Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

Finished reading Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games today. I've ordered the second from the library, but I'm number 11 in the queue, so who knows how long that will take.

I really, really enjoyed it. The people who told me I should read it, friends and patrons alike, weren't kidding.

I wonder if the twins have read them. I wonder if I could get them to...

(I'm sure I had something intelligent and/or insightful to say, but I'm blanking. Too tired to think.)

Dear Self,

Do not read other people's porn while you are trying to write your own. It will only make you have doubts. And you don't need any more of those.

Trust me,
Me


Usually it's not really a problem, but since this fic is trying to kill me, it kind of is.

It's kind of funny, though, but the amount of SPN fic I was reading tapered off greatly once I started writing it. I guess since I spend a lot of my free time writing it, I want to spend other parts of my free time reading something else? It sometimes makes me feel like a bad fan.

I do read it! If something catches my eye. Lately even my other fic reading has gone down. It's because my interests got snagged elsewhere. They're still snagged elsewhere.

And I got back into a nice book reading groove. In the last couple of days I finished Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Robin McKinley's Spindle's End, both of which I enjoyed.

Fun Home was yet another great example of why comics/graphic novels are such a great medium. An aunt of mine still doesn't think Sandman is legitimate literature and I know that annoys my cousin. Personally, I could geek out all day over the use of text and picture. Bechdel uses both wonderfully.

Spindle's End was recommended to me as a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in which the princess is an actual heroine and not a snoring lump in a bed. Sleeping Beauty is pretty much my least favorite fairy tale. I don't understand what it teaches young girls and generally find it pretty useless because the princess fulfills a curse and gets molested in her sleep. I find it questionable. But Spindle's End fixed that for me, explored roles and identity, destiny and expectations. It wasn't perfect, but I was very happy with it.

Tuesday I finished reading Vonda N. McIntyre's The Entropy Effect, which is the first Star Trek-related book I've read. It's got singularities and time travel and Spock and McCoy being pretty fantastic. It also supports both Spock/Kirk (boy does it ever) and McCoy/Kirk. While I am a Spock/Kirk girl myself, I am totally behind all the love. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Except for the written Scottish dialect. We know Scotty is Scottish. I don't need to be confused by additional vowels, missing consonants, or random apostrophes. Other than that, though, it was solid. Ending maybe a little anti-climatic.

( Spoilerific )

It's a storyline I wouldn't mind seeing applied to the new Trek 'verse. Not movie-wise, but fic-wise. I want to see new Kirk and Spock with their different history (and histories) go through this. Because I want to see how they'd react.

Now I really want to read more Trek books.

My love for Spock is massive.

- Have not watched the finale of Stargate Atlantis. And I'm still unspoiled for it.

- Saw ( The Curious Case of Benjamin Button )

- Finished reading John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things. If this book were a movie, Terry Gilliam would be the director. I am completely enamored with it. From David to Roland to the Communist dwarfs. (omg, the Communist dwarfs.) And while I'm done with the main part of the book, the last hundred or so pages are fairy tale background and writerly thoughts and that makes me happy. Especially from an intertextual point-of-view.

The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers, David's mother would say. Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions, all shouty and insistent, while stories - real stories, proper made-up stories - were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were as insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales.
- John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things (p. 9)

What a great book to start the year with. It was one of those books I had no idea I was looking for, y'know?

- Hey! Amber from House is on this repeat of How I Met Your Mother!

I'm so glad I'm in Seattle and not at home. Mom called it "sweltering" yesterday, so I'm pretty happy to be missing that. Ick.

Sunday I saw WALL-E with Kasey and Kit. ( I really loved it. )

This morning I finished David Crystal's ( The Fight for English )

Apparently Don S. Davis passed away. This makes me incredibly sad. I'll miss seeing him randomly on TV, but I will always enjoy him as General Hammond.

I said I had another book to pimp and last night I finished it, so it's pimpin' time.

The library that I work for is sponsoring a One Book Program and everyone in the community is reading Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I wasn't planning on reading it, but Shannon recommended it and two of the quotes on the back are from people whose work I enjoy, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Basically, I loved it. It made me laugh and cry (oh, did I cry) and there were many points where I had to stop and re-read because I hit a sentence that just made me go, "oh."

I'd never read anything by Alexie before. Now I'm thinking I might have to do some further reading. One of the things I enjoyed about the book was that I could actually picture what he was talking about. When he talks about Reardan and Wellpinit and Spokane, I know where he is. There was even a mention of the petrified wood forests near George, Washington. That was field-trip material when I was younger. When he describes going to high school in a small town, I know what that was like. It was just a lot of fun to read something that felt familiar. It's not often that I read a book that's set in places like that.

It's not a perfect book. (Can such a thing really exist?) But it's good and worth the time. In my opinion, anyway. When Shannon showed up at the library the other day to take over, I told her how much I was enjoying the book. She told me that it was interesting how some people would come in and say they loved it and the next person would say they hated it. There's supposed to be a book discussion at the beginning of May and I'm looking forward to hearing what other people have to say. I can see that people could have problems with the language or content, but both felt appropriate for the age (fourteen) and mentality of the main character.

I also ran into some criticism of Alexie's short sentences over at Amazon. (And, seriously, I need to stop reading those reviews. The bad ones aggravate me.) Now, maybe it's just because I like using short sentences, but I think the criticism that it shows lack of trust in the reader's intelligence is a load of crap. It's a stylistic choice, and one I felt fit with the main character. In other words, I thought they packed a punch.

Anyway. Reading this book made me think a lot about the Ethnic American Literature class I took. Which in turn made me miss classes and discussions (and professors). So I really am looking forward to the opportunity to talk about this book with other people. I may even actually be leading the discussion (if Shannon's not kidding), which is a little daunting and kind of exciting.

This morning I finished reading Christopher Moore's Fluke: Or, I know Why the Winged Whale Sings. It was enjoyable, but reading his work this time around I noticed something I hadn't before.

He has the habit of using phrases like "the scientist/researcher/young woman/brunette/etc." to indicate characters instead of their names or a perfectly good pronoun. Now, is it fanfiction that has made me aware of this particular practice? Or did he not use it as much before?

And is this sloppy writing?

Maybe it's harsh to call it sloppy, but it annoys me. Lately the practice pulls me completely out of the story and I have to stop and think, "Now why did the author do that?" I understand that as a writer you don't want to constantly be using the same things over and over, but in real life I have never thought of someone I know as "the librarian" or "the older man."

What really gets me is that I can understand the practice in slash, where you have scenes with two characters of the same gender, making the clear use of pronouns difficult and opening up the possibility of too much name repetition. But I don't understand why you'd do it in scenes with a man and a woman, other than because you were bored using "he" and "she."

Though it is somewhat allowable, I guess, if the characters have only just met or don't yet know each other's names. Or if the author is making a point about the character's profession. Which, okay, Moore seemed to be doing once or twice. That doesn't change the fact that I read it and went, "What are you? Posting on fanfiction.net?" And, yes, I'll admit that that's harsh. (Nothing against fanfiction.net! Just, y'know. It's not the first place I would go for quality.) But, at the same time, that's the way it felt once or twice.

Not to say that I didn't enjoy Fluke. I really did. Even laughed out loud several times, as Moore tends to make me do. And the protagonist, Nathan Quinn, is maybe my favorite Moore character so far. But I did feel that the book had some flaws. Besides what prompted the mini-rant above, I thought the end was a bit anti-climactic. Or maybe a lot. It was like I was reading and tension was mounting and then all of the sudden...smooth sailing. Little bit weird.

Also, I started to find some of the humor a little sophomoric. In a "Really? Did you really have to go there?" kind of way. Sometimes holding some things back is much more interesting, and funny, than going all out. (This is my small problem with The Whitest Kids U Know.) Although, in the acknowledgments at the end of the book it turns out that a few of the more outrageous incidents happened in real life. So maybe it's just me.

Now I'm going to have to get other people to read it so I can see what they think.

Mom and I saw Hairspray yesterday and for basically the whole movie I had a ridiculously huge grin on my face. To the point that I was aware of it and thought, "Boy, if anyone could see me now they'd think I was cracked." I've still got a big grin just thinking about it. Colorful, happy movie. Plus, James Marsden and Zac Efron are totally just shiny pieces of eye-candy. (A friend of EB's can never remember that term and always ends up saying, "eye-food.") Well, basically everyone was. And the theater was actually crowded for Moses and people were into it! It was just a lot of fun.

As I said in my last post, I finished reading Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke and was unimpressed. I picked it up because a classmate recommended it to me when we discovered we had many similar tastes. But this just didn't really work for me. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't engaged. In fact, I kind of felt that Pullman's writing was a little condescending. I was talking to Mom about this and brought up the fact that, well, maybe I just had to remember that this was written for a certain younger age group. Mom pointed out that Harry Potter is (or started out being) written for a younger age group and doesn't come off that way.

Maybe condescending isn't the right word, but there was something about the dialogue between the text and the reader that was very...shifty to me. Or juvenile. Or both. There were a lot of moments where the characters were shown in dialogue but their conversation was kept a secret from the reader, which seemed to be a lazy way of saying, "Look! There is a mystery here! See how there is something you don't know!" Which annoyed me quite a bit after awhile.

So I don't think I'll be looking into the other books in that particular series. I don't remember Pullman's other books reading like that. Although I never did finish The Amber Spyglass. If I remember correctly, the characters started to drive me crazy.

Now I've started The Jane Austen Book Club. That's for when I'm at work. I'm keeping Deathly Hallows for reading at home. Still not finished with it. Lately reading anything has been something I've had to work at. And I'm feeling a little reluctant to finish HP and find out what happens, no matter how much I really want to know. When I finish and post about it, I'll get into just how ridiculously emotional I've been over the actual reading of it.

Finished Corinne tonight so I could write my paper on it.

While I enjoyed the book, I still feel this desire to chuck it across the room for the satisfying thud of it hitting something. Because, omg, did parts of it piss me off. And I'm usually level-headed when it comes to stuff like this. Seriously, professors have commented on it.

Interestingly, though, this skill-building paper has helped me work through some of my issues. I am attempting to read what is a confusing ending from a woman writer considering everything that has come before as a good thing, and not the tragic thing it looks like on the surface. I think I've succeeded, but I guess I'll just have to wait until I get the paper back to find out for sure.

Next book is George Sand's Indiana.

It feels like a Thursday night and not a Tuesday night (well, Wednesday morning). It's because I messed with our usual schedule and went ahead and made pasta for dinner and then didn't go to work.

This evening I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Both Dr. Berry and Natasha recommended it to me and I am so glad I finally got around to reading it. I would have read it sooner, but with all of the books I'm assigned for classes, this one was a little too close to that sort of thing to pull me in during the school year. Pleasure reading calls for the fluffier things.

( Middlesex )