The Warrior's Apprentice
I'm not quite sticking to my schedule of going to bed by 11:00 where the weekends are concerned. But Friday night I got to bed by 12:30, and last night I was asleep by midnight. That's not too bad. I was basically awake by 9 am this morning but spent the next 45 minutes rolling around, not really ready to get up.
Still, that gave me an hour and a half for my morning routine, plus reading the Sunday paper and puttering around the apartment, before I went off to this month's WisCon meeting.
The meeting was not all that exciting, which is no big surprise. Things rolled forward slowly. There's a rumor afoot that the woman I met last weekend at David's housewarming party may be doing our publicity. And we have various open and potentially-open spots on the convention committee, in case anyone out there wants to volunteer. (Of course, it helps if you live within driving distance of Madison!)
After the meeting I had to go over to Monona Terrace to test out the hardware and software configurations for the classes I'm teaching at our User's Group Meeting this week. That took about an hour and a half, and didn't turn up any problems that couldn't be fixed in five minutes (more to the point, which were fixed in five minutes). Yes, it was tedium itself: I had to test out each of three different programs for each of two separate Windows logins on each of 18 different PCs. I'm pretty happy it only took me 90 minutes, actually. I got into a nice rhythm where I was testing two-to-four machines at a time, typing at one while the other three were in various stages of logging in, starting up programs, or logging out. Whee!
I always dread teaching and things like UGM, but it never turns out to be that bad.
I spent the later evening finishing Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice. I can see the point behind the title, but I find it a rather lame and generic title, overall. Other than that, though, it's a lot of fun. Several genuinely moving scenes, and quite a few little chuckles to be found in the adventure.
The protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, is the son of a prominent noble on the planet Barrayar. Due to a failed assassination attempt on his father while his mother was pregnant, Miles was born with extremely brittle bones, and is therefore quite short and fragile. He's also very smart and clever, however. After failing to get into the Imperial army academy, Miles heads off on a vacation with his bodyguard and the bodyguard's daughter. Miles is basically a good samaritan (as well as someone who's looking for things to keep his time and mind occupied), so an effort to save a man from killing himself due to his spaceship being repossessed leads Miles to smuggling weapons into a war zone, capturing a war ship and assembling his own mercenary fleet.
Bujold's surface style is essentially one of swashbuckling space opera. Deeper, the basic approach of this book and the later Memory is to set Miles' basic good and honest nature against his need for adventure and his inherent think-fast-on-his-feet cleverness. The latter obviously gets him in a lot of trouble, but it also the thing that gets him out of trouble without compromising the former. (Although I think it doesn't quite work fully in The Warrior's Apprentice, since Miles is to a certain degree saved by sheer luck and the goodwill of the forces that oppose him.)
I think I needed to read something like this right now. I've been reading so much deep and complicated and serious and dour stuff over the last several months (speaking of prose more than of comic books; although they each suck up my reading time, mentally they don't register as the same thing) that something more witty and clever is good medicine.
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