fleela's 2010 Journal of Things Read (and some things thrown against a wall)

Hi, I'm Dayna and I'm a wordaholic.

I guess I'll start off with a link to what I've read this year so far. There's a lot of comic books in there (I went on a trade paperback rampage), and more recently I've been reading post-apocalyptic fare.

Just last night (early this morning, actually) I finished The Postman by David Brin. I have absolutely no feelings about this book. It's cliche to say 'meh' but there's no better way to describe how the story impacted me. I never gave a whit about the characters and the pacing was uneven; nothing much happen until the very end, and even that was unsatisfying. I thought about abandoning the book several times, but since it was audio it was easy enough to leave it on my iPod and listen to it while I washed dishes.

I've got nothing on my plate now and I don't know if I want to go audio, dead tree, or ebook next. Such hard decisions we have to make here in the first world.

Have you read The Hunger Games? I thought it was okay.

I haven't. I've mostly been leaning towards books that focus on the time period during or not too long after the apocalyptic event, A Canticle for Leibowitz being the exception. I may have to look into more dystopian type stuff.

I was really annoyed & disappointed with The Hunger Games. Apart from the fact that the idea was cribbed from Battle Royale, the characters seriously bugged the heck out of me. Sorry Morphy ... just got caught in my Hunger Games hate rampage. Normal service will now be resumed ;-)

Is Canticle worth reading? I feel I ought to read it but for some reason have never done so.

I wasn't supremely impressed with Games. I was just curious because of fleela's current "theme" and I had recently read it.

I've been annoyed with the YA I've been reading lately. It's all angsty and depressing and has no humor.

I read Canticle many years ago. All I remember is that I hated it.

Canticle stuck with me for many days after I was done with it. The story can feel a bit disjointed because it was originally three separate short stories that had been published at different times.

I think my love for the Fallout video game series had something to do with why I liked the far-future wasteland setting of Canticle.

I've read, and re-read Canticle. I loved it. Not a book with answers though. Lots of irony and complex themes, which you can interpret any number of ways.

I read Canticle back in the 70s and again about 10 years ago. I enjoyed it immensely both times, but possibly even more the second time.

Hearty agreement with the pro-Canticle sentiment. It's been one of my favorites since I was a teenager. I would say there are plenty of answers, primarily an exhortation to hope.

I hated canticle, I started it and got about midway through nut still can't summon the energy to finish it - but I loved Postman, one of my really big favourites from last year. The disjointed feeling comes because it was apparently a serial in an SFmagazine a long time before it was a novel. I generally like all of Brin's work, though some is notably better than others.

Maybe I'll try it again sometime.

Also tried reading Canticle some time ago, but couldn't finish it. I have considered reading the Postman, but having seen the Kevin Costner movie, have never been able to muster the energy to pick it up.

These are the challenges I loosely try to keep up with. Mostly I like to see how my natural reading falls into the categories, rather than actively try to finish the challenges.

Dewey Decimal Challenge: thread - TBR list
Library of Congress Challenge: thread - TBR list
European Challenge: thread - TBR list
Canadian Challenge
Global Reading Challenge: TBR list

I'm in that weird place where I have neither an audio nor a dead tree book going right now. I have the hardest time choosing new books to read. Opening a new book is like making a big commitment to another time and place and OMG what if I make a bad choice and end up in a filthy Victorian port-a-potty?!

I've loaded Lucifer's Hammer onto my iPod. It's the last in my stash of post-apoc books. I think I'll make my dead-tree read some kind of nonfiction.

A fellow came into the store today looking for some post apocolyptic books and while I was recommending all kinds of stuff, the only one we had in was Lucifer's Hammer. Hope he likes it. I haven't read it since the '80s, when I enjoyed it, I warned him the technology would be definitely be dated!

>17 katylit:
I kind of like the idea that not every plot hole can be filled by giving all the characters instant communication via modern cell phones!

Oh no. The narrator for Lucifer's Hammer sounds like a nasal, monotone robot. I may have to put this book off until I can find a paper copy.

"sounds like a nasal, monotone robot"

Okay, I know it's sad for you, but I am laughing...

Steve Urkel should not narrate audiobooks. :-)

Yeah, it's sad to reread something you loved in your teens or early 20s (well, for me that was a really long time ago, but for others it might be only a decade ago) only to find the technology or ideas so dated it just falls flat. Stranger in a Strange Land is the latest icon of mine to fall, and I wasn't all that impressed with Dune when I read it (on audio) a year or two ago.

Who's the reader?

Connor O'Brien.

Sorry Connor, but I hope you can get by on your looks.

Hah! I'll watch out for him and avoid anything read by him.

Ok, change of plan: going with The Stories of English by David Crystal.

Oh, that's a shame about the narrator :-( Boy, they sure make or break a audio book don't they? I love your description though, like clam, I was glad I'd swallowed my coffee before I read your "nasal monotone robot", (which at first glance I read as "rabbit")!! hee hee.

Hope you can find a paper copy soon. I've kept my huge hard back for years and years, one of these days I'll have to re-read it.

Tell me about it on the narrator. Audible.com finally got unabridged versions of Chandler's Philip Marlowe series and alas, Elliiot Gould narrates them. Badly.

This is only the second time I've had to stop listening to a book because of the narrator, so I guess I've been lucky. The first time was back in middle school when I tried to listen to the audiobook version of Scarlett, narrated by the late Dixie Carter. The first time I heard her pronounce "Tara" I knew I couldn't listen to her say it that way* for 823 pages.

*She pronounced it in a way that rhymed with Lara. In my mind it rhymes with Sarah

No way! My Tara rhymes with Lara. Maybe it's my English accent.

I have to get the Crystal book. Are you listening to it or dead papering it? I listened to Melvyn Bragg's History of English but I didn't like doing linguistics on audio.

>30 klarusu:
Your Tara should rhyme with Lara! But I'm a Yank and my big plantation house in the Old South rhymes with Sarah. ;)

My Crystal book is paper. I got it from BookMooch with the points you donated to me! The only linguistics I've done on audio are lectures from The Teaching Company.

For centuries of language pedagogy, formal English has been lionized and informal English marginalized - often penalized, using labels such as 'sloppy' or 'incorrect'. But the more we look for informality in English linguistic history, the more we find it, and moreover in contexts which have unequivocal literary pedigree.

See why I love David Crystal?

See, to this North-Easterner's ear Tara and Sarah do rhyme, (as does mascara) but Lara rhymes with car a. I did some Googling though, and pronunciation of Lara seems split.

Everyone talks funny!

Well, your momma wears Army boots. Nyah!

(she really does)

During a discussion about English writers, like Charles Dickens and George Orwell eschewing words that weren't of 'pure' Anglo-Saxon origin, Crystal says:

...following the coming of St. Augustine in 597, the influence of Latin-speaking monks must have grown, with Latinisms being dropped into speech much as they still are today, a modus operandi which add gravitas passim to one's magnum opus, inter alia (pace Orwell).

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard while reading a linguistics book.

Fine.

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Glad the points went to good use!

Here's an Old English riddle from my current book:

A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man,
under its master's cloak.
It is pierced through in the front;
it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place.
When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee,
he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing
that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before.

Heh. Naughty. But I'm sure there's a non-naughty answer?

His gate key?

>42 klarusu:
Aye -a key.

Muwahahaha...

Can I has prize?

Oh, they are just too cute for words!

They are cute. Can you store stuff in them or are they purely decorative?

I found them on Flickr but I imagine it's easy to make them into holders by not stuffing them completely.

Wants them!

They need jellybeans in them.

Yah, chocolate would be too messy.

Chocolate kisses would not be too messy - we have Christmas ornaments that are crocheted and stuffed that way - no messy accidents, yet. ;)

No life without Chocolate....

This can be one of my unemployment projects ... learn to crochet snails. I shall decorate my pet snail herp-houses with little crocheted beasties.

>54 klarusu: You could even make cozies to put on the shells of your real snails, though that may be venturing into 'crazy cat lady' territory.

Last night I started on a new book that I got from the liberry. The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet is full of some of the first color pictures taken of various people, places, and things around the world. Albert Kahn was a banker and ardent pacifist who thought ending ignorance was the key to stamping out violent conflict. He saw photography as a way to bring people together, so he hired teams of people to travel all over and make use of the, at the time, new Autochrome Lumière technology.

This book also fill a couple gaps in two of my challenges:
Dewey Decimal Challenge - 779 Photographs
Library of Congress Challenge - TR Photography

I'm still working on The Stories of English as well. It's slower going because I stop to do research on a lot of the topics that Crystal brings up throughout the book.

Oh, my snails are so getting cozies! Nothing wrong with being a crazy cat lady.

I've just bought Empires of the Word - am looking forward to diving into that once I've cleared my CR pile.

Empires of the Word so wonderfully mashed my loves of history and language.

I do like the snails. Very cute.

(mostly unrelated to reading but I want to pimp it because it's so fun: I have a new Tumblr about Vikings and whatnot at http://fuckyeahnorsemen.tumblr.com)

*thumbs up*

Finished The Dawn of the Color Photograph - wish there had been more photos and less words.

Barnes and Noble coupon codes!

online: K3V7M4E
in-store: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/email/2010/10/GenCoups/1007_NM_DualCoup... (valid until Oct. 18)

From the library book I checkoued ouat and started tonight:

Among the aims of this book is to restore the violence to the Viking Age, and to try to show why our understanding is incomplete without it.

The Vikings: A History

#64 - Here's one that shows up at for 15% off for me:

Online code: U3U9X9H

in store: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/email/2010/10/GenCoups/1007_M_DualCoup_...

Hey, flee... can I buy two items and use the coupons together, do you know? Yours shows up as 10% off for me, but the links seem identical. ETD: I see the dif now.

"may not be combined with any other coupon"

booooo

Rats. Maybe they mean combined on one item. I might try ordering two items and seeing what happens.

Last night I read through The Digital Photography Book: Volume 2. It was a book I had to request from another library branch so I finished it even though I wasn't really the intended audience. It was geared more toward professional photographers, but it was something to look at while I kept my other eye on the baseball game.

but did you pick up a couple things you could use?? I remember trying to wade through books in the 80s. Eventually things did stick, but mostly it was practice, practice, practice.

Oh yes. There was a tip about using the timer to take macro shots so the act of pressing the shutter button doesn't cause any blur. Seems obvious now, but it had never occurred to me to do that.

Ooo, good tip! Hadn't thought of that.

That's a good one, fleela. I do that basically any time the camera is on a tripod, my default is a 2 second delay. Not to say my cable release isn't useful, one time it really was when I was at a brook, but most of the time the delay suffices. Too bad they ditched mirror lock up in most new cameras.

I started Slaughterhouse-Five late last night and finished it up this morning.

I wish I had read it a long time ago.

*thumbs up* to Kurt Vonnegut

YAY!!!! Vonnegut is one of my Personal Gods. :o)

What would you recommend next by him?

I think my other favorites are Breakfast of Champions and the last fiction he published, Timequake. His non-fic is pretty good, too.

Just a little interesting note: When Vonnegut was teaching grad school one of his pupils was John Irving, and when John Irving taught at the same grad school, and one if his pupils was T. C. Boyle.

What's with the blasted touchstones? }:o(

Since I can't get into actual reading right now, I've been listening to a set of lectures about Tolkien, LotR, and The Hobbit. They're free to download here, or you can find them in the iTunes U section of iTunes if you search for Tolkien Professor.

Been reading The Atlas of Middle-earth for the past couple days as the start of a Tolkien binge I intend go indulge myself with.

Reading The Hobbit Companion now. One of the first illustrations in the books is of a naked nobbit, a la Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. I truly could have lived my entire life without ever seeing a hobbit's penis.

Bwaa haa haa!!!
:o)
Brings to mind a new phrase, "Hung like a Hobbit!"

Yikes! I always heard big feet, big...

Continuing my Tolkien studies with Shippey's classic, The Road to Middle-earth.

0.0
There's another Shippey??? I only knew of (and read) J.R.R.Tolkien: Author of the Century.

And the wishlist groweth...

You're falling behind....it's from 1983!

I guess I should have bought/mooched The Road to Middle-earth rather than checking it out from the library. I've renewed it twice already (the max. allowed) and I'm only on page 80-something. Every few chapters, Shippey mentions something interesting that makes me put down the book and go do internet research. At this rate, I'll finish reading it by spring.

I read a palindromic number of pages this year: 21112.

new thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/106332