Ick

[mrissa]

So. We're not sure yet, but it looks like timprov is going to need some more doctor time to balance out this spinal fluid thing. Which was one of the reasonably likely possibilities, and we will deal with it just fine.

I'm not sure I can continue to blame the antibiotics for how I've been feeling this morning. I may have some virus on top of them. At any rate, I was not well enough to read for most of last night and early this morning. I'm well enough to read now, I think, but I still intend to spend the day at home doing nothing "useful." I will shower this afternoon and put on clean pajamas. This is giving in to the Sick, I realize. But sometimes that's the way to go.

I'm reading Octavia Butler's Fledgling, when I'm up for reading, and I watched a movie version of "Five Children and It," which was substantially different from my memory of the book, so I think I'm going to reread the book soon. (I have learned through bitter experience that it's best in this order. I hated the Oliver Platt/Kiefer Sutherland/Charlie Sheen version of "The Three Musketeers" the first time I'd seen it, because I had just finished the book the previous week. Now I like it just fine, because I know it's not The Three Musketeers but another story by the same name.)

Tell me what you're reading, and whether you like it, and why.

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I just finished The Surgeon's Mate, and I quite enjoyed it. I haven't decided what to read next yet. I have a ton of unread books left to read from Christmas and my birthday, and one more book I want to buy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have a pretty good stack left from Christmas, too, and from other people's discards. I should do a book give-away post again soon....

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I settled on Reave the Just, and Other Tales by Stephen Donaldson.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Eco's "The Myth of Superman" is a neat little piece, and touches quite eloquently on the structural reasons for why many iterative and serial works are content to repeat what are essentially the same story over and over again. I'm also seeing theoretical connections between Eco's work and the work of later authors, which will be useful when I have to do the survey of previous studies of seriality in my thesis.

I also stayed up late to finish Hammered last night. I'll have to pick up Scardown from the Coop or read it in the MIT SFS soon.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I'm currently reading Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand. I'm not very deep into it, but I'm enjoying it well enough. I think Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard will remain my more definitive book on the topic, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought The Stress of Her Regard was better, too. I had some issues with Mortal Love's handling of mental illness, among other things.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and I never noticed before how funny Welty and Delta look together. It's very lyrical and owes a lot to Virginia Woolf, insofar as a southern American writer can sound like a mannered experimental British modernist. Southern writing appears to have "lyrical" as its major commonality. Do I like it? Not sure. Only thirty pages in.

[ellarien]

Patricia McKillip's Solstice Wood, which is a bit different from her usual thing -- it has a present-day setting. I'm not very far in yet, but so far I like the blend of just-out-of-sight faerie and modern practicalities like cell phones, though it isn't as uniquely and recognizably McKillip as most of her work. I probably need to reread Winter Rose, then reread this, to get the most out of it.

[pameladean]

Having just come off a long triumphant string of new reading, I have relapsed upon a Martha Grimes mystery called The Winds of Change. I haven't read it yet, but it's part of a series, so it's only semi-new. Do I like it? Well, enough to keep reading it. Her writing is erratic. Sometimes she has just the right phrase, and sometimes she overshoots. She does great kids and animals. I am fond of her detective, even though I spent the last few books shaking my fist at him and yelling, "Quit BROODING!" I don't know what her editor is thinking, or her copy editor. I don't see how a little thing like a whole paragraph about how some character's smile is devastating because he uses it so seldom, followed by a conversation with a total stranger in which said character smiles eight times, could get past a reader. I know how it could get past an author, mind you. But geeze.

It's a useful reminder to me to check for tics in my own work, for sure. Also when she is at the top of her form, she's very funny.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of problem that makes me write "MAKE THIS TRUE" in the margin of a first or second draft, with underlining under a key phrase like "uses it so seldom."

I think my internal editor may have Patrick Stewart days.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I recently finished Fortress of Thorns and am excited to start on The Grey Road. :)

I am reading the Garth Nix series, The Seventh Tower. I distinctively like it mostly because it has a viking-type girl that is fun to compare with Dwarf's Blood Mead, and it has good characterization for familiar-type creatures. Otherwise it's just generic inoffensive YA fantasy. (I like his series that just had Drowned Wednesday come out much better, but those books are coming out once every 1.5 years or so, and the other series is finished).

At work I'm reading commentaries on the Johannine Epistles. They are very rewarding when I can stay focused instead of dozing off. They're good for theology and early church history and discrediting Gnostics, and I have a soft spot for all three of those things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Drowned Wednesday series, though I've read the rest of Nix. Probably I should.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

The "Keys to the Kingdom" Series has some good and intriguing bits, but it's not really on par with the Abhorsen books, IMHO. Try out Mister Monday and see what you think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You don't have to be be H around here, Alec!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I am rereading Naomi Kritzer's Dead Rivers trilogy of which only the first two books are out. Sure hope the third is published this year. I like them because they are historic fantasy not set in faux-medieval England, the magic in them is limited (there's really only one element of magic) and cool, and the people are interesting. Good story, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It sounded to me on naomikritzer's lj as though the third one comes out this year. So that's good.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I think I already mentioned the two I started last week. I am not sure yet if I like the Banks; I am sure I've probably already said too much about the Berger. I got reminded that I had thought about reading Jack Zipes quite a while ago, so I checked out The Brothers Grimm, Happily Ever After, and When Dreams Come True, and one by Derek Jarret called The Sleep of Reason. I am also working my way through some rose choices downloaded from the UnCommon Rose, and the Winter 2006 issue of The Journal of Mythic Arts, a huge tome on the works of Michelangelo, and the EM Forster Aspects of the Novel is still here but I haven't done much with it. And for work, some articles by Dr Richard Hurd from the Labor Relations end of Cornell.

I am actually enjoying the Hurd pieces. He's looking at professional associations from the outside and discussing what they do well and why people belong but with all this labor backround. It reminded me how it is easier for a knowledgable outsider to see thos things, and I think his openess to the two learning from each other.

We do both and we are quite unusual for that. It creates strengths at the same time it creates stresses also, from having a kind of split personality. The two can exist uneasily. They have historically. I don't believe they have to, so this is reinforcing at the same time it highlights sme areas I may want to focus on.

The Berger was a big piece for me last week and I am still processing that. I think I need to reread it after letting it stew for a week or so. I've just started Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry, and I suspect I am going to like that too. It has soemthing in common with Berger's The Sense of Sight in that I am not coming to either cold.

I had a small wish with the Berger that I could step back in time and experience that book from what I was in 1985, not because of wishing I could have read it then and had it change my way of seeing, although that would have been good; but just to get the full impact his work might have had had I been a part of that culture.

With the Zipes also, I've read enough on various boards and other places that I already know the material won't be new to me but I anticipate a similar type of read. There will be things in there I don't know, and I am looking forward to it.

The roses are always good. I'd like to try some Barden's this year. I've been reading his websight for almost as long as I've been online, and I am a great admirer of both the site and his work. Likewise with the Mythic Arts Journal. There is always something there that sparks both my thinking and my work, and this issue looks particularly rich, especially in the visual arts. It's also dovetailing with the labyrinths reading I was doing last week and different types of transformational experiences.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oof, that's a lot, thanks!

[jsgbits.livejournal.com]

In the middle of John Crowley's The Deep and just opened Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla (book 5 in the Gunslinger series).

Crowley is one of my favorite writers for style, mood, and tone.
King is one of my favorite writers for story.

I finished a non-fiction book by Robert McKee, a noted screenwriter, called Story. It's a very good read for someone who had never read any How To books before. Although its focus is on screenwriting/screenplays, many of the points can be applied to novels. I also really enjoyed his breakdown of some well-known movies.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I am reading the first Newsweek magazine from February, because I can't ever seem to get closer than at least one month behind. And bits and pieces of my pregnancy book, as applicable. Soon we will be reviewing the "what to pack for the hospital" section, so we can at least make a list, if not do the actual packing ahead of time.

I also read a book about how dinosaurs go to bed to the people that attended my baby shower. It was greatly enjoyed by all. :)

I would possibly be reading more if we weren't still a week behind on our TiVo recordings of Olympic coverage.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That would drive me nuts with a news magazine. I would tend to start with the most recent one that had arrived and go backwards from there. I can see how that would mean skipping some issues eventually, but that would drive me less nuts than being behind on the news. But then, most of my experience of news magazines was maintaining the extemporaneous speaking filebox in high school, where being behind on the news was a liability to the speakers, not just a backlog of work.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Actually, being behind on the news is helping me get though each magazine issue quicker. A lot of the political stories aren't interesting to me anymore after a month, especially since I've heard said stories rehashed a million times elsewhere. I'll admit, reading the profiles of Olympic athletes now rather than a month ago was a bit annoying, but for the most part, the things I would have found interesting a month ago are still the parts I want to read now.