{"id":150,"date":"2002-02-25T13:06:51","date_gmt":"2002-02-25T18:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/02\/25\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-22T16:51:39","modified_gmt":"2005-10-22T20:51:39","slug":"getting-testy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/02\/25\/getting-testy\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Testy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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They’ll be coming back shortly to make us do more testing, so I’m not even going to try to get anything useful done. Hence, bloggage.<\/p>\n

Last week a conversation that Kenpi, Jen and I were having led me to mention The Westing Game<\/u> by Ellen Raskin. Imagine my shock when neither of them had even heard<\/i> of it, much less read it. It’s a freaking Newbury medal winner! We’re not talking obscure kid-lit, which I can excuse people for not knowing. *ahem* Then again, Kenpi is the one who had never read Matilda until 6 years ago.<\/p>\n

In any case, the mention of it made me dig out my own copy and read through it. I admit, the Newbury winners have a tendency to skew towards the sort of books I dislike — books with random character deaths, pointless angst and pretentious, “deep” themes. But there are some which do not and they’re very worthwhile to read. <\/p>\n

The Westing Game takes place in the late 70s (when it was written), in the eastern part of Wisconsin. Essentially, Samuel Westing, a rich, bitter eccentric, wants to figure out who he should leave his fortune to. So he arranges a little ‘game’ by subtly inducing all the people he considers his potential heirs to move into an apartment building near his mansion. Then he dies and the game begins, starting with the reading of his will. There’s a pretty large cast of characters who then have to solve the puzzle of how to get chosen as the heir, and their activities are amusing and interesting. The female characters especially are strong, which is probably why I’d liked the book in the first place — the dutiful daughter who really wants to be a doctor and is executing a quiet rebellion, the loud, neglected daughter who plays the stock market, the meek little child bride who’s a lot more canny than anyone thinks… and it goes on.<\/p>\n

Being a children’s book, it’s relatively short — under 150 pages, I’d say. But that’s okay, because it actually does what a lot of books completely fail to do: it ties up the plot ends and tells you what happens to the characters! That alone would get it a recommendation from me. Go and read it if you haven’t!<\/p>\n

The other book I’ve been reading is one I picked up at Boskone: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion<\/u> by Neil Gaiman. It’s really quite interesting and contains a lot of information which I hadn’t really put together before. It’s also made me want to find a copy of the Infocom Hitchhiker’s game, which I believe I will look around for as soon as I’ve finished this blog entry. I believe the 6th and final (*sigh*) Hitchhiker book should be coming out relatively soon. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a year since Adams died. I should see if it’s pre-orderable. That and the new Miles book. And I’ve been thinking of picking up the Sandman comics, but I think I better hold off. KOR is going to kill my wallet, and AnimEigo will eventually get done with it, just when I least expect it.<\/p>\n

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They’ll be coming back shortly to make us do more testing, so I’m not even going to try to get anything useful done. Hence, bloggage. Last week a conversation that Kenpi, Jen and I were having led me to mention The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Imagine my shock when neither of them had even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,19,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}