Daily Archives: March 31, 2008

What I Read This March

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler
No Humans Involved by Kelley Armstrong
The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King
Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Spirit by Deborah Kesten
The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon by W.O. Mitchell
A Genius in the Family by Hilary and Piers du Pré (reread)
A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King
Atonement by Ian McEwan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon

Atonement: The middle of the novel lost me. It was well-written, I just didn’t enjoy it. Much preferred the first and third sections. I can see why it was made into a film, and now I’m mildly interested in seeing what the film is like.

No Humans Involved: Finally, a chance to see Jeremy away from the pack! This book also helped me like Jaime a lot more than I previously have.

A Grave Talent and Art of Detection: I read these voraciously. I enjoy King’s Mary Russell series, so it’s just taken me a while to get around to the Kate Martinelli books. But now that I have, hurrah. Yes, I know I missed reading a few between the first and most recent titles; the latter was the only one my local bookstore had when I’d finished reading Mousme‘s loan of A Grave Talent.

Er, yes. That’s about it. They were books; I read them and enjoyed them to various degrees. Not much to say other than that.

Growl


Stupid page proofs.

I’m going to STET all the punctuation corrections I did. I think. Maybe. Well, I’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.

I’m catching other errors on the second go-through. I wish inconsistencies in phrasing through rituals etc. had been caught in copy-edits. I wish they’d been more stringent. This will teach me to crow about an easy copy-edit review.

I want these gone, gone, gone by tomorrow. I need the time to finish the other book, you know, the one that needs to be handed in in a week or so?

Hope and Healing

I wasn’t online yesterday so I missed the bone marrow registry/Heal Emru reminder blog-a-thon date, but better late than never, especially in a case like this.

I’ve said it before, but I’m saying it again: it’s quick, easy, and you’ll likely never get called. But if you do, you’ll be giving up a day or so of your life to save someone else’s.

Here’s the pertinent point: ethnic minorities are woefully under-represented in the registry, so if you’re of Ashkenazi, South Asian, East Asian, Pacific Islander, Aboriginal, Caribbean, African or mixed ethnic heritage — among many others — it’s even more important that you add your information to the registry to provide a wider pool from which a matching sample may be drawn. If you’re tested in regards to a relative, make sure to say that you want to be on the unrelated donor registry as well.

Emru was diagnosed with leukaemia in mid-December of 2007. As is typical of their enormous hearts and giving souls, Emru and his sister Tamu have taken this opportunity to work on behalf of everyone who needs a bone marrow transplant. The web site may be called Heal Emru, but it’s about people everywhere with cancer or sickle cell anaemia who are suffering daily while they wait and pray for a matching donor to be found. The excellent web site features clear FAQs, contact info for registries all over the world, information on how to register, copies of interviews they’ve given in print and audio media as well as related interviews or articles, and flyers and other images to print out and use wherever you can. The web site now exists in French as well as English.

It’s not just Emru. It’s every single person out there, hoping that a match will be found so that they can go on living.

Drop by your local blood clinic and talk to them about the process. It’s important. It’s such a small thing on your part, but someone else’s life and well-being, and the lives of their family and friends and colleagues.

The impact you can make is beyond measuring.

Heal-Emru.com

Such A Monday

This morning, I drove home from dropping the boy off in white-out conditions. It’s cruel, after a lovely warm and sunny weekend. Wasn’t this supposed to be rain? The first few flakes began falling and the boy said, “Why the snow?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think we should tell it to go away.” From the back seat there came a very clear and deliberate, “SNOW, GO AWAY!”

Thank goodness for a lovely recording of The Lark Ascending on CBC that played on my way home. I always think of Pasley when I hear it. Otherwise I’m so irritated by the CBC these days. They’re disbanding the CBC Radio Orchestra — the last surviving radio orchestra in North America — and they’re changing the Radio 2 format yet again so that it’s no longer going to be a mainly classical station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly revamped it to feature more jazz and folk and so forth, with which I’ve not been thrilled but have tolerated (although the radio gets turned off at 6 on the dot because I cannot stand what the evening programming has become). Now, however, they’re formally announcing that they’re going to go more mainstream, and cancelling the existing shows. This was done to net a larger audience, but it’s backfiring already: the backlash has been dreadful, and they’re going to lose droves of current listeners (like me, hello, who’s been a faithful listener for decades). If they did market research, they certainly didn’t think of asking their current audience what they thought of the idea. I’ve been meaning to write about this since they announced it and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put my resentment about this dilution of content and commitment to culture into words. This isn’t what I wanted to say, either, but I have to say something at some point.

I am stiff and achy and want to be in the better mood I was in this past weekend.