palace of winds

Next up: Sign of the Labrys, by Margaret St. Clair. I picked this one up in a fantastic used book store in St. Louis. I can’t remember the name of it now, but it’s built in an old house and up in the children’s section had a set of old books for the nursery in a fantastic house-shaped slipcover, complete with roof. I should’ve taken a picture.

Anyway, in bookstores I’ll often check for things by a handful of favorite authors, and have a list of books I’m on the look-out for saved in my phone — but mostly I shop by title and cover, and might read the first page or something random from the middle to make sure the style’s not going to drive me up the wall. I was sold on this one the instant I pulled it from the shelf and turned it over:

Really, guys? Original publication date, by the way, is 1963. In case you can’t read the above image (bad cell phone pic, sorry!):

WOMEN ARE WRITING SCIENCE-FICTION!

ORIGINAL!BRILLIANT!!DAZZLING!!!

Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind’s obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel.

Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, SIGN OF THE LABRYS, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites…

FRESH!IMAGINATIVE!!INVENTIVE!!!

Admit it: you’ve already run over to Amazon to search for your very own copy, or you’re mentally composing the email you’re going to send me asking to borrow it. Worth it? I think so. I haven’t read any other sci-fi from this era (I’m more of a fantasy gal than sci-fi, so I’ve actually read very little sci-fi, full stop), so I can’t comment on it vs. others of the type, but overall I was pretty entertained. It’s a weird little book, definitely a different tone than anything else I’ve read. The setting is a future dystopia, after wild yeasts have decimated 90% of the world’s population. People are living mostly in man-made underground caves, and have developed an aversion to one another. There’s the Evil Government, and the main character who undergoes a journey and an awakening, and a lot of strange talk about yeasts and fungi. In other words: AWESOME! WEIRD!! ADJECTIVE!!!

In February, I also finished listening to the audiobook version of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society; by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows; read by Paul Boehmer, Susan Duerden, Rosalyn Landon, John Lee, & Juliet Mills. I don’t remember where I read the recommendation for this one; it was on my library list for quite a while before I actually got it, and by the time it arrived I’d completely forgotten anything I’d ever known about it. I just popped it into my cd player, trusting I’d had a good reason to request it in the first place, and discovered that it’s a narrative told through a series of letters. And I have to admit, for the first while — a half an hour? a few hours? — I was on the verge of giving up on it. I’m a bit of a tough sell on first-person narratives, especially outside of young-adult fiction, and correspondence fiction is even worse. But sometime during that first disc, I got a bit hooked. And then a bit more, and by maybe halfway through I was totally on board, totally in love with the little cast of characters from Guernsey.

The book takes place in England, shortly after WWII. The main character is an author who strikes up a correspondence with members of the title Society, who write to her about their experiences during the war. The characters are endearing, and the story is by turns charming, sweet, and sad. Nothing too surprising in it, but I did find myself lingering in the car to hear just one more sentence, and being thankful for long stoplights. For the audiobook aspect: they have different voice actors reading each letter-writer’s part, and it works well.

I just finished listening to Odd & the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman, read by Neil Gaiman. It’s a short one, just two discs, but Neil’s a fantastic writer and (rare beast) a fantastic narrator, and this one didn’t disappoint. A lovely Norse fairytale. If you like audiobooks, you should definitely hunt down all of Neil’s stuff. A good share of it is read by him (I can recall the short stories, The Graveyard Book, and Coraline off the top of my head), and the stuff that isn’t (Anansi Boys for sure) is still wonderful. Broken record, but: nothing ruins a good book like a bad narrator.

Anyhow, Odd & the Frost Giants being so short, I’m not sure how to count it. One? Half?

I’ve also just devoured issues 25-33 of the Buffy Season 8 comic series, plus the two extras (the Willow one and — can’t remember the title, but the one about the new small town vampire boy), and Angel: After the Fall volumes 1 and 2. I have 3 and 4 waiting. And I have NO ONE to gasp over them with. Though Joe is finishing up season 5 of Angel right now, so I’ll soon be able to force the comics on him. (He just finished watching Smile Time, which is on the same disc as Hole in the World, and: dude. That has to be one of the finest discs in the whole Buffy & Angel collection, yeah?) Joss Whedon is involved in the comics, so of course they are wonderful and utterly terrible.

So anyway, I’m going to add all those littler things together (including the Angel volumes I haven’t read but will in the next few days) and call it — two. Two books so far for February.

2010 Book Count: 4 (+3 fluff)
January: 2 (+3 fluff)
February: 2

This year, I made a New Years goal (not Resolution!) to read at least 24 books: two a month. And so far I am (yay) on track!

A few weeks ago I finished listening to the audiobook of Harlan Coben’s The Innocent, read by Scott Brick. Not really my usual type of book, and — well. When you’re listening to audiobooks, the person reading makes a huge difference. Huge. If you don’t really mesh with the person doing the reading, it’s hard to separate how much you dislike how they’re reading the book from how much you dislike what they’re reading. Brick was just So Overdramatic! about everything, and I found myself not really buying any of it, particularly the dialogue. Maybe the fault of Brick, maybe the fault of Coben. My favorite thing about this book was the complete and utter ridiculousness of the technology. Cell phones must’ve just been — wait. Okay, so I went to look up when this was written, and 2005? Really? Because Coben makes this HUGE deal about the main character and his wife buying camera phones — these cell phones that can send pictures! — but neither of them can really figure out how to use them, or be bothered to try, because they are So. Hard. for realz. And when the main character receives a picture on it, there are maybe eighty-five pages of description about which buttons he pushes to bring up the picture. And there is a private investigator who has super-special software (I KID YOU NOT) to get the picture off his phone and sharpen it. Ditto the video. Which, fine, okay. Let me spend five pages explaining pixels.

Oh man, okay, I have a new favorite part of the book, which is this review from Amazon:

You are Harlan Coben and you are a writer. You are tired of your series character and you have a contract to deliver a book. You decide to write a stand alone book about a guy who can’t become a lawyer because he killed some guy at a fraternity party. So your character becomes a paralegal whose practice is only eclipsed by Danny Devito playing Deck Shifflet, the “paralawyer” in The Rainmaker.

You aren’t a lawyer so you don’t know how utterly improbable this is. Your character marries a wonderful girl, who has a past worse than your protagonist. You offer lots of plot twists, but with fifty pages to go and the bad guys dead, you don’t use them up. So you spend fifty pages showing off how clever you are.

You are so clever that you try to write the book in second person, present tense. Your editor stops you, but you manage to open and close it in the second person. In the middle you write third person past tense from differing points of view. You consider yourself daring. Others are just annoyed at your waste of talent and waste of their time. They know you can do much better.

I didn’t actually mean to rag on the book so much (except the part where the wife tells her backstory to her hubs and it’s supposed to be dialogue but instead it’s like Coben wrote the scene out and just put quotation marks around it. Dear Coben: People do not talk like that! Not even people like me, with weird vocabularies!), but…there you go.

Book #2! Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Y’all probably read this a long time ago, but it was my first time, and I LOVED it. I’m not entirely comfortable with the state of violence or gender politics among rabbits — but then again, they’re rabbits, and it seems like Adams did his rabbit research. So I guess I was more bothered that it didn’t really bother me. ANYWAY. I don’t really like to say too much about books I think people should read — and if you haven’t read this one, I think you should! I’m not ashamed to admit I cried a little when someone went off to bunny heaven. (Which is not a spoiler because c’mon, you know it’s going to happen at some point in a book all about rabbits.)

I also read three (3!) romance novels when I was in St. Louis visiting Steph last week; horrible romance novels are something of a tradition we started in college. We spent one particularly memorable sunny afternoon with them on the rooftop of an Italian hostel, looking down the terraced city of Manarola to the Mediterranean Sea, sipping limoncello. (”Sipping” may not be exactly the right word; we didn’t realize until we went to stand up just what type of alcohol limoncello is. Tip: it is not to be drunk like wine.) They’re books and I read them; do they count? Maybe I’ll keep two running totals…

January 2010 count: 2 (5 including fluff).

I’m not one for big New Years Resolutions. Let’s face it: I’m going to do what I want, regardless of having (or not having) a defined goal. Even I can’t make myself do something I really don’t want to (so, those of you who know me, rest assured: it’s not just you).

Anyhow, I feel like I can have a few modest goals for the year. Not Resolutions; just goals.

• Post more than last year. This one should be pretty easy; apparently I only had 16 posts in 2009. Shame on me.
• Read more; keep track of it. Can’t compare this one to 2009 since I have NO idea how much reading I did. So, this year, let’s say: 24 books. Two a month. That seems do-able. I won’t even cheat and count the one I finished at the very end of 2009. (Though it was really really good! The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. You should all run out and get it and Oryx & Crake and read them — Oryx & Crake first.)
• Take more pictures. I have a nice camera and like using it. So I guess this is more a reminder than a real goal.
• Travel. This is a little bit of a cheat, I guess, because I already know I’m going to be traveling this year. But I like checking things off lists (hi future self!), so I’m putting it here anyway. I really need to get started figuring out where I’m going to go — doing masses of research to prepare is a big part of the fun for me.
• Start cooking again. I’ve totally fallen off the cooking-at-home bandwagon in the last year or so, and that’s sad. I love to cook, and it’s tastier and cheaper than eating out. I just need to balance it with riding, and I know exactly how to do that: PLAN. I need to start making weekly menu plans again.

So, there we go. That seems like enough to be going on for now. Well — that and this, which is the list of stuff-I’d-like-to-do-but-probably-won’t:

• Website facelift. I like coding, I do, but the thought of updating WordPress and re-learning their whole system (and anything new) just makes me want to go lie down for a nice little nap.
• Write about Peru. I have this sort of fantasy (tied in with the WordPress upgrade above) about making a travel subdomain, or just one for Peru, separate from this main part of the site. And I would lift stuff from the journal I kept, and spiff up some of my pictures, and finally have a nice online recap for your viewing pleasure.
• Write fiction. DO NOT GET EXCITED. There’s a reason this is in this category and not the one above. Or, rather, many reasons; lack of time and discipline chief among them.

Okay, there we go for real this time. Happy 2010, y’all. My real hope for my own is that it’ll be better than the last third of 2009; shouldn’t be hard.

I had yesterday off work, and had vague plans to clean — I have a few boxes to go through, and vacuuming, a little laundry, etc. But Sunday evening Jo came over and we had lots of pizza and played Spore and visited our Sims — and she brought over a few books to lend me: the first three Sookie Stackhouse books (Dead Until Dark, Living Dead in Dallas, and Club Dead, by Charlaine Harris), to be exact. I started browsing through the first one a bit during Brothers & Sisters commercials, and after Jo left around midnight began reading in earnest…

And yesterday around dinnertime, finished the third book. It was a glorious day off.

I even managed to drag myself to the grocery store after watching House! Though their entire produce section was in desperate condition: wrinkling apples, small hard nectarines, and bananas all spotted brown. I couldn’t find a single banana I trusted to be edible in the morning, and ended up coming home with no fresh fruit at all. Still, I got most of the other things I’d gone for. And there was a little snow falling so softly, as many flakes drifting up as down, the beautiful light swirl that charms you into thinking that this winter thing, in Minnesota? Not so bad after all.

Speaking of productivity, over the weekend I finally managed to edit the team sorting video I promised you in, what, November? And voila!:

It was shot on my digital camera (and I had to process it twice through Premiere, for one reason and another), so the quality is not great at all, but there you go. I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting an actual video camera lately, because it would be fun! and useful! Except I’m worried that I’d get one and then never remember to use it…