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The Dead Days
To wit, those last five days after Christmas and Boxing Day. (How glad I am to be living in a country that has Boxing Day, even if people have to work on it; at time-and-a-half, in the case of Blawblaws up the street, down from double pay, which is what one expects of ketchi Blawblaws. I was still happy, in my commercial Torontonian way, to have a place I could go and shop at, since doing it before Christmas, between crowds and ice and the freezer chill of the 24th, was literally painful.)
The Dead Days are usually warmer than usual, hence grey and wet and dank and suffused with wanhope: the emotional fallout of Christmas or a sense of tempus fugit, or in the worst years, tsunamis leaving hundreds of thousands dead. I'm actually pleased at the warmth of today, due to return to deep freeze slipperiness tomorrow; one takes one's mobility in winter when one can.
But this year Christmas itself was the essence of Dead Day: housebound, snow falling on ice, incipient pressure headache, the apocalyptic mindset of malaise. Followed someone's Yuletide rec and read that Hark, a vagrant! squib about Polidori, which left me with a foul taste in my mental mouth for reasons it would be tedious to unpack. Still have it. Blech.
Entirely off my own bat, though, I looked up Rivers fic, and so read that Folly story that's being recced about. Peter is a ray of sunshine, even when he's someone else's Peter.
2. I wish the overarching moral of the Flora Segunda books didn't seem to be 'your parents know better than you; they are always right'. Possibly Wilce doesn't realize that's the moral she's pushing. Ah well; they're fun submersions in another world and appreciated as such. Especially the female generals.
3. Bakka is having a sale till New Year's, so I bought Miyabe Miyuki's Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo. Did this somehow without remembering who Miyabe Miyuki is, and that I've read her this year. On the whole, am glad not to be doing this in Japanese. And as the library doesn't have any of Lavie Tildhar's steampunk in borrowable form, may get one of those this week, sidewalks permitting.
4. My local bookseller occasionally holds the odd Pratchett for me in case I want it. Asked him once 'Have you read Whichever?' and he said 'No. I always wait till the next one is out before reading the last one, so that if anything happens to him I'll have one more Pratchett to read.' I thought this daft at the time, also impossible-- be sure I read Unseen Academics and Snuff the minute I had my hands on them. But now the same superstition seems to be at work with me, because I'm oddly reluctant to start reading Raising Steam. Then again, it might be because none of the local enthusiasts has it and I might start rubbing their faces in that fact if I start nattering.
The Dead Days are usually warmer than usual, hence grey and wet and dank and suffused with wanhope: the emotional fallout of Christmas or a sense of tempus fugit, or in the worst years, tsunamis leaving hundreds of thousands dead. I'm actually pleased at the warmth of today, due to return to deep freeze slipperiness tomorrow; one takes one's mobility in winter when one can.
But this year Christmas itself was the essence of Dead Day: housebound, snow falling on ice, incipient pressure headache, the apocalyptic mindset of malaise. Followed someone's Yuletide rec and read that Hark, a vagrant! squib about Polidori, which left me with a foul taste in my mental mouth for reasons it would be tedious to unpack. Still have it. Blech.
Entirely off my own bat, though, I looked up Rivers fic, and so read that Folly story that's being recced about. Peter is a ray of sunshine, even when he's someone else's Peter.
2. I wish the overarching moral of the Flora Segunda books didn't seem to be 'your parents know better than you; they are always right'. Possibly Wilce doesn't realize that's the moral she's pushing. Ah well; they're fun submersions in another world and appreciated as such. Especially the female generals.
3. Bakka is having a sale till New Year's, so I bought Miyabe Miyuki's Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo. Did this somehow without remembering who Miyabe Miyuki is, and that I've read her this year. On the whole, am glad not to be doing this in Japanese. And as the library doesn't have any of Lavie Tildhar's steampunk in borrowable form, may get one of those this week, sidewalks permitting.
4. My local bookseller occasionally holds the odd Pratchett for me in case I want it. Asked him once 'Have you read Whichever?' and he said 'No. I always wait till the next one is out before reading the last one, so that if anything happens to him I'll have one more Pratchett to read.' I thought this daft at the time, also impossible-- be sure I read Unseen Academics and Snuff the minute I had my hands on them. But now the same superstition seems to be at work with me, because I'm oddly reluctant to start reading Raising Steam. Then again, it might be because none of the local enthusiasts has it and I might start rubbing their faces in that fact if I start nattering.
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I have The Long Earth too, but having read a short story in that universe in A Blink of the Screen, I'm not beating down doors to start it. Doesn't sound like him at all.
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