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Reading Wednesday is a zombie
Oh central AC and ativan, how delicious the sleep you bring, how sweet the dreams, how gentle the wakening into a civil dry world that smells of nothing at all. One feels like a human being- one registers the way it 'sposed to be- for a half hour or so, before one leaves the house at Fartooearly.am and goes into the hazy sun and muggy polluted air, bound for a 90 minute dentist appointment.
But all things pass, and the evening wind blows, and it's currently cooler than it was last night (is why the AC was on.)
Last finished?
The Prince. Just where did all the Elizabethan hoo-ha come from, I wonder? Because Niccolo said it's better to be known for cruelty than kindness and to lie at need? Those were passages in passing: mostly he stressed the need to stay clear of mercenaries. And very right too.
Akunin, Pelagia and the White Bulldog. That was a very uhh *Russian* mystery, complete with digressive essays in case the Russian readers got tired of the mystery plot. I don't remember the Erast Fandorin books doing anything of the sort, nor being so Chekovian-obscure with respect to names.
100 Demons 25, whereby hangs a tale. Sunday night I was digging through the very obscure last story which contains many banking terms, when my Wordtank refused to give me jukugo, insisting instead that I needed new batteries. I gave it new batteries just a few weeks back when I started reading #25. As someone remarked on a wp, and as I know only too well, when Wordtanks start draining batteries they're not long for this world. The one I bought in '02 had the feature from birth: it went through batteries in days, and then got picky about what brand it would use, and finally withdrew into sullen silence, leaving me with my warhorse '93 model.
But Wordtanks, or gaijin-friendly Wordtanks, are getting hard to find. People seem to think that phone apps will give them everything they need. Not on *my* phone, for sure; maybe if I ever get a tablet where things can be enlarged.
However, eBay offer the usual range and happily the same model I want. I buy it: and then jump through Paypal hoops to make sure they aren't charging me $60 US for the shipping as their receipt seems to indicate they are. It's in the mail, and the super-expensive Global Shipping Program will have it here in oh maybe two weeks? What's wrong with US Post, guys? aside from our own posties' tendency to threaten strikes, I mean...
Still reading?
Am almost halfway through The Decameron and can't bear it anymore. Put aside.
On hot summer nights, beaver away at The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which has many of the same stories as The Mammoth Badly-Edited New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by much more famous authors (Stephen King, Naomi Novik, Barbara Hambly- except that's the one where she had the London Metropolitan Police operating in rural Scotland in the 17th century.)
In a loose-end fit last weekend decided to go back to non-fic and tackle two books that have sat on the living room book tray for years. Women Who Run With the Wolves by me needs to be a lot more Jungian than it is. Somehow is not the riveting read I'd expected from browsing. Pandemonium and Parade, which is not about youkai but about how the Japanese thought about youkai, is less of an academic slog than I'd feared, even if he must drag semiotics into it, and writing the landscape, and so on and on. It's good background for 100 Demons, in that it may indicate some of the things that may be around in Ima Ichiko's own unconsidered mental gestalt; then again, maybe it doesn't. Academics talking about fanwriters are always way off the mark; academics talking about youkai may well be too.
Next?
Conclude I never did buy Full Fathom Five, take my book token from xmas and go get it at godless Indigo: and politely protest when scan says it's 27.50 with tax while the back cover says it's 18.99 without. Truly this is my week for unTorontonian assertiveness. It burns us, my precious, it burns, but I do it anyway.
Of course, not sure I really want to read FFF. I can never get the right metaphor for how the world runs. Faith is money? Faith is capital? Gods are corporations with shares that can be taken over in hostile bids or suffer collapse when people stop believing in them or something? Just, they say there's a trans character in the book which I didn't catch first time around (any more than I did in Kafka on the Shore) and I do sort of want to know who. But my memory of the plot is that it's a downer and a mess.
But all things pass, and the evening wind blows, and it's currently cooler than it was last night (is why the AC was on.)
Last finished?
The Prince. Just where did all the Elizabethan hoo-ha come from, I wonder? Because Niccolo said it's better to be known for cruelty than kindness and to lie at need? Those were passages in passing: mostly he stressed the need to stay clear of mercenaries. And very right too.
Akunin, Pelagia and the White Bulldog. That was a very uhh *Russian* mystery, complete with digressive essays in case the Russian readers got tired of the mystery plot. I don't remember the Erast Fandorin books doing anything of the sort, nor being so Chekovian-obscure with respect to names.
100 Demons 25, whereby hangs a tale. Sunday night I was digging through the very obscure last story which contains many banking terms, when my Wordtank refused to give me jukugo, insisting instead that I needed new batteries. I gave it new batteries just a few weeks back when I started reading #25. As someone remarked on a wp, and as I know only too well, when Wordtanks start draining batteries they're not long for this world. The one I bought in '02 had the feature from birth: it went through batteries in days, and then got picky about what brand it would use, and finally withdrew into sullen silence, leaving me with my warhorse '93 model.
But Wordtanks, or gaijin-friendly Wordtanks, are getting hard to find. People seem to think that phone apps will give them everything they need. Not on *my* phone, for sure; maybe if I ever get a tablet where things can be enlarged.
However, eBay offer the usual range and happily the same model I want. I buy it: and then jump through Paypal hoops to make sure they aren't charging me $60 US for the shipping as their receipt seems to indicate they are. It's in the mail, and the super-expensive Global Shipping Program will have it here in oh maybe two weeks? What's wrong with US Post, guys? aside from our own posties' tendency to threaten strikes, I mean...
Still reading?
Am almost halfway through The Decameron and can't bear it anymore. Put aside.
On hot summer nights, beaver away at The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which has many of the same stories as The Mammoth Badly-Edited New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by much more famous authors (Stephen King, Naomi Novik, Barbara Hambly- except that's the one where she had the London Metropolitan Police operating in rural Scotland in the 17th century.)
In a loose-end fit last weekend decided to go back to non-fic and tackle two books that have sat on the living room book tray for years. Women Who Run With the Wolves by me needs to be a lot more Jungian than it is. Somehow is not the riveting read I'd expected from browsing. Pandemonium and Parade, which is not about youkai but about how the Japanese thought about youkai, is less of an academic slog than I'd feared, even if he must drag semiotics into it, and writing the landscape, and so on and on. It's good background for 100 Demons, in that it may indicate some of the things that may be around in Ima Ichiko's own unconsidered mental gestalt; then again, maybe it doesn't. Academics talking about fanwriters are always way off the mark; academics talking about youkai may well be too.
Next?
Conclude I never did buy Full Fathom Five, take my book token from xmas and go get it at godless Indigo: and politely protest when scan says it's 27.50 with tax while the back cover says it's 18.99 without. Truly this is my week for unTorontonian assertiveness. It burns us, my precious, it burns, but I do it anyway.
Of course, not sure I really want to read FFF. I can never get the right metaphor for how the world runs. Faith is money? Faith is capital? Gods are corporations with shares that can be taken over in hostile bids or suffer collapse when people stop believing in them or something? Just, they say there's a trans character in the book which I didn't catch first time around (any more than I did in Kafka on the Shore) and I do sort of want to know who. But my memory of the plot is that it's a downer and a mess.