The Lord of the Rings Readalong started this month! Hosted by Eva, Maree, Teresa, and Clare, this readalong is starting with reading The Hobbit this month, and we will all read one of the Lord of the Rings books each month subsequently. Until we run out at the end of April, and then there will be a great mourning across the blogosphere until everyone agrees to read, I don’t know, The Silmarillion. It is not a challenge. I have absolutely put my foot down and shan’t join any more challenges than the ones I already have, and this Lord of…
26 CommentsReading the End Posts
Watching the English, Kate Fox I have a confession to make, y’all. I am a sucker for pop psychology, and also pop sociology and yes, pop anthropology. It’s all, you know, it’s all readable, and there are interview excerpts, and people talk about what they think and why they do the things they do. How could anyone not love that? I love that so much! I know that Kate Fox’s Watching the English is observational and subjective and thus Not Proper Science, and maybe it was a tiny smidge repetitive…and yet I do not care. Because it got me all…
43 CommentsJasmine M. Puppy is getting bigger and bigger. Soon I will have to call her Jasmine M. Dog. Every time I see her, she seems to have gotten bigger. Her nose is longer. It is harder to support all of her feet when I scoop her up, and indeed I am scooping her up less and less, as my parents are trying to train her to be a standard-poodle-sized dog rather than a lap dog. Here she is at seven weeks, with her toy koala bear: And here is a picture of her with her koala toy from eleven weeks…
22 CommentsI should know better. I very foolishly checked Slaughterhouse Five out of the library and brought it to read on our camping trip even though I suspected I wasn’t going to like it and I knew the person who recommended it to me was going to be on our camping trip wanting me to like it. I read books when I’m given them, and when I don’t like them, I’m likely to say “I liked [specific thing],” or “It’s very well-written!”, rather than lying straight out with something like “Yes! I liked it!”, and I had planned exactly what I…
47 Comments(in the mornings) (since the holiday ended) 1. Abandoning the use of my alarm clock. Who needs ’em? When I set my clock, I only hit snooze a zillion times because I don’t want to get out of my warm warm bed. So I’ve got my clock set for the latest possible time I could get up and still make it into work with my hair and teeth brushed (around 8:30), and I find I’m getting up around the time I had set my clock for originally (around seven). 2. The last three mocha chocolate drizzle biscotti from Madame Grand…
14 CommentsHouse of Leaves put me in the mood for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I can’t account for because they are two wildly dissimilar books. House of Leaves is terribly modern and American and all sort of up in your face, and Jonathan Strange is set in early nineteenth-century England (alternate England, but still) and is much with the fairies and book-learning and wry gentility. Anyway I fetched out my convenient three-volume box set of paperbacks, and I read it starting in 2009 and finished in 2010. There should really be a word for a book you start one…
37 CommentsEveryone else in the blogosphere seems to keep track of their reading stats far better than I, but I have stolen a meme from Savidge Reads. Check it. How many books read in 2009? 200. More or less. I counted from my books read page – some books I didn’t finish, and some I reviewed all at once (like Fables), and some I read but didn’t review. 200 is a nice friendly number, isn’t it? I’m sticking with it. Hooray for approximations. How many fiction and nonfiction? This was trickier to count than I was expecting. Do Noel Streatfeild’s autobiographical…
27 CommentsHello to experimental fiction. One of my roommates in college loved this book, and kept telling me to read it, and I went on the internets and found this interview with Mark Danielewski where he said something about how older readers would probably not like his book because they’ve been taught to have certain expectations of what books look like, and he doesn’t conform to those expectations because he thinks books can be so much more. And it’s not that I disagree with him on any particular point, but his tone aggravated me, and the book looked all crazy and…
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