Words are inadequate

The last two weeks have seen my largest book-acquiring binge since the Tysons Corner Borders closed. Unsurprisingly, we're now entirely out of credit at the two used bookstores in Bellingham.

BOOKS ACQUIRED:

• Two gifts (one Chihuly book for Mrs F, one [REDACTED])
  
• One Stoppard play (Night and Day)
  
• One paperback with Roger Zelazny's name slapped on the cover (Chronomancer by Jane Lindskold, the novelisation of a decent mid-nineties point-and-click adventure game with worldbuilding by Roger)
  
• Two first-two-of-a-trilogy (Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura on repeated plugs by thanate plus a vague recollection that City of Bones was pretty good; and Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light because we had spare credit at one bookstore and his name sounds familiar)
  
• One last-three-of-a-tetrology (the previously mentioned Long Price Quartet, because I seem to have become interested in closed series books again)
  
• One second-of-a-trilogy (eBear's Shattered Pillars)
  
• One third-of-a-trilogy (WJW's Conventions of War, and seriously, Chapters, would it have been so hard to ship the second one at the same time?)

BOOKS STILL REQUIRED:

• Martha Wells, The Siren Depths (dependent of course on liking the first two)
  
• Ken MacLeod, Engine City (ditto)
  
• Hal Duncan, Ink (unless Vellum goes entirely off the rails in the next few hundred pages, but I'm liking it so far)
  
• Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer
  
• WJW, The Sundering (on order from Chapters)
  
• And as always, various not-yet-published / -written, to include the third Eternal Sky book, Aspects: A Novel With Sorcery (ha), and while we're dreaming however many more books it'll take WJW to finish the Metropolitan sequence

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And a meme! Via firecat.

How this works:

You comment, I give you an age (please tell me how old you are, or risk having to time-travel to find out the answers) and you respond to the meme questions with what applied to you back then, and what's true now.

firecat gave me 19. Eep. That would be December of 1995 and most of 1996.

I lived in:
A dorm room in Newman Hall at Virgina Tech, with James Matthew Roberts. I think that was the summer I took a couple of classes, so I stayed in Newman until July (Matt left in May). I stayed with my parents for a couple of months, and then Apartment Six in Blacksburg, with Mandy, Kym, and, um, I don't remember if Justin was there that semester or if he was off co-oping and had left us with Random Rob the subleaser.

Now I live in a condo in Vancouver, with uilos and two geriatric cats.

I drove:
Nothing at all, except for visits home when I borrowed Dad's dark green pickup.

Now I drive ... nothing at all, except for the occasional Car2Go or rental.

I was in a relationship with:
I'd started dating Shaye B-- right before I left for college; that lasted until a week after Valentine's. (Stupid February.) I got together with Steph D-- sometime in July.

Now I'm in a long-term relationship with uilos, who I met that August.

I feared:
In winter and spring I was scared of losing Shaye, and of getting bad grades. I don't think I was specifically afraid of anything in the fall. Other than being a failure and being alone.

Those last two are pretty much the only things I fear now, but now I'm willing to call them by name.

I worked at:
I was a full-time student at Tech, living off student loans.

Now I'm a tech writer for a medium-sized software company.

I wanted to be:
An engineer, a writer, a graduate, independent, surrounded by friends, loved, recognised.

Now I'd just like to be more confident in myself; everything else follows from that. If I could only get my record clean, I'd be a genius.

What are you reading?

I've made it about two-thirds through Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child. I am doing a lot of nodding and saying "yes, exactly" as I read this, which suggests it's good and relevant. Then a lot of what's there falls out of my head five minutes later, which suggests even more strongly that it's good and relevant, in ways that my brain is refusing to think about because they're scary/painful. I think I may need to reread this fairly soon after finishing it.

What did you recently finish reading?

Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams. Mid-eighties cyberpunk, indebted in equal parts to Neuromancer and Zelazny's Damnation Alley. Fantastic if you're into that sort of thing. (I am.) Also, JMF's Web of Angels, a pre-Neuromancer cyberpunk novel. I think Hardwired may be the better book; it has certainly aged better, in both tech and storytelling. Web is not without its charms, though.

What do you think you’ll read next?

The books I have with me are Tristan Taormino's Opening Up and WJW's Voice of the Whirlwind (100-years-later sequel to Hardwired), so most likely one or both of those.

Via sartorias, on Book View Cafe.

What are you reading?

I'm currently about forty pages into N.K. Jemisin's The Shadowed Sun. It and the first book (The Killing Moon) have been slow going and I'm not sure why; good characters, fantastic worldbuilding, fine prose. There's just something there that's slowing me down. Might be the need to actively process everything that's going on, because so much is unfamiliar. Regardless I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

I'm also reading chunks of Diaspora, a hard-SF RPG built on the Fate engine. I... am not sure what I think of Fate as described in Diaspora. I'm having a hard time getting my head around the use of Aspects and Fate points. It's possible that story-games aren't my thing, at least not as presented here. I'm also not thrilled by the various combat mini-games. On the other hand, the collaborative world-building of a number of linked star systems seems like a lot of fun.

What did you recently finish reading?

Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear, because semilocal J-- was kind enough to loan me her copy when I mentioned that all the Vancouver library copies were reserved. In sharp contrast to the Jemisin, I breezed through this in the space of about a week. It's very good epic fantasy. About halfway through I realised the word I was looking for was "melodrama," of which it has its fair share-- but I'm willing to accept that because the main conceit is that it's the main character telling his life story to a chronicler. I'm very interested to see where Rothfuss goes with the third book, and even more interested to see what he does next.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Either the last volume of Zelazny's Collected Stories or Nancy Kress's Steal Across the Sky, both of which have been at the top of my TBR shelf for months now. Or maybe something else.

Posts I have been intending to write for awhile now, and may or not get to:

• Medialog, Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus
  
• Medialog, Flann O'Brian's The Third Policeman
  
• Medialog?, Burn Notice S1 vs Leverage S1
  
• What I have been and will soon be up to
  
• On the uselessness of role-playing books
  
• On having a close friend again (mostly by accident, as these things tend to be), and some implications thereof
  
• And a month and a half of linkspam, probably broken up among several posts.

Soon, grasshopper.

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So apparently it's National Book Day? Or at least World Book Day in the UK. Good enough excuse for one of them question meme things, this one via mrissa.

The book I'm reading: Warren Ellis's Ellisian noir Crooked Little Vein, on loan from semilocal J--. Roger Zelazny, Collected Stories v.5: Nine Black Doves. I've had a bookmark in the front of Kushner & Sherman's The Fall of the Kings for months now. I suppose I can be said to have given up on truepenny's Corambis since it's been six months since I touched it. (Too much all at once; binged on the first three volumes and then my brain said "okay done now" around page 50.)

Books I'm writing: um. The last time I looked at "Junkyard Dog" I thought it might actually be a YA novel, or a novella with a YA protagonist. And I don't think "One Only" is a novel but there's one (at least) in that universe. Etc.

The book I love the most: gah. If you held a gun to my head I'd say Heat of Fusion And Other Stories by John M. Ford, at least today.

The last book I received as a gift: Vancouver Special by Charles Demers, an Xmas gift from uilos.

The last book I gave as a gift: Clark Ashton Smith's Red World of Polaris, to uilos for Xmas. She had very nice things to say about the quality of the book. The prose contained within seems to have been, um, for Smith completists.

The nearest book: A large paperback edition of Hesiod (Theogony, Works and Days, Shield), because the Misc shelf (top to bottom: poetry, cooking, Greeks + drama, more drama, lit-crit / writing advice / The Guide To Getting It On, oversized art books) is in the office behind me. If you go with "book that's not shelved," it's Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which I picked up along with The Third Policeman a few weeks ago.

The book I want someone else to please write for me: I'm still looking for something like "A History of Vancouver, 1960-2010." The Demers book was close but not quite; it's more focused on contemporary Vancouver and only incidentally touches on how it got that way.

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Links, visual. Videos or comics or images.

The Lumarca: a short film of "a low-cost visualization project." Gorgeous.

This record player reads tree rings instead of LPs.

Darkness: "My roommate is dark... Sometimes you meet people like that, they have one adjective that fits them like a glove."

Old school screensaver.

Some self-assembly required.

Via jadelennox, I feel like slacktivisticly saving the US Postal service Canada Post.

First ten people to comment (comments screened) with their address and then repost this meme in their own blogs will get a snail mail letter.

ETA: Comments are screened; you're not just putting your address out for the world's spambots to harvest.

Eh, sure, why not.

Question authority! Ask me anything, and I'll attempt to answer. Truthfully, even.

(Questions screened.)

As seen around the web, most recently at badmagic and kdsorceress, a letter.

( Dear fifteen-year-old self: )

Also got long.

( from kdsorceress )

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( from absolutliz )

From rbandrews:

1. Other than people who live there, what's so great about Seattle?

The temperature and humidity. The transit system. Pike Place Market. Being right by the water. The way the clouds part and the sunlight's bright enough to shatter the gloom. Mountains. It's just my kind of place.

2. What is the worst job you've ever had?

A&W cashier, 1997-2000. Long hours, bad pay, high stress, a manager (Jed) who spent all his time on the phone with his ex-wife, an assistant manager (Carlos the Asshole) who'd mastered the art of sucking up to the boss while making everyone else's life miserable, and coworkers who for the most part ranged from "horrid" to "mediocre." Things improved when Carlos left after a year, and Jed left after another, so by the time I quit it was only godawful instead of staggeringly horrid.

3. Would you rather be a famous author, famous game designer, or a rock star?

Rock stars make more money and get more adulation, but I've still got to go with "author."

4. What is the thing you miss the least about Blacksburg? (turnabout is what kind of play, again?)

What Jonathan Tweet referred to as the "mystic s*** crowd" in Over the Edge. I'm not talking about the pagans; I'm talking about the morons. (There is, of course, some amount of overlap.)

When I was busy being depressed and failing out of college in spring '97, I spent a lot of time in Owens food court: there was almost always someone to talk to, and the refills on cokes were free if you brought your mug. One day the fluorescent light directly overhead was having some problems: every fifteen minutes or so it'd go BZZZZT and cut off briefly. During the several hours I was there I had no less than four different people, at different times, notice the flicker and say some variant of "sorry about that, i'm not shielding too well today."

(I also had a roommate tell me not to have sex on the vernal equinox or else I'd get my partner pregnant. I'm mostly willing to chalk that up to passive-aggressive shenanigans, but it's still good for a head-shake.)

5. What convinced you that polyamory was right for you?

Prior to Thanksgiving 2005 I spent months if not years resisting the idea that I might be poly, because the only examples I had weren't ones I wanted to emulate. I wasn't poly, and wasn't in love with two people; I was just confused and needed time to sort out my head.

Then over Thanksgiving I was spending time with some old friends late one night, and found myself having the following conversation inside my head:
"It would be really easy to fall in love with her."
"Oh? And that wouldn't mean I wasn't in love with uilos or nixve?"
"... no, it wouldn't."
"Well, then."

(It's a valid but ultimately academic question as to whether my willingness to have this conversation with myself was sparked by my_catharsis's death the day before.)

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

The heck with "supposed to." On the other hand I'm bored this week and have a short attention span.

( one through twenty-five )