{"id":10944,"date":"2008-02-06T17:26:38","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T22:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/06\/10944.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:10","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:10","slug":"book-report-his-majestys-drago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/06\/book-report-his-majestys-drago\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: His Majesty\u2019s Dragon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger was poking around the World Wide Web back in the day, the day being, I think 1996, and I happened on some site out of MIT I believe that encouraged you to rate a bunch of books and then gave you recommendations based on other people’s ratings. This was before Amazon, or at least before I had seen Amazon, and the idea was intriguing. The database spit out a list of recommended novels, most of which were by Lois McMaster Bujold. I had never heard of Ms. Bujold at the time, and went over to the nearby Superlibrary to pick one up. In the event, it was Cetaganda<\/I>; I didn’t like it much, and I never went back to the site. After a while, for no reason I can remember, I picked up another book by Ms. Bujold and enjoyed it, and finally went back and read the whole series, and it turns out that Ms. Bujold is one of a small handful of authors whose every new book I eagerly anticipate.
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Digression<\/I>: It seems I’ve told this story<\/a> before. I have a habit of converting my life events (or, for that matter, other people’s) into stories, and then telling those stories over and over. Ideally, of course, to different people, although my Best Reader, tragically, is often present when YHB tells a story for the umpty-’leventh time. I fear, though, that because I am dreadfully self-centered, I tend to focus on the story, rather than the audience, and tell the same story to the same person again and again. Well, nearly the same story. And, I suppose, only nearly the same person. Still, it’s a problem. And since the story-telling habit is born out of a deep and panicky fear of being boring<\/I>, it is (like so much) self-defeating. My strategies for entertaining people turn me into a garrulous bore. So are we grist in the mills of the proverbial. End Digression.
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Anyway, the reason that particular story came to mind is that I suspect that people had recommended His Majesty’s Dragon<\/a> to me, or if nobody did, I can’t think why, given my other tastes. And I vaguely thought to myself that I really should give it a try, and I vaguely thought to myself that it seemed a bit overrated for what seemed to be a very deliberate cross between Anne McCaffry and Patrick O’Brian. And it is<\/I> a cross between Anne McCaffry and Patrick O’Brian. But it’s such a cheerful rip-off that it hardly seems worth pointing it out. Welcome to this world<\/I>, it seems to say. It’s a cross between Anne McCaffrey and Patrick O’Brian. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s have some fun<\/I>
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And I did.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger particularly enjoys the whole bizarre convention of formality amongst navvies of the better sort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18256,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10944\/revisions\/18256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}