Two Hectobooks

Books I Never Finished

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:39:00 +0000

I'm currently writing the Finnegans Wake review, and it got me thinking (you'll see why soonish) of the various books that I've never finished, and since I've been meaning to write a post about them for a while, I figured that there was no time like the present to do so.

Some people can pick up books, get bored by them, put them down, and never think about them again, and do this frequently.

I am not one of those people. Once I've started a book, it's as if there's no alternative in my mind but to read it all the way through, without skipping a word. It helps that I actually have incredibly poor taste, so I tend to enjoy most things while I'm reading them, especially if it's a book that I've picked for myself and not, say, something that I'm reading from a ... List.

There have been a couple of books that I didn't finish because they were so overdue at the library that I had to return them before they were finished. I'll get back to these books eventually (Excalibur and The Pilgrim's Progress, the latter of which I encountered in Little Women and have wanted to read ever since, but failed on two attempts).

But there are three other books that I made conscious decisions to stop reading, and won't be going back to. In a sketchy order from least to most recently left unread, they are:

How to Mutate and Take Over the World by R. U. Sirius and St. Jude

I really don't have any memory of how I found this book in the first place, because I probably tried reading it around 2002 or 2003, and it was published in 1996 and I sincerely doubt that there was much call for it in the small city I lived in at the time. In spite of its awesome title, which I'm sure was the main thing that caught my eye, it was just a jumble of weird mid-90s internet counterculture fantasy. I had a good internet friend at the time who I complained to enough about it that he finally suggested I just stop reading it. Which hadn't occurred to me, but I did end up taking his advice. I'm not sure now whether it was actually terrible, over my head, or simply irrelevant, but I don't care at all.

Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Fairies. Oh God, fairies. I had a not-all-that-brief fascination with the fae that TO BE HONEST I don't think I've ever truly gotten over. This book of short stories had elements that were really awesome: Warner's fairies live in a really well-defined world. The problem, though, was that the stories she was writing about them simply weren't very interesting to teenage me. (And speaking of fairies, here is a kind of fun video about the Cottingley fairies, which has some, uhh, interesting comments on it.)

House of Chains by Steven Erikson

My sister ended up trapped in one of those "we'll send you a book every month and you'll probably pay us for all of them because you'll be too lazy to send them back" schemes a few years ago, resulting in her having this book lying around, and me picking it up because the title was cool. I found the book overwhelming, though, full of made up words (it's part of the enormous Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series) and not particularly engaging.

How about you? Can you easily drop books once you've started them? Or, if you're like me, what are some of the few that you couldn't finish?

Board Members: Daniel J. Boorstin

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:14:00 +0000

As promised at some point in the past, here is the first board member bio type thing. This will by no means be a comprehensive summary of any of these people's lives, although I will focus on a few broad descriptors so that I can summarize them at the end of all this.

Name: Daniel J. Boorstin

Born: October 1, 1914
Died: February 28, 2004
Country of Origin/Main Residence: United States (son of Russian immigrants)

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Ruth Frankel, 1941
Children?: Yes: 3
Education: Law
Religion: Jewish

Literary Awards: Pulitzer Prize for The Americans: The Democratic Experience

Life:
Daniel J. Boorstin's life begins with a very interesting story, involving his lawyer father's participation in the defense of a Jewish man accused of murdering a young girl in Georgia. From there things get a bit less exciting, though.

Boorstin grew up in Oklahoma after his family basically fled Georgia, and went to school at Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and finally Yale Law School, i.e. he was a lawyer by training. He was a professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years and the US Congress librarian, despite not being an actual librarian, for 12 years.

He wrote over 20 books, many of which seem to have very rah rah Ameican subject matter, although some of the others, dealing with celebrity, world history, and the influence of technology on history, look like they might be interesting. After all, a bunch of them were apparently bestsellers.

Besides being a patriot, Boorstin ~~flirted with~~ was a member of the US communist party in the 1930s--probably during his early twenties, in other words. He then abruptly became a conservative. It's unclear whether he was racist or just insistently colour blind.

He and his wife/editor, Ruth, had three children.

Sources: this obituary and of course Wikipedia

Current Distractions, January 2012 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

This month I've been on a sort of self-improvement binge. I feel like I've pretty much recuperated from the pneumonia I had in November/December, and now I'm trying to organize and be healthy and so on. I know how lame this sounds, trust me, but it is a thing that I'm doing right now and actually have been relatively successful with, so whatever.

I'm not all lame, though.

At the beginning of this month, I picked a convention to go to this year, and the rest of the month has been consumed with planning costumes. I've decided that I love costumes, and nothing you can say will make me ashamed of this fact. I won't reveal which con this is until after the fact, so that any crazy stalker-people out there can't track me down and murder me. So keep your eyes open for a post about it sometime in the next eleven months, or something like that. Whatever, dudes.

Back in April (although I guess I didn't mention it) I bought a PS3 for the express purpose of playing Portal 2. I'm not much of a gamer, but when I discovered that Portal is a puzzle game, I decided to play it and it pretty much changed my life, which is only a very slight exaggeration. So I was compelled to play Portal 2, with extreme trepidation, and fortunately it is also awesome. Anyway the whole point of this is that when I bought my PS3 I would've settled for just buying Portal 2 and no other games, ever (it's also a bluray player, after all), but the system came with Uncharted 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. These games didn't catch my attention at first, and then somehow I found out that Uncharted 2 was made by Naughty Dog (the original developer of the highly excellent Crash Bandicoot games for the PS1) and has won pretty much every single award, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I started playing the weekend before last. And let me tell you, it doesn't disappoint so far. I still have no interest in Metal Gear Solid 4, but tell me if you've played it and think it's any good.

Possibly most importantly of all, though, I got a breadmaker for Christmas and I've been making bread every weekend this month, and it's super great.

Anyway, here are some tumblrs that I enjoy a lot:

Dads Are The Original Hipster - Dads are one of humanity's greatest inventions, and this tumblr is a celebration of their kickassity.
Before They Were Grandparents - A little bit like the previous one, but less sarcastic.
Foul Bachelorette Frog - I can't relate to every single one of these, but I can relate to a terrifying number of them.
Socially Awkward Penguin - I can relate to every single one of these.
Brotips - A small number of these are douchey, but the majority are about just generally being a stand up dude, and they make me smile.

R23. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:14:00 +0000

Year Published: 1992
Pages: 578
First Sentence: Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.

Review:
Every time I read science fiction, I wonder why I bother reading anything else. I mean, it's obvious: I like other books, too. I like Gothic romances, "low" fantasy, history, and all the rest. But there's nothing that can get my motor running quite as efficiently or as reliably as technobabble and spaceships. And so I present Connie Willis' Doomsday Book.

In a not-too-distant future (2054), time travel is a fait accompli. Oxford University undergraduate Kivrin Engle travels to the year 1320 to observe the contemporary Christmas celebrations, while her tutor, Mr. Dunworthy, worries himself sick. Literally! Seriously though, what should be a straightforward "drop" into the past gets complicated when the tech running things falls very ill with a mysterious virus, just before he can tell Mr. Dunworthy and the rest of the team that something has gone wrong. Meanwhile, Kivrin arrives at her destination and she ends up sick as well, unable to communicate with the people around her who have rescued her and nursed her. Etc.

I'd read what I guess you could call spoilers for this book online prior to reading it, and that caused me some frustration with some of the pacing. Along the lines of "seriously holy shit how long is it going to take for the damn tech to wake up and say what went wrong?" (Those spoilers are also why my summary is so brief—in case you want to go looking for the book, too.) Other than that I really enjoyed the story. There are an odd quantity of comic relief characters (i.e. a lot of them) but considering some of the book's dark subject matter, I suppose that's justified in terms of the overall tone that the author must've been going for. Connie Willis is a competent writer, but the combination of comic relief with mega-depressing stuff does make the tone of the novel kind of inconsistent.

The biggest problem with this book is that it's pretty dated. I think 2054 is still believably far enough away for time travel to become an established fact within the time between now and then, but there are a lot of things missing from this future that are impossibly important in our actual present. For example, no one in this book has a cellphone, although they all have video phones, a technology that I'm still not convinced is ever really going to catch on. To be fair, the entire genre is plagued by this problem, and really the book isn't crippled by it. It was just another frustration.

Also, I'm getting more and more wary of historical fiction, which this partly is. The more I learn, the more clear it seems to me that it's impossible to imagine the people in the past, if only because their attitudes were shaped so differently from ours (I'm thinking of things like neuroplasticity here, but also just general concepts like "it's ok to own another human being" or "bathing in hot water is bad for you"). I'll continue reading this genre because I love history and attempting to imagine it, but I'm really not going to trust it anymore. Possibly I should've come to this conclusion a long time ago. Or then again, maybe I'm completely wrong about this.

"The Big Bang Theory: Are We the Joke?" - Overdue Impressions on a Dragon*Con Panel

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:59:00 +0000

I think I'll have to begin this particular post by giving a bit of context to it. Back in September, as you may recall, I attended Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America. It was my first time in that country (outside of airports) since I was about two years old, which was a little bit surreal to realize. (And speaking of surreal, the United States is such a strange place. I feel like it should be the same as Canada but it's so oddly different. And no, I'm not one of these obnoxious Canadians with an inferiority complex who really wants to make the differences clear. I just think it's bizarre how in Canada when you get a little individually packaged butter, it's actual butter. In the United States, it's a "buttery taste spread" apparently made mostly from corn syrup.) It was also pretty much one of the most amazing experiences that I've ever had. I attended celebrity and fan panels, and was immersed in geekitude far deeper than I've ever been before in my entire life. Also: Atlanta was really nice and the people there were all awesome (con attendees and normals alike).

However, one of the panels that I attended really didn't satisfy. The title of this panel was in the title of this post, i.e. "The Big Bang Theory: Are We the Joke?" It set out to discuss whether this particular tv show (and seriously if you don't know what The Big Bang Theory is, I'm not going to explain it, because I doubt that this post will have anything of interest for you in it, anyway) is laughing at or with the people it portrays. It's very easy for me to state why the panel didn't satisfy me: it didn't address the question that it was supposed to. Instead, it consisted mainly of people gushing about the show and speculating about it, and saying how they saw themselves in it, and basically just not critically examining it and its audience in the way that I'd hoped for, and had come to expect based on other panels I'd been to. Someone even compared the character of Raj from The Big Bang Theory to the character of Abed from Community, which is pretty much the worst comparison that I've ever heard, because the only thing that they have in common is that they're both brown. Yikes.

So being that there was a lack of insight displayed at the actual panel, I wanted to address the question here.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with books, language, gender, engineering, or any of my other fair game topics? Not very much; it's a tv show. But bear with me just this once, please and thanks.

I need to qualify this post just a little bit further before I get into the meat of it, though. I'm actually not a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory (which I'll refer to as TBBT from now on, just for simplicity's sake). I think the first episode of the show that I watched was Wil Wheaton's first episode (I'm a huge Wil Wheaton fan, and maybe one day I'll write about how awesome Wil Wheaton is*), although I'd heard about the show a very little bit before then. I was living sans cable by the time the second season started in September 2008, and so it wasn't really on my radar. I enjoyed the first episode I saw, though, and when my sister started watching the show, I watched a bit with her, and I was always entertained. I watched Wil Wheaton's second episode, too. But I'd only seen a few episodes between that and his third episode, which aired very recently, and also featured Brent Spiner, who loves to stir shit up on Twitter.

So I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a person who has seen every single episode. I don't know if I'm going to be making any arguments that are really affected by that, though. Ok yes I am.

So, who are "we," and are "we" the joke?

"We" obviously, are the people like Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard. We are geeks/nerds, smart people into gaming, science fiction, technology, and being obsessed with make believe/things that the vast mass of society thinks of as being really lame. This line is a difficult one to draw at the moment, with a lot of sf-type stuff appearing pretty much everywhere recently (depending, of course, what you consider to be sf, but for the purposes of this post, I'm including things like Transformers, and Avatar, and, um, I'm not sure what else). It may be worth noting that I draw my geek line ("This far and no further!") at furries, Japanese articulated dolls, and LARPing, the first two of which have a bizarre sexual undertone from what I can tell, and latter of which is just... so silly. Of course, YMMV. What I mean, though, is that pretty much no one is ashamed to go to see Transformers 3**, whereas I felt I had to keep the purpose of my trip to Atlanta a secret from my coworkers. So while some activities are still too geeky for the mainstream, others are less so. But I think it's pretty clear that we're the kids who were teased for our odd interests. We were the ones in the a/v club getting excited to watch a copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You know?

Next question: are we the joke?

The premise of TBBT, once I'd started watching it, made me nervous. It was a comedy about geeks, and when I watched it, I felt like I was laughing along with some of the things that they were saying. But I was concerned, because I was also laughing at them. And let's keep things realistic. In comedy, you're often supposed to be laughing at the characters. I was laughing at all of the Bluths when I watched Arrested Development (if I was laughing with anyone in that case, I guess it would've had to've been Ron Howard). And I was laughing at the people on The Office. And at The Simpsons. These aren't really sit coms, though, so my other example is M*A*S*H. (And no I'm not trying to say that TBBT compares to any of these shows, just that the concept of laughing at characters holds through pretty much all of comedy, as it should.) So why would it be a problem to laugh at the geeks on TBBT?

I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but I think that it has something to do with the way these concepts are presented, and the way the audience views the characters. Beginning with Arrested Development: this show is just one insane, long-running joke about a crazy family. The characters are clearly all completely crazy, and caricatures of real people. Or perhaps I should take this opportunity to apologize to the closeted gay, never-nude, Blue Man, unemployed psychologist community. The Office: let's go with the UK version, and say that our laughter is mostly the nervous and crushing laughter that we can't let out at work every day, and so this is our outlet. The Simpsons: agh, let's just move on to M*A*S*H.

In M*A*S*H, our heroes are the funniest guys, and a lot of the humour comes from various quips and zingers. We're really rooting for the vast majority of the main characters, and even the "antagonists" have a sort of dignity. Our laughter is at the situations that they get into, and the ways that they deal with and comment on those situations. I haven't seen every episode of this show, but in the ones I have seen, it took its characters seriously.

It's very probably misguided of me to try to compare a classic sit com set during the Korean War with a current show created by Chuck Lorre about a bunch of geeks, but I'm going to do it anyway. While TBBT does derive some of its comedy from the hijinks of the geeks, even this is largely driven by poking fun at them for being obsessive, infantile, socially inept, whatever. If this were really a show by geeks, for geeks, it would focus more on the work of the various characters (seriously you could have so much hilarity in a fictional physics lab, and also holy shit they're all brilliant why don't we respect them more?!). And the dialogue would be 90% just straight-up quoting from eight million obscure sources, and 10% regurgitation of scientific trivia. And the geeks in the audience would swoon, and the mainstream audience would be scornful.

And the show wouldn't be terribly successful, but it would be honest.

Because the geeks are the joke on this show, a lot of the time. They don't really get any respect for being brilliant, they're just these awkward people. And I do believe that there are real geeks somewhere behind this show, who care about it and who prevent the characters from descending too far into the stereotype of the fat, unwashed man playing an MMORPG in his parents' basement (for example). But I think that most of the audience doesn't care, and that they're laughing at us. And the reason I think that the audience is laughing at us is that I've been laughed at. And maybe some people are like that horrible kid in Freaks and Geeks, who just wants to play D & D with the geeks, really, except that he's afraid of being laughed at, too. But just as many people are too busy cheering for professional sports teams to understand why someone else would obsessively catalog the entire Dune series on a wiki or play a six hour table top game with a group of people who have well-known online personas thanks to their really insightful comments on some unheard of message board about antique watches.

I don't know what normal people do with their time, besides talking about and watching pro sports. And hey, geeks (including me) laugh at those normal people, too. But that's kind of the point: in a show where the geeks really are the heroes, they would be the ones laughing. They wouldn't be just a bunch of geeks on display for a mainstream audience to laugh at.

But I can't deny that I've enjoyed episodes of TBBT. I just wish it was a better version of itself. And really, there are enough old Star Trek episodes out there that I never need to watching anything else, anyway.

What do you think, readers?

*Please note that my love of Wil Wheaton doesn't extend to wanting to tell him that I want to marry him, as much as I may joke about this. But that's a whole 'nother topic on celebrity culture or some such whatnot, and I don't have time to go into it right now. And let's also note that my love of him has at various points in the past extended to getting his tweets on my phone.

**People should be ashamed, though. And probably if you're cool enough to be reading my blog, you at least thought twice about it. I hope so, anyway! This is also another topic entirely.

In Which Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:19:00 +0000

I'm reading Finnegans Wake and if I start writing about it I won't be able to stop, so.

Because it's going to take a long time to finish, I'm going to be posting a lot of junk over the next while. I think I'm finally going to do the profiles of the Modern Library board members who made The List, which I think I've mentioned before at least once. And of course, there'll be a "random novel" review coming up, as well.

Just a heads up, I guess?

Also I just got a Goodreads account, but I'll figure out how it works later.

78. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Rudyard Kipling's wish fulfillment fantasy.

Year Published: 1901
Pages: 217
First Sentence: He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
Because I couldn't find Kim in its own volume at the library, I ended up getting it in a book of "The Best Fiction of Rudyard Kipling," which meant that after I was done Kim I finally got to read The Jungle Book, which I'd argue is Kipling's much more famous work. However, reading the two books in such quick succession also meant that I got to see how far superior Kim is, in its story structure especially.

Kim O'Hara is a young Irish boy who has basically gone native in India. His mother died when he was a baby, and his alcoholic father, "a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment," became a railway man, and brought baby Kim with him everywhere. Eventually Kim's father becomes an opium addict, and dies, leaving Kim with some identifying papers and nothing else, so that Kim basically just ends up running wild in the streets of Lahore.

That's where the book opens, with Kim and some other children playing where they shouldn't be, outside of a museum. A strange-looking man appears and Kim is immediately curious about him. It turns out that the man is a Tibetan lama, who left his monastery to search for a legendary "River of the Arrow." Kim latches onto the Lama as his new chela, or disciple, to beg for the lama and help him around the countryside on his search.

The two of them spend some time on the road, until by a strange coincidence, they end up encountering the Mavericks en route to Sanawar. The identifying papers that Kim's father left him are kept in an amulet that Kim wears around his neck, and when these are discovered, the regiment pretty much instantly takes Kim in hand, to finally send him to school and so on. Kim is very unwillingly separated from the lama.

I'll stop there for spoilers' sake, but say that the story really seems to be about the relationship between Kim and the lama and how that relationship illustrates Kim's struggle between the world of the "sahibs" (British colonist types, in this case) and that of the natives. It's this relationship that makes the book extremely readable. Obviously, the lama is a Buddhist, and thus prohibited from developing attachments (or at least I think that's how it works), but he undeniably loves Kim by the end of the book, and Kim has a tremendous amount of love and respect for the lama.

The book also seems to be a love letter to India from Kipling. All of the descriptions are very vivid, and the book is full of really remarkable characters. India isn't quite as much of a blind spot as the entirety of Africa is for me (I've seen Ghandi, after all, hahaha), but every time I encounter it in fiction it seems to be the most complex and bizarre country in the world. Also, it's very clear that the country Kipling is describing here is just the wilder, more old-fashioned version of the India portrayed by Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children.

I like Kipling's writing. He's very good at describing very unfamiliar settings (for a so-called Western reader, anyway), and his sense of humour is never far away. (I've loved the Just So Stories for a very long time.) Also, he avoids the horribly annoying thing that a lot of writers do when they're giving dialogue to people who speak accented or a vernacular English, where all of the apostrophes and misspellings make that person's dialogue almost unreadable, and insulting too in some cases. Kipling just makes judicious use of some extra letters here and there to get the point across. I know I'm harping about this, but I really hate it when writers do it.

Overall the book is good. It's not one of the best of the 3/3s, because the story is pretty simple, but it's definitely worth a read.

Quotations:
(I didn't find anything particularly quotable in the book, so instead here's a stanza from "The Sons of Martha", one of Kipling's good bad poems that I have a bit of a soft spot for. -M.R.)

They finger death at their gloves' end where they piece and repiece the living wires.  He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry behind their fires.  Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall,  And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and turn him till evenfall.

Current Distractions, Slightly Belated December 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:47:00 +0000

Hello everybody and Happy New Year! I spent last night watching Star Trek: TOS with my bff, and it was awesome. We're almost finished the first season, finally. (There are no fewer than twenty-nine episodes, which is ridiculous.)

Ok, so my distractions for December should be pretty obvious: the stuff I mentioned last monthish, plus holiday preparation and participation. When I wasn't buying stuff to wear to my office Christmas party, I was buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, baking, and finally hanging out with family and friends. My holidays were pretty successful overall, so now I just have to go back to work tomorrow and get my boss to approve the holiday request I made a month ago, instead of firing me. (I don't think he'll actually fire me.)

A few other things to mention:

I wrote a couple of reviews yesterday that will be going up over the next few weeks, as I finish reading other books and get around to doing the editing of said reviews written yesterday.
Might as well sum up everything I read ~~this~~ last year, because it's probably too late to dedicate a post to that all by itself. Here's a table of all the books I read in 2011 (there are 30 of them, averaging 378 pages each):

I'm too lazy to correct this on the table, but The Evolution of God is technically non-fiction depending on your opinion of evolutionary psychology. I think you can click to embiggen.

I know this is an ugly table, but the very last thing I am is a visual artist, so you'll have to just deal with it. Mainly I just wanted to make a spreadsheet to count up pages I read ~~this~~ last year, and the total comes to 10,964! This averages to about 30 pages read per day, which isn't too bad considering some of the hours that ~~I've been working this~~ I worked last year. (This number also isn't completely accurate, not just because of not being able to adjust for things like words per page, but simply because I don't know how many pages there were in Kick-Ass.)

Longest book: The Soldiers of Halla by D. J. MacHale (The surprising conclusion to a pretty sweet YA series.)
Shortest book: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (A picturesque and thoughtful middle-gradeish novel dealing with race, religion, family, etc.)
Best book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman (So-called "Harry Potter for adults" that also owes a lot to C. S. Lewis and was just so, so good. The sequel came out this year, but I'm waiting to buy it in paperback because that's what I have the first book in, and I'm crazy like that.)
Worst book: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (This is probably some kind of blasphemy to some people, but this book was just so boring.)

I think that covers everything and my laundry is done now, so I have to move on to buying groceries and so on. I hope you all had good holidays, and keep reading my lame but beloved (i.e. by me) blog in 2012! :)

R22. The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 03:38:00 +0000

Year Published: 1949
Pages: 318
First Sentence: It was Charles who called us the parasites.

Review:
I'm really not sure where to begin with this one, so we'll have to go straight in to the summary. Maria, Niall, and Celia Delaney are three semi-siblings. Maria is the daughter of their "Pappy" by some mysterious woman, Niall is the son of their "Mama" by some mysterious man, and Celia is the daughter of Pappy and Mama. Pappy is a famous singer and Mama a famous dancer, and the Delaneys' famous parents cart them around early 20th century Europe and basically neglect them.

After Mama dies in a tragic accident, Maria goes to a theatre company in Liverpool, Niall goes to boarding school, and Celia continues touring with Pappy. But it seems to be during this time that their roles become cemented: Niall and Maria develop a confusingly intimate relationship, and Celia becomes her Pappy's caretaker as a way of avoiding her own life.

I've read two other books by Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca, which I think is her most famous one ("Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again"), and The House on the Strand. I enjoyed both of those books a lot more than this one. Rebecca has a much stronger story, and The House on the Strand has much stronger themes. The Parasites, meanwhile, just sort of is.

Maria and Niall aren't very likeable characters and although I found Celia a bit better, she's clearly just sort of a doormat. Furthermore, I found the relationship between Maria and Niall to be really creepy. These are two people who were raised together but apparently (?) become physically intimate at some point. I'm pretty sure there's something in attachment theory that says that that shouldn't happen. (It isn't on the scale of Francesca Lia Block's Wasteland, or anything, considering that Maria and Niall are aware that they're stepsiblings throughout their lives, but still, ugh. Wasteland was oddly less creepy, in some ways.) Of course, this has everything to do with their characterization as parasitic, but it wasn't fun to read.

The book wasn't all bad or anything by any means. There are quite a few good secondary characters, and the scenes between them and the Delaneys can be quite good. Pappy is great, and so is Niall's sugar mama, Freada. But this definitely isn't a must-read, and I'd recommend Rebecca long before The Parasites.

(Fun but irrelevant fact: I inherited all three of the Daphne du Maurier books I've read and one other one, which will probably show up in a post soon, through my great aunt who died a couple of years ago. I'm not sure about the others, but this book must've actually first belonged to my great grandma, since her name is written on the first page.)

Quotations:
The tragedy of life, though Niall, brushing his hair with the ebony brush and too few bristles that Pappy had given him on his twenty-first birthday, was not that people died; but that they died to you. All people died to Niall, except Maria. Therefore Charles was right. I live and feed upon Maria, thought Niall, in her I have my being, I lie embedded deep in the guts of her, and I can't escape because I don't want to escape, ever... ever...

Current Distractions, Belated November 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:45:00 +0000

NaNoWriMo took up most of my time in November. In fact I have very little else to say about the month, because mostly I was just writing. I've been reading Anthony Burgess' essay collection But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? instead of starting a new book that would distract me from the writing (as an aside, Burgess is brilliant and if I can be half as smart as he is someday, I'll be happy), but finally a couple of days ago I started in on The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier, so that'll be the next review I'll post. I actually read a couple of other books that I could've reviewed and posted about last month, but left them too long without writing the reviews, and if the book isn't fresh in my mind I can't review it, so.

All of the health problems that I think I've been mentioning over the course of probably the last six months or so finally came to a head on the third last day of November, when I came home from work with a fever that I couldn't really shake for the next week, whereupon I went to see a doctor who told me that I had pneumonia. Woo! (Fun fact: I've had pneumonia once before, during the summer when I was probably about eight years old. All I remember from that time was being incredibly weak, and too hot to eat anything other than popsicles. Here's hoping this doesn't become a frequent thing for me.) Anyway, this whole pneumonia thing has kind of scared me, and now I'd really like to get myself sorted out and start taking better care of myself, which means even less time for the blog, yet again.

Oh, and also I should mention that I've been watching a lot of The X-Files. I had a dream at the beginning of November that had something to do with me saying how Dana Scully was my hero multiple times, which I took as a sign that it was time to dive back in (I've been watching it sporadically for something like a year or two now), and ended up watching season 5, the movie, and season 6 in quick succession. Now I'll be breaking again for another few months, before returning to watch what I hear was the show's descent into terribleness over the final three seasons. By the way, The A.V. Club provides their usual astute commentary on this show.

Anyway if you're still reading, stick around because I'm not going anywhere, I'm just really lazy.

Current Distractions, October 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:00:00 +0000

So I survived the illness and the mysterious allergic reaction that resulted in a full-body rash, and the various drugs that various doctors gave me to deal with all of it. But that actually took most of this month, and I've only really gotten back to normal over the last week or so. I've concluded that my number one issue healthwise was that I wasn't getting enough sleep. So my new bedtime is 9 p.m., with very few exceptions outside of the weekends. Which, yeah, sucks.

Other than sickness, the backlog of reviews that I'm supposed to be writing for books that I finished a long time ago, and guilt about overdue library books, my number one distraction this month has been NaNoWriMo.

!!!!!

NaNoWriMo stands for "National Novel Writing Month," and you may recall me writing about it last year. Last year I attempted to write my own Harlequin romance novel, and wrote about it, and failed oh so miserably, although I did manage to hit the 50 000 word goal due to a clever framing device.

This year, I have no idea what I'm going to write about. Usually October is a rush of ideas for me, but I've been completely uninspired lately. So November 1st should be a very interesting day, and I'll be sure to keep you all posted while I'm procrastinating or puzzling things out.

And instead of brainstorming, I've basically been writing extremely long, overly detailed responses to people's engineering-related questions in the Reference Desk forum.

Anyway.

I won't be able to read Kim until after November, thanks to NaNoWriMo, but I will have at least one other review ready to post sometime in the very near future. I also attempted to make a sidebar with the "random" books on it, but I was only partially successful. I'm going to try my best to get it working soon, so maybe by the time you read this, it will be. (I'm trying to cobble it together out of the code for the other sidebar, haha.)

79. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:27:00 +0000

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Beethoven and an anonymous Italian's murder provide the impetus for a love story.

Year Published: 1908
Pages: 246
First Sentence: "The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all."
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
I very nearly gave this book a 2, but the more I've thought about it while getting ready to write this review (while procrastinating on writing this review, actually), the more I realize I really liked the book, and it's sticking with me, especially the very last scene, which I won't tell you about.

Lucy Honeychurch is a young woman travelling in Italy with her cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, who is an old maid (probably around 35 years old or so), as chaperone. The book opens with them lamenting the fact that the rooms they've been given in Florence have no view of the city. A horrendously uncouth old man gallantly offers up the rooms he and his son occupy to the two ladies, which sparks discussion among all the guests at the pension, Miss Bartlett's great dismay, and Lucy's bewilderment. Because, you see, Lucy is basically an innocent country girl and also somewhat strange, still trying to figure out how to deal with the world on her own terms and those of her crazy, repressed society. (A lady can't say the word "stomach" in a man's presence, for example.)

But my tone is too sarcastic, and my summary is too detailed so far.

The horrendous (actually very sweet) old man is named Mr. Emerson, and his young, sad son is George. The two of them seem to live outside of the social norms, and because the pension is so small, and tourists have such a limited territory, Lucy and her cousin are unable to avoid them after the room debacle (Charlotte is convinced to allow the switching of rooms, somehow). Eventually, Lucy goes out alone on a whim, and ends up witnessing a murder of some random Italian. George happens to be in the vicinity, and escorts Lucy back to the pension. During this walk, they experience a strange sort of tacit bonding, which will bring both of them no end of trouble. Later, on an excursion out of town, George HORROR OF HORRORS kisses Lucy. She and Charlotte flee Florence and go to Rome the next morning.

Back in England several weeks later, Lucy ends up engaged to some terrible dude whose name I haven't bothered to remember. He is clearly the worst possible match for her. And then the Emersons show up again, and...

You can read it to find out how it ends.

(George and Lucy are the names of a couple we met before in The Magnificent Ambersons. That book was written about ten years after this one, though, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be some sort of weird literary reference or if it's just a coincidence because there were only five names to choose from at the time.)

Lucy is this great mercurial sort of character, who has a tremendous amount of passion and good sense. I think she'd actually make a good friend; I can imagine having really great hangouts with her and Jane Eyre. The Emersons are also really fascinating. As I mentioned before, they're a bit out of step with their time, apostate proto-feminists with socialist tendencies. I'll admit I have a bit of a crush on George.

I think by far the most interesting character, though, is Reverend Beebe. He shows up first at the pension in Florence. He's a youngish Anglican priest who originally met Lucy when she was at school, and who is in Italy for short time before moving to Lucy's, err, area to take up duties there. So he appears again in the English countryside along with the Emersons, as both an ally and antagonist to Lucy. He's portrayed as being a lot more jolly than most priestly types, more open-minded and generally an all-around cool guy. However, as the book progresses, you see that he actually has these really conservative beliefs surrounding vocations and celibacy. (As an aside, I'm not sure if the Church of England has the same notions about vocations as the Catholic Church, but basically Catholics talk about "vocations" as callings to different paths in life, e.g. marriage, the priesthood, religious orders, etc. and that's what I'm talking about here.) Basically, he believes that celibacy is the highest calling, and that nothing else is as good. This reminded me a lot of The Song of Bernadette, where the future St. Bernadette just wants to get married and have babies, and everyone around her says GOOD GOD NO A VISIONARY CANNOT BE DEFILED YOU HAVE TO BECOME A NUN. P.S. read The Song of Bernadette. In Catholicism, all vocations are technically created equal, and as long as you're not doing something evil like fornicating, then you're ok. Supposedly. But essentially what I'm trying to say is that while Rev. Beebe seems really progressive, he's actually just like the rest of the repressed society around him.

The style of the book is very deceptive in that it feels extremely modern. The Emersons seem like the product of a mind from the 70s or 80s, not 1908. So I'm really looking forward to the upcoming books by this author. And actually, before I realized that the book was so old, I was kind of annoyed by yet another modern author putting the spin of modern attitudes onto the past. Oops! There's a lot of hilarity in the book, too, by the way, especially in the descriptions of tourists (who apparently haven't changed at all in a hundred years) and the pretense of the "English colonists" in Florence.

In closing, this book wasn't earth-shattering, but it was beautiful and funny and thought-provoking. It didn't punch me in the gut, but it made me smile. If I initially mistook that reaction for something less than stellar, I've changed my mind now.

Quotations:
Chapter 6: The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them (Yes, this is pretty much the best chapter title ever. -M.R.)

How often Lucy had rehearsed this bow, this interview! But she had always rehearsed them indoors, and with certain accessories, which surely we have a right to assume. Who could foretell that she and George would meet in the rout of a civilization, amidst an army of coats and collars and boots that lay wounded over the sunlit earth? She had imagined a young Mr. Emerson, who might be shy or morbid or indifferent or furtively impudent. She was prepared for all of these. But she had never imagined one who would be happy and greet her with the shout of the morning star.
Indoors herself, partaking of tea with old Mrs. Butterworth, she reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much. "I will bow," she had thought. "I will not shake hands with him. That will be just the proper thing." She had bowed--but to whom? To gods, to heroes, to the nonsense of schoolgirls! She had bowed across the rubbish that cumbers the world.

R21. Persuasion by Jane Austen

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:15:00 +0000

(Have I really not posted a review since July?! I AM VERY SORRY, YOU GUYS. -M.R.)

Year Published: 1818
Pages: 240
First Sentence: Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.

Review:
This may come as a bit of a shock, but I’ve never read a Jane Austen novel before this one. In fact, I’ve somehow managed to pretty much completely avoid all of her work and the numerous film adaptations of it. I like my 19th century female authors Brontë-flavoured, basically, and until I can find out for myself whether Frankenstein lives up to its hype, things are going to stay that way.

So, that means that while I have the vaguest possible notion of what happens in Pride and Prejudice, I went into Persuasion almost completely blind about Jane Austen and the kinds of books that she wrote, her style, and so on.

The story is about Anne Elliot, a quiet sort of young woman (about 25 years old), sole sane member of a family of fools (her anomalous, much-beloved mother is something like ten years dead at the opening of the novel). Her entire family is portrayed hilariously, if somewhat one-dimensionally, as being generally vain and concerned with their status and wealth. However, at the beginning of the novel, the family is somewhat hurting for said wealth due to Anne’s father’s expensive lifestyle, and so they end up having to rent out their house. The house is rented by an admiral and his wife, who happens to be the sister of the young Captain Frederick Wentworth, a past suitor of Anne’s.

Thus, after a separation of something like eight years, Anne and Captain Wentworth come together again for the first time, and LOL AWKWARD it’s left to Anne to navigate the situation with her typical poise and quiet charms. Will her feminine wiles attract Captain Wentworth a second time? Because p.s. she totally still has the hots for him after all these years. I think the answer is obvious, although Austen does throw a bit of a curve ball over the course of a few chapters, in the form of Anne’s cousin William Elliot, who is the heir to her father’s title and very interested in Anne.

The book was good and the heroine somewhat atypical (in that she was pretty much completely conventional, not at all rebellious or stubborn or anything like that), but I found it extremely short and rushed. There was a lot more room to ratchet up the tension, and the book suffers from not taking advantage of that. But I ended up checking Wikipedia before writing this review to make sure that this book (published after Austen died) was a legit novel of hers and not one of these “lost” novels that are in horrible draft form but get published regardless, and it turns out that the reason the book is so short is that Austen was literally hurrying to finish it before she died.

So that makes things just a little more macabre.

One thing that I really find interesting is how a novel like this one is completely opposite from a modern romnov in terms of the sex content. And actually, I think that both suffer because of it.

There is tension and “heat” in Persuasion, but there’s also an underlying stuffiness that really threw me off. The novel basically culminates in this conversation that Anne and Wentworth have over the course of a stroll through some park in Bath, where they talk to each other about their “characters.” As far as I’m concerned, “character” isn’t even really a thing anymore, and I know that the book is a product of its time, but the whole conversation just crushes any previous subtext about these two basically just wanting to tear each other’s clothes off.

On the other hand, the modern romnov immediately pours on the sex and never really stops, and that’s really distracting, as well. In fact in many cases it seems like everything that isn’t sex is just a struggle to convey some sort of normalcy to the situations described.

In real life, sometimes you want to tear a person’s clothes off, and sometimes you want to look at them across a table over mugs of hot chocolate, and sometimes you have errands to run, and sometimes you don’t want to see them at all because you’re spending the evening with your respective friends. While Austen neglects the sexual aspect of the relationship, she does capture some of that sense of normalcy. (And I hope that it doesn’t seem like I’m conflating sex and love too much. Mostly I’m just trying to say that both are a part of the vast majority of long term relationships in very important ways.)

Tangents about doin’ it aside, I’ll definitely be reading more Austen in the future. No matter how much I love the Brontës, I’ll be the first to admit that they don’t really have a sense of humour, whereas Austen does, and I’m interested to see what its powers are when not (possibly) somewhat dimmed by impending death.

Quotations:
Mr. Shepherd was eloquent on the subject, pointing out all the circumstances of the admiral's family, which made him peculiarly desirable as a tenant. He was a married man, and without children; the very state to be wished for. A house was never taken good care of, Mr. Shepherd observed, without a lady: he did not know, whether furniture might not be in danger of suffering as much where there was no lady, as where there were many children. A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.

"--Well, Miss Elliot" (lowering his voice), "as I was saying, we shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps I shall.--Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to example in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."

Buy at Amazon.com!

Current Distractions, Belated September 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:16:00 +0000

September was... an interesting month. I switched work locations again, and then within a week I contracted a mysterious plague that basically knocked me on my ass for the next two weeks. (Seeing as this plague hit me the week after I started going to the pool to do laps, I can only surmise that the exercise was what made me sick.)

Needless to say, I didn't get as much blogging done as I would've liked.

However, it's worth noting that although I'm a bit behind on reviews, I'm at least reading again, and enjoying it. It's nice to be working my way through the unread books on my bookshelf, because it kills me to have unread books on my bookshelf. That, and when I think of a book that I absolutely must read, I don't have to put it off for five years from now when I finally finish the project.

There are reviews coming for all (two) of the other books I read, but I'd like to also mention the graphic novel Logicomix. I picked it up at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal this summer, because I'm trying really hard to get the hang of graphic novels (I struggle a lot with the visual aspect of them, but I feel like I'm missing out on good stuff by not reading them). It's sort of the story of Bertrand Russell, but I suppose moreso the struggle to develop logical foundations for mathematics. As I said, I have a really hard time with graphic novels because I don't look at the pictures unless I'm making a conscious effort to do so, but this one was alright. It reminded me of the book A Brief History of Infinity, in that it had interesting bits about crazy mathematicians, and also really dry bits about crazy mathematics.

Speaking of A Brief History of Infinity, I lent it to someone to read for my book club and now I don't know where it is! Serves me right for breaking my strict policy of not lending books to people. (NB this is totally my own fault, because I don't even remember who I lent it to in the first place.)

Anyway, hope you're all healthier than I am. NaNoWriMo is less than three weeks away!

Margaret Mitchell's Apartment

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Oh hey, so I was in Atlanta recently, unless the endless Dragon*Con talk didn't tip you off to the fact.

Know who used to live in Atlanta?

Well, if you read the title of the post, you'll know it was Margaret Mitchell.

I think you can click to embiggen

HOUSE

I didn't go inside or anything, but was intrigued enough to take a picture, anyway!

Dragon*Con

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 01:35:00 +0000

So, Dragon*Con.

I don't really know where to begin, so I guess I'll just start from the beginning of the trip and work my way through. Ish.

In case you have no idea what Dragon*Con is, the official website is here. According to that site, it's "the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe*." Basically my Vegas. I've never been to a convention before but have sort of been dying to go since I finally came to terms with my nerdery several years ago and better yet, finally found friends with similar interests. The original plan was to attend San Diego Comic-Con, but registration for that was a complete schmozzle, and to make a long story short, Dragon*Con came to the rescue.

Taken in the Centennial Olympic Park

(By the way, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I was basically gushing ecstatically the entire time, and you probably won't even need to read this post.)

I set out for Atlanta very early in the morning on August 30 with my friends Cat and Dave, arriving there in the late afternoon following a very uneventful flight. We planned to spend a little bit of time doing general tourist stuff in Atlanta, and then attend the non-stop nerd party for the remainder of our time there. Without getting into too much detail about the pre-con days, I'll say that we achieved pretty much exactly what we wanted to. I actually really liked the parts of Atlanta that I saw, despite all the naysayers.

Also I had this delicious ice cream

We had peaches from a fruit and vegetable stand, and visited the World of Coca-Cola, and ate delicious food. And then we registered for the con and the whirlwind began.

"Normals" won't understand this, but when you've been a nerd for a long time, you do a sort of natural self-censoring that involves never bringing up your interests around strangers. So on registration day, being around an enormous room full of other geeks for the first time in my life, I was pretty much completely overwhelmed. All of their t-shirts were hilarious. All of their jokes were jokes I would make. I guess that sense of belonging must be what the normals feel all the time, and it's a very good feeling. It's especially nice to know that you're not the weirdest one in the room, which is how I often feel at work. (To be fair to the other con-goers, I only saw one girl with one of those creepy Asian ball-jointed dolls, and only encountered one woman who seemed to think that she was actually a witch, so the weirdness level wasn't really that high.)

Registration Day was September 1, and that night Cat, Dave, and I partook in some partying. There were some things happening in one of the other hotels, so we walked over and...

HOLY SHIT THIS IS A HOTEL

(I basically feel like a country bumpkin every time I leave the province, but this was especially severe. In Montreal the crowdedness was too oppressive, but in Atlanta things were all enormous and impressive instead. I should also add that this trip was the first time I've been to the US of A since 1989, when my parents brought 2.5 year-old me to Disneyland shortly before my sister was born.)

But even with all the awesome that preceded it, I think the con really started for me when we were mobbed by a group of the Sesame Street Martians/Yip-Yip Aliens. Good Lord.

Beer? Beer-beer-beer?

Anyway I'm starting to get into mundane details.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS ALSO A HOTEL AND IT IS ACTUALLY MORE IMPRESSIVE JUST HARDER TO PHOTOGRAPH

The con was spectacular, basically. I got to see my hero, Wil Wheaton, in the flesh, at the first Guild Q&A panel, although I didn't manage to make time to meet him during any of the ensuing days. Unfortunately I'm pretty typical and he's pretty much the King of the Geeks, so the line to see him was always very long. I also went to a few other panels (Terry Pratchett fan panel, Narnia vs Middle Earth film adaptations fan panel, The Big Bang Theory - Are We the Joke? fan panel, and, most terrifyingly, the Conservatives in Space discussion panel), at least one of which I'd like to address in more detail here in the coming weeks. The level of discourse was almost always really good, whether it was coming from the panelists or the audience.

Jellyfish are pretty but also terrifying

I'm a wimp so I didn't do much partying, but I did drag my friends all the way around the Georgia Aquarium on the con's aquarium night. Oh, and the three of us were in costume the first day, too, which was a lot of fun. People even asked to take pictures of us, despite the fact that we weren't super hardcore cosplayers and also that I was cross dressing.

I'm not posting any pictures of people in costume right now because there are a million of them elsewhere online that you can find if you know how to do a Google search. I'm also not posting any pictures of my friends and I because I don't have their permission and I don't think there are any pictures of just me, at least not that I have yet, and also lol I'm trying to protect my anonymity, fools!

In short, I very highly recommend attending a convention if you have the time and/or resources. I'll probably try to make it to a smaller one next summer, and I may even consider returning to Dragon*Con at some point in the future, if it doesn't become as hard to get to as Comic-Con currently is. I'm sure I left out a lot of stuff, but if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

And here are some Tribbles. I'm pleased to report that they didn't detect any Klingons in the vicinity, and will now be guarding my apartment.

* I'd say this last bit is debatable.

In Which A Mission Is Modified Again

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

OK, so I’ve obviously been neglecting the blog to a pretty absurd degree lately. And although I’ve been really trying to resist this, I’m afraid that I’m finally just going to give in.

No more romance novels.

I dunno if this’ll be a shock/disappointment/relief to you guys or what, but basically I have less than 50 leisure hours available to me per week, and there are too many amazing things out there for me to spend insane amounts of my free time reviewing terrible novels (I’ve taken that away from Dragon*Con, if nothing else). Like I said when I previously modified my mission statement, if there comes a time when I’m an unemployed loser again, I’ll happily go back to the romance novels.

The blog is called Two Hectobooks, though. I have something like 45 inherited books sitting on my bookshelf that desperately need to be read, and a reading list that’s about a million miles long on top of those, so I’m just going to keep reading and reviewing whatever, interspersed with the Top 100 books. In case you’re curious about what random novels may be coming up, the inherited books are mostly a lot of Canlit. My personal taste, if you haven’t figured this out by now, runs strongly toward sf, with forays into fantasy, horror, historical, and basically just about anything that has a catchy title and smart cover.

I feel sort of sad about this decision, but I feel good about it, too. The blog has been feeling like a burden for the past several months, but now that I’ve made this decision it’s starting to seem like a fun project again. The current romnov, Night Bites by Nina Bangs, is a lot of fun, but it’s also seemed like an impenetrable barrier that I had no time to dissect mercilessly. Now I’ll set it aside in favour of something else, and hopefully get back into the groove again, and post more often than never.

Still, if any one, five, or ten people out there want to take over the romance side of the project, I’m completely open to that, and I’d be happy to add you as a contributor to the blog, or just put up some guest posts from you! Just comment on this post or, you know, call me, since I think all my readers are close friends who have my phone number, haha.

And finally: hopefully over the next couple of weeks I'll have a chance to mess around with the formatting and various pages on the site, so that they reflect the various changes.

Current Distractions, Belated August 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Last month was a whirlwind, to put it mildly. I went from my Company’s office, to no fewer than three different job sites, two of which required drug tests* for access (so I had two pleasant afternoons of hydrating madly to convince my shy bladder that it would be alright to pee in a cup). Work stress has thus been a bit higher than usual, and the hours have generally been longer than the standard 40 hours.

The other major distraction was preparing for travel at the end of the month. I went to Dragon*Con in Atlanta, which I think warrants a post of its own, so I’m not going to say much about it right now. But prior to the trip I was at a remote site, and so my preparations were all a lot more rushed than they normally are. Fortunately I was with two other people, and so we all sort of managed to get things figured out as we went.

I have an announcement post that’ll be going up shortly after this one (and hopefully the Dragon*Con one), which will please and/or disappoint you. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to work on my reading in the very near future. (I brought Good Omens with me for reading during the con, and I finished it on the flight home, so I’m all set for a new book!)

* That brings my Total Lifetime Drug Tests quantity to four, which I feel is kind of a huge amount.

Current Distractions, July 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Well it's summer, so I hope you guys don't need a whole lot more justification than that.

But in case you do need more, I'll tell you that I've been in Montreal (if you follow me on Twitter you may have figured out something to that effect).

This is all I'm going to tell you about it, though.

Well, I'll also tell you that I read three books over the course of the trip, but none were my assigned reading:

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett - This is only the third Discworld novel, and not as strong as some of the later books. I enjoy the Witches a lot, and from what I've read of the Discworld series so far, they're at their best in the Tiffany Aching books. (And p.s. if you're ever looking for a YA series with a kickass girl as the main character, you don't need to look any further.)

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá - A highly amazing non-fiction book about human sexuality and wtf is going on when it comes to sex and why things are the way they are. As if I needed any more convincing that the Stone Age was pure awesome. This book should be required reading for all romance novelists.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - Prototypical steampunk, enjoyable but missing a certain something that I can't quite put my finger on.

80. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Catholicism cockblocks another one.

Year Published: 1945
Pages: 381
First Sentence: When I reached 'C' Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
To begin, I have to note that I read a "revised" edition because that was what I found at the public library. The revision was by Evelyn Waugh, about 15 years after the book's original publication, and in his preface he states that he made "many small additions and some substantial cuts." I'm not sure exactly what these additions and cuts consisted of, and I'm really irritated with the notion of revised novels in the first place (I'm looking at you, Stephen King), but I suppose that the more recent version is likely to be the one that the author stands by, so it should still make sense to review.

Anyway.

The book begins in the self-indulgent tone that I so recently despaired of in my review of The Adventures of Augie March. Charles Ryder is a disenchanted British Army captain moving troops around the English countryside during the Second World War. However, it just so happens that he ends up moving them to a place called Brideshead, a house that he knows very well.

Cut to Charles' college (Oxford) days, where, at the age of 18, he meets Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian carries a teddy bear named Aloysius everywhere he goes, but is otherwise a very charming young man, of the sort that I wonder whether anyone has actually met in real life (but excellent nevertheless). Charles, Sebastian, and a selection of other rich young men engage in some debauchery and eventually Charles and Sebastian become very close friends. In fact they fall into that sort of platonic love that Englishmen are apparently so susceptible to (Sebastian's father's mistress makes some comments to this effect at some point). Sebastian reluctantly introduces Charles into his home environment of Brideshead, "where [his] family lives," and Charles essentially spends the rest of his life running into these people. It's difficult to get into this too much without giving everything away.

I struggled to rate this one, because while I didn't enjoy it enough for it to be a 3, it's not really boring enough to classify as a 2. In fact, I was pretty engaged throughout. After Sebastian drops out of Charles' life I was less interested, but the book is redeemed by the fact that Charles isn't a completely selfish asshole the way that Augie March and Stingo were. He actually seems to care about what's best for other people. And the other people in this book seem just as lost as he is, instead of him imagining himself as a lone tragic figure in the midst of fulfillment. (I realize that there are lots of lost people in both of those other books, it's just that their main characters seem way more self-absorbed, so the reality of the other characters just wasn't really.. there.)

My favourite thing about the book was the friendship between Charles and Sebastian. I wish it could've continued throughout, even though it's more realistic that it doesn't. I find the relationships between men endlessly fascinating, and books are the only experience I have of what's going on under the surface, so they're endlessly fascinating by association. There's also an unexpected undercurrent of religion throughout this entire book that I, as an apostate, really appreciated. It poses questions about how hard old habits die, basically, when, at the end of everything, it's time to come to terms with your sins.

Waugh's writing is, I think, best described as unobtrusive, in that I didn't really notice it as being either clunky or good. In his preface he pointed out a couple of passages that I then ended up keeping an eye out for, grand speeches that no one would ever spontaneously make in real life, but enjoyable regardless.

I'd say if you're interested in reading about rich English Catholics in the first half of the 20th century, give this book a read. If not, you can probably skip it.

Quotations:
"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too."

Current Distractions, June 2011 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Alas, the format for these Distraction posts is just too difficult to maintain, so I think that instead I'll just use it for updating you wonderful people who are still paying attention on my various activities and whatnot. I know, that sounds like the most interesting thing you can imagine.

I'll still give you one link, though: my friend Scott recently started a blog called I Smell Good (I almost typoed that as "I Smell God," which would've been hilarious and misleading at the very least). It is spectacular and it's about his hitchhiking travels as a non-dirty hippie, and also some other things. So far he also updates more frequently than I do and his content is a lot more exciting, so I won't be offended if you abandon my blog in favour of his.

Anyway I've had some upheaval this month, moving off of the construction site I was at and back into the office, and trying to remember what it's like to not have all of my meals cooked for me and dishes done and bed made and so on. (Having reasonably speedy internet access in the evenings doesn't help, let me tell you.) It's pretty tough, and being chained to a desk is pretty boring. In short, I really suck at being a responsible adult.

But I've been reading! I've finished and drafted a review for Brideshead Revisited that should be edited and ready for posting by the time the weekend rolls around. And I started reading another romnov, and I think in order to do these things justice, I'm going to have to post my comments on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Which means that I might be posting a lot more in the near future!

In Which We Finally Look Back Again

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 23:04:00 +0000

Hot damn, y'all/good afternoon ladies and gentlemen! I am alive!

I have been the worst blogger lately, I know. I'm going to try to do better, but it's really difficult! At the very least, you'd think I could keep up with my Current Distractions posts, but no.

I don't have a lot of time at the moment to, like, explain any of this, so here's a summary:

Top 100 So Far

Last time I did this, approximately eight million years ago, I promised charts, but unfortunately I'm lazy and I don't really know how OpenOffice works most of the time. Overall the books from 90 to 81 were better than those from 100 to 91 (with 40% of the former receiving a 3/3 rating compared to 30% of the latter). So the new overall percentages for The List, based on my ratings, are: 35% good, 20% bad, and 45% mediocre. Hopefully the percentage of good books keeps going up. Also, fun fact, from books 100 to 81, the average year published is 1950, which is where it should be. But there hasn't been a single book yet from the 20s, and, as I believe I've mentioned before, there are no books on The List from the 90s. Oh, and it took me roughly a year to get through these ten books. Yikes.

90. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - 3/3
89. Loving by Henry Green - 2/3
88. The Call of the Wild by Jack London - 3/3
87. The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett - 3/3
86. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow - 2/3
85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad - 2/3
84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen - 1/3
83. A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul - 1/3
82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner - 3/3
81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow - 2/3

Total Pages: 3954

Romnovs So Far

Still no sidebar for these, alas.

R11. The Black Cat by Robert Poe
R12. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
R13. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
R14. Earth's Children (series) by Jean M. Auel
R15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
R16. NaNovel 2010 by M.R.
R17. Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson
R18. I Thee Bed... by Jule McBride
R19. Rules for a Lady by Katherine Greyle
R20. Camille by Alexandre Dumas (the younger)

Total Pages: 5759

Other Stuff I've Read

Between starting Midnight's Children on April 17, 2010 and finishing The Adventures of Augie March on April 30, 2011, I read a bunch of books that weren't exactly on either of my lists. I'll try to stick to them better in the future, so I can post slightly more often! But if I encounter another A Bend in the River, I can't say for sure what will happen.

The Secret History of Fantasy by Peter S. Beagle (ed.)
Machine of Death by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki (eds.)
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
The Never War by DJ MacHale
The Reality Bug by DJ MacHale
Black Water by DJ MacHale
The Rivers of Zadaa by DJ MacHale
The Quillan Games by DJ MacHale
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

I've also read some other books between finishing Augie and starting on Brideshead Revisited (which I'm enjoying a fair bit so far), including a couple of excellent non-fiction books: Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Eliot and The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. I recommend both of them and any of the books above, too, to varying degrees.

R20. Camille by Alexandre Dumas (the younger)

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

I picked this book basically because it was on my bookshelf, next time I'll try to choose something that you've heard of (or am I the only one who has never heard this story before?). Also, the next round of romnovs will be along that pattern I was talking about in January. -M.R.

Pages: 186

Pairing: kept woman and, um, dude?
First Sentence: In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired.
Climax: No, but this is hilarious: "Well, then, it won't do for you to come and be pettish here because you have seen a man in my box."

Review:
My edition of Camille, inherited from my rich and grumpy great aunt, boldly calls itself the greatest French love story ever told. This seems a little bit hasty, given other famous French couples like Abélard and Héloïse or even, in some ways, Napoleon and Josephine. And to be honest, I really don't think Camille lives up to this claim.

So what is the love story? (Spoiler alert, obv.) It starts out with Armand Duval admiring Marguerite Gauthier, a Parisian courtesan, from afar. He "falls in love" with her, and eventually approaches her and makes her his mistress. She is indulgent toward him because he shows genuine concern for her when she's seized by her consumptive coughing fits. They end up falling for each other very quickly, although Marguerite continues entertaining other men so that she can keep up her expensive lifestyle. However, they eventually move out into the country, and Marguerite starts selling all of her things so that she and Armand can shack up together in a quiet corner of Paris.

Enter Armand's father, urging him to end this madness and not ruin himself for a prostitute. Armand basically tells his dad to fuck off, but, upon returning to Marguerite in the country, finds that she's left him. Armand reacts like any gentleman would, and takes another mistress for the express purpose of insulting Marguerite. When she goes to see him and beg him to stop being such a huge asshole, they share one final night of passion, which he then has the audacity to pay her for. And then he basically goes travelling for several months.

Marguerite dies while Armand is away, leaving him a letter that reveals his father went to plead with her to leave him. Armand's father did this for his daughter's sake, because the family of the man that she wanted to marry wouldn't let the marriage happen while Armand was openly living with a prostitute in Paris.

Presumably everyone lives happily ever after.

I found this book intriguing, but not very touching. It suffered from the same problems that the romnovs do, basically a lack of character development and a not terribly engaging story. Armand seemed like a decent enough guy, and his father, too, but Marguerite was hollow and I didn't really know anything about her except that she was a consumptive "kept woman." There was none of the sense of volition about her that you can get from the Scarlett O'Haras and Jane Eyres of the literary world. I'm curious how much of this is due to the fact that Camille was written by a man.

Which brings me to what intrigued me about this book. Mainly, how transgressive it felt to read it. There was nothing explicit at all, but it just seemed to incredibly scandalous. This became especially clear at the part when Armand briefly returns home to his father and sister after Marguerite leaves him. He's basically a wreck, and he mentions how his sister is confused by this, because "of course," she knows nothing about his exploits in Paris. When I was in my early teens and devouring L. M. Montgomery's novels like I've never done with any author before or since, I remember reading passages in her books (the words of uptight aunts, usually) deriding novels as trash not fit for female consumption. I never really understood that sentiment at the time, but if Camille and Les Liaisons Dangeureuses were the kind of books on offer to Anne and Emily, I can see why their aunts were concerned.

Huh. I guess the French are a pretty sexy bunch, aren't they?

Quotations:
You see, sir, we are obliged to love the dead, for we are kept so busy, we have hardly time to love anything else.

Then I began to believe, with the superstition which people have when they are waiting, that if I went out for a little while, I should find an answer when I got back.

"Sir, I know more of life than you do. There are no entirely pure sentiments except in perfectly chaste women. Every Manon can have her own Des Grieux, and times are changed. It would be useless for the world to grow older if it did not correct its ways. You will leave your mistress."

When one's existence has contracted a habit, such as that of this love, it seems impossible that the habit should be broken without at the same time breaking all the other springs of life.

Flashbackward

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 17 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

I've been pondering the topic of accessibility lately, specifically web accessibility, in a bastardized sense of the term that I hope you'll allow me until I get a chance to figure out what the proper word is. (According to Wikipedia, "accessibility" should be "a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible.") What I actually mean is something closer to "level of service," with an accessibility aspect.

Accessibility in its actual sense is something that I for one don't think about anywhere near enough. This is most likely because I'm a jerk who can't see problems until they're right in front of my face. Hence why I'm thinking about it now.

But I'll quit being so vague. The reason that I've been thinking about this is simple: the internet sucks in northern Saskatchewan.

I don't think I need to turn part of this post into an argument about why the internet is or isn't an essential service. It's pretty clear to me that it's unquestionably an essential service. I use the internet every single day at work, I used it when I was trying to find a job, I use it to keep in touch with people, for entertainment, information, blah blah blah. Sure I don't need it to survive, but I don't need potable water or electricity from the city to survive, either (okay, well I probably do, but I could learn to live without them--and the internet, via boiled water, candlelight, and whatever I did with myself ten years ago before my family got a computer). To do more than just survive, though, I need clean water from the tap, power from the wires, and a way to access the ~~Borg collective~~ internet hivemind.

So this is where the level of service thing comes in, if you agree that the internet is an essential one. And the fact is that almost nobody is designing with slower connections in mind. The vast majority of websites that I visit while I'm on site are so bogged down with Flash and various other graphics and tomfoolery that it pretty much incapacitates my browser (we use IE at work and route everything through a central system elsewhere, which is most of the problem, but still). This includes my own company's website, by the way. Swimming Canada froze up my entire connection for five minutes one day, and some recent updates mean that I can't even check my Google Reader during my lunch break anymore.

However, the website of the airline that we use to fly up to site has a prominently(ish) placed "Slow Internet?" option on its home page, because many of its customers are northern residents/located at minesites with terrible internet. But as the design potential of the web improves, it seems like everyone else is forgetting that there are still users out there without high speed internet. And while the infrastructure is maybe catching up, I don't think it's getting there fast enough that we can just tell people in remote locations to suck it up until the tower gets built. It can't be just northern Saskatchewan that has a problem with this, and even if it is, this is where the whole accessibility thing comes in. There are a few thousand potential users up there. Is that enough to warrant a Slow Internet design requirement?

The moral of the story is that, to my dismay, this basically looked like shit when I opened it on my work computer. So does basically every gif. And what does all of this have to do with books? Not a whole lot. Project Gutenberg loads up just fine.

PS - Is this blog accessible? Not quite. I could do a better job of captioning my pictures at the absolute least, and I have no idea how good Blogger may or may not be with accessibility in general. But now that I've ranted about it, maybe I should look into it a bit more carefully.

81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

noreply@blogger.com (M.R.) — Tue, 10 May 2011 22:34:00 +0000

Zomg after the next romnov review goes up, it'll be time for a retrospective post! And new books! -M.R.

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: A young man angsts all over this fine continent.

Year Published: 1953
Pages: 586
First Sentence: I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Webcam pics, ahoy!

Review:
I'm getting frustrated with The List. The Adventures of Augie March is yet another example of the "Dude Feeling Sorry for Himself" genre that seems to occur every other book or so. The narration is invariably in the first person, the story is a nonentity, and there's a very heavy sense of the author behind the words, stroking his ego. It's not quite accurate to say that half of The List so far has consisted of these books, of course, but I can think of at least two other examples: A Bend in the River (which defied convention somewhat by not being about a white dude), and Sophie's Choice (which defied convention somewhat by actually having a plot external to the narrator). And frankly, I'm not interested in these books. In fact, while I'm reading them, I'm less interested in what's happening than in whether anything at all is going to happen, and when the book will finally be over.

Yes, they do brush certain truths about people and life that I find interesting and thought-provoking. But mostly they're boring and hard to relate to. The List is supposed to contain the best books written in the last century. To me, this means that these books should have not just the best writing, but also the best characters, best stories, and all the rest. A book about some random dude wandering through his life, trying to figure out what his place is in the world, and boning lots of beautiful women while he's at it doesn't really constitute a great story and great writing, even if some of the philosophizing makes me nod my head. I can't relate to these books because as a young woman I just barely have the amount of agency that a young man does (debatable, I know). I have enough uncertainty about my own place in the world that I don't really have time or interest in reading about someone else if there isn't also a plot of some kind to keep me engaged (see The Magus for what I think is an excellent example of angsty existentialism that doesn't suck).

But as for Mr. March, his story proceeds like so: raised in a sort of hazily Jewish household by a single mother and an old woman whose children have failed her, Augie holds various jobs through his youth and meets a variety of intriguing individuals. At some point the 30s occur, and Augie gets older and gets into scrapes and just sort of drifts. Much later (the jacket talks about this, but it feels like a spoiler because it doesn't happen 'til pretty far in, so, um, be aware) he hooks up with a rich girl named Thea and they pursue a crazy falconry project together and also bone a lot.

Despite my rant and impatience, this book wasn't all bad. Saul Bellow is an excellent writer, although his style only half appeals to me. There was also a really good bit right around the middle where a friend of Augie's has to get an abortion, which I think is the final argument I'll ever need to see about providing safe access to that particular medical procedure for women. Thea was a very cool character, with probable mental illness and a hobby of catching poisonous snakes. There are actually an astonishing number and variety of characters in the book, including several with disabilities, which was a little unexpected. On the other hand, Bellow lost me for good within the first hundred pages, where he wrote about an old man who could just fondle whoever he wanted, because he could hone in on women's best attributes. That and it was just too meandering. The compelling bits were mired in a lot of, for lack of a better word, blah.

It's not that Augie is a bad dude. He cries when his surrogate grandmother dies, and his heart breaks, and he reads books. It's just that I didn't particularly like him that much, or care about any of that. And I guess that's one of the side effects of The List being compiled mainly by a bunch of old men (I keep talking about this and one of these days I should actually profile these board members or something...): the books that speak loudly to them aren't necessarily the books that speak loudly to me.

Quotations:
I don't know whether it was the refusal or the emotion of speaking and being spoken to that knocked me down, and I wasn't in any condition to touch around and feel for the trigger, where it was and why it was like a loose tooth.

Imagining how this would be, I melted, my chest got hot, soft, sore, and yearning. I saw it already happening. It's always been like that with me, that fantasy went ahead of me and prepared the way. Or else, as it seems, the big personal van, dark and cumbersome, can't start into strange terrain. But this imagination of mine, like the Roman army out in Spain or Gaul, makes streets and walls even if it's only camping, for the night.

"Let me come with you."
"No."
That was how it was. Nothing as I had foreseen it.

So works of art aren't eternal. So beauty is perishable. Didn't this saintly German wake up many mornings inspired, with joy in his heart? What more can you ask? He couldn't be both happy and sure of being right for eternity. You have to take your chance that being happy is also being right.