Off the Cliff

"To keep or to burn?
To burn: anything by Elizabeth Bear."

I'm beginning to see why. Starting with, Blood and Iron is part of the Promethean Cycle but it's not the same part as Hell and Earth or Ink and Steel. Which means 403 dense pages with neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe in them. Should I be reading Gloriana instead? Re-reading Armor of Light? Or just cut to the chase and revisiting Point of Dreams?

Or spend the weekend reading the damned book just to say I did. (The dragon is intriguing. The dragon is a female dragon even if not my kind of female dragon.)

Reading Alex Kerr's Lost Japan, a book someone gave me almost a decade ago. (Time works different after 50. It bothers me more than I can say.)

The book irks me less this time than it did when I first tried it. Then, I think, my problem was that it was *so* different from westerners' books about Japan that I couldn't deal with it. Kerr wrote it in Japanese and someone else translated it, and it read like translated-from-the-Japanese normally does, which is flat and a little... off. IME English and Japanese do different things, as languages per se, and stuff that we unthinkingly expect to find in English isn't there in Japanese. This is fine as long as one is reading in Japanese, because the resonance comes from other things, but put it into English and it's a little like having all the tenses missing, or the articles. Something very basic just isn't there.
( Read more... )

My used book-fu was on today. Copped another Holdstock at Eliot's Books. Very satisfying. Also saw dentist and had tooth ground down so I'm no longer biting on it. That it was possible to grind it down is a testimony to how well naproxen works when taken in quantity.

Must note also dramatic cold-weather sunset clouds yesterday evening, purple-black and scarlet-gilt, and bright Tokyo-January cold sun on the bare trees this morning. (Unseasonably cold for TO November, usual for Tokyo January.) See out the corner of the mind's eye uncapturable glimpses of places I knew there. So much of place-memory is things I wasn't really looking at at the time, which may be why it never comes back whole.

Flypaper memory. Jane Austen noted somewhere 'I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.' (In a letter. And while we're on the subject, is there anything more infuriating than google books, JSTOR aside? Google at least lets you see things, even if navigating within the book is an exercise in screaming frustration. JSTOR just shows up with the intro to exactly the quote you need, demands your academic credentials, and spits in your face if you don't have them.)

Thusly, I have read Engine Summer, roasted a turkey, & wish I had nothing else to do, but the Workplace of Perpetual Crisis has other ideas on the subject.
( Cut for digressions and reading )

I don't have a To Read pile. I have a To Read bookcase. I suppose I'm happy to be making some inroads on it. That said, Quarreling, They Met the Dragon is the kind of book that leaves you feeling slimy. 1984: before anyone knew the tropes of the western yaoi imagination; before, I fancy, the Japanese had even created them for themselves.

Fascinating. Once upon a time there was a magazine called Horizon. I was eight when it first came out and intrigued by the notion of a magazine with hard covers. In the ensuing years I read my father's copies, in bits and pieces, because seriously, the late 50s/ early 60s mostly-New York art and theatre scene is kind of beyond a Toronto kid's comprehension. I wish we had those early copies still. I fancy they were the source of my vague notion of what Beat poetry and Nichols and May were all about. Alas, we gave Dad's Horizons to the Art Gallery when he died.
( Read more... )

'They cried, La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall.' Meaning the vampire Torontonian lurgey that's been going the rounds this last month finally got me on Thursday. It's still in the headache and malaise state; I think I shall be positively relieved when it turns into the faucet nose and cough.
( Amusing Pastimes with The Beautiful Lady Who Never Says Thank You )

Buying books for pleasure, not buying books to read, part the five thousand and whatever-th.

Went on a book crawl yesterday, ostensibly looking for Moonwise, now I remember a) what it's called and b) what its author's name is. I could order it online but online wants $38 just for starts, and I don't do pigs in pokes at that price. I was also looking for early Pratchetts which the first-run bookstores don't have. Online has those too, but online means amazon or indigo, which are... morally tatty. Am not sure I want Tiffany enough to give money to these guys.
( And so I biked the summer city )

"Incurably romantic with his falsely placed love toward the greatest criminal Califa has ever known--"

I don't want to buy the second Flora book. Which is fine, as it won't be released till September, though people are blogging about reading it now. But I do want to know *why* Butcher Breakspeare was the greatest criminal Calif(orni)a has ever known. (World-building? Looks straight AU to me.) She's rumoured to have shot her husband but that, surely, is a mere bagatelle.

I hate having to wait for backstories to be revealed, with no guarantee they ever will be. Hrmph.

Reading another off-the-shelf volume that's probably old enough to vote: The Book of Dede Korkut, the national epic of the nomadic Oghuz Turks who once lived in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and those areas of the Silk Roads that I still haven't got straight. ( Cut for Autres temps, autres moeurs )

It's the 13th in Japan? Then happy birthday, kagenami! May the next year be better than this.

Am discovering the sad fact that if you don't use it, you lose it. 'It' in this case is reading Japanese prose. Time was-- time being 2005-- I could trundle along fairly happily through the 12 Kingdoms novels, which have a rep of being slightly difficult. Now I'm stumbling through やさしい竜の殺し方, 'How to Kill Gentle Dragons', a YA fantasy novel, which was recc'd here. So far I have yet to encounter any dragons at all, gentle or otherwise, but so far isn't very far. I'm not even sure that the title isn't intended to be 'The Gentle Art of Slaying Dragons.' Whatever, we do at least have our requisite fantasy silver-haired purple-eyed character, though with the current brainfry I'm not actually sure if he's in fact either.

Decided last night that life is too short to read Brian Stableford's baggy inflated Werewolves of London, which reminds me of what the Chinese readers here had to say about the happi endo Woxin fic that tells you Every. Possible. Thing. that Fan Li is or might be thinking, all the way through the story. Less is more, guy-- an awful lot more. If I want to practise my speed-reading, there are better things to practise on. Into the giveaway box it goes. (Supposed to rain all weekend. The giveaway box will not be sitting on the lawn in the near future.) ( But. But. But. )

Possibly this is the Zombie Cold talking or possibly this is some kind of literary insight. I'm reading The Remains of the Day and I'm reading it fast to have it done with because Ishiguro is doing what Ishiguro does so well. Meaning, I'm fighting off anxiety attacks from the low-key but settled sense of menace implicit in his utterly mundane narrator's narration. There are rotting human remains in the middle of that bland English field or hidden in those overgrown English hedgerows, and in a minute I'll see them.

I don't know how he does it but I wish he'd stop and let Stevens go back to being what he should be, which is an eccentric character in one of Jack Aubrey's ships.

(I also wish my Nyquil would come out of hiding so I could dry my nose up overnight.)

Woke at 6:15 from a nightmare about Japan, that really was about Japan and not the imaginary Japan I usually dream of, and thus was able to turn my clock forward an hour and still be up early.

The thing about March snow is that it's *March* snow, id est it must contend with March sun. This is generally no contest. As was proved last week. Last Sunday I walked out in shoes. Last Tuesday snow fell in quantity. Last Wednesday the sidewalks were clear and in many cases dry. Thus yesterday's 36 hour snowfall that had the local papers screaming about 30 centimetres and the worst to come last night!!! a) wasn't 30 cm here b) stopped early last night and c) has vanished entirely from sidewalks shovelled this morning.

Someone else-I suspect the next-door older bro- did my sidewalk; I contented myself playing Ling Gufu slaying the enemies of Yue at the street corners and the tits on a bull's corner place that I regularly clear. Not all of it: I grow old, and no doubt tomorrow it'll be slush or ice or both as I trudge to work. Came back and looked at my current reading, the Hambly of which has dropped anvil-sized hints about the Horrible Things that will happen to a nice young character, and said the hell with it, I'm reading Judge Dee. Judge Dee is one of life's regular reliable pleasures. It belongs to that easy cosmopolitan European way of doing things that I wish we had more of over here, and proves that one can indeed write from outside another culture without having people inside it turn puce: but only, I suspect, if you read your sources in the original.

And I shall ignore that certain person on people's FLs maintaining that it's only Gen X-ers like herself who truly appreciate Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, while Boomers like me are still stuck at Suzanne. Suzanne. Four decades ago Suzanne. If this is true, then Canadians really and truly are different from Yanks, and not just because we can marry who we please.

Someone over on incandescens' FL was rhapsodizing about Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series. I have one of those that I never got into, though the premise is fascinating: early 19th century New Orleans by someone who isn't Anne Rice, and the protagonist a free man of colour. For no reason I can pinpoint, Barbara Hambly's writing doesn't ping with me. A dozen years ago someone burbled about the Silicone Mage books and I never got anywhere with those either.

However, last night it was either English reading or the latest (mad, on acid, with tiny kanji) Papuwa or Woxin disk 5, so you can guess which I went for. ( Read more... )

abyss_goat, sho_sunaga, your 100 Demons book and the shitajiki arrived! Thank you so much- I'm so happy with it. The book was something I'd seen at bk1 and said No can't have, too expensive and you don't need pretty pictures you already own. Henh. I do *not* have those pretty pictures because they were Nemuki and bunko covers, so nnah. And am pleased that I needn't buy the later bunko vols to get the covers of, say, Uncle Kai and his bald horned youkai.
( 100 Demons natter )
Also finished rereading Hexwood last night. Diane Wynne Jones has this black hole aspect to her books, or some of them: I don't quite get them when I read them and I can't remember afterwards what happened in them. Granted, Hexwood is deliberately structured as a 'go back and reread' book, or reread while reading book, and I did both the first time. This time... things make a bit more sense, I suppose. I'm still not sure what happens in it. Next up in the 'I don't remember a thing' queue is Conrad's Fate, which is not supposed to be a problem book, and about whose action I remember literally not a thing.

(I need *another* Suffer In The Snow Emo King icon. This one is getting too much use.)

To end of ep 5. Oh Fu Chai you are such a manly man, except that even after three days in a wooden stocks you don't need to shave, lucky Mr Peachfuzz. Equally, I think even without my FL's collective encomia I'd have liked Wen Zhong, if only for the way he cuts straight through Shi Mai's slippery soap and slithery slime. ( Cut for spoilery thoughts about the Field Marshal )

Equally I finished The Janissary Tree last night. The historical detail is fascinating: that truly is what one reads the book for. The murder mystery is just an extra. I was amused on starting it to find the murder echoing that in The Lake Ching Murders, with the difference that I was quite ready to accept the former while the latter struck me as operatic and silly and unlikely. Flashy gimmickey grand guignol seems not wholly impossible in Ottoman Constantinople- the Ottomans did a lot of stuff that looks demented to us and Byzantium has always been, well, a Byzantine place. (Read Peter Dickinson's The Dancing Bear for a fascinating example of same, should it still be in print. Like, laws to regulate the amount of the bribes an official is allowed to accept?) But it's so not the style of good grey Communist China.

However after I finished, the murders and the schtick began to bother me more. ( Cut and partially lux'd for Janissary Tree/ Lake Ching spoilers )