Off the Cliff

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.

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.
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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.
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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:
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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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.
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What have you just finished?

I am Half-sick of Shadows, Flavia de Vere vol 3 or 4? Have the next to latest but am putting the series on hold in orderto clear my head out.

What are you reading now?

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Never read any of this series; found copy on boulevard; good hot weather reading. For extra points, is the brit version where Percy eats crisps.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol 6. Some 40 years ago (the downside of being over 60 is that you can use that stunning phrase and still refer to an episode in your adult life) I picked up two second-hand vols of the then Complete Pepys thinking it would be fun to dip into. Have now started dipping into and am ready to throw both vols in the recycle. 'Skank' does not begin to describe Pepys. Corrupt rapist does. Entries vary between how much money he can make on the side from various gov't positions, to how he finally 'fait ce que je voudrais avec' the woman who'd come to ask him to use his influence to get her husband a place-- even though he sprained his thumb in achieving that 'finally'. Always pawing and kissing any woman who came within his purview, unless she was an aristocrat. Reminiscent of many GoH at many cons, in fact.

What will you read next?

Dunno. More Flavia before it's due back? It's the one set in the Toronto of my birth. Might prove amusing.

The weekend was only moderately virtuous, but I did finally mend some essential items and wash some other items at the laundromat and get some editing done. And read vast quantities of Flavia de Luce: three and a half inside a week. The weather is perfect: sunny, not too hot, dry. A good summer, this; how unfortunate that I've gone back to my old way of not retaining anything that happened during it. No matter: it forces me to concentrate on the moment as it happens and let it go afterwards.

I should note better where I get my recs. Some someones somewhere were discussing Margery Allingham and noted Traitor's Purse as being in some way unusual. Have just finished it, and indeed found it unusual-sort-of, though I also note that it ends with Campion spoiler spoiler spoiler a bunch of working stiffs and not letting it bother him a whit.

Last night's blue moon (for certain definitions of same) was nothing much to look at, but tonight's one-day-past is quite gorgeous.

So there exists a Lost Library fic exchange, where to quote skygiants, "you write a bit of a book or play or movie that's implied or stated to exist in another book or movie."

Selden has taken the JS&MN (footnote) ball and run with it.

And Rivers of London, as run through google and semi-deciphered by Lesley.

I tell myself that I'm dragging my feet on watching JS&MN because I don't like watching stuff and would rather read yadda yadda. In fact, I drag feet because when I've watched it all it will be over and there's nothing left that will take me Elsewhere so quickly and entertainingly. Watched eps 5 and half of 6 last night, and went off to have the strange dreams I do have these cool nights after watching that far-away place. Coolness will end tonight or tomorrow night, and so will Jonathan Strange.

Finished ep 4 of JS&MN. Yes, I do regret many things that had to be changed from the book, but of course you couldn't make a series about two men whose main emotional entanglement is with an abstract subject and each other. Also I have no problem seeing the actress who plays Arabella a lot, so we make Strange a devoted, not a neglectful, husband.

The scenery is fantastic: loved the King's Roads. (CG or a location?) The cameo with George III was excellent, and him appearing in the middle of the road on what looks to me like a blasted heath was a lovely bit. Norrell is and is not as revolting in the series as in the book; one never knows whether to sympathize or not.

Do not like the characterization of Drawlight, which is overdone. Certainly do not like the Gentleman, who is a totally original character. On the nitpicky side, I always thought of Segundus as round and middle-aged, not a romantic young man. Am with kate_nepveu that Stephen does *not* have a bargain with the Gentleman: saying yes to an invitation to a party does not apply consent to whatever terms it is the Gentleman thinks he's agreed to (which no one ever tells us that I can see.) I'd have liked a Stephen who was less a helpless victim, trapped as much by his self-image as the consummate servant as by the Gentleman's whims: though in the book Stephen uses his butler's skills to talk the Gentleman out of his more bloodthirsty schemes, which is how servants traditionally finagled the system so it worked at least a little less against them. Stephen who's voluntarily made some obscure bargain with a person he doesn't know goes down a lot less well.

But mostly it's Stephen and Lady Pole that bugs me. Naturally they're linked; presumably Lord Pole has no one he trusts as much as Stephen to see to her welfare, and so we always see them together. But it feels totally *off* that Lady Pole is sent north in company of three men, completely unrelated to her and of a a completely different class, without a female servant or chaperon or you name it. Sorry, that's just Not Done.

(As ever, these spectacles elide the presence of servants. Lord Pole would appear to have none at all except for his butler and a maid or two. No footmen, no body servants, no one in the public areas of the house should he want to send a message. Stephen has to answer all the bells himself.)

A pleasant evening with the Little Girls last night, who are not as little as they used to be. M seems always to have grown another inch every time I see her, even if it was only six weeks ago, and L has suddenly added a mental year or two. She's moved into the front bedroom, formerly her parents', meaning she has maximum floor space for all her tiny plastic toys, books, notebooks, pencils, and you name it. "L, when you get up in the night to go to the bathroom, how do you avoid stepping on all those sharp edges?" She gave me a haughty eight-and-a-half year old stare. "I have excellent night vision," she informed me. "And my room is very bright because of the street lamps." This is true; but then she decided to lower the blinds, leaving the room in darkness, and I cleared a path to her bed so her parents wouldn't puncture their feet when they came to kiss her goodnight on their return.
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I was ready to push off on my bike but had to wait for a pickup truck moseying up the street and taking its own sweet time. Passed me, I saw it was full of bits and pieces of stuff, guy jumps out several doors up and goes to inspect a barbecue left out for the garbage pickup. Light dawns. I peddle up. 'You take scrap? I have this window screen and an aluminum pole--' Yup. Two more bits the garbage collectors wouldn't take, happily removed from my front porch.

Chrome famously fails to give sound to Youtube. I thought I could hear the preview to JS&MN because it was embedded in someone's post. But when I went to the youtube site, mirabile dictu, Chrome had decided to give me sound again. Of course, this XP groans mightily when playing vids there, which drowns much of it out. But still am I content. Might even attach speakers to hear things better.
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Finished another of my Lost Books from the 90s- Lesley Downer's On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, which stands at the opposite pole from 'Look at me!!' books like Richie's The Inland Sea, Booth's The Roads to Sata, and even Kerr's Lost Japan.
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Patched the study floor where my rolling desk chair has gouged a deep hole not merely in the industrial linoleum tile but the two inch planking beneath it. We shall see if this works- takes a few hours to dry and then I'm supposed to sand it (and then put new tile on top, which is not happening). But it calls itself cement, so possibly I'll be able to roll my chair over it in peace.

Then went for a swim at the local club, where I haven't been in four years in spite of good intentions. Didn't actually swim- walked in water as physiotherapist advises. Did this for maybe ten minutes and then was bushed. However if it lets me walk on land again, am prepared to continue the practice, especially if it stays warm enough that I can bike there in just a dress over my bathing suit, which simplifies changing etc. immensely. Today wasn't quite that warm, but the theory is it will be shortly.

Am not a fan of Elizabeth Bear, either as a writer or a person, but Karen Memory is keeping me pleasantly occupied. I fear were coming to the point where All Goes Wrong and people must be rescued from the evil sadistic badguy, which is where I start to skim; but maybe she'll do something different for a change.

Time was I wasted time reading the comments on wank communities, but they're all dead now. Time was I wasted time reading the comments on newspaper articles, but the local ones are behind paywalls and the Guardian's layout hurts my eyes. Time was I wasted time playing online solitaire and I still do. What these have in common is that they're all really depressing activities.

Which is to say, it's a cold rainy Sunday and I hurt from the cold and rain and I don't want to read anything that I have on the go-- Pico Iyer's deep study of the Dalai Lama or Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking-- because both are depressing. The LM Montgomery I just finished was depressing- the airless caste-ridden insular (literally) world of 1920s PEI. So I'm reading a gruesome police procedural murder mystery modelled on the Black Dahlia killings.

This is why I've come to dislike weekends.

Grey cold May returns for however long.

Wound up reading a book I bought in Japan in 1990 and of course never read there. A Personal Sketch by Sasaki Mizue, about teaching foreign students Japanese. *Should* have read it, because it has explanations of obscure usages I never got (the use of past form when talking about a future event, use of the continuative as a kind of perfect) as well as some indications of where pitch accents are supposed to come (ie opposite from where I put them. I really do talk like someone from the Kansai.)

Encouraged by that, started another book from Way Back When, Home Sweet Tokyo, but had to stop. The author went to Tokyo in the 60s when the city was cheap (artificial exchange rate) and undeveloped (Roppongi was a backwater.) Kennedy rhapsodizes about the friendly chatty Tokyoites he met, always welcoming him into Golden Gai bars and soaplands, and quite happy to help him build his house in the city. Well, maybe it was like that fifty years ago; maybe it's still like that for cheerful extroverted American males. It was not like that for me.

When I wasn't reading Buddhism this last month, I was reading the last three Toby Daye books. Which were, well, um? Yes, I'm a suck for backstory, and yes there was *some*, but not nearly enough to scratch all the itches. I still don't know the whole story on Simon, or what happened to Luna or Rayseline, and somehow I thought this was going to be the Great Revelation that Told All. But in the end we just have Surprise!badnasty now secured off somewhere for the time being, just as Last Book's Badnasty is-- well, no longer secured, are they? Someone made off with the body of evidence IIRC, and since it was a library book I'm not even sure whether they were defunct or just comatose.

But that's the Toby Daye books. Never quite what I want but enough to keep me reading. (If only everyone didn't sound alike. Tybalt and Toby may speak High Style and Low, but they're saying exactly the same things when they do it.)