The Diamond Age
Also posted on BookCrossing.
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Write on Wednesday
Okay, so it’s not Wednesday, but I just discovered this blog and I’ve decided to participate here and there. This week’s Write on Wednesday talks about – what else? – NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month. I’ve blogged about this before, how it’s a month-long challenge every November to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I’ve participated four times (2003-2006) and won the latter three times. In 2004 it was a Real Accomplishment. In 2005 I won and got married in the same month. In 2006 I finished in only 13 days. After that I decided that my problem is clearly not blathering on for pages and pages. You see, I have yet to actually read any of my NaNovel manuscripts. I haven’t done any rewriting or editing, and though those stories may conclude with “The End”, they are far from finished.
Do I feel that NaNoWriMo is a waste of time? Of course not! Writing practice is terribly important. The more you write, the better you become. I write pretty much every day, even if it’s just some random scribblings in one of the beat-up old notebooks I drag around with me everywhere. One of these days I may decide to buckle down and churn out a real novel, and I may even use a NaNoWriMo-like schedule to get a first draft. But for now, I think I’m happier doing my own thing. Good luck to all you NaNoers, though. Writing with wild abandon is fun.
What’s in a Name
Okay, so I told myself I wouldn’t be participating in any more reading challenges. After all, the Reduce My TBR Mountain challenge has been really effective but also has made me kind of obsessive. So instead of pushing myself to read such quantities of books, I’m going to read a specific few. This is a year-long challenge (throughout 2009, that is), where the books are based on title. I chose exclusively from my existing TBR pile, so I had to stretch it a little here and there. The titles may change should I come across something more suitable. Here are the ones I plan to read for each category:
- A book with a “profession” in its title: The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
- A book with a “time of day” in its title: Seize the Night by Dean Koontz
- A book with a “relative” in its title: The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
- A book with a “body part” in its title: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
- A book with a “building” in its title: The Fall of the House of Usher and other tales by Edgar Allan Poe
- A book with a “medical condition” in its title: Give Me a Break by John Stossel (okay, so maybe that’s stretching it a touch. It was that or Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, though Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard sure sounds like a medical condition!)
Anyone care to join me? For more information, visit the welcome page.
Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lady Audley’s Secret
I am usually wary of so-called “classics”, after so many bleary-eyed attempts in school to discover the symbolism and hidden truths lurking somewhere between the lines, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover Braddon was a writer of thrillers for the general public. The footnotes in this particular edition were especially helpful given the large number of pop culture references. These take away from any timelessness this story might have had, but it was still fun to watch Robert connecting the dots and building up evidence.
Robert is an intriguing character as he makes the slow transformation from lazy trust fund kid to passionate mystery solver. Alicia is delightfully obnoxious as well. The ending did not impress me much – it felt too neat, especially the final word on George Talboys’s disappearance – but after hundreds of pages of build-up I suppose there wasn’t much else to be done. It felt almost as if Braddon had written herself into a corner. All the same, it was a pleasant way to pass the time, if not a terribly memorable story.
Also posted on Blog a Penguin Classic and BookCrossing.
SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
SCUM Manifesto
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Blog Action Day 2008
Here in the US, Blog Action Day is technically tomorrow, but the posts are already rolling in (and I suspect I’ll be busy enough tomorrow that I’ll forget to post), so I suppose I’ll go ahead and weigh in.
This year’s topic is poverty. I have no solutions. So many people are focused on government-sponsored solutions to poverty, as if throwing money at people will make the problem go away. The simple truth is that the extreme poverty of so-called third world countries is mostly caused by corrupt governments. It’s not that the rest of the world isn’t helping, it’s that the politicians are intercepting everything rather than letting it get distributed. I don’t know how to solve that, except to get rid of the corrupt governments. How to do that is another question. As we’ve proven in multiple wars, installing democracy by force doesn’t work so well.
In the United States, in cases where laziness or misplaced priorities aren’t to blame (which happens more than most would like to admit in this land of victims), often the problem is inadequate education. This is not the fault of the individual, but rather where they live. Unless you can afford private school, the quality of your education is a total crapshoot. In short, the public education system is failing us. Throwing money at it isn’t the answer; it needs to be restructured. Administrators and teachers need more accountability: there is such thing as a bad teacher and they need to be fired. Likewise, good teachers need to be rewarded, rather than simply earning the same amount as everybody else in the union. Children need to be challenged and inspired: most kids find school boring, tedious, and largely irrelevant. When it’s difficult they simply give up, having zero interest in progressing. They need to know why they are learning as much as what and how.
This is a fixable problem. You can start by educating yourself. Pick up a book – even a Dummies guide – on some subject that has always baffled you. Read up on chemistry, or Chinese history, or economic theory. Then talk to someone else about it. Become a tutor, if you feel so inclined. But whatever you do, never stop learning, and never stop teaching.
Weekly Geeks
Crikey. This week’s Weekly Geeks is a quiz. The post lists 100 first lines from books and asks how many you can identify. There is some kind of contest about getting all of them but ehh, I’ll just see how well I can do off the top of my head. Here’s the ones I know for sure:
1. Call me Ishmael.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Er, duh. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984 by George Orwell
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (*snore*)
10. I am an invisible man.
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (not H.G. Wells *grin*)
12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Gee, I wonder if this could possibly be If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. ;)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
(I can’t technically count this one. After all, I only know it because of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. That is, I only know who wrote it because of that. I first learned it, like most people, from reading Peanuts.)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Great book, BTW.)
53. It was a pleasure to burn.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
65. You better not never tell nobody but God.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (another excellent book)
66. “To be born again,†sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.â€
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (kind of a meh book)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (a very strange but intriguing book)
83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,†Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.â€
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (I loved it, but it’s not for everyone)
So, I was able to identify 15 of the 100. Not bad, considering how few of the books I’ve actually read. I recognized many more, but Googling is cheating, so I’ll leave it at that. I hope subsequent Weekly Geeks are more interesting than the memes that routinely show up on LiveJournal.
Weekly Geeks
I’ve decided to dust off this blog and post some more. It will still be link-centric (as opposed to diary-like), and I’ll still most likely never post more than once a day, but with my recent discovery of Weekly Geeks I may start branching out from my normal subject matter.
So let’s begin, shall we? This is week #20, but it appears to be a continuation of last week’s, so I’ll do that. Weekly Geeks #19: list your top books published in 2008.
I was looking at my list of books read this year so far, and realized that I’ve read only two books this year that were also published this year. I imagine my Reduce My TBR Mountain challenge participation has something to do with it (I pledged to read 30 books off my pre-2008 to-be-read pile, which I completed about a week ago), and the fact that ye olde TBR has become so overwhelming that I also (mostly) stopped signing up for ARC’s.
Unfortunately, as one of the books was not worth reading, I only have one 2008 book to share as my “top”. Fortunately, it was actually a very good book: Nation by Terry Pratchett. I reviewed this fairly recently so I won’t repeat myself, but I will say that it’s definitely worth your while.
Anime USA
This weekend is Anime USA in Arlington, Virginia. I’ll be in the artists alley with Binary Souls / Other Dimensions. If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hello!
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin
Steering the Craft
Also posted on BookCrossing.