flemmings | Entries tagged with reading

Happy birthday,

incandescens! I hope it is/ was excellent, and that the continuation of it at work tomorrow at least partially soothes the fact that it's Monday (and that you have to provide your own birthday cake, which seems to me *all wrong*.)

Is cold. Is not cold enough to kill off the ragweed or whatever causes the itchy eyes and itchy throat. Passing Blawblaws y'day, saw they were having a tax free day and so bought two bottles of my lens solution for a scant $20. And then thought, 'I've worn my lens maybe one afternoon out of the last month and even then it wouldn't stay in. Why am I buying this stuff again?' My brain seems to have happily settled to this 'left eye short-sighted, right eye long' thing; unlike

mvrdrk's husband, I have no difficulty with middle distance.

Years back

paleaswater lent me Martha Welles' The Death of the Necromancer, pointing out the vanishing m/m subtext ('it was there when I read it the first time and then it wasn't.') I found it well enough but not grabbing; bought my own copy intending a reread some time but never did. Now someone on my FFL says 'isn't tDotN sort of Sherlock Holmes but from Moriarty's point of view?' That plus hints of steampunk (a word I didn't know in '05) suggests the reread should be soon.

The post-Labour Day reprieve has yet to happen. Weatherwise it's hotter than July was; kidwise there are now five sets of twins in the daycare, one set of which speaks no English at all. For good or ill there are no twins in the infant section, but there's a fast-moving commando-crawler who loves to pull hair, and a floor-sitter with thick brown curls, and the room is not big enough for the both of them.

One evening's walk this weekend led me to a box of books, and in it the collected Peter Wimsey short stories. I thought Oh goody! and picked it up. Then thought again, read a page or two, and put it back. No, alas, at my age I really can't be having with Wimsey. *Deep* desire to bean the smug git with a frying pan.

Also: I had three squash growing in my pool. I now have one. Squirrels somehow got in and ate half the little pale green one; the littlest green one has vanished completely. Swathed the middle-sized dark green one in netting, but should probably harvest it soon; no guarantees it'll be there come morning.

Via

umadoshi, a post on unlikable heroines. YA is a separate field, I think. It has not just female protags but teenagers, who tend to have unlikable behaviours anyway. There are, for better or worse, genre expectations that almost require there to be a love interest, which then raises the 'what could he possibly see in her?' question. Compare and contrast, if you like, the expectations in a kids' book like Harriet the Spy- Harriet is immensely likable but OMG what a pain she is, or Hilary McKay's Casson family, with the batty but sympathetoc older sisters. (The commenter who drew a distinction between likable and sympathetic was on to something, I think.) Or the British Marlows of Antonia Forester, that's all about teenagers and growing up and school and the first steps to relationships, but whose characters are likable and unlikable simultaneously- you know, like real people. (Another country: they do things differently there.)

I may be in a minority in not cutting the guys more slack. An obnoxious hero is obnoxious, and it's usually the one with the manly behaviours and the lack of empathy for other human beings. Not always- Harry got on my nerves something dreadful, and Ron was worse, just for being wet and a weed in the first instance, and a teenage boy in the second; but I was also reacting to the feeling that I was supposed to like and identify with them. I liked Hermione, though she'd have driven me batty in RL; but she thought about people other than herself.
( And speaking of lack of empathy )

Oh really, Guardian readers, how small-souled can you get? Reading every book on a single library shelf sounds to me like great fun, but the comments are all toffee-nosed disapproval. Is she not taking reading seriously enough? Is the exercise not improving enough? Why do people go idiotic when books and reading are concerned? Like the person who was roundly panned for making sculptures out of books-- OMG it's a *book* how could you desecrate it like that!! (Same for 'OMG it's a *book* how could you throw it out/ break the spine/ leave it facedown and open/ dogear the pages??!!! You'd think things were still handwritten on vellum, and every mass market paperback was the sole copy of Saphho's odes.)

I like arbitrary reading projects. A book for each letter of the alphabet. A book for five different genres. The first ten books offered on the Frontlawn Library. The arbitrary makes you expand your reading horizons, and not a bad thing either.

To wake, alive in this world
What happiness!
Summer rain

To paraphrase Kuroyanagi Shouha. (Still can't find that haiku in Japanese; just the one about sea cucumbers as winter season word.) Is true. How pleasant to wake in coolness (thanks to the standing fan and AC) and the sound of rain outside, instead of waking in mug (thanks to the window fan) and the sound of rain outside.
( Cut for memeage )

poliphilo scratches a fifty-year old itch of mine. The Franchise Affair repulsed me when I was fourteen. It all felt basically *unfair* somehow, but I couldn't say why. Now I know. 'Hysteric', yes indeed. It's an hysteric book.

(Am not fond of Tey's mysteries anyway. Daughter of Time struck me as special pleading and cherry-picking combined. Must consider that the antipathy is all from her characters.)

This article on home libraries makes dispiriting viewing. "Traditional home library with dark-stained wooden furniture and ornate details"-- and open two floor cathedral ceiling and dark panelling all the way up and and and. Number three is much closer to the kind of rooms I live in, but even so-- where are all these huge high ceilings to be found? Not in my house. Abandoned abbeys, yes.

Which is probably a good thing because seriously, folks, ladders are not for the arthritic.

"Turn the window under the staircase into a cozy reading nook with built-in bookshelves." What window under the staircase? "If it’s spacious enough, a home office can also accommodate a sitting area." That's not a home office, guy, that's a conference room. "It’s a great way of saving space in your home office." And leaves room for the cannon in the front hallway.

Also vertical bookshelves strike me as a very bad idea.

1. Blue sharp-edged sunny days of March, how lovely you are. Almost as much as the grey dry Novemberish days of March, which was yesterday. Or maybe they're more Decemberish, because as I walked back from the coffee shop, I was ambushed by a memory of advent calendars in childhood, somehow called up by the whorled clouds and the cold.

2. Shaw is a one-way-south street on the other side of Christie, about the only street linking Bloor to Dupont. (A Russian Orthodox cathedral and a Catholic elementary school interrupt the others.) Today under all the 'one way' and 'no entry' signs were new large black Bicycles excepted add-ons. Hurrah!

3. Forgot to reduce the wine before adding the meat to my slow-cook recipe. This is why web recipes need to be transferred to hard copy format. Shall have to slow cook it extra, I suppose.

4. Thought the no Pepsi regime wouldn't survive the arrival of allergy season, nor has it. Oh cold caffeine, my stay and hope, give me energy and help the meds to soothe my aching sinuses.

5. A farewell sandwich at that little cafe on Shaw which is moving 'around the corner, a 4 minute jaunt away' they say, the liars. Four minutes by bike, perhaps, but no one can walk five long blocks in four minutes.

Probably shan't miss it that much: coffee too strong and filled with yups and their macs. We only go back to 2010 and the books I read there (Mushishi in English, Ten Nights Dream, The Gods of Manhattan, East of Sunset) have odd and not quite pleasant associations. Well, there was Pema Chodron and The Hobbit this time last year, but generally, no.

So The Guardian has a think-piece- rather idiotic IMHO- about Jonathan the 182 year old tortoise of St Helena. And cites Derrida analysing "the bizarre feeling of shame and nakedness he feels when he comes out of the shower and is confronted by his cat." As someone says, "Wow, that is some neurosis". Other comments that made me LOL quite literally:

-The cat isn't naked. It's dressed in its own fur. The human feels, presumably, "fur envy". (I think Freud missed that bit.)

Reply: Was Fur Elise Beethoven's cat?

(Must buy Beethovan's Wig's CD and its take off on same.)

-We've become soft, effete urbanites. The next fashion will be to start weeping for withered plants.

(reply) "Beverley Nichols was in tears - one of his daffodils left home!" (Norman Evans in "Over The Garden Wall")

(me: nobody reads Beverley Nichols these days, and a good thing too)

I could go ask at

whatwasthatbook but my information is sparse. There's a clan of werewolves in Scotland with an old laird heading it up. No females allowed (possibly because there *are* no female werewolves?) but the clan has a strong-willed housekeeper / laird's sister/ something of the sort, who walks into the top councils anyway. Memory says I was reading this about the same time as The Anubis Gates; is there any hope it *is* The Anubis Gates?

Gender-switched Hobbit, with much fun as the comments segue off to Lord of the Powertools: "Do not read the instruction booklet aloud! For it is written in the Black Andecker Speech..."

Got this from

lnhammer who cites his subject lines, as ever- 'from "As Hermes once took to his feathers light," John Keats.' I, one-eyed and blurry, saw that as 'As Holmes once took to his feathers light' and wish it had been.

ETA: LJ seems to be doing its occasional trick of not showing lj users' names after the tag, at least not on my outdated browser. That's lnhammer.

And here

dreamer_easy provides a nice parallel to the Japanese ability to suss out other people's rank so as to be able to talk to them.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/607604.html

What have you finished reading?

Lai, When Fox Is A Thousand. Several thoughts as I was reading:
( Cut for same )
What are you reading now?
Wilce, Flora's Dare, taking longer than I'd thought because of the weather, no really. Icy snowy Christmases are so rare these days.

What will you read next?
The new Pratchett, finally, after dinner and presents tonight.

The King William's College General Knowledge test. I think I know three answers out of 170-odd, and recognize the source of three more but can't answer them.

Since 1904, the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper (GKP). The pupils sit the test twice; once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year, after having spent the holiday researching the answers. However, the test is now voluntary. It is well-known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred.

How lucky to be living in the Age of Google, even if the test is no longer compulsory. And I'm relieved that it's an exercise in research, not in actual general knowledge.

Oh, yes, this. Thank you very much for saying what I've only vaguely felt. Especially after that 'Susan becomes an American and has a fulfilled life battling social injustice, which she couldn't have done in Narnia or England neener neener neener' story that was going around FB, and seriously cheesed me off.

Otherwise, read Geisha, a Life until 2 am and then prudently unplugged my phone. Thus I didn't get the dolorous phone call until 10, five minutes after I got up, and missed the 8 am one. Still had to cancel an acupuncture appointment for 90 minutes of work, which barely covers the cancellation penalty. Could have had a further three hours in the afternoon, but was feeling scratchy and shifted it about so I only had to do another 90 minutes and got to bicycle home in semi-light. Did however go out to Starbucks on my break, in Birkenstocks (-16C windchill) and rejoiced in the ease of walking. Bicycles and Birks will end Saturday with the return of snow. Can't complain: it's still not 2007.

Matt Kressel posts about Yiddish, and suddenly I have a great desire to learn the language. We had The Joys of Yiddish at home (can't believe it came out when I was 18: I seem to remember reading it in high school) and like any large-NA-city-dweller my vocabulary includes a buncha Yiddish words that register to me as English-- spiel, kvetch, shlep, kibitz, schmooze, nosh, glitch, schlock, schmaltz, dreck, kitsch, shmatte, schmuck, nebbish, tuchus, schtick, and the one I only just learned from English writers, shtum. Suddenly I realize it's an actual *language*: verbs and nouns and adverbs and everything. Which probably conjugate and decline, if it's as High Germanic as all that, but likely not as hard as German, because err well very few European languages are, outside of the Slavic ones.

But of course there's a fly in that ointment. Yiddish is written in Hebrew. Teeny tiny Hebrew with its teeny tiny dots that make furigana look like child's play. Alas, I'm too old for that. Cobbler to his last: back to Japanese.

Can't remember if it's the harvest moon or the hunter's that happens in September (presumably it could be both if September is a two-moon month.) In any case there's a bloody big nearly-full moon out there- full as of 7 am tomorrow, which is near as dammit. Close to the horizon, near sunset, its size was surrealistic.
( Now I think of my life as vintage wines from fine old kegs )
( Wednesday meme )

*Finally.* It's not the fact that it's raining, welcome/ inconvenient as that is. It's that it's not monsoon downpouring as it does it.

A happy piece of serendipity last night. Cruising Doug Miller Books, that cavern of double-ranked books on all shelves and cartons of stacked unopenable boxes with their indubitable treasures, in the second rank and fortunately at eye level I discover Lambda 1 and Other Stories. Lambda 1 is the title I've been trying to remember for at least forty years. To me it was the quintessence of science fiction, even more than Bradbury (whom I read for style and setting) or Asimov (whom I read for sensastrange). Of course, it's still a story about the interior of the human heart, which may be why I liked it.

Didn't buy, even for three dollars. Suck fairies and all: I'm no longer fourteen. Bought The Difference Engine instead.

Top ten mould-breaking fantasy novels. As Tuttle says herself, "that sort of labelling implies there's a strong consensus view of what fantasy literature is, both among those who read it and those who wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When people in the comments suggest Roger Zelazny, Stephen Donaldson, and Robin Hobb as further possibilities, I have to wonder what their consensus view of fantasy is. By my standards, all those are as western quasi-medieval derivative as anyone could wish. Maybe all they mean by 'not yer average fantasy' is 'not Sword of Shannara.'

Am pleased by the number of 'but what about Aaronovitch?' comments, though.
( Cut for Wednesday memeage )

1. Am very taken with this distinction (in a discussion about Literary Fiction vs Genre.)

For me, kinetic writing is the sort that is libidinously exciting, and leaves you feeling almost physically bereft of the characters at the end of the book. The non-kinetic may be very intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, but it doesn't do that. Kinetic writing issues in the fan impulse, and the non-kinetic doesn't. This doesn't map onto literary / genre distinctions very well, but I think that "genre" writers more often aim to excite their readers in a kinetic sense, and "literary" types often self-consciously avoid it. But I don't think it's anything to do with quality as such. Scott is nearly always kinetic, and Nabokov hardly ever is; Joyce rarely is, Dickens quite often is.

( Read more... )

Rivers of London to be televised! (Aaronovitch has already done his fantasy casting. Wonder if he'll do the scripts as well.)

And for added squeefulness, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is also a TV drama. Must see if one can watch that on the computer.
( Cut for branelessness )

One reason I don't get much read these last months is that the weather has been splendid. I mean it's rained not a little-- it was raining last Thursday, and the one before that, and though it didn't rain three weeks ago, the next day it poured. But when it's not doing that it's comfortably cool, and of course light till past nine: and so I walk about the neighbourhood in the evenings and look at the yuppies' and muppies' and retired Italians' gardens, which are well worth looking at.

On my street a honeysuckle vine has wrapped itself halfway up a concrete street light, and the smell is heavenly; two blocks over it's a Sleeping Beauty rose hedge. There are Martian flowers I cannot name, like the something that grows into a purple sphere but empty at the centre. The peonies and ajisai- what's that in English? right, hydrangeas- are coming out and should burst forth in the coming week's heat. Of course, the coming week's heat will probably drive me back indoors, to the comfort of the fan if not the AC; and then I shall read more. (Like last year, doggedly reading my way through Brust and Griffin and Carey until the heat of July cancelled all memory of what I did.)
( Read more... )

Our koaki (little autumn) ended on the weekend. Sun shone hotly and people went to t-shirts and shorts. Today it's back: cool grey damp, with the pleasing melancholy of mildly rainy days. Sprinkling rain turns to nostalgia as if they were Japanese pillow words: ah, days of '83 in Paris, wet pavement and the smell of Gauloises! ah, days of '86 in Amsterdam beside the dimpling canals! ah, days of '91 (and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5) in Tokyo, amid the soft omnipresent green! (Truly, the preponderance of my Tokyo days were like this, no matter the season-- greige skies, moisture about to condense from the air, jackets at need, do not forget umbrella or leave futons out on the balcony rail.)

Note that *dry* grey cool is something else entirely. That translates into autumn and energy. Still not immune to nostalgia. Last week's October ambushed me with the memory of a trip to Echizen in the summer of '92, also cool and grey after a fortnight of post-rainy season hot. My first year in Tokyo must have been unusual, or maybe it's just that I had AC at my inn. '92 was the classic experience of 'to bed in 16C grey one night, wake to 30C sun next morning.' The subsequent two weeks of summer heat with no fans and no daylight saving time (ie light at 4 with the loud dawn chorus of birds and genki oldsters) drove me to the extremes of sleep-deprived hysteria. Was very glad to welcome the cool and the odd designer colours of ura-Nippon: beige sand, cobalt sea, grey sky, in three bands outside the train window.

Mused, as I walked TO's wet streets after my morning latte, that the world's great (and longest) novels are all about nostalgia for a lost and better time. Genji, Red Chambers, Proust-- though the golden age in the first and last look less than that to us here (well, and to Proust then, I assume: he's the one presents his enviable aristos as balding plump little voyeurs, and everyone else as vulgar upstarts.)

Lovely day. A pity I devoted it to acquiring books instead of something more useful, but then I was perforce one-eyed all day, so usefulness was not to be come at. On the plus side the books are all from libraries that I walked to, so go me. Also passed flocks of people in the south Annex on the Doors Open walking tour of same. Doubtless interesting-- these are houses I ride by every working day and know nothing about-- but being in a herd of fifty or more bodies is not my idea of fun.

Shall be indoors tonight. Have made it a rule not to refuse work, since the last two times I did so, work immediately dried up all over; and the last time I accepted (foregoing a free showing of The Life of Pi) shifts then rained down on me. So now I'm afraid to say no. Would rather be indoors on the sofa at home instead of in one of those apartments whose owner clearly never reads at night (and with a toddler daughter, I see why.) But ah well. Is money. And I may have to take my lens out anyway, so no guarantee of reading even if at home. Or, well, I might, but then I'd be left with an experience similar to reading A Fisherman of the Inland Sea one-eyed last night, which left me in rather a bad mood.

For practical purposes, I'm declaring the Kitchen Table Stack formally demolished. A respectable six weeks, but with side trips for the occasional library book or basement book or 'been sitting in the bedroom since October' book.

For unpractical purposes, must finish The Pastel City. Not at all sure how Viriconium wound up on Mieville's list of-- whatever it was a list of, because the site was down when I went to look at it and I had to do it from cache. Anyway it's not Pastel City he listed, which is stock 70s Elric-begot swords'n'stuff, but IIRC Viriconium Nights. Or maybe The Floating Gods? or is The Floating Gods merely Viriconium Nights by another name? There's a problem with the manuscript tradition of Viriconium, but I can't be arsed to go look up what it is.

Equally of course I've finished neither My Name is Red nor The Quincunx, and put Oryx and Crake out on the sidewalk after ten pages. (I can't read Atwood; can't. And to think she doesn't even have an LJ to make me hate her.) Obviously this is the worst kind of cheating, because Quincunx is a door-stopper and Red respectable, and removing them renders the stack a molehill. No matter. I shall transfer them to the Coffee Table Wall, to replace the Wall books I shall start reading next. (The coffee table is flush against a wall, is why the books on it form a wall and not a stack.)

Was all happy about TIFF Lightbox having mid-day shows of Up on Poppy Hill, the latest Miyazaki/ Ghibli. Then discovered that I'd been handed the early afternoon shift today, which never happens, and that the noon showing was dubbed. So am going at 4:30 on Sunday. Whatever it's like, the cityscapes are natsukashii spot on.
( Read more... )

What have you just finished?
The Agency: A Spy in the House, which has been on my shelves, a third read, since July. Finished it off last night, skimming and skipping, because I refuse to let a YA book consume several more days on top of the ones it swallowed last summer.

White is for Witching. Oyeyemi writes the kind of book that simple-minded readers like me can't read properly. She's a marvellous writer but I can't follow what she's doing. This may be because of what I normally read. Someone reviewing this said, essentially, 'If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is for you.' Well, I did and it wasn't. Castle is a genre book; it does its genre task very neatly indeed and solves the riddle so that even the dumbest ox knows what happens. Witching is not genre, so even though there's a House, with Things in it, ummm-- there's no guarantee that actually there *is* a House rather than a house, or Things inside it; or if there are, there's no saying what the Things are. Thus literature.
( Cut for prolixity in the other sections )

1. Reading journals are dangerous things. I have two regulars: Things Mean A Lot and A Striped Armchair. Was secretly a little relieved when RL issues intervened in their keepers' keeping, but there's still, alas, the back archives. A Striped Armchair is especially dangerous for its lists of books that relate to this book.

2. Not sure when my life's goal became Read All The Things, but it does seem to be what occupies my time these days-- my fandom in the absence of a true fannish time occupier. I'd hoped that getting library books would impose some order and limit: books must be returned therefore must be read by a certain date therefore maybe I should read instead of playing solitaire? Hasn't worked that well. I still have the acquiring addiction, and the stacks of unread books has now taken over the kitchen table. Clearly what I need to work on is that maternal reflex, 'you never know when you may need this'. I never know when I may want to read LeGuin so yay for the five volumes left out on the Front Lawn Library.
( Read more... )

Have I ever said how much I dislike unreliable narrators? I really really do. I'm quite happy for visual media to pull switches on me, possibly because I really don't care whether you met last year in Marienbad or not, possibly because the visual is always open to question anyway. Am perfectly happy for a film or manga scene to be an unmarked hallucination or a flashback or a dream: the narrative thrust is not the main reason for watching a film or reading a manga.

But in prose narration it gets up my nose just a touch, only mitigated a little by other people's guesses as to what really might have happened. (Or by my own imperviousness: I had no idea Ishiguro's narrator in An Artist of the Floating World was at all unreliable.) The word must be trustable or how can we tell where we are? Agreed, I only feel this way because of prose conventions, but conventions count for a lot. People who arbitrarily break the rules of murder mysteries annoy me too. If a narrator lies consistently, I want at least to be able to construct the facts. If the facts are beyond construction, as they are in Liar, I become anxious.

I also can't conceive of writing a book like Liar *without* a Received Version at hand. If the writer herself doesn't know what really happened, how can she maintain any kind of consistency in the narrator's departure from it? And if it doesn't matter-- if readers really can pick the reality they choose from the facts available-- why bother? It's like a whodunit that doesn't say who did-- an exercise in pointlessness.

petronia has a tumblr meme: "This is a list of the books on my shelves which I haven’t read." Which is hahahaha NO. There's a word limit to LJ entries, guys.

I give you instead a list of the unread books on my kitchen table. Not the living room table, mind you, nor the dining room table, nor the bedroom table. Just the relatively recent stuff that winds up in the kitchen, because that's where I unload my hauls from the Front Lawn Library, the Public Library, and the second-hand bookstores, and then reload them into the backpack when I go out. Five years ago I went to the hospital for an outpatient procedure without bringing a book, and consequently spent two interminable days with nothing to read. Never again. Now I always have something sensational to read in the ambulance.

Note that once I put table books on the kitchen shelves, the chances of their being read diminishes greatly, is why there are some books here that date from the summer.
( With provenance noted )
( Oh let's do the Reading Wednesday one too )

metaphortunate nails it:

The other reason is that I tend to avoid Famous Important Narratives of Resistance by Oppressed Dudes because in my experience they tend to explore the depths of human nature and the cruelty and resilience and cowardice and anger and nobility in all people except for women, who get dragged in occasionally for real people to have sex with. (Elie Wiesel, Malcolm X, I'm talking to you.)

Same goes for those 'great masters of portraying the human condition' like Saul Bellow, where both the critic and the novelist believe that the set 'human' does not include the subset 'female.' And *know* that they're excluding half of humanity: 'of course he's pants at writing women' one blithely appended to his encomium of the master's universality. (Well, not those words, but that's what he menat.)

1. LJ is being strangely coy about my journal. Doesn't want to load it but will happily load everyone else's.

2. I bought a digital scale on Saturday. No more peering one-eyed at the murky black lines and invisible red one. Farewell old scale: I think you date to the 80s, but you were accurate to the end, in your adjusted in 2001 to weigh 7 lbs plus avatar. (The downside of digital is the fractions of a pound feature. 'I have had no cake for ten days, why am I .6 of a pound up?!')
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I am pleased to know that I read at the speed of Aristotle and St Augustine, though I'd be more pleased to make that 'Plato and Hypatia.'

OTOH reading like Hypatia is a problem when confronted with 600+ pages of T'ang dynasty murder and madness. So I'm sort of swiftly reading Deception, and cursing all blurb writers to perdition. 'It begins simply enough. In the capital, Lady Wu and her evil mother are plotting against the Empress...' No it does not, rottit. It begins that way if you read so fast you forget the first sixty-five pages, because up till that it's an interesting enough Judge Dee mystery. I shall probably start skimming when I meet evil Lady Wu and her evil mother. Anyway, isn't characterizing someone as 'evil' a sure tip-off that the approach is just that little bit less than subtle?
( Read more... )

I know I have a copy of The Hobbit, because I've been carting it around for at least three decades. It's the navy blue covered one with the mountain on the spine, and it's in with my kids' books on the lower bedroom shelf. Only it's not. The navy blue book is The Lost Queen of Egypt, and if I have a copy of The Hobbit it's hiding in some black hole I should email Stephen Hawking about. So perhaps I should go buy a copy to re-read?

And half of me says Oh yes yes reread The Hobbit, this winter (well, this week of this winter) is exactly like when you were reading LotR in high school. And the other half says, You're kidding, right? Where's your nostalgia when the snow starts falling next week?

And besides, over at the Gladstone library I just made a discovery, TPL's own black hole.
( Read more... )

I'm a little... bemused, I suppose, reading American writers' comments on Rivers of London. LMB was apprehensive that Aaronovitch would kill off Nightingale-- because so many fantasy writers kill off the mentor-- and pleased that he didn't. Kate Elliott was delighted that Peter actually has to work to master Newtonian magic, instead of being a spesshul chosen one who can yanno *just do it* because he's spesshul chosen, or fae, or whatever.

Maybe I don't read enough fantasy. But seriously, it never occurred to me that Aaronovitch would do either because, well, it's just not that kind of world. Maybe it's the fact that it's Newtonian magic which predominates: suggests order, logic, and reason in the human world. (Genii locorum are another matter, of course.) Peter's not special. He's a rookie cop who nearly became a paper-pusher until it turned out he was qualified to become an apprentice mage. Become. So of course he has to learn, and of course he needs someone to teach him, someone who won't be killed in the first book because then where'd Peter be? British ensemble cast, is what this feels like. Much more so than, say, Kate Griffin; and you don't relentlessly prune your cast every season (or book) to leave the shining hero still shining (as Griffin does, grump.)

Spent a chunk of last year reading random recs from here and there. Aaronovitch's I can usually trace to Aaronovitch: they have a certain genre similarity. Others came from the FFL, which is how I read Tim Powers, Michele Batchelor, and Hilary McKay. Usually I c&p the name into the Toronto Public Library system, note what branches near me have which copies, and go and get them. Occasionally none does and I have to put a hold. This will become more frequent now that winter has retired the bicycle.

The trouble is that I rarely note where I got a rec from, and Swiss-cheese-brained as I am, occasionally fail to remember that I've put a hold on at all. Thus I was surprised to discover that I'd ordered a copy of Deception by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri, of whom I remember not a thing. It's set in Tang China, it has Judge Dee (must be the why of it) and it concerns the Always-Evil Empress (empresses being always-evil by definition) Wu. Who, the blurb says, deposed Confucianists and promoted Buddhists; and that's a bad idea, because IIRC the histories are written by Confucianists. So I'm thinking 'hostile tradition, here we come' and wondering if I want to read this thumping great door-stopper at all.

ETA: the wiki article on Wu Zetian contains the lovely line that she was responsible for 'the "Wordless Stella" at the Qianling Mausoleum.' Someone's autocorrect was too quick on the draw.

Why did I think her name was Constance Webb? Some mnemonic confusion of Mary Webb (Gone to Earth) and Constance Garnett (translator of Dostoevsky and mother of Bunny) who have nothing in common except for living in the same time period. Is why I need a smart phone, or at least a notebook, because I'm hopeless with both names and mnemonics, and go blank the minute I walk into a book store.

But once established that it's Catherine Webb, I had no little difficulty finding a copy behind a bunch of other books on the lowest shelf of the YA (used-not-new) section at Doug Miller Books. (If I ever win a lottery, one thing I'll do is find Mr Miller larger premises. All those unseen books in boxes and double piles at the back where there's no light frustrate me in the extreme; besides which, if there are three people in the place there's no room to move.)

It's also signed. So go me.

My grasshopper memory means I can't easily read WIPs. I need that 'in our last thrilling episode/ manga chapter/ tankoubon/ volume' reference for absolutely everything. I do want to read the ending of FMA, but I hesitate because it involves reading the last ten vols of FMA. At least. And every new Aaronovitch requires rereading the previous Aaronovitch. At least. And so on.
( As for online fic... )

I read my friends' FL page, and every so often someone's book rec sends me off to the library catalogue to see if we have it. Then I think, no, I'll wait till I'm back from NYC or have finished whatever is on the go right now. Trouble is, I'm finding that book recs are like dreams. Sometimes fragments remain ('I was driving a car' which was a nightmare because I don't drive) but more often it's just 'Oh yeah I had a dream last night.' Someone somewhere recommended something that sounded must-read but now I can't remember if it was a fantasy or a mystery or a children's book or, indeed, anything about it at all.

Maybe I just dreamed that I read someone's book rec?

Magie Noir a Soho? Oh alright if you must. But calling the series Le Dernier Apprenti Sorcier? A tad too Mercedes Lackey for me.

(Googled the English just to be sure that wasn't what they call it here too, and they don't. The Rivers of London series, or the Peter Grant series, but not The Last Apprentice ~~Mage~~ Magician.)

rushthatspeaks discovers HP Lovecraft being, in essence, HP Lovecraft even while talking about some rather uninspired caverns in Virginia.

Glimpses of far black vistas beyond the radius of the lights-- sheer drops of incalculable depth to unknown chasms, or arcades beckoning laterally to mysteries yet untasted by human eye-- bring one's soul close to the frightful and obscure frontiers of the material world, and conjure up suspicions of vague and unhallowed dimensions whose formless beings lurk ever close to the visible world of man's five senses.

Am I the only person who thinks Lovecraft writes like a fog machine? Formless, inchoate, and dimly menacing, like the gibbering of Those who dwell Down There.

As so often, my lj won't load but

incandescens' will. Odd.

I never watched any of the Harry Potter movies, being not a movie person and certainly not a Potter fan. But The Little Girls' treat last night was Goblet of Fire, ordered from whatever highway robbery system Bell has in place for its digital subscribers. (Ordered and set up by the older, who hasn't yet reached double digits. 'Did you watch on the TV or the computer?' asked her dad on returning. 'The TV.' 'Oh yes, the computer is so complicated.' Give M a year or so and she'll have it down, I'm sure. OTOH what she wanted to do before-treat was play paper dolls with me and her sister. Some things do not change.)
( Yes, Alan Rickman is hot )

Happy Beaver is good hot weather reading. It passes the time, keeps the attention focussed, and leads nowhere in particular. For a London-set series, it reads unnervingly unEnglish. Aaronovitch and Griffin present me with what feels like Londoners, however urban magical they may be; but Carey's people seem to belong to some generic and semi-American series. The way they talk, the things they feel, the amount of time they spend in cars, all negate the place names that were so grittily and grottily London in Griffin's books. Nor is there any of that half-feyness or slight battiness that Aaronovitch's Peter doesn't even know he possesses. (True, Felix is supposed to come from Liverpool. That only makes it worse. Am trying to hear his lines in a northern accent and not quite succeeding.)
( We won't mention his manners, because he has none. )

Ben Aaronovitch is talking about the previous incarnation of ideas that made it into Rivers of London, one of which was a Hogwarts hommage. "You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together."
( I too can take someone else's ball and run with it )

1. Orca is one of the better Vlad books, partly because Vlad doesn't spend half the book saying how much he really really needs to kill someone, or that he just has to kill someone, or if someone looks at him like that again he will kill them, or whatever. This is good, because Jhegaala was painful and Athyra not much better, third person or no third person. But Orca has a nice twisty plot and Kiera, which is excellent.
( Read more... )

No one has Brusts, as I said, except for various volumes of Paarfi. Don't ask me why-- there's always a copy of 500 Years After or The Phoenix Guard or Sethra Lavode in any used bookstore. But for a wonder, Eliot's Books had both Yendi and Teckla, thereby saving me 24-7=17 dollars for the compendium.

Eliot's Books also had a number of familiar-looking volumes, and two which clinched it: The Japan We Never Knew, by David Suzuki and Keibo Oiwa, and Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler. Those were mine, put out on the front lawn library some weeks ago and last weekend respectively. So now I know.

And occurs to me, if people are going to flog my books at Eliot's, why shouldn't I do the same and get the benefit of it?

Being half an hour early for my doctor's appt yesterday I went to the used bookstore across the street. They had a loonie bin out front-- in Canada that's 'any book for a dollar'-- and the books were all ancient and sometimes classic SF. Passed on Ethan of Athos and a couple of Moorcocks (all Moorcock is the same Moorcock, in essence) but gladly copped M. John Harrison's The Floating Gods (In Viriconium by any other name) which I was pretty sure I didn't have. Bopped back to my doctor's office to discover that I was not, in fact, fifteen minutes early, but forty-five minutes late. Must speak to her about this disturbing mental fuzz at next week's rebooked appointment.
( Read more... )

Alan Garner is finishing the Weirdstone Trilogy. "I have no expectations, none," as Stoppard's Guildenstern said (unless it was Rosencrantz.) But what happened to Susan, if Colin's the only one left in this mortal realm? wibble wibble

(Garner, famously, is the writer who never ever wrote the book I wanted him to. The Moon of Gomrath was followed by Elidor; Elidor was followed by The Owl Service (aka 'what these people need is a limey'); The Owl Service was followed by Red Shift and its unlikable self-pitying rapist protagonist. After that I gave up on Garner. So yes, mixed feelings here.)

As long as I do it from someone else's user info. Curse LJ's new style, because I used to be able to do it from comments.

In my daily blog reading, Aaronovitch has useful advice on dieting. He's losing slower than our mayor, but then our mayor is a loser. Stephen Pentz has some musical commentary I agree with.

For instance, I am willing to acknowledge (albeit reluctantly) that people are entitled to believe that "Imagine" is John Lennon's best song, and that it provides a possible blueprint for reality. (I, on the other hand, would opt for "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "If I Fell," or a dozen or so other of his songs.)

Must stop buying books. Won't stop buying books. Thus I wind up with Conan Doyle's Tales of Terror and Mystery which fantods me in spades. Not that the content is all that innovative: could see what was coming a mile away in the three I've read so far. But like MR James' ghost stories, they express perfectly a sense of time and place. Do this with not particularly nice places (or times) and the result is instant nightmare. Should wash it away with a few pages of 1Q84 which is being intensely flat-footed to date, even when the action involves murder. Actually, *especially* when the action involves murder. Am waiting for the surrealism I've been promised and only have a whisper of it so far.

AMLA has disappeared from yahoo groups. Or possibly I, the list maintainer, have somehow been bounced from AMLA. But so far it appears to be gone.

In other news, I have two Hasui calendars hanging on my walls. Well, four, actually, because 2009 and 2010 have been turned to my favourite prints therefrom. The other two, 2011 and 2012's, arrived from

kickinpants earlier this week, which is commendably fast (it usually takes two weeks plus to get anything here from Seattle.) I suppose it was because she sent them traceable and requiring signature. She also gifted me with a personally dedicated volume of Connie Willis short stories (where have you been, TTG?) and Havemercy. I take it this is Lady Jaida turned pro? It is all very lovely and I am extremely happy, especially with Hasui's Meiji Iris Garden and the rainy hot springs. This outfit rather tends to fixate on Hasui's snow and temple scenes-- there's four each in both calendars-- which I think is a mistake. Seen one red temple in snow with umbrella-carrying kimono-clad woman and you've seen them all.
( Cut for earworms )

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