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However if I can't brag about my presents I can certainly blog about them.

So [livejournal.com profile] deepfryerfire and [livejournal.com profile] stanking gave me Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic. Tragicomic because Bechdal is a... err, mangaka (I shall never be able to use the word 'cartoonist' again) who draws the famous Dykes to Watch Out For strip. I opened it at random and read two chapters, thinking as I always do 'Man western comics are wordy', before putting it back down to get on with my Christmas morning present opening. I was wrong, of course )

Not sure what the moral of this is. 'Pictures good', maybe. More time for pictures. And of course, thanks hugely, [livejournal.com profile] deepfryerfire and [livejournal.com profile] stanking.

(no subject)

Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 08:29 am
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Several decades back someone gave me a hardcover copy of Foucault's Pendulum as an unbirthday present. I have no idea why. Possibly a hint that I need to work on my image presentation. Last night after I finished Post Captain I had a sudden urge to read Foucault's Pendulum so I rousted it out and lay down in my comfy sofa. Ten pages in and I ceased to have any desire to read Foucault's Pendulum at all. Really, I feel quite oppressed by the thing.

So I read 100Ghosts in wide-han, the one about the hotel ski resort in Ibarakai and Things rolling down the mountain, and then went to bed with the mad winds outside sounding, truly, like thunder and iron wheels on pavement, and the thought of the neighbour's tree crashing down on my house. An uncomfortable night to start, but luckily reading Japanese always makes me sleepy and I slept.
But small happinesses )

English reading

Sunday, November 19th, 2006 04:24 pm
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I finished The White Darkness. Cut to avoid any kind of spoiler for the experience )

I picked TWD up at the library on Friday morning and went to get a coffee before work, and found myself obscurely dissatisfied that I only had TWD to read because what I *wanted* to be reading was Master and Commander. Which is, you know, very odd. Cut here for people not enamoured of larboard mizzens and t'ps'ls )

Santa Claus parade today and everyone in filthy tempers trying to drive away from it afterwards. But still, officially Christmas season in TO, hence my Christmas icon from [livejournal.com profile] xsmoonshine

Embarras de richesses

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 06:52 pm
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It is so nice to have extra money these days. Means I can buy books, and sometimes safer books than the latest Ishiguro, which I still haven't finished. Let me count my countless blessings one by one )

Not funny, universe

Saturday, October 28th, 2006 10:25 pm
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'I shall read the latest Ishiguro to cleanse my palate of genre fiction.'

Turns out the latest Ishiguro is science fiction.
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Anh. Finished Snake Agent. Anyone else notice how often people are grabbed by bodiless hands and pulled backwards into Elsewhere? Like Minekura's tendency to lay Sanzou out on his back, which she seems to have outgrown. Really, Williams' editors (ha ha ha) should have caught and corrected that tic of hers.
Further thoughts, spoilery for the reading experience of course )

(no subject)

Thursday, October 26th, 2006 10:46 pm
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Perfect happiness when I was 17 was a new Alan Garner and a bag of soft-centre chocolates in my coat pocket. Perfect happiness almost 40 years later is having enough money to buy the new Diane Wynne Jones in hard cover and the newest Kazuo Ishiguro (even if what I was looking for was The White Darkness) and then to come home and- not read them, in fact, but instead to dismantle the toppling stack of Gangans and ZeroSums and WARDs and put various episodes into files where I have them at need. All my Gaiden eps in order in the clear file book someone has finally thought of importing from Japan. Ah, such happiness.

Also to discover I *can't* dismantle ZeroSum because there are too many series that look too interesting. I shall build a wall with them instead.

ETA: to add to my happiness, sort of, this. The PO is a horse's tuchus, as ever, but the union makes us strong.

(no subject)

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 09:10 pm
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Reading Liz William's Snake Agent, borrowed from [livejournal.com profile] paleaswater. I think just maybe I'd have realized on my own what [livejournal.com profile] paleaswater said about it: William's Chinese hell is actually Christian in one fundamental respect-- it sides with and promotes evil. That's not how hell works in Konron no Tama (yes, yes- everything I know about the afterworld I learned from Japanese manga) and it keeps tripping me up, especially because her Hell is also as bureaucratic as one expects a Chinese hell to be. But Hell doesn't exist in moral opposition to Heaven: it's just another part of the way things are, and its demon denizens have their own uhh human feelings like you and me. Yeah, so they torture sinners on occasion. That's their job, see?

OTOH it stand in nice contrast to the Peter May mystery I'm reading in tandem, that uses 'oriental' quite seriously to talk about Chinese people and has characters talk about 'the mysterious east' ditto. I hope that's just a set-up and we'll stop having little cultural lessons thrown at us eventually, but not with any great hope.

(no subject)

Thursday, October 12th, 2006 09:22 pm
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Note for those who might try it: Don't read Susannah Clarke's new book (a collection of short stories) while sickening for the flu. It makes the world look very odd indeed.
Thoughts )

Fannish Random

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 02:05 pm
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Read the first Temeraire book on the train back. It's sweet and pleasant and I cried like a drain but I think the second one is much better. I'm also suffering twitchy 'I'd have written this differently' flashes. That's a change from most of my fantasy English reading, which is usually 'I wouldn't have written this at all and I rather wonder why you did,' but still. My perfect contentment is marred, grump grump.

Stunned to find Zero-Sum waiting in my mailbox when I got back. It came out last Thursday. And went to Vancouver and crossed the country and arrived here on Monday-- no, I don't believe that's possible at all. If it comes out on Thursday *Hong Kong* gets it Friday. That Toronto gets it Monday (no weekend mail delivery) is a miracle. Iwase usually takes ten days to two weeks to deliver.

I now have limited-edition Saiyuuki gels from Zero-Sum's Comiket booth, courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] abyss_goat, in lovely glowing colours, which I may iconize when I finish gloating over them. But you can't put gels in the window like I want to. The light bleaches them.

And that old joke about giving Manhattan back to the Indians? What a good idea )

(no subject)

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 10:58 pm
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There was a welcome back barbecue Saturday for [livejournal.com profile] shiny_monkey out west a ways, and casting about for good bus reading (assuming I'd be able to read on the bus) I took my last unread Brust, Orca. Turned out to be an inspired choice. How brisk and business-like Brust is, even when doing his sometimes confusing braided narratives. I'd put off reading Orca from some confused idea that it was one of the non-Taltos narrated ones that don't work nearly as well as the I-style. (Brust has this in common with Mary Renault, by and large. The Paarfi ones I call pastiche and don't count.) But someone having a hissy fit about the unfairness of authors keeping secrets from their readers, the swine, cited Orca as a possible instance of same: and the possibility of having a secret revealed gave me the incentive to read. I like authors who keep secrets from their readers, as long as we find out what the secret is eventually. If they keep a mysterious silence, like John Fowles, I'm tempted to write them off as fakers and/or pretentious teases.

The change of TO scenery was welcome, and the change of reading material more so, because I'd been reading Graham Greene.

I read a bunch of his novels in hospital in France, they being about the only English books the French bookstores had, or perhaps the only thing my cousins thought I might want to read. (I'd been travelling with War and Peace, and Greene was indeed a pleasant change.) I remember nothing of them now, but that might be due to, well, reading them in hospital flat on my back in traction. The only impression I retain is an odd kind of strangling claustrophobia.
Voice from the past )

(no subject)

Sunday, June 4th, 2006 07:57 pm
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A little while ago Bunny the Younger was working his way through his parents' bookshelf, which at his age (turned one last Thursday) means removing the volumes one by one. I intercepted him as he was flinging Pride and Prejudice away and clapped him in irons or the infant equivalent thereof. But the reminder that P&P exists prompted me to rout my copy gingerly out of the back room to have another look after lo these many decades.
Read more... )

(no subject)

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 04:44 pm
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I think Bunny the Younger has passed on his strep throat to me. Glands swollen, faintly feverish, I go out to buy necessities like duvet covers that keep the dust mites inside. Wander into the bookstore and find Black Powder War. Wander into the super and find cold boiled lobsters on sale at $6 each. (State of fever indicated by me wanting to write 'bold coiled lobster.') Wander home, and propose to spend the evening on the sofa eating cold boiled lobster and reading Napoleonic dragons. Life holds little better. Well, a chilled Chablis along with the lobster would be nice, but not in the allergy season.

(Using my Tenpou mosquito coil icon from the picture KaKa drew for me last year, in honour of the first- but alas not the last- hot day of the season.)

Book rec

Monday, May 15th, 2006 10:52 am
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Ha. A writer is always without honour in her own country if she's Canadian. I was all ready to burble about my latest find, Aristotle, Detective, and then I discover it was written in 1978, no less. What I have was the rerelease. But about time, I say.
Read more... )

Ill-fated Beginnings

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 10:58 am
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The latest Saiyuki ep arrived Monday (and is on its way in the usual fashion, those who know.) Lovely interaction with Hakkai and Gokuu, leaving me shaking my head yet again at the insistence, by those that way inclined, on Hakkai's scary semi-psychotic dangerousness. Even being sensible as a doorknob, as here, and empathic and tactful and down-to-earth, can't save him from people who want to harrow up their souls and indulge a little horripilation over the grinning psychopath. "Hakkai is a dark and twisted man! He killed a thousand youkai!" Yes: and the slaughter was clearly just a passing whim of his that had no repercussions worth mentioning, and that certainly left him with no special feelings about it at all. So one may reasonably expect him to wander out some afternoon and murder another thousand youkai. Because people work like that. If I bang my fist into the wall in a fit of rage and break my fingers, next time I get mad I'll certainly hit that wall again. Unh-hunh. Is the idea that actions have consequences, and that those consequences change you profoundly, so foreign these days? Or is some perverse Calvinism at work: your character is decided forever by 18 and you are predestined always to act as you acted before?
Read more... )

DWJ inventory

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 12:29 pm
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So I dropped Howl back off at the library, thinking as I did so 'It's not due for another two weeks I bet this is a bad idea.' As indeed it was. )

(no subject)

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 08:37 pm
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Spring melancholy. The 20-somethings squeeing over Peter and Harriet make me feel old. I too squeed once. Then I reread the books twenty years later and thought 'what an odious unlikable pair.' Nothing comes as it came before, and everything looks worse second time around...

But is for others undiminished somewhere. )

Everything looks worse second time around except for Miyazaki maybe. I finally watched Howl in a decent copy, not pirated with crappy sound and surrreal subtitles. Followed it with a reread of the book. I like the Miyazaki better than before, naturally, but I'm surprised to find it edging the book out as well. Miyazaki's WTF interpolations- the war, the bird, that disconcertingly story-book disguised prince- who gave me the creeps BTW- are on balance no more WTF than Jones' own trademark and casual WTFs- like the dog man who's actually two people, that I still can't figure out precisely what happened to him where, and what was going on between Howl and the Witch and why, and all that stuff in the last quarter of the book that's just there, deal with it. There's a lot of thready loose-endedness in Jones, which is doubtless a change from the common run with every last blessed detail explicated into the dust, but it does annoy the tidy-minded, like me.

And of course Miyazaki has his landscapes, straight out of 1920's children's books with the colours intact. This is no fair because he's a master of landscapes and wins with them over just about anyone I can think of.

(no subject)

Thursday, March 9th, 2006 11:23 pm
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Reading Charles Williams' Descent into Hell. Williams' morally superior characters are less flatfooted and annoying than CS Lewis', and certainly less than Dorothy Sayers' Peter and Harriet with their little minuets of oneupmanship: 'my quivering moral sensibilities are more delicate than *your* quivering moral sensibilities. Observe me make allowances for a moral scruple I'm assuming you possess though of course neither of us must ever mention its existence because we're far too delicate for that.'

However that Williams fails to grate may be only because his writing is so opaque that it's hard to say wherein the moral superiority of his morally superior characters lies. One morally superior character in DiH has just turned into a mountain. This is accounted virtue in her. OK, I say, whatever. Wish I could find my copy of Death Note 2. Cause no one *there* is moral, period.

(no subject)

Saturday, March 4th, 2006 10:18 am
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Reading A Great and Terrible Beauty on Emily's recommendation. It was the Utena mention that pulled me in. I've just realized that, fan as I am of the series, the memory of Utena gives me- here's that word again- the fantods. (My fantods are a milder and more dark-dank-ineffable-British version of the creeps.) The whole of the late-90's does, for various psychological and (oddly) political reasons having to do with reverse culture shock and returning from half a decade away to find your happy socialist homeland taken over by a right-wing dictator who regularly has social assistance programs taken out and shot every morning before breakfast. Also hospitals and schools and little infrastructure institutions like that.

(The Harris regime left deeper scars than I'd realized. In local news, the police officer who shot the Indian protester over a decade ago died in a traffic accident before he could testify at the continuing and much delayed inquiry. Would that the guy who gave him implicit orders to do so had done the same, because I have no confidence that Mr. Harris will ever be forced to take responsibility for any of his actions, and his continued presence in my city and government offends me.)

Well, fantods are a good background to reading Great and Terrible Beauty because fantods are what it's about.
But there's always a fly in the ointment )

(no subject)

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 12:33 pm
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Finished Jonathan Strange last night at 1:30. (One reason I haven't finished JS&MN before- these days I can't stay up till 1:30 in the full charge of a good read. Reading like writing is something I do better from 11 to 3 am but employment doesn't allow of such luxuries.)
Am I avoiding talking about it? Yes )

(no subject)

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 06:40 pm
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Inverting again, the Nataku & Gokuu frontispiece from Gaiden 2 ch 10. Nataku looks a bit Christlike to my eyes but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Reading )

(no subject)

Sunday, January 15th, 2006 07:21 pm
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Warning for honkingly big sexist attitude.
I don't read men )

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