Jul. 15th, 2007

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I answered some newbie-with-Japanese-garb questions on sca-jml, and worked on the sleeves and collar for the Tosenin. Why didn't I finish them?

Because I needed to get out of the garret. Badly.

KDFC's Sunday morning "Big Island (of Serenity)"programing was so serene it was putting me to sleep - Vivaldi and Mozart's Flute and Harp concerto and some damn Harry Potter waltzy thing from Goblet of Yawning Bore. At least they finally cracked the somnolence with Monti's "Czardas" )  Remember, finishing the gold work does not mean this project is finished, it means it's maybe halfway done I can finish the gold tomorrow night if I want but I need clean underwear SOON.

I ran a load of laundry and finished reading  Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, which only serves to remind me to get down on my knees and thank God that J. K. Rowling says she has written the last of  Harry F***ing Potter and maybe people will start reading something clever and intelligent that actually deserves to sell well. Thanks to [profile] mamapduck for turning me on to Fforde with The Eyre Affair.

I look at the $25 Boring Snowballs gift card that's been sitting on the TV table since Christmas and think, "Emeryville or Jack London Square?" Emeryville will be harder to get to traffic-wise.

Silly me. I forgot that Jack London Square is THE Barnes and Noble that will never actually have anything you want, unless it's every edition of every Jack London title. Or Harry F***ing Potter, of course, because somebody might actually run out of the Jack London Cinema and have to buy a copy of The Order Of The Flea Collar. The "Summer Reading" table was like a bad flashback from high school, except they had Life of Pi and a Chinua Achebe novel mixed in there with the Hemingway and the Salinger and the Fitzgerald. They did NOT have Well of Lost Plots, so I had to settle for Something Rotten. They did not have Lindsay Davis' See Delphi and Die. I settled on Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, which passed my Random Paragraph Test.  I was pleased to see a prominent display stand for a new paperback edition of Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials, no doubt tying into the December release of The Golden Compass.

I read a review of the new Potter. It sounds like it really helps if you liked the book. I thought Order of the Phoenix was boring, so I doubt I'm going to go out of my way to see it in a theater. Potter as gateway drug has its merits. Give your kid Sorcerer's Stone to read, then say, "You liked that, wait until you read THIS!" and hand them The Golden Compass. Or Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave.....
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Picking up from the last thread, because I spent part of the afternoon roaming around a bookstore trying to find something decent to read. Granted,  my father lobbed a lot of Great Classics Of Litrachure at me whenever I seemed bored and I was attacking Dickens 900-pagers when I was nine. Dickens, the Brontes,  Mr. Clemens and so forth are worthies, of course, but this is the stuff I was running to the library for as a kid and a teen.

Mary Stewart's Merlin series. I read and reread and reread The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills over and over and over.

T. H. White's The Once And Future King too.

Mary Renault's Greek novels.

The juvenile works of Robert Heinlein and some of the not so juvenile works of Heinlein - before he turned into a completely insufferable and pompous ass. If Harry and his classmates had read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress they'd've rebelled against the tyrranical Umbridge a good 80 pages sooner.

Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea Trilogy, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven.

C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

E. L. Konigsburg. From the Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Won the 1968 Newberry award. It's like The Da Vinci Code for kids. I've been trying to think of ways to dodge security for an overnight stay in one of my favorite museums for decades now because of this one.

Elizabeth Enright. The Saturdays. Four very bored children come up with a plan not to be bored: pool their allowances so that each Saturday a different sibling gets to spend the money doing something special.

Howard Fast. April Morning. Lexington and Concord, 1775. Also Freedom Road on the Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Can't remember the author. I think the title was To Spit In The Wind, and it was about Thomas Paine.

(Oh, good another oldie that you can find thanks to the internet!)
William Mayne. Earthfasts.

James Thurber. The Thirteen Clocks. For when you're in the mood for something silly.

Josephine Tey. The Daughter of Time.

Michael Crichton. The Andromeda Strain. Borrowed this one form Mom. I was twelve. I had a technical science question she couldn't answer. I wrote to the author. He wrote a very nice letter back, answering my question. (This was before The Terminal Man had even come out.) To this day I am kicking myself that we lost the letter during a move.

The following were discovered much later in life, but I think they would've qualified just as much:

Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series.  Condemned by a prenatal  chemical attack to being frail and physically odd looking, Miles decides not to let his shortcomings get in the way of  doing what needs to be done.  Not your average hero, this one. Start with The Warrior's Apprentice. If you like that one, then you can decide whether you want to read the rest of them chronologically.

Salman Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories. I saw it lying on a table at Dad's, thought the title was absolutely wonderful. He lent it to me when he was done. The story is even better than the title. Read this one aloud to your kids if they're not old enough to read it themselves. Absolutely magical in all the best senses of the word.

What, no Tolkein, you say? I read it as a kid. I liked it well enough then. I tried reading it again right around the time the first of the Peter Jackson films came out, got most of the way through Fellowship and got bored with Tolkein's writing style. It just doesn't work for me any more, so I'm not going to pretend that it does.

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