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

ritaxis: (hat)
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 02:14 pm
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 And the country of the dead is only passing interest for me even though I have written (yet another unpublished) book featuring a country of the dead as well.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?
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reading on Saturday

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Saturday, April 11th, 2015 10:42 am
Wednesday isn't sacred, right?

So I finally got back into the groove of going to the library on a regular basis, which is nice. I can catch up on old books.

I brought home a bunch of Margaret Atwood this time. I remember now why I got out of the habit of reading her, even though I admire her books and enjoy them a lot of the time. There is, however, a ration of grimness that I can't sustain. The one I just finished is Life Before Man, than which I can't recall having read much more glum except perhaps some fin de siecle century Norwegian stuff. The only glimmer of joy is Lesje's preoccupation with dinosaurs, and even that gets ground down to a pathetic misery by the end of the book. It's a feckless fellow and the three women who feel something sort of like love for him, though in none of those cases does it seem very much like affection. It's one of her realist novels. The inner lives of three of these people are on display, and those reach the sensory intensity of fantasy. It's really masterful: unlike many alternating-pov books, each shift solidly contributes to advancing the story, and the separate points of view are distinct and consequential. It's compelling even though I didn't really like anybody very much, and while at no time was I having any fun, I was really involved with the world, the story, the language. I guess I have to say that she made me care about people I kind of wanted to tell off and I am really glad I don't know.

Now I'm reading Cat's Eye and I think I read it before, though I never remember any of it till I come to it, so it's like reading a new book. I like it a lot better, though I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up hating everybody in it too.

I think I have to go read some Joyce Carol Oates now too, even though I decided a long time ago I didn't like her books and wasn't ever going to read one again. The reason I have to is that Atwood's writing in these two books reminds me a bit of Oates, especially in the ways that don't please me, and I have to figure out why I decided I like Atwood and I don't like Oates.

I am also reading a trilogy my brother-in-law leant me, something I'd never pick out for myself. It's the Powder Mage trilogy, a fat gory fantasy epic with everything I don't like to read. The author is Brian McClellan. The first book is Promise of Blood, an unpromising title for me, but I am paying attention. It's well-written enough that I'm not skimming all the incessant fight scenes. I now it's a bad habit, because sometimes information is in those scenes, but I usually find them boring and unproductive in terms of advancing the story. The one author I know that embeds enough information in fight scenes that they are worth reading every word is Jo Walton in the King's Peace books. What won me over to this trilogy besides my brother-in-law's recommendation (which has to be taken judiciously because we have almost opposite tastes in reading) is the cut line:"The age of kings is dead...and I have killed it." I am not sure whether the speaker of that line is going to turn out to be a villainous point of view after all--I would feel betrayed if he did, but there's indications that this story could go either way. It also has the problem of the characters all being kind of assholes, but they're sort of sympathetic assholes for now.

I have also been lent a Kameron Hurley and I have some other stuff in my library bag. Yes, I am reading lots of real books again, not just cookbooks and online fiction.

Also, I started a completely new story, a school story about Yanek's sister, who is a botanist with second sight which works best with respect to trees. Also she is a Zelnik, and I believe this story is how she finds out what that means and also begins to find a way to abandon her position in the aristocracy without losing her ties of affection to her family. I do not believe this story goes as far as her figuring out how to have a family of her own: that is in the future.
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Haven't done a reading Wednesday for awhile

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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015 12:05 pm
I took 3 books out of the library. Changing Planes by Ursula LeGuin: The Sugar Festival by Paul Park: and Probability Moon by Nancy Kress.The second was gruesome (on purpose) and unreadable by me. The third I did not finish because the people annoyed me so much. The first was more or less a meringue: frothy and sweet.

That's all you get. Still using the disability keyboard and it's excruciating. So is voice recognition. And my spare keyboard died the death--it might be 20 years old.
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Readreadread

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Wednesday, January 7th, 2015 05:41 pm
I finished Longbourn.I liked it a lot, though I was kind of dissatisfied with the ending. But I often am. I know some of you people care deeply about spoilers, so suffice it to say that the ending felt a wee bit rushed and forced to me. But the main thing is that here is a richly detailed working class romance where the resolution isn't "take the porotagonist out of the working class." Also, it's a great antidote for the whole (in my opinion) corrupt Regency Romance thing. I think I understand why so many people love that genre, but my response is usually "I hate these people and I want someone to expropriate everything they own and distribute it to the workers," Not exactly conducive to enjoying a lighthearted read. Longbourn is not, by the way, lighthearted.

I also read a chapbook of Karen Joy Fowler's (The Science of Herself)and now I want to call her up. She lives in my town! She actually went to school with the nice fellow, and sweetgly contacted me after he died--she didn't know he lived her until she saw his obituary.

Right this minute, I have no reading agenda, I am editing a thing for submission and I want it done byu next week, so I can do the next thing, etc. I want to get these old things cleaned upo and ready to send away, and then clear the decks so I can go back to not-Poland after surgery.

I finally got a cost estimate on the surgery and it's a relief: I do not have to cancel after all. This is of course a terrible crime against men of property and Congress would like to put a stop to it.

The other good medical news is I rode my bike to physical therapy and back: maybe three miles altogether? I'm not sure. And it was fine, though I expect to wake up tonight with the screamies. I did walk my bike up the one substantial hill, but the physicfal therapist says with my knees, I really, really should. She approved of the venture in general, though.

Yesterday I was thinking it looked like I am in a period where I can have more function or less pain, but not both, and that I seem to have chosen more function for now. Today it looks like I can have somewhat less pain if I persist in  going for more function. That's also reassuring. That's how it was until about a year ago. More exercise relieved pain as well as providing more function, bu just not right away.

Oh, and on another front: aside from the rain giving up on us and retreating, we do seem to have entered early spring, by the particular flowers blooming (quince) and the busy behavior of the birds. Also, I can tell there is more light, and both dog and I are more ambitious. She and I went for a long walk at the Yacht Harbor yesterday. She had some trouble coming back up the stairs, barely enough to call trouble.
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books I will (almost) never read

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Saturday, October 11th, 2014 01:58 pm
Do you have a list of elements that wll keep you from reading a book? I do. A strong enough recommendation from a person who knows my taste, or whose taste is aligned with mine, especially if they include a note about why they think the book is readable even with that element present, will sometimes cause me to try a book anyway. But usually, the minute I know the book contains one of these, it's off my to-read list with prejudice.

These are the things I can think of right now:

  1. mercenaries

  2. assassins

  3. serial killers

  4. an unexamined hero-worship of policemen or soldiers (I can certainly handle heroic policemen and soldiers, but the author has to have a nuanced view of the work environment and the complex political and moral universe surrounding these people)

  5. a storyline designed to "justify" slavery, aristocracy, capitalism, or the penal system (I understand how come there are people who do this with respect to capitalism, but the others?  how can they?)

  6. people who are better than other people because of qualities they inherited

  7. (to borrow a phrase from Patrick Nielsen Hayden) unreflective pastoralism (rural settings with an intelligent view of the relationship between urban and rural, class relationships, and material conditions and culture of the rural working class are more than welcome)

  8. people who are villains because they are born to be villains, particularly if they are from "the south" or "east" or they are "swarthy" or "sallow" and my dog how is this still a thing and why do I see it

  9. soulfuckingmates

  10. the word "abs" outside of dialog assigned to an idiot (edit: becauser it signifies the obtification of men's bodies and the fetishization of a particular type of hypermasculinizagtion)

  11. men who are supposed to be sexy because they are brutal, or because they are overly muscled, or because their profession is authoritaria

  12. (edit) the dead bodies of women as plot tokens (suggested by personhead[livejournal.com profile] pantryslut along with the corollary:

  13. the dead bodies of sex workers triply so

The problem with numbered lists--well, there are lots of them, but I can't figure out how to turn that 13 into a 12a. Thank you personhead[livejournal.com profile] pantryslut for 12 & 13, which should be 12  & 12a, and thank you personhead[livejournal.com profile] redbird for asking for clarity on 10.
​
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read read

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Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 07:25 am
So a lot of my reading time goes into mstuff that's hard to list for one reason or another and it looks like I don't read as much as I do. But I'm finishing up <i>A Natural History of Dragons</i> now and I'm going to read <i>The Tropic of Serpents</i> which is the sequel. They're by Marie Brennan, who has also written other things including a series of stories about an American magic college. These books purport to be the memoirs of a secondaary-world lady naturalist of a time and place sort of rather like Darwin's. She talkks about issues of gender and class and nationality among the stories of sheer wonder and adventure. hey're my daughter's books and they are perfect for her, and I only wish I had discovered them when she was a child because I would have been so excited to give them to her.
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read read I read read

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Wednesday, May 21st, 2014 06:18 pm
I finished the second volume of the glass thorn series by Melanie Rawn. Now I have to wait for the library to get the third and fourth books. I never ever do this. And when I tried to tell Keith (my younger roommate)about why I liked this stuff, I couldn't describe it in a way that doesn't sound like bad books. But they are not bad books, they're fun. I've put the third one on request for when it comes in, but the fourth one, while published, is not even on order yet.

Now I'm reading Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi and oops it looks like it's part of a series too. I'm not sure I like it. I haven't thrown it against the wall yet. I won't, literally, of course. But it has a lot of elements I find annoying. All the post-singularity claptrap where whatever happens is because the author decided it would be cool, and the mechanics of the world allow for any damned thing whenever, that just irritates me. And I'm not into stories about "history's greatest thief" either. But in translation at least it's sort of amusing, even though I can't bring myself to much care about anybody, even the poor Quiets, who are paying for their longevity by taking turns being transformed into enormous hideous worker drones.

I'm also still slogging through The Coasts of Bohemia which is for some reason harder to get into than Prague in Black and Gold. I gather Derek Sayer, author of the first, is a decade or two younger than Peter Demetz, author of the second, and didn't leave during the Communist years like Demetz. I wish I could say that one or the other of them is more left- or right- wing, but I don't really have evidence as they both take a kind of Scheikian view of the Soviets as being just another of a long line of people who seem to have thought that Central Europe would fare better as clients of someone else. And also both of them are critical of Czech nationalism and clear-eyed about history's nuances. I would maybe say that Sayer is more bitter than Demetz, based on a few sentences here and there, but I don't even know if I can say that. I do feel like Sayer's point is "We Czechs (et cetera) are too much more important than anybody ever acknowledges, so there!" while Demetz's point is "these lands have always been diverse and polyglot, in fact the Germans and Hungarians got here a bit before the Czechs (etc, since apparently until Masaryk "Czech" really only referred to a certain tribe of Slavs in the region, and if you wanted to talk about all of them you said Slavs or Slavonians)." I may be being unfair the Sayer, I should be able to tell when I'm done with the book. It's not that Sayer doesn't address the issues of ethnic and linguistic diversity in Bohemia (etc), he does, and he addresses the question of "who the hell is Czech anyway?" which is a touchy one throughout much of the history fo the area. Because a lot of German speakers considered themselves Czechs and a lot of Czech speakers considered themselves German, or Austrian, or whatever the country was that was ruling them at the time.

On another front, my latest leg insult is not a blood clot. It may be something rather like sciatica. On a relatred front to that, I like the clinic arrangement. I like having these different assistants and other professionals to talk to, and I like the production-line fashion that they deal with admistrative things. I also like that when they ordered a doppler ultrasound on my leg, we didn't have to wait a week for the insurance to authorize. I didn't even have to take a paper. The PA asked me to make my appointment before I left the office because if it didn't work the first time she would pull strings. The doppler itself was amusing. The handheld device was set against my leg repeatedly and it made quiet little clicks each time until suddenly it went WOWOOSH which was the doppler we spoke of running through clear blood vessels. I couldn't stop laughing afterr that. Unfortunately, it doesn't make a nice tidy image for me to get a copy of.
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Wednesday reading. Yes, I know it's Thursday.

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Friday, April 11th, 2014 05:35 am
Finished reading: Magical Tips to Deliciousness by Paul Ho, who is almost consistently referred to in the book's seven prefaces as "A-Bao." It is a cookbook of mostly single portions? Or perhaps one is meant to make like six of these for a small family dinner? I mean, a whole casserole is one chicken leg. It's nicely illustrated with finished dishes but minimally explained and it looks like there's some matter that is not translated. Though the translation looks good, fluent and idiomatic and only a few ingredients leave me scratching my head so I figure those ingredients probably really are things we don't have here. The title of the book may actually be Savory Dishes because that's how the book is referred to in at least one of the prefaces. One of the prefaces is written by Martin Yan, who has a cooking show I've never seen, and I get the feeling that the other preface writers and Paul Ho/A-Bao are probably all TV cooks. Googling Paul Ho is useless, though. Apparently there is someone called Paul Hollywood! I found that out. But no linkies for you.

I found this book in a Taiwanese bookstore in San Francisco where I was trucking around Chinatown with my editor and online friend Tanni-Fan who is doing a whirlwind tour of the West Coast. I determined I would buy a bilingual cookbook while she was looking at the Chinese novels and being talked at very fast by the proprietor of the shop.

Currently reading: Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz. I've been reading it forever! I just read the Defenestration of Prague. I almost didn't make it through the Hussite Wars. I had never placed the Hussites on a pedestal, but I was really disappointed to read what they were really like. Which is pretty bad, but you could argue that the Catholic Church and their royal allies were even worse. I believe that the counter to the argument would be -- of course they were, they had more resources to be horrible with. I do think I detect that the non-catholic Bohemian Estates cleaned up their act a lot in the century or so after, so by the time you get to the battle of White Mountain (I have been to White Mountain! I've been to a lot of the places mentioned in the book!) I see much less reason to be appalled by their general behavior. The book is only 375 pages, you'd think I'd be done with it by now, but it is pretty dense. About a hundred pages of it is King Charles. Hana-my-daughter-in-law had already explained to me why Charles is Charles and not Karel, but reading his early life brought it home to me: he wasn't raised in Bohemia, but in various places around Europe, notably Paris, and his father was from Luxembourg, so no reason for him to be called Karel. Unlike a lot of other rulers of Bohemia, he did at least learn Czech. And he did a lot of very cool things (and I discovered I had the details of the Hunger Wall wrong: the cause of the economic downturn that inspired the building of it was just the finishing of other projects, not crop failure), but you know, he had Jews murdered in order to confiscate their stuff, like all the others. Well, no, actually, he was worse than some of them and not as bad as others.

History is a terrible, terrible thing.

So he doesn't seem to explain what the "Black and Gold" in the title refers to, but on a hunch I looked up the flag of the Holy Roman Empire, and in fact it was black and gold. Well, all right. The thesis of the book seems to be, by the way, that ethnic dioversity and polyglottism are the defining characteristics of Prague history and culture going back to prehistory, and that actually its Czechishness is not that deep or defining, and people should stop being obnoxious nationalists. There were Germans and Jews and Italians there from the beginning, for example, sort of, though it's as hard to call those people Germans in any modern sense as it is to call the Slavic people who arrived after the Hungarians Czech in any modern sense of the word. This thesis harmonizes nicely with the thinking I've been doing about Central European demography while I study it to better understand the world of not-Poland. This idea that there are places that have "always" been the home to some idealized "nation" appears to be a  modern one. In the old days people seemed to up and cart themselves across the landscape rather freely, and while they might claim land and fight over it and they might be horrifically xenophobic and willing to carve each other up over language or religion, they didn't have the elaborate national myth and personification of the Land to bolster up their terrible actions towards each other. I am not sure that internationalism and solidarity politics is possible without passing through the fires of nationalism, though.

Those medieval Europeans sure did truck around that landscape though. We've got these people -- princes, charlatans, priests, scientists, poets, artisans -- careening from London and Ghent and Cracow and Madrid and Milan and Prague to everywhere else, sometimes with thirty or a hundred and fifty carriages worth of stuff, and sometimes more than once in a year. And sending artwork and telescopes over the Alps!

Reading next: Probably A Natural History of Dragons. Emma lent it to me.

Did I mention I read Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (link leads to a more positive review) a while back? I was disappointed. It was all fan service, and mostly repetitious to the point of dulling the fun. Oh well.
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John Dee and the Golem

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Friday, March 21st, 2014 11:14 am
I read The Alchemist's Door by Lisa Goldstein last night. It's not terribly new- twelve years old -- but it's new to me. It showed up when I was searching books about Prague in the library and I said, sure, why not read someone else's Prague-inspired fantasy?

It has a decidedly weird relationship to history. On purpose. It's not a book where you can say "She got it wrong" (except for a little movie geography, which I'll nitpick in a bit: but it's not important) because what she's done is completely sideways on purpose. I will say this: she hasn't violated the space-time continuum with the characters' movements around Europe.

The premise is this: "What if John Dee was totally sincere and of course there's real magic, and he teamed up with Rabbi Loew to fight against Edward Kelley, and also King Rudolf and Elizabeth Bathory and also demons?" The sticking point is "John Dee as a sympathetic hero," but as stuff you have to grant an author to get along with the story, that's not too bad.

Some things I liked: the everyday life parts, the constant worry about money, the personalities of some of the characters. When I set aside the fact that the protagonist was John Dee and forgot about his historical ickiness, I liked him a lot. I liked his wife. I liked Izak the bastard. I was usually annoyed with Rabbi Loew, but I think that was about right. I liked that his status as an oppressed Jew didn't make him into a saint. I like that the fact that he had a bit of magic and was an oppressed minority didn't make him into a Magical One-Dimensional Prop Character. I adored the character of Magdelena, the street-dwelling apparent old lady who wants to learn magic. I liked that when she wrote John Dee as sympathetic and also a product of his times, she didn't feel she had to defend his prejudices. I've always said that if your protagonist has bad ideas or ideology and the reader feels as if the writer is promoting them, it is a failure of craft. So no failure of craft on that front here. No preachy-preachy either. Just clarity.

I am of two minds about the setting. Maybe I'm prejudiced because of my own romantic attachment to Prague. Maybe I'm territorial. I hope not. The movie geography wasn't usually actually important. Though I was thrown right out when there's an emphatic two paragraphs describing the very impressively long walk from Stare Mesto to Faustuv Dum (Faust House, where Kelley was living). I've done that walk, and it's like six blocks. Maybe eight, if you go the long way round. Maybe when Goldstein went there she was tired, or maybe she got lost on the way. It's easy to get temporarily lost in the center of Prague, though if you are patient you will get unlost eventually.

Another set of tiny details that threw me out of the story -- again, this is not really fair because it's a little thing -- was the description of how the spoken languages sounded to John Dee. They didn't read right. They read like descriptions of what the written language looks like, not what the spoken languages sound like. The thing about Czech not having any vowels -- it doesn't sound like that when spoken. The vowels are quite prominent and fluid, the consonant clusters don't stomp all over them at all. And Hungarian dolesn't sound hissy and sibilant, either. It looks sibilant, but it doesn't sound like that.

People call time to tell John Dee stuff about history and geography a lot. Of course they do that in real life. But it reads a little clunky. I actually think it would be a non-problem altogether if it were cut by only a little bit.

I was hoping for a different resolution to the golem part of the story (what, you thought that there could possibly be a story about Rabbi Loew that did not include the golem?), that would involve greater emotional and moral growth for Rabbi Loew, but the resolution here doesn't violate the source material (by the way, I just did a quick check on the dates for these guys, and as I thought, she has them right).

So anyway, if you like alchemist stories and stories with demons and Mad King Rudolf and the Golem, you might enjoy this. I'm going to look for other books by Lisa Goldstein, though I might hope they are set somewhere else so I don't get sidetracked with nitpicks.
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readie-read

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Wednesday, June 5th, 2013 07:09 pm
So I'm still struggling through The War of the nd of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. It's my bathroom book so I don't have to read more than a couple pages at a time. It's hard for me because Vargas Llosa is really delighted to tell me everything terrible about these people. Everybody;s awful and violent and filthy.  But because personhead [livejournal.com profile] pantryslut is doing it and it reminded me, I'm reading Moby Dick too. That's on my tablet and I'm reading it in bed and all the time, because hot damn this is good stuff. I'm finally really enjoying a book! Woo hoo!

What you have to know is that it's one of those poignant standup comedy routines. Somebody like Bobcat Goldthwaite is reciting this stuff to you, or somebody more deadpan and dryer. Even the dramatic parts. Especially the dramatic parts. That's how it should be dramatized, not with some too-portentous-for-my-shirt movie.A standup comic should read out some chapters each day until it's done. Maybe a marathon. I don't know.
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reading wednesday on friday

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Friday, May 24th, 2013 11:16 am
It's been a very long time since I finished anything, but I did finish what there is of an online fiction called "Helix" by Jessi Hajicek. Be warned if you follow that link it is incomplete and was last updated two years ago. I think where it stops is not the worst place in the world to stop, but it doesn't substitute for a complete story. It's a lovely bit about stormchasers in love.

What I'm reading: The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. It's humungous and I'm keeping it in the bathroom, so it will be approximately four hundred years till I finish it. So far I'm highly suspicious of the fact that about half the major-minor characters are evil men named Joao with different backstories. Vargas Llosa is notorious for messing with the reader and having nothing but unreliable everything, so I will not be surprised if all the evil men named Joao turn out to be the same guy.

I need a bedstead book, bjut right now I don't have one, and I'm reading online fiction on the half-busted laptop at night.

What I'm going to read in the future: dog knows. Well, she doesn't, but nor do I.
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wednesday reading, finally

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Wednesday, May 8th, 2013 04:52 pm
( oh, I don't know what a spoiler is, so the cut's just in case somebody cares )

for some reason youtube is refusing to play this playlist I'm listening to as a playlist and I have to poke it after every song. That's okay, I guess, I'm not liking the playlist that much either.
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I read slower than you

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Friday, March 15th, 2013 09:13 pm
There's not much point in this report. I'm still reading Reamde in bed and The Hundred Thousand Fools of God in the bathtub. It will take me forever to read these.
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Read read read

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Thursday, March 7th, 2013 03:54 pm
I can't even remember what I read in the weeks I didn't post, which is why I have joined this little game.  Anyway, my bathroom book is A Hundrede Thousand Fools of God which is not about religion especially: it's about everything to do with ethnic music in ex-Soviet Central Asia since before it was ex-Soviet to roughly now. It comes with a CD to which I have not listened yet. It's more of my father's ethnomusicology trove. It's really interesting, and the author's point of view is one of the least annoying and most nuanced ones I have read when assessing Soviet history. Even things he hates (like the Soviet penchant for inventing large-ensemble music styles for each nationality, whether the instruments and the musical styles were suited for it or not) he is able to look at with open eyes. It's refreshing to read something that is neither an apologia nor the usual dumb, uncaring knee-jerk anti-sovietism that you see around the place.

My bedroom book is Stephenson's Reamde which I am having trouble with. It's very, very scary, because he's got this whole normal, benign world that people are moving through and then -- people who view large amounts of murder as a simple, sensible business strategy get involved. It is very long, and very detailed -- not loving graphic details of murder, but it doesn't need it to be unsettling and even occasionally disgusting (I don't mean that the writing is disgusting, but ddisgusting things happen).

I seem to have inordinate amounts of trouble with all sorts of things lately. I haven't really finished very many of the books I've started this year.

On another front, I got deferred for giving blood today. My hemoglobin was 11.5. It needs to be 12.5 to give blood. Last time it was low and then it came up enough when they re-tested it. I do not like this development: I used to have remarkably high hemoglobin, and now it is below the normal range (it should be 12 to not be considered to have anemia or something). I am pissed off. My diet is normally high-ish in iron. I have a reason at hand for why I might be dropping hemoglobin levels, but I do not see an immediate answer for what to do about it. Also, I still have no health insurance, so I'm looking for self-treatment first. I will go see the doctor but first I will do whatever I can find that is obvious so as to be able to come in with that information and make the most efficient use of his time.

On still another front, a PSA: too many livejournal users are using the automatic location finder thingy and they are publishing the exact address from which they are posting. This is a dumb move, folks. If you want to post a location, use some kind of cute shorthand instead of your whole address.
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(no subject)

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Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 03:43 pm
- for some reason it delights me to discover that I will be in Prague on Jan Hus Day (July 6)

- it's premature to say more, but it's really likely I'll be working by the end of next week

- they built some really cool minimalist statuary at the Highway Nine end of the levee: they are exercise equipment. Some of them have moving parts and others are various kinds of bars to pull yourself around on. They are beautiful to look at and fun to use. I tried a couple of them today (as many as Truffle had patience for) and I got a little light-headed (motion sickness?) but they were actually quite fun and only hcallenging enough.

- I filled out the Army of Women questionnaire for breast cancer research and I am not happy with how I answered some of the questions. I answered that my health limits various activies "a little" but what I wanted to say was "my health doesn't really limit my acitivities but it makes me think about them really hard and it sometimes makes things uncomfortable"  Also sometimes they gave you radio buttons when ticky boxes would have been better -- as to why I'm not using birth control, for example. And it was surprisingly moving to fill out the consequences of all my pregnancies.

- I skipped two weeks of reading report, but I like doing it, so here it is again:

Recently read: Madeleine Kamman's Savoie which is a travelogue and cookbook, and some book about Rebetika which was sitting in my dad's stuff in xeroxed form

Reading: (continuing the dad's bookshelf project): Francisco Garcia Lorca, In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico: Hanif Kureishi, The Balck Album: Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (another instance of how Making Up Improbable Culture is the New Guinea national sport), and re-reading The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginsburg.  Why yes, I am reading four books at once. I thought I'd stopped that nonsense. But none of these have grabbed me in a way that makes me want to just read page after page until it's finished.

Will be reading: I don't know, some random books or other.

- - writing: it's getting there. Really, really getting there. The war is over, Yanek's getting reunited with people one by one, he;s going to meet the trees soon. But I'm going to have so much work to do in the revision to get this set up better, because I look at it now and it's not set up properly at all. This is because when I started this story it was going to be a different thing entirely. It was kind of a romance at first and now it's not at all.
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No they did not

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Friday, January 25th, 2013 01:00 am
Dorothy Heydt used to say that the moment for her when she dropped a book was when she found herself saying "I don't care about these people."

For me, it's when I find myself saying, "no, they did not," meaning that I do not believe they did or said what the author just told me they did or said.

Sometimes it's because the story is set in a real world milieu and there are particular ways that the people behave in that milieu, sometimes it's a matter of physics or biology, sometimes it's the human emotion or thoguht process that's wrong.

I'm struggling with an old Vonda MacIntyre right now, because of this. I don't think I'm going to finish it, thoguh it has many elements that I love, and it's Vonda MacUIntyre, and I've enjoyed other books of hers. And this is part of a series I started a long time ago.  But the characters are doing things I don't believe they would do and they are saying things I don't believe they would say. And so are the institutions  behind them. And it's getting too annoying to proceed, so I think I'll read myself to sleep with cookbooks again.
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oh yeah, reading

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Friday, January 18th, 2013 12:52 am
Reading: A Simple Haban Melody by Oscar Higuelos (bathroom book)
was going to start What is the What but I can't handle it right now, any more than I can handle Those Bones Are Not My Child: I guess I need something less harrowing at the moment.

Just finished: Periodic Tales (you can have it now, Emma and Jason) and The Handbook of American Folklore

about to read: I'm not sure, I have this immense pile of books from my dad and stepmom.

writing:
I got my guy into a situation I've been planning for a year and suddenly it's like I can't imagine how this would actually go.

Having a Mr. Earbrass moment anyway. Just re-read a bunch of earlier chapters for reasons and they read like a dull biography to me.
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reading . . .

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Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 10:27 pm
1. What are you reading? Periodic Tales by Hugh Addersley (bedroom) and A Simple Habana Melody by Oscar Hijuelos (bathroom)

2. What did you recently finish reading? Hallucinations by Oliver Sachs and The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell.

3. What will you be reading in the future? What is the What? By David Eggers and something ethnomusicological from my dad's library

It's not that I have such fine literary tastes, but that these are the books I brought home from my father's stash, plus two books Emma gave me for Christmas.

also, I am as always, reading several million words of amateur online fiction every few days.  My mother used to read murder mysteries and thrillers when she was depressed. I read mensch romance when I can find it.
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reading . . .

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Wednesday, December 26th, 2012 11:53 am
Personhead [livejournal.com profile] pantryslut posted this reading thing and unlike most things it appealed to me. Originally it's from Should Be Reading (I think that's what it's called).

It's three questions:

1. what are you currently reading? Hallucinations by Oliver Sachs.

2. what did you recently finish reading? Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon. And Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven.  I must admit that most of the rest of the year I was only reading amateur fiction from the web.

3. what will you be reading in the near future? Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

#1 and #3 were christmas presents from Emma.

I have become a slow reader of real books because I have become conditioned to fall asleep with books. . .
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a real man

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Monday, May 7th, 2012 08:03 am
whenever I visit romance sites I bump into the non-question: "Is there anything sexier than a former Marine with a gorgeous body?" (Really. every time)

Yes, yes, there is.  A former marine isn't sexy to me at all.  Show me a real man -- a railroad engineer, a nurse, a chef, an archaeologist, a mechanic, a hairdresser, a guitar repairperson, a tailor, a phlebotomist, a glassblower, an irrigator, a dentist, a gandy dancer, a crab fisherman -- not a marine.

And those bodies that can only be achieved by carefully symmetric, exactly counted, perfectly time repetitions of precise movements and measured weights, and evenly tanned all over to some peculiar ideal?  They're boring and unattractive.  I want the ones that develop from real-life activities and experiences, a sinew there, a muscle there, a lump of fat there, a tan line, a freckle, a mole, a scar, something real and imbued with story.  I don't care what a man can bench-press.  I want to read his story.

I knew an ex-marine that I liked very much.  He joined to defend democracy.  When I knew him: he was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

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