Robynettely

I had the idea a couple of weeks ago to try to read all the books for the Cybil awards. So, I started requesting them from the library (so far I've requested three and received two). This was the first one I read. In fact, I may have been the first person to read this particular copy of the book from the library. The hard cover had a satisfying creak when I opened it. I hope other people pick it up. I don't quite know what I expected. Maybe the title led me to think it might be vampires or something. I started it without even reading the back or the flap, and I think the library had placed the branch sticker over the label that indicated it was the first book in a trilogy. (The boy, however, read the back first, and then put it down because the first blurb was from Nancy Farmer, and he read a couple of books by her and was Not Impressed. Interesting how marketing fails. ) There are two non-concurrent storylines, and the chapters alternate. One storyline happens far in the past ...

You know in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Aragorn and Boromir walk through chest-deep snow, clearing a path for the smaller members of the party? The snow we've had here lately makes me think perhaps Tolkien had never seen more than an inch or two of snow. We got maybe eight inches, and I could barely walk through that.

Believe it or not, nothing to do with the Batman character. But you can't go wrong with a 100-page factbook about poison ivy written by someone who has a couple of books of poetry listed in the front flap, right? I bought this book back in April for my sister, who has a lot of poison ivy growing in her yard and is afflicted every year. I learned lots of awesome facts. You can get it from petting a dog. If you burn poison ivy and and breathe in the smoke, that's a bad thing. if you go swimming in water with poison ivy growing right up to the edge, you can get poison ivy. Don't bother trying to dig up the roots. It's related to mangos and cashews and pistachios. Seemed long for the amount of content, however. Repetitive. I read in an amazon review that this book was a must-have for the well-stocked medicine cabinet. Who has a book about poison ivy in their medicine cabinet? I don't even have a girl guides first aid book. Apparently everyone who visits my house is luck...

It all started when one of the other writers in my office left last November. I may have gotten taken advantage of with what seemed like a disproportionate amount or his work dumped on me (temporarily, I hope). Anyway, so I found myself one weekend knowing that a major project I had picked up needed an index, and needed it soon because who knew when the thing was going to product release (still any day now). So one Friday evening I backed up the entire manual onto a thumb drive and brought it home to work on during the weekend. This was actually a watershed moment for me. I had six hours in my weekend, every weekend! that I didn't know about. Sure, sometimes when we're done with our Saturday activities, we rent a movie or go to a friend's, but most of the time, that time is mine, and I didn't know about it. I usually frittered it away with knitting while watching home improvement shows, and even when I did have a social activity, well... I bet I waste a lot of Friday ni...

My younger sister claims my older sister asked for Doris Lessing books for christmas. So, since my older sister is pretty poor about providing a wish list, and she buys everything she needs, pretty much all she got was Doris Lessing books. However, she says there might have been only one she was interested in. Probably it wasn't this one. As my dad put it, when he saw me feverishly reading it on the 23rd, "Your sister is not interested in children." But this book isn't really about children, anyway. It's about British society in the 70's, the shift in cultural values away from the traditional family, and young thugs and crime. When I heard my sister wanted Doris Lessing books, I immediately ordered this one from Abe Books, because it was the Doris Lessing book on my list (not the one I provide my sisters and my dad every year at Xmas time, but the one I carry with me in case I find myself with a few spare hours in a library or something). I had read about it o...

"Angels on Toast" by Dawn Powell This book came up passing in some article I read online. I don't remember the thrust of the article, but the author said somewhere that Angels on Toast was one of the best stories about a bad marriage, like ever. So I requested it through my local library. I got it about a week later. If I can use the speed with which a book reaches my branch through the TPL system to judge its popularity, I would have to say this book is not popular. But it's a spurious statistic, I know. The introduction by Gore Vidal discusses how popular Dawn Powell should have been, but I can sort of see why she's not. Her characters are middle class, and they are mocked mercilessly. People might see themselves a little too much in these characters -- their hopes and dreams and why they fail. It's like nagging, maybe, to read about why we fail. I had a hard time remembering which of the two main male characters, Lou and Jay, was which. I didn't have a ...

So I was reading this article: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/14/unholy_trinity/ For my non-link following reader, it's an article about state-sponsored terrorism. In the Death Squads section, the author describes Vietnamese terror squads using what sounded to me like the Eye of Sauron as a marker on victims. And in Guatemala, they used the white hand of Saruman. Weird.

The boy got this one for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I had to pretty much force him to read it (actually I read it to him, but anyway). I don't know what the problem was -- maybe it looked too set in real life, or too old, or to young, or like the books about aircraft and submarines that are so often read around my house. Maybe he was deterred by the Governor General's seal of approval on the cover. But once we started reading it, he got totally into it and asked for more pages than was reasonable on a nightly basis. If I wasn't there to read, he would read himself, which was good, really, except that then I would have to catch up before continuing. And even Ed, who so often takes no interest in the bedtime books, got into it. The prologue to this story has the main character, Matt, working on a derigible in an alternate universe victorian era. He's on watch duty, and sees a hot air balloon, apparently in trouble. He helps rescue the balloonist, who dies shortl...

So I was typing an innocent corporate email today, and when Outlook automatically spellchecked it before sending, it offered me the following as a correction to my corporate Oracle login: HAMLET. The hatchet of doom is hanging over me, I think.

Any book that has a blurb on the back saying "Probably the best sheep detective novel you'll read all year!" can't take itself too seriously. I read a review of this one near the start of the summer, maybe on www.salon.com . I think it was part of a "beach reads" article. I requested it through interlibrary loan, and got it 3.5 weeks ago. It was very fun. I wanted to read it because I want to write a "Watership down of (insert name of animal here)" kind of book, and the idea of limited thought processes, skills and abilities in a mystery appealed to me. The sheep can understand human speech (English but not Gaelic), but we can't understand them. They have lots of sheepy limitations -- they don't like to be alone, they eat all the time, they know they are edible, they generally (except Mopple the Whale) have poor memories. They have many sheepy advantages -- they can tell if a person is lying because they can smell it; no one is very conce...

This book didn't offend me. I read it to the boy, and it moved along well enough and with enough humour to entertain him. Something that amazes me (and I suppose this is a criticism of him, not the books) is that the books were sitting around for maybe 18 months before we ran out of other things to read and wound up reading the first one, and then this one in quick succession (and I believe tomorrow I will get to purchase the third volume in the series). Why is he so reluctant to try something new? Though we were casting about for something to read "in the meantime" a couple of nights ago, and he declined to start Harry Potter again. He said there was no point, now that there was nothing to anticipate. Fascinating. Update on my coworkers making fun of my clothing: Yesterday the person who referred to one garment I wear as my "elf suit" wore a boxy green jacket with a large applique weasel wrapping around the neck. The head was on her left shoulder, and the tail ...

Found this in the Young Adult section of the library and picked it up without reading the back because I like fairy tale things. I hadn't realized I had read another book in this series, "Snow White and Rose Red", which featured two girls named Blanche and Rosamund (neither of those names sounds particularly beautiful to my ear, maybe because I hear them with a New England accent). I just looked it up on Amazon to get the title right, and considering that I got it out of the library at Toronto City Hall, I must have taken it out at least twelve years ago. I'm amazed I remember much of anything about it. And I discovered it was by Patricia C. Wrede, whose Enchanted Forest Chronicles I quite liked. I had a hard time getting into this book. I read the first 40 pages or so, which alternate between short chapters where Gemma (the grandmother) tells Sleeping Beauty in different snippets to her three granddaughters (abandoning the story at a later point each time for a diff...

"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...