I didn’t know I needed this article about identifying with the uncool pragmatic characters until I read it today.
The picture is a link, I hope. Anyway, I love Tor.com. Book reviews, book re-reads, movie reviews, fun articles about science fiction and fantasy STUFF. It has become part of my daily internet regimen.
Started: 1/28/18
Finished: 1/28/18
Another novella, also good, but not as gripping as the previous two. Felt more psychological thriller than science fiction.
Started: 1/27/18
Finished: 1/28/18
Another novella, the second in the Wayward Children series. Very good, maybe not as good as the first one, but still really nice to dig into the actual through-the-looking-glass story of two of the characters.
Started: 1/26/18
Finished: 1/27/18
REALLY good novella. It was creepy and fascinating and I don’t want to tell you anything about it because I don’t want to give it away but I want MORE. What is WRONG with her? How did she get that way? What’s up with her parents? WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!? More, please.
Started: 1/23/18
Finished: 1/26/18
The premise was interesting – post-apocalyptic world, society determines that overpopulation was one of the causes of collapse, so people have to earn the right to have kids – but it took a while to get to that explanation, and I never felt like it had a point. Also, the writing was ANNOYING. John was reading another of her books at the same time and had similar issues with the writing. I finished it, but it was difficult not to skim through to the end.
I’m working late, and when I’m working late, I’m cranky, and when I’m cranky, there’s no room in my head for anything but what’s making me cranky, and I don’t want to talk about work.
I might be cranky about describing myself as cranky – I am NOT a toddler.
(I might be acting like a toddler.)
If I throw a tantrum, maybe I can stop working.
No, that’s not how this works. Big deadline tomorrow, and I’m stuck waiting for four other people to do their thing, one at a time, before I can do MY thing, and this is the fifth time we’ve gone through this exercise today. It’s 8 o’clock. I want to be done.
Oooh, we have butterscotch pudding.
I AM a toddler.
Started: 1/21/18
Finished: 1/23/18
There’s a trope in comics, movies, TV, books, everything, about how the hero’s love interest has to die or be raped or whatever in order to give the hero a reason to go be heroic. The love interest is an object, a plot device, not a character. The trope (and there’s a website) is called Women in Refrigerators because a particularly egregious example involved a Green Lantern comic where the girlfriend was killed and actually stuffed into a fridge for the hero to find. This novella, focused on the comics aspect, is about turning those women into characters. Pretty darn good, too.
It’s raining. It’s lovely. It’s a nice day, with real steady rain falling, dim lighting so I can have my twinkle lights on all day long, and the store had my favorite creamer in stock, so I can have coffee all day. (I blend decaf and regular together – I can’t handle fully caffeinated coffee all day long. I’d die of a cracked skull from bouncing off the ceiling.)
It’s pouring, and I can’t concentrate.
Like, how-is-there-that-much-water-up-in-the-sky kind of rain.
Let’s forget this whole water cycle thing – that’s too logical. REALLY, my neighborhood is in a giant shower. Some alien has decided it’s time to bathe and I can’t see it (the alien) because a) we’re all really really tiny compared to the giant alien in its giant shower, and b) we’re off to the side of the tub so we’re not in danger of getting stepped on.
Sure, this alien must be taking a really long, really cold shower (it’s been raining for hours), but hey, aliens aren’t like us. Maybe it prefers cold water. And the shower is going on for so long because it doesn’t happen all that frequently, and the alien has a lot of dirt to wash off.
That river that’s just a couple of blocks away? Nah, that’s a trickle of water heading toward the alien’s giant shower drain.
And when the rain stops and the sun comes out, I’ll know that the alien has stepped out of the shower and opened the curtain again.
I should be working.
John went to visit Tom this weekend, drink some beer, brew some beer, and talk about manly things (I assume), so I had a little over 24 hours to myself. Let’s see how I spent that time:
John came home!
I lead a very exciting life.
Started: 1/18/18
Finished: 1/21/18
Interesting, but not great. It suffers from telling, not showing, and the descriptions of locations were decidedly NOT clear. I couldn’t picture any of those locations, despite the descriptive text. I almost put it down a couple of times.
Feel It Still, by Portugal. The Man, is the latest song that makes me happy every time I hear it:
Yet another upside to working from home: I can’t get whatever awful bug everyone at work is passing around. No kidding, in the last few weeks, nearly EVERYONE I work with has taken at least a couple of sick days with the flu. I never leave the house, so I am SAFE. Also, everyone at work is 400+ miles from me, so even if I left, I wouldn’t get THAT bug.
On the other hand, I didn’t get any sick days. I should take a sick day.
Started: 1/15/18
Finished: 1/18/18
It started out as an interesting family drama in a near-future China where the men vastly outnumber the women, and then it took an unexpected, I think unforeshadowed, violent turn. It’s told from the point of view of four characters, three of whom felt real. The fourth one, who, incidentally, is the one whose plotline took the thriller turn, felt like wish-fulfillment. Or maybe he was just not very smart.
There are days when even I don’t think my brain is an interesting place. This is not one of those days. Okay, yes it is.
I’m looking askance at this jar of peanut butter I bought at CVS today. I don’t know why I expect it to be sub-par. I mean, peanut butter is peanut butter, right? It’s the same brand I usually buy at the grocery store. It’s not like CVS made it themselves, and besides, who am I to say that CVS couldn’t make some damn good peanut butter if they felt like it?
Don’t let it be said that I stood in the way of anyone’s dreams.
I think my blood sugar is low. My head hurts, I’m cranky, and I can’t settle on any one thing to do while I’m waiting for John to finish working so we can eat.
I ate a couple of crackers. We’ll see how that goes.
…
Starting at the cursor isn’t going to feed me. I picked up my book a couple of minutes ago, but it’s a dinner scene and they’ve having Chinese food (well, they’re Chinese), and oh my god I want Chinese food but we’re not having Chinese food tonight, we’re having tomato and mozzarella sandwiches and have I told you about our basil plant?
We bought one of those basil plants you can sometimes get at the grocery store, and we kept it on the window sill in the kitchen. Turns out that window gets zero sunlight, and the plant began to die. We finally moved it to the front room, lots of light, and stuck chopsticks in the pot so it could stand upright again (it was practically horizontal), and now it appears to be doing better. But now, John is invested in this basil plant, and he won’t let me pluck leaves from it to cook with. He wants to get a second basil plant that we can eat. Well, neither of the nearby grocery stores carry them, so I’m out of luck, I guess.
As far as I know, he hasn’t named it.
Hey, he’s here and we’re going to eat tomato and mozzarella sandwiches without basil!
Started: 1/14/18
Finished: 1/15/18
It was interesting and not at all what I expected and I LIKED it but I didn’t love it. A kid and a teenager and a demigod and some sentient robots in South Africa.
Started: 1/13/18
Finished: 1/14/18
I was a little hesitant at first – Russian fairy tales are not my favorite – but I flew through this book and loved every page. Great characters, great story, and the imagery, the descriptions made it so real. I don’t like flowery descriptions, and these definitely weren’t – there was just enough, written clearly, that I felt like I was watching a movie. I could SEE it all.
I have haircut regrets. I went to the salon planning to just do my standard mid-length bob, maybe angled down in front, maybe stacked up short in back. While I was there, I remembered that I wanted to do something more like this:
To be fair, my stylist did exactly what I asked her to, and I approved it before I left.
It came out KIND of like in the picture, but rounder? Shorter? Fluffier? Now that I’ve had a couple of days with it….
I hate it.
It’ll grow out. And it’ll grow fast enough probably that I can get it fixed within a month. Probably. And I don’t have to see anyone I know in the meantime and NO, you can’t have a picture.
I don’t like it, and this sucks.
How to make the perfect Saturday for me:
Started: 1/10/18
Finished: 1/13/18
It’s probably cliche to say so, but The Power is powerful. Roles get flipped, and a lot of that feels viscerally real. As a novel, though, I’m not sure I’d call it great. It feels like an experiment, especially in the framing device – a meaningful experiment, to be sure. It’s just that the novel part of the story feels somewhat unresolved.