Off the Cliff

The Somnambulist

2016-01-01T03:36:06Z

I see that Jonathan Barnes writes Dr Who. I must then conclude that the echoes of Aaronovitch- particularly Peter's out of body experiences in the earliest times of London- which I find in The Somnambulist probably work the other way around, even if Aaronovitch never cited him as a source.

I also have the feeling that I've read this book before in some other book, but couldn't say which of many steampunk novels it might have been. All of them, maybe, possibly even starting with The Man Who Was Thursday. One aspect of never remembering a plot once I've finished a book is that the book only exists while I'm reading it; after that nothing's left of it but a memory of the smell of smoke and a presumption that once my eyes watered, as it were. So many similar elements: night, fog, detectives, inspectors, detective inspectors, hypnotists, grotesques, prostitutes, secret societies, and the occasional automaton. The Somnambulist lacks only the automata. It does not, for that matter, say why the Somnambulist is called the Somnambulist, since he never sleep-walks at all.

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Wednesday?

2015-12-31T02:00:31Z

The pre- and post-Christmas season is famous for scrambling the time sense. Monday being a holiday has put me a day out in my reckoning all week, even though it was preceded by four days off- but the first two of those don't count because they happened in spring, and the weekend doesn't count because it happened in fall, and Monday turned into winter. Whatever, have now established that it's Wednesday, and there's another four days off before I have to work again.

But it seems that I just did this meme, even though I did it in spring.

What have you just read?
Dick Francis, The Edge and Hilary Mckay, Binny for Short. How pleasant to read about nice people. Francis' protagonist is unusually nice even for a Francis protagonist, and McKay's family- well, McKay also writes problem children (Binny is one, certainly) but in her families there's at least one kind, observant, preternaturally considerate member, and in this one there's two. Non-dysfunctional families, what a treat. And layered characterisation, even more. Not that I'd figured it myself- me, I was wondering if Binny was neurally atypical, with her tendency to go and hide in trees- but Goodreads enlightened me.

What are you reading now?
Still plodding along with Raffles, nearing the end but never getting there. Working my way through Dickinson's City of Gold that turned up unexpectedly from my Hold list, and Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist ditto.

What will you read next?
Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and Dickinson's Merlin Dreams, good winter reading, since winter seems to have started finally.

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Wednesday again

2015-12-24T03:34:17Z

What have you just finished?
An Artist of the Floating World which, along with the March-like damp weather and the uncertain gut, has left me feeling bleh.

What are you reading now
Hilary McKay, Binnie for Short- enchanting McKay as ever.
Peter Dickinson, Merlin Dreams- not sure if I'm fantodded or not.
Sophie Masson, The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare- ditto.
Dick Francis, The Edge- set in Canada, full of pleasant bland Canadians and one very nasty Brit. Should speed-read to discover what the nasty Brit did to all his poor suicidal victims.

What will you read next?
Probably all the above, plus whatever book G gave me for Christmas.

I'm sure there's some self-help skill or cog-behav method to kick one out of the Christmas doldrums. I might try it one of these days when I stop being so bloody tired.

Otherwise there was a strange beetle in the side bedroom yesterday with a kind of triceratops frill about its head (luckily no horns.) Did the glass-and-paper trick and dropped him on to the flat roof. Windows have *not* been open in spite of 10C highs so he probably originated in the house and may not survive the Great Outdoors. OTOH it's 14C tomorrow, so maybe he will. (And tomorrow is supposed to be 17. Daffodils bloom.)

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Loose-end Sunday

2015-12-21T01:02:41Z

The Salvation Army ads print in Chinese on my browser.

An Artist of the Floating World is an incredible downer. That I never noticed what was going on in the plot when I first read it, thirty years ago, must be due to my single-minded fascination with how Ishiguro rendered Japanese speech in English. Except that I knew no Japanese at all thirty years ago.

Wandered into a Christmas Craft Fair yesterday, and wandered out with new crocheted pot holders to replace the ones K-chan sent me from Japan a dozen years ago, that finally succumbed to the pilot light gas-grunge of my stove. Also home-made rose potpourri from someone's garden, which proved, alas, to have something distinctly ungardenly chemical in it. Had to toss it. Also a notebook covered in black washi with dragons on it. Alas again, writing longhand in notebooks is a lost art with me.
( Read more... )

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Wednesday Meme

2015-12-17T03:24:33Z

What have you just read?
A Robe of Feathers and other stories by Thersa Matsuura. Very 100 Demons: traditional ghostlies and ghastlies appearing unremarked in modern Japan. (Or historical Japan: several of the most powerful stories are backset to the same vague Meiji/Taisho countryside that Mushishi occupies, and several more have furusato longings to them, on the lines of leaving beloved country home for burgeoning alien city.) The narrative style is often a tad more surreal than Ima Ichiko's 'everyday reality with bakemono' but one could see many of the stories done in her style. In fact, there actually is an Ima illo for the ending of Mrs Misaki's Eyes, except that the circumstances are rather different.

Matsuura is an American who's lived there 23 years, and it may be that commonality that makes her two gaijin-narrated stories- Sand Walls, Paper Doors and Mrs Misaki's Eyes- especially congenial to me. The outsider seeing inside, and seeing much more than I ever did, for sure.

What are you reading now?
Still with Raffles and Masked City and The Edge- brief spurts of comfort reading after work. Or The Age of Exuberance, probably a university text aimed at American undergrads, but useful enough to have my scattered impressions of 18th century social history laid out clearly in one place. This week is a marathon complicated by continued sickness on several people's parts, including mine, and the loss, either temporary or permanent, of three replacement staff. Next week is holiday schedule and in theory much more doable. I may even have a brain for reading with.

What will you read next?
There's a newish Hilary McKay on its way to me from the library. Have gone back to reading book blogs; probably shouldn't. Or I could read the results of following book blogs two years ago ie my holds list at the library, which is where I got A Robe of Feathers from. Or I could weed the TBR pile by trashing everything that doesn't grab me by page ten, which is where I got The Age of Exuberance from, something I believe I've had for thirty years more or less?

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flemmings @ 2015-12-09T20:55:00

2015-12-10T02:16:11Z

Warm today- sunny and springlike. I went home at break and changed into my fleecy and cloth jacket. Came out and the sun had gone, the wind was up, and I was cold. So then it was grey and fall-like, and still is. Shall probably turn the heat on in case those lows of 4C happen, but I won't turn it up high.
( Cut for Wednesday meme )

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Death of a thousand cuts

2015-11-28T23:40:11Z

I believe I was foolish enough to say something about being able to sleep in Friday morning. Was then sent a text at 10 p.m. on Thursday asking me to do someone's morning shift. Yes, well.

At work I scraped my knuckles on a sharp edge, was bitten by an invisible something that caused a large swelling on my forearm, and developed the usual winter fissure under the nail of my right forefinger. (Always the same finger, and only one finger, caused by combi of heat and frequent handwashing; exquisitely painful, and nothing makes it close up again until spring.) Callus on foot from orthotics cracked, making me limp all day; knees reacted to rain by aching ferociously on every step; high fibre lunch involving lentils led to the usual high fibre fallout.

Thus today has been devoted to languishing on sofa reading Stephen Booth, all of whose characters talk alike. OTOH went for a walk in the afternoon's pale November blues and sun, and found a copy of Dick Francis' The Edge at Doug Miller, which no one here has, including the library. So not a total bust.

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Because Wednesdays are still useless

2015-11-26T01:20:49Z

The week of Early Risings. (Doctor, acupuncture, shift, dentist.) Also first snow early yesterday morning which, thank you god, did not stick on the pavement down here in Greenhouse Effect-land. But I bicycled through several large dumps off cars that had come in from the burbs.

(I have new boots- yet another pair of boots- guaranteed double-E width. May still not be wide enough to accommodate orthotics and liners and bunions. Am told I need to replace orthotics every two or three years, which is-- you think I'm made of money? Am also told that the orthotics I have are designed for running shoes, not boots, which is-- let's try anything but the Walking Clinic this time.)

Anyway. Wednesday meme:
( Under the cut )

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Wednesday Meme because Wednesday is always a bust

2015-11-19T02:49:29Z

What have you just finished reading?
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street as per two entries back.

What are you reading now?
Last Car to Elysian Fields, as per yesterday's entry. Can't see me getting any farther with Raffles.

John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, which is heating up bean bags reading. Beanbags take nearly fifteen minutes to ready. Book has much smaller print than I remember.

What will you read next?
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is on its way. Hear it's a doorstopper, not sure if it'll be to my taste.

What have you stopped reading?
Stephen Booth's Cooper and Fry. Depression reading: goes down easy, requires no effort, makes one feel grey.(Does Diane *never* learn?) Shall take the two current library books back. If I want to return to my folly again- well, I have two second-hand paperbacks in the series.

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Varieties of strange

2015-11-18T03:55:16Z

Am back in 'read all the things!' mode. This has led to the disorienting experience of reading a Dave Robicheaux mystery in tandem with Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. The Robicheaux is much the more rivetting, mostly from the way it presents New Orleans and Louisiana as hallucinatory places that connect neither with the New Orleans mythos nor with the general ethos of Southern writing (which makes the American South sound to me like a corner of hell. All Gothic, all the time, and rationality a totally unknown concept.)

There are no gentlemen in Robicheaux's world, but in its reflection, Raffles' gentlemen and their world look pretty damned weird too. Fagging, cricketers, gentlemen's clubs- the cozy familiar British Empah world of Peter Wimsey, even if he was much later- takes on a distinctly sinister hue. Maybe it was hell as well.

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Several things make a post

2015-11-16T01:14:02Z

1. Stayed up to 3 finishing The Watchmaker of Filigree St. Yes, it's hard to assign this a genre. Not quite steampunk, not quite historical A/U, not necessarily fantasy... Call it historical magic realism and be done with it. That at least explains why the characters don't fall neatly into genre roles, and good for them.

I found it hard following the logic of uhh how not to think of a possible future so as to prevent that future from happening because uh because. Very near the end was a single word that enlightened my perplexity, but since Mori presumably didn't know the word he couldn't use it to pigeonhole himself, and so he could only describe things the way they looked to him. (But Steepleton knew the word, so Mori should have too. Just saying.)

Caveats about Meiji families aside, I still have to wonder if female Oxbridge scientists swore and blasphemed (as it was then thought of) quite as much as Grace regularly does.
( Read more... )

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flemmings @ 2015-11-13T12:32:00

2015-11-13T17:40:21Z

Enjoying The Watchmaker of Filigree Street as far as I've got, but wondering if the Meiji emperor's second cousin would actually be called Matsumoto. Maybe through his mother...? Superficial googling is inconclusive about practice affecting married daughters of the royal house prior to 1947 (post-47 daughters who marry outside the family become commoners automatically.) But there were collateral branches of the royal family with effective last names that could have been changed to spare the innocent. No Nashimotos were harmed in the making of this book.

Whether any collateral royals would have been brought up in a *castle* OTOH...

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I woke last night to the sound of thunder

2015-10-23T01:09:05Z

Actually, I went to sleep last night to the sound of thunder, another of those unseasonable storms we've had lately. What I woke to was the fragments of a vaguely erotic dream about the dragon kings, which was who the protagonists of the earlier, unremembered part of the dream had turned into. All that remains is the picture of Gouen (or possibly Goujun) standing very still on a night porch in a failed attempt to evade his oldest brother who was searching for him because Reasons. This still made me very happy for most of the morning until reality reasserted itself.

My mother was able to lose books in her bed- also lighters, cigarette packages, hair brushes, bed jackets, and you name it. I've now done the same. The book I was reading last night in the sideroom bed has simply vanished. I suppose it must have slipped down one side and slid underneath the platform, but I can't see it at all. No matter: wasn't an enthralling mystery after all. Started An Artist of the Floating World instead, hawkeyed looking for the hints that the unreliable narrator is unreliable.

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Reading and Chilly Wednesday

2015-10-22T00:34:52Z

How can a day with a forecast high of 18 have been so cold? Well, because it dawned 12 and then went down, so the fall jacket didn't cut it at all. Winter jacket worked just fine, thanks. Tomorrow sounds to be just as mixed-up. Ah, October.

What have you just finished reading?
The Third Policeman. Does leave a hangover. Can't decide if CS Lewis did this better or worse. Suspect it was worse ie much more flat-footed.

What are you reading now?
Another Stephen Booth mystery, name forgotten. It's a Stephen Booth, about Derbyshire detective Diane Fry and sidekick cinnamon roll Ben Cooper. I of course thought the author was Susan Cooper, having got his sex wrong, having confused his name with the protagonist's, and having remembered the other protag as being Diane Rich. Luckily Mr. Miller the bookseller was able to penetrate my brain-fry.

What will you read next?
Depends how brain-fried I remain. Have White Teeth and Aki: the Years of Childhood and The Famished Road still sitting in the pile; money is on White Teeth, because it's set in a cold grey England that matches cold grey Toronto.

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flemmings @ 2015-10-18T20:51:00

2015-10-19T01:08:49Z

I have to wonder about the me of thirty years ago. Not only did I manage to read At Swim-Two-Birds, which was irritatingly twee when I tried it again a few years back, I also read The Third Policeman without noting the twist, even though an afterword tells you what the twist is. And again, I managed to finish it. I shall finish it this time just to see how the twist works out, but at the moment I'm finding the Nabokovian digressions a bit wearisome and the wordplay too random to be entertaining. I long for a nice mystery with a logical beginning, middle, and end. Nice mystery is currently sitting on the kitchen table.

That said, I'm reminded why I was so enchanted by it first time- the conceit with the bicycles, since back then I'd only just learned to ride a bike myself and thought bicycles the best thing in the world. But the bicycle conceit can be reduced to a one-liner and the rest of the book is slow once it's happened.

Maybe this shallowness is the brain-rot of age or the brain-rot of the internet. Maybe I'd find all my quondem door-stopper favourites impossible now. Tristam Shandy? Look Homeward, Angel? I note that one of my childhood favourites, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is also impossible. Genre or epistolary novels are all I want to read these days.

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Wednesday Reading is at a loose end

2015-10-01T02:31:00Z

What did you recently finish reading?
Dear Enemy by Jean Webster. Sequel-ish to Daddy-Long-Legs. Book from youth, unvisited by Suck Fairy, unlike so many others (Anne of Green Gables, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, much of Narnia etc.) Casual racism is of its time and slappable rather than horrific. Best of epistolary novels.

What are you currently reading?
Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton. Because it's on the shelf and might be better than it is. Life is too short to read come-by-chance like that unless one reads much faster than I do. But I keep on. See title.

What will you read next?
What indeed? Webster is the first female author I've read in two months, and she was casual bedtime reading. So might finish either of my other one-the-goes but abandoned; might finally read the last Max Gladstone; or might get into White Teeth. I want fantasy and steampunk; I am currently 40th of 42 for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street; that's a long wait. Money is on Gladstone.

In RL, finally had teeth mended at the dentist's for slightly under $400, even with the discount she kindly gave me. However was not rackled by spasms of coughing, so shall count it gain. Cough syrup is nearly all gone ad I hope I have no more need of it.

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A Downer is an Upper?

2015-09-27T17:06:39Z

Finished The Knife of Never Letting Go at 2 am last night. Short term- yes, gotta find out what happens. Long term- why does anyone read dystopia? Why is there so *much* YA dystopia? (There was an article about that somewhere.) I suppose it's a corrective to the mandatory happi endo of kids' books. Today you are a man, so now you can read books where the hero and his entire family die, as well as the dogs and horses. (Actually, isn't that Njal's Saga? But why would you read Njal's Saga either.)

Certainly has echoes of Riddley Walker: premature (by our standards) adulthood, dialect, post-catastrophe world. Of course RW is a tour-de-force and much more opaque than Knife: I wasn't entirely sure what was happening / had happened much of the time, and needed the Coles' Notes to help me out. Knife lays things out for you, as you would expect, even if it takes forever to do so. Among the irritations was the 'every time someone's about to tell Todd the truth, they're interrupted by some new threat.' The other irritation (aside form what one reviewer called 'Aaron the Energizer Bunny' and I mean *really*. Is the man a cyborg? a zombie? a character in Angel Sanctuary?) is ( Cut for spoiler )

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Reading Wednesday Cannot Make Up Its Mind

2015-09-24T01:03:24Z

What have you just finished reading?
Nothing since last week. On account of--

What are you reading now?
I'm still noodling away at
Winter's Tale, which fell off in interest at the end of the Peter Lake section;

The Throne of Fire, 2nd in Rick Riordan's Egypt series. Riordan is depression reading: I don't enjoy it much but I keep on reading it to be reading something. Not unlike daytime TV;

The Guizer, Alan Garner's collection of stories about the Fool figure, or rather, the Trickster. Depressing in quite another way. Why are there no female tricksters? apart from the one Le Guin wrote. (I see there's a space in that last name now; has it always been there?) Because Trickster figures are psychotic sociopaths and we can't conceive of women as being amoral *and* powerful, is it? Understand, I don't mind this: but reading tale after tale of psychotic sociopaths is depressing.

The Knife of Never Letting Go, which so far is rivetting. May stick with it. To my tastes, YA generally has a lack of complexity that makes it drag. (See Riordan, above.) Hope this is one of the exceptions. (Yes yes, I know; like manga, it's not *for* you. But still one hopes. After all, Diana Wynne Jones counts as YA or whatever, and *she* managed it.)

Have also reread The Invisible Library, picking up what's given of Vale and his family. They never did get their book back from Bradamant, did they? But was it Bradamant who stole it? They're in Leeds and her depredations were in London, I assume? Do wonder what the book had in it...

What will you read next?
Might get back to The Famished Road when the weather cools; might forge on through Winter's Tale. Discover among my nostalgic 80s Picadors a copy of Pilgermann which wikipedia discourages me from reading, promising horrors. Jew wandering through medieval Europe, yes I would think so. But still.

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Reading Thursday

2015-09-18T01:30:15Z

What have you just finished reading?
The Shepherd's Crown.

What are you reading now?
Winter's Tale

What will you read next?
The Famished Road

-- on account of in hot weather, like now, I need to read about cold things, like winter in New York. And in cold weather, I'm happy to read about hot places, like Nigeria. Is currently hot, and will be cold day after tomorrow. By which time I will *not* have finished that doorstopper of Helprin's, so may go in tandem with Okri. Or drop it entirely.

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flemmings @ 2015-09-15T22:37:00

2015-09-16T02:50:24Z

Finished The Shepherd's Crown. This entry says most of my thoughts better than I could. Spoilers, of course, huge honking ones, so don't read until you've read because the book's best approached spoiler-free.

Shall mention however that Pratchett believes in redemption, which is very old-fashioned of him and not what one usually finds in English lit. Calvinism got a surprisingly solid grip on the CofE soul: some people are redeemed or at least qualified to be redeemed, but others are preterite and unregenerately damned, end story. In light literature the preterite are, distressingly often, middle-class vulgarians who don't know their place or have pretensions above their station or whatever the quintessential English social crime is. Has just occurred to me that Pratchett allows even these people to be redeemed, which was nice of him.

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Is it Wednesday already?

2015-09-10T02:56:06Z

What did you read last?
Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid. Hot weather reading. Fun if I read faster, but sloggy as I do not. Also Riordan never read Barbara Mertz, who teaches you first off that the noun is *hieroglyphs*, and hieroglyphic is the adjective.

What are you reading now?
What am I not? Winter's Tale, Riddley Walker, and The Famished Road. Or was reading, because--

What will you read next?
The Shepherd's Crown which came from incandescens today, and of course could not be kept waiting.

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flemmings @ 2015-09-07T20:14:00

2015-09-08T00:30:03Z

Feel distinctly out of focus, which is partly heat, partly allergies, partly a long weekend, and partly a visiting petronia taking me to that Elsewhere my house becomes when someone else is in it. Took me also to dinner last night at the expensive Korean restaurant with the antiques. My first time for Korean barbecue: alas that my table manners couldn't measure up to the surroundings. But I can't see how anyone stays graceful eating barbecue. Yes, well, the slender fashionable Japanese who surrounded us did it, but I am not Japanese.

However on the way down there, in the muggy grey evening, we came across an excellent Front Lawn Library on Manning of-all-places (street must be gentrifying) and copped Ben Okri's The Famished Road and leGuin's Lavinia. The former I think was on the Guardian's list of 1000 best SFF, and the latter has cropped up on some other list lately. Started the Okri in spite of concurrently reading Riddley Walker and Winter's Tale, which are also a possible cause of unfocussedness.

petronia told me the best oil to use for cooking in an iron frypan, as also for seasoning it, and how to do steaks in same (preheat in a 500 degree oven) and many other useful things I shall try once coolness returns. In the meantime I rejoice in my central AC, thermostat set to 'icecube'. Slept in till nearly 10 this morning because of it, which I can't do tomorrow on account of a 9:30 shift. 'And she says Go back, go back to the world.'

(Dreamwidth translates the lj user tag as dreamwidth user. How does one make it lj?)

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Hot summertime, finally

2015-09-06T16:11:39Z

-I read Riddley Walker back in the 80s. I even remember little bits of it. Somehow I didn't remember that it was written in phonetic dialect. Must have been even more reflex of a subvocal reader then than now.

Read *some* of A Winter's Tale back in the 80s. Somehow didn't remember that it takes place in no New York anyone has ever seen. Must have thought New York was like that; and even though I was reading Cortazar and Fuentes and Garcia Marques at the same time, must not have registered that this was a similar genre. That said, it *still* recalls The Golem and the Jinni, which was much more HA.

I need a list of fantastical works set in historical New York. Goodreads is much too inclusive, everyone else too contemporary.

-Have turned on central AC for the first time in years. (Eight, by my reckoning.) Huzzah, it still works! Maybe I don't have to replace it after all, against next summer's promised El Nino heat.

Power outages both yesterday afternoon and this morning (your regularly scheduled Sunday morning power pause. Always early Sunday morning, for some odd reason.) Y'day's lasted half an hour, in fact, but I was out for all but five minutes of same. The nuisance is that every time I have to go next door and reset our net connection, because it always fails when the power goes.

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My garbage life

2015-08-30T20:16:19Z

Yesterday and this morning were autumn, and very pleasant. It is now summer again (hint: the sun came out) and not so very.

In my half-aware state I've succeeded in doing some basic cleaning, like the lower shelf of the perpetually unsatisfactory living room table. It's wicker, and the wicker was already sagging when I bought it at a yard sale a dozen years ago. Anything put on the shelf sags too, like books, so it became a kind of oubliette. Clearly needs a flat surface, so I retrieved a framed and glassed picture from the basement and inserted it there. Works very well. Would work better if picture wasn't of a clock, with real metal hands in front and a little battery box behind; but wicker's slump accommodates box just fine. Then leafed through a bunch of National Geographics from the Front Lawn Library that had got umm shelved there. Will keep the one from 2012 on the colours of the terracotta army and the 2000 one about Genghis Khan. The 1964 one about Tokyo just pre-Olympics... shall keep the 'general overview' map, which names streets and shows landmarks in relation to each other, which none of my dozen other Tokyo maps do, and trash the rest. They approve of the expressway, for one thing. Besides, there's this other article called "Cambodia: south-east Asia's 'neutral' corner", which is too painful to even read.
( Read more... )

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flemmings @ 2015-08-23T21:13:00

2015-08-24T01:16:50Z

Must go and fill out police check form, now that I have the money order and all to pay for this egregious money-making scam. Must take to work early tomorrow which will save me the cost of a stamp and the distinct possibility of the thing blowing up in the sorting machine. Will. Some time. After I finish playing online solitaire and reading Flavia.

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