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Blowy August evening
There are many advantages to baths over showers- loosening of muscles, ease of washing feet, ease of shaving legs, general well-being from lying in water up to one's neck. One more advantage for me is that it gives me an opportunity to brush my teeth. Of course, I could do it in the half hour I save when having a shower, but then I don't want to. Whereas running a bath requires me to be in the bathroom to monitor depth and temperature, with nothing else to do. So yeah, I can then pick and floss and electric brush for two minutes, with no feeling of time wasted.
(Monitoring depth and temp is needed because I can't actually get into a bath of my preferred hotness. Evidently blood never reaches my feet because they're ice cubes always, and never more so than when dipping into a hot bath. So it has to be merely warm to start, and not too deep, so that I can fill it up with hot water once I'm in.)
Finished?
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms
Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad and The Terracotta Bride
-- read on tablet, because the print book can only be had second-hand for something like $400. A collector's item, as they say. So I had to look up all the Malay words on my phone, when I'd much rather be reading a book and looking things up on the tablet.
Don't know if the medium had anything to do with my sense of 'This is seriously Not Like anything else I've ever read' or not. Maybe paper and print would have lessened the effect of a highly-coloured dream: oh, yeah, just Malayan ghosties and ghoulies, not really different from youkai, surely? (I actually had several highly-coloured dreams when reading this, of which I remember only that one was about Odin, Thor and Loki but *not* the Marvel versions of same.) (And Malayan ghoulies feel a lot different from youkai: /much/ more unpleasant.)
But it wasn't the supernatural that did it so much as the casual multicultural polyglot Malayan society, viewed by one of its members. There may have been concessions made to foreign readers- the dialogue may not be as Manglish as in real life- but I wouldn't know. I just found the whole thing exhilarating, the language not least of all.
The Terracotta Bride feels more traditionally Chinese: denizens of Hell and so on. Its companion piece is probably The Ghost Bride, which I should maybe reread. Or go on to Sorceror to the Crown, but that's a different genre entirely.
Reading now?
Pratchett, Feet of Clay
-- a reread through the earlier Watch books because they tend to run together in my mind. Naturally, because each has a plot point of people trying to replace Vetinari with a king.
Agatha Christie, After the Funeral
-- still too many family members, and the list of characters happily dishes up a clanking big spoiler-- 'But where was he the night X was murdered?' when X is still very much alive.
Next?
Maybe The Ghost Bride, maybe Jingo if that's what comes after Feet of Clay.
(Monitoring depth and temp is needed because I can't actually get into a bath of my preferred hotness. Evidently blood never reaches my feet because they're ice cubes always, and never more so than when dipping into a hot bath. So it has to be merely warm to start, and not too deep, so that I can fill it up with hot water once I'm in.)
Finished?
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms
Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad and The Terracotta Bride
-- read on tablet, because the print book can only be had second-hand for something like $400. A collector's item, as they say. So I had to look up all the Malay words on my phone, when I'd much rather be reading a book and looking things up on the tablet.
Don't know if the medium had anything to do with my sense of 'This is seriously Not Like anything else I've ever read' or not. Maybe paper and print would have lessened the effect of a highly-coloured dream: oh, yeah, just Malayan ghosties and ghoulies, not really different from youkai, surely? (I actually had several highly-coloured dreams when reading this, of which I remember only that one was about Odin, Thor and Loki but *not* the Marvel versions of same.) (And Malayan ghoulies feel a lot different from youkai: /much/ more unpleasant.)
But it wasn't the supernatural that did it so much as the casual multicultural polyglot Malayan society, viewed by one of its members. There may have been concessions made to foreign readers- the dialogue may not be as Manglish as in real life- but I wouldn't know. I just found the whole thing exhilarating, the language not least of all.
The Terracotta Bride feels more traditionally Chinese: denizens of Hell and so on. Its companion piece is probably The Ghost Bride, which I should maybe reread. Or go on to Sorceror to the Crown, but that's a different genre entirely.
Reading now?
Pratchett, Feet of Clay
-- a reread through the earlier Watch books because they tend to run together in my mind. Naturally, because each has a plot point of people trying to replace Vetinari with a king.
Agatha Christie, After the Funeral
-- still too many family members, and the list of characters happily dishes up a clanking big spoiler-- 'But where was he the night X was murdered?' when X is still very much alive.
Next?
Maybe The Ghost Bride, maybe Jingo if that's what comes after Feet of Clay.