

From Rock & Reel, I give you YoYo Verret, which is arguably one of the very first La Bottine ditties I ever fell in love with. The vid is static images only, and includes several of the modern lineup of members–so keep in mind that this is actually an older La Bottine song. I’m pretty sure that Michel Bordeleau, the other former La Bottine member now in the Charbonniers, has the lead here. And listen for the shiver-inducing deep harmony at the very end of the vocal section!

Off of En spectacle, here is “La Grand’ Côte”, one of the best tracks in the performance. There’s a stunning footwork solo towards the end–where the feet are flying fast enough that it sounds like machine-gun fire!

By contrast, if you search for “la bottine souriante 2011” on YouTube, you should be able to find several videos of the current lineup of the group. This one unfortunately has clipping issues on the sound, but you CAN see Éric Beaudry over on the side making with the footwork with a guitar in his lap, and the guys with the horns kick in fairly quickly. Of note as well is the dancer on the stage, Sandy Silva, whose primary function in the group does in fact appear to be dancing. This one is notable because I recognize what they’re playing–it’s “Landslide Village Medley”, a.k.a. “Medley des Éboulements” from Rock & Reel! And, this one is only a partial, but again there’s M. Beaudry there on the side, and Sandy Silva dancing all over the stage.

La Bottine remains an active band, although that’s a bit hard to glean from their website–the YouTube search is a much better indicator. AND! AND! I am seeing rumblings on their Facebook page that they do have a new album on the way. So I’d recommend keeping an eye on their site, and if you are Facebook-inclined, they have a group right over here as well as an actual fan page!

It’s greatly comforting to see that the band’s current lineup is continuing its long and proud tradition, and here’s hoping that the new album will enjoy some electronic release!

October 20, 2011 by
Book Log

Book Log #15: So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta

So Cold the River

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read Michael Koryta’s So Cold the River as a library checkout, since I’d never encountered the author before yet was in the mood to try a suspense-oriented horror thriller. And while I found it competently done in some ways, in others, it was ultimately kind of disappointing. This was an uncommon instance of a book I read and wound up not actually wanting to buy.

Eric Shaw was once an up-and-coming filmmaker, and now he’s slogging through his days by filming memorials for funerals while he avoids dealing with how he’s walked out on his wife Claire. A wealthy socialite, Alyssa Bradford, hires him to do a documentary about her father-in-law–and when Eric agrees to take the job, he comes to a town full of the obligatory layers upon layers of disturbing secrets. At the heart of them all lurks something evil, something Eric begins to see in visions once he starts taking drinks from an old bottle of Pluto Water.

At its core the plot wasn’t bad, I’ll happily give it that, yet some aspects of its execution rubbed me the wrong way. One big one was that while you initially are led to believe that drinking this old mineral water is what’s causing Eric to have visions, it comes up at one point that he has this ability anyway–and his wife actually has to remind him of an incident where he’d exhibited precognition. That yanked me RIGHT out of the story, because I found it impossible to believe that a person could forget something like that.

The other thing that bugged me was that a good deal of time is spent in the POV of the primary mortal antagonist. I acknowledge that this was necessary for the development of his character, and you do ultimately see where his character is going. But that said, more than once I found that character repugnant enough that I was almost driven away from the book.

On the good side, there were several genuinely creepy passages, and I had no issues with anything about Koryta’s prose; more, my quibbles were with aspects of his characterization and plot. In the end, though, this book didn’t seize me well enough to make it permanently into my collection. I’d recommend it as a library read, or if you need something to read on a trip, but nothing more than that. Two stars.

October 20, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Quebecois band recommendations: Galant, Tu Perds Ton Temps!

It gives me ridiculous amounts of glee that a (mostly) female group has dived into the male-dominated Quebecois trad genre, and this is exactly what you get with Galant, Tu Perds Ton Temps! I tend to listen to male groups in general just because I’m a sucker for the sound of several guys singing in full round harmony, a thing of mine that goes clear back to Elvis and the Jordannaires–but if you give me a bunch of women doing the same thing, oh my yes, I’m there.

The Galant group is technically not 100% female–they do have one male member of the group, Jean-Francois Berthiaume, who does their footwork and other general percussion. However, he doesn’t sing–so all the vocals are in fact female. And yeah, the Galant girls meet and match their male colleagues in this genre with some kickass vigorous harmonies! I haven’t identified which girl is which yet in terms of ranges sung, but whoever’s got the lower ranges in particular is delivering some great contralto/tenor lines, and whoever’s got the highest soprano is notable as well.

They’ve got only two albums available to date, Fais-toi pas d’illusions and the self-titled Galant, tu perds ton temps, which is actually the newer of the two albums. To further confuse matters, the band gets its name from a song of the same name, and that song appears on the earlier album! “Galant, tu perds ton temps” translates roughly to “Suitor/lover, you waste your time”, which is another thing that makes me giggle and giggle. Especially given that my boys over in La Volée d’Castors have also covered this song.

So which album should you get? That’s a bit of a hard call. I’ve got a LOT of tracks off the newer one on my Favorites list, and that one does have the selling point of being a double CD so you get a lot of music for the money. On the other hand, the three tracks I’ve marked as favorites on the other album are in fact the ones I’ve recently played more often. So really, it becomes a question of which one you can find, and which one you feel like paying money for.

YouTube has a lot of videos of them up, though, so if you search for “galant tu perds ton temps”, you should be able to find them. Here’s one of them doing “Mary of the Wild Moor” in English, and the video quality is good, so you can get an excellent idea of their overall vocal style. And here’s a partial vid of them doing “Les promesses du galant”, which is one of my favorites off the newer album, and I’m desperate to find proper lyrics for it because I’m FAIRLY SURE they aren’t actually singing “Monsieur Pants” in there. XD This one is “Faites-moi un homme sans tête / Reel Bergerville”, which I like off the newer album as well!

They’ve got no links to buy on their site, so your only option (that I know of) is iTunes if you want their music electronically and you’re outside Canada. Archambault.ca has only the second, larger album available for download, and their downloads are only for Canadian customers. For physical CDs, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Archambault.ca all have those, but as with my earlier rec posts, if you’re not actually in Canada, be on the lookout for large shipping charges and be prepared to double up your purchases to qualify for free shipping if necessary! Or, if you are so inclined, recruit a Canadian friend to buy albums for you and ship them to you!

Out of all the Quebec groups I’m following, in some ways I’m most delighted by this one because, well, girls. And I heartily encourage checking them out in particular, if nothing else to encourage them to put out more albums–and to encourage other female groups to jump in on this genre as well. Because I’ll totally buy them, if they are this awesome!

October 20, 2011 by