korafox

This year I read 47 books!  Huzzah.  I spent a chunk of the year reading books of random accumulation that I was pretty sure were going to go for donation, I just figured I should actually give them one read-through before they went.  And now all my books fit on my bookshelves.

 

( Book list under the cut... )

 

For me, another year complete.  So here are the books I read this year.  It is less than usual (32) and a good amount of re-reads.  But in my defense, I spent all summer taking a programming course and then the better part of two months finally finishing the Mars trilogy.  So the latter is an accomplishment I've been trying to manage for over a decade. 

The list:

 

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I Ate'nt Dead?  I have been lurking a lot and using my longhand journal instead of posting here.  It is hard to accumulate the needed emotional activation energy to get over "but I have nothing interesting to say" and "half the time I stick my foot in my mouth anyways". 

But I want to stop sitting in the corner by myself, too.  So I will try to post a bit more and hopefully more about things I am actually Doing.  So here are a few things I have been doing lately.

• Finished a painting yesterday, probably I have a half-dozen or so that I have completed during the pandemic.
• Continuing noodling around with a stained-glass-inspired crochet design.  It is not there yet but I keep finding additional techniques that might work for it.
• After about four attempts across my lifetime, I think I am finally going to get through the entire brick of Les Misérables.  I am about 300 pages from the end, certainly farther than any previous attempt.  I think now that I am 33 I may be finally old enough for this book.  : / 
• I am making bread right now!  I did not jump on the bread-making bandwagon earlier in the pandemic but I...need to use up this yeast.  It says best by July 2020 and the end result already looks a bit dubious.

Oh and in September I got hired for a new position at my place of work that is a lot less front-desk-customer-service and a lot more fiddling with data and making sure All The Things Are In Order.  I am still not at the top of the learning curve and it is an entirely new position in the organization, too, so there is a lot to figure out still.  But at the end of the work day I feel like I have a lot more spoons left, so I am glad to have made the jump even with all the challenges. 

I have done it.  I've finished reading the giant stack of library books I took home the week before we all went into lockdown. 

Now I am not sure what to do with myself.  The libraries are all closed, so I can't get any new physical books.  So my choices are 1) look into e-book borrowing, 2) read some of the new-to-me random-ass books I acquired at library sales that will have a greater proportion of duds, or 3) re-reads. 

Or I could stop faffing about and do some art for the first time in weeks.  But that feels insurmountable at the moment.  (Am I having a Depression right now?  Yes.  Yes I am.  So it goes.)

In other distracting-me methods, I have started playing through the original Final Fantasy 7 in Japanese.  Protip: you can do this on the PS4 by changing the console system language, which you can do freely from the settings menu.  This is going better than I expected and I am trying to be diligent about looking up words/phrases I don't know rather than saying "I got 85% of that, let me skip it."

Yesterday was my birthday, so it is once again time to log my annual reading for posterity!  I am happy to have reached a total of 50 books this year, only two of which were re-reads (marked with an asterisk).  Next year I have a specific goal, which is to read all the non-textbooks used by faculty in one of my departments. (i.e., I'm not reading ten different freshman composition textbooks, thank you very much.)  I hope it will be interesting and get me into some areas I don't usually read about (some non-fiction, huzzah!).

The list of books I read this year, behind the cut.  As always, I am happy to take questions or comments about my experience with any of these:
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I actually remembered to get in line at the library for the third book of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, and last Friday my hold number came up.  We only get the book for two weeks, so Husband and I are reading it at the same time. 

The Fool is still the best and I want to give him all the hugs.  Robin Hobb is seriously meaner to her characters than I am. (Yes, really.)  : P

Also I love that Fitz is finally, finally over himself enough to not freak out at the Fool's gender fluidity and fluidity of personalities generally.  In the first-person POV, he uses different pronouns and names for the Fool in the same paragraph and I can't stress enough how right this feels.

(I kind of want to write a fanfic of this titled Harlequin Romance but I have no idea what it would be about other than the obvious.)

I got an email today that said our college library is putting together a display of "transformed" books for National Library Week--books that have been altered by being drawn on, had things pasted on, had the pages cut up to make 3-D effects, etc.  They are asking for loans of any such books people might have.

I just...do not know how to feel about this.  Well, I know how I feel.  It causes an immediate and visceral negative reaction in me.  I cannot imagine taking a knife to a book, even to create art out of it.  I've never been able to even highlight or underline in textbooks, let alone dog ear pages.  I just don't know whether this is a mala prohibita thing that is just my own bibliophilic moralizing, or if it's actually a mala in se offense that goes against the Good and Just order of the universe.

It's not like I have delicate sensibilities when it comes to art.  "Piss Christ" didn't faze me, and I can just shrug at Christo's "let's cover a bridge with tarps" installations (I do worry about the environmental impact, though I think he makes efforts to minimize it).  But I wouldn't break into someone's house to steal their paints, and I wouldn't go into a museum and scribble on paintings someone has already made.  That's what cutting on books feels like to me--these are already works of art, complete, and they belong to everyone in the sense that they are physical records of the human body of knowledge. 

I just think about what would happen if we have a nuclear apocalypse, and how precious that knowledge would be.  Can you imagine being one of the monks from Canticle for Leibowitz, and you come across this treasure trove of "transformed" books?  How devastating it would be to find these texts, chopped to bits and missing half or more of their information. 

So, yes.  I will never be able to bring myself to make art out of books in any way that damages them.  Alas, it is the way of things that there is not a damned thing I can do to keep others from doing so.

Right now I am (very slowly) reading my way through It for the first time.  Don't judge; I've only been on this planet for twenty-nine years and only twenty-five of those are literate ones.  There's a huge backlog of good books to work through!

So far I like it a lot, and the structure of the narrative is interesting and working for me.  The only problem is that now I'm pretty sure I will be thinking of evil clowns when we go to visit the in-laws who live in teeny tiny town, Wisconsin.  I have definitely gotten the idea from stories told to me that it has its share of Bad Things what happened in the past.  And it has a little river that runs next to downtown.  Bwugh.

In any case, it seems to be making a metaphor for the darknesses that run under the patina of good old fashioned small-town family values, which is timely enough for the current political climate.  It's a reminder to guard against feeling righteous in the appearance of goodness while ignoring the call to actually do good things.

Tomorrow I am going for step 1 of Doing My Part for the country, and attending my election judge class.  I am oddly both quite nervous about it and also resigned to it (or perhaps, resigned to the nervousness).  Quite out of practice at putting on that particular people face, but hopefully it'll be mostly or entirely lecture rather than any roleplaying or such.  I can spend four hours learning interesting rules of election play.

In book news, I've picked Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull up again.  I bounced off this one twice but am enjoying it a lot better this time.  The big difference is that I've read some annotated Jane Austen novels in the meantime, so I have a much better appreciation for the genre as well as the background to understand the context and particular vocabulary associated with the British aristocracy of the 19th century.  Alas, I am not going to finish it in time for this year's tally.  Oh, well.

Inktober proceeds, though I am behind.  I should be getting more work in on it.  I'm fairly certain I can finish the Empress before the end of the month, but I may not get a third card done unless it ends up being a reeeeally sparse one. 

It's that time again.  Time to tally up how many books I read in the past year.

I definitely won the race with last year (50) by reading a grand total of 57 books.  Yay, I got past the 1/week mark.  I was also very successful with my goal to read more books by non-white-cis-men. 

The long-form list (re-reads are asterisked, though there were amazingly only two this year):
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I keep meaning to actually start participating in that Wednesday reading meme, but if anyone has any questions about books I have read this year, I am happy to answer.