subdee

Still trying to write something for every book I read this year. On the plus side it's really helping me to remember them, on the minus side it takes SO LONG. *shakes out fingers*

...and I still have two essays to write this weekend, weeeeeep.

Vamped, David Sonowski
Set in a future society composed almost entirely of vampires. Sonowski has a lot of fun working out exactly how that would work – vampire economics, vampire pop culture, vampire corporate politics, etc. One fairly dorky vampire, who remembers the days before vampires took over the planet (and actually, who helped the process along) finds a young human girl and, almost in spite of himself, adopts her. Of course he has to keep his “daughter” a secret from his neighbors so that they won’t eat her. ( Read more... )

The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
A Calcutta businessman goes to see an aunt in “Tide Country,” a very poor chain of islands near Bengal, whose inhabitants are subjected to bad storms, periodic flooding, and gruesome death by man-eating tiger. Along the way, he meets an American marine biologist headed to the same place looking for river dolphins. I bought this for my mother. I’m not sure who started it – maybe me? -- but we’ve been buying each other India-themed books for a while now. It was one of those weird situations: I assumed that because she bought an India book for me, she probably liked that sort of thing, so I bought one for her, so then she bought one for me, and this escalated until it finally came out that neither one of us is particularly interested in India. XD ( Read more... )

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Beautiful but heartbreaking! I have since lost the book, but I can quote this part from memory because it is so traumatizing: Rahel, sensing that something is off with her twin brother Estha, says something a little disobedient to her mother, but it’s not a big deal, it’s something any normal six-year-old would say. Her mother gets a stony expression and Rahel realizes with horror what she’s done, but she can’t take it back, it’s too late for that. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” her mother says. “You made me love you a little less. That’s what we do when we say hurtful things to the people we care about: we make them love us a little less.”( Read more... )

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
I spent a while looking down on Brittain, because she does not really understand what Roland, on the front lines of WWI, is going through -- but it’s not as if she didn’t realize this at the time, and it's not as if Roland didn’t believe the pro-war hype more than she did when he signed up, and it's not like all civilian endeavors becomes worthless just because there’s a war on, and anyway it is COMPLETELY ridiculous for me to feel superior to someone with so much sensitivity in her memoirs, merely because I have experienced the trenches through lectures and written accounts. ( SPOILERS )

The Classic Slum, Robert Roberts
Half anthropology, half memoir. I liked this book a lot. The level of statistical detail is amazing (this is the "what much does a family of six circa 1900 eat in a Manchester clum versus a London slum" book). And Roberts' commentary is great, he's SUCH a socialist. Anyway the best part about this book is that I finally have a sense of the value of money for all of those Regency romance/Victorian fantasy books I've been reading. This was so useful that I typed up the information to share with you. ( Quick Monentary Guide, England Circa 1900 )

New Grub Street, George Gissing.
About the Victorian publishing industry. Believe it or not, I didn't read this one for class (I say "or not" because it perfectly ties into several lectures.) There's an amazon reviewer who says:
George Gissing's 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," is likely one of the most depressing books I've ever read.
Although it's true that certain characters suffer for their art, yea even unto death, it's not as depressing as all that. I recommend this book to: everyone who has ever been a writer, dabbled in writing, or even thought about dabbling in writing. It's about writing for a living vs. writing for the sake of writing (Gissing uses two characters who are like...opposing facets of his own personality to comment on this). And his commentary is still relevant, it's amazing. I earmarked favorite passages and ended up with half the book. If you like reading about writing, you'll like it (no really).

To-read:
- Black Powder War, Naomi Naovik (halfway through, actually I like it better than Throne of Jade (which I liked better than HMD))
- Dreamfall, Joan Vinge (although I cringe just reading the first paragraph)
- Around the Bloc, Stephanie Elizondo Greist
- Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslan
- The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russel
- Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Added another list to the last post: Being Normal/Being Weird. Nonfantasy YA with fantastical elements, acid trips optional, may not be suitable for assigned age group.

Some more lists here. These're more generic than the other ones. (Did I make the dealine? Please say I made the deadline.)

WITH lacewood: ( Alternate Europe Historical Fantasy )
( British YA fantasy VS The Arabian Nights )
( You're in the Army Now -- In the Future )
( Poetic and Heartbreaking )
( Identity and Memory in Manga )

YES DONE FINALLY. Suggestions welcome!

(Going on forty hours of no sleep! ...I really have to stop doing this, it's so unproductive.)

Today's lecture was on how war changes language, for an example of this we watched the final episode of the cult British comedy television series Blackadder. ( spoilers I guess )

Context! Context! Like the context where nonfans wonder at the appeal of slashing two male characters together! Speaking of, our next paper in that class is Regeneration-themed (I take back everything trivial I said about this book, it's brilliant). We're supposed to draw parallels between the book's treatments of communication and memory and the larger historical implications of same. Inspired by worldserpent, I am going say that homosexuality was something everyone was talking about, but in indirect double-speaking ways, and how this was similar to not being able to openly denounce the war. Actually I'm not positive there is any validity to this what-so-ever, I just want an excuse to systematically go through the book looking for circumlocutions XD.

Massive Crossover Recs Post By Elihice <33333
Not just crossovers, crossovers subdivided into smaller categories of crossover! Be still, my beating heart.

Professor Israel must be cackling to herself right now, because Regeneration by Pat Barker is more homoerotic than any other piece of published fiction I have ever read. ( Read more... )

trimgular asked for a picture of the most horrifying t-shirt I own, here it is: http://pics.livejournal.com/sub_divided/pic/00001qht/

Still taking photograph requests.

Other news:
1. Finally got around to updating the Death Note Links and General Links pages of my website. The Links page was especially outdated -- last update was August of 2004! -- but sadly, it's still pretty lacking. I don't really do that much websurfing, or at least not that much interesting websurfing.

2. edited the untitled Eternal Sabbath fic to be (slightly) less incoherant. I know there were people who liked it the way it was, but that was because they weren't familiar with the series and expected it to not make sense -- whereas if I wanted to post the fic to, say, fanfiction.net's Eternal Sabbath section before the official American release of the manga on May 30, I thought it would be better to clear up at least some of the confusion.

3. browsing through the journals friended to s2flexisquares (something I enjoy mostly because those journals are SO PRETTY though the prettiest are always friends only, what's up with that?), I found megaupload links for the first episode and the Ninja Baseball episode of Samurai Champloo: Episode One, Episode Ninja Baseball. From finnigan_geist.

Out of curiosity, which one of these would you rather see:

( one )
( two )

So.

[Poll #730071]

Sorry about the delay on Call Me Anytime. I haven't give up on it or anything like that, it's just that uhh Suikoden V got in the way. (more on this later) Also I bought waaaaaay too many books during the Ann Arbor Book Festival. I read and read and read, and the pile does not get any smaller. (more on this later too.)

EDIT - does anyone want to write the next entry at chain_of_fics? The line is "Maybe he had done it because she had warned him, who could tell."