The only birthday that matters currently

Today is the anniversary of both my children's births. They are not twins: theyare eight years apart. Today one of them is in the UK, thousands of miles away. He said he worked, and afterwards and his wife celebrated by taking a walk along Butthole Lane until it turned into fields of some kind of brassica. The other lives close, but she worked today too. She said she celebrated by buying a coyote skull.

I'm spending the day with my ailing, possibly-dying dog, and also moving into my proper bedroom at the top of my house, where I have a view of green layered on green, and the last of the Belle of Portugal roses wilting in the apple tree.

The dog might be okay, but if she isn't, well, she had many years more than we thought she might, and she's been my true companion, and I don't want to go too far in this direction yet, until I know whether she's recovering from this.

So apparently I can't do reading Wednesday on Wednesday ever

I've been plowing through books, at least that's what it looks like from my end. I finished The Other Wind by Ursula LeGuin, a tiny bit disappointed because it's about the country of the dead and it's another Earthsea book: not that I mind Earthsea, but I was in the mood for something else. And the country of the dead is only passing interest for me even though I have written (yet another unpublished) book featuring a country of the dead as well.

I also finished both the Margaret Atwoods that I took out of the library (they were in one volume). I thought it was brilliant to package Life Before Man with Cat's-Eye: it's like Cat's -Eye is the more matuire consideration of the problems between women, and an explanation why a woman might find herself growing up trusting men more than women, and also a reconciliation with all the women in her life,. Kind of. Some reconciliations are not possible, so they happen only one-sidedly.


I also just finished Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death?. Man, this was hard to read. At the same time it was wonderful and beautiful to read. I admit I was imagining the Sahel/western Sahara through the whole book and then felt dumb when the Sudan is mentioned at the end because everything made so much more sense knowing it was Sudan and not Sahel. It actually scratched all my itches too -- sense of place, sense of wonder, sense of person, language, story, color, sensation, mystery. Not to mention politics, both simple and complex at once. I like that when she humanizes the villains, she does not excuse them. Also I love that the technology is both advanced and backward, that it's clearly a future setting with a darfk ages but they didn't lose everything, and I love love love that it's Africa itself, not Africa determined by the rest of the world.

I may not finish the Melanie Rawn I am reading. It's so unlike the Glass Thorns books or that immense Spanioid fantasy she co-wrote. It's unfortunately full of all the things I hate in romance books: the horrible cliche hypergendered descriptions of the hero and heroine, the Irish malarkey, the embarrassing stock descriptions of sex that just don't sound like any sex I've ever had (well, okay, so I guess I don't expect it to be much like what I've experienced, but it doesn't sound like sex at all, it sounds like a greeting card). I would not take this as an anti-recommendation of Melanie Rawn in general, though, just this book. The Glass Thorns books are excellent.

So I also had a moment reading The Other Wind. well, a few moments at different times. Where I recognized something she was doing as something I do too, and I was thinking, damnit, when I do this people tell me I'm screwing up and I should do something else. And I wonder if it is because I'm just so bad at it?