In Which I Am Feisty

I have a phone interview tomorrow morning.  It's for a part-time job, but one that might be completely awesome and personally beneficial.  More to come later about that!

In my humble opinion, Sarah Palin is a lout who appeals to louts.

Today, between job-hunting sessions and general housekeeping duties, I finished reading Charles Stross' The Family Trade.  I found it pretty entertaining, but there was something significantly off about it.  The heroine, a successful young woman, becomes assertive, and then aggressive, and then vulgar and finally completely unlike her original self.  At first, I sort of liked her, even if she was a little bit dry and difficult to know.  By the end, I sort of despised her and wondered where her true fire had gone, and why it had been replaced with a machine gun.  Her flagrant use of expletives and propensity to call other young women "baby" or "babe" just really effing irritated me!  Who does that?  Not only that, but it is almost embarrassingly obvious that the author is slinging around some technological jargon of which he only marginally understands the nuances.  I kid you not, the main character was described as having to replace the "hard disk" of a digital camera after storing 1000 pictures.  Memory card, mayhap, would have been the proper term.  The author was going for edgy, but ended up gauche, with a hint of kitsch.

Also, the main character goes, in a span of two weeks, from underpaid journalist content with her relationships and middle-class lifestyle, to a power economist, international relations theory expert, weapons master, poli sci guru and large-scale political manipulator.  She also ends up having an uncanny, even unlikely head for machination, and it rang false to this reader.

Wow, I ended up railing on that book.  Guess I hadn't really thought about how I truly felt about it before sitting down to write this post.

I am restarting Ian Irvine's The View from the Mirror series, and this time I'm going to finish it!  Locus had it right, though, in labeling the series "...a worldbuilding labor of love."  Sometimes I have to labor through the worldbuilding, which is completely unlike me, and saying something.  At least his characters act oddly on a consistent basis!