Andy H.

I read some books:

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Sarah Monette, The Mirador
Laurie J. Marks, Fire Logic
Pamela Dean, The Secret Country (reread)
Pamela Dean, The Hidden Land (reread)
Pamela Dean, The Whim of the Dragon (reread)
Emma Bull, Territory

(Also Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water; I can't decide if I think that qualifies as a novel for the purposes of this project.)

Today it snowed all over everything; I didn't have to consider whether school was going to stay open, because it ended yesterday, aside from the five or so term papers I have to write in the next two weeks (also, it's Saturday). I should write one of those papers every day or two so that I can be done all the rest by next Friday, and then spend a week on the relatively enormous Honours essay. I finished the first one today (having properly commenced it yesterday), so maybe it's possible.

I took my dog out briefly, and when we came back in he lay himself down on the rug in the front hallway and carefully licked all of the snowflakes out of his fur.

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Apparently a list of the books most often marked unread by people who own them on LibraryThing; after the fashion of the other people who've done this (I spotted it at yhlee and truepenny), bold means that I've read it, italics that I started to but couldn't finish it, and strikethrough that I particularly disliked it.

( Obscured for length. )

Unsurprising things that we can deduce from this exercise:

• I haven't read many of these at all, although in my defense (?) I also don't own many of them. (The 'owned but not got around to' subsection of the list seems to consist entirely of Mrs. Dalloway and Gravity's Rainbow.)
  
• If it's SF, I am significantly more likely to have read it than if it's otherwise, and
  
• If I started it, and it doesn't use quotation marks when people are talking, I wasn't able to finish it.

Of the books that I did read, the ones I was assigned for school were Brave New World and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I devoted a bunch of my August leisure to video games, so I haven't been reading as much as I might have. No doubt this trend will continue for different reasons as I fall on into a morass of schoolwork.

Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor
Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch
Sean Stewart, Resurrection Man

School began Tuesday and continues; today I had my first class that wasn't that class' initial introduction. (For Social and Political Philosophy; we watched a video on the Milgram experiments with the shocking.) The campus is much busier and yet somehow more organized than it was in the summer; somehow the effect of the vast tides of people surging between buildings past signs and booths and shouting isn't anarchic, but fractal, every piece of it presumably making cheerful sense if you look closer. On the first day, there were people with shirts saying 'I am UBC' holding signs and leading around huddled groups of first-year students; the signs apparently just had to be distinctive, and I saw a lot of people with seemingly random words: "Somatic", "Endemic", "Bourgeoi$". I also saw five or six different people I knew from Langara, which was unexpected and heartening, as all the Langara people I'd kept in touch with have stayed there (hi, Marilee and Allison); most notably, Goldie, from my introductory Metaphysics class in 2006, is in the Social and Political class, and we hung out for some time measured in hours afterward.

The main things going on in my home are preparations for my sister to move out (for, yes, the second time); this time she is going to Fort St. John, which is considerably farther away as well as being, by my family's standards, almost bewilderingly small and inconveniently located as technical cities go. ("It's not that it's in the middle of nowhere; it's just that it's nowhere near anywhere else.") She is going there because she has been offered a job at their local newspaper, the Alaska Highway News, which suits her very well on account of how she's a newspaper reporter with an adventurous streak. So there has been a lot of putting things in boxes, and we bought a new car (a startling shade of red; so far my mother won't let anyone else touch it or get inside) because Tess is getting the old Volvo, and attitudes are generally a harried sort of excited.

I am playing in Rachel's online AD&D campaign on Saturdays. I rolled somebody who could have been a paladin even if we were playing 2nd edition*, so a paladin is what I'm playing, which is neat because I've always kind of wanted to try it. It's very different from being the wizard I played last campaign, who was always making pragmatic moral compromises; that was fun and interesting not least because of the way it often made me the player kind of uncomfortable, but it's a very different sort of gratifying to play someone who speaks up when something seems wrong, and won't kill someone who isn't facing him with a sword in his hand and won't allow the torture of prisoners, etc.

(* We're playing 3.5, which I seem to be getting used to; I still think they made some unfortunate decisions in the Player's Handbook, and that a lot of the character classes feel less special than they used to, but some 2nd edition rules are starting to have the same startling quaintness for me that 1st edition does. It's a little bit sad.)

The sun is starting to learn again to be comfortable. I always liked autumn and spring the best.

Whoops, this is late!

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (reread)
Steven Brust, Dragon
Steven Brust, Issola
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Samuel R. Delany, The Ballad of Beta-2
Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

When I hit exactly fifty after six months*, I thought perhaps naturally that I might therefore turn out to read exactly a hundred in a year, but it doesn't look like that's going to be the case: this list and last month's together contain fewer books than that for last September, even though the Rowling and the Brusts are each the sort of books I can get through in a single day. This lessening is presumably going to be the new norm, thanks to a certain new school that sort of rhymes with 'QED'; my fall courses won't be as intensive as the summers were, of course, but I'm going to be averaging five (or equivalent) per term, whereas at Langara, since I wasn't aiming for anything in particular, I generally kept to a comfortably conservative three.

(* Insert Stan Lee-esque reminder here, true believers.)

Speaking of UBC (and that should help out anyone who was stumped by the rhyme puzzle), I got my marks back for that summer term and they were gratifyingly up to my usual standard -- well, the Philosophy of Religion grade was the lowest I've ever received for a philosophy class, but still high enough that it would be unseemly to complain. This is nice for soothing my anxiety about whether my ability to handle college at Langara is a fluke that won't hold up at a gigantic and intimidating university. I'm also now properly a third year student and registered in the honours program and confirmed that I don't have to retake the basic symbolic logic course just because Langara's transfers weird, plus registered online for all my winter courses, so I don't really have anything to worry about until the fall.

For the interim, I have acquired one job, which is to pull big stacks of the Georgia Straight around on this cart they gave me and deliver them to businesses along Marine and lower Pemberton, every thursday. I am gradually, by trial and error, figuring out everywhere I need to put on sunscreen. Slotting a term for working between my school terms like this kind of makes me feel like a character from Princess Maker; I'm not sure which stats this is lowering, but it's definitely raising my strength.

We Live In The Future Watch: Marilee's friend Palle, who gave me a ride downtown from her party yesterday, has a car whose windshield fluid (if I understand correctly) leaves a special residue so that you don't have to use your wipers when it's raining; the rain just slides off. He says that there are other, more expensive cars which don't even have wipers, and accomplish something similar with an electromagnetic field. I didn't get to see it working, but my suspicion is that this looks really cool.

I got kind of distracted from books toward the end of the month.

C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Shon'jir
C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kutath
Sarah Monette, The Virtu
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Ian McDonald, Sacrifice of Fools
Linda Nagata, Memory

Sacrifice of Fools was written in 1996, and set, if I recall correctly, in 2001; one of the little future-projection worldbuilding details is that there is now a King Charles on the British throne. Especially since the death of the last Pope, I've been a little more aware of my pleasure in the stability of Elizabeth's still being Queen; there has been no other face on Canadian coins for well more than twice my lifetime. (One of the neat things about having a living person on one's currency is that the portrait of the Queen ages, depending when the coin was issued. It's so hard to imagine someone else on our money that I've occasionally supposed aloud that once she is dead we will just have her continue to age, a zombie Queen Elizabeth slowly decomposing until, long after most people have forgotten why, every coin is stamped with a grinning, regal skull.)

School starts Monday. I don't quite feel ready.

I own a fair number of books, but not many at all that I value as individual physical objects rather than as particular instances of valued texts. The chief exception has been an edition of The Poems and Plays of Alfred Lord Tennyson which I bought at one of the VPL's book sales. It's bound in a red material whose precise nature I'm not quite sure of -- I think it's some sort of fabric -- but which feels very authoratative, and the title on the spine and the logo on the front cover (which is a running man with a torch) are gold on black. The pages are very thin and black along the top edge. The copyright page says 1938.

Tonight, while we were watching TV, the gate that usually blocks access to the lower two floors of the house was left open, and my dog went down and into my room and chewed on this book. He tore off about the top fifth of both the front and back covers, and about the top third of the spine, and he chewed on the corners of the pages at the end of the book and the exposed cardboard of the back. Nearly all the text is still legible, but the text is in the public domain and would be no irreplacable loss, and so seems no significant salvage. The thing that I valued about this book has bled to death on my floor.

It would have been easily preventable, the knowledge of which somehow doesn't retroactively prevent it. I told the dog 'no' a bunch and shut him up in his kennel, as punishment, and then after a while I let him out again, all of which was the appropriate thing to do but feels similarly hollow. (He ought to be trained out of chewing up books, but if he was only going to ever chew up one, it was certainly arranged so that he did maximum possible damage.) I'll probably have other books as nice, of the sort that when you hold them and read them it feels almost heady, like holding a sword, but I'll probably never find one of the other copies of this lovely edition of Tennyson. This is the same way that I feel when I lose a lot of computer data, so I know that I'll recover emotional equanimity about it, and it will be just a thing that happened; and this will be a lot sooner than it would have been if I'd lost a friend, for instance, or indeed my dog. Right now, I'm still horribly filled up with the waste of it.

Writing about it has helped some, though.

Here they are, dripping silence, enigmatic and question-tempting.

(Okay, not much silence.) I debated for a little bit about whether to count the books I'm assigned for English class, since they seemed like an edge-case with textbooks, which I generally don't count; I eventually decided that I should. It is slowly becoming clear to me that my main criterion for inclusion is that the book should feel like it falls along the novel 'track'. If I were reading Ender's Game*, for instance, and in the interval between reading I read through a volume of Scott Pilgrim, I wouldn't feel like I was interrupting myself, but rather like I was just doing something else in the time I wasn't reading my book; but if I picked up The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, it would feel like an interruption, because I had taken up a novel, again, and it was a different one.

Steven Brust, Taltos
Steven Brust, Phoenix
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed
Steven Brust, Athyra
Christopher Priest, The Prestige
Sean Stewart, Night Watch
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

(* Possibly not the best example, because when I read that book I tend to read it in a concentrated burst over the course of a single day.)

I am at Rachel's house and Rachel is next to me. That is the power of trains.

Here is Rachel: "Andy doesn't like animal crackers! Why not, yo?"

Why not, indeed. Meanwhile, I read some books last month. Perhaps everybody has seen enough of these posts by now that I don't need to rephrase my assumptions and expectations?

Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead
Steven Brust, The Lord of Castle Black
Steven Brust, Sethra Lavode
C.J. Cherryh, Chanur's Legacy
Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead
Diana Wynne Jones, The Pinhoe Egg
Tim Powers, Declare
Rob Thomas, Slave Day

Rachelagain: "I like animal crackers."

The year is new! I am still at Rachel's house. (Her Monmouth house, so technically, as she reminds me inaudibly to livejournal, her parents'.) All right, then. I should post this before the book-stuff is overwhelmed by nonsense.

Oh, right.

Steven Brust, Jhereg (reread)
Scott Westerfeld, The Last Days
John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Steven Brust, Yendi
Steven Brust, Teckla

All the usual stuff applies -- I'm only keeping track of novels, I'm happy to be asked my opinion of any of these, and so on. (So far, the 'getting people to ask me about books' aspect of this experiment has gone really well.)

This month included the first time since I started keeping track that I reread something, and I even that I did in preparation for my first reading of the sequels, later. This might give the impression that I'm generally a pretty forward-looking reader, but actually I seem to go through phases, depending somewhat nebulously on my mood; there are periods sometimes when the familiar is firmly in the majority. It also contained the inevitable first time that the fact of the record-keeping put me through my arts student version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- there was a day or two early on where I couldn't decide what to read next in large part because I was, semi-consciously, trying to decide what would look best next on the list -- but it was, happily, transitory and not overwhelming.