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“When the economy makes big news, many photographs of people at work come across the wires, usually to help illustrate a particular story or event. By collecting these disparate photos over the past few months, I found that a global portrait emerged of we humans producing things. People assembling, generating, and building items small and large, mundane and expensive, trivial and important.”
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“If you headed out to the theater and saw Coraline this past weekend, then you saw the main character cycle through an arsenal of more than 200,000 facial expressions. To put that in perspective, Jack, the main character from The Nightmare Before Christmas could do about 800 when that movie was released in 1993. The improvement didn’t come from insomniac sculptors, but rather from a machine that literally prints 3D objects.” With video!
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“So here in all its glory is a pattern for the Coraline gloves. The stripe sequence inside the pattern itself is as true to the itty bitty original gloves (by the amazing Althea Crome) as I can make it.” (via Neil Gaiman’s blog)
Feb 222009
Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones
Publication: Greenwillow Books (1995), Hardcover, 214 pages / ISBN 0688133606
Genre: Fantasy, YA
Rating: 5/5
Find @ Amazon
Challenges: Read Your Own Books 2009 (#9)
I absolutely love this book. I wasn’t really expecting to, since the first chapter had so many weird names and so many people being introduced that I couldn’t keep them straight (and I still had trouble with that even after half of them exited the main story). By the time I got to the second chapter, however, I was fully entrenched into the world of Cart and Cwidder.
Summary from Amazon:
For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, four extraordinary young people — from the past, present, and future — nust join forces to reunify their beloved land.
When Moril inherits his father’s prized instrument — a Cwidder said to have belonged to one of the Undying — he must learn to harness its strange power in time to prevent a destructive civil war.
So, yeah, the beginning was a little tough to get past. I actually tried reading this in January but couldn’t continue because of the name-dumping, but I got over it and kept reading (obviously). I’m so glad I did! This is such an awesome book, and I can’t wait to read the next three. I love the setting, the characters, the writing, the plot! Everything! Yay!
It’s such a quiet, nearly subdued story for about, what, half of it? And then things start happening and it all picks up ’til the crescendo at the end. Then it gets a little quiet again, but the kind of quiet that’s just before a storm hits. Unfortunately that storm is put off until the next book, Drowned Ammet, but hints of it hover nonetheless.
Parts of it are a little sad, mostly because of the fighting and wars and the horrible things associated with that, but it has it’s light-hearted moments, too. I especially liked the growth of the characters, and the ending was especially good. It left enough room open to expansion into other books while still resolving nearly all the issues brought up in this book. What more could I ask for in a book?
I really only had one problem, a tiny little thing– how to pronounce “cwidder”! I think it’s like “quid-der”? Whatever, it’s a small niggle and I just made a pronunciation up, anyway.
As a side note, according to Wikipedia this is the first book written for the quartet but the third book chronologically? That has the potential to be confusing, but then maybe it’ll be like the Chrestomanci series, where the books don’t necessarily have to be read in internal chronological order to be enjoyed (plus DWJ recommends reading them in published order, anyway). Guess I’ll find out later, eh?
Anyway, Cart and Cwidder is highly recommended!
Feb 222009
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Pictures of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at a reading/performance! Yay!
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