Bookshelf
Things I have just read that were awesome:
Haven Kimmel – Iodine. I love Haven Kimmel, and even more when she is unabashedly weird and spooky and the tiny golden-haired waifs turn out not to be redemptive, but just part of life’s irredeemable, inescapable, overarching and deeply literary awfulness.
Things I keep meaning to read:
Lois McMaster Bujold – some books about some people named Cordelia and Miles, which sound right up my alley.
The Book Thief. I liked the first two pages, I just… it never seems to be the right time to pick up a book about the Holocaust narrated by Death. Perhaps I should grasp the nettle.
Neil Gaiman – The Books of Magic. Even though I bought a used, battered copy and promptly spilled orange juice all over it. I will try reading it in the shower; that should unstick the pages.
Things to finish reading if it kills me:
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Unconsoled. I adore this book, I really do, it’s just that if I read it for too long at a time I become convinced I am actually dreaming and start trying to levitate things and set things on fire with my brain, the way I do when I’m actually dreaming and become convinced of it.
William Goldman – Boys and Girls Together. Slow going, because after completing each chapter I have to go reread something chipper, with flowers in it, to cheer myself up. Current number of Goldman-induced The Secret Garden rereads: six and counting.
Robert Heinlein – Time Enough for Love, because I just absent-mindedly reread Friday and Job and by golly I love Heinlein, I just do, despite everything. I can get over the fucking insufferable narrative voice in TEFL. I think.
Carol Berg – Transformation. I would have finished this a long time ago, but I’m too embarrassed to take it out in public because the cover depicts a shirtless man with neon green wings kneeling on a rocky promontory and invoking a lightning bolt over a distant castle. I mean really. Not that the contents are really that much less lurid, but the cover could have the decency to disguise the fact.
Diana Gabaldon – Outlander. I always like this book while I’m reading it, but when I’m not reading it I always feel like it’s unfeminist. Or it’s going to get unfeminist. Claire is very cool, don’t get me wrong, but I have a horrible suspicion she’s going to meet a sweetly virile and historical hero who will put her on her back and insert a bun into her oven as God intended. I may have to flip to the back of the book and find out before I can properly finish the book, like when I was twelve and had to shower with the curtain open because otherwise the fear that a skeleton or psycho killer was sneaking up on me would ruin a perfectly good shower.
Things I am currently rereading in defiance of all of the above:
Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash. I didn’t remember being quite this annoyed by Hiro the first time around, but I still have a deep and abiding love for YT, Uncle Enzo, and the Rat Thing which make up for it. Plus he (Stephenson) is just awesomely spazzy and ADD. Not that I can relate to that at all; it is intriguing to me in its foreignness.
Kelly Link – Magic for Beginners. This is a collection of short stories, and the titular “Magic for Beginners” is the greatest short story of all time. I do not qualify that in any way. I love Hemingway and Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce and Nathanial Hawthorne and Dorothy Parker and Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain and Saki and Shirley Jackson as much as anyone, but I am telling you. Read the first four pages.
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. God, she’s good at worldbuilding.
Magic for Beginners reminds me of Tom Robbins. If you haven’t read him yet, I think you’d like his style.
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Yeah I’m a huge fan of the short story too. I think I’ve read everyone in your short story list except for Hawthorne. I guess this is something new I’ll have to check out. 🙂
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Kazuo Ishiguro lost my respect with that awful Never Let Me Go book… made me want to defenestrate children. Have you been away forever or just writing faves only entries which I am not privy to?
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ryn: I always said that! I’ll locate it, I have my ways… thank you. Sorry, I really don’t want you spending any money on me, buy some perfume or summat. A childlock for the internet to keep Jeremy off Notliberal.
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See – my noters want you! Love you! Are intrigued by my love for you despite your absences and incredibly dull entry! And they are an Indian intellectual ice queen / rampantly sluttish English hedonistic headcase! And they read! And you can listen to my interpretation of who they are through the medium of Sheffield music! *lures you back to OD*
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Read Bujold! Wonderful wonderful wonderful Bujold! Oh, have been missing you. *hugs*
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ryn: Ah, any friend of Michael’s is a friend of mine. By the way, I meant to do this ages ago and totally forgot, but presumably you are aware of the presence of this particular video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWSjUe0FyxQ The title of your last entry just brought back the memory.
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ryn probably should stop sending you so much sheffield music eh. eventually we’ll be conversing totally in song lyrics…
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and you normally so nonchalant about cats! i just sent you a email but it probably didn’t make much sense. it’s sunny here too. cat & sun & 14 whole hours between shifts which is pretty good at the moment. is that recent fungus or the original fungus? you said he was ill this weekend? I get so worried…
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no you got it all wrong – you don’t clean up after cats – they eat everything including any smaller belongings you may have thus the flat is cleaner when he lives in it.
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mate, my entire LIFE consists of one brandnew low after another, I can live with the guilt over stealing my own cat…
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i dunno if tabby’s that bad.I just fail to understand why someone like her would jump me in the first place. <–lifelong issue ry other: yeah there was, I really liked CJ, but she told me I wasn’t boyfriendmaterial, and it gets hard to have casual sex for more than a couple of months without that rearing its ugly head meh, tabby’s not a big deal, I’m not bothered, don’t make me feel likei have any right to feel bothered.
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Did you buy me the ability to write long notes?
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for as nice as you all are to me online, i am still really really dubious as to how happy you’d be to have your sister/any of your mates dating kids with drug issues who’ve been on and off the streets all their lives. just saying.
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er, simultaneous note war Mine still sort of answers yours, roundaboutedly
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it was a gneral comment, i left it before I saw yours.
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I miss tarot readings.
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Thanks for your indignant notes mate. They made me smile. For the record, she is now doing the silent treatment on me, which I suppose is vaguely amusing as no one has ever beaten me at that game, in the history of time and space.
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I don’t know anything, thanks, the TB thing happened so quickly last time, it got serious so quick, you’ve lived with this for years, I’ve been in and out of hospitals for years but only for me, I haven’t been for other people since Tim and I never knew what was going on then, they don’t explain anything to you when you’re a kid. I think I freak out more than I should because he was always… youknow… Hunter… he was so fucking tough, you know? He never got ill. Just been to see him – he’s ok – but they’re keeping him in a few more days.
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Everything you ever say to me helps. Slagging off girls I sleep with, tarot readings, anything, I’m sorry, I must be so hopeless to talk to, nothing ever fucking changes. I try so hard and nothing ever changes. I got hardly anyone to whine to in real life, I got hardly anyone left to apologise to either. I do it to graves.
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ps. If you were going to buy a Stars album, Nightsongs > Set Yourself On Fire > Heart > In Our Bedroom After The War, but all of them are vicious and brilliant.
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Come back! Jeremy’s articles are all political and he doesn’t give you a name any more, you’re just a wife *hisses*
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a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. yeah, that’s going on the amazon wishlist immediately.
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Shining core boys really have to learn to differentiate between “a girl” and “all girls”. Yeah it seems to be a rather surprising upgrade… though obviously the whole thing still might be an attempt to humiliate me. You guys are shit at giving me good replies, why else do I post such things!
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ryn: But I love being told off. I don’t think I got enough of it as a kid or summat 🙂
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I don’t really know. I always seem to have such a good excuse for what I’m doing, like “I need to work these shifts or I’ll end homeless and Hunter will die” or “I haven’t been out in a month and getting wasted with someone I really fancy is obscene amounts of fun and I never have fun” But. I don’t know.
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I’m very into her, er, physically. I’m not always this shallow, but there it is.
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Hey… are you feeling better today? Less achy and rainy? Did you at least get something like a normal weekend (whatever that is for you)
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^ mate?
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meh, the cold doesn’t really do much to me but make me miserable, it doesn’t set off my head or anything. It’s not really the cat vs heroin either… it’s more the weight of John’s lungs in the cold/damp vs putting exboyfriends in very close proximity and seeing if/when they fucking tear each other to pieces. Anyway. John saw it after me and said no and wouldn’t even argue about it.
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ryn: you know I still can never quite work out what you think of kira… yeah she reels out the sharkbait nonsense even when tired maybe more for me than her, and I insult her about it maybe more for her than me, funny how your kid patterns stick eh? I don’t have any other people from when I was little, I dunno if you find yourself re-enacting your kid-relationships with people…
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