What I Read In August 2010
Not much this month; not a lot of time for reading, or the energy/focus for it.
Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (reread)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (reread)
Star Wars: Survivor’s Quest by Timothy Zahn
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (reread)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Gwenhwyfar by Mercedes Lackey
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The boy and I have read over half of The Guardians of Ga’Hoole: The Capture, too. We’re really enjoying it. This is his very first chapter book without any illustrations at all, and he’s paying good attention.
What I Read In July 2010
Perilous Gard Elizabeth Pope (reread)
The White Cat by Holly Black
A Comet in Moominland Tove Jansson (reread)
The Path of a Christian Witch by Adelina St.Clair
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly McNees
The Lost Years of Jane Austen by Barbara Wilson
Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn
I give up on:
Freedom & Necessity by Steven Brust & Emma Bull (this has a great premise but I just can’t settle into it)
Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (the style of this keeps me at arm’s length)
Extraordinary Engines ed. Nick Gevers (short fiction, and again, most of them are holding me at arm’s length)
Other:
Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain (I have had one chapter of this to go for a year, and I’m finally declaring it read in order to get it the heck off my bedside table.)
Stories ed. Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio (I can’t rightly say I read this, since I read less than half the stories, but I did read some of it before I had to take it back to the library. I quite enjoyed Gaiman’s story and Joanne Harris’, as well. Nothing else stuck in my head.)
The moral of the story is apparently that it’s summer and I can’t focus on much. And I want to enjoy short fiction, I truly do, but by the time I settle into the style or story it’s over, and the next thing is different and I have to go through the whole adjustment process again.
Catching Up
Let’s see, what of importance happened last week that I didn’t sit down and write about?
* A second job with my publisher in negotiation, this one for a single editing contract due in November. My editor is a networking goddess. Also, I hammered a lot of evaluation assignments home in the past two weeks and today I get to invoice for a very nice amount.
* The inevitable happened, and the boy lost Whitey-Blackie the bunny on a shopping trip Friday. Oh, the screams in the car after the first fruitless search when I explained that if he was lost and we couldn’t find him, then someone had found him and picked him up to give him a good home. “AAAAAAAAAH!” screamed the boy through his tears. “I DON’T WANT ANYONE ELSE TO HAVE HIM!” Cuddling him while he cried in the car was a sobering example of how sometimes all you can do is hold someone while they grieve or rage against the injustice of life, and that sometimes a mother’s kiss doesn’t make it all better. Retracing our steps the second time, we found the bunny stuffed under the bottom shelf in Zellers where we had been trying on new sandals that didn’t rub the boy’s feet to fresh blisters on top of the blisters of the day before.
* I had a lovely surprise Saturday morning. It was dull and gloomy, and I haven’t been sleeping well, so the boy was up playing and I was still lying abed with a book when the phone rang. “Who’s calling at this hour?” I said, leaping for the phone, but of course it wasn’t seven-thirty (which is what both the light and my inner clock were telling me), it was nine-thirty, and Bodhifox was on the line to wish me a belated birthday. I curled up in my office reading chair and had a very enjoyable chat with him. It set a lovely tone for the rest of the day.
* We had friends over on Saturday night and ordered in an incredibly large spread of General Tao, beef and black bean noodles, spicy peanut butter ravioli, and other things. This was a belated birthday thing, too, and was an inspired alternative to all of us going out. The food cooled a bit beyond what I’d have liked while I put the boy to bed, and I should have thought of putting everything in the barely warm oven to keep it hot. And Ceri made a peanut butter pie which was kind of like an ice cream pie with chocolate sauce that was light and delicious.
* I am so very tired of talking to people about the house. I was tired of it two days after we sealed the deal, and so many conversations still lead back to it. Yes, it’s a house, it’s lovely, we’re happy, but all I seem to do is repeat the same information over and over when people ask about it, which is boring to me and thus, I assume, boring to others. That said, it must be recorded here that after all is said and done, our combined monthly mortgage payment is going to be slightly less than our current rent. It’s only by about six dollars, but it’s the principle of the thing, and makes us very happy. Also, no one seems to make the kind of light wooden-leg loveseat I want for the new living room, and I am peeved. We have picked our paint colours, though. Earthy and creamy tones, as usual, because they work for us.
* I picked up the new Scott Pilgrim graphic novel on Friday, and finished it in about twenty minutes, handed it to HRH, and watched him finish it in about forty-five. (An excellent wrap-up of everything with some really good storytelling; I am pleased with it.) We then sent it home with Scott on Saturday, which was only right as he and Ceri had lent us the first five as they came out. Besides, he left me Tongue of Serpents, the new Temeraire novel, in return, so everyone is happy.
* I had literally just finished reading The Lost Years of Jane Austen, which posits that Jane travelled to New South Wales (AKA Australia) with her aunt and uncle Leigh Perrot, when Scott brought me the new Temeraire novel… which takes place in the same place at essentially the same time, so all the place names and locations and general conditions are familiar to me. Very synchronous and convenient for my mindset.
* The boy and I stopped by the library on Friday (post-Whitey-Blackie incident; the bunny stayed in the car, as all toys are doing from now on) and I discovered that they had the first two Moomintroll books on the new acquisitions shelf on the kids’ side. I jumped up and down and exclaimed and snatched the first one, and the boy totally brushed me and my excitement off, heading for Dewey numbers 625-629, which are his regular turf. That night I said we could read the first chapter at bedtime, but he said no; then he compromised, saying I could read him a picture book of his choice and then the first chapter of whatever this chapter book I was so excited about might be. And it turns out that when we got to the end of that chapter, he took my arm and said, “No, Mama, you should keep reading.” We read a chapter and a half the next afternoon while HRH vacuumed, and another chapter and a half that night, and a chapter last night, too. We’re going to have to go back for volume two sooner rather than later. Or perhaps we shall buy them, which would make me very happy indeed. I found my first Moomintroll book at a church sale when I was about ten, and loved the series so much.
* I spun 4 ounces of Corriedale into a single comparable to the single I spun last weekend of the HAY batts, and dyed it a deep sort of crimson rust colour yesterday. It’s drying now, and I’m hoping the colour complements the HAY single well enough to ply them together this week. I also experimented with dyeing 4 oz of the local wool/mohair roving I had, mixing up what I thought should be a celery green and looked it in the pot, but when the roving dried it was more of a cheerful lemon-lime colour. I tried blending some with a bit of white Tencel on my hackle comb, but while it breaks the solid green up a bit it doesn’t have the lighter sheen I wanted. I think I’ll spin the green roving as-is, then possibly overdye it with a bit of blue. My problem so far is I think I’m mixing up really weak dye solutions (a quarter-teaspoon of dye powder total to about eight cups of water) but they’re stronger than I expect. This green would have worked if it had been about a third of the concentration. From now on, I’ll mix the solution and then use maybe half of it; I can always do a second dye bath to deepen a colour, but you can’t take dye out.
* Working on some nudges and fixes of Emily’s cello book (second edition! if you own the first edition it is now a collector’s item!) made me want to play the cello, so I pulled it out and played for half an hour. I regretfully sent a note to my cello teacher saying that the plan had been to set up lessons again after everyone’s stuff in July was done, but now that we’re moving in three and a half weeks I just don’t have time, what with packing and work.
* Music-wise I have been thoroughly enjoying Zoe Keating’s new album Into the Trees, and Hans Zimmer’s score to last year’s Sherlock Holmes. I also recently picked up Danny Elfman’s score to The Wolfman, with lots and lots of lovely dark cello, but it has, alas, suffered in the aforementioned company, and so I have tucked it away for re-introduction later when my brain is not obsessed with other music.
Right, enough of that. This is what happens when I don’t blog for a week.
What I Read in June 2010
Charlie Bone and the Red Knight by Jenny Nimmo
Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier
Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster
Size 12 is Not Fat by Meg Cabot
Tales of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters
Romancing Miss Bronte by Juliet Gael
I tried to read Susan Vreeland’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, something I’d been looking forward to for some time, but I couldn’t get past the sixth chapter. I just couldn’t get into the characters.
What I Read In May 2010
A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire
Changes by Jim Butcher
The Accidental Sorceror by K. Mills
Overnight Socialite by Bridie Clark
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Story of Cirrus Flux by Matthew Skelton
Simple Weaving by Hilary Chetwynd
By the Mountain Bound by Elizabeth Bear
Jacqueline du Pre by Elizabeth Wilson (reread)
The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (reread)
Changes: Whoa yeah. Well handled.
Soulless: I really, really wanted to like this more than I did. I wanted the world to be deeper, and the characters to be less light. It’s not the fault of the book; my expectations were different.
By the Mountain Bound: Elizabeth Bear is one of my favourite contemporary writers. She uses language so beautifully.
