Vintage Japanese Illustration

I found Kogundou on Twitter. The text is all in Japanese but there are many lovely images from old books, most of which seem to be children's books.

Books and Things

Dammit! I was really going to start blogging again, at least semi-regularly, but it hasn't been happening. I could blame "too much time spent on Twitter" but there are plenty of times I'm not on Twitter and I think about blogging something but I'm like, "Nah. Not in the mood. Maybe later." It's just habit I think. I used to be in the habit but now I'm out of it and it's not so easy to get back into it. Part of it too, I think, is knowing that I will spend time writing something and maybe three people will read it or maybe none and I'll never know because one has anything to say.

Okay, sorry, I'm starting to whine about how unpopular I am and nobody wants to read that. Let's get to what I'm really here for today: books!

I finished reading The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin several weeks ago and have been wanting to rave about it but I don't know quite what to say other than, "It's fantastic!"

I first found out about it on Twitter. At first I didn't think much about it but then someone said something about a "sentient planet"? So that immediately got my attention and made me want to read it. As it turns out, it's not really clear whether the planet is actually sentient or the people in the story only believe it/he is, like we believe in God but, let's be honest, there's no proof that He/She/They/It actually exists.

Okay, let's quickly leave that can of worms behind us. It's also not clear, to me at least, whether these books should be categorized as science fiction or fantasy and that's one of the things that I like about them - it doesn't matter. Magic is mentioned, not as something that is performed but more like a force that exists, like gravity or magnetism or maybe the weather. But they also mention technology - mostly the technology of dead civilizations that the characters in the story don't understand. And, I don't know, there are just things about the story that seem "science-y" to me, a non-science-y person.

This trilogy has an epic, important, feel to it. I highly recommend it but maybe not to everyone. It is dark and often violent and involves some child abuse so if you're especially sensitive you might not enjoy it. But I really don't have the words to tell you how excellent The Broken Earth Trilogy really is.

* * * * *

I'm currently reading Persepolis Rising, book 7 in The Expanse series and loving it as always. And there are a dozen or more books that I want to read absolutely right away! One of my favorite things about Twitter is Book Twitter - all the readers and especially the many authors (some of them true superstars, in my mind at least) who freely engage with readers just like ordinary people. I have discovered more Must Read! books in a month on Twitter than I did in a year before I went back to spending time on Twitter.

My final thought for this post: Twitter (and the rest of the Internet) is whatever you make it. It can be politics and ugliness or it can be friends sharing books and cat pictures. It's all up to you.

Books

Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

I love big books. I have even read books primarily because they are famous for being long. And I enjoyed them. So don't think I'm complaining about these two books by Peter F. Hamilton being long. (988 pages and 1008 pages in mass market paperback) But some parts of the books, especially the first one, were long and tedious, hundreds of pages of politicians and VIPs schmoozing and fornicating. But the more interesting parts, with strange aliens and time shifting paths through the woods and such were very brief.

I know some people say, "Why waste time on a book you're not enjoying? Just quit and move on to something else." It makes sense but most of the time I just can't, maybe because I've been rewarded for such patience again and again. I actually decided at one point that I would not buy Judas Unchained though, but before I got to the end of Pandora's Star I was hooked in spite of the the long, tedious passages and it ended on a cliffhanger so of course I had to continue.

Judas Unchained turned out to be increasingly interesting and finally brought the story to a satisfying conclusion. I really like Hamilton's world building and characters, two elements of a story that are especially important to me. And overall the story was excellent - about the fight against a truly terrifying race of aliens determined to exterminate humanity.

Now I'm sure I will read more by this author but probably not for quite a while. I have a lot of other books on my must read list and maybe even some re-reads that I want to get to first.

Been Reading

I have been reading a lot, actually, but I'm only going to mention a couple of the more recent ones I've read.

Catherynne Valente's Space Opera is not the kind of book I'm normally into. A lot of people have compared it to Douglas Adams' novels. I can understand the comparison; there's a similar kind of irreverence and silliness but Space Opera is in no way a copycat. I first read the first chapter on Tor.com and I was charmed by the extreme wordiness and clever metaphors so I bought it. (Kindle) After the next couple of chapters I started to get impatient with it and considered quitting but it was still interesting enough that I wanted to see what happened. Would the entire Earth be destroyed all because one guy couldn't sing well enough? Well, if you care, you'll have to read it and find out for yourself. I won't spoil it.

There is going to be a movie, which surprises me a little. It wouldn't be my first choice of book to be made into a movie but I'm sure it will be entertaining if it's done well.

Oh! I almost forgot. There's what you might call a catchphrase in Space Opera which is one of the most true and profound bits of wisdom I have ever read: "Life is beautiful and life is stupid." Isn't it though!

Another, more exciting, book I finished recently was Gareth Powell's Embers of War. This is so my kind of book. Pure space opera like I thought no one was writing anymore - starships, weird planets, aliens, action, politics, drama. I finished it in what was for me record time. Unfortunately the sequel won't be out until next year.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is all the authors I'm discovering. At first I was following only two authors, then authors started following me. Obviously just to get my attention so I would buy their books and it is working. That's how I discovered both of these books and there are a lot more that I want to read soon.

Monteverdi

This music was mentioned in a book I recently finished reading, Firebird, by Tony Rothman. (More about the book later. If I get around to it.)

Good Guys Drink Tea

Yesterday was Charles Dickens birthday. As a fan I should have known that but I didn't until I came across this article about coffee and tea drinkers in Dickens' novels. Of course as a tea drinker myself it makes me happy that more often than not "the good guys prefer tea while the dodgier ones plot and scheme over coffee."

This also inspired another thought: that both what we consider elite and what we consider sinister or evil is at least partly due to a lack of familiarity. Here in America we think of tea (we're talking about hot tea here) as more elite than coffee and we imagine proper Brits sitting around in elegant parlors drinking tea from beautiful little tea cups. Never mind that that's probably no longer reality, if it ever was.

This also explains why a certain kind of movie villain always listens to classical music. Most people are not familiar with it so it seems plausible that it's what smart evil guys like. Wait! Is this why nobody like me? Because I drink tea and listen to classical music?

Books Books Books

It has been way too long since I wrote anything about the books I've been reading and, to be honest, there are some that I barely even remember so I'm going to go through these briefly, starting with the most recent one I finished.

Generally, I do not much like post apocalypse novels but for some reason Amazon keeps recommending them to me and darn it some of them are actually pretty good. Excellent, in fact - like The Silent Earth Trilogy by Mark R. Healy. It begins sometime after a Nuclear Winter. All life on Earth has been wiped out and all that's left are "synthetics," what most of us think of as androids. Strangely though, these synthetics are exactly like humans. They have emotions and feel pain, both physical and emotional, just like humans. The only difference is that if they get damaged they don't heal, they have to be repaired but on post apocalyptic Earth there are no repair facilities. (And of course they don't eat or drink which is the main reason I would never want to be an android. Ice cream is too important to me.)

The synthetics have formed various factions. One faction hunts down other synthetics and kills them for spare parts. Another is trying to form a new civilization. The main character is one of two synthetics who are trying to restore life using frozen embryos and seeds. This is, as I have already said, an excellent book - compelling story and great characterization. I can't really consider a book "good" unless it has characters I care about and other characters to fear and/or hate. This has both as well as a great story with plenty of action. I highly recommend this book to all science fiction fans.

I suppose you could call Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time post apocalyptic also but the whole story takes place on a ship and an alien planet so I think of it as more of a space opera. A few thousand humans have left a dying Earth and headed for a previously terraformed planet. When they get there they find the planet is already home to a rapidly evolving civilization. The story takes place over a period of hundreds of years as the characters wake up from cold-sleep, go back into cold-sleep, and wake up again several times. This is another excellent story and as unique as anything I've read. If you're arachnophobic you might want to skip this one though.

I finally read Oliver Twist. Around the time I was ten years old the movie, Oliver, was a really big deal and everyone thought Mark Lester was the most adorable kid ever but I never got to see it so the book was completely unspoiled for me. I'm a huge Dickens fan so of course I enjoyed it. I did get a bit impatient with Oliver always being in some kind of danger but mostly it was a fun ride.

Sadly, I do not have a perfect memory or even an especially good one. Good enough - average, I guess you could say, but there's only so much disc space available so inevitably some things are going to get lost. I remember very little about Gemini by Ray Jay Perrault. I do recall that I thought it was interesting and different, though I can't say excellent. I may read it again sometime.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is sort of an odd book and really hard for me to explain. I've been thinking, well, really for weeks, about how to describe it, what to say. I'll just say I liked it and I plan to read the other two books in the trilogy. If you want to know more you can go read about it on Amazon

I am afraid that there is nothing I can say about Babylon's Ashes, the sixth novel in James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, that wouldn't spoil the earlier books so I'll just say it's good - really good. Some things happened in it that were kind of disappointing to me and overall I didn't like it as well as some of the earlier books but still, it was very good and of course I will continue reading this series.

Henry Darger

After posting the link about the 15,000 page novel yesterday I just couldn't let it go. This is the Internet! Surely someone has posted that whole ridiculous masterpiece online. Well, sadly, so far no luck. Maybe on the Dark Web? [kidding]

I did, however, learn more about Henry Darger himself. Holy crap, people! I felt like I was reading the synopsis of a Criminal Minds episode. And the book, aside from the length, is probably not something I would want to read but I still kind of want to read it anyway. Lost or inaccessible works really stir up my curiosity, not to mention some minor outrage at being denied access to something I'm curious about.

The book by John MacGregor, mentioned in the article, is $200 at Amazon so that's not happening either.

Just a Few Links

Long Reads - I discovered this excellent site via Twitter. It has longish articles on a variety of topics.

Henry Darger's 15,000 Page Novel - I have a strange thing for big books. I have actually read books because they are long. But a 15,000 page novel? Well, yes, I want to give it a try. I probably will never get the chance though. I have checked both Amazon and Project Gutenberg. [Sad, pouty face]

Snow Sculpture Battle in Tokyo - Nice, lots of Star Wars stuff.

Vintage Store Front Mosaics - I love these. It makes me sad that nobody does this anymore and few people are interested in saving the ones that still exist.

Reading List

As if I really need more books to read, here are 95 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2018. I haven't finished reading the list yet but already I have found a few that interest me.

Stars Uncharted, S.K.Dunstall
QUIETUS, by Tristan Palmgren
Free Chocolate, by Amber Royer
Outpost, by W. Michael Gear

Well, that's certainly a good start. Now, to read the rest of the list.

The Rewards of Perseverance

I finished reading Bleak House this morning! I very rarely give up on reading a book once I've started and my experience with Bleak House confirms my feeling that it is not "a waste of time" to stubbornly finish a book "no matter what." I seriously started thinking about quitting when I was about a quarter to a third of the way into it but by the time I was halfway through it started to get interesting and I started to care about some of the characters. Others not so much.

I don't recall ever reading a novel with so many annoying characters, so many individuals to whom I wanted to give a severe tongue lashing. But the thing that made it hard to get into at first was that everyone used so many words to say the simplest little things. What you or I could say in one or two sentences took up one or two pages in this book. Everyone was so wordy. Generally, I like wordiness in novels; I like big books, I cannot lie (sorry, not sorry) but dialog is different. When someone has something to say I want them to just come out and say it plainly, without two or three pages of preamble.

I am glad I read it. Parts of it were sad and some of those parts made me feel like, "That's not fair! but that's like real life. A lot of it is not fair. And it wasn't all sad. For the most part it was a very good ending.

Oooo! A Book List!

Hello out there! Anyone still reading this thing?

I usually roll my eyes at any list of things I "must" or "should" do but I'm inclined to take this list of 200 Books Everyone Should Read at Least Once a little more seriously because, hey, it's books! Even if I don't agree that I should read them all (which I don't) it's still a good list. So, you can follow the link and read the whole list but I'm going to make two lists of my own out of it: books I have read and books I want to read.

Books I Have Read

Bleak House by Charles Dickens - I wasn't sure which list to put this one on because I haven't finished it yet. This is the book I'm reading right now. I'm 32 percent of the way through it. At first I found it charming but it soon became almost unbearably tedious and now I'm kind of between, "I can't take any more of this," and "Dammit I will finish this book!"

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Charlotte's Web, E. B. White - Does it count that I had this read to me when I was a kid?

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M Auel - Do not waste your time reading this book. It's awful.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I have read this one twice, first in high school, mainly because I wanted to appear smart but I did find it interesting then, and then again just a few years ago.

Dune, Frank Herbert - Yes! Several times. I read the first 4 or 5 books in the series. First three are excellent, the rest were disappointing.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck - At least twice, maybe three times.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley - Such a famous character I had to read the original. Actually liked it better than I expected to, though it is by no means one of my favorite books.

The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett ? - I did read one novel by Pratchett. I think it was this one. It was okay, not really my cup of tea but I might try one of his other novels sometime because I do sort of feel like I should.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

The Green Mile, Stephen King - One of his better ones, I think.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad - Didn't like this one. In particular one detail kept bothering me. He kept talking about how silent the jungle was at night. Sorry, I know better. My back yard out here in the middle of nowhere is not silent at night and I'm pretty sure the African jungle isn't either. Besides that, there was just nothing about it that I found interesting or enjoyable.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams - A long time ago and I'm not sure if I finished it.

Johnathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach - Yes! I loved this book. I need to get another copy. Somewhere in our several moves I let it go and now I wish I still had it.

Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien - I didn't love this one as much as I feel like I should.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville - Twice. I actually read it the second time because I hadn't liked it the first time and for some reason felt like I should give it another try. I think I "got it" a little better the second time around but still not one of my favorites.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde - It was okay.

The Stand, Stephen King - Didn't care much for this one.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens - Two or three times. Excellent book, with arguably the best first and last lines of any book.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee - I should read this one again. I read it when I was probably too young to really get it, I think.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy - I actually read this one because it has such a reputation for being a long book. I enjoyed it and it didn't seem unusually long to me because I have read other very long books.

War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells - I hate to say this but the movies were better.

Watership Down, Richard Adams - A lovely, unusual book. I want to read it again sometime.

1984, George Orwell

Books I Want to Read (An incomplete list, just the ones I most want to read)

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll - I've seen numerous cartoon and movie versions of this and it has never been one of my favorite stories but my mom once told me it was one of her favorite books when she was a kid so, for that reason, I have always sort of felt bad that I never read it.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy - I liked War and Peace so maybe I would like this one too.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres - Have never heard anything about it but it's about a captain? and a mandolin? Sounds interesting.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker - Just because I've heard so much about it.

The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye - Because I like the title

Flowers in the Attic, Virginia Andrews - Because my mother mentioned it once or twice

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

The Once and Future King, T. H. White

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez - When I was in high school one of my classmates did a book report on this - the kind where you stand in front of the class and talk about the book - and I sort of thought I wanted to read it but never got around to it.

Ulysses, James Joyce - Because people have said it's challenging or "difficult"

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera - Maybe. I like the title but...

In addition to those, I of course want to read anything by Charles Dickens that I haven't read yet and I want to read at least one book by Jane Austen. And I want to read at least one more book by Terry Pratchett.

Random Linkage

Books in Books - 12 novels that mention lots of other books. I think I want to read Among Others just based on its hidden reading list.

Subway to Nowhere - If this was in the U.S. within a couple of months there would be a 7-11 and half a dozen fast food places nearby. In America if you build it they will come.

Ingo and Friends - Gorgeous photos of a German shepherd and his owl friend. Seriously, I can't tell you how much I LOVE these.

Pizza Forward

Museum Twins

Love and Skeletons - Oh those prudish Victorians! NSFW

And finally, the solution to all problems:

Books, History, and a Bit of Politics

I recently finished reading Foundation: The History of England From Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors after reading it off and on for over a year. It took me so long not because it wasn't interesting but because I was trying to read it while reading other books at the same time and that never works for me. It really is a fascinating book. I have always wanted to know more about early England and this was the perfect book to get a good overview.

The second book in the series, The Tudors begins with the reign of Henry VIII and I couldn't resist immediately downloading that one too. I have been reading it for several days and got through the section on Henry VIII. All most of us know about him is that he had six wives, two of whom he had beheaded, and that he established the Church of England, with himself as its head, because the Pope wouldn't let him divorce his first wife. The details, of course, are a lot more complicated and more horrifying.

As I was reading this book a thought occurred to me. A lot of people like to compare presidents they don't like to Hitler but if our current president has any historical parallel it's Henry VIII. (Now if this blog was popular enough to attract trolls someone would surely point out that the Donald has never ordered anyone beheaded, to which I would respond, "That's because it's illegal now days, dumba**.") Of course you can't really compare two people who lived over 400 years apart. The differences in culture are too great. No one can say what a modern U.S. president would do if he had the same powers as ancient Kings. But the similarities in personality traits are striking: egomania, paranoia, greed, demands absolute loyalty, can't stand criticism, overall kind of gross and disgusting.

Anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there. Someone else can take it and run with it or tear it to shreds if they are so inclined. As for the books, I highly recommend both of them but maybe not The Tudors if you are prone to nightmares.

Great Space Opera

Oh! Wow! Space opera fans, you have to read this: Kit by Val Kubera. It's part crime drama, part political drama, part horror story, part romance, and 100% space opera.

The title character is a Tentari, who are hermaphrodite humanoids. Kit and a younger sibling are the only survivors from a starship that was destroyed under suspicious circumstances. They survive as best they can on a large space station inhabited by all manner of unsavory characters. He (I'll address the matter of pronouns in a minute.) has some memory chips given to him by his parent that contain information that everybody wants. He is taken in by a merchant ship captain who was close friends with his parent and thus the wild ride begins.

The author uses male pronouns when referring to the Tentari which is grammatically correct, I suppose, but it feels wrong in a number of ways. One, it reinforces our human tendency of binary thinking - every creature must be either male or female. I found it nearly impossible to think of Kit and other Tentari characters as anything but male. It also at times felt awkward and ridiculous since the author remained consistent in using the male pronoun even when referring to a character nursing an infant. I think it would have been preferable to use made up pronouns, such as Mary Gentle did in The Golden Witchbreed with the neuter pronoun ke.

Anyway, very minor quibble. Overall it was a fantastic, exciting, edge-of-your-seat, unputdownable book. A few scenes are not for the squeamish and there are a couple of fairly explicit sex scenes but nothing that a reasonable person could call "gratuitous," in my opinion.

That Moment When...

Have you ever been reading a book and come across a line or a passage that suddenly changes your perspective on the author? Maybe it sends the author up a notch or maybe it's like, "Oh! I thought he was that kind of author but he's actually that kind of author." Am I making sense?

The first three books in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series were discounted during Amazon's Prime Day. I had always been kind of interested in these but also kind of not or maybe I should say less interested than I was in some other books but the Prime Day discount seemed like a good opportunity. Not only were they discounted but they are standard size paperbacks which seem to be increasingly rare these days, at least in the books I most want to read, which annoys me no end.

So anyway I got them and started reading the first book and it's good. I'm not a big fan of military sci-fi but this is fleshed out enough with personalities and interesting dialog, and of course, interesting technology, to make it seem like not just military sci-fi.

So I finished Old Man's War and immediately moved on to The Ghost Brigades. It's been a fun read. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, maybe a little more, I come across this line:

And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it?

This begins a couple of pages long discussion about consciousness. I'm not sure I'm buying it, or maybe I'm just not completely able to wrap my head around the concept of a being that thinks but is not aware. That's kind of beside the point though. What I am charged up about is discovering an author who explores tricky subjects such as consciousness. So, now I'm suddenly a Scalzi fan and I have added several more books to my Must Read list.

BTW, Scalzi is really entertaining on Twitter. I have liked so many of his tweets I'm starting to feel like a creepy celebrity stalker.

Books Books Books!

So I have been putting off blogging about my reading for months! It's not an obligation, of course. Nobody is obligated to blog daily, but see, I want to share this. I just haven't. So anyway, I've mostly forgotten what I wanted to say about all but the most recently read of these so I'm just going to put them all in one post and just to do something different I'm going to stick some completely unrelated photos in here as dividers. (These are not all of the books I've read this year, just some highlights.)

Earlier this year, thanks to Amazon's recommendations for me, I read two books with similar subject matter. Both are set during the Civil War era, including the pre- and post- Civil War years. Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim is about a young plantation owner's daughter's warm, loving relationship with her nurse, a slave woman named Mattie who is separated from her own son in order to nurse the white infant.

In the other book, Sister of Mine by Sabra Waldfogel, Adelaide is given a slave girl named Rachel to be her personal maid when they are both still children. The two get along well and soon discover that they are actually half-sisters. The story follows them through adolescence to young adulthood.

I highly recommend both of these books. The stories are interesting and the characters are fully developed and realistic. Both books manage to illustrate the tragedy and injustice of slavery without beating the reader over the head with brutality at the expense of the story. I don't want to give away the endings but I will say that both are satisfying though the ending of Yellow Crocus seems the more plausible of the two.

Of course one of the highlights of my reading year was Amongst the Stars, the third book in Kelly Sedinger's Song of Forgotten Stars series. This is the kind of fun and exciting adventure story that got me hooked on reading science fiction in the first place. While I now love a great variety of science fiction it's great that someone is still writing this kind of purely fun story.

I am a huge fan of fantasy writer China Mieville. His novella This Census-Taker is quite different from the other books of his that I have read. In it a young boy witnesses his father killing his mother. The authorities (and most other adults) choose to believe his father's version of events, that his mother abandoned them, but there are other hints that Dad is "not right." There are elements of fantasy in the story but they are so subtle they almost don't matter. This Census-Taker reads almost like a mainstream novella.

I have started reading Three Moments of an Explosion, a book of short stories by Mieville. They are also very different from the Mieville that I'm used to and I like some better than others. I have taken a break from it to read some other books though. The nice thing about a book of short stories is that you can spread them out, reading them one at a time between other books.

For some reason a lot of authors follow me on Twitter. I figure they're just trying to get attention, which is fine, but mostly I haven't paid much attention to them. I'm not sure what was different about S.E. Smith. Maybe the titles, maybe the cover art. Whatever it was, I followed her and followed her links to her books on Amazon and discovered A FREE KINDLE BOOK! A Warrior's Heart. Free. So I didn't even bother to read any reviews; I just downloaded it.

I am so glad it was free. Oh! My! Gawd! As I have already said on Twitter, it's pornographic. But dammit it's still science fiction and there was actually a bit of a story and I really hate to not finish a book; I mean like a Sheldon level have to finish so, quickly skipping over certain scenes, I kept reading. Turns out there were really only a couple of explicit (very explicit) scenes near the beginning and a couple more near the end.

Aside from that there was a lot in the book that just seemed silly to me. Two brothers who were kidnapped from Earth and enslaved as children grow up and fall madly in lust with two sisters from an alien warrior race. (Think Klingon but even meaner and cuter and purple) Anyway, in spite of the fact that these sisters are perfectly capable of kicking anyone's butt and feeding it to them, and the brothers really are not, the brothers constantly feel the need to "protect" their alien girlfriends.

Overall the story is pretty simplistic. The only real action (other than the aforementioned [ahem] "action") is a pretty standard escape. That's really unfortunate because the races and civilizations mentioned in the story seem like they could be interesting if the author would concentrate more on those and less on the "romance" and interpersonal [ahem] activities. But, you know, I guess some people are into that sort of thing. I won't judge. Or at least I'm trying not to judge.

Photos taken by me over 10 years ago.

Book Quote

From Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds:

And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.

Thanks to my son for sharing that with me. I have read the book but it was several years ago. ("Several" being something like 10 maybe)

Book Quote

From Helliconia Summer by Brian W. Aldiss:

Hate cheers you up, makes you forget guilt.

This 'n' That

I came across a word that I don't remember seeing before even though it is an old word, probably considered outdated which would be why I hadn't noticed it before. (And it does seem sort of odd that I had never seen it so maybe I had and just forgot about it?) The word is botheration. This seems like a useful word. The way it's used in the book I'm reading, Helliconia Summer, it's an understatement. All kinds of big, really bad events are just botheration. With all the hyperbole we have in the world today I think more understatement would be healthy.

Here is a list that I actually, totally agree with: Top 20 Things No Woman Should Wear After 30. No, really. You have to go read it. I'll admit though, I might be tempted by the cursed amulet. Or maybe I'm trying hard to find something on the list that I would wear, just to be contrary.

I thought of an idea for a Criminal Minds episode. Disturbed blogger who never gets any comments hunts down lurkers and tortures and murders them after forcing them to comment on every single post on his (or her) blog. No, no! Not me! I would never do that. I wouldn't know how to find you anyway. But it would make a good creepy story, wouldn't it?

Fake fur in a spring fashion show seems a bit odd. Well, that's not the only odd thing about this collection but my inner child wants to pet these clothes and maybe even wear them. At home, alone, where no one can see me.

A nice post about body image. You know, body image is sort of important to me but not important enough to ever make me want to wear long sleeves in the summer. But then, I live in Oklahoma, not New York.

There are several books in this list, How to Escape in 9 Books, that I might want to read. It's not often that you see a general list of books that starts with a science fiction novel so I was immediately encouraged.

Finally, here's another one of those cool Animusic videos, because I simply can't resist.