My Major Complaints about Life At the Moment

In general I am pretty happy with how life is going right now, but I do have some complaints.

(1) I have to put my shoes on every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Often socks are involved as well.

(2) If I don't feed and hydrate my body, it gets really cranky and sometimes starts hurting

(3) I have to fix meals. Like, every single day. Sometimes more than once a day! [See #2]

(4) Summer

(5) Dishes, laundry

(6) I have to take showers. It's such a production. First you have to arrange a time when the shower is not being used by someone else and the laundry and dishwasher are not running. Then you have to get out a towel and a washcloth and a bath mat. And soap. Then you have to undress. Then you have to get in the shower. Being in the shower is okay, even pleasant, but eventually you have to come out of the shower. Then you have to dry off and dress and clean up the towels and shower and bath mat and now there's more laundry.

(7) Not only to I have to bathe and feed and hydrate my stupid body, I have to exercise it. Even in the summer. UGH.

(8) Republicans and MAGA. Can't we vote them off the island?

(9) So many books are very bad. True, there are also good books. But I need to sort through all the terrible ones to get to the good ones. GOD.

(10) Once you hit about 65, everything starts hurting pretty much all the time. This is also when you retire and finally have plenty of time to live your life but how can you when everything hurts all the time?

(11) If you're thinking about getting a border collie mix, remember it's like installing external ADHD.

(12) Summer. Did I mention summer? Let's mention it again. It's going to be 101 degrees on Tuesday and there are still eleven more weeks until we can reasonably expect some cooler weather. If we must have summer, couldn't we just have it for a weekend in August like they do in some European countries? Or well, I guess as they used to do, since climate change has changed that.

What's that? What's that out there? Let's GO SEE!!

Conversation at the Library

I stopped by the library, to pick up the half dozen books they were holding for me.

The big library in our town is maybe five miles away. It has the most books, so I put books on hold when I want to read them, having them sent to the library which is two blocks from my house.

All the librarians there know me, since I'm in there two or three times a week, either picking up books and looking for books or bringing books back. Also, the Kid used to hang out there a lot when he was in high school, and he always volunteered to work there summers.

Anyway, today the new librarian, who I liked a lot, was there. She got my books and checked them out for me, asked, "You read so much. You must just go home every night and read."

"I do," I agreed cheerfully. "That's pretty much all I do, read books and write them. But what can I do?" I added. "There are so many books!"

"Same!" she said, and we beamed happily at each other.

One reason I'm hesitant to move out of our current house (which I would love to do, to move into something with a lower rent which is closer to the school) is how much I would miss having this library within walking distance, right across the street from the post office, and also the local grocery store, only maybe a tenth of a mile further on. Also! Our dentist is like four blocks in the other direction.

If it only wasn't so far from where I work, this would be the perfect house.

(So far: eight miles. I can get to work in ten minutes, if the traffic is light. So ignore my whining.)

Remember That Cooking Blog I Have?

I finally put up a new post.

I was reading a British mystery novel, and the main characters had baps for breakfast.

You had what? I thought to myself, and looked this strange item up on the internet.

That's how I spent a large portion of the past several days researching what baps are, and how one makes them, and the best recipes for baps, and how to make baps in America.

Then today I made some.

I'm happy to report they're lovely.

Here's the recipe, over on Cooking With Delagar: Baps.

The 100 Must-Read SF Books by Female Authors -- A Challenge List

You might have seen this post, over at Book Riot: a list of the top 100 SF/F books by women writers. Some of my favorites are missing, but still! Not a bad list to start with.

Reading List

I've mostly been prepping for classes these days, reading Chaucer and for my American Epics class this summer; but in my infrequent free time I've discovered a couple interesting writers.

1. John Green. YA. Start with Will Grayson, Will Grayson, a book he co-wrote with David Levithan. But don't stop there! I've read nearly everything he's written now. All winners. His plots are interesting enough, but it is the cast of characters that keep me reading -- always a small group of friends in their late adolescence, slight misfits, smart, deeply attached to one another. And! Real women characters! Always a plus.

2. Nisi Shawl, Filter House. I'd actually read this one before. But we published a story by Nisi, "Black Betty," in a recent issue of Crossed Genres, and my kid liked it so much that I recommended Filter House to her; she liked the book so much I read it again. I'd forgotten how good it was. It won the Tiptree Award in 2009. Science Fiction stories, but not the time-anchored sort.

3. Inhuman Bondage, by David Brion Davis. Slavery and slave revolts in the New World. I'm not done with this one yet, but yowza. Found it via TNC, who makes me smarter every time I read him.

Now if I only had an extra month every week, to get all my work and writing done, and time to read as well...

Okay, I surrender

Here's proof that English majors are idiots.

111 Male Characters from English Literature in Order of Bangability.

Nothing is said about the methodology, but I am assuming the list was compiled by English majors or English professors, because who else would have read all those books?

But here is my issue -- issues --

• Will Ladislaw at 84? My Will? The love of my (fictional) life? Are you people high?



• James Steerforth beats out Will Ladislaw? Really?



• Why is Casaubon on the list at all? The whole point was that he was not bangable -- could not do the bang, as it were. Did none of you actually read Middlemarch?



• Algernon Moncrieff at 14? Are you fucking kidding me?



• Randolph Henry Ash, from Possession, is on this list, but Jackson Brodie is not? Aren't you people paying attention?



• And Mr. Rochester at #1. Le Sigh.

Book Review: Coal: A Human History, and More!

So for my Hanukkah present I got an iPad.

This is totally inappropriate for two reasons.  (1) I am not 10 years old, and Hanukkah presents are for children and (2) Hanukkah presents are supposed to be tiny things, like, well, a book, or a box of chocolates.

But Herr Dr. Delagar, that is how he rolls, and he knew I wanted an iPad (I have been visiting the iPads at BestBuy for the past six months), so voila!

I love it.  How much do I love it?

I don't think I can go back to reading books the other way.

And you know me, I love books.  If you had asked me two years ago whether I would give up physical books, HA!  I would have laughed at you, HA!

But I have now spent -- what? fifteen days?  Reading books this way?  HA!  I am never going back to reading books on paper.

When I do have to -- as occasionally I do, because not all books can be accessed via iBooks or Kindle (the iPad comes with a free Kindle app!  How cool is that???) -- it's just so dragggy!

Books on paper have to be held open!  Their pages shut if you aren't keeping them braced EVERY MINUTE!  You can lose your place in them!  With books on paper, if you don't know a reference, like what a "negus" is, or where Catalina Island is, and you don't happen to be right next to a computer or dictionary, why, you just have to STAY IGNORANT!

With the iPad?  You tap the page, and two seconds later, you're in a dictionary or on Wikipedia, or on the net, and you know!

Also!  You can take notes on the text, type them right in.  You can sort of do that with a paper book, but you have to write it in the margin, and maybe there is room and maybe there is not, and it's your awful handwriting, and if you change your mind about the note you can only erase so much.

Also!  All my books can go with me everywhere!  In one tiny little skinny folder.  

(Also -- and this is the dangerous part, I admit -- with the iPad, if you want a book?  You tap STORE, you look the book up, you tap BUY BOOK, and TWO SECONDS LATER, you have the book.)

Best Hanukkah present ever.

I'm reading on it, at present, London Labour and the London Poor, a couple of Terry Pratchett novels, a book of short stories by John Kessel, and another by Robin McKinley; I just finished reading Coal: a Human History, which I highly recommend.

Written by Barbara Freese, Coal travels through history, from the first use of coal, as jewelry, interestingly enough, to our modern era, when coal was instrumental in buying George W. his presidency, on through what effect coal is having in staving off any effective action against global climate change.  It's a relatively short book, packed with detail, and very readable.  Kept me up, engaged, more than one night until two or three in the morning.

Highly recommended, even for those who aren't, like me, in love with rocks.

Writing Work for Those Who Do Reviews

Bart Lieb of Crossed Genres needs you!

If you write genre book reviews, that is.

I’m looking for a few people who have experience writing reviews for genre fiction. This is for a new project that’s being developed. Review experience with short or long fiction is welcome.

It's for a new project he's at work on.  Go here for full details.

Book Review: Wolf Hall

I just finished reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which has made me want to revise all my Julian novels to make them big fat novels filled with flashbacks and historical/political texture.  Why didn't I do this?  I kept fuming, as I read.  Why didn't I do that?  Writer's envy: a certain sign that you are reading a fine writer.  

(A mediocre writer you keep thinking, well, okay, but it would work better if she did this; a bad writer, you do not think at all.  You just gag and fling it against the wall.) 

I think I would have enjoyed Wolf Hall even more if I had known even the smallest bit about the period -- 1530s England, which is way outside my realm (my era, the era I wrote my dissertation on, was 1st century Rome and 7th century Greece -- comp lit, remember -- the nature of translation, fap fap fap -- but I've been teaching Chaucer, along with the Victorians, long enough to have picked up a bit about 14th and 19th century England, and who doesn't know a bit about early 2oth century England; but the rest?  It's a dark and undiscovered country, as far as I'm concerned.  I had to keep asking Herr Doctor Delagar questions.  "This Jane Seymour," I would say, "is she going to be important?"

(No, I'm not kidding.  Somehow I made it to my advanced age without knowing all the names of the six wives of Henry VIII.)

I also didn't know Thomas Cromwell was related to Oliver Cromwell, though now that I do know it it's way cool.

Anyway, a deeply satisfying book.  Have fun.

Oooo, Baby!

Gotta get me some!

Byatt's The Children's Book: Review

I've been reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book for the past week; I've been reading it slow, because I can't bear for it to end.  

I read Byatt's Possession way back when it was published, a billion years ago.  That one won the Booker Prize, I believe.  Then I went out and read everything else she had written, though nothing else she had written up to that point was nearly as good as Possession.  The movie, when it came out, as I recall, sucked; or anyway, wasn't nearly as good as the book. 

I was a little wary, getting this book, despite a review I read somewhere, which promised me wonders.  But oh my is it good.

It seems like it will just be a kind of Dickensian knockoff, at first, although a very well written one.  Byatt is a brilliant writer.  But as we climb further and further into the book, and Byatt reveals more and more about her characters, the layers of meaning begin to build -- and oh, this is a great book.  Much better even than Possession.  I'll just say, because I don't want to give spoilers, that it's the most truly feminist book I have read in a long time.  But not a bangy bang the drum feminist.  Feminist in the sense that she's written a great work of literature about what it means to be a woman in the patriarchy feminist.

I love this book.  I think I want to marry this book.

Also -- if you know anything about E. Nesbit's life?  That will make you love this book even more.

Book Review, Etc

Everyone was sick at my house this weekend, off and on, including me (a migraine Sunday, although the migraine meds worked for once -- yay! -- and it's gone now): which means everyone was grumpy, including me, and almost nothing got done.

Also the seder Saturday night, which I had to clean house for, and also the kid is off to Tulsa to visit the zoo with her school today, on a school trip which has me a bit edgy, since surely nine years old is too young to be crossing the country (okay, it's like 110 miles, but still!) very nearly on her own?

Anyway, all of which is to say that I spent all day yesterday prepping for class today, and, inbetween that (it was Chaucer's The Shipman's Tale, and going through nine papers for students who are meeting me for conferences, and reviewing my notes and the reading for HEL*, and my background for Hayao Miyazaki, whose film, Howl's MovingCastle, I am starting in WLIT II today). When I wasn't doing all that, and cleaning the horrible house, and trying to make the kid and mr. delagar feel better, I was reading One for Sorrow, an interesting book, though (as the kid would put it) odd.

Not that odd is bad.

It's Christopher Barzak's first novel, I believe, and he's got a nice voice; also, his main character, Adam, steps out of the normal modes -- not a Mary Sue by any means, and not a lost prince, and not a brilliant and misunderstood genius, blah-de-blah. True, he can see the dead and from time to time drifts into other dimensions, but that, in this book's worldview, is not precisely an advantage.

Also, he's a working class kid. That alone made me want to keep reading. His father builds houses; his mother, though she stays home with the kids, is not June Cleaver -- she's pissed at her fate, and takes the car out drinking when she and the old man fight. His brother does too much dope. His grandma dies on him. There's enough money, but not enough for fancy crap like trips to the nearby city to visit museums, and his visit to his girlfriend's house lets you know how tight his family's budget is -- though his family doesn't have it as rough as Jamie's.

Jamie is the ghost, the kid who visits him, moves in with him, more or less -- sleeps with him, sort of. This is an interesting move. Jamie is his shadow-figure, and his demon lover, and his Belle Dame Sans Merci, but also a scared kid. It's an intriguing mix.

Jamie was also, before he was murdered, in love with Adam -- and this I like a lot, since Adam, though he clearly loves the girl in the book, also loves Jamie. This rejection of sexual categories -- I'm gay, I'm straight -- for something else (I love these people) is one that doesn't often get made. One really good scene in the book is one where the gay bookstore owner attempts to reach out to Adam, to explain how all his problems stem from his trapped sexuality -- which the reader knows as well as Adam just is so wholly reductive, especially at that point in the book. (Although, nonetheless, the bookstore owner comes off well, and remains, at the end of the book, one of the few people Adam can trust.)

Anyway, it has some problems, this book, but it's intriguing and well-written, worth the time.

Reading Middlemarch With the Plague

Been sick as a dog the last few days -- nothing serious, some sort of body-aches/upper respiratory gizmo that had me bunked and moaning for about 40 hours, miserable and grumpy.

This has left me unable to do anything but read all weekend -- that's when I felt well enough to read -- I couldn't even write, which you know I'm sick if I can't make it to the computer for my daily three or four hours at the screen; all I did was read Middlemarch and sleep.

Yes! It's Middlemarch season again. This is such a fine book. Even when you're running a fever of 103 and hallucinating a bit (i kept hearing people singing and alarm bells going off yesterday) or maybe especially when you're hallucinating a bit, how do I know, but this time, my sixth or seventh time through the book, I'm seeing things I never did before -- well, for instance, I knew that "the web" was a huge metaphor Eliot was working with, but not until this time did I see how thoroughly it works. Everything anyone does in that book connects to and effects the actions of a dozen other characters, usually in ways those other characters *never* see or understand, and often with immense (and sometimes tragic) effects.

Way back when Bulstrode does not tell his "rich widow" that he's found Sarah Dunkirk, for instance, her long-lost daughter -- look what far-ranging effects that one action has, on not just Sarah, but on Will Ladislaw, her son, obviously; and on Casaubon and Dorothea's marriage, which, if Casaubon had not been supporting Will, as he was, would not have taken the turn it did; and on Lydgate, the trouble he gets into, which he would not have, had Bulstrode not been trying to hide his wicked ways; and on Dorothea, since if Will had not been around, why, she would not have fallen for his pretty eyes and impetous temper; and on Rosamund, since the destruction of Lydgate is her destruction as well, though she never knows or recognizes that.

None of them, except Will and Bulstrode, know anything about what happened with Sarah Dunkirk, and WIll knows very little; but it shapes all their lives. This, as we can tell from that last paragraph, is Eliot's point. We're an interactive web. You think your actions effect you alone? Well, they don't. And they don't stop effecting the world, maybe forever, and in ways you may never understand.

This is such a brilliant book. Why did they make me read The Scarlet Letter in high school, will someone tell me, when this was available?

Now What Now?

So you might have heard about the fuss, in the NYTimes, over Junie B. Jones, who doesn't use "proper" English.

The spunky kindergartener (first grader in more recent volumes) is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers. And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix “ly”; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.

My kid loves Junie B. , not to mention Hank the Cowdog (he's from Texas and says ain't and fixin to). Amazingly, she loves these books because Junie B. and Hank get the grammar wrong: because she knows more than they do. (Hmm. Wonder why the parents in the NYT article can't imagine that possibility?) She likes snickering over the characters' mistakes.

She also likes the other mistakes Junie, and Hank, makes -- these are trickester tales for 8 and 9 year olds. Junie plagiarizes, in Junie B Cheater Pants. The appalling outcome, for my kid, went a lot further than all of my rants about the evils of plagiarism (and yes, there have indeed been many) could ever have gone. Hank thinks his barking makes the sun come up. Will I ever have to explain the post hoc ergo facto hoc fallacy to my kid now? Nope.

Nor do I have to tell her that "I'm fixing to take me a bath" is not standard English.

Because she ain't no idiot, that's why.

Sheesh.

For more on this, read here.