The Reptile Room, Book 2 from Lemony Snicket

The kids and I read the first book a few weeks ago. Three quarters of the way through, we promised ourselves we would finish the first one and that would be that. We would not be reading further. Why? Because A Series of Unfortunate Events is, naturally, depressing, and quite unfortunate.

And yet, at the end of the first book, suddenly the kids were clamoring for me to download #2. Which I did.

Now halfway through The Reptile Room, I am still interrupted every couple of paragraphs by a child demanding -- a word which here means "yelling insistently so as to drown out the parent attempting to read aloud" -- that I explain "Why don't they just TELL someone it's Count Olaf???" 

Yet we keep reading. Why? Because the books are lots of fun, very well written, and as with a train wreck in slow motion, you feel compelled to watch every detail unfold. The train wreck, of course, exists in the lives of the characters and does not here refer to any defects in the writing process.

My thanks to Lemony Snicket, whose biography we will probably be reading in the near future, when we have run out Unfortunate Events.

Arwen

"Resurrection" by Arwen Elys Dayton, available today!

Resurrection is out today. :)

Resurrection: Inside the Great Pyramid with John Anthony West

(This post is an excerpt from a longer post I wrote for Amazon's Kindlepost blog. www.kindlepost.com)

My book Resurrection comes out tomorrow. I hope you'll pick up a copy.

Arwen walking up the Grand Gallery.

In researching Resurrection, I toured the Great Pyramid with maverick archeologist John Anthony West, known around the world for poking large holes in archaeological doctrine. (His best-known book, Serpent in the Sky, is a great introduction to his work. http://www.jawest.net/)

When we arrived in Egypt, the pyramid was actually closed to visitors due to some renovations of the interior walkways. Luckily, John new the art of baksheesh and also pulled some strings with the higher-ups. Combined, these assets bought us private entrance into the pyramid, which we explored by flashlight -- a flashlight with batteries that were already low when we started and which had nearly run out by the time we emerged back into the sunlight and heat of the Giza Plateau.

John Anthony West walking away from one of the square air passages in the King's Chamber

Arwen lying in the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber

John was a big proponent of the pyramid's sound enhancement qualities (which ended up playing a part in the Resurrection plot), and I was instructed to lie in the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber and chant an Om. Why an Om? I don't know, but it sounded amazing. The chamber didn't echo exactly, it just took the sound and magnified it, letting it reverberate through the solid walls for a LONG time.

In that dark space, with the flashlight's beam starting to flicker as the batteries gave out, it was a bit creepy but also breathtaking. From my standpoint, my visit to the Great Pyramid may have been more exciting that the one paid by Pruit and Eddie in the story -- but I'll let you be the judge. 

Diagram of the interior of the Great Pyramid, by Jeff Dahl.

Resurrection: Pictures from Egypt

My book Resurrection is coming out on January 24th. I hope you will pick up a copy!

Resurrection on Amazon








Here are some photos I took of the Cairo bazaar that is the stage for the very intense chase scene toward the end of the book.

I loved the idea of a sea of uneven roofs stretching out in every direction. Pruit had a lot of running and jumping to do.

Bazaars are great for chase scenes because there is no end to the number and size of obstacles you could encounter.

The man in the red suspenders (below) is John Anthony West, maverick Egyptologist extraordinaire. More about John in a post next Monday.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?

I'm confused! I'm pretty sure I enjoyed this book. But reading it was like coming in in the middle of not one conversation but forty-five conversations, all carried on by people who have known each other for years. 

I think I will have to start earlier in the John le Carre universe to catch up with all the moving parts. Still, I liked it. I especially liked the sense of time and place in cold, rainy England in the 1970's.

Amazon.com: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: A George Smiley Novel eBook: John le Carre: Books http://amzn.to/yUZOw4

If you've seen the movie, let me know how it is. I'm looking forward to seeing what the director and screenwriter did with it.

Rick Riordan is Great

What can I say? We love the Rick Riordan Percy Jackson series. Both of my older kids bugged me for months about this book, while they waited impatiently for it to be released.

When we finally got it, The Son of Neptune did not disappoint.

And you know what? My kids know more about Greek (and now Roman) gods now than most adults.

The Son of Neptune - Heroes of Olympus: The Online World of Rick Riordan http://bit.ly/zdCJDG

His books are great to read aloud with your kids. If your kids are anything like my kids, though, they will sneak the books after bedtime and stay up long into the night reading them by themselves.

:)

4 1/2 Star Advance Review of Resurrection :) :)

I broke out in a cold sweat when I read the first three paragraphs, but then it got really good. :)

ADVANCE REVIEW: Resurrection
reviewed by Daniel Elkin

ADVANCE REVIEW! Resurrection will go on sale Tuesday, January 24, 2011.

I was convinced after reading the first 35 or so pages of Resurrection, by Arwen Elys Dayton, that this sci-fi novel was written by a precocious teenager who had been raised on a steady diet of Star Trek reruns, Mountain Dew, over-reaching praise from his or her parents about the extent of his or her talent and really good intentions. The first pages of this novel are bogged down in pretty lifeless exposition. I mean, for goodness sake, the first sentence of the novel is, "The feeling was gray, like dawn, but harder to define."

Then I looked at the author's biography which reads: "Arwen Elys Dayton was born on the West Coast of the United States to a math professor father and a romantic mother, who named her after an elf in the Lord of the Rings."

For the sake of this review, though, instead of tossing the book aside and attending to what I thought would be the better writing of my high school freshmen's To Kill a Mockingbird essays, I stuck with Resurrection, and let me tell you, this decision made all the difference.

Once the expository details were established and put aside, Dayton began to show her real talents as a writer. From truthful character development to gripping action scenes, from a thought-provoking rewriting of history to expansive alien worlds, Dayton has created a fast-paced, fun to read 422 page science fiction epic that I ended up devouring in less than a day.

Through an intricate narrative structure that expertly builds drama through the manipulation of time, Dayton has built a engaging story in a completely realized world populated with believable and remarkable characters.

The sophisticated plot revolves around three central ideas: a war between two alien races, the Kinley and the Lucien; an early Kinley expedition to Earth during the time of the ancient Egyptian Empire; and the search for a lost technology in the modern world that could put an end to the alien war. The intersection between the three ideas pulls the novel together. Dayton is able to do this all seamlessly through her characters. As the plot unfolds, the conceits of "good guy" and "bad guy" break down as everybody ends up having to do awful things in pursuit of their goals. 

One of the main characters is Pruitt, a female Kinley solider, who endures both emotional tragedy and some serious beat-downs in her quest to find the tech that could save her world. She is a heroine that you care about, displaying all the right attributes of empathy, intelligence, and bravery.  Dayton layers her with enough flaws and vulnerability, though, so that you understand her motivations. As with the rest of the "aliens" in this novel, she is completely human.

I was a little worried that the flashback sequences reframing the creation of the Great Pyramids of Giza would end up being a little too "new-agey" for my tastes, but, once again, as in the rest of the novel, Dayton's characters become the central focus of this part to such an extent that any sort of spiritual "touchy-feely" stuff gets subsumed into the development of the narrative. It's really great stuff and, in its own way, completely engaging and believable.

Arwen Elys Dayton has really pulled off a great story here with Resurrection. It's fun, engrossing, fast-paced, and pure entertainment. I understand why Amazon has tagged this novel to be a part of their initial slate of sci-fi books they're publishing under their 47North imprint.

---

Daniel Elkin has been reading and commenting on comics since the mid '70s when he used to wear a great deal of brown corduroy. Currently he lives in Northern California where brown corduroy is slowly becoming fashionable again. Daniel has worked in bars, restaurants, department stores, classrooms, and offices. He is a published poet, member of MENSA, committed father, gadfly and bon vivant. He can over-intellectualize just about anything and is known to have long Twitter conversations with himself (@DanielElkin).

P.S. He keeps a blog, Your Chicken Enemy.

Young the Giant

I can hardly buy albums anymore, because I usually end up liking the ONE SONG that got me to buy the album, and that's about it.


So it was with some trepidation that I bought and began to work my way through Young the Giant's self-titled album.

I decided to make the purchase after loving the song "Cough Syrup." Sure, "Cough Syrup" and "My Body" may be the keys to get you into the rest of the album, but it turns out the other songs fully live up to the promise of the few that have come out as singles (or whatever the current equivalent is of the single).

http://www.facebook.com/youngthegiant

"God Made Man," "12 Fingers," "Garands".... There's a lot of good stuff here.

http://www.youngthegiant.com/

I like their abstract lyrics. They might not make a whole lot of sense literally, but they capture emotion really well.

This has become my go-to album for the book I'm working on.

Some of their songs...

India: Ambani house and slums

We became obsessed with this building. It's the Ambani residence, 27 stories tall, 400,000 square feet of living space. 

It was build a few years ago for the six members of the Ambani family: Mr. Ambani, his wife, their three kids and his mother. It's serviced by 600 staff, because 500 really wouldn't have been enough.

Just in front of it is this other really nice building with a lot of laundry hanging out of the windows. The people who live there probably only have about 50 servants.

Here's what blows my mind. Not far from the Ambani house are bottom-rung-of-human-existence slums. And these slums were fairly small in comparison to the gigantic slum to the north of the city. 

Here's the edge of the slum.

This slum is right across the street from the Four Seasons Mumbai. In fact from the rooftop bar (below)...

You look down across the slum toward the water.

Here's an incredibly well produced video showing basically the exact same thing as the pictures above, in case you are really bored:

India...

We were in India about a week ago. It was my first time there.

Sky and I had the romantic notion of finding a place where we could live with the kids for a year out of the "bubble" in which we find ourselves in our beautiful home in the hills above Santa Monica.

India attracted us because it's a country going through a transformative expansion in so many ways. We wanted to see entrepreneurs and schools and daily life.

What we found was a country still very much in the Third World, improving, but not as quickly as we had imagined.

Mind you, on this first trip, we only went to Mumbai. That's a bit like visiting the US and only going to Detroit. (Except that Detroit does not have 20 million people in it, last time I checked.) We are in no way experts on the country. We've barely dipped a toe in India's fragrant waters, as it were.

I think we were half expecting to watch the plot of Slumdog Millionaire unfold before us as we drove through the city. We did find slumdog and millionaire, but the two did not ever overlap. More on that in a later post. The disparity between rich and poor is breathtaking.

I'm going to do a few blog posts about the trip. It's past bedtime right now and I want to get something up, so this is just a start: the Taj and Gateway of India. We arrived in Mumbai at night, and these were the very first things we saw when we woke up.

We stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which has been in business since 1903.

It's quite nice, though a tad musty in the rooms facing the harbor.

Interior corridor and gallery.

Right across the street is the Gateway of India, a forlorn sort of tourist spot. 

I like this picture of the little kid picking up seeds for the birds. In the background is a huge crowd. The plaza around the monument is enormous, so maybe that doesn't look like a lot of people, but it is.

The resolution on the picture above is not great, and you can't read the inscription. So here's a much better picture I took from someone else's Flckr stream, which shows it nicely:

The monument does have a sort of "Bow down before me, my lowly subjects" type vibe, but it's also kind of cool. Boats can pull up just below it, as you can see here, so it's part of a working harbor.

More to come: beggars and slums and bureaucracy and a cow...

I know there was a giant bridge here a couple minutes ago...

I've become obsessed with the construction on the bridges across the 405--and I have time to be obsessed because the construction often brings all traffic out of the Westside to a slow, long crawl that makes me wish I were listening to the audio version of the Encyclopedia Britannica or something equally long but more exciting.

A new south side was added to the Sunset Bridge, and the old half was just hacked off and carted away on Saturday night. Don't ask me how. It was there on Saturday, and then it was gone. I'm kind of impressed.

Nice mention of Resurrection in Christian Science Monitor and Publishers Weekly

Christian Science Monitor: New Amazon Sci-Fi Imprint

 Publishers Weekly: New Amazon Sci-Fi Imprint

Willamette Valley wine country vs. Los Angeles

I was up in Oregon's Willamette Valley wine country for a few days. Something different in the air up here. Possibly oxygen. Best nights of sleep I've had in months. Here's the view I woke up to there:

I'm not saying LA doesn't have its charms. It really shines when you photograph it out an airplane window:

Note the tidy arrangement of semi trucks in the endless sea of concrete.

And here is the LA river, adding its gentle beauty to our landscape:

See if you can find your house:

On a separate note, I am excited about the new International Terminal at LAX. It's nice to see LAX getting some upgrades.

 It looks pretty cool:

To Santa Barbara by Motorcycle

We drove from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara by motorcycle this week. I like this shot.

And here's me reflected in Sky's helmet.

There's some ghosting in the picture below, but what can you expect when taking a shot with your iPhone on the back of a motorcycle going 70+ miles per hour? (Don't tell my kids.) I love this stretch of PCH.

You can kind of see me reflected in the helmet here too.

In Montecito. The bike was a rental, and probably designed for people a little bit bigger than we are. But it was fun!

National Geographic article "Animal Minds" by Virginia Morell

This is a really terrific article about animal intelligence. The last section, which talks about dolphins who have been taught the word "create" and are then asked to "create a new trick" is very, very cool.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text

The Thing looks pretty good.

Okay, I want to see this! Great set up: the bad guy could be any one of the good guys.

Another great day on the set of Raising Hope, shadowing director Mike Fresco. What a great guy.

This episode has a very funny fight sequence, complete with a stunt man for a ridiculous leap off a balcony. Here's Mike taking the actors through a rehearsal.

It was over 100 degrees in Chatsworth for a very long day, but comedy cannot be stopped!