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I started my new year off by waking up on a futon to an angry cat clawing at the door demanding to be fed, feeding said cat who continued to dislike me, and then I made my own breakfast: chocolate cake in a bowl with milk.  I had a very nice, casual New Year's Eve at a friend's wherein we watched HGTV and Arrested Development, ate pizza and chocolate cake, drank some wine (I had two whole glasses!  Bringing my 2011 yearly total of wine consumption to approximately 4.5 glasses!), and generally just hung out.  At one point we heard distant fireworks and then like half an hour later were like, oh, happy new year.

Today we took down all the Christmas stuff and grilled out, because this weekend was gorgeous.  Yesterday we went for a walk!  In short sleeves! ♥

( December Writing Progress )


( New December Media )

19. Your favourite picture, junior fiction and Young Adult books

I don't really remember many picture books.  I started off with Berenstain Bears and He-Man/She-Ra books, but beyond that, I don't really remember.  (I actually still own all those books, and had them in my bookcase along with all my regular books.)  Some of my favorite kids and YA books:  Invitation to the Game, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Singularity, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and of course old stand-bys like the Anne of Green Gables books, Little Women, etc.  The ones that I linked to are all books I've continued to reread over the years as an adult, and they're all great - I totally recommend them.

20. Least favourite plot device employed by way too many books you actually enjoyed otherwise

I'm not at all a fan of the love triangle.  AT ALL.  It is incredibly difficult to make work, it tends to make the central character, the one torn between two others, into some kind of irresistible Mary Sue (because that character is usually a woman), it overwhelms the plot (or becomes the plot), and it just generally bores me.  I hated it in The Hunger Games, it drives me to distraction in the Sookie Stackhouse books (especially when it's not a love triangle but it's instead a love rectangle or pentagon), and I haven't read Twilight so I probably can't complain about it (and wouldn't enjoy the books otherwise, I'm sure), but hey, why not.  I'm sure there are books out there with interesting stories about someone caught between two lovers or something, but for the most part?  Eh.

21. A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving

I just now read Jane Eyre for the first time.  I won't say I didn't think I wouldn't like it, but I expected to just read it, and have my "classic I've never read before" book out of the way for this year.  And I LOVED IIIIIIIIIIITTTT.  So, so good.  Even though I knew the basic plot ahead of time, I still found myself reading late into the night so I could see what happened next.  And I was just incredibly impressed with the character of Jane, who became a confident, intelligent, completely independent woman who knew her own heart and mind and refused to let anyone, not even the wealthy Mr. Rochester, change that.  (If you want to talk about things that are depressing, compare Jane Eyre to Bella Swan.  Yeah.)  I just finished watching the 2006 BBC miniseries (which was perfect and wonderful and Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens I LOVED THEM YESSSS), will watch the 2011 film this weekend, have the 90s film with Ciaran Hinds (mmmmmmmm) to watch after that, etc.  I'm sort of consumed by it atm.

(I first tried to post this on Tuesday, and when it wouldn’t go through I saved it.  Since then, I’ve just added to this same post, so I guess you could say that this was my week.)

7/25: So today was horrifying.  Apparently our air conditioning at work never came on Saturday, and at 2pm they finally closed down, and stayed closed yesterday, too.  Today they allegedly fixed the air at 11am, but either it’s still not working or it’s just going to take forever to cool the building down.  It was 85 degrees when I walked in the doors, and super humid, and it’s weird to talk about an inside space having a heat index, but it totally felt like it was at least 90 degrees inside.  What was worse, the air wasn’t circulating at all, so it was just stifling.

I was pretty exhausted by noon, sort of shuffled about like a zombie to finish out the day, and skipped writer’s group tonight.  Now I’m home and have had a cool shower and such, but I am still super-tired, which does not bode well for the rest of the week.

7/26: BUGS.  LIVE BUGS.  LIVE BUGS IN A BOOK, TRUNDLING ABOUT OVER THE PAGES.  I WAS HOLDING THE BOOK AND THERE WERE BUGS.  LIVE BUGS.  LITTLE TINY BUGS I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WERE OH GOD.

TWO HOURS LATER AND I’M STILL ITCHY.

7/27: I was thinking last night, as I came home, ate, got into bed and read for hours, that it’s not a bad thing to take a break, voluntary or otherwise, from the internet/Livejournal for a few days.  Sometimes I find myself sitting in front of the computer when I get home just out of habit, and not because that’s what I actually want to be doing.  I don’t want everything to be down forever, but I can’t honestly say that it’s not been a bad thing, LJ being down.  I mean, if nothing else, it’s a good idea to not immediately stare at a computer monitor after having spent 8 hours just doing so at work.

I’ve also used some of this time to finally catch up with Luther, which is an amazing show.  Dark, superbly acted, and very original for not actually being original (watch it and you’ll know what I mean), I definitely recommend it.

7/28: Bug guy came in to pay for his book.  I started explaining about the bugs, and he said, “Oh, laughing out loud, I had that book in this truck I bought off Craigslist for three weeks, and the truck was full of bugs, and I took it to the salvage yard.”  Thanks, bug guy.  Thanks for maybe figuring out that keeping a book in a truck full of bugs might INFEST THE BOOK, TOO.  But he paid for it and was polite and didn’t complain, and that’s more than we get from about 95% of patrons whom we bill, so, eh.  I guess it’s okay.

7/29: Livejournal is back!  But, I think instead of checking my flist and all that tonight, I’m going to write.  I have, like, eight WIPs and a new screenplay, and I feel like I never have time to write.  Although I did read like 800 pages of A Storm of Swords in the last three days, so maybe I need to sort out my priorities.

13. Do you reread a lot? Why (not)? Name a book you have reread many times.

I do!  I generally have at least one book I'm reading at any given time that's a reread.  Sometime it's a comfort thing, sometimes it's nice to have a book I can pull out of my purse and just open anywhere if I need to randomly have something to do for a few minutes, sometimes a book is so awesome I need to reread it the same way I'd watch an episode of TV or a movie again.  Besides my favorite books and authors that I've previously mentioned, I've reread David Brin's Uplift series several times.

14. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

I was quite taken with The Monstrumologist.  Very scary, very well-written, intensely dark.  

15. Do you recommend books to other people? If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

I...don't.  I find that no one ever actually reads books I recommend?  So I sorta gave up on that.  Every now and then (like, really every now and then), I'll convince someone to try a book I like, but it's so rare that I don't usually bother.  I would definitely try to make everyone I know at least read the first 100 pages of Red Mars.  Give it a shot!

07. What fictional character are you (secretly) in love with?

I'm sure I'm not alone with this one, but Gilbert Blythe.  Growing up, I very much wanted to be Anne Shirley, and find a Gilbert of my own.

08. The last book you acquired, and how (begged, bought, borrowed?)

I had to think about this one for awhile.  Nearly all the books I read come from the library, and that's not really "acquiring" them, I don't think.  I was trying to remember the last book I actually bought, and whether it was from the library booksale cart or from a thrift store, when I remembered that the last book I acquired was actually given to me.  nhpw gave me a copy of the novelization of In the Beginning, a Babylon 5 movie, which I'm quite excited about!  I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to reading it, as should be evident from the next question.

09. Your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next.

I rarely read a single book at a time.  I generally have a book in each location where I tend to read.  So I have a work book (two, actually), a kitchen table book, a purse book, a bed book, and a bathroom book (exactly - we all do it!).  I'm currently reading:

Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans, by Malachi Martin
Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman
The Story of Civilization Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant
Insomnia, by Stephen King
The Valley of Fear, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
ETA:  Also, The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Peter Heather.  I'm currently reading so many books I can't keep them straight.

I consider a book one I'm currently reading if I've opened it up in the last two weeks.  There are other books I'm not finished with lying around here and there, but I haven't looked at them in awhile.  (I will never finish my sister's college Art History textbook, for example.  I read a chapter approximately every eight months.)

You can see my last reads in my last new media post, though I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle since then.  Up next are the aforementioned In the Beginning, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, The Demonologist and The Devil in Connecticut by Gerald Brittle, The Uninvited by Steven LaChance, and the next A Song of Fire and Ice book.  (A Feast of Crows?)  I also have a couple series I'm working on but I keep getting distracted by other books: the Master and Commander series, a hard SF series I need to finish up, the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro vampire books; I need to catch up on the True Blood series (I think I'm three behind now that the new one's come out), and I have some books I've bought that I'll eventually read (Neal Stephenson's Anathem for one.)  And of course my Latin books.  Yeah...

02. Your earliest memory of reading or being read to.

My dad read to me every night, and my earliest memory of that was when we lived in what we call "the old house."  The attic had been finished into two bedrooms, and mine had a window that overlooked the street.  Every night, my dad would read a book to me, and then we'd sit in front of the window and play an absolutely stellar and very complicated game called "I think I see a car coming."  (It was a tremendous day when I figured out how my dad always won - the bastard knew to look for the headlights!) 

What books did my dad read me?  He-Man books, AWWWW YEAHHHH.  That's how I learned to read.  He would read them and read them, and then start reading them with the wrong words, which I found endlessly entertaining.  I would correct him, and he'd tell me I was wrong, that He-Man was in fact fighting the Poo-Poo Monsters, and I would have to point out the actual word and what it said.

03. Your favourite book aged 9 ½, or 13 ¾, whichever you remember best.

I can't remember with anything approaching that level of specificity, but one of my favorite books in elementary school was My Teacher is an Alien, by Bruce Coville; as far as middle school goes, that's when I started reading adult fiction, so I'd say probably The Stand by Stephen King, or maybe The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.  (LOL, one of my mom's favorite stories was the day my 6th grade language arts teacher called her to let her know that I was reading Interview With a Vampire and maybe she and my dad would want to have a talk with me about what was acceptable reading material, and my mom told her that my dad had given me that book to read.  She said there was literally twenty solid seconds of silence from the teacher before she meekly hung up.)

So I started reading The Story of Civilization, which after just ten pages is totally awesome.  The writing is just...amazing.  "Most history is guessing; the rest is prejudice."  GUH.  PERFECTION.  WILL DURANT, HOW YOU WRITE MY FEELINGS.

Anyone have any non-fiction, especially non-fiction on ancient history, they want to recommend?