TV Turnoff Week Book Swap
My friend Another Dem on the
Drinking Liberally in Cincinnati blog posted about next week being
TV Turnoff Week. As a fun way of observing the week, I propose that we meet at lunch on Monday and exchange books to read during the week. On Friday, we could meet again at lunch or after work to discuss what we read.
Are you game?
Nia's Book #10: This one makes up for the audio book
For book club #1, I read
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. It was quite long, but quite good.
Due to an overload of other work, it took me forever to read this thing, but during the times that I had available, I was thoroughly engrossed. Granted, I was a little annoyed at the information that was presented as requiring extensive research, since I knew a lot about Vlad Dracula from a vampire phase I went through in my younger days. Although, I was rather surprised to learn that, in the end, he was just an evil librarian.
Sometimes, the style got a little convoluted, because it was presented largely in the form of letters and notes from the 3 main historians involved. After a while, it got hard for me to keep track of who was going through some bizarre research-related ordeal. I guess it is in the style of the original
Dracula, but I didn't really like that book. It revealed the details in the right way, but it still could have been done a little bit more coherantly.
All in all, I really liked the book, it was very interesting.
Nia's Book #9: Ok, ok, so it was an audio book...
A few weeks ago, I listened to
A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain while at work. It was loaned to me by a coworker who once told me "I'd eat a dog's ass if it was prepared well," and in that sense I feel he shared a lot with Anthony.
Basically, Anthony spent some time traveling around the world (particularly focusing on Asian countries), eating local cuisine in 4-star restaurants, hovels, and everything in between. He dealt with the western disconnect between eating meat and realizing how you get meat, and took on vegetarians at every turn. Speaking as someone who doesn't eat any meat that remotely indicates that it was once an animal (this weekend, facing the scales on a salmon fillet I was cooking almost made me throw the whole thing away), I felt that I would have resorted to full-on veganism within a couple hours of this journey. However, Anthony was there for the whole experience, from the slaughter of whatever was on the menu to the usually delicious end.
Something that he pointed out, and I have often noticed is the predominance of foods in Asia that are intended to "make you strong like bull." I have often wondered over the apparently-urgent need to do something for their wangs (hehe, I typed "wang"). There is no real explanation, just more food for thought.
The most extreme experience he had, from my perspective, was eating the still-beating heart of a cobra. That was one of those "strong like bull" dishes. Don't worry, though, the rest of the snake was not wasted. Everything was eaten, including the bones.
In summary, I felt a little ill while listening to it, but it was quite fascinating and worthwhile. I have the MP3s if anyone is interested in the experience.
I am currently reading a very long book for my book club. I hope to have it done next week, otherwise there will be a fine. Wish me luck.
Skippity's Book 17: Some sheep, and some snobs
Wendy Holden's "
Farm Fatale" was one of those reads that is light enough to keep you entertained but just meaty enough that you don't feel guilty for reading a potato-chip book. The main character is a woman named Rosie who has a rosy view of what living in the country is like. She has been stuck in a shitty flat in London with her boyfriend, and when he gets a job offer to write about what living in the country is like, Rosie is thrilled. They move into a cottage in a town called Eight Mile Bottom and of course, madness ensues (because it would be a boring book otherwise). Rosie's bf turns out to be a real jerk and can't write for shit and won't accept any of the column ideas Rosie offers (which are all quite good). Rosie gets the hots for a local farmer. Some crazy bitch who thinks she's an actress moves in up the road at a mansion that she wrecks with her decorating taste and when she throws a party and invites Rosie and Mark (the bf), Rosie accidentally meets a celebrity who lives on a local estate while he recovers from celebrityhood, but he lies and hides his identity from Rosie, there's more madness, Rosie and Mark break up, and the book ends with Rosie falling in love and accepting the marriage proposal of the celebrity, thus getting her comeuppance, which has been due her the whole book because of the astronomical number of shitty things that keep happening to her.
I recommend this book if you have a busted shoulder and nothing but time on your hands. It is a good read. It's a little hokey in places and now and then you're not convinced that things are just coincidences, but the plot is kind of out there anyway and you just keep rooting for Rosie. She's worth rooting for.
Skippity's Book 16: I've heard this before...
I'm reviewing that same book of fairy tales Nia reviewed, and I liked it as much as she did. Let us just say, it got me through some poopie times. I think I could actually re-read the second half of the book and it would be all new to me because I was high on Percocet when I read it and I don't remember much.
Stories I particularly liked: The Reverend's Wife, about two chicks in the church who "borrow" one another's husbands to great success for both of them (and with a not-so-subtle message that men are thick as bricks). The last one, about a commoner trying to hack through the roses surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle, because he got lucky and it was quiet and introspective and nice. The one about the witch having the thumb-sized daughter getting her revenge, because I dig revenge stories and fancy myself able to carry off revenges for petty wrongs, even though in the end I always just let it go. All the stories that told a familiar tale from the point of view of someone the story traditionally shuns (the Snow White story in particular).
Like Nia, I didn't dig the poems much. The one about the matchstick girl was ok though.
Oh and the Rumplestiltskin story, that was probably my favorite. The narrator totally took me for a ride. It was great.
Nia, I shall try to remember to bring your book back Monday. I meant to Friday and my silly brain forgot.
Oh yeah while I am thinking of it
It's not a wine, it's a beer, but I'm going to review it, because it is so damn yummy.
Genesse Creme Ale, kids. It's fabulous stuff.
Sadly, I think you can only get it in the Allegheny Mountain region of Pennsylvania and New York.
You know how cream soda compares to regular soda (or, pop, if you're from Ohio)? That is how this beer compares to other light-colored beers. It is just flat-out yummy. Here is a picture:
It's the one on the right. It looks a bit darker in this picture than it actually is because of the reflections and also because I had some blue tissue paper taped over the light I was using to light this (for that cool, summery feeling, of course).
It's good stuff. Worth the drive to New York.
How do you review a beer, anyway? "It tastes good."
Skippity's Bickity-Bam! Three in a row!
Kay, so I suck a lot and my life has pretty much been a carnival of pain for the past three weeks, but I am now going to review...dum dum dum...three books at once! Cuz getting all my typing done in a lump hurts less.
Book 14:
Maid Marian, by Elsa Watson. Please make fun of me for reading this book, for I deserve it. Long ago, when I was a tween, I got hooked on Robin Hood stories (I know, I know...
). This was a buck at Half Price Books and I needed something to read on my ski trip, so I picked it up. It was okay. Nothing to write home about. Nothing spectacular. It kept me interested, but it let me down too. It's the Robin Hood story told from the POV of Marian, and it was pretty predictable. It was very obviously written by a woman who has a lot of cats and a real peachy view of the world, which, sadly, I do not share. I give it a "meh."
Book 15: High Impact Portrait Photography by Lori Brystan. I guess I know how to take high-impact portraits now. Dammit, there should be a hyphen between "high" and "impact," woman! It's called a compound modifier! Ack! No, but anyway, I actually found this book really useful. I want to do a sort of kids-and-pets kind of photo gig if I ever get the hell out of advertising, and this book had lots of cool ideas in it, for props and poses and lighting and all sorts of stuff. I took notes. If anyone would be willing to pose for me so I can practice my high-impact portrait photography skills, I would appreciate it. As soon as I get my arm glued properly back into its socket and I am able to lift my camera again.
Book 15: Lighting Secrets for the Professional Photographer by Alan Brown. The lesson I learned from this book is that the secret to professional lighting is that you need to be really rich so you can afford all the shit they use in this book. It seemed to be aimed much more at people who already have a photo studio and a shitload of professional lights, which I don't. Nonetheless, I read the whole thing, hoping to glean some useful bits of information. The only really good idea I got from this book is that you can use fill cards to un-fill too, which, well, if you're not into the photogeekery crap isn't going to make any sense.
So. I actually read all these books a while ago and I am just now getting around to writing about them. Sitting down and reading is, randomly enough, very painful right now. So is not sitting around and reading. Pretty much everything I have done the past three and a half weeks has been painful. I am really ready for this doopidity to be over.
Okay. Enough bitchin'.
Nia's Book #8: Hey, haven't I read this review already?
And the answer is a resounding "yes, now stop bitching about it!"
Tommy's Tale by Alan Cumming was
originally reviewed by WWB&B's own extreme reader Skippity Dee-bop about a month ago, and after finding out the my one true love, Alan Cumming (shut up about me and the gay boys), has written a book, I was so enthralled that she brought it in so I could share in the drug addled joy of it all.
As I just stated, most of this book is pure, drug-induced glee. It also includes a lot of good and amusing snogging and shagging. I really enjoyed the bond that our dear, confused Tommy shared with his flatmates. It made me long for the days of living with great friends and sharing in traditions and jokes that nobody else can possibly understand, because they probably wouldn't want to. Not to mention the annotated photographs and magazine ads covering our bathroom walls and elaborate written and practical tests that we put eachother's boyfriends through.
But I digress.
Tommy's fairy tale laced descent into drugs and sex is a fantastic read, but it really did seem like the ending was a total cop-out. Like he had just made everything more and more complicated, overwhelming, and horrible, and then he couldn't figure out how to write Tommy out of this hole in a proper fashion, so he just skipped over all that stuff and made everything better. A very disappointing ending to an otherwise worthwhile book.
Perhaps we should try writing "The true ending to
Tommy's Tale"? It would probably help restore my faith in vice.
Nia's Book #7: Fairy Tales for the Over Disney-fied
I finally got my hands on
Black Swan, White Raven edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, so I am very, very happy! They have edited 4 (at least) other collections of fairy tales like this, and I was delighted to find that this one measured up to my memories of the other 4 (especially considering some recent disappointments with sequels).
Basically, the idea for these books was to have current fantasy writers reimagine fairy tales, which have been sanitized and Disney-fied for hundreds of years. There are occasional stories contained in the book that are friendly to everyone, but the majority of these fairy tales are not for kids, whether due to violence, sex, or general "adult themes."
This particular collection seems to have more modern versions of the tales than I recalled from the other collections, but it has been years since I read them (this one is out of print, and I had a hard time finding a copy). There were only a couple of poems included, which was good, because those usually are disappointments.
Among my favorite stories were:
"Three Dwarves and 2000 Maniacs" - A version of Cinderella involving a somewhat unstable high school geek turned millionaire psychotropic drug creator, his slightly masochistic lady love, an asylum full of the last 2000 crazy people in the world, gorey movies, and a treatment to end all treatments. Pure, demented awesomeness.
"The Reverend's Wife" - Based on a folk tale that I don't know, but very amusing. A couple of neglected wives back in the times of yore (sometime in the past, I don't know when) scheme to get what they want from eachother's husbands. Kinda sexy. The funny bits are due to the total ignorance these guys have in relation to the female reproductive system and the kind of BS they will believe to rationalize cheating on their wives.
"True Thomas" - Based on a poem I don't know and an account of a 13th century girl being taken away by fairies. Very interesting. Thomas happens upon some fairies and is taken in by their queen after his body has been subjected to a number of procedures to enhance his ability to understand their non-verbal Language. Whe he returns to the human world (150 years later), he has amazing abilities to see the truth of people. It has interesting paralells to modern-day alien abduction stories.
"The True Story" - The truth of the Snow White story, from the perspective of the evil stepmother. Vastly different from any version I have heard before, but I really liked it. Probably because there is finally a mother figure in a fairy tale who seems to have a child's best interests in mind. It is a nice change of pace.
That's all for this one. Vacation time is good, I can read again. I will plan to bring this in for Skippity on Thursday, I hope you like it, too! And if you do, I have the other 4 books on my shelf.
Skippity's book 13: While I'm on a roll here...
Riding the Bus with My Sister is one of those true-life stories about a handicapped person that inevitably make you tear up now and then. It's written by a woman who is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her writing is really, really good. Her sister Beth is mildly mentally retarded, and to keep herself entertained, she rides the busses of her city every day except Sunday, when they don't run. Rachel, the writer, has totally thrown herself into her career and has become emotionally cold and has no inner life. When Beth invites her to ride the busses with her for a year, Rachel at first doesn't want to, but then relents when she realizes it will at least make for a few good columns. But of course she comes to find that she depends on these rides and on her sister's hidden wisdoms to warm her back up into a live human being again who does more than work herself to death. She gets to know the drivers of the busses and takes notes on the wisdom she inevitably finds in them as well. Sounds trite and like it's been done before, and maybe it has, but there's enough hardness in the book to make you know that it's not all sappy sentimentality. The story of how the girls grew up, along with their brother and other sister, is nothing short of horrifying in some places, and you get a lot more sympathy for both Rachel and Beth when you learn what they've been through that has helped shape them into what they are.
Having worked with handicapped kids for a living, I was able to very easily understand a lot of the frustrations and heartache that Rachel bangs her head and heart against when dealing with Beth and her limitations and obstinancies, and also the overwhelming feelings of joy and unworthiness when small triumphs occur. It's difficult to explain unless you've experienced it.
A good read. It kind of stretches you into a better person.
(I had a lot of time to read in the car and hotel this weekend. Sorry to unload three books all at once.)
*edit: apparently this was made into a movie with Andie MacDowell and Rosie O'Donnell. I'm actually going to check this out. You can also see artwork done by Beth on that site.
Neat.
Skippity's Book 12: Continuing on with a supernatural theme
Eva Moves the Furniture is totally a chick book. I don't mean that it's full of fluff or about those silly relationships between women that revolve around fashion and gossip. I mean it is, at its heart, utterly feminine. It takes place in Scotland after WWII.
Eva's mother dies giving birth to her, and Eva is raised by her father and her father's sister, who moves in to help out. Throughout Eva's life, she is visited by a woman and a girl who she calls "the companions," since for the first three quarters of the book they don't give their names. No one else can see these beings but Eva, and she ponders their nature throughout the book--are they dead, and come back to life? Angels? Aliens? They often act to influence Eva's life, by helping her in moments of need but also hindering certain of her desires; when Eva gets a job as a secretary, they misfile things Eva has filed correctly and bungle her typewriter so it produces errors. But they also arrange things now and again so that a man they want Eva to marry looks favorable to her.
The actual reading of this book was very enjoyable and I found myself thinking of it a lot while I was not reading it. The narrative voice is utterly and completely believable, and you feel about the main character the way you would expect to feel about a trustworthy and long-held-dear friend. The turns of the plot are also well laid out.
It's good stuff. I didn't want it to end. But when it did, I was okay with it, because it felt like the right place for the book to end.
It was all intuition, whereas April Witch was all cold logic. Kinda weird that I read those two books right next to each other when they so clearly contrast like that.
Skippity's Book 11: The Swedish female John Updike
April Witch by Majgull Axelsson is one of those books about women that reads like it was written by a man. But Majgull is all female, as evidenced by both the photo on the back of the book and the interview with her that was included with the "book club guide" or whatever the hell they call that list of questions in the backs of popular books that make you feel like you're back in high school taking a bluebook exam. I don't know how to really put my finger on what I mean by a book about women that sounds like it was written by a man--it's as if all the softness has been taken out of these characters. The book is told from the point of view of Desiree, who is an invalid who can't speak but possesses her full mental powers, and then some--she can leave her body and possess animals and even humans. She was turned over to the state by her mother at her birth, since apparently that's what you did in Sweden in the forties if you had a kid who was all messed up, and her birth mother then adopted three other girls (all unrelated to each other). Desiree decides one of them has lived the life she was meant to live, and she observes everything about the three girls from various vantage points, including a seagull. It's a kind of creepy book, but very interesting too. The ending disappointed me because it seemed to be building and building until the inevitable conflict when the four "sisters" would come together, but then it all petered out and there were some cliche moments that surprised me because everything else was so well written.
This book was originally written in Swedish and then translated, so I wonder how much of the feeling of the prose is due to the translator. It's not choppy or anything, it just seems that some of the word choices were interesting in that I wonder how well they can really translate--concepts that we wrap English words around to explain may be very different in Sweden. I don't know.
It was a pretty good book, but also dense and dark. The cover is very misleading.
Nia's Book #6 - It's a work thing
Thanks to the kindness of Skippity, Nattie, and Stinky, I am allowed to count the 68 page document of Acceptance Test Cases written by our 3rd party programmers that I had to read on Friday as a book. Whee!
My review: It sucked. I nodded off at least 3 times that morning, and I would never
ever read this for any other reason. The really sad thing is that this is at least the second time that I have had to read this crap. Yeah. I had to review these specifications for a project, because it is being transferred to a new version of the technology, and I have to make sure the specifications are accurate to how the site actually works. Argh!!
Please, for your own sake, don't read the Acceptance Test Cases for NAI!! They are crap.
I am also reading a good book of reimagined fairy tales. I hope to be able to report on those soon.
Nia's book #5: Elphaba should be allowed to rest in peace
It took me over 2 weeks to read this book (I actually started it before I read
The Glass Castle), but as you may be able to guess, I had a hard time reading it. And no, it wasn't because of the big words. So, I read
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire, after having read his other 4 books, and I was sorely disappointed.
Liir was raised by Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, to those unfamiliar with
Wicked, his earlier novel), but throughout the book, he is not sure if he is actually her son or not. Generally, I found him to be an unlikable character, whining that he can't be of any use because he lost her flying broom. He is generally lame and ineffectual and I had no sympathy for him.
Even Liir's savior, Candle, was boring and entirely unsympathetic. Towards the end, she was hugely pregnant, had been abandoned in a run-down barn for 6 months, and was endlessly imposed upon by a tribe that suddenly appeared in the farmyard, and it was still written in a way that I really didn't feel bad for her. I guess I just couldn't care about these characters at all.
Despite the fact that Elphaba met her final bucket of water before this book even began, she played a significant role in this book. The poor, poor girl, hadn't she suffered enough? And the final reveal, the secret of her connection to the bland Liir (couldn't even be spiced up by a gay relationship,
jeez) simply elicited a "well,
duh" from me. Very big disappointment, since I enjoyed the story of her life so much.
I think that at least a portion of the problem I had with this book was due to the fact that it had been so long since I had read the original
Wicked, having come out 10 years ago. In so many ways, I felt like I was totally missing something.
By the way, the anti-dragon message in the book hurt me deeply. It is just wrong. Some of my best friends are dragons, and none of them behave in any way like the way they are portrayed in the book.
Disappointment all around.
Skippity's Book 10: Damn, that was a real pick-me-up
Sike.
I picked up
Project Girl by Janet McDonald on a recent (sorta) foray to that dangerous pithole of teeming adolescent hormones and firearms known as the Cincinnati public library. It is not the cheeriest book I have ever read.
I wonder what you have to do to get your autobiography published. I also wonder what the difference between an autobiography and a memoir actually is. Is it only a memoir if you're famous?
So far as I can tell Jan McDonald isn't famous other than for writing her autobiography, which is all about growing up in the nas-tay parts of NYC during the seventies and her continual identity crises as she tries to reconcile the fact that she has a brain with the fact that the place she comes from encourages anyone with even so much as a functioning brain
cell to do themselves in via gun, drugs, prostitution or STD. She's doing a pretty okay job of pulling herself out of the trenches when she gets raped on the campus of her college, then it goes downhill from there for a really long while. There's a narrative break at that point--she switches from telling her tale in hindsight to just filling the pages with the journal entries she was writing at the time she was attempting to recover from this, which as you can imagine doesn't make for very happy nights spent on the couch with this book.
But, she did manage to pull it together by the end, which has her living in Paris practicing law (sorry to ruin the ending, but I doubt any of you will ever read this book).
Good, but depressing.
Next!
Skippity's Book Nine: Whack!
Cintra Wilson likes to kick words around like you might kick a tin can around an alley, if you were a little drunk.
Colors Insulting to Nature is one of those books you pick up and mean to just read a little of, because you have other things to do, but which you wind up unable to put down and miss appointments and bus stops and dinner for. The plot is freakin' fabulous. The characters are bigger than life and full of gritty detail. And the
words are twisted together in the most delicious of ways. In the first couple pages for instance, we're introduced to Liza, 13, as she is going through an audition for a part in a TV commercial:
The judges squirmed in their seats, intensely disliking the thought of their own daughters or nieces belting out a song in this seamy, overwrought fashion--parroting the stage acts of overripe chanteuses, moist with the rot of numerous alcoholic disappointments in both Love and Life. The mother would probably be devastated if her child didn't land the gig... she might, in fact, lock herself in an all-peach-colored bedroom and wash down handfuls of muscle relaxants with cheap Polish vodka from a plastic handle-jug; her unfortunate daughter would be left for days without milk and forced to eat lipstick.
It goes on from there, following Liza's adventures through puberty and young adulthood, each incident in her life more sordid than the last. Liza's character through all of it is crass and admirable; you can't keep the crazy bitch down. I just loved her.
You know, come to think of it, it's a little like a female version of
Fight Club. Only having nothing whatsoever to do with
Fight Club, and conceived entirely independent from it.
It's good stuff.
Bud Light Daredevil
For my next amazing stunt, I will read one, count them, one chapter of "The God of Small Things."
(insert noises of pain)
Okay, I read chapter one. I hope the other 452 chapters aren't as painful.
I'm figuring a chapter every couple of weeks.
I don't get it, it seems like the Indians complain and bitch about each other a lot. Hey, that's kinda like OUR society. Mebbe there is something to this? I'll have to get to chapter two in the next week or so!!!
-The End.
Skippity's Book Eight: Old, New, Borrowed and Blue
Dan Savage's
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, is, sadly, likely to preach to the choir. I mean, what opponent of gay marriage will read it?
Dan Savage's writing style has matured, and this book got me a little teary here 'n there (shh, don't tell). It's everything you'd expect from the man who writes a sex column that encourages people to get their kink on, but it's a lot more than that too. There's genuine emotion behind everything he talks about, which ranges from retarded poodles to his mother's insistent pressure that he marry his boyfriend and "make an honest man of him." The book tells the story of Dan's mother planting the marriage seed in Dan's mind, and the twists and turns the little plant takes as it roots in the fertile soil of his intellect and reaches its tender fronds toward the light of day. Do Dan and Terry run away to Canada and get married at the end of the book? Is a frog's butt watertight?
Once I was in a bookstore where Dan Savage was doing a book signing for "Skipping Towards Gomorrah." There was an embarrassing incident with a butterknife.
I'm sleepy. This review sucks. But the book is really good.
By Popular Request....
Ok, it was just Nattie Hattie. Here's the Under-30 essay I wrote on the topic of "History of blogging: 2000 - 2020":
Roots of the Modern Internet: The Blog RevolutionThe Blog Revolution was one of the most significant technological events at the turn of the millennium. Though the actual events occurred in the opening years of the 21st century, its roots go much deeper than that.
In fact, the beginnings of this revolution go back to the 20th century when the people were increasingly turning to the internet to get their information and entertainment. During that time, such services as Tripod and AOL Hometown started appearing, offering free web space and user-friendly tools for creating basic homepages. This allowed even low-level users without any HTML knowledge to have the opportunity to mark their own little corner of cyberspace.
Soon, most of the regular internet users had their very own poorly-designed homepages filled with interesting facts about themselves, animated GIFs, hit counters, and guest books. The main problem with these homepage services is that though they made it much easier to create HTML pages without ever touching actual HTML code, it still wasn't easy enough. These homepages were usually fairly unappealing aesthetically, and when a page was created it was still just a flat page, no real opportunity for interacting with others through the page.
Then, in the closing years of the millennium, a small community of what were eventually labeled "weblogs" ("blogs"), began to spring up among some of the more technically-savvy web enthusiasts. Like the higher-end personal websites that the followers of the homepage craze wanted to emulate, these original bloggers set up their own sites, updating them regularly either directly by HTML code or via their own interface.
As this community grew, new tools for easily starting and running a blog started appearing, including Blogger, and LiveJournal. The original form for blogs was focused more on cataloging content found elsewhere on the web, then giving it some context, additional information, or simply pithy commentary. This evolved as people started creating original content with blogging tools.
Blogging tools created a homepage that was easy to update, which allowed for regular (daily, hourly, constant) updates by multiple users. Many blogging tools also had "comment" features built in, which produced something that was an integration of the homepage and guestbook concepts, allowing the blog's readers to make comments on individual posts. That increased the interactivity of the site and allowed for more collaboration.
The revolution grew users were attracted to the increasingly simple tools for updating their blogs. They could make updates from any computer via email, and even could create moblogs from their mobile phones and PDAs. This ability to add new content from any location, and nearly any electronic device caused blogs to explode across the internet. Users started maintaining multiple blogs, and were writing about anything, from the minutia of daily life, to hobbies, to global politics.
As the Blog Revolution came to a peak around 2006, mainstream media started to take notice of the would-be reporters and authors that the blogging community had created. Blogging was an official part of news networks' 24/7 coverage of the party conventions before the 2004 US election. Bloggers who gained a following and sparked the interest of mainstream media started getting book deals, which drew more wanna-be writers into the fray.
Around 2009, the Blog Revolution itself was effectively over. Blogs had so saturated people's lives that "check out my blog, I just wrote about that" became an acceptable response in social situations to the question "how are you?" Thus began the Blog Reconstruction period of technological history. During this time, the blogging technology and some of its related outgrowths, like RSS feeds, podcasts, and video podcasts, had spread far beyond the hands of web enthusiasts, and into the standard repertoire of traditional media outlets and corporations.
During the reconstruction phase, everything had a blog attached to it. Labels on products listed the blogs of the product developers and marketers responsible for it. Consumers could read all the details of how the product was developed and learn funny things that happened at 3 a.m. when on a deadline for completing the project.
When the blogs on the web had grown so numerous that they were choking all of the other content, a movement of people realized that it was unnecessary for everyone to have a blog about everything and it lead to an overload of information. They banded together and formed large, collaborative communities centered on a single portal for information.
These community logs (or "clogs") had members from across the globe who shared news and information, making them a more reliable and balanced source of information than traditional media. Eventually, the old mode of local news broadcasts and papers became obsolete, because more interactions were based on clogs, not geography.
One by one, the 24-hour news networks shut down and the talking heads of the evening news disappeared, as people turned to their new community for information. Television itself was eventually abandoned completely, in favor of the daily human drama that played across the clogs. Podcasts and video podcasts became the new entertainment and news sources.
The influence of celebrities and political figures from the physical world waned as the individual gained power in the clogs. A single person sending out the right message at the right time could start a revolution; of thinking and ideals on the clogs or of people and guns in the physical world.
Strengthening the connection between the physical world and the clogs, and breaking political and social ties based solely on geographic location were the beginning steps towards the world we live in now. Now, the "old guard" of the clogs that remain after the Clog Revolution govern the people. With the reapplication of another technology from the time period of the blogs, virtual reality, life in the physical world and wired world have been blended together into a single experience, the true reality.
Skippity's Book 7: Plants and dirt and sunshine, hooray!
Yet another in what will inevitably be a long string of photography book reviews...
Ian Adams' "
The Art of Garden Photography" is one of the better photo-instruction books I've read. Which, I mean, there haven't been that many yet, but it seems a lot of them are filled up by fluff and pictures the author has taken. By fluff I mean, content that reads well but that doesn't actually teach you anything, or pretends to teach you something new but just says the same thing over and over in different ways.
In addition to being written in a user-friendly tone, this book addresses a good range of subjects that crop up in outdoor photography, such as lighting, structure, angle, and even finding good gardens. Much of what he has to say can be applied to "untamed" nature vistas as well. And being a fairly recent book, it even addresses digital SLR photography. Even though it was published last year, though, it's out-of-date about that part, which is both good and bad--good in that technology is moving so fast, bad in that it's damned hard to find stuff in print about it that's not outdated from the time it's written to the time it goes to press. But that's ok in this book, because most of it is about technique rather than equipment, which is exactly what I was after. I even applied some of what I learned already.
Skippity's Book 6: A sexy romp
Tommy's Tale, by Alan Cumming, is described on the cover as "A bisexual
About a Boy, only with lots more shagging and partying." Which is apt enough, I guess, only Tommy has a job and a lot more friends than that noofus Hugh Grant plays.
This is one of those books that you shouldn't really read in public, unless you like it when people glance over your shoulder on the bus and see lines like,
"Picture the scene. I have coke spilling out of my left nostril, a ten-pound note jammed up my right, her saliva dripping on to my (unfortunately very light gray) trousers from my fast-shrinking penis, and on top of it all I am being given a lecture on the evils of drug taking by a furious woman wearing a crucifix, in the disabled toilet of Planet Hollywood.
I laughed.
I never saw Pauline again."
lol
Most of it's not like that, but there's a fair bit that is, so, you know, read in public at your own risk.
This is one of those fast reads that you don't really take seriously. Tommy is 29 and trying to decide between growing up and trying to make a life with his on-again off-again boyfriend Charlie, and the partying lifestyle, which he physically can't maintain (at one point in the book he faints at work because he's ingested nothing but e, coke (not the soda kind), and water for five days straight. He also jacks off on a bus and wakes up in odd places, not really realizing how self-destructive his behavior is until his flatmates give him a shakeup. Even though he's a complete hedonistic wreck, you kinda like the guy because he's
funny. I laughed out loud a lot while reading this.
And the ending is all nice and fairy-tale-ish and you're left thinking, kinda, "yeah right," but it still rings true because Tommy still talks to you in this very innocently slutty voice.
Anyway. A fun read, but, you know, not Thanksgiving dinner or anything.
For book club #1, I read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. It was quite long, but quite good.
A few weeks ago, I listened to A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain while at work. It was loaned to me by a coworker who once told me "I'd eat a dog's ass if it was prepared well," and in that sense I feel he shared a lot with Anthony.
Wendy Holden's "Farm Fatale" was one of those reads that is light enough to keep you entertained but just meaty enough that you don't feel guilty for reading a potato-chip book. The main character is a woman named Rosie who has a rosy view of what living in the country is like. She has been stuck in a shitty flat in London with her boyfriend, and when he gets a job offer to write about what living in the country is like, Rosie is thrilled. They move into a cottage in a town called Eight Mile Bottom and of course, madness ensues (because it would be a boring book otherwise). Rosie's bf turns out to be a real jerk and can't write for shit and won't accept any of the column ideas Rosie offers (which are all quite good). Rosie gets the hots for a local farmer. Some crazy bitch who thinks she's an actress moves in up the road at a mansion that she wrecks with her decorating taste and when she throws a party and invites Rosie and Mark (the bf), Rosie accidentally meets a celebrity who lives on a local estate while he recovers from celebrityhood, but he lies and hides his identity from Rosie, there's more madness, Rosie and Mark break up, and the book ends with Rosie falling in love and accepting the marriage proposal of the celebrity, thus getting her comeuppance, which has been due her the whole book because of the astronomical number of shitty things that keep happening to her.
And the answer is a resounding "yes, now stop bitching about it!" Tommy's Tale by Alan Cumming was originally reviewed by WWB&B's own extreme reader Skippity Dee-bop about a month ago, and after finding out the my one true love, Alan Cumming (shut up about me and the gay boys), has written a book, I was so enthralled that she brought it in so I could share in the drug addled joy of it all.
It took me over 2 weeks to read this book (I actually started it before I read The Glass Castle), but as you may be able to guess, I had a hard time reading it. And no, it wasn't because of the big words. So, I read Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire, after having read his other 4 books, and I was sorely disappointed.
Tommy's Tale, by Alan Cumming, is described on the cover as "A bisexual About a Boy, only with lots more shagging and partying." Which is apt enough, I guess, only Tommy has a job and a lot more friends than that noofus Hugh Grant plays.