ARR's birthday

ARR wanted a truck birthday again this year. This time, though, he's old enough to invite his own friends instead of ours. So we had three other kids from school come over.

I'll admit I'm feeling a little smugly self-congratulatory. We did a really good job of putting together this party. We had little wooden trucks for everyone to paint and take home as their favors. I came up with "Truck Bingo", which was wildly successful. (Different kinds of trucks instead of numbers; everyone had the same trucks, just in a different order so no one would get upset if they didn't have a given truck; Skittles for counters and when you filled a row, you could eat all the Skittles in the row; we kept going until we pulled all the trucks, so everyone got to eat exactly 16 Skittles in the end.) I got multiple yellow plastic tablecloths and decorated them with road lines of duct tape, and we just whisked off the tablecloth and replaced it each time there was a mess.

And I made a bulldozer cake that I'm really proud of. The body is dairy-free banana cake, and the wheels and blade are actually Rice Krispie treats.

Book Reviews

#9: Noises Off by Michael Frayn. 4. I'd read this farce a number of years ago; I re-read it immediately after seeing the current Broadway production to see what had been in the script and what had been added. (The entire second act is essentially in pantomime, so there's enormous room for elaboration in staging.) I'm having a lot of trouble rating this because of the difficulty in evaluating it as a object to be read rather than performed. Some plays, like much of Shakespeare, work as well if not better on the page than on the stage. This one, less so. For a standalone reading experience, it's maybe a 3. It's mildly amusing. When performed by a talented cast, it becomes a gut-busting 5. My face hurt for half an hour after leaving the theater. Frayn doesn't intend this to be read, so it seems unfair to penalize him for that. But really, don't read this--go see it in person. (Or rent the movie, which apparently is pretty great.)

#10: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. 4. This has similar issues of readability vs performability as Noises Off, which I read immediately before it. Added in is the fact that this play features some of the most benignly malignant characters I've ever seen. They're awful, awful, dramatically unpleasant people, but in a situation which limits the damage they can do. We avoid pretty much all of the horror humans can inflict upon each other--there's no torture or murder or rape or any other violent nastiness--and stick just to attempting to completely crush one another's souls. I can see how it would be a tour de force for talented actors--playing out interlocked desperately codependent relationships gives a lot of room to chew up scenery like there's no tomorrow. But I have to say, I did not particularly enjoy inviting these people into my head.

#11: The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher. 4. This is a classic ghost story...in space. It's actually really impressive how well Christopher manages to meld the "vengeful ancient ghost from legends" (including all the standard horror tropes of deceased loved ones reappearing, whispering voices, disappearing minor characters, cold and sudden darkness, serious mind-fuckery, and so on) with a space opera derelict research station. You can't really decide how reliable a narrator the protagonist is until almost the end of the novel, which just increases the level of creepiness--something is definitely going horribly wrong, but how much is in his head and how much isn't is left up for debate for quite some time. I appreciated how Christopher manages to tie his mystical manifestations into the science fiction trappings through clever world-building. That said, the initial chronology is kind of needlessly confusing.

#12: Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. 5. The Nazis have superheroes. The Brits have sorcerers. It all goes quite badly for basically everyone involved. None of the basic ideas here are particularly original; it's the development that's graceful and horrifying. Our viewpoint characters begin well-intentioned, and then as the situation becomes more desperate, are increasingly willing to make worse and worse choices. At what point do the good guys cease to be good, after too many expedient decisions? But even as their superiors go to pieces, the central characters never lose their humanity, just become gradually more damaged. All of it is overseen by a sociopathic oracle who's delightfully malevolent. Watching her maneuver people like chess pieces is fascinating. I hadn't realized, when picking it up, that this was the beginning of a trilogy, and was fooled by the short story at the end into thinking there was a prayer of wrapping it all up. I'll admit being almost ready to throw the book across the room in frustration when it ended; I'll have to be satisfied with tracking down the sequel instead.