Wine, Wenches, Books and Biznatches

TV Turnoff Week Book Swap

2006-04-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-03-24T12:24:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-18T09:02:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-03-18T08:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-05T22:50:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-03-05T22:30:00.000-05:00

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 Photograph y 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?

2006-02-28T23:54:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-21T21:22:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-02-13T17:31:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-13T17:22:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-13T17:13:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-12T21:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-06T20:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-06T20:17:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-02-06T20:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-02T14:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-30T11:05:00.000-05:00

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....

2006-01-30T10:39:00.000-05:00

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 Revolution

The 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!

2006-01-23T22:22:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-22T09:22:00.000-05:00

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.

Skippity's Book 5: Damn that chick is funny

2006-01-21T22:49:00.000-05:00

I got Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse: My Life in Comedy by Phyllis Diller (and that Richard Buskin dude) out of the library last week and it's a good 'un. The first, say, three-fourths of the book are depressing, 'cuz her life was, but after that it starts getting funnier. It's funny all the way through, but there is some depressing stuff in it. That Phyllis. She's a whack chick. Did you know that she had three cockroaches as pets once? They drowned themselves in their water dish. She was also married to a crazy person for a very long time. And then she divorced him and married another crazy person. Then she got a facelift. Then she kept on getting facelifts.

I wish I could laugh like Phyllis Diller.

Book #4: If These Walls Could Talk...

2006-01-21T22:08:00.000-05:00

This book is one I actually read in one night (Tuesday, been too busy to blog this week). One really long night. Hooray for insomnia!

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about her very dysfunctional family. I have gathered that Jeannette is currently a correspondent for MSNBC.com, so the comfort throughout all of this insanity is that you know she gets out alright and is able to do well for herself, in spite of the bizarre circumstances of her upbringing.

Generally, I am not a fan of memoirs, but this kept me engrossed from beginning to end. I think it was so fascinating because I kept wondering "how can things get any worse than this?", while knowing all the time that there really was no great revelation in store where Jeannette's parents realized they were destroying their children's lives and finally, everyone would be able to live happily ever after in a nice desert home. Yeah, I know that I said it is a foregone conclusion that Jeannette ends up ok, but the first chapter of the book begins with Jeannette on her way to some fancy party in NYC, and looking out a cab window to see her mother rooting around in the trash. Basically, that says to me that her parents are not going to be improving their (or their children's) situation any time soon.

The beginning years of Jeannette's life were kind of a wonderful adventure for her. Her family moved from place to place, occasionally living outside in the desert, occasionally sneaking out of their current homes in the middle of the night to avoid the "Gestapo" or whatever other names her parents had for people they owed money to. They made plans to build a glass castle in the desert, but first their father needed to finish building the Prospector (a machine that would help him mine for gold) or whatever other money-making idea he had at the time. Her father taught Jeannette and her siblings (2 sisters, 1 brother) about the wonders of mathematics, physics, and reading at very young ages, and in spite of occasionally catching on fire, falling out of moving cars in the middle of nowhere, or taking multi-state trips in the back of a U-Haul, things were relatively happy for the family.

As the years wore on, her father's inability to hold a job and her mother's unwillingness to make use of her teaching degree (because she was going to be an artist) began to put the children into increasingly dangerous situations. Jeannette was sexually victimized at least 3 times in the book. When Jeannette tried to talk to her mother about it, she asked if Jeannette was ok, and said she knew she had raised her to be stronger than to be bothered by being groped by her uncle while he masturbated. Then she said "that poor man, he is so lonely". That kind of pissed me off. Her parents were also angry that the children objected when they discovered their grandmother molesting the brother, because that made it harder for them to keep living off of her (highly questionable) good will. Up until that point in the book, Jeanette's parents were weird, but at the very least, they were protective of their children. After that, all bets were off, and they lost every ounce of sympathy I had for them.

Her father descended into drinking, and repeatedly stole money from the family. Once, he even had Jeannette dress up real nice and took her down to the pool hall to flirt with some of the men he was trying to hustle. Then he sent her upstairs with one, who tried to have sex with her (she was in her mid-teens), and on the way home, her father compared her experience to being taught to swim by being thrown into the middle of a deep spring (his actual method, by the way).

From time to time, her mother would take up a teaching job, always with the help of her children to get all of the work and grading done. However, once she got sick enough of it (a school year or less), she would quit, declaring that she had spent all of her life doing things for other people, and it was time that she did something for herself for a change. Then she would spend a few years devoted to making her art career take off in whatever small, mining town they happened to be living in at the time.

Yeah, as I said, of course things turned out well for Jeannette (and most of her siblings, too), but through no help from their parents. They end up living in New York, the kids in apartments, going to school or with jobs, and their parents lived on the streets, refusing any help from their kids and declaring that they were finally living the life they wanted.

One of the many things in this book that disturbed me was that the whole time, her family didn't have to live like that. They had many ways that could have allowed them to live a life they way they wanted, but with such luxuries as non-maggoty food and houses that you didn't occasionally fall through the floor of.

My thoughts: I recommend this book. She managed to write it in a way that was honest and straightforward, and still packed an emotional punch for the reader. It didn't come off like a whiny "poor li'l ol' me" kind of story. She didn't vilify her parents to the level that I think they could have been because, in the end, she still loves them and wants to try to take care of them. As time progresses in the book, she goes from early childhood, where her life looks like an adventure, and her dad is really going to do everything he talks about to gradually recognizing the faults of her family and realizing that this isn't how they should live, to finally doing something to change it.

This was read for my book club, and it was the first book in a long time that I hadn't read previously and ended up liking.

Star Wars Battlefield II instruction booklet

2006-01-18T22:51:00.000-05:00

(aside)

If I were under thirty years of age I would say blogs are an important indicator of societal trends and a thermostat for public intellect.

If I were over thirty years of age, I would say that blogs might minutely infect public opinion. If they made money, blogs would rool. (edit: ah crap, on the blogger.com landing page there is a call out to making money on your blog. Obviously, relationship marketing doesn't work on me) If you can trick people out of their money with blogs, give me a holla.

(/aside)

Star Wars Battlefied II instruction booklet is actually kind of vague and only remotely assists you with actual game play. These days if you jump in and start whacking, you will figure most of it out. I did have to read up on how to make my fleet stronger with extra bonuses and credits reaped from crushing defiant realms with brute force. However, the space simulations are more difficult than you would think, and the instructions weren't much help. Well, duh, it's space.

The end.

ps: I prefer "Stinky (sort of)." "Stinky (barely)" seems to indicate that Stinky don't care. If we reviewed wine a little more, well then.

Skippity's Book 4: Oxygen

2006-01-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

I'm too freakin' tired and lazy to add an image to this post.

Oxygen is about a dysfunctional family in England, and it's written beautifully. Unfortunately, it leaves you hanging like sixteen-year-old jailbait at the end. Andrew Miller does this quote-unquote "clever" plot device wherein one of the characters has written a play that has an inconclusive ending, and as a parallel, the book has an inconclusive ending as well. I get it that the reader is supposed to use the knowledge that they have of the characters to predict what each of them will do in the rotten situation at the end of the book, but jeez, come on, writing right up to the denouement and then stopping cold turkey is kind of a cheap trick in my book.

Ha ha, I said "in my book."

Okay, it's late.

I did like the style of prose in this book though. Every great great once in a while, I'll read a novel that will grab me by the sinuses and make me think in the style the author uses to lay down his/her thoughts, and I found myself composing sentences and paragraphs during the time I was reading this book, about such mundane things as my commute or the scum in the kitchen sink or laser pointers. So, that was good.

Shame about the ending, though.

And hey, what the hell happened to the rest of you, 'cepting Nia and Stinky (barely)? Y'all forget how to pick up a book, or what?

By the by, Blogger's spell check, sadly, sucks. It does not know the word "dysfunctional," which, okay, but it also does not recognize the word "blog."

Seriously.

Book #3: A touching romance

2006-01-13T00:09:00.000-05:00

Ok, so who guessed that the book that I read that was later made into a movie with Helena Bonham Carter was Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk? Anyone? Aww, come on.

Anyway, I recently saw the movie for the first time. It has only been out for 6-7 years now, you know. I mean, I was aware of the phenomenon at the time of the movie's release. My best friend's teenage brother and his friends spent the next couple of years beating the crap out of eachother and trying to build things to bring the school down. I even knew the first 2 rules of fight club, but I figured that the whole thing was just another marketing ploy directed at angry, adolescent males without any other value. After seeing it, I felt that though I absolutely loved it, it probably would have connected on a more personal level if I had fewer X chromosomes. But I liked it enough to be interested in the book that started it, which I picked up on my recent "using up my holiday gift cards" shopping day.

So, on to the book. I think it added to the whole experience. It really expanded on Tyler and the Narrator's philosophy of destruction and clarified a few bits that I was kind of fuzzy on from the movie. In some ways, it was even more violent, because you got more of a description of the pain and injuries, and the ever-widening hole in the narrator's cheek. It kind of turned my stomach, and I had to read through it because I couldn't just look away and wait until the scene changed. So it ended up being a more intense experience in some ways. The story ended differently in the different tellings, and I think that I definately liked the movie ending better, as it gave more ambiguity to it. In the book, it felt a little trite and maybe a little like a twilight zone episode. Still worth the read, though.

You may be wondering why I describe this book as a romance in the title. In the afterward, Chuck discusses the aftermath of the book's publication and movie's release, and how other people described his book to him. Some of the the ideas were outlandish, but I thought it was interesting that he really only describes the book as a romance. I guess it just made me think of when a friend described the movie Unbreakable as a romance, too. In both cases, I have thought about it and come to the conclusion "huh, I guess you're right". My question is, though, were they envisioned that way from the start? It would be interesting to find out if he thought "Ok, so there are 2 people in love, but let's make one of them suicidal with a tendency for self-mutillation and the other have a friend who is shoving him towards hitting rock bottom and is hell-bent on destroying civilisation as we know it. Oh, and they should meet by pretending to have various horrible diseases and attending support groups for them. That sounds nice."

In summary: liked the book, want to watch the movie again.

The Ground Meat Cookbook

2006-01-12T10:11:00.000-05:00

A flash back to the days of old when you weren't sure what Grandma was serving you, but it was salty and had a lot of gravy. And the gelatin salad was only nibbled on.

This book has it all, some familiar, some bizarre. The Veal-Oyster loaf wasn't something my Grandma ever tortured us with, nor the Jellied Veal loaf (yipes). The ground cooked heart ranks a close second or third.

All in all, the 30+ page book is a nice trip on the wayback machine back to the days when using MSG was cool and carrot balls were all the rage.

The Ground Meat Cookbook

Book #2 - Naked Barbie Torsos?

2006-01-10T20:36:00.000-05:00

Ok, ok, so it isn't really called Naked Barbie Torsos, but I think that would be a pretty clever title, an homage to a friend I had in high school. But I digress.

What I actually read for my second book was Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. Yeah, I realize that I ended 2005 with a Gaiman/Sedaris combo, but I really needed to read myself a path through the pile of books next to my bed. Also, I really like them both, so there. Stop trying to spoil my joy!!!

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book as well, it had more craziness with his family than the previous one I read. I especially liked the description of his oldest sister's home: "...the house itself had a way of aging things. Stand outside and you looked, if not young, then at least relatively carefree. Step indoors and you automatically put on twenty years and a 401(k) plan." In this book, we got to spend significant time with most of his family members and like whenever I visit my family, it made me think that though I like to visit, I don't know that my sanity could take it if I lived there.

We also get to learn about the gun laws around the US and the holiday traditions of various European countries that he has visited. I feel that the Christmas eve goodnight that Dutch children get is probably the most therapy-inducing: "Listen, you may want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming along with 6 to 8 black men. They might put candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared." Ah, the holiday magic. It just fills the air.

He also has observed just how much his home in Tuscany looks like it could easily be occupied by a serial killer from a horror movie. Really, who hasn't thought that at one time or another?

Anyway, I'd recommend this book. 8 somethings out of 10 other things!

PS: Nope, no Gaiman or Sedaris for at least 1 book. Currently, I am reading a book that was later made into a major motion picture (because no book was ever made into a minor motion picture). Who can guess what book?

Enter the James Frey fray

2006-01-10T13:10:00.000-05:00

OK, I haven't read "A Million Little Pieces." If any of you have, may I ask the following:

1. Does the fact that he apparently lied about many of his exploits in the book lower your original opinion of the book?

2. Should the book now be considered fiction?

3. If you haven't read it, would you read it now?

4. Should Oprah kick his ass?

American Gods II: British and Caribbean Gods

2006-01-06T22:38:00.000-05:00

So I have finished my first book for this experiment/resolution. As I have discussed in a couple of status reports, I read Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.

I liked it very well, which wasn't surprising. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was a little annoyed that I saw the mid-story "twist" coming from around the time that Fat Charlie's mysterious brother, Spider, was mentioned. However, the more I think about it, the less I mind. It ended up being less important to the story as I got to know Fat Charlie and Spider, anyway.

The story is: Fat Charlie has an embarrassing father (anyone who has met my father and seen him dance knows that I empathize, deeply), Mr. Nancy, who dies in the first few pages of the book mid-Karaoki. To make matters worse, his last dying act as he reached out while falling from the stage was to rip the tube top off of a woman sitting next to the stage. But, really, it's how he would have wanted to go, anyway.

Fat Charlie (who was nicknamed that by his father at a young age, and is unable to remove the "Fat" from his name, no matter how much distance he puts between himself and his father) has been living in London, and returns to his native Florida for his father's funeral. While in Florida, he learns from an old neighbor that his father was a god (Anansi) and he has a brother he never knew about, named Spider. Fat Charlie doesn't meet Spider until he returns to London and, following his neighbor's advice, asks a spider to bring his brother by.

As you can well imagine, this was not a good choice for Charlie. Spider wreaks havoc on Fat Charlie's life, dating Charlie's oh-so-sweet fiancee (while she thinks Spider is Charlie), causing him to spend a night in jail due to suspicion of white collar crime at his workplace (an accurate assessment, but misplaced blame), and generally being a poor houseguest.

All-in-all, enjoyed the book greatly. It makes me want to go back and re-read American Gods, which I will have to do once the pile of books in my room goes down a little more. It also made me think about the parallels between this book and Neil's first adult novel, Neverwhere, a topic which I hope to discuss later, because now I am too enthralled in the tawdry details of a friend's new romance to elaborate.

Still well behind Skippity

2006-01-05T22:50:00.000-05:00

I am now at over 2/3 through Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. I am a little disappointed that I saw the mid-novel twist coming, but as that there is still plenty of story left I will not despair.

Neil has a great way of writing, describing the "pretending to be sick" voice that Anansi used in one of his stories as a "weenie, weedy, weaky" voice. As a Latin geek (different from a
Latin Greek) from way back, I giggled for a good couple of minutes over that.

Hopefully I will have a full report on the book tomorrow, when I intend to finish it. Tonight, however, I must pay attention to the cookies I am attempting to bake. I wonder how people like Cajun-style cookies.

Skippity's Book Three: The Photographer's Manual

2006-01-05T16:10:00.000-05:00

John Freeman's The Photographer's Manual: How to Get the Best Picture Every Time, with Any Kind of Camera is just what you think it is, except maybe a little hokier. I found about 30% of it useful. But it has nice pictures in it. And man that guy needs to learn how to use a comma.

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead

2006-01-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

What do you do when your best friend dies, you lose your job, and your girlfriend dumps you on Christmas?

Capture the burglar who's breaking in for the third time!

New York city can be tough for an actor who hasn't made a name for himself, but at 38 Jim only knows that his budding novel has been stolen and that acting is no longer his profession of choice. New Year's Eve finds Jim joining Aunt Jamima (flipping out), as he sadistically captures his burglar, ties him to his chopping block and proceeds to tease, terrorize, and tantalize his prey.

But Vito's no ordinary captive. An ex-junky that used to live among the stars, he's got spunk, stories and a big hard-on for ole Jimmy. He plays into Jim's seeming break-down and offers clarity and some really good weed to cool his captor down.

Author James Kirkwood totally gets dialogue. Funny as hell, probably erotic for a gay guy, and well-paced, I finished this book in two sittings. The ending is too sweet and, of course, his cat is dead, but I'm glad I found this book clearly written in the excess love and drug days of the early 70's.

Out of 7 Lays, I give it 5 fucks.

(Sorry, the books pretty raunchy and I've got you know what on the brain)

Beckie

5 Minute Mysteries

2006-01-03T13:34:00.000-05:00

My nephew and I went through the first chapter of 5 Minute Mysteries.

No, it was not the butler.

The lady had to be moved into the car after she was dead because the automatic window still worked.

There, you don't have to wonder any more.

Did someone say alcohol? I think I put it on a New Year's Resolution card somewhere.

The end.

Skippity's Book Two: Chinese Takeout by Arthur Nersesian

2006-01-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

So, this dude also wrote a book called The Fuck-up, which should give you some idea what sorts of permutations of the English language he might get up to between the covers of this one.

Chinese Takeout is told in the first person from the point of view of Orloff Trenchant, a starving artist living out of his van in NYC circa October/November 2000 (remember the election circus? Orloff doesn't; he's too busy shacking up with a heroin addict and carving a chunk of alabaster into a headstone in the shape of a Chinese takeout box). He sells used books on the street to keep himself abreast of his monumental parking ticket debt and impending starvation. The book starts with him destroying his relationship with his fiance, June, also an artist, and then there are about a hundred pages of him whining about art and how he really messed stuff up with June and how much New York City sucks sometimes and how he's trying to get into the pants of this or that artist and how she is trying to get into his pants. It gets tedious, but not too tedious because there is just enough information about the "seedy underbelly" (God I hate that expression) of the NYC art scene to keep you hooked.

And then the book gets good. Orloff gets a deal on subletting a loft space and meets Rita while he's scoping out some drug addicts to draw for the owner of the loft space (eh, it makes sense in the book). Rita's working the needle exchange program NYC has in place for its addicts. She's enough to keep the reader's interest piqued through the rest of the book. Orloff falls for her, discovers she's a heroin addict, has his life go to bits because of her, and works on various art projects involving someone swimming the East River and angels and demons tearing Rita in half. The art is described fairly well in the book, although it gets tiresome hearing someone's art referred to as "their work" (just a pet peeve of mine I guess, I don't know how else it should be referred to). (Launching ping-pong balls at a boa constrictor and filming it for half an hour does not constitute art, as you will discover if you read this.) There's enough dramatic tension to keep you reading and enough meat behind the story to keep you thinking. You honestly don't know if, at the end when Orloff is hauling his one-ton chunk of Chinese takeout box sculpture to the cemetery, he is going to make it or everything is going to end in a flaming ball of godawful doom on the 59th Street bridge. Even though you might not necessarily like him for some of the shit he does and some of the shit he whines about, you root for him.

There is also a pretty good extended metaphor at the end of the book. It's *almost* too transparent, but Nersesian pulls it off at the last minute.

If you want to read this one, holler and I'll bring it in. There is some cussin' and some sex and some poop in it. That should be enough to entice anyone. :) He also wrote a book called Dogrun, which I have, which I thought was better than this one, and which I can also loan out. Some tea exploded on it though so the pages are warped but it reads fine.

-Skippity

Nia's Current Status

2006-01-03T08:17:00.000-05:00

As of last night (round-bouts midnight-ish), I am about 1/3 of the way through my first book, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It is a sequel (in a way, maybe more just "set in the same universe as") his previous novel, American Gods. At least once a chapter, I find myself thinking "I need to re-read American Gods," due to my previously-mentioned inability to remember anything for any reason.

All-in-all, I'm feeling on track. Except not enough alcohol so far this year. I'll need to rectify that.

Skippity's Book One: The Boxes by William Sleator

2006-01-02T14:40:00.000-05:00

Okay, so, I have this embarrassing habit of reading JV fiction with the delusion that someday I'll write a JV fiction book and be good at it when in actuality, I just like a short, plot-filled piece o' whatever to read from time to time that isn't really going to challenge me in any way.

With that caveat, I hereby review The Boxes by William Sleator. It's the sequel to Marco's Millions, which I read a while ago. Sleator is a kids' sci-fi writer and both these books are in the same vein as all his other stuff--a kid has to solve some sort of scientifically weird or impossible dilemma with few resources, and has to hide the problem from his/her parents. Basically, Sleator uses these books as a platform to introduce principles of quantum and theoretical physics to his young readers, and, if you don't know jack about physics, his books will give you a very basic primer in the form of, imagine what this shit would be like if it happened on a level that affected your day-to-day life in a very real way--such as if time slowed down for you but no one else, or if quantum, molecular physics got big enough to form the basis of action for entire physical beings instead of particles. In The Boxes, Annie's mysterious Uncle Marco leaves two boxes in her possession and goes off on one of his mysterious trips. The boxes seem unopenable until the method of opening them comes to her in a dream, and she opens them, and then you're smacked about the head and shoulders for a while with Pandora metaphors, teen angst, and some imagery that would be much creepier if it occurred anywhere else but this book, and the whole shebang winds up with Annie slowing down time in an attempt to foul a real-estate deal. (? I don't know either.)

All in all, a quick, fun read (took about two hours)--like watching a somewhat hokey movie with a pretty main character while you eat popcorn and cotton candy.

I'll review a real book next time, I promise.

-Skippity

kurt vonnegut is near divine

2005-12-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

if you haven't read breakfast of champions, pick it up if you can. this book is so psychologically thwarted that it is a masterpiece. i love me some vonnegut.

Kon-diggity-nichiwa

2005-12-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

In keeping with tradition--oh wait, I mean in establishing tradition by building on what came before--my book 0a for 200aaaaaaaalllllllmost6 is The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. It was a good read in that it kept my interest all the way through, but there was a chapter in it in which the main character is a 38 year old woman who is single and trying to find a man, and it seems I've read a hot godjillion stories like that and they are all the same. The nice thing about this one is that it had a happy ending. Other chapters in the book were better, and every once in a while the author popped out with a surprisingly good insight.

A quick read, not too meaty, but a nice feel-good book.

Greetings from the Arctic

2005-12-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

Hello all, I hope this finds you warm and toasty and toasted.

I hope to read something soon.

But maybe I'll rent a movie instead.

I like Newcastle.

The end.

In the Beginning...

2005-12-29T23:59:00.000-05:00

Before I am finally able to embark upon my year-long epic journey (think Lord of the Rings only with more books and hopefully less physical peril) -- attempting to read 50 books in a year -- I thought it was time to do some final housecleaning so I could start 2006 off right. By "right", I mean "without dozens of nearly-finished books laying next to my bed". So, as the first WWBB post, I bring you: Books 0a and 0b!

Book 0a: Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

I just found David this year, but this is already the 3rd book of his essays and stories I have read. His stories range from the slightly odd(a graduate student attempting to meet her favorite author) to the truly bizarre (a cheerful Christmas newsletter from a mother whose copious legal problems and family dysfunctions won't dampen her holiday spirit), and the essays are always quirky and funny (like his description of working as an elf at Macy's).

Having read Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, I came to this book with a decent background in his family life growing up, so it was very easy to see comparisons between sloppy, chain-smoking, somewhat negligent but always loving mother and many of the mothers in his fiction stories. When I went for longer periods between reading the stories, I often had to suffer throughanother rediscovery phase where I slowly realize that he isn't really talking about himself and his mother or his father (who also bears a strikinresemblancece to most of the fathers contained in this book), but fictional characters. Many of these stories feel like the Sedaris family in an alternate dimension, where everything is just slightly wrong, but the people still seem to have a similar flavor.

Net: I loved it. You read it.

Book 0b: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This was my second trip through the Apocalypse according to Neil and Terry, and I honestly don't know how I forgot as much as I did from the first time! My only excuse is that I was in college and, well, my memory doesn't hold up for more than a couple of minutes at this point, so that is out of my Memento-like grasp of my life experiences. I couldn't have enjoyed it more. My favorite description in the book, though, comes in the cast of characters listing. The main demon character is listed as: "Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)", which is apt. I find that Gaiman has a knack for describing his characters, as my favorite moment in another of his novels (written without Pratchett), Neverwhere, is the introduction of the main villains of the book, Mssrs. Croup and Vandemar.

When I went with a friend to hear Neil speak at a bookshop in Dayton, we were able to talk to him for a while about this book, and he said that people seem to be under the impression that he was trying to write a relatively serious novel, while Terry skipped along behind him throwing in crazy things like the Witchfinder Army (and all its many members), telemarketers meeting terrible (but deserved) fates, and the other 4 horsemen. However this wasn't the case, though he did say that usually when people go up and tell him about their favorite part of the book, he is forced to admit that Terry did that part. The happy ending is that when my friend asked him to sign her favorite section, he was quite pleased to announce that he had written that bit.

Now, if I had to deal with an Apocalypse, I'd hope it was this one.

So, there's my first attempt at an entry on a blog of my own. Once the new year starts, I hope the rest of the Fellowship (yeah, LotR references again) will join me in relating their progress, both in the books and the always-rewarding study of alcohol.