The Rest of This "Year"

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Longtime readers know that I set my goals around an approximation of the academic year, starting on October 1st. That means That means we've officially entered the "Oh gods, I'm so behind!" part of the year. (See progress bars on the right for details). What this means for the blog is that from here until the end of September, we're going to be throwing the schedule out the window, in favor of working on whatever I'm most behind on at any given moment. During this time, I might write as many as 26 additional blog posts, but these will not come at any kind of reasonable intervals, and the reread posts may not strictly alternate between Dresden Files and Wheel of Time. Plans are underway to create a less uneven and chaotic experience for next year. - watch this space for details. One of the big things I need to figure out is how to make book reviews work the way they're supposed to. Also the reading list for this year is now up to date. 

Probably you'll be getting a Dresden Files post sometime this week. Tonight? Friday? Who knows, not me. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things.

Wheel of Time Reread - The Eye of the World Chapter 1 - Part 3

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Bran is standing outside the inn, wearing the silver balance scales medallion that's his badge of office as mayor, along with the real scales that he uses to weigh the coins of merchants coming in to buy wool and tabac. This is the first time we're told what the exports of the Two Rivers are, although we could potentially have guessed about the wool, given that the status of lambs has already been mentioned twice at this point. It establishes part of why they're in such a fix, with the spring refusing to come. Their cash crops, the things they devote the largest part of their agricultural space and labor to producing, aren't edible. If they were growing say, grain as a primary export, and had a bad year, there would at least be options, decide how much to sell and how much to hold onto and eat, depending on whether they could get a price on what little their was that would let them buy whatever else was needed. They do grow some of their own vegetables, but this doesn't seem to include much in the way of starchy, high calories root vegetables like turnips and potatoes, much less cereal grains. (Although Cenn Buie makes reference to root cellars, so maybe they do and it's just not talked about). This is a little hard to gauge, of course. The series spends very little time in the Two Rivers, almost none of it under normal circumstances, and we don't see any farms other than the al'Thors', so it's hard to know what exactly everyone is growing. There's a mill, and a miller, so someone very well might be growing wheat, rye, or barley, even though it's never mentioned, the same way the existence of honey cakes implies the possibility that someone is keeping bees. 

Bran wouldn't normally be wearing the medallion, since it's not Bel Tine yet, but with everyone so stressed about the weather, Rand figures maybe Winternight, the night before Bel Tine, when everyone visits each other's houses, exchanging small gifts and having snacks, is reason enough. This, at least, I recognize as a kind of mashup of Halloween (itself an intensely syncretic holiday), Christmas, leaving may baskets (appropriately), and for some reason I'm getting Martinmas vibes even though there's no actual description here of lanterns or singing. Given what we're told about how ready Two Rivers folk generally are to sing and dance, I can't imagine they don't sing. 

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Tam and Bran talk a little bit about the wolves and the weather. Mostly Bran is complaining, village council member to village council member, about people complaining to him, as though he can do anything about it. This, of course, prompts Cenn Buie to start in about the storks. By Bel Tine, there should be storks nesting on the roofs, and it's a bad omen that they're not. That's kind of understandable - storks return to the same nests every year, and they're not small. Having a bunch of big stork nests everywhere, standing empty when their owners should have returned by now, is going to make the storks themselves conspicuous in their absence. It's unsettling. Cenn has a longish list of complaints, about Nynaeve, about the very real possibility of starvation, but what catches my notice here is his intuition that the winter isn't planning to end at all. The thing is, he's right, and I'm not sure that Tam's crack about Cenn listening to the wind like a Wisdom is all that far off the mark This isn't the only piece of evidence that Cenn Buie can channel, or if not then that he has one of the other weird talents, along the lines of sniffing, or Min's viewings. Tam asks, sarcastically, if Cenn is a soothayer, a term which I don't think we see at all after the first book, and which is only otherwise used in Eye of the World in a discussion of how Min isn't one. We don't really know what soothsayers are in this setting, but sensible people like Tam act as though they're a real thing, so maybe whatever a soothsayer is, maybe Cenn actually is one. 

At this point in the conversation, Mat surreptitiously gets Rand's attention, and invites him to come release a badger on the Green. Literally the first thing we're told about Mat here is that he "never seemed to grow up", which is true enough in its way, but I think creates some unfair anchoring bias about his character development, especially in the early books when he' still pretty annoying, but increasingly responsible and possessed of more perspective than the other characters give him credit for. Rand, who is far more...overtly responsible than Mat, refuses, saying that he promised to help unload the cart. This is an echo of Tam at the beginning of the chapter, when we're told how he promised to bring the brandy and cider. And it has weight that carries all the way forward to the thing in A Memory of Light where Rand says that the difference between him and Lews Therin is that he was raised better. 

Apparently Mat saw the Myrdraal too, although he doesn't know what it was any more than Rand does. They agree that he was terrifying, and Nat says that for a second he actually thought the cloaked figure might have been the Dark One, or one of the Foresaken. Apparently when he was little his mother frightened him with stories of how Ishamael or Aginor would get him if he didn't "mend his ways". I'd be immensely interested to know what he was told Aginor would do to him, but we're never told. Rand responds by reciting the catechism about how the Dark One and all the Foresaken are bound in Shayol Ghul until the end of time, and were sheltered in the Creator's hand. While it's not immediately obvious at this point in the series, this is actually the sum total of canonical religion in this setting. They don't have a bible, or any equivalent. They don't have churches or clergy. Rituals and holidays are apparently secular, even High Chasaline, although it's hard to tell in a setting that apparently only has one faith. They just have these two sentences. Freaking Veggie Tales took longer to make essentially the same point, and it wasn't trying to cover all of Christianity. I use the word "catachism" here because it's what people in the series call it, but a catechism is "a summary or exposition of doctrine...traditionally used in...religious teaching of children and adult converts" (wikipedia), and so far as I can tell, this is the doctrine in its entirety. If there ever were a longer or more involved version, it's been lost or abandoned for a very long time now. Since the 1500s, catechisms are also usually in a question and answer format, which this isn't, although if I squint my brain a little, I can sort of imagine it having once been part of something that was?

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Mat's other thought is that perhaps the man in the black cloak was the Dragon. This is also the first time that title is mentioned, excepting the prologue, and we're given no additional context on what that name has come to mean. They agree that it would be better if they could tell the grownups what they saw, but since both of them have already told their fathers and not been believed, they're not sure how to go about it, and Rand notes that since Mat is such a well-known prankster that he's sometimes blamed even for things he didn't do, his corroboration won't be worth much. 

There's a small thing here that I find interesting - as far as Rand knows, murder is not a thing in the Two Rivers. Obviously this is drawing from the thing in Lord of the Rings where Hobbits don't deliberately harm one another, made realistic for a human population (they have fist fights and such, but they don't kill each other), but there's something about this that strikes me as significant, even though I can't quite put my finger on what it is. 

Their discussion is interrupted when Tam noticed Mat and promptly drafts him into helping unload the cart. Mat's efforts to escape are disrupted by the news that there's a Gleeman in town for Bel Tine. This naturally causes a lot of excitement for Rand and Mat, although Cenn Buie thinks it's a waste of money. He feels much the same about the fireworks, which leaves me with questions about how exactly money works in the Two Rivers. Plainly the Village Council has access to some kind of petty cash fun for things like arranging entertainment on feast days, but where does this money actually come from? Do the members of the Village Council kick in money for stuff, or is there some kind of hyperlocal taxation going on? Does the Women's Circle have a similar cash reserve? I'm guessing that Cenn's objection here is that the Gleeman and the fireworks are coming out of the same money that would be used to like, bring in extra food in the event of a famine, and that's not entirely unreasonable, although I'm with Bran on the importance of keeping spirit up, and it sounds like he sent for the fireworks months ago, whn there wasn't yet any reason to believe things would get this bad. I would love to know how he hired Thom. Gleemen aren't all that common, even in an almost-city like Baerlon, so I guess that around the same time he sent away for the fireworks, Bran would have put out some kind of advertisement to which Thom responded (presumably by messenger?) at some point in the interim, which mans he randomly happened to be in Baerlon sometime last fall? 

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It's also established here that the harp and flute are the signature instruments of a gleeman, as much a badge of his office as the patched cloak. I note this largely because it had an impact on the 1995 justified fantasy series Singers of Nevya, in which Cantors and Cantrixes uses these same instruments (albeit with in-world names) to maintain the light and warmth of Nevya's few inhabited places, while lower status Singers use the flue alone to do much the same thing on a smaller scale, guiding those without their Gift through the frozen wasteland between the Houses. This hierarchy of instruments also comes from Wheel of Time, as we see later in Thom's willingness to teach Rand and Mat the flue while refusing to let them touch his harp. 

Mat asks why Bran didn't tell people there was going to be a gleeman, and Bran prompts him to think it through. It's Rand who figured out that if Bran let anticipating build up, when it was possible he wouldn't come, the disappointment would be a bigger blow to public morale than the excitement would be a boost. Rand's ability to figure this out is like, the second or third actual piece of characterization Rand gets - he's smart about specifically this kind of thing, and that's gonna be important later. It's also significant that this is what the Village Council, and in particular the Mayor, does. Unless Perrin's assessment when he comes back to the Two Rivers is wildly off-base, the people here don't need a lot of day-to-day leadership, so a big portion of Bran's job is keeping everyone's mental health good so they can continue to make good decisions for themselves. Bran is impressed by Rand's reasoning, and suggests that he might be on the Council himself some day. He also hints that Nynaeve has expressed objections to Cenn Buie's presence on the Council. One gets the impression that in this place, at this time, the traditional opposition between the Village Council and the Women's Circle, between the Mayor and the Wisdom, may be more of a hinderance than a healthy system of checks and balances. Not to say that Bran should remove Cenn from the council, any more than the Women's Circle should remove Nynaeve as Wisdom just because Cenn thinks she's too young, but I get the sense that Bran is frustrated that he can't even openly consider her input.

Covert-responsible Mat sticks around to help unload the cart, even after Rand assures him that he doesn't have to. He takes the opportunity to give Rand a hard time about his crush on Egwene. Rand himself is immensely confused about his feelings there, and can't figure out whether he wants to see her or not. 

This has been...one chapter of the first book of this immense series. I hope you're having as much fun reading these as I am writing them, because we're gonna be here for a while. As usual, we'll have Dresden Files chapter 21 on Saturday, and the first post for Eye of the World Chapter 2 this coming Wednesday. We may experience greater delays than usual, because I've got some paying work coming, and that's going to take up some of my time for the rest of this month. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 20

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Harry wakes up (except not really) somewhere dark and smooth and featureless, except for a pool of light with no apparent source. This is where we meet Inner Harry for the first time. He looks just like regular Harry, except for the nicer, all-black clothes and the classic evil twin goatee. Despite the facial hair, Inner Harry makes it clear that he is not evil, he's just the subconscious, the instincts and intuition. And he says they need to talk. There's a bit of back and forth where Conscious Harry doesn't want to talk, and Inner Harry explains that he can't do the banter thing, and mostly what strikes me is how serious Inner Harry is. Like, Lirael-level serious. When Harry's being goal oriented, pragmatic, persistent, that's not any of it a strategy or a learned behavior - it's a core personality trait, instinctive. 

On "the banter thing": Inner Harry says he's not good at it, and he mostly doesn't try. This makes sense, and is displayed consistently in every appearance between here and Dead Beat. But when he reappears in Cold Days, his verbal-linguistic skills have taken a massive leap forward. He's suddenly using sarcasm, wordplay and complex metaphor, pop culture references. Heck, at one point he makes a joke in latin. Inconveniently, it's difficult to know if this is related to Bonea's existence or to the Winter Mantle. I'd guess the latter, going by the snowflake badge, but we can talk more about that when we actually get to Cold Days. 

Another small note on the beginning of this interaction - when Conscious Harry is trying to talk away, Inner Harry tells him he can't, because "no matter where you go, there you are". This, of course, is the same thing Uriel said at the end of Ghost Story when Harry asked for "fortune cookie wisdom". This is another thing we're gonna talk about more when we get to it, but it does suggest that in addition to the obvious implications - reassurance about the continuity of the self in the face of not only death but Mab, there may have been a layer of meaning there meant specifically for Inner Harry. 

The first order of business is for Inner Harry to reassure conscious Harry that what happened at the police station, what happened to Murphy, wasn't his fault. This despite the fact that they are both thoroughly convinced that Harry kept things from Murphy on this case, and if that were true it would be at least partly his fault, but he didn't. He kept things from Kim Delaney, but she'd not mentioned in this chapter at all. Even if we accept that he should have figured out Kim's connection to the case sooner, being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, and given that he didn't realize there was any connection until it was too late to do anything, I don't think he can be faulted for failing to volunteer "Oh, unrelatedly, I had a weird conversation with my kinda-apprentice, who is fucking around with greater circles". If I remember correctly, I don't think he's told Murphy about the Streetwolves at this point, or about being approached by Marcone, and he definitely should, at least if she ever starts acting reasonable enough to make conversation possible again, but neither of those things had any bearing on the specific chain of events that began with Murphy deciding to arrest a loup garou on the full moon, despite knowing how dangerous he was, and ended with the police station getting torn apart. Inner Harry's next point, that Conscious Harry needs to stop trying to protect Murphy, and give her close enough to the full pictures that she can start protecting herself, is considerably more valid, 'cause if she has context, rather than just pieces, her ability to figure stuff out on her own won't be so limited by what Harry does or doesn't realize is important. 

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The next point of discussion is why Harry doesn't trust Susan, and I notice that Inner Harry doesn't actually say they should trust her, or that he trusts her. He does, however, suggest that the basis for their mistrust is how things went down with Elaine. His mental illustration for this part is aged up a little from the last time they actually saw Elaine. I don't know if that's significant in some way I'm just not getting, of if Jim Butcher just hadn't yet settled on the age Harry and Elaine were at when things went down. Elaine's pentacle is described here as "identical" to Harry's, except for being less battered. I'm not gonna comment right now on The Controversial Thing - we'll save that for Summer Knight. At this point, of course, Harry is still fully convinced that Elaine betrayed him on purpose, and we get the first details of what actually happened there. Since the things with Elaine wearing only body paint, and DuMorne trying to get Harry to drink from a chalice of blood didn't happen in the flashbacks in Ghost Story, I'm assuming those were after h went back to the house, which we still haven't seen any part of. Inner Harry insists that Elaine is still alive, that they never found a second body, and that part of Harry being able to trust anyone is gonna have to involve consciously accepting that. There is plenty of reason to distrust Susan, because she routinely acts like she is only with Harry for the proximity to the supernatural, but I think I've belabored that sufficiently at this point. 

Inner Harry also wants to talk about Tera, and this is where things get a little weird. He points out that Conscious Harry hasn't confronted her about the secrets she's keeping, which is a little unfair - mostly he hasn't had time. He asks why Conscious Harry is trusting her, and points out that she's not human, and might be manipulating the Alphas. But looking at the trajectory of the conversation, the number of times he changes his position on Tera, I think this is a case of the subconscious needing to be indirect. Conscious Harry hasn't been trusting Tera; he keeps circling back to whether she betrayed MacFinn, whether she and MacFinn are targeting Harry, and by questioning Conscious Harry from this angle, Inner Harry is trying to maneuver him into noticing that he has plenty of reason to trust Tera, and no real reason not to besides "she's not human". And once we get some of that conscious-mind noise out of the way, he has enough room to introduce the thought that they haven't seen the real killer yet, at least not so as to pick them out from the background, and that in addition to the very real possibility that someone is targeting MacFinn over the Northwest Passage project, it could also be monster hunters or something, people who just hate him because he's a werewolf. 

The briefly discuss the known-but-unaddressed threats against Dresden, including Marcone, the Streetwolves, the cops, and the possibility that the former two might be working together. Then Inner Harry has a thought about Margaret, but he doesn't have a chance to say it before they get woken up. Harry's still in the car, and according to Tera, they're being followed. 

This was a weird one to talk about, and even weirder to find images for, since there is literally no scenery and technically nothing happens. It's literally two people in an empty room talking, and honestly I'm impressed that Jim Butcher managed to pull it off as well as he did. Stay tuned for our third Wheel of Time post (Chapter 1 - part 3) on Wednesday, and for Chapter 21 this coming weekend. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Wheel of Time Reread - The Eye of the World - Chapter 1 - Part 2

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The second half of this chapter starts with a description of the Green, which doesn't have as much grass as it should this time of year. The geese don't think there's anything there worth their attention, which sort of implies that geese in this setting...don't eat grass? Alternatively, there might be something a little bit wrong with this grass, which the geese are sensitive enough to pick up on, even if the milk cow that's also staked there isn't. Of course, it's also entirely possible that they're just doing fine eating weeds in the ponds of the Waterwood and just can't be bothered with the sparse grass. 

We get more of the layout of Emond's Field, following the Winespring to the Waterwood, which we're told is swampy in addition to having, as already established, numerous streams and ponds. Th Windespring is described here as "sweet enough to justify its name a dozen times over". Water can be described as "sweet" for a lot of reasons. The Winespring could contain unusually high levels of calcium and iron. It could be a bit alkaline. Heck, the colloquial description of water as "sweet" often just means it's soft water that's good to drink. But given the unusual history of this setting in general and this area in particular, I think it's worth considering that the Winespring may consist partly of heavy water, water where one of the hydrogen molecules is deuterium. It can't all be heavy water, because that would kill everyone for whom it was a primary water source, but enough for the characteristic sweet taste to be detectable. There are basically two ways to get deuterium, and by extension heavy water, in real life. Quite a lot of it was produced during the birth of the universe in which we live, and most of what we use is what's left from the Big Bang - it's in seawater, and can be separated out through industrial processes. It can also be made in a hydrogen-1 fusion reactor, but that isn't really practical. Technically, deuterium is also produced in stars, but it doesn't stay deuterium very long, and I'm almost sure there isn't a star somewhere under the Sand Hills or in the Mountains of Mist. This, assuming it is actually heavy water, leaves two possibilities, on considerably more interesting than the other. Th less interesting option is that there's a ter'angreal somewhere in or near the Winespring's aquifer that makes heavy water, although why anyone would create such a thing I have no idea. The other option, which is more interesting and to my mind more plausible, is that when Eldrene went nuclear during the fall of Manetheren, she in some sense literally went nuclear, creating some kind of ongoing reaction that adds neutrons to some of the water molecules. The Winespring did well up during that part of the battle, so it would make some sense for there to be a connection. 

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There are bonfires already laid for Bel Tine, and the Spring Pole is going up, although Rand does his  best to ignore it - the men are supposed to pretend to be surprised when they see it tomorrow. If this is based on any real world maypole tradition, or any real tradition of any kind, I can't find anything about it. It founds vaguely familiar though, so it's entirely possible that this is a real thing in some context and I'm just not good enough at research. At noon, the unmarried women will dance around it, while the unmarried men sing. If this is a tradition for maypoles or Beltane, I don't recall it, but "the unmarried women all do a thing, and the unmarried men all do a different thing" is certainly a thing for spring fertility rites, which this clearly is. Bel Tine is what, if it weren't so very far removed from the source material, I would call a syncretic tradition, since Beltane and maypole celebrations are actually totally separate things...or they were. I've never in my life participated in a Beltane celebration that didn't include a maypole, but The Eye of the World is a year older than I am, which seems to open up the possibility that this book influenced not just the subsequent literature but actual contemporary neopagan tradition. 

No one in the Two Rivers knows where their Bel Tine traditions came from, or what they're about, but it's an excuse to sing and dance, and that's good enough for them. This, along with the fact that no one knows why the North Road becomes the Old Road south of the Wagon Bridge, serves to underscore that the Two Rivers is a very old place, where things change slowly if they change at all, and that at least as far as Rand knows (and we have no reason to doubt him on this), they like it that way. The information that Two Rivers folk will take pretty much any excuse to sing and dance is an important complication to what we learned in the first half of this chapter about how stubborn they are, how when disaster strikes (and it sometimes does), they go "meh" and start rebuilding. Life in the Two Rivers can be hard, but it's not miserable, and their individual and collective resilience comes as much from community, celebration, joy as it does from toughness and determination. That's incredibly important, both of the characterization of most of the Two Rivers kids, and as the first piece of the groundwork for how very wrong things have gone when, many book from now, Rand starts trying to just make himself harder, deliberately discarding the springiness that makes the people of the Two Rivers so difficult to break. 

We get a full list of the competitions held as part of the Bel Tine festivities: archery, sling, quarterstaff, riddles and puzzles, lifting and tossing weights (not clear if this is one activity or two), singing, dancing, playing the fiddle, sheep shearing, bowls, and darts. This list is reproduced here largely for the sake of thoroughness - I have few immediate thoughts, except that I don't think bowls is ever mentioned again in the entire series, and that the establishment of archery, and the use of the sling and quarterstaff, as things they have reason to get better at than the practical usefulness of these items to their daily lives would otherwise necessitate helps lead into the numerous instances in the early books when facility with one or another of these items saves the kids' butt, or at least allows them to impress the shit out of someone. 

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The Winespring Inn, largest and fanciest building in Emond's Field, has a foundation of stone that some
say came from the mountains, which I feel goes nicely with my theory from the previous post about there having been a quarry. It also used to be bigger, which can be seen from the remains of a much larger foundation, which Bran al'Vere uses for outdoor seating, around an oak tree 30 paces around. That... is a big, old tree. In our system of measure, that's 90 feet, or about 24.7 meters in circumference. For aging a tree, we actually want the diameter in inches, not the circumference in feet, so we're gonna multiply that 90 feet by 12, to get 1080, and then divide by pi, for a diameter of roughly 344 inches. This is where we have to start making guesses, because we don't know the tree's actual species, beyond "oak". If it's a white oak, based on growth factor tables, it should be about 1720 years old, meaning it was planted around FY 413, after Davian was captured and gentled, but before whatever exactly happened with Queen Sulmara of Masenashar. If it's a red oak, it's about 1376 years old, planted ca. FY 757, around the time Kyera Termendal was translating the Karaethon Cycle. And if it's a pin oak, it might only be 1032 years old, planted in the last decade or so of the War of the Hundred Years. Our ability to extract anything useful from these calculations is complicated by the fact that oak trees just don't live that long, nor, properly, should they get this big. Trees with this kind of lifespan are virtually all conifers, although a couple of exceptions exist, including African Baobab and Sacred Fig, neither of which could readily be mistaken for an oak tree, although the latter can reach the size and spreadiness described here. There are, therefore, three reasonably possibilities for what is going on with this tree. 1) It's a Sacred Fig, and not an oak tree at all (age notwithstanding, no other non-baobab broadleaf tree reaches this diameter, and the Sacred Fig only manages it by having multiple trunks kinda smooshed together). 2) It's some kind of Age of Legends cultivar or something, and able to exceed the normal limits of an oak tree's age and size. 3) This is an oak tree of ordinary species, which at some point got attention from an Ogier, allowing it to live longer and/or grow larger than it otherwise could. The fourth, less reasonable possibility, is that subsequent to the Breaking, CO2 levels are higher or something, and conditions cause most plants, or at least trees and other long-lived things, to get bigger than they do in our world. (Which would throw even the roughest age estimates out of whack). We can look to rule out the first and fourth possibilities by keeping an eye on whether there's any mention of acorns here, and whether other plants are described as larger than they ought to be. 

This got really long and ended up taking 3 times as long as it was supposed to, which is why it's Friday afternoon right now, instead of Wednesday evening. We're going to finish Chapter 1 next week, hopefully on Wednesday. The next Dresden Files post will be going up tomorrow. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 19

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I'm still not sure what Harry's nagging sense that he's missing something was about, but suddenly there's screaming and gunfire out in the hallway. We get a really vivid, poetic description of how he calls up his magic to blast through the wall. He feeds his fear and frustration and grief into the spell, and after doing it he actually feels better, clearer headed and in some ways less exhausted. It's an effective illustration of how, in this setting, emotion is literally a fuel source, something that can be burned to power a spell, and then isn't there any more. See also: all writing about magic is writing about writing. This is a lot of time time how the creative process works, at least in writing and music, which are the only two media in which I have any experience to speak of. You put your emotions into the art, which is one of only a few ways to get the art to happen at all, and then in important ways it's in there and not in you anymore. 

MacFinn is just shredding through to cops, and Harry's gearing up to fuego him when Murphy reappears and shoots MacFinn a few more times, causing him to run. She chases after, and he turns to attack her. Harry and Carmichael both run to her aid, which is especially impressive on Carmichael's part since his entire abdomen has been torn open. He essentially feeds himself to the loup garou in order to buy Murphy the time she needs to defend herself. She has a good shot lined up and everything. Unfortunately, she's out of ammo, and her gun just does the sad empty click. Harry, on the other hand, is still bursting with energy, fueled further by his desire to protect Murphy, and he blasts the everloving shit out of MacFinn, launching him through the wall of the police station, across the street, and clear through the building on the other side. 

Everyone is terribly impressed, except Murphy, who is mostly crying over Carmichael's body, which feels...weird. This is a normal enough response to feel out of character for books 1-3 Murphy, who doesn't react normally to anything. I'd expect her to immediately blame Harry, accuse him of murder, yell at him, try to arrest him, maybe attack him again. It would also be out of character for Murphy in the later books - she would have waited until the crisis was actually over, until she'd done everything she could to make sure the people for whom she's responsible were okay. So this is just weird. 

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Now that he's got some breathing room, Harry is able to make use of the Snoopy doll and paper cup, which Rudolf had just kind of been holding onto for him. It's weird seeing Rudolf being helpful here, but still not as weird as Murphy's emotional breakdown, because this is part of his actual character arc. Rudy latches on to the biggest power that he thinks can protect him from the supernatural. At the moment, that's Harry, and because it's Harry, after this horrible night Harry and Murphy come to kind of embody the threat of all the things he doesn't understand. He's not gonna feel like it's over until they're both out of the picture. So it makes sense, even tough it feels a little strange on a reread. 

We get a little bit of description of how thaumaturgy works, since Harry is explaining it to Rudolf as he gather loup garou blood for the ritual that will slow MacFinn down impair his senses until sunrise, at which point he'll turn back into a human. Having accomplished this, he just kind of walks out (using the stairs, not the gaping hole in the wall, since they're five floors up). Susan and Tera meet him partway to the car and help him get the rest of the way there. Between the blood loss and the serious magic he's completely exhausted, and passes out as soon as he's sitting down. 

I apologize for the severe lateness of this post. The second installment of the Wheel of Time reread series should still be on Wednesday, and the post for Chapter 20 in this series will be this coming Saturday. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Wheel of Time Reread - The Eye of the World Chapter 1 - Part 1

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The Wheel of Time turns, ages come and pass, and our story starts with what might literally be the most iconic opening paragraph in all of fiction. It's very visual, establishing space, climate, history before we've even seen any people. Rand's name hasn't been mentioned yet, but we already know that the Sand Hills used to be the shore of a great ocean, and a quick glance at the map on the facing page tells us that this means everything we see in the next 100-odd pages takes place somewhere that, until the Breaking, was underwater. Given the specifier "great", we can reasonably assume that this ocean stretched all the way to the Spine of the World, meaning that most of what happens in the series, excepting events on the west coast (Tarabon, Arad Doman, and Almoth Plain), in the Blight, and maybe in the Aiel Waste, happens in places that were underwater before the Breaking. I say maybe the Waste, because it strikes me as entirely possible that it was also part of the ocean, with the Spine of the World a peninsula projecting down from what is now the Blight, the way Windbiter's Finger does off the Shadow Coast. If you're familiar with the way these things go in real life, this reinforces how drastic, how unnatural, the changes of the Breaking really were, because usually after being the bottom of an ocean, the next thing a place becomes is a desert. Now, if we look at places like the Sahara, it's totally possible that there's a cycle here that just hasn't become observable yet because it's only been 3000 years, and in another 10,000ish, maybe most of the westlands will be a desert, although I expect the people of the Two Rivers will still be right where they are now. 

Zooming way forward in time, although not all the way to the present, I notice that the road our as-yet-unnamed characters are walking on is called the Quarry Road, despite the fact that no one in the Two Rivers goes into the Mountains of Mist, nor appears to have any awareness of a time when anyone did. Certainly there's mining, and presumably quarrying, farther north, like up near Baerlon, but if there were ever a quarry in this part of the Mountains of Mist, it was a damned long time ago. One wonders if the reputation of the Westwood and the foot of the mountains as "hard luck country" might have originated from that having been where quarriers lived before the quarry failed, or whatever happened to it, leaving those people in a bad way. This might also go some way towards explaining why the other reason for not farming there is that it's rocky. Given the assertion that only the hardiest men farm in the Westwood, and that those in the Two Rivers who aren't prepared to shrug and start over when things go wrong are "long since gone", one suspects that those who do farm there, including Tam al'Thor and the Dautrys, are likely the descendants of quarrying families. Heck, this might account of the people in Baerlon whom Rand can easily match to Two Rivers families. One of them looks like a Congar, not a family known for their resilience or ability to like, do anything, another looks like Jon Thane, the cabinetmaker, and a third looks like Samel Crawe, the miller. If you tilt your head and squint, this looks like it's possible that there was a quarry, it failed or collapsed or who knows what, and and a lot of the Westwood based folks who worked there, those who didn't feel up to farming, or living so close to whatever the hell went wrong up there, either moved into the village and got into other work (milling, cabinet making, whatever the Congars do), or spread up into Baerlon where there was still mining or quarrying work to be had. 

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It's established that it's cold, and spring should have come a while ago and just kind of hasn't, and the only trees that have green on them are evergreens, although the word is not used, and the existence of broadleaf evergreens is established (this will be discussed more in a later post), dead brambles from last year (likely blackberry or another member of genus Rubus, with perennial roots but vines that fully die back over the winter, although it may be some kind of self-reseeding bougainvillea living in a climate where it's an annual) cover rocky outcroppings, and the weeds under foot are mostly nettles, unspecified spiny things, and "stinkweed", which is almost certainly skunk cabbage. This is an interesting confluence of science and symbolism. The vibe here is that these are like, bad, unpleasant plants, maybe evil plants, but botanically this makes a lot of sense. Nettles are hardy as hell (and incredibly useful - if the winter doesn't end soon they're gonna be eating those), and skunk cabbage is actually thermogenic, making its own heat so it can grow and bloom when the ground is still frozen, and therefore adapted to exactly this kind of climate glitch. While you won't enjoy stepping on it, it's an incredible symbol of hope, of life withstanding the touch of the Dark One, and perhaps, especially with their unpleasant reaction to being messed with, a better symbol of Two Rivers resilience than the stone and oak roots that are invoked later on. 

Despite the delayed spring, it's the day before Bel Tine, and Tam gave his word that he would bring in the apple brandy and cider for the festival. There are two things to talk about here. Bel Tine is obviously Beltane, although it seems to have been moved closer to the spring equinox than the first of May, given what we're told about the expected weather, and the length of time between here and Sunday, which we know to be the summer solstice. The cider and brandy themselves are also a little bit interesting, because there's no mention, so far as I can recall, of apple trees on the al'Thor farm, so maybe other people just like, give Tam their apples for this? Rand and Tam are both described here, and w're told that Rand doesn't look like his father, or much of anyone in the Two Rivers, and that Tam claims Rand's red hair and grey eyes come from his outlander mother, whom he mostly doesn't remember. There's a bit in her about how he puts flowers on her grave every year at Bel Tine and Sunday, and it didn't really hit me until after I started working on this post that he doesn't get the chance to do that this Bel Tine, and it's just kind of never mentioned again. 

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Rand has his bow out, because with the spring coming so late, wolves and even bears have started going after livestock and people. He has the sense of being watched, but it's not a wolf or a bear following them, it's a Myrdraal, although of course he doesn't know that yet. He tells Tam about the mysterious rider, but when they look around again he's gone. Rand reflects that this is the first time he's really felt afraid of the woods here. He's been running around the Westwood "almost since he could walk", which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that little little kids in the Two Rivers are allowed to run around unsupervised. He learned to swim in what's referred to here as the "riverwood". I'm assuming this is what in every other instance is called the Waterwood, but I don't know if Riverwood is an alternate name that just doesn't see a lot of use, or if this is an early installment editing issue or what. In any event, he's afraid now, and despite his best efforts to be cool about it, Tam notices, and tells Rand to remember the flame and the void. As far as I can tell, there are two criteria every second world 90s fantasy series had to meet in order to be like, up to code. First, the protagonist's magic must be a dramatic irony reveal, apparent to the reader before the main character catches on (this makes sense in Wheel of Time, but stretched plausibility in some of its contemporaries). Second, it must contain a description of a meditation technique, in enough detail for the reader to actually practice it. 

They finally reach Emonds Field, and we get a description of the village as a whole, as well as the odd distribution of farms, which I discussed above. It's indirectly established that almost everyone likes Tam, since everybody wants to stop and talk to him on his way to the Winespring Inn. Mostly they want to compare notes on how farming is going, and none of it is good news. Two Rivers stubbornness is established here. "And if the Light doesn't will, we'll survive anyway" is a thing multiple people say during these conversations. Two Rivers folk: literally more stubborn than God. Wit Congar, on the other hand, wants to talk about Nynaeve. He thinks she's too young to be the Wisdom, based largely on her failure to accurately predict the crops and weather this year, and if the Women's Circle won't do something, the Village Council should. Both Tam and Daise Congar roundly reject this idea, although Daise does so with considerably more hostility. This is the beginning of establishing the gender binary as it exists in this setting. There's men's business and women's business, and openly interfering with each other is a moderate-to-serious violation of social norms. 

This segues neatly into the last thing that happens before the closest thing I could find to a reasonable stopping point. Apparently, women in Emonds Field keep trying to set Tam up with their various widowed friends and relatives, asserting that it's "simple fact" that a man can't do without a woman to look after him, and it's been long enough since Kari died. Increasingly, they're turning similar attention on Rand, and he kind of hates it. He's as stubborn as anyone in the Two Rivers, and deeply dislikes feeling like he's being forced into anything. 

We started with the beginning of Chapter 1, rather than the prologue, because the prologue is better discussed in the context of what comes after it. If I could reasonably wait until later in the series to talk about it, I would, but that's not practical, so we're gonna do it at the end of this book. I definitely made the right choice splitting this up, because this post is already super long, and took almost 5 hours to write. Tune in next week for Part 2, and on Saturday for the next installment in the Dresden Files reread series. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 18

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Murphy shoots the Loup Garou, and to Harry's surprise, it actually does some damage. She melted down a pair of silver earrings she inherited. There's some weirdly mixed telegraphing here; like three sentences are devoted to how she's not wearing any earrings, how "naked" hear earlobes look without them, which sort of implies that she melted down the earrings she actually wears (and used them to dave Harry's life), but then she makes a joke about how she told her aunt Edna she'd "never get any use out of those earrings", which indicates that these aren't the earrings she wears. I feel like Jim Butcher wanted the foreshadowing and the quip and either didn't realize they contradicted each other, really wanted to have his cake and eat it too or, again, handed this in before completing the last planned round of revisions. 

Sadly, she doesn't manage to kill MacFinn. As she explains while she's re-arresting Harry, and checking him for injuries, the ammunition she makes herself for competition shooting is .22 caliber, and unlikely to take him down unless she manages to get a bullet through his eye. She tells Harry that the room MacFinn went into is just archives, no people this time of night, and that Harry himself will be locked up somewhere safe until they can get a doctor to look at him. She hands him off to Carmichael, who hands him off to Rudolf with instructions to listen if Harry tells him to do something or gives him information about what's going on. This is the first time we meet Rudolf, and I'm realizing that part of why I tended to get him confused with Harris on previous rereads is because he isn't described at all beyond "good looking". 

Rudolf is pretty thoroughly freaked out, and keeps repeating to himself that this isn't really happening. Harry is pretty injured and stressed out, and he's having a thought about blood, but he can't quite get it to come together. He has Rudolf bring him a cup of water, which he splashes on his face (once again triggering the drowning reflex to lower his heart rate and get his head back together), and another one that he actually drinks, and the idea finally starts to come into focus, although he has the vague sense that he's missing something. 

He goes to Murphy's office, over Rudolf's halfhearted objections, to collect his spellcasting gear, shorting out her computer monitor in the process. Now all he needs is a stuffed animal, which he has immense difficulty explaining to Rudolf. When he finally persuades his reluctant and temporary ally to go check Carmichael's desk (apparently Carmichael keeps toys for when kids have to wait for their parents - more incidental positive characterization), he tries to get a look at the injury to his foot, which is still bleeding, but he almost faints, so that isn't going to work. Rudolf locates a snoopy doll, which he pronounces perfect for his purposes, and then "all hell broke loose". 

This was a short one, both because the chapter is actually short and because not a whole lot happens after the opening. It's mostly just Harry working his way through a problem, and eventually arriving at a solution that won't be explained until the next chapter. Wednesday, we will be doing our first ever Wheel of Time reread post. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!