Hi, all!
Costa Rica was beautiful and I will definitely be posting about it in a day or so. The trip was a packaged tour with my cousins Greg and Janet and their mother, Beth, and Janet’s husband, Larry. It was great hanging out with them all; I’d only ever met Greg and Beth once or twice, and I never had met Janet before (I have tons of cousins, but none that live in the same state I do.)
I also turned out to really enjoy the “packaged tour” setup, where the tour director took care of everything and there was nothing at all to worry about. The tour director was wonderful and knew everything about Costa Rica and totally kept everything perfectly on schedule, and the whole experience was almost completely stress-free and seamless (there’s always some stress about connecting flights, that can’t be helped, but in the event all the air travel worked out just fine, too). There was one guy on the tour who I started referring to as Complaining Dude halfway through, but it’s almost inevitable you’ll get one guy like that on a trip, I suppose, and it was sort of fun to be snarky about him, anyway.
The tour was well-designed, with visits to both the Caribbean coast and the Pacific coast, plus various volcanoes, many producing plumes of smoke — I really didn’t know how volcanically active Costa Rica is till this trip! This was a Caravan tour, btw, in case you’re curious.
Of course, if you’re going to drive around a country and see different sites, then you’re going to be on a bus a good bit of the time. I was endlessly grateful that I can read on a bus, even on the bumpiest roads. I got my Kindle specifically for this trip, and what with airports and buses (and waking up VERY EARLY every morning) wound up reading eight books:
Emilie and the Hollow World, by Martha Wells
Shadow Unit 2, by Emma Bull et al
The Medair duology, by Andrea Höst
The Touchstone trilogy, also by Andrea Höst
and, in bits around the novels, Writing Down the Dragon, a nonfiction analysis of Tolkein, by Tom Simon
And I will post about all of those later, too. I will say briefly that I was disappointed with Emilie, pleased with the second Shadow Unit collection, and very happy with everything by Höst. I’m going to go get everything else she’s ever written, next. I’m not even going to bother reading the descriptions; just buy ’em all. There, done — there were three on Amazon that I didn’t have. Now I do, with the touch of a button. Poof! The Kindle is a wonderful thing.
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Welcome back!
I just dumped DECONSTRUCTING TOLKIEN as not worth the pixels. I look forward to your report on WRITING DOWN THE DRAGON.
I was really disappointed in Emilie as well, but in a way I’m glad to hear I wasn’t alone since that was my first Martha Wells. I still feel very encouraged to read more of her work! I have the first Touchstone book and Hunting by Host and clearly I need to carve out time asap.
You MUST read something else by Wells! I don’t know whether to put the Raksura trilogy at the top, or Wheel of the Infinite. I would love to know what you thought of those!
Thanks! And I haven’t actually quite finished the Tom Simon one, but I’ll eventually let you know what I think.
One chapter of Writing Down the Dragon is available online here, at the author’s site
http://bondwine.com/2013/01/11/the-rhetoric-of-middle-earth/
and here’s his most recent loosely-related essay, which does not appear in the book. It’s essentially an exercise in philology which explains the context of one of Tolkien’s key inspirations in more detail than I’ve seen anywhere else.
http://bondwine.com/2013/04/10/eala-earendel-a-study-in-names/
Thanks, Craig!