Category Archives: Reading

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Internet Killed the Chain Letter Star

Am I the only person who misses chain letters?

No, not the current, “You must forward this onto 35 people for good luck, otherwise your house will be crushed by Cthulhu” spate of chain letters, or even the “tell me 25 things about yourself” series of questions (although at least the latter makes the person write something). I’m talking about the old school chain letters, where you added your name onto the bottom of a list of six people, and sent something like a recipe to the person at the top before sending the new letter out to six more people. If that chain went somehow unbroken you’d end up with over 46000 recipes, but of course the reality was never that good.

I was overjoyed, then, to recently get an old school chain letter mailed to me from a friend and former co-worker who lives up in the wilds of Wisconsin these days. It’s a much simpler chain, one with only two rungs. You send a paperback book to the person at the top, add yourself to the bottom (and do so by adding in mailing labels, which is an elegant solution so that there’s no retyping or such), and if it ends up unbroken you’d end up with 36 books in the mail.

The letter referred to it as an informal book club, and I love the idea of it. I actually spent a bit of time trying to figure out who to send my six letters to. They had to love books, of course, but I also didn’t want to send the letter to friends who knew each other, so that  it wouldn’t get stuck on the same people. (So for example, I sent it to only one person in my book club; that way he has the option to pass it along to other members.) I also tried to spread the locations out a bit; one letter went to Oakland, another to Boston, still another to Williamsburg.

Now, of course, I’m waiting to see if I get anything in the mail. How far will the chain reach? Will all six people I’ve sent it to break the chain? (Hopefully not, I tried to think of people who would be equally enamored with the idea.) If nothing else, hopefully the person I sent Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book to will love it. It’ll be fun to see what if anything arrives here. Mind you, I love getting mail that isn’t a bill or junk. So hopefully, I’ll hit the jackpot before too long.

Until then, though, I’m going to be dreaming of chain letters involving chocolate chip cookies arriving at my home. Mmmmm, cookies.

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Wishing I Had a Porch

Last Saturday was a little crazy busy for me; I had a 12-mile run in the morning (with another one scheduled for Sunday morning), business to take care of at my parents’s house out in Vienna, and dinner with some of Charlie’s co-workers up in Chevy Chase. And let me first get out of the way, the run was great—Charlie and I ran it together, and despite some nasty headwinds beating us down, we had a really good time. Likewise, dinner (at La Ferme) was also excellent, with good company and good food.

But I have to say, the best part of Saturday? It may have been after I’d finished taking care of everything out at the family estate, and I got to sit out on the deck and read my book for about an hour.

A Peaceful Afternoon [365portraits: 094]

I know, it doesn’t sound like much. But one of the things that I’ve really missed when I moved into Arlington was having my own porch or balcony; it’s something that while in both Falls Church and Tysons that my place had and I somewhat took for granted. There are a lot of nice parks in my current neighborhood that I can walk to and kick back and relax at… but there’s something extra-special about being somewhere all by yourself and just able to really and fully unwind. Especially in the spring.

It was just a great way to spend the afternoon; finishing the second 400 pages of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, drinking a (rare for me) soda, letting the sun keep me warm, and not worrying about anything else. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, and being outside means that I don’t find myself looking at everything in my home and thinking, “I really should take care of that.”

I also got to fiddle around a bit with a new camera lens; it’s a macro lens that lets me get some tight focuses on objects and blur everything else out behind them. I’m definitely still learning its finer points but so far I’m pretty happy with what it’s letting me do.

Daffodills Daffodill

Mom’s daffodills are already getting a little droopy and towards the end of their cycle, so it was nice to have someone appreciate them while they’re still out. (You know, for someone who hated hated hated weeding the garden all those years, every now and then I think that it would be nice to have a garden of my own. What sort of horrible subliminal brainwashing is going on with me?)

And speaking photography, I started looking at alternate lighting ideas for Artomatic this year, and may have found paydirt. Of course, what I really need to do is get up early on Saturday and hopefully finish up the set of photos for the exhibit. And then print the photographs, and buy frames… and paint for my wall at Artomatic… get new business cards…

It’s no small wonder I still owe some people e-mails from two months ago. Or why updates here are few and far between. I’m ready to become fabulously wealthy and live a life of leisure, can’t you tell?

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Hurry Up, Spring

This morning I was really tired and it took me a while to figure out why—it’s because I’ve been using my psychic powers at full-blast to try and make spring arrive ahead of schedule.

Well, perhaps not, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? I’m so sick of it still being dark when I wake up to hit the gym on Monday mornings, or perhaps to do some before-work running on Tuesdays or Thursdays. If it’s still dark out, it just drags me back into slumberland. At least we’re at the point now where it’s not pitch-black when I leave work so I can get the running in then, but still… not a fan. I don’t know how people live up near the Arctic Circle during the cold months; not even so much for the brutal temperatures but the lack of sunlight.

On the other hand, I’ve been having taking three virtual trips into Japan as of late to get through my desire of being somewhere else. As I think I’ve mentioned before, Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii is still intensely a funny, an adorable and low-key simulation game where my biggest worry is trying to eventually catch all 64 fish for the local museum’s aquariums. Also in the game realm, though, is Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice For All, which I finally started playing on the NintendoDS. It’s a fun cross between an adventure game and a novel, as you navigate the twists and turns of Phoenix Wright’s latest cases before coming to the inevitable conclusion. In many ways it’s like reading a mystery/investigation novel where you have to solve the crime before the author point-blank tells you. I enjoyed the first of these games, and it’s fun checking out the second one.

Last night I also started reading the 856-page comics autobiography A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I’ve really enjoyed reading Tatsumi’s comic short story collections as they’re translated into English; they’re always slightly twisted and depressing little vignettes of life in Japan by slightly pathetic people, with something just off-beat enough to attract as a reader. What’s great about A Drifting Life so far (although to be fair I’m only on page 80!) is that Tatsumi is able to really plunge the reader into a different place and time without ever overtly doing so. There’s no huge info dumps or exposition, but it really gives me a strong feel for 1949 Japan.

In many ways, A Drifting Life is just the kind of autobiography that I really like, because it lets me “travel” to not only a different place but a different time as well; it’s a much less expensive way of visiting somewhere that would otherwise be inaccessable. Really good stuff, and once it’s officially released (next month?) I think it’s going to knock people’s socks off. I hope so, because I love the Tatsumi short story collections and want there to be many, many more down the line.

(And, with no exercise scheduled for tomorrow morning—my spinning class is in the evening—that means I can stay up a little later and read some more of the book. Yay!)

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Getting There?

Today was the first morning in which there was almost no hacking/coughing at all. Could I actually be on the mend? I sure do hope so, that would be nice. I might go to the gym tomorrow morning for a little bit and see what happens. But we’ll see.

Last night, having officially given up hope of it ever being reprinted, I broke down and bought a used copy of Sheri S. Tepper’s The End of the Game, an old Science Fiction Book Club omnibus of three of her novels (Jinian Footseer, Dervish Daughter, and Jinian Star-Eye). I absolutely adored Tepper’s True Game books when I was growing up, of which there were nine in all. The initial three (King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard’s Eleven) were published by Ace and reprinted ages ago in a big The True Game omnibus. The books were all marketed as YA novels, but there’s an increasing complexity with each new installment. I often joke about re-reading King’s Blood Four years later and nearly falling over in shock at having completely missed as a teenager what was clearly a post-sex/afterglow scene very early on, but there’s more to the books’ adult nature than just that.

Anyway, the other six books (three Mavin Manyshaped books which were a prequel, and then the three Jinian books) were published by Tor, who let them all go out of print years ago and have shown no signs of bringing them back into print. I regularly see individual copies of Jinian Star-Eye going for $60, $80, $100 a pop. And of course, I somehow lost my old copy of The End of the Game about 15 years ago and have given up hope of it ever, impossibly re-appearing. So when I saw copies of the omnibus going for less than $20, well, I bit.

I absolutely cannot wait to re-read these books. The imagery in them has stuck with me for years, from the living pathways that once webbed across the land, to the twin bells that create light and darkness when they ring, to the planet’s desperate dreams of warning appearing in jewels that you allow to dissolve on your tongue. Hopefully some day I’ll find a reasonable price for the Mavin books (which I read from the library as a child but have never owned), or against all odds they’ll be reprinted. But until then, I will treasure my hopefully-arriving-quickly copy of The End of the Game. I’ve read and enjoyed other books by Tepper since then, but she never hit the sheer wonder that these always evoked in me. Hopefully someday I can create something that does similar things to other readers.

Do you have books like that in your past? Ones you haven’t read for decades but which will always stick with you?

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My Fall Listens and Reads

With everything else going on I forgot to mention it, but I became even more of an Arlington resident stereotype last week; I donated money to WAMU, our local NPR station. I started listening to WAMU around the start of the year on my drive to and from work, and I have to admit that I’ve grown to really love Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And from there, well, I’ve started adding podcasts to be automatically downloaded, like StoryCorps, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, or NPR roundups of the week’s news relating to specific subjects (my two favorites are Food and Pop Culture), and most Monday mornings at the gym I spend my hour on the rowing machine and the elliptical listening to the weekend’s episode of This American Life.

So yeah, they’ve given me a lot of entertainment, so with the latest pledge drive I finally crumbled. (It does help that I can make it split over 12 months. That’s not so bad.) But it did make me realize that I really have not picked up much in the way of new music this year. There are still a few albums I’m hoping to get for Christmas (new ones from Aimee Mann and Pink leap to mind), but I didn’t feel the need to rush out and get them. The newest album I can think of acquiring was Tod loaning me Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Trip the Light Fantastic, which was pretty darn good.

Is this a bad year for music? Or merely a bad year for me finding music that I’m interested in?

On the other hand, I’ve definitely done a lot more reading this year; getting those two hours on the bus at least once a week has certainly helped, of course. I’m almost done with Pride and Prejudice and all of you were absolutely right, it’s very enjoyable. At some point I’ll finally tackle Wuthering Heights, but that will have to wait for a little bit. I took advantage of Small Beer Press’s fall sale and ordered the “everything we published in 2008” set (which may sound like some huge crate of books but it’s actually just five).

It helped that three of the books were already ones I wanted; a new Geoff Ryman book is reason to celebrate (Cambodia? Really? I’m in!), I’ve been wanting to read Joan Aiken’s works for a while now, and I’d heard very good things about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories. So that made the decision easy; doubly so because Benjamin Parzybok’s Couch sounds entertaining, and I’ve always heard very good things about John Kessel too. (And hey, one of the stories in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories involves the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice meeting Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster. It’s like it was meant to be.)

Also on my radar (but for 2009) is NESFA Press’s planned six-volume set of anthologies collecting every single Roger Zelazny short story. I cut my teeth on Zelazny’s Amber novels, and from there went to his anthologies (I still vividly remember telling a friend about Unicorn Variations in the sixth grade and wishing that I could write a short story like Zelazny did) and many of his novels. With half of his anthologies out of print and the other half all scattershot and over the place, a complete, definitive edition of everything? Oh yes. Yes yes yes. It’s just as well that it’s a minimum of four months away.

(Oh, and World of Goo for the Wii is one of the coolest games out there, and for $15 at that! A steal and a half. I actually have to stop myself playing it at times because I don’t want it to come to an end. It’s that good. I would talk about wanting an Xbox 360 Pro, here, but I fear that you lot will just egg me on to buy one. And, um, no. I cannot justify one. Maybe next year.)

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Cutting Edge and Old Classics

I only just heard of “netbooks” in the past week or so—those laptop computers that are stripped down in power but perfect for checking e-mail and surfing the web when you’re on the go. I’m intrigued and fascinated by the idea; if I’m not on a business trip, all I really need on my computer is a web connection and something with which to write. (Being able to watch DVDs is nice, but with the PSP it’s not quite as necessary as it would’ve been in the past, and I know that adding in a DVD-ROM will spike the price.) Being in the $250-to-$400 range makes them perfect, and awfully tempting.

Well, until I was looking at SlickDeals today and noticed someone selling 4GB flash drives for $8. And that’s when it hit me that five years ago, those little numbers were priced through the roof. And even when it isn’t some sort of crazy deal, they’re still pretty cheap these days. (I think I got my 4GB flash drive for something like $35.) So in a couple of years? Those netbooks might very well be even cheaper. And since I do have a fully functioning laptop anyway… yeah, I can wait. If anything, that makes me all the more excited for when I eventually get one, mind you.

At the other end of the spectrum, my latest “on-the-bus reading” material is something a little more old-fashioned: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Considering my major at university was English Literature, you may find it a little shocking that I have never read anything by Jane Austen before. (Or, I might add, any of the Brontë sisters.)

My guess is that each professor assumed that one of the others assigned it to be read, and the end result was an Austen-sized hole in my knowledge; the closest I’ve ever come was seeing the movie adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Oh, and having Clueless on my Netflix queue for over two years and counting. Anyway, a discussion of the ITV series Lost in Austen brought this to light, and I’d decided it was time that I should fix this gap in my knowledge.

So far? I’m really loving it. I knew I’d hit pay dirt in the second chapter when I hit this little gem:

“…What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”

Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.

“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr. Bingley.”

I swear, I could almost hear the ker-pow noise at that little zinger directed at Mary. And I am wondering if Mary was based on someone that Austen hated, because wow, the shots keep coming as I chortle merrily away. (“Mary had neither genius nor taste…” “Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family…”) I also picked up a copy of Wuthering Heights so I’ve got all sorts of classics of literature just waiting to be read.

Good times, good times.

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Then Again, Maybe I Won’t

Last week I had a sudden, out-of-the-blue, burning desire to read old Judy Blume books from my childhood. Instead, I settled for reading Wikipedia entries on them, and while I was surprised at how many of my old favorites I remembered point-for-point (like Blubber, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., and Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great), the one that had quite firmly lodged itself still in my head was Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. It’s not surprising; it was the “boy hits puberty amidst personal crisis” book (and the counterpoint in many ways to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.), after all.

I was surprised and intrigued to learn that a lot of Blume’s books have been edited/updated to reflect the modern day. Nothing huge and plot-point shattering, but small mentions like casette tapes turning into CDs, that sort of thing. I guess it surprised me in part because I remembered reading books that had belonged to my parents and grandparents when I was growing up and having no problem with the earlier time period, but also because it hit me that the tweaks were probably in part because the rest of the books are so completely fitting into the modern day already. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t with its story about members of the family assimilating when they move from Jersey City to a wealthy town in Long Island is the sort of thing that still goes on today, after all. People rejecting/ignoring their heritage to fit in more happens as much in 2008 as it did in 1972, when you think about it. Probably the only gaping hole in the comparison between the book’s original time period and now is the existence of the internet and search engines to get a lot of the answers that the main character was wondering about.

This weekend I’m half-tempted to head to the library and check out copies of the Blume books I never did get around to read, and maybe a few of the old favorites. (Never mind the 9000 other books I have waiting to be read.) Boy, those books were great.

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Radio Contact Has Been Established

I feel like that’s what I should be hearing whenever I update my website, these days. It’s been one of those everyone-all-at-once sort of months; nothing terribly huge, per se, just lots of little things that threaten to overwhelm my schedule.

On the bright side, after this weekend, things slow down a bit. I already had my final long-training-run of the season (a 22-miler) this past Sunday, which went pretty well aside from a relatively recently problem with a foot cramping (and some nasty heat). I did head off to the podiatrist to talk to him about the foot, and he diagnosed it as a strained muscle in the arch of my right foot. So right now I’m not running (as to let it heal) but fortunately the elliptical and swimming are both doctor-approved forms of exercise so that I don’t lose too much conditioning. I’m hoping to start running again on the 21st but like so many things I will play it by ear.

The other big time sink about to vanish is the Small Press Expo, which is this weekend. Even though I’m no longer first or even second-in-command of the show, it does take up a lot of my time. The nice thing is that the one big thing I’m in charge of (the Ignatz Awards) seems to be all under control, and more importantly it means I can get rid of all those boxes of books that were submitted to the jury (we’re auctioning them off) that are cluttering up my office.

Early Light(Oh, and my picture project continues to move towards its conclusion. Some days I get irritated with the whole, “Oh great, stop and think of something to photograph” aspect that it can create. Other times, like very early this morning, I find myself glad that I have my camera with me as I got to see the morning sky over a church in DC. The shot may not come out quite as I’d wanted, but with each photograph I still feel like I’m really learning.)

There are a bunch of things I kept meaning to write about, like going to the opera for the first time ever (it was nice), or an overly-friendly employee at the CostCo (the fine line between being outgoing and flirting and how to recognize the difference), or the terrifying person who really was flirting with me at a Baja Fresh (next time I’m faking a seizure). But after long days of running, or e-mailing jurors, or scanning and scanning and scanning in covers and excerpts, it’s just felt like there’s no real energy left. Things definitely came to a head last week when I finally ended up crashing (energy-level that is) and having to stay home because I had finally hit empty.

So while I’m looking forward to SPX this weekend, and Karon’s birthday party at the RennFaire next weekend, and the marathon in November, and continuing to spend quality time with Charlie, I’m also looking forward to some quiet time. Scaling back on running (although I am in taper mode now anyway so that’s happening), actually getting some reviews written (I literally have three half-written reviews all begging for an ending), doing a little redecorating (new bookshelves in the living room), and just sitting down and reading.

Speaking of which, I must say that one of the things I’ve loved doing the most lately is reading the two Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets re-issues over the course of the past couple weeks. Dave introduced me to the comic back in 1991 down at JMU and it was pretty revelatory. The new reprints are beautifully designed, an easier size to handle, and most importantly they’re just full of amazing material. I thought I’d read Maggie the Mechanic over the course of a month or so, but a week later I was picking up The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S. to head right into. Gilbert Hernandez will be at SPX, so I’m looking forward to getting copies of Heartbreak Soup and Human Diastrophism from him with which to do the same thing. It’s so great to re-discover an old favorite.

Anyway, yes, I am alive. I really will try and update a tiny bit often with something of vague interest. In the meantime, you can imagine me looking at the lovely gray skies and cool temperatures outside, sipping some green tea, and just giving a sigh of relief because I can finally push my office chair back without smacking into boxes of books. A small victory, but a great one.

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New and Old Reading Material

Over the past couple of years, with the embarrasment of books already in my home, I’ve tried to get a lot better about getting books from the library. (Especially with book club, since if I’d actually bought copies of John Varley’s Red Thunder or Greg Egan’s Teranesia I’d be pretty angry. I’m still a little scarred by briefly owning David Gerrold’s Blood and Fire, for that matter, but this is all fodder for an entirely different entry about hits and misses from the book club.) I’m regularly taking older books to the library for donation, in fact, trying to thin things out, re-evaluating what needs to stick around.

As it is, I’ve still got a bunch of amazing books just waiting to be read (some ones I chose, other ones that friends wisely picked out for me), and so I’m trying to minimize the inflow to ones that are really important/interesting to me, ones that I feel are worthy of making the cut. I have actually bought a couple of books recently; these are ones that “made the cut” and were considered (not yet read at the time of purchase) good enough to not just be a library borrowing. So, let’s see:

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs. To be honest, none of his books have really captured my attention in the way that Dry (his story of alcohol addiction and recovery) grabbed me and was devoured over the course of 48 hours. They’re good travel books, though, especially since his last two have been collections of short essays/stories.  Fun, but with diminishing returns. Having just finished this one, I think any future books by Burroughs will be via the library for me.

The Rules for Hearts by Sara Ryan. I first heard of Ryan through her also-talented husband Steve Lieber; her first novel Empress of the World was the sort of book I wish I’d read when I was a teen, and her first comic (with Lieber) “Me and Edith Head” was sheer elegance. I had a gift certificate burning in my pocket from Lambda Rising, and I’d just decided that in addition to Possible Side Effects I’d finally buy one of the Love and Rockets re-issues that I’ve been eyeing for ages. Then I saw they had The Rules for Hearts in and you’d have thought L&R was on fire I’d dropped it so fast. Oh, and Ryan’s got other great comics out as well. If you haven’t already, go check out her short story “Click” (drawn by Dylan Meconis) and see what you’ve been missing. I’m about halfway through the book now and am absolutely loving it.

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey. I’ve enjoyed Carey’s comics in the past (Lucifer and Crossing Midnight in particular) and Karon had said good things about his prose novel debut. Since he was in town a couple of months ago for a signing tour connected to it, I decided it was a good a time as any to buy a copy, say hello to him again (we’d met a couple years ago), and give it a whirl. Hopefully I’ll be starting it soon.

The Selected Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry. Ok, I have to admit I haven’t actually bought this yet, but only because the last time I was at the store the line was so long I decided to go back. But it’s part of Barnes & Noble’s “Classics Series” which are bargain-priced; in this case a nice 432-page trade paperback for $5.95. What little I’ve read of his short stories I’ve enjoyed in the past, so I figure this is as good a way as any to give it a whirl.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners by James Joyce. And last but not least, also from the “Classic Series” we have another inexpensive trade paperback. I read Portrait when I was in high school and I loathed it, pure and simple. But I am a bit wiser now and I want to give it another shot. More importantly, though, the only story from Dubliners I’ve ever read is “The Dead” and I think it’s a truly amazing piece of writing, one of the best out there. So that is what really attracted me to this book; the chance to read the rest of Dubliners and to have a more easily-accessible copy of “The Dead” for my Christmas Eve tradition of reading said story. (Normally I have to dig out my college textbooks and figure out which one contained it.) This will be an interesting journey to see just what else of Joyce’s I actually like.