Music: Claire de Lune

I love this:

Photography: Giant's Causeway Part 2

A continuation from this entry:

Songs: Silver Lady

This is good:

Board games: Sushi Go

This is a fun little card game. You start off with a hand of cards showing different types of sushi and have to choose one card to keep each turn and then pass the rest of your hand on to the next person. At the end of the round the cards you kept give you points. The number of points the cards are worth depends on the other cards you have, and the cards the other players have too. You have to make a quick decision on which card you're going to keep by predicting what other cards are going to come up and what cards other people are going to keep, so for a quick and simple game there is actually quite a lot of strategy to it. The game also changes dramatically depending on how many people are playing. If there are only two people playing, there are only two hands of cards in the game, so you can very quickly learn what cards are available. If more people are playing there is a lot more guesswork involved. And the pictures on the cards are so cute!

Songs: Bend It!

I like this one:

Book Reviews: The Magic Finger (spoilers)

As I've mentioned before, I like to reread my old childhood books when I go home, and recently I've been working my way through the Roald Dahls. The latest one I've read is The Magic Finger. It's a very short one, and I got through it in one sitting, but it certainly packs a punch. It's about a little girl with a magic finger that tingles when she gets angry and makes weird and wonderful magical things happen. She uses this magic finger to teach her hunting-mad neighbours not to hunt, by forcing them to swap places with a family of ducks and learn some empathy.

As I said, it's small but mighty. It's very well written, and the anti-hunting message comes through loud and clear. The difference between good and evil is also much less clear-cut than in a lot of other children's books. Even though the family of hunters is clearly the villains, as you follow them on their journey as ducks you can't help sympathising with them and how lost, confused and uncomfortable they feel. Their redemption is very genuine and you're left feeling that they really have changed and are on the right side now. Not bad for something only a few dozen pages long!

Songs: Proud Mary

It's a classic:

Book Reviews: The Ambassador's Mission

This is another book by Trudi Canavan, set in the same universe as her Black Magician trilogy and her The Magician's Apprentice prequel. It's the first book in a trilogy called The Traitor Spy trilogy. It's got many of the same characters as the Black Magician trilogy, but the focus has shifted onto the next generation.

I liked the jump forward in time and how the world I knew was facing new threats and challenges which were very different to previous books. Though I liked the new characters, I actually thought that the older characters were still the more interesting group. The younger generation seemed to lack their own identities and were merely their parents' children. As the start of a trilogy it works well, but considered by itself it's not as good. The ending isn't very satisfying and there are a lot of questions left unanswered. The focus seems to have been on setting up the next books rather than having much action in this one. Still, it has achieved what it meant to though, in that I'm eager to find out what happens in the next book.

Songs: Cover Me

One from The Boss:

Book Reviews: The Magician's Apprentice

The Magician's Apprentice is a prequel, from one of my favorite authors, Trudi Canavan. It's written as ancient histroy to her Black Magician trilogy. The Black Magician trilogy concerns the goings on in the Magician's Guild in the land of Kyralia. The Magician's Apprentice is set long before, and is about how the Guild was set up, and about how one young apprentice discovered the secrets of healing magic, which had eluded magicians for so long. There is also a third important character, Stara, a young woman from Sachaka, Kyralia's enemy. In Sachaka women are very much second class citizens, and so Stara runs away and starts an organisation called the Traitors. She wants to set up a women's sanctuary, but in later books the organisation has also become guerilla fighters and assassins. As a prequel it works well. When it's set there is no Guild for educating young magicians and instead magicians each take on an apprentice and teach them individually. But of course everybody teaches slightly different things. The way the magicians come to the conclusion that setting up a guild to share knowledge would be a good idea is convincing, and the way the young magician, Tessia, slowly discovers the secrets of healing magic is very good too. There's a properly nasty and threatening villain, Takado, who drives the plot forward nicely.

I do feel, though, that it falls into a trap, that plenty of prequels do, of being more concerned with fitting into the larger narrative than with working well on its own. The main story could have been more exciting, and there's a shocking bit in the epilogue where, with NO warning, you find that in subsequent years Tessia's master was assassinated. I know the epilogue was trying to sound like a history book, but I could have done without that bit.