Robynettely

"A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" by David Foster Wallace Seven essays. First one was about peaking in Tennis at age 14. It was okay. Second one was about TV, written in 1990. I learned some things. To whit: Malignant addiction is defined by two things: an addiction that causes problems in the life of the addicted person, and that purports to solve the very problems it causes. In his essay TV is a malignant addiction. Written before the internet. The success of TV is based on everybody having both highbrow and lowbrow tastes. Everybody's lowbrow tastes are the same, and everybody's highbrow tastes are different, which explains why everybody I know can sing "Hotblooded" by Foreigner, but I'm the only one who knows who David Foster Wallace is. It also explains the "long tail" marketing thing about the internet and kind of predicts its hockey stick shape. The funny thing about that essay was it quoted extensively an article which se...

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com You scored as Serenity (Firefly) You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% SG-1 (Stargate) 88% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 75% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 69% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 69% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 63% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 25%

Must have read a review or something, I don't remember where. It was on order at the library forever. For months and months.They ordered eight copies, I was 9th of 11 when it eventually arrived. It's short stories. I hadn't read any stories by her before (I don't read whatever magazines short stories are published in) so it was all new. I loved "Stone Animals", which has one of the best openings I've ever read. I was happy to see it on someone's top-10 list of opening lines, I forget where. "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" had a fabulous ending. I loved "The Hortlak", though I had to go online to find out what the title meant just now (maybe when I go home later I'll check and see if it ever turns up in the story in the phrases that I mostly skipped over). Reading it while listening to Joanna Newsom was extremely disturbing. Not so much "The Great Divorce" and "The Cannon". And then I lost the book, I think at...

Last night at band practice, I told the 1st clarinet who sits next to me (who was fretting about how he freezes up when he has to play a solo) that when you're playing a solo, people are rooting for you. They don't want you to fail. When you're playing a solo, the room is totally on your side. Music is the opposite of car racing, where the audience only watches to see cars crash and burn. And then this morning I remembered Britney Spears performing at the 2007 MTV Music Video Awards. Yeah, right.

This is the first book in a series, and introduces 12-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis and the fairies he takes on. He's the only person to ever get away with fairy gold, fair and square. Well, not exactly fair but you have to start somewhere. The fairy society that lives underground is well developed, and the rules of their magic seem well thought-out. The technology that Artemis employs seems modern, not dated (which seems like a risk when you write a book these days, it taking so long to get a book into print from when you write it). It was funny, too. I read this with the boy, and the next day we started the next book in the series, so I guess he enjoyed it, too. It seems strangely appropriate to me to be thinking about this book right now, because my coworkers have taken to calling my green jumpsuit my LEPrecon outfit, thinking it's some kind of a joke or a dig or an insult, I guess. However, I think I won't be dressing up as Holly Short for Halloween. I suspect I...

Because he's the Writer-in-Residence at the TPL this quarter, I thought I should read something by him. This is a collection of extremely short stories. Some of them seemed like poems, especially in the way that they required me to think about them to even have a clue what they were about. Smetimes the title gave a hint. I had to put the context to them, figure out what was going on that the people would hurl insults at each other that way. Not that I minded. It was like doing a crossword puzzle in a way. I'm just not used to that in a book. The longest was 10 pages. I found the longer ones easier to deal with, actually. The smaller ones I had to use up energy trying to figure out what they were about. I was thinking it was a good thing probably that I got it out of the library, because that meant I had to bring it back eventually (and on time) which provided a motivation to finish it. Short stories are a catch-22. They're great for reading in short bursts, but often there...

The first book can't have been that bad, because when I was at the library the next weekend, I picked up the next book in the series. The problem is, I don't feel like there was a grand plan. Nothing is set up in the first book in order to make the second book work. What I"m looking for here is a JKRowling-esque preplanning where there are characters mentioned in passing in book three that become features of book six, (like the thief I forget his name who is always ripping off the order of the phoenix). We never hear about Tris's cousin in book 1 (that I remember anyway). Right before she needs to be able to see magic, the concept is invented. JKR would have put that in book 1. I think this may be the nature of being a professional writer who is making a living off your books. I think she writes one and then has to get it published, and then has to write the next one, in some kind of a madcap schedule. Did I mention before the "about the author" bit at the ba...

It was an entertaining read with a good amount of suspense. I read all the way through because I wanted to find out why Stephen was having the nightmares and what Brenda was hiding. But... It was exactly the same as the other TWJ book I read in so many ways. (That other book was "A thief in the house of Memory") Main character male, approximately 15 Has younger sister, approximately 7 Lives in an architecturally wacko house Family was abandoned by one of the parents Figuring out why that abandonment happened is the main quest of the book Small exurb town (I take that word to mean that it's farther out than a suburb, with farms around, but is still like a feeder community, but I could be wrong) School friends who are outrageously precocious (in this book Stephen writes whole poems out of only the letters in a person's name, and another person's name; in Memory a girl spends whole days only using words that don't contain the letter e) Coffee shop scenes This lef...