ninety6tears | Entries tagged with books

RL is kind of meh. My best friend is moving a lot farther away and I will miss seeing her more often than a couple times a year. Also I am finding it harder and harder to drag myself to work these days because I'm getting so fed up with how inexplicably freezing it is at our office - I'm talking thick socks and fingerless gloves in an indoor workplace. WTF. And the supervisors complain about it so casually, like it just always has been like that. I DON'T UNDERSTAND.

-While on Tumblr I frequently find myself thinking, not exactly negatively, "Man, it must be really nice and fun to give a fuck about John Green." In an act of true pettiness I caught myself looking at how many fics The Fault In Our Stars has on AO3 just to see if I needed to feel bitter (you know, as a forever frustrated book-fandomer for other things). I don't. I have it on reliable opinions that Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a good read but unless this guy is like the Shakespeare of YA fiction - and I'm sure he's not - I may tire a little of every single book blog acting like he's the best thing since feminism.

-Probably the only prevalent thing I hate about a certain niche of Trek fandom is the "OMG IS HE OKAY?! HE LOOKS SOOO SKINNY" comments I predictably see all over Chris Pine photos (which amusingly happens so often you would think people would realize that just might be closer to the default when it comes to his body type). I mean, there is the occasional person who will pretty much frankly imply that they enjoy objectifying him more when he has a little more bulk on him, and that's just being honest, but with some comments there's this very distrusting asshole part of me that just feels like I'm watching the fangirls fall over themselves in a contest to see who can be the most accepting of Chris Pine in his less skinny states, and I find that just as annoying as the SPN fans who think that Jensen Ackles is gaining too much weight (which was funny as hell to me, because I hadn't actually noticed he wasn't quite as thin now until it was pointed out to me).

-ARGH, MORE OF MY PETTINESS. I could never complain too much about any kind of activity in my teeny-tiny book fandoms but man, have I been seeing some fancasts on Tumblr lately that make me go NOOO. Even though I'm not sure I can logically make a case against the Cassie Maddox = Rose Byrne thing that I've seen in multiple places it still gives me a headache cause to me it is just so off (and in general I've tried really hard to like Rose Byrne but it isn't happening). I say this as if fancasts have any standing on movies that don't exist yet, LOL.

-The best thing about this season of Mad Men, amirite:

I still can barely stand that fandom, BTW. I can't seem to browse the Tumblr tag without seeing someone call Peggy a bitch. (No lie, I would be pretty scared of Peggy, but that's part of why I love her, especially since I never could have seen myself saying that back in S1.)

-I'm very much ready for the weather to start acting like spring, mmkay. I had the totally awesome luck of dropping my car keys somewhere on campus yesterday and having to retrace my steps a few times in the freezing cold before resigning myself to the fact that I wasn't going to find them, and thank the lord for a man who knows where to find my spare keys even when I don't know where they are but for half the time Shep was on his way over to give them to me I was on the phone with him whimpering, "I'M NOT WARM." And I just got this nice new Swiss Army knife that was attached to the keys. Bahh.

-One of the many annoying oversimplifying attitudes I see directed at Wuthering Heights made me curious about what the initial critical response was to it, and some of the stuff quoted on Wikipedia is backwardly amusing to me:

"There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible ... Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt. Beautiful and loveable in their childhood, they all, to use a vulgar expression, "turn out badly."
EVEN THE FEMALE CHARACTERS. You don't say?

"How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
WELL.

To be honest it has been a long time since I read Wuthering Heights and I would probably fail to back up anything I have to say about it but, while Emily may not have much on someone like Mary Shelley, I've always felt that from time periods in which female creativity was pretty much encouraged to be merely decorative, for women to write such unflinchingly dark characters/themes is just kind of badass, and to me there's something that feels relatively uncensored about WH that gives me a strong loyalty to it. And even if I don't know that I would ship the love story exactly, I've always been fascinated by the fundamentals of that kind of romance - if you can call it a romance - where the love may have once been good, in a vacuum of innocence, but when it's thwarted and denied the whole momentum of it becomes destructive to everyone around it and to the affection itself.

-Haven't been watching the Star Trek trailers that are rolling out so I'm going to be maybe a lot more surprised by this movie than other people. I've seen and probably will see a couple trailers in the theater but that's enough for me. I feel like there was an article that gave away the villain, even? I'm getting more and more annoyed with the gimme-gimme-spoilers culture of the internet, even though I don't treat it like it's the end of the world if I do get spoiled.

Current Music: Madonna - Waiting

- I'm sooo happy to have my Southland back but man, that season premier did not make me feel good, aside from affirming my love for Sammy Bryant. That show is just one phase of "Remember the good old days?" after another, but god, I love it. Super un-enthused with the new guys, but I guess we're kinda supposed to be.

- I'm wondering if anyone else out there has read any of Lukyanenko's Night Watch series. I finished the first book quite a while ago after stumbling upon the movie adaptation on IMDB and thinking the premise sounded interesting and hey, I'd never read anything Russian that wasn't classics and I'm always on the lookout for unique fantasy. I could easily see an attempt to market the series as "hard-boiled Harry Potter" and that wouldn't be too bad a description; characters are initiated into a magical dimension and realize their potential as wizards or shapeshifters or incubi, etc., but there's really no time for wonder or the good kind of adventure on the way to a sudden acceptance of great responsibility. And my, there is a very downer level of emphasis on how much easier it is to be the bad guy. I like that type of unsettling fantasy that deals with an essential balance between good and evil instead of the idea of vanquishing evil altogether, and there is a literally bureaucratic treatment of all that with the peace treaty between dark and light "Others."

Buuut I'm kind of teetering on whether I want to go on because while the plots were great, I don't know if I particularly connected with any of the characters. I do feel like I would like to get to know the narrating character better, but I wish this author was better at writing women. There were moments in the novel when I felt I was being prodded to affectionately roll my eyes at Anton for his failure to understand the feelings of his love interest when all I wanted to do was roll my eyes at the author for spitting off stereotypes about how cryptic and indirect women are. But I have a perhaps disproportionate loathing of cliches; putting aside that problem, there are just as many if not more powerful female characters than there are equally powerful males. And I couldn't stop myself from imagining the shapeshifter team known as "Bear and Tiger Cub" to look a little bit like Natasha and Clint for some reason XD

Current Music: 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me

So I totally finished this a while ago and then never talked about it?

She can't write a book I won't love, and this one was supposed to be such a hard sell for me too. It had a couple issues for me and is probably my least favorite of the series (even as I find it difficult to rank her novels because they all feel so different from each other) but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got invested in it. Scorcher is such a difficult character to like I don't think I would have gotten past the first couple pages if I wasn't already Tana-initiated, but by the end, regardless of how much I liked the guy, I felt for him a lot and I actually think it's the most complicated characterization she's pulled off since the first book. I find it hilarious that Frank Mackey's more long-winded and much funnier explanation for the nickname is somewhat contradicted by Scorcher himself, either out of pride or because he never realized the joke at his expense - I could see it being either way. (However Scorcher did not say "Goal!" even once during the novel, and I can easily believe that Frank is prone to exaggeration.)

The beauty of this novel, for me, was that we had an opportunity to see how Tana can develop a relationship as it's beginning, in all the little subtle ways; in In the Woods we only get a few pages of Rob and Cassie's blossoming friendship before it skips to them having known each other a couple years, in The Likeness you almost couldn't imagine there was a time when the grad student group had barely known each other, but she does just as well of making the potential for companionship a very poignant thing. Richie was an essential character because he added a more human dimension to Scorcher; I really liked how he took care of Richie balking out of the post-mortem, and I liked how Richie could take Scorcher's occasional macho b.s. and still come back sharing sandwiches and breath mints and not letting other people at the office talk crap about him.

( spoilery bits )

Aaand I finally finished S2 of Teen Wolf. It's still such a huge guilty pleasure and I'm crossing my fingers that there's oodles of fics that are better than the show, LOL. I really thought that the last third of S1/the first third or so of S2 was the best it had going; I was really more intrigued with the parts of season 2 when I had no fucking clue what was going on.

Stiles and his dad, though. They're always making me want to cry.

And I'm not really seeing anybody talk about it, but Colton Haynes apparently probably won't be back for S2? That sucks a lot. Gettin real sick of actors dropping out of shows for fuck sakes.

Current Music: The Horse Whisperer OST - There Was Snow (Opening)

I feel like it's becoming a trend in book covers to have photographs of models (not sure what else to call them) rather than more traditional art. Like this. I don't know if I like it, though in the realm of fantasy a lot of the cover art is rarely that attractive to begin with :/ (I am of course really picky about book covers, though. It makes me cringe when the only edition I can get is one that I don't like.)

Sooo I'm about eight episodes into Teen Wolf because half of Tumblr is really into it and IDK IDK. ( Read more... )

And I watched a couple movies, starting with one called Three.

( 3 )

Also watched The Man Who Wasn't There, a neo-noir by the Coen Brothers. Very noir, very Coen Brothers. I could go on and on about my mixed feelings about the noir tropes and how impatient I can be with them sometimes, but this is one that definitely worked for me because there was such a sense that you were supposed to find it a little ridiculous and funny how deep of a hole the main character gets dug into, without it quite being a comedy.

Current Music: Kisses - On the Move

So, for my Tana French people, I have to pass on these little tibits somebody shared on Tumblr. Um. ( cut for In the Woods spoilers )

I really can't believe I haven't cracked open Broken Harbor yet, but I'm in the middle of a couple trilogies I think I want to finish first.

I'm so irritated about that last Walking Dead episode. ( Here's why. )

Hey, remember how I was watching Lost? I am still watching Lost. Just slowly. I'm somewhere in season 3, which is quite better than S2. This show is after making me want to read tons of femmeslash that probably doesn't exist.

It is just not good that I have discovered the clothing of Out Of Print, because every time they come out with something in a book I love I'm gonna be all grabby-hands. Seriously if they had the Slaughterhouse-Five design in the sweatshirt style I could have easily been sucked out of eighty + dollars; as it is I am happy with the adorable Wizard of Oz one. That Pride & Prejudice design is also so pretty it makes me more tempted to actually read Jane Austen. Right, I know, blasphemy. I've just never been super-inclined.

Current Music: Gabriella Cilmi-Sweet About Me

Much less grumpy today, though still tired. Internet is working again, but only on and off.

I wonder how many of y'all might have read Francesca Lia Block. I'm currently reading Necklace of Kisses, a not-so-young-adult sequel to her YA Weetzie Bat series which is sort of aimed at the same generation that were teenagers when the books came out and tells of Weetzie's troubled marriage and mid-life crisis.

I was not expecting much from it, to the point that I almost wondered why I dropped the money on it. My vague memory of most of Block's books (with the exception of Wasteland which is gorgeous and kicked me in the chest about as hard as a book can) gives me an impression of subculture reference overdose and a lot of characters who'd be described as hipsters in seconds flat, and justifiably so (I have to admit naming your baby girl "Cherokee" is kind of adorable, but come on). I was wondering if I'd be able to get past the constant descriptions of what the characters are eating and wearing now that my generation is the shitty economy generation, only to be pleasantly surprised when this exact thing was written with a new self-consciousness, and also in a way that really brought the characters back to me. Dirk - who is now about forty and no longer wears his hair in a mohawk - chuckles at a pile of old punk band t-shirts being unpackaged for Weetzie's thrift store and says, "None of those could have been mine. My shirts were all shredded to pieces by 1985." Not to mention I'm really thankful to get quite a few appearances from the other characters, since Weetzie was never particularly my favorite.

There are some actual normal names scattered in with the rest. My Secret Agent Lover Man settles for going by Max now.

It snowed for like five minutes today. I almost thought I imagined it.

This Sandlot gif is not relevant but I am just really really happy it exists:

I finished reading Faithful Place a couple days ago and I just have to say...

Scorcher? The next book. Is going to be about SCORCHER?
LOLOLOLOL

I mean, okay, I'm pretty sure Tana can't write a book I won't like and it's fair to say that he's probably a little twisted as the butt of Frank's jokes, but man. If anything I would have thought she'd use Moran, the rookie who was giving Frank all the inside info. I liked him. At least the setting of Broken Harbour sounds interesting, from what I've read.

In general I loved Faithful Place. It was missing Tana's usual dash of the surreal, but that seemed fitting with Frank's character.

I'm feeling seriously moody and insecure this week. I don't know what the hell is going on. I need to get back on a sane sleeping schedule and get more sunlight or something, lords.

Current Music: Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own Hole

-I'm not usually lucky enough to have a whole lot of fandom-related dreams, but lately books I'm reading keep popping up in my dreams. After I finished The Likeness? I dreamt that I was Cassie Maddox hanging out in Whitethorn House, and very psychedelically, it was supposed to be a dream that Cassie was having. I've dreamt that I was dreaming before, but not dreaming as a completely different person. Wooaah.
More amusingly, I'm reading Dune right now, and last night I dreamt I started reading about where I left off in the book and that these two new characters show up and I was totally getting into their dynamic and slashing them together and everything, only to wake up and realize those characters don't exist. HAHA MY BRAIN IS REALLY EMBARRASSING ME RIGHT NOW.

-I'm going to have to start hunting for a beta for my Trek big bang soon. There's a super-convenient match-up post at

stbbsupport, and I should look over the betas listed again, but a lot of the people who seem ideal look like they've already been approached, or else there's some other issue like they say "I don't like dark stuff," which is fine, but I'm just not sure how dark they mean by dark. A plot that revolves around a murder and dubious actions of police officers and all might not be their cup of tea for all I know, even though they're probably just meaning "If your fic has nine characters getting tortured by Klingons and time-traveling Nazis in the mirror-verse and even more of them dying, it's probably not for me."
And then there are the people who would be just fine except that they make themselves a little unapproachable by having these, um, quality standards. I totally understand just saying "I probably wouldn't be interested in betaing this pairing" or even "I don't like AUs," but saying things like, "I won't read OOC stuff" seems like...kinda missing the point? Cause like, most people make an effort to keep things in-character, but sometimes it's hard, which is kinda why they might want to look for a beta reader?

-I've gotten into a new anime. This is the first time this has happened in many a year for me. It's called Tiger & Bunny, and it's about (LOL) superheroes who have corporate sponsors (or as Shep called them, "Nascar Heroes"). The characters (with the exception of the leads) have variably "That's just my day job" mentalities and there's a lot of slow-as-hell-building-of-trust between the title characters (who are very, very shippable, I am told, and can believe).

-New favorite TV Trope I didn't know existed until recently: EVERYTHING'S WORSE WITH BEARS. If you can guess what the top quote's gonna be before clicking, I will give you a hug. Though I'm a little disappointed that one Avatar: TLA episode isn't listed as an inversion.

Current Music: Underworld - Back In The Fears (live)

Once again, there's an element of near-to-but-not-really-fantasy to French's work, and with The Likeness the premise is quite a bit more uncanny, and is the driving force of the plot rather than something winking from the edges.

Many reviewers read the entire damn thing but still mostly criticized it for the unlikelihood of the central whammy, being of course that Maddox has had a double running around in Dublin, wearing the name of her old alias and thus somewhat chillingly erasing any traces of where she really came from. I'm sure all of those reviewers are really fun to bring to the movies. I mean, come on. If an author thinks up a premise as uniquely ridiculous as that, it's practically their responsibility to write it. This book could be a disaster, but it's not. As with the first book, it may not please those looking solely for a mystery, but the premise would have been tragically wasted on a less character-studied plot.

( We really should be using the actual body for this...but I figured that might be a little weird. )

Current Music: Radiohead-Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box

- Leave a comment saying "round and round the garden like a teddy bear!"
- I'll ask you five questions to satisfy my curiosity.
- Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
- Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

Q's from

jolinar_rosha...

1. Which one of your fandoms' worlds would you choose to spend a month in?

His Dark Materials. It would be cool to know what my daemon would be. And the setting is vaguely steampunk, which is awesome and otherworldly but not too much so? I'm pretty sure my answer would be completely different if it was permanently living somewhere, probably a futuristic setting.

2. What was your favourite sweet when you were small?

The sugar cookies my mom makes around Christmas. I still love those, but I'm more into the toffee around the holidays now. I loved getting rock candy too, though now I don't eat it cause it's too sweet.

3. Which place have you always wanted to visit?

I've hardly gotten to go anywhere, so the list is very long. England, Italy, and Norway are high up there. If you threw me pretty much anywhere in Europe I'd be pretty damn excited.

4. What is the longest it's taken you to read a book?

In recent memory, it took me probably half a year to get through Middlesex, not so much because of length as me reading it during a couple very busy semesters.

5. What food are you best at cooking?

I'm not bad at cooking, but I don't do a lot of it. The most complicated thing I've made was beef stroganoff and it came out pretty good. The stuff that other people actually ask me to make is more baking than cooking.

I love Pogo <3

Current Music: The Bravery-Believe

We have this ridiculous amount of marshmallows at our house, I think at least three whole bags, which makes me really want to make some corn flake treats. (Yeah, like rice crispy treats but with corn flakes...It's actually the most awesome thing ever. Mmm, texture.) So I'm sitting here wondering if Dollar Tree could hook me up with some super cheap cereal and if it's likely to start raining cats and dogs and unicorns again while I'm out.

Many are talking about the Game of Thrones show which makes me remember I've been halfway into the audiobook of GoT for a really long time. I'm really bad with listening to audiobooks because I always just wanna jam to some music in my car and forget that I have BOOKS for my LISTENING PLEASURE.
(Actually, would anyone want me to upload that by any chance? The R. R. Martin audios seem to all be out of print. I'm not particularly in love with the reader, but he's not bad.) So what's the deal with the show only being named after the first book? They just thought it sounded cooler?

OH MY GOD MY CAT WON'T GET OUT OF MY FACE. Seriously, I'm very happy she isn't the bitchy little attacker she was after we got her fixed, but I cannot ADJUST to her need for AFFECTION. Soon as I hit post I'm gonna pet this thing to death.

Day 17 - A song that you want to play at your funeral
Day 18 - A song that makes you laugh
Day 19 - A song that turns you on
Day 20 - A song you've listened to after a break-up
Day 21 - A song that gives you shivers
Day 22 - A song you can't help but air-jam to

Lou Reed - "Perfect Day."

Current Music: Elliott Smith-Between the Bars (orchestral)

Got my hair cut real short again. I blame Carey Mulligan.

I'm loving all the unexpected Caprica love on my f-list. Pictures of Esai Morales and Sasha Roiz = always a good thing.

I have an urge to bake. Must bake soon. I've been meaning to make a gooey butter cake for like three months now. This needs to happen. I also just remembered I'm supposed to give this awesome clove cookie recipe to Kitty's mom. Damn, those cookies were good.

Haven't heard any opinions on Burton's Wonderland yet, which surprises me. *checks Rotten Tomatoes* Hmm. Not good. I have to admit--call me a blasphemer--I'm not an Alice In Wonderland purist/fan by any means. The Disney movie always kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and the books were boring when I was a kid and are still boring to me now. I like A) the play, which we put on in grade school and B) the supposed sexual-identity-crisis symbolism in the original text which is discussed by a character in Atwood's The Edible Woman and is also referenced throughout Edible Woman in the partly comical rather than arty-farty way Atwood manages to do everything, I guess. (I got to write an essay arguing that Duncan represents the caterpillar, among other things, for Professor Awesome's Sixties class. It was fun.)

I need to start getting down to reading for my final lit theories paper, which makes me feel like my spring break is already kind of over. Any suggestions on sources that dicuss adaptation theory? LOL. Scholarly articles that discuss fanworks are definitely fair game, but I fear that I've seen/read them all.
Jesus, I need to watch Adaptation again...

*siiiiigh* *grumble* How the hell am I supposed to make a case for myself when a class I am 99% positive I've only missed once has "excessive absences" checked on the progress report? I thought it was kind of strange when the instructor was all "Nice to see you, Layla" when I walked into class the other day, but I HAVEN'T BEEN GONE. What the HELL?

I was given an awesome prompt for that TV Producer meme that's going around and have been putting some thought into it, but until I get the time to actually do that one...

comment and I'll give you three of your fandoms, then copy and paste the questions onto your journal and fill it out. (You can totally give me a list to pick from if you don't think a lot of your fandoms would be obvious to me.)

betweenthebliss gave me...( Caprica, His Dark Materials, and Neverwhere. )

Current Music: Cat Power - He War

Reply to this meme by yelling 'WORDS!', and I will give you five words that remind me of you.

Then post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you.

Keep in mind that if I don't know you that well, your words might end up kind of odd or weird.

My words from the lovely

_tehrin...

1. Star Trek

Haha, I like it a little? The first series I got into, just because it was on during the time of my childhood that I was regularly watching TV after school, was Voyager, though there was some TNG and DS9 sprinkled in there too. The BF had a similar nostalgia for it and kind of randomly bought the entire series to rewatch during our junior year of high school, and thus began our realization of being huge geeks. Voyager I definitely got into for the actual sci-fi intrigue, but TOS encompasses more the strength of character development that's got me pretty damn fangirly over how they were rebooted.

2. Jacob Black

Oh dammit, you made me talk about Twilight. No, honest to god, I read the Twilight books in order to be able to beta read for somebody and while they are every bit as sexist and terribly written as people say, it's a fun universe especially once you get to the werewolves. Jacob Black is a character who anomalously just hops off the page and feels very real in the midst of the obnoxious flawlessness of some of the Cullens and blank slate of Bella's character. Taylor Lautner, he's an awesome kid, but he'll never quite capture the mix of youthful humor and mature confidence that the character has on paper, that is, until his disturbingly castrating fate in the final book, which I did not even finish.

3. writing

It's kind of weird how I've sorta known for most of my life that I would probably end up doing something in writing but never actually got into just doing it in my spare time until--apparently I can be this specific--around the beginning of 2006, which was during my first year in college. Yeah, WTF, self. My life was simpler before I wrote, but I am incapable of taking it back.

4.

ontd_startrek

I think most of the reason Star Trek was kind of unanimously irresistible was because the cast just had phenomenal group chemistry all around. (Casting two guys who were ALREADY FRIENDS to play Kirk and Spock? Yay!) This is one of the very few ONTD groups I watch or ever will watch, cause generally I don't really obsess about actors, but they're all pretty hilarious and awesome (and smart, and hot) and will never stop being entertaining.

5. fantasy

Even though I read all kinds of stuff, I'm starting to realize that reading fantasy is always like coming home. Neverwhere and Wicked are the two books that always stay firmly on my list of favorites, but F. L. Block and Philip Pullman have probably actually influenced me the most as a writer. And yeah, my novel is a fantasy, and even in the process of writing in the genre I haven't quite figured out what the common thing is about it that draws me to it so strongly.

Aaand the novel of doom must be done by Tuesday. I'm like 600 words away from the min length. Life is doable.

Current Music: Talking Heads-The Good Thing

Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

My q's from

betweenthebliss( some of them spoilery for BSG... )

Eight ships you like :
1. Cook/JJ (Skins)
2. Kara/Lee (BSG)
3. Kirk/Uhura (TOS/Trek XI)
4. Jack/Doctor (Doctor Who)
5. Lucy/Schroeder (Peanuts)
6. Charlie/Daisy (Anansi Boys)
7. Kirk/Spock (Trek XI)
8. Anders/Barolay (BSG)

Four ships you're curious about :
9. Arthur/Merlin (Merlin)
10. Claire/Gretchen (Heroes)
11. Chuck/Blair (Gossip Girl)
12. Lacey/Zoe (Caprica)

Two ships you don't like :
13. Chief/Cally (BSG)
14. Kirk/McCoy (Trek)

( & questions about my shippidy ships )

Current Music: Stina Nordenstam-I Dream of Jeannie

There's this girl at my college I'd never met before who I ate with along with some other acquaintances in the cafeteria today? Looks EXACTLY like Jewel Staite. To the point that I assumed she gets it all the time and waited till she left to point a fork after her and be like, "Kaylee in Firefly? Anybody watch Firefly?" One of the dudes was like, "I've said so before. It's uncanny, isn't it?" Must be, cause I had to try not to be like, "DAMN, woman, you are PRETTY."

It feels so weird to be done with RS. I kind of wanna just sit back and say to myself that I'm gonna focus on just classes and not work on fic for like the rest of the month, but I see that happening for like three days at the most, haha.

Some Champaign MOFOs are having a party tomorrow and a couple of my grad friends should be coming. WIIIN. I have a feeling this plan to go above and beyond the minimum requirement for this 100-level class lit paper by actually reading Alice in Wonderland as an outside source (and making it have something to do with Edible Woman) is going to come under reconsideration for friend times. I have another paper to write for Romance: The Genre that's gonna kick my ass because I've been phoning it in for so much of this semester. If it wasn't comparative I'd be fine; if it was on what we're reading now I'd be fine. But no. I don't want to write on Chretien de Troyes, I...I just don't.

Current Music: Frank Zappa & Mothers of Invention-Hungry Freaks, Daddy

I was just perusing our library site and happened to see this:

The Ames Library is pleased to announce that author Louise Erdrich has been selected for the 8th Annual Ames/Milner Visiting Author Program.

Ms. Erdrich will be on campus the evening of Thursday, October 22nd 2009.

3:00 – 4:00 Presentation and Q and A, Milner Library, Illinois State University

7:30 – 8:30 Presentation, Presser Hall, Illinois Wesleyan University

8:30 Book signing, The Ames Library Illinois Wesleyan University

BRING IT ON. I LOVE ERDRICH. I GOTTA GET MY COPY OF LOVE MEDICINE FROM HOME SO I CAN GET IT SIGNED. OMG.

Ruby Rod shares my enthusiasm.
Man, today was just not working. I could tell from when I woke up that I wasn't gonna be able to motivate myself to do anything. The major hang-up is attempting to fudge my way through an extremely difficult chapter in my book that I'm just kinda not ready to write. I got to the point of reaching the word count for the week and just throwing in the towel. I'll have to try to whip it into shape later, but I'm frustrated that I'm getting so behind. I could totally write this in a non-linear fashion and still get credit, but the fact that the professor is consistently following and enjoying it means it's a really good chance to get a lab rat perspective on how well the little plot twists are composed and...all that stuff. And now I just realized that a paper due Friday is just a little more complicated than I thought it was and I just don't feel like doing work. Ugh.

Listening to audiobooks while I'm walking around campus is a good idea, until Neil Gaiman writes something hilarious that has me giggling like a moron when I'm walking down the street by myself.

"It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck."

So far I like Anansi Boys quite a bit more than I liked American Gods. Neverwhere still pwns all. As far as what I'm literally reading, I've been slogging through but enjoying Middlesex, which I swear would be kind of boring if not written by Eugenides (almost typed Stephanides, LOL) who is a goddamn god of descriptors. I have never simply stopped and gone "HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT?" so many times while reading a book.

I am seeing a whole lot of back-to-classes procrastinating-instead-of-facing-reality gloom on my f-list. I'm so there. And since I have all these graphics I should be uploading somewhere instead of letting them sit on my hard drive, I think it's time for...

!!!***an end of summer trek cast dumpspam, y'all***!!!

(This is my learning and doing stuff face.)

And OMFG I am having problems with photobucket, making pics a reasonable size, etc. Consider that your warning.

( random-ass sloppy picspam of hotness, some new-school and *some* old )

Current Music: Ryan Adams-Come Pick Me Up

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Entries tagged with books

PROJECT KILL MACHINE

I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my mittens!

"Sure, I know, it's true. But some truths are probably worse than lies."

Broken Harbour (+ a bit about Teen Wolf)

yesterday upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there.

*

(no subject)

FOREVERR. FOREVERR.

(no subject)

"Do you know what I had to do to get seats this close to the bear?"

In which I finally talk about The Likeness (and also talk a bit more about In The Woods)

meme, take 2 / UPULAR.

you just keep me hanging on...

"Drum roll, please. I'm gonna be a screenwriter."

TAURON > YOU

!WORDS MEME

DOIT

"This just in. No it's not."

feck yeah

SPAAAAAAAM