Words are inadequate

The real problem with being sick is that it's entirely thrown me off my running. I was doing alright for the first week of April. Now I can't even take a deep breath without coughing, or even stand at my desk for several hours without getting light-headed and needing to sit down for a bit. Makes it hard to keep up any kind of pace.

It's been pretty bright out lately, which is nice even if I'm still coming to terms with the sun being up at seven PM. I just got used to it being dark at four-thirty and now they have to go and change it on me. Stupid seasons.

Media... dug into The Cloud Roads a couple of days ago. Even in my somewhat muzzy-headed state it's quite enjoyable. On advice/praise from a wide variety of people including daghain, silmaril, everyone at LG&M, and my friend Kosh from junior high, we watched the first episode of The Wire a couple of weeks ago. I immediately ordered the complete series DVDs. This looks like exactly the kind of in-depth storytelling I'm looking for.

The last of the immigration paperwork is off to the immigration lawyer, so there's that. Now we just wait for some amount of time which will probably be less than a year, and we're permanent residents and can start the much more involved citizenship process.

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( 101 in 1001 update )

Weekend already, sheesh. Some weeks.

Last weekend was ... I was going to say 'quiet' but that's not true at all, it just wasn't in any way stressful. Satyrday there were games in New West followed by some Rock Banding. I stumbled through vocals on a handful of tracks (including Werewolves of London, which according to semilocal J-- sounds like Sweet Home Alabama, argh) and acquitted myself somewhat better on guitar, and we convinced uilos to sing "Eye of the Tiger" and "Carry On My Wayward Son," which she did quite well. Good times all around.

Sunday we drove down to Seattle to see Tylan (sounds like Thailand and not Dylan, which is not what I'd expected), and also to spend some time with Karawynn and Jak. Karawynn cooked the only broccoli I have ever been able to eat (lightly pan-fried with a ton of garlic and some red pepper flakes), and Jak made the best creme brulee I have ever had the good fortune to get my mouth around; between that and just getting to hang out for a couple of hours it was an excellent trip even without the concert. The show itself was good but not great. I get the sense that Ty's still finding her feet in doing solo shows. She played mostly stuff from her solo album, with a handful of her Girlyman songs ("The House Song," "The Person You Want," one or two others). Still well worth the seeing.

Last night we saw a cheery Britpop band called Veronica Falls and their opener, a SF grrlpunk band called Brilliant Colors. I still have "Teenage" stuck in my head. Good times, and since both bands had two CDs and they were $10 each, we have a bunch of new music for the drive down to Seattle today.

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Sometime during last week I utterly devoured book 1 of Walter Jon Williams's space opera epic Dread Empire's Fall. Very good stuff if you're looking for space opera. It's... how did Jo put it? "The empire is ruled by the truth of the Praxis, which forbids things likely to lead to boring singularities (no AI, no nanotech, no uploading, no immortality, etc.) while promoting things likely to lead to space-opera (spaceships, space navies, space stations, conquest of aliens, aristocracy, exploration of wormholes etc.)." Pretty much. It's 400 pp in paperback; roughly the first 250 pp are buildup and worldbuilding (very good buildup and entertaining worldbuilding!). Then there's an extremely tense 30pp where the rebellion gets underway, and the book is off and rolling. The only reason I haven't plowed straight through the other two is that they're in transit from Chapters. Recommended.

Boys don't read Girl Books and other lies my Society Told Me: "My brother read a lot. And as it happens, a fair number of the books he reads either a) are written by women b) have female protagonists, or c) center on 'girl' issues like 'family' and 'relationships.' This fact makes him the Miracle Boy Foretold By the Prophecy."

Confession time: I read Girl Books when I was a kid. I have clear memories of reading a bunch of Baby-Sitters Club books in fifth grade because they were there, and at a book fair one year I picked up a couple of D&D Romance Choose-Your-Own-Adventure things. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, about two imaginative girls whose friendship is sorely tested by Growing Up, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew there was something vaguely 'wrong' about reading them. I was always worried that someone would make fun of me for it, in a way that was somehow worse than the normal abuse I got for reading, or for reading genre. But I didn't let it stop me.

My choice of reading material may have been the one place in my childhood where I was unquestionably brave. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that books were something my parents didn't ever try to shame me about, or tell me that there was something else I'd like better and shouldn't I be reading that instead. (Tangent: current theory is that books were Play and thus not worth the effort of fighting over; it wasn't until Play started threatening to overshadow Work, in the form of saying I wanted to be a writer, that I got slapped down.)

I always thought I was just a weird kid for doing that. Nice to know I'm not, quite, the only one.

Tip Your Server and Save the World: "There are two types of people in America: those who have worked in the service industry, and those who have not.... Those who haven't are, virtually without exception, the reason stories like this exist." Yeah. Time to start tipping 20% and rounding up.

Leslie Fish on cats: "About breeding cats for intelligence: it started off as a college Psychology project, and just sort of grew from there." Scary smart cats, including one who invented the lever.

The Reply Given in Arkell v. Pressdram: "This case is well known among lawyers and journalists, especially the phrase 'I refer you to the reply given in Arkell and Pressdram'."

Obituary: John E. Karlin, inventor of the push-buttons on the push-button phone. People have been "calling from a touch-tone phone" for fifty years now.

An amazing photo of someone feeding birds in Krakow. No, really.

Thriving since 1960, my garden in a bottle: "In fact, on the last occasion he watered it Ted Heath was Prime Minister and Richard Nixon was in the White House." I want one. Will have to keep an eye out at thrift stores etc for an appropriate glass jar.

It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being 'It': "Mr. Dennehy and nine of his friends have spent the past 23 years locked in a game of 'Tag.'"

Sharp Suits: "Ad creatives, designers, animators, directors, illustrators and more took time out to dress up their favourite worst feedback from clients, transforming quotes that would normally give you a twitch, into a diverse collection of posters."

If you lose your cellphone, don't blame Wayne Dobson: "An unexplained glitch with at least one cellphone company is directing people with missing phones to [Dobson's] North Las Vegas home." Oh dear.

Random House to Reissue Ruth Chew's Fantasy Oeuvre: "Random House Books for Young Readers has acquired the rights to Ruth Chew’s 29-book canon of middle-grade fantasy novels." Yay! I devoured these when I was in early elementary school, and they're as responsible as anything for my love of fantasy.

did you know how hilarious the patch notes to the sims are: "Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out."

Friday night I put a large number of things in a slightly less large number of boxes. Satyrday, tripped down to Bellingham with uilos and culfinriel. Spent around $80 on the USPS because even with the car rental it's cheaper than shipping through Canada Post. Faster and less US Customs-intensive, too.

Bellingham has a new "game store." Disappointingly, it's actually a Warhammer / Warmachine store with a bunch of Magic cards and two shelves of boardgames. So that took about five minutes to peruse. On the other hand, Mallard's is currently serving frankincense ice cream (ETA: recipe courtesy thanate), which may be the best ice cream I've ever had. (The pomegranate sorbet from Moorenko's is disqualified on the shaky grounds that it's a sorbet, not an ice cream.) And the dueling used bookstores remain fine places to find any number of things. One, for instance, has volumes two through four of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, which I've heard a couple of people say nice things about and which I have resisted picking up because, hello, volumes two through four are of little use to me. I did pick up a(nother) giftable copy of JMF's Growing Up Weightless, because it's one of those books (along with The Dragon Waiting, and The Last Hot Time, and Heat of Fusion if I ever saw that in the wild) that I buy on spec because surely I know someone who needs it, and because I adore the cover. (Of which there is not a satisfactory image online, because much of what I adore is only visible in the wraparound.)

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Since then I have been fairly brain-dead. Not sleeping well has been part of it; not sure about the rest, if there even is anything that's "rest." I did have a lovely evening last night with a handful of people I'd mostly never met before, at a small local poly meet... thing. The jury is still out but it may be the type of thing I'm looking for.

Also, as of season 4, Battlestar Galactica has gone so far off the rails that it can no longer see the rails from where it is, and in fact retains only a dim memory that once there were rails for it to go off of. Or, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic."

... and we just had five minutes of snow hail downtown. All melted now of course, but still nice to see.

So this is going around the internets lately:
( Cut for unrepentant Tolkien geekery )

... good thing I don't have to do it.

Elseweb a friend asks, heavily paraphrased, "my preteen kid wants to read Hunger Games. i'm not letting her right now, because she's hypersensitive and it would freak her right the heck out. thoughts?"

Which to me sounds entirely wrong-headed. I was brought up with free rein in my reading material: if I could reach it, I could (try to) read it. The notion of telling a kid "no you can't read that you're not ready for it" is foreign to me. I could see "it's kinda disturbing and might be a little old for you; give it a try and we'll talk about it during/after, and if you're too freaked out it's totally okay to stop." But saying "you can't read that"... does that ever end well?

This is apart from the question of poisonous drek like Twilight, which someone else brings up in comments and to which I have no easy answer.

Thoughts?

(I'm not identifying the friend because I don't want to be That Guy With No Kids Who's Telling Her How To Raise Hers; likewise, I'm not asking her this directly because I don't know how to ask that without either sounding like That Guy Etc or making it her job to educate me on the nuances of parenting that I'm missing.)

When reading a non-chronological series I tend to be a Strict Publicationist.

That is, I have a strong preference for reading books in the order they were published, rather than in internal chronological order.

If that didn't help: go look at your copies of The Chronicles of Narnia. (What do you mean, you don't have your own copies? Fine, go look at the library's copies.) If you're unfortunate enough to have an edition published in the mid-nineties or later, the first book is The Magician's Nephew. If you have an earlier edition, the first book is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. LWW was written first, but the events in MN take place before the events of LWW, and for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture the publisher sorted them into chronological order in the mid-nineties.

There's a whole long rant I do about why this reordering is not only WRONG but a CRIME AGAINST LITERATURE. For these purposes just take it as a given that I believe in reading books in the order they were written, rather than in the order in which events in the books occur.

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So: when reading a non-chronological series, especially for the first time, I tend to be a Strict Publicationist.

Later-written prequels tend to only be interesting by the light they shed on later events in the series; volumes that jump ahead make for interesting speculation of the 'how are they possibly going to get character X to point Y?' variety. Then you have authors like Mr Brust who enjoy messing with chronological readers, as in Dragon which takes place before and after Yendi, or Tiassa which takes place at a wide variety of times possibly including no time at all. (Note to self: reread Tiassa and determine whether it is actually the best of the Vlad books.)

I may have found a point at which I'm willing to break that.

I read the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire shortly before the third one came out in paperback, because that was supposed to coincide with the release of the fourth one and the timing seemed good. Ha. As You Know, Bob, when George R.R. Martin got to being three years late on A Feast for Crows his publisher said "just send us what you've got already," so he chopped it in half by geography and sent it off. Then he published the other half five years later as A Dance with Dragons.

The half that made up FfC was the half I was less interested in. I figured I'd just wait until the other half was out and read them both then. Trouble is, it's been long enough (eight ten bloody years) that I have only the vaguest recollection of the first three books, and I'm not ready to commit to a reread of the whole series every time a new one comes out. So these, like Harry Potter, have fallen into the "I'll read them when he's good and done" bucket.

Meanwhile, via zarfeblong, joenotcharles claims to have solved the Feast / Dance problem. He's gone through FfC and DwD, chopped them up, and stitched them back together in what, he claims, is an ordering that makes sense and is paced better so you're not abandoning half the characters for six hundred pages. It has the downside of needing to haul two big-ass books around instead of just one, but by then perhaps everything will be electronic anyway.

I find this an intriguing enough concept that I think I shall try reading it/them like this. In another ten or fifteen years, whenever GRRM finishes the series.

Given: Bookshelf space is a serious consideration for housing. We got unbelievably lucky with the place we're in right now but it's bloody expensive, and we may not be so fortunate in the next place.

Also, books are the great majority of the physical objects I own. If I'm looking to reduce the amount of Stuff in my life (and I usually am; the "do not have any attachments" pattern is locked in eternal conflict with the "might be useful someday" pattern), books are a place to start.

Hence: the possibility of going over to ebooks for the small portion of the library available in that format plus anything new that comes out.

The imminent release of the new iPad is doubtless a small factor in pondering this possibility.

Pros: Less space, obviously. Being able to buy books immediately as I want to read them may (may) curtail the need to Buy All The Books whether or not I have time to read them. (Case in point: acquired "Throne of the Crescent Moon" this weekend, but gord only knows when it'll slot into the stack.) Not as much having to haul a giant hardback around because it's what I'm in the middle of (e.g., Anathem). Ereading is likely to lend itself to reading more online magazines & contemporary short stories.

Cons: Love of the physical experience of reading a paper book. Fear of lost data. The visible library is a defining feature of Home. Another %&$ device that needs to be plugged in. Can't loan ebooks to people who don't have an ereader. Many older works are unavailable as ebooks, leading to frustration. Need to find an ereader acceptable to uilos as well as one for me, otherwise she'll just buy dead-tree copies of anything I pick up in ebook that she wants to read too.

Unknowns: The biggest factor is how well I'll like reading on an ereader / tablet / what have you. (Already known: how well I like reading on the Device, that being "not very," but that's a function of the tiny screen.) How much of a problem the confusion of "do i have that in ebook or dead-tree" will be. How much of a problem DRM will be, though I anticipate "not much."

Thoughts?

That one line in this year's tor.com First Lines Game wasn't actually from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, but by the time I realised that I was ten pages into the book, so I just kind of went with it. And then I wanted something else with a Tom Canty cover (shut up), and aamcnamara had put in Privilege of the Sword so that was already on my mind, so I picked up Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

Swordspoint has a sequel, The Fall of the Kings, by Kushner and Delia Sherman, set sixty years later and peripherally involving some of the same people. It's also got another sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, by Kushner alone, that takes place between the two. Normally I'm a strict publicationist when reading series (ask me about Narnia sometime if you want me to rant. Or better, don't) but for some reason I feel like I ought to read Privilege next and then Fall. I think it's because Fall feels so unlike the other two: it's got overt magic, and much less swordplay. Anyway, thoughts? [ETA: first reread for all three, so it's not like plot points will be spoiled for me or anything.]

(Tam Lin is about the small liberal arts college you wish you'd gone to and the college experience you wish you'd had, and it made me terribly homesick for things that never happened. The Riverside books... will probably get their own Medialog post.)

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Relatedly, Darrell K. Sweet has died. If you read the Wheel of Time books, or any fantasy at all from the 70s through 90s, you knew his covers: medieval / Ren-Faire-ish, very busy, with bright colors and slightly muddy shading. At one time my bookshelf had more DKS cover art than not. I very much liked his Lord Foul's Bane, and his Lord of the Rings covers on my battered paperbacks are still what I think of when I think of "Lord of the Rings." He was... iconic, in a way that not many other cover artists have been. Canty, of course; Michael Whelan; Frank Frazetta, Rowena Morrill, Boris Vallejo. Midori Snyder Kinuko Craft, now, although she may be more of a niche thing as she mostly makes me think "Patricia McKillip."

(The other thing about DKS is that whatever the merits of his artwork, he read the books he was illustrating and his covers always depicted a scene from the book. This is rarer than you'd think it might be.)

My taste long ago drifted away from the things implied by a DKS cover on a book, but still... it's something from my past that's definitely gone now, with no going back.