Book Recommendation: The Shifter

In Nya's world, a healer can stitch up a wound and pull its pain out of the affected body and into her own. Healers draw out the hurt, carry it, and then store it in a substance called pynvium—a non-renewable resource mined from the mountains. For the right coin, any injury can disappear; healers can heal any hurt.

Well... most healers, that is. But Nya isn't like most healers. When she pulls the pain out of a person, she only has one option: to shift it into someone else. Pynvium doesn't work for her. And that's a problem, because without it, Nya can't be a real healer. She can't find work, she can't help people, and worst of all, if anyone ever finds out she's a shifter she'll be carted off and forced to cause harm.

But now her sister has disappeared, the Healers' League has stopped taking patients, and a mysterious man is tailing her around the city. Nya is the only one with a chance of setting things right, and she might just have to use her terrible power to do so.

Janice Hardy's The Shifter is an incredibly fun read. I absolutely loved it. I've read a lot of heavy books lately, so this one had just the right tone to put me back in balance. It's not all rainbows and sunshine, of course—Nya struggles with some very hard decisions—but it's an adventure that left me with a smile.

The ideas behind the book really worked. The “about the author” at the end mentions “the darker side of healing,” which I think is an absolutely brilliant concept. Janice Hardy takes that idea and continuously pokes and prods it. She puts Nya into a lot of situations that don't have an obvious right or wrong solution. I really appreciated the ethical questions that came up in this book.

I also loved reading about Nya's world. I didn't find any flaws in the internal consistency, and I was impressed with how the main idea had an impact on more than one aspect of society. Healers don't just take the place of physicians. The ability to heal during war and the competition for the pynvium resource set up a complex political environment.

Though I say this about almost every book I like, it's no less true here: I enjoyed the characters. Nya is very likable. The secondary characters, both allies and villains, add some nice variety to the story. There wasn't a single one that I wished would just disappear. I also liked that there's a hint of possible romance, but that it's playing out slowly. I can see what each of the characters appreciates in the other, so it's a rewarding relationship.

All in all, I'd say this is a very good book for anyone who likes fantasy, and probably even for those who don't tend to read it. I know I'm looking forward to the next in the series!

The Love/Hate of Exercise

This is how it happened:

Hubby: I need to exercise more. My current workout schedule is not doing enough.

Me (far too smug for my own good): I is exercise already! ROAR!

Hubby: Yes, and you look hot too. I want to be just like you.

Me: *preens*

Cameo of hubby's dad: Hey, son, check out this new exercise program your stepmother and I are doing.

Hubby: Hey, Audrey, check out this new exercise program my dad is doing. *Hint, hint.*

Me: Exercise with company in the evening instead of exercising alone during the day? This proposition... IS ACCEPTABLE.

(Events may or may not have transpired in precisely this manner.)

So last week we started our new workout program. Now I've done lots of different kinds of exercise. Growing up I did ballet for years and years. I've tried both home exercise programs and working out regularly at the gym, and I've been pretty successful with all the different regimens I've attempted.

But no matter how many different kinds of exercise I do, or how many muscles I build, every time I start a new workout I find muscles I never knew existed. And by “find” I mean “yikes, that aaaaaaches.”

The funny thing this time is that I did a very bad job of predicting which muscles would be sore. I was certain my abs would be protesting, and if not those then surely my arms. But my calf muscles? Never would have guessed, especially after all the jogging and biking I've done.

Well anyway, doing this new program got me thinking about all the things I love and hate about exercise. Here are a few:

-I love the idea of improving my body.

-I hate how long it takes to build muscles or even to drop a single pound.

-I love the feeling of being in shape and having a healthy metabolism.

-I hate that staying in shape requires continued maintenance with no hope of ever being finished.

-I love discarding all the clothes that are now too baggy for me.

-I hate that my body shape will always be quirky and difficult to find clothes for no matter what weight I am.

-I love the feeling of slightly sore muscles that means I got a good workout.

-I hate overworking my muscles by accident.

-I love being able to tell the doctor that I exercise several hours a week and know that I'm not fudging the truth even a little bit.

-I hate that exercising means those hours can't go toward doing something else instead.

But most of all I love that I've developed the habit of doing something really positive for myself.

How do you feel about exercise? And do you have this kind of love/hate relationship with anything in your life?

Perfect Days

Today is a perfectly beautiful day.

I know... talking about the weather is rather banal, but some moments are simply too exquisite not to mention.

The air smells entirely pleasant, like someone put down a giant adhesive and then ripped it off, carrying all the bad smells away on the sticky side. The sun is shining on my toes at a soothing 75 degrees. And the wind...

Oh, how I love the wind.

People say that we associate memories with smells, and that may well be true, but I know for myself some of the strongest memories are attached to days exactly like this. [Riding home on the bus with my eyes fluttering closed and my heart so full that it's pushing up the corners of my mouth. Walking across campus with Emily and I say, “Look, they cut the grass,” and she says, “Yeah, I heard the smell.” Sitting outside with a book and wondering how I could possibly be so blessed as to have this life.] So each time a day like this comes, it's even better than the last, because it holds all the memories of the past perfect days.

(Following my stream of consciousness: everyone probably gets deja vu, but have you ever had the opposite? Instead of “I've seen this before,” have you ever thought “I'm going to see this again”? That happened to me once. I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, going through a calming exercise, and suddenly had this odd feeling that I was going to be there again.)

Well, I think it's clear that we're not going to get much more rational sense out of me for a while. I'm too immobilized by the way the grass is swaying outside my window...

I hope wherever you are your day is even half as amazing as mine.

Fluke Friday

Hey everybody, I'm in the middle of several books right now, but I don't have a particular recommendation for this week.  So... time to turn the Friday recommendation on its head: what books have you read and loved lately?  I'm looking for some new suggestions!

Math Stories

Thinking about game theory on Monday got my mind whirling about math for the first time in a while. I've probably mentioned before that I was a math major in college. For a long, long time math was my greatest interest. I loved the logic of it and the fact that every problem always had a correct answer. I loved its elegance and I loved that mathematical truth could usually be known with certainty.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that math wasn't my final destination. Much as I still love it, I never regretted making the change to writing. But I've always found a lot of beauty in math, and since I know so many people don't see it I want to talk about math from a story perspective.

History

Ever hear of Evariste Galois? I won't be surprised if you haven't. He was a brilliant mathematician of the early 19^th century, but he died at a very early age after being wounded in a duel. The reasons for the duel aren't entirely clear, but evidence suggests it had something to do with a girl.

How about Carl Friedrich Gauss? There's a famous anecdote about Gauss as a young boy. His teacher asked him to find the sum of all whole numbers from 1 to 100, thinking the task would take a long time to complete. Within seconds Gauss had the answer.

Surely you've heard of Isaac Newton. But do you know about Gottfried Leibniz? Did you know there was a huge plagiarism scandal over which of the two men invented calculus? Today they are both credited with coming up with it simultaneously, but in the early 18^th century the question sparked a bitter controversy. (By the way, Leibniz's notation is the one we use today.)

The history of mathematics is full of quirky people and dramatic events, many of which are fascinating to study. And I bet I wouldn't have to search very hard to find a mathematical story worth telling. Why? Because despite the pure logic of mathematics, it was developed by very human people, and human stories are universal. So if you're ever looking for a new character idea, consider browsing through a list of famous mathematicians for inspiration.

Mystery

As a child one of my favorite mysteries was Fermat's Last Theorem. If you already know about it, forgive me for explaining to those who don't.

Everybody who has taken Geometry should be familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem: a² + b² = c², where a, b and c are the lengths of the sides of a right triangle (c being the hypotenuse).

So here's the question: what if you change the equation to aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ, where n is a whole number greater than 2? That is, if a, b and c aren't squared but are instead, say, cubed, or taken to the fourth power, can you ever find a solution to the equation?

Pierre de Fermat (a mathematician living in the first half of the 17^th century) said no. At his death, his son found the following written in a book and referring to the fact that the equation had no solution: “I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.”

But what was his proof? Nobody knows! It was never found. And for a few hundred years, nobody was able to prove that the theorem was true. Only within the past fifteen years did one man (Andrew Wiles) and a 100-page proof finally lay the question to rest.

But surely Fermat's proof wasn't 100 pages long! So did he really have a proof? And if he did, what was it? It's still a mystery!

And it's not the only mathematical mystery. So if you've got writer's block and you're looking for something new to stimulate your mind, try delving into a math mystery for a while.

Magic

You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I'm still always amazed when I find that things in the real world come back to mathematics. There's something almost magical about how math just fits everywhere.

In fact, I wrote a story once about math and magic and music and the embodiments of Hope and Peace and other such ideas. I called it Fugue. It was a NaNoWriMo story and had almost no research, and a lot of the math was just hand waving because I didn't go through all of it rigorously, but it was a lot of fun and I liked the idea.

I already know what I'll be writing for the next couple years at least, but maybe some day in the future I'll work on another book with math in it. In the meantime, if you're looking for some interesting people to help you get rid of any lingering anger toward math, I'd point you in the direction of Martin Gardner and Vi Hart. They make math pretty irresistible.