Reading

Current Music: David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra, "Everybody Laughs"

Every song we sing and every kind of place

It is my fifteenth anniversary with

rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the last plague year.

Finally got a call back from the repairfolk

And they now expect the part in tomorrow, at which point we should be able to make an appointment to repair.

As I reiterated - but briefly, because the person making the call was not responsible for this situation - a delay in shipping is one thing, but lack of communication is something very different.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

We are undergoing some upheaval at work, and as always in times of upheaval, I’ve turned to the soothing verities of mystery novels. In this case, I read Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang, my first Nero Wolfe novel, which features MANY delicious meals, Nero Wolfe taking on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and a certain amount of Wolfe’s assistant Archie ogling women, the last of which means that I shouldn’t read too many of these books in a row or else I’ll get too irritated to continue. But I do mean to circle back to Rex Stout from time to time!

I also finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, which wrapped up with “The Grey Lady,” in which a woman escapes from her evil husband (a secret highwayman!) with the aid of her lady’s maid Amante, who disguises herself as a man and passes herself off as our narrator’s husband.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing my meander through Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Reading all those Newbery books from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has really helped me appreciate this book more, because their repeated paeans to Progress (and cowardly, skulking wolves who need to be shot) makes it clear just how hard Leopold was swimming against the tide when he notes that Progress has drawbacks, such as the fact that if you shoot all the wolves, the unchecked deer population will eat the mountainside down to easily eroded dirt.

Also, a quote that struck me: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? The label at Von’s said this book was one of Miyazaki’s favorites as a boy, and how was I to resist that?

Still no repair response

I sent them another voicemail and email saying that a delay in shipping or even ordering a part may be acceptable, understandable, or forgivable, but lack of communication is none of those things and if they don't get back to me with an ETA on this repair then they'll have to refund our deposit so we can call somebody else.

Either way, I know how I'm spending the next few hours (laundromat) and how I'm spending tomorrow morning (phone).

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We Live Here Now, by Sarah Pinborough

This novel appears to be a well-written and enjoyable but conventional haunted house story; it turns out to have a twist on that theme which I've never encountered before. I very much enjoyed discovering that for myself, so if you think you might too, don't read the spoilers.

A young couple, Emily and Freddie, move from London to Larkin Lodge, an old house in Dartmoor, while Emily's recovering from a serious accident. After she fell off a cliff, her heart stopped and one leg was permanently damaged. Doctors warned her and Freddie that she might suffer from post-sepsis mental complications, so when she starts perceiving weird things involving Larkin Lodge, both she and Freddie think it's probably her, not the house. Emily and Freddie's marriage is not the greatest, but is that something that was previously going on, or is it cracking under stress, or is the house having a bad effect on them?

Emily and Freddie are not the best people, but that really works for the story. I thought it was a lot of fun.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Content notes: Not even slightly gory or gross. Mention of a miscarriage (off-page, not described). Some violence, not graphic. No on-page animal harm, but the body of a dead raven is found.

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Not a lemonade stand

This past weekend I was doing errands, and there were a bunch of kids, maybe four, ages about nine to twelve, at a T-junction of a road into a development and the more general-use road. They were waving and gesticulating at passing cars the way high school kids do when they're trying to get you to come to their fundraiser car wash, but there was no place to wash cars, and these kids were definitely younger than high school age.

So maybe they were selling lemonade? Or cookies? Or --?

I came back around and pulled into the smaller street and parked.

"Pokemon cards! Pokemon cards for sale!" they yelled, waving around exactly the sort of notebooks my kids stored their Pokemon cards in.

"Why are you selling your Pokemon cards?" I asked.

"We're bored," said one.

"We want money," said another.

"We're going to buy more Pokemon cards," said a third.

"This card here?" said one, stabbing one with his finger, "it's worth $600. I looked it up on eBay."

"I don't think anyone driving by is going to have $600 on them," I said.

"No but, no but: this one guy? On a bicycle? He bought one for $30!" said another.

"And another guy said he'd come back with $50!"

O_o

Okay, what do I know?

They proceeded to show me several others that they assured me were worth hundreds of dollars.

"Mmmokay, but that's out of my price range," I said. "Do you have any in the $5–$10 range? ... of Pikachu?" (Because I am boring and vanilla)

They showed me several and I got a cute one for $10.

Then I told them the story of the ninja girl, how she entered a contest to design a Pokemon starter card for a starter pack, and her Pikachu won and was included in the pack. As a prize, she got a $500 gift card to Target and 50 packs of the winning five cards. Those are now worth a couple thousand dollars, so we've been told. Uhhh, yup, just checked. Here's an example showing the ninja girl's Pikachu.

I mentioned this to the kids, and one nodded knowledgeably. "A creator pack," he said. "You should get your daughter to come here and look at our cards."

"She lives in Japan," I said.

"JaPAN?!" he wailed. "Lucky! Japan is the best place for Pokemon cards because, um. It was started there."

Afterward I told the ninja girl the story and showed her the Pikachu I bought.

"Oh!" she said. "A surfing Pikachu! So cute!"

I told her I'd send it to her.

a metallic-shiny pokemon card of Pikachu on a surfboard

a metallic-shiny pokemon card of Pikachu on a surfboard

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Forgotten Newbery Books that Are Really Worth Reading

rachelmanija suggested a list of Forgotten Newbery Books that Are Really Worth Reading, so I’ve compiled my top ten, listed here in order of year of publication. For obvious reasons, this list skews toward the older books, and I tried to pick ones that I felt have been really forgotten, although it turns out that it can be a bit hard to tell if a book has been truly forgotten or if I, personally, just hadn’t happened to heard of it before this project.

1. Marjorie Hill Allee's Jane’s Island, 1932. Come for an engaging story that also meditates on women’s place in the sciences and society, stay for lovely description of life around the Wood’s Hole research station, and also for the cranky German scientist who is VERY shell-shocked from World War I and FIRMLY intends to prove that nature is red in tooth and claw.

2. Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus, 1932. FAIRIES put on a CIRCUS with the aid of WOODLAND CREATURES. What more could you want from a book!

3. Erick Berry’s Winged Girl of Knossos, 1934. Have you always wanted a retelling of the tale of Theseus and the minotaur crossed with Daedalus and Icarus with a genderswapped Icarus who is a tomboy in the tomboy-welcoming culture of ancient Crete? Yes you have.

4. Christine Weston’s Bhimsa, The Dancing Bear, 1946. Two boys (one English and one Indian) go adventuring across India in the company of their friend Bhimsa, the dancing bear. A fun adventure story.

5. Cyrus Fisher’s The Avion My Uncle Flew, 1947. An adventure story set in post-World War II France, featuring a glider and some secret Nazis in the mountains and the most impressive literary trick I’ve seen in a Newbery book, or indeed in pretty much any book ever. (I talk about it at more length in the review but don’t want to spoil it here.)

6. Claire Huchet Bishop's Pancakes-Paris, 1948. In post-war Paris, a young boy gets a box of pancake mix from some American soldiers, and makes pancakes for his mother and sister for Mardi Gras. That’s it! That’s the story.

7. Louise Rankin's Daughter of the Mountains, 1949. When a young Tibetan girl’s beloved dog is stolen, she chases him all the way across Tibet and into India to get him back. Super fun adventure story. No one is the least bit fazed at the idea of a girl having an adventure.

8. Jennie Lindquist's The Golden Name Day, 1956. Nancy spends a year with her Swedish-American relatives and they get up to all sorts of lovely escapades. Beautiful illustrations by Garth Williams, who you may be familiar with from the Little House series. There should be more books which are just about characters having a fantastic time.

9. Mari Sandoz's The Horsecatcher, 1957. A Cheyenne boy wants to become a horsecatcher rather than a warrior. I’m not planning a companion post to the Problem of Tomboys about Boys Who Don’t Want to Do Classic Boy Things, but if I were, this book would be on it. Fascinating evocation of our hero’s world.

10. Cynthia Rylant's A Fine White Dust, 1987. Kind of an outlier on this list, which is mostly adventure stories and people having good times stories. This one is a realistic fiction story about a boy growing up in the South who falls in love with a traveling preacher. VERY intense. EXTREMELY gay. Never admits to being gay but nonetheless one of the gayest books I’ve ever read. Very short. I read most of it in one lunch break and spent that entire lunch break internally keening because it is VERY STRESSFUL but in a good way.

Current Music: Neko Case, "Wreck"

A wreck of possibilities, a volatility of stars

I wish merely to register my pleasure that when I went looking for the uncredited actor playing the dean of the law school in the early scenes of Winterset (1936), I found that Murray Kinnell had the kind of Wikipedia biographer who includes short reviews with their subject's stage and screen resume. "An unusual role for Kinnell as a derelict one-time gentleman; the film opened in July 1931." "'No man is a hero to his valet', as Kinnell's character in this murder mystery could testify." "Kinnell as yet another butler, though this time with an unexpected flourish." I am much more used to finding this kind of partisanship on social media: with no prior attachment to an actor whom I did not notice previously in a handful of pre-Codes, just its enthusiasm makes me want to see these lovingly noted small parts even when a non-zero quantity of Charlie Chan seems to be involved. I hope Kinnell would have appreciated his future, however microscopic fandom.

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cons

Capclave!

I have my schedule for Capclave! I'm doing three panels and a reading (should probably figure out what I'm reading...). Here's what we've got:

The Power of Places. Friday, 5:00. Every work of fiction has a setting. This is especially true of science fiction and fantasy where the settings are imaginary – other planets and fantasy realms. How do writers decide on a setting and communicate it to the reader? What makes some settings seem real while others mere painted backdrops? How does society help to shape the world around it? What writers have effective settings and what techniques do they use?

The Absolute Boss. Friday, 7:00. Much of SF/Fantasy has Galactic Emperors and Kings of fantasy kingdoms. We have Disney Princesses but not Disney Elected Leaders. Many plots feature the Return of the King. Why are there so few democracies in SF/Fantasy? What does it mean when our entertainments focus on absolute rulers?

Author Reading, Marissa Lingen. Saturday, 3:00.

Hopeful Fiction for Dark Times. Saturday, 4:00. The world seems to be in a dark place, such that "peddling hope" could appear irresponsible. Panelists will talk about hopepunk, cozy fantasy, and other forms of "lighter" fiction, giving examples, and talking about how hope is particularly important.

Current Music: Jack, "Love and Death in the Afternoon"

In my time on earth, I said too much, but not nearly, not nearly enough

Unless I lost track of one in the phone tree, I have just spent my afternoon calling five different doctor's offices, garnished with one bookstore and one library, and I would still like a refund on selected and considerable tracts of physical existence. In other news, while I have always had an inevitable affection for the mild-mannered character acting of Donald Meek, I have not seen him anywhere near recently enough to explain his appearance in last night's dreams, especially not the one with the used book store crumbling literally on the edge of some awful revelation. Over the last three days, I mainlined a rewatch of the first two seasons of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) and just before bed had started re-reading Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), which in the years since I originally read and much later wrote about it has garnered at least one nonfiction rebuttal and more contextually interested explorations, because nothing engages the human instinct for rabbit holes like a cold murder case. No offense to Donald Meek, I'm not sure where he came in.

P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.

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book log challenge

Revisiting My 2015 Reading List

When I was first compiling my reading lists, I kept thinking, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to read more by that author! And that one! And that one!” At last it occurred to me that it might be useful to compile a list of those authors from each year and then, you know, actually revisit that author’s work.

When I compiled the first list for 2012 (the first year I have complete enough records to make it worthwhile), it ended up including three Rosemary Sutcliff entries, and I realized that if I didn’t take evasive measures I would probably end up with twenty Rosemary Sutcliff books in a row in the 2013 list. So I refined the parameters: each author gets only one listing per year.

I’ve already read my way through 2012 and 2013 and most of 2014 (still waiting for Elizabeth and Her German Garden! Come on, library!), but it occurred to me that it might be fun forthwith to share my lists as I work on them, and also a good chance to get input if I’m still deciding which book to read for an author. So! Here is the 2015 list. The crossed-out entries are the books I’ve already read for this list.

~~Jacqueline Woodson – Peace, Locomotion~~

~~Rosemary Sutcliff – Little Hound Found~~

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – In the First Circle or Cancer Ward. I have both on hold, so we’ll see which gets in first

Zilpha Keatley Snyder – Today Is Saturday (a book of poems. Possibly Snyder’s only book of poems?)

~~Ruth Goodman – How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England~~

~~Ngaio Marsh – A Wreath for Rivera~~

Sarah Rees Brennan – Long Live Evil

Dick Francis – Whip Hand

Margaret Oliphant – probably Kirsteen, although the library has a number of others, including Phoebe Junior and Salem Chapel. Also a bunch of biographies? I hadn’t realized Margaret Oliphant wrote biographies.

~~Elizabeth Gaskell – Gothic Tales~~

Andy Weir – Hail Mary

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bookses precious

Castoff, by Brandon Crilly

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend, as you will find out if you read to the end and see that I am in the acknowledgments for the honestly light and easy work of being Brandon's pal.

Good news for those of you who wait until a series is complete to read it: this is the second book in a duology! So you can just pick up Catalyst and Castoff and read them together, if you haven't yet. I'm going to try not to spoiler the first book too much, which is going to leave me vague, because this is definitely my favorite kind of sequel: the kind where the consequences follow on hard and fast from the first book. Happily for those with shaky memories, there's a quick summary at the beginning of this one.

So there are airships! There are strange vast somewhat personified forces! There are people working out their relationships in the face of personal and social change! It's that lovely kind of fantasy novel that almost might be a science fiction novel in its concern with human interactions with truly alien intelligences. I love that kind. I want more of that basically always. And if it can come with airship adventures alongside the ponderings of the nature of intelligence and caring about others, even better. Very glad this is about to make it out into the world so I can talk to more people about these books.

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A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall

A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a book that should have been so far up my alley it was knocking on my back door ready to come in for a cup of tea, and instead it didn't work for me at all. I'm writing it up partly because I think the ways it (imo) failed are interesting, and partly because tastes differ and I suspect some of you may enjoy it very much.

Okay, so. The premise, which is what hooked me initially, is that this is an epistolary story about fantasy deep sea exploration and sibling bonds. It's set in a world in which there is no land except a single atoll; long ago, people lived in sky cities, but some kind of cataclysm ended that, and now everyone lives either on the atoll, on floating residences of various sorts, or (fairly recently) in underwater habitations. One of these is the Deep House, the deepest underwater home yet made.

A year before the start of the book, reclusive E. Cidnosin began writing to shy scholar Henery Clel; E. lives in the Deep House, which her mother built, and Henery is fascinated by the Deep House and the largely unexplored depths of the ocean. The two of them grow increasingly close, and then, at some point and in some way, die or vanish -- it's not initially clear which. Whatever it was, a year later, E.'s sister Sophy and Henerey's brother Vyerin strike up a correspondence and begin to trade their siblings' letters and journal entries and so on, along with their own letters, bonding as they try to discover what happened to their beloved siblings. The story thus unfolds in two timelines, as Sophy and Vyerin go through E. and Henerey's writings sequentially and share their own thoughts and reactions. Some of the letters they're sharing are their own from a year ago, written to their siblings at the time, so for Sophy in particular we get past and present events intertwined. (In the one-year-ago timeline, Sophy was on a scientific expedition to a deep marine trench, though busily writing letters to E. about it.)

It's a really cool conceit! Other things I like: ( very mild spoilers )

...And unfortunately, that's pretty much where it stops, in terms of what worked for me. ( from here on out this gets more negative, with some vague but not detailed spoilers )

I think part of my problem here is that I love domestic stories, and I love books with very low, personal-level stakes, and I love books about ordinary people having everyday struggles, and I love books about hope and the restorative power of kindness... but I also believe in the power of misunderstandings and petty frustrations and supply chain logistics and all the bits of sand in the gears of life, and so I absolutely bounce hard off a lot of the books currently being written as "cozy," and this is another victim of that. I wanted a domestic epistolary story about siblings and the material culture and scientific inquiries of an ocean world; I got coziness that, unfortunately, felt like cloying cotton candy to me. I suspect that some of you would react similarly, and for others, what I found cloying would be charming and relaxing coziness. And that's clearly what the book is aiming for, so if you're in the latter camp, I hope you have a great time with it!

Me, I'll just spend a moment pining for the book I wanted it to be, which is not the same as the book Sylvie Cathrall wanted to write.

Current Music: Jack, "3 O'Clock in the Morning"

And there's this all-night garage and the 7-Eleven

For reasons as yet unknown to medical science, although I am doing my best to get medical science to find them out, I am in the acutely worst shape I have been in since the summer of 2023 and it is devouring all of my time. Have some links.

1. In music still in situ on my computer, I have had the Punters' "Jim Harris" (1997) since 2005 when I believe it to have been one of the fruits of a now-deceased music community on LJ. It is not a variant on Child 243; it was contemporarily written by Peter Leonard of Isle Valen about a local schooner fender-bender in 1934. I discovered last year that it's got a Roud number and I have never gotten over the way its last verse turns from traditionally recounted maritime mini-disaster to Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi:

It's all right when the wheel is going up, but when she turns for to go down
You all might meet with the same sad fate as Jim Harris in Paradise Sound

The folk tradition being what it is, this song is naturally the only thing I know abour its eponymous captain, which is rough.

2. I should not have read this article about the Instagram filter valley of the current rejuvenative craze for deep-plane face-lifts no matter what because one of the reasons I have trouble being read as younger than my age is that I have worked very hard to reach this one, but toward the end of the piece I hit an anonymously quoted surgeon, "When you look at someone else with an elite face-lift . . . all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people," and at the notion that eugenics should be aspirationally mixed with ageism, I just wanted that surgeon to be operated upon by Dr. Einstein after an all-night open-bar horror marathon. I felt better after dialing up the grainily inimitable footage of Pamela Blair's "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" (1975).

3. Thanks to listening to Arthur Askey, I became curious about the origins of the musical have-a-banana phrase which diffused decades ago from music hall into general pop culture and apparently the best guess is a Rocky Horror-style audience improvisation that has now endured as a meme for more than a century. Good for it.

I just want to sleep and read books and write about movies. Who's even asking for a small fortune?

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Joyce Carol Thomas

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to

rachelmanija's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' points of view, plus authorial observations, and various problems of life were glancingly or directly looked at, but then there was this suspense-novel plotline! But I really loved reading it, I think because I liked all those observations. I just liked spending time with the author as she told this story. (I wasn't actually so into the suspense-novel plotline, but I didn't mind it either; I was able to just go along with it.)

And the language, just great. I quoted some last time I talked about the book, but here's a little more. Here, for instance, is what I mean about all the living creatures in the world being present and part of the world in a way you don't often get (and that I love):

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

Or how about this, about lightning:

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

It's not just the beauty of the images, it's that Thomas says the lightning is jealous of the light--it's that living-ness of everything. Just adore it. ... And mind you, she put this in a story of [rot13 for spoilers] grraf orvat noqhpgrq fb gurl pna or fnpevsvprq gb erwhirangr anfgl byq zra. I'm so glad she did! And so glad this story got published!

One more, when a boy who's been teasing her asks her why she doesn't like him:

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

His own blue quality of light. Did you know that that's what people seek? It feels so right.

I thought Thomas must be about my age, but no: she was my mother's age. She's a whole generation above me.

From Wikipedia:

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

Well thank you for everything Ms. Thomas. I really admire your outlook, your observations, and your writing, and appreciate what you gave to the world.

TIL: the words broccoli and brocade come from the same root

I had absolutely no idea!

*********************

( Read more... )

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(no subject)

genarti and I have been working our very slow but delighted way through We Are Lady Parts, the British sitcom about an all-Muslim punk rock band composed of opinionated women with beautiful and compelling faces. I'd been seeing a lot of gifsets of these faces before we watched the show and I am pleased to report that they are even more beautiful and compelling at full length. For those of you who have missed the gifsets, please enjoy Lady Parts performing "Villain Era":

Watch on YouTube

The two most protagonist-y protagonists are Saira, the band's lead singer/guitarist, who is at all times extremely punk rock, and Amina, a stressed-out trad-Muslim scientist with terrible stage fright, who really has to work to access her inner punk rock. The cast is rounded out with Ayesha, the angry lesbian drummer; Bisma, who plays the role of maternal peacemaker until she starts to chafe at it; and Momtaz, the band's go-getter manager. The first season focuses mostly on the question of whether Amina can conquer her own inhibitions enough to contribute her excellent guitar skills and huge Disney eyes to the band after Saira press-gangs her into joining them. The second season brings the whole band up against the music industry more generally, and the various ways that the public pressure of moderate fame starts to push each of them into re-examining their self-image and relationships to their music and identity. It's a good show! I liked it very much!

Also, like everyone else in the world, we have recently watched KPop Demon Hunters. Also a very good time featuring banger music tracks -- I'd seen it described as 'a series of really good music videos' and broadly I agree with this assessment -- plus twenty pounds of fun kdrama tropes stuffed into a five-pound bag. Probably would not have felt compelled to write anything about it except for the fact that by an accident of timing, we ended up watching the season finale of Lady Parts the day after we watched KPop Demon Hunters which made for a very funny accidental wine pairing. Both funny and telling to go from ( high-level spoilers for both KPop Demon Hunters and Lady Parts )

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Book Review: The Subtle Knife

In the days of my youth, when I finished The Golden Compass, I immediately snatched up its sequel the The Subtle Knife and dived in. I zoomed through, finished it up, and set it aside with an impatient yearning for the next book to come out already, as surely the third book in the series would redeem this middle book, which was ever so slightly disappointing.

Upon rereading The Subtle Knife with

littlerhymes, I still find it ever so slightly disappointing. I feel this review would have a stronger narrative arc if my opinions had changed, but actually they’re pretty much the same.

(Well, okay, there is one difference. As a child, I don’t think I noticed the creepy instrumentality of Asriel’s forces in his fight against the Authority, most prominently the two angels who let Stanislaus Grumman/John Parry get shot because “his task was over once he’d led you to us.” Just catastrophically failing at the Kantian maxim to treat people as ends not means. This may be something that Pullman will unpack in The Amber Spyglass; I genuinely don’t remember.)

First of all, I’ve just never loved Will like I love Lyra. The best parts in The Subtle Knife in my opinion are the bits where Lyra goes off on her own and does her Lyra thing, like the bit where she goes to meet Mary Malone and makes the dark matter machine talk to her like the alethiometer. (I also loved the bit where Mary Malone has a chat with the dark matter machine and follows its directions through a door to another world, and one of the reasons I MOST wanted the sequel to come out, like, yesterday, was that I really wanted to know what would happen to her next.)

The bits where Lyra and Will work together to solve problems are also fun. The bit where they confront Lord Boreal about stealing the alethiometer and his snake daemon pokes its little head out of his sleeve? Iconic. The part where they use the subtle knife to get back into his house by cutting windows back and forth between worlds, culminating in Will hiding behind Lord Boreal’s couch and Lyra crouched beside him, but in another world? Amazing job leaning into the premise.

When it’s just Will doing his Will stuff? Eh. He’s fine I guess. I don’t dislike him, but he’s just kind of there taking up time we could be devoting to Lyra.

I had also pretty much forgotten everything that focused on the adult characters, possibly because as a child I simply didn’t care about adult characters (with the exception of Mary Malone) and therefore didn’t bother to read those parts. They are not bad parts! They just weren’t what I was into at eleven. I probably appreciated them more now.

But I think the bigger problem with The Subtle Knife is that it just can’t live up to The Golden Compass. In The Golden Compass, Lyra moves through many different worlds-within-worlds in her own world, and they’re all fascinating, almost all places that the reader would love to visit. Who wouldn’t want to have a glass of Tokay in the Jordan College Retiring Room, attend one of Mrs. Coulter’s cocktail parties, ride in a gyptian boat, see the bear’s fortress at Svalbard?

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lyra walks into the sky to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, etc. etc., and what does she find? The world of Ci’gazze, which starts out vaguely promising - an abandoned city, that’s cool, right? But it turns out to be completely full of Spectres that will suck out your life the second you hit puberty, and it appears to have no other characteristics, none of the richness of any of the places Lyra visited in her own world.

But the next book, my child self was sure, would get us back on track. We would visit more worlds, and these worlds would be INTERESTING worlds, and maybe Will would just kind of disappear.

Current Music: Arthur Askey, "I Want a Banana"

You brought me back a lemon and you squeezed me tight

"Would a Calvinist have just scoffed an entire bag of fish jerky?" I reasonably texted

selkie, who had just significantly improved the evening of a week that has taken a deeply unwanted turn for the medical by causing a bagful of groceries and seltzer to appear on the front steps. Hestia professed interest in the little squares of maple-and-coconut salmon, but had to content herself with treats designed for delectation of cat and curling up on the couch next to me. I am fascinated by the pumpkin spice cookies that come ready to bake from refrigerated. The bananas are already having a short shelf life.

ETA: Later texted to

spatch: "Who the hell is going to steal and sell Pedialyte? If you could get high off it, I'd have spent 2023 as a kite."

Entry tags:

Laundry room

One of the things I have been doing with myself in the last three months is watching videos in an online interior design course, mostly because various things about the house bother me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's not mean to be a pro-level course, and there's various things I already know, but it's helped me figure out one room so far, by forcing me to slow down and first think about who uses the room, what for and how it's used.

It's the laundry room. One would think, "Laundry, duh." But it's also circulation space, because it connects the house to the garage which is the door we use 99% of the time, and it's also storage space. And I would like it to be hang-dry space as well, because the other options for hanging clothes to dry are untenable for various reasons:

1) the first and foremost is my ADHD. The more steps I have to do, the less likely it is to get done. Get out the drying rack, take it somewhere in the house or back porch, set it up, hang clothes, check if they're dry, collect them, bring them in, break down the drying rack, and put it back where it's stored? OH HELL NO.

2) drying outside also makes the clothes smell like the outside and I've never had problems with this before, but both

myrialux and I concur that the outdoors smell we get on clothes here is not appealing. Plus, we live in POLLEN CENTRAL and would like to not be allergic to our clothes.

3) the best place to dry inside is the spare room/gym and if clothes are hanging there that I need to move before working out, I won't work out (ADHD again). The spare bath is taken up by the litterbox, and the main bath is back to issue #1, with the added problem of fitting the drying rack in the tub. Any other room gets HUMID and GROSS.

So! I have a PLAN for the laundry room, once we get the $$$ saved up. Steps:

1) hire our neighborhood appliance handyman company to stack the washer and dryer on one side of the TINY room and swap the dryer door to open on the same side as the washer.

2) measure the back wall, to allow for power and water outlets and the dryer vent in the next step, which is...

3) install simple shelving of the rails-screwed-into-studs with shelves on them type, adroitly avoiding the outlets and vents above, as well as pegboard on part of it, to allow for...

4) the wall-mounted drying racks that will require a bit of space to extend/fold out. And then finally...

5) a closet rod installed across the room for clothing that can be put on hangers and hung.

SIMPLY RENDERED PEECTURES BELOW THE CUT...
( you know you want to know more about my laundry room )