(no subject)

12 Jul 2025 11:29 am
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
lest you think that having returned The Pushcart War to its rightful owner I went away with my bookshelves lighter! I did NOT, as she pushed 84, Charing Cross Road into my hands at the airport as I was leaving again with strict instructions to read it ASAP.

This is another one that's been on my list for years -- specifically, since I read Between Silk and Cyanide, as cryptography wunderkind Leo Marks chronicling the desperate heroism and impossible failures of the SOE is of course the son of the owner of Marks & Co., the bookstore featuring in 84, Charing Cross Road, because the whole of England contains approximately fifteen people tops.

84, Charing Cross Road collects the correspondence between jobbing writer Helene Hanff -- who started ordering various idiosyncratic books at Marks & Co. in 1949 -- and the various bookstore employees, primarily but not exclusively chief buyer Frank Doel. Not only does Hanff has strong and funny opinions about the books she wants to read and the editions she's being sent, she also spends much of the late forties and early fifties expressing her appreciation by sending parcels of rationed items to the store employees. A friendship develops, and the store employees enthusiastically invite Hanff to visit them in England, but there always seems to be something that comes up to prevent it. Hanff gets and loses jobs, and some of the staff move on. Rationing ends, and Hanff doesn't send so many parcels, but keeps buying books. Twenty years go by like this.

Since 84, Charing Cross Road was a bestseller in 1970 and subsequently multiply adapted to stage and screen, and Between Silk and Cyanide did not receive publication permission until 1998, I think most people familiar with these two books have read them in the reverse order that I did. I think it did make sort of a difference to feel the shadow of Between Silk and Cyanide hanging over this charming correspondence -- not for the worse, as an experience, just certain elements emphasized. Something about the strength and fragility of a letter or a telegram as a thread to connect people, and how much of a story it does and doesn't tell.

As a sidenote, in looking up specific publication dates I have also learned by way of Wikipedia that there is apparently a Chinese romcom about two people who both independently read 84, Charing Cross Road, decide that the book has ruined their lives for reasons that are obscure to me in the Wikipedia summary, write angry letters to the address 84 Charing Cross Road, and then get matchmade by the man who lives there now. Extremely funny and I kind of do want to watch it.

(no subject)

10 Jul 2025 11:33 pm
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
I mentioned that I did in fact read a couple of good books in my late-June travels to counterbalance the bad ones. One of them was The Pushcart War, which I conveniently discovered in my backpack right as I was heading out to stay with the friend who'd loaned it to me a year ago.

I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.

The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.

(no subject)

9 Jul 2025 07:20 pm
skygiants: Enjolras from Les Mis shouting revolution-tastically (la resistance lives on)
[personal profile] skygiants
When [personal profile] kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!

Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?

We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.

By a few chapters in, I was describing it to [personal profile] genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time.

Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. mid-book spoilers )

Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.

Now even as I write this, I know that [personal profile] genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak.

And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.

On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.

weary of considerations

9 Jul 2025 11:54 am
silveraspen: an aspen clone with golden leaves under a cloudy sky (silveraspen: an aspen clone under a clou)
[personal profile] silveraspen
(N.B. - Sometimes you encounter a poem by random chance and it speaks to you.)

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

--Robert Frost

(Poetry Foundation dot org.
umadoshi: (berries in bowls (roxicons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
[personal profile] scruloose and I did make it to the little farmers' market down the road for its opening day of the season, and even managed to get there earlier than later! (I think it's open from 8 to 1, and we probably were there...a bit after 10?)

We made it home with two quarts of strawberries and one of cherries, new potatoes, a dozen eggs, and boneless chicken thighs, plus a bee balm for the garden, which we quickly tucked into a fairly open space in our little garden bed yesterday evening. (What was there before? UNKNOWN. Will I manage to reconstruct it from old posts or something? Also unknown. But hey, a plant!)

Reading: I finished Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi), which was fantastic. On the fiction front, I followed it up with Tamsyn Muir's novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (not really my thing--I continue to rarely bond with novellas, I guess--but interestingly done), Sacha Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (marvelous), and Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (again, didn't really bond emotionally, but it executed what it was doing beautifully).

Non-fiction: David Chang and Priya Krishna's Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave), which is, like...primarily actually a David Chang book that Priya Krishna did a ton of heavy-lifting assisting on (which may be very normal for co-written cookbooks, but in this case she was interjecting and clarifying in her own voice as well as doing a fair bit of the actual writing in his voice, and it was all very transparent that it was being done that way, but also a little odd to read). I think I bought this as a sale ebook before hearing that Chang (the Momofuku guy) is something of an asshole, but then when I was reading it, it felt really promising as a book that might be genuinely useful for me (and even by cookbook standards, its ebook is terribly formatted), so I was pleasantly surprised to readily find a used half-price hard copy available on line, which is winging its way to me now. I've also made sure that Krishna's own Indian-Ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family is now on the wishlist where I keep an eye out for ebook sales.

And now I'm reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler, which is a cookbook mostly in the form of essays on cooking as a thoughtful/mindful practice.

Watching: One more Murderbot episode to go in this season, and oh, I hope we get a second one. I'm going to miss this little show.

We finished watching the second season of Kingdom (the historical zombies k-drama), which I found very satisfying. The ending very much sets up a subsequent season, and there's a movie out that fills in the backstory of the person/people we glimpse at the end of season 2 who would presumably be extremely central in any further season, but I don't think we feel inspired to watch said backstory movie unless a third season of the show is ever announced and it becomes relevant in that way.
umadoshi: (summer swing (never_ender))
[personal profile] umadoshi
At the start of the month I entertained the fleeting thought of trying to post every day in July, especially with [community profile] sunshine_revival (in which I have in no way participated) going on, but. Well. *gestures at current date* And as we all know, something-something-only-perfect-results-matter, etc. etc. etc.

But here. It's Friday. The world is terrifying, but at least for this moment the sun is out. I spent most of my workday in a style guide meeting, which was genuinely pretty fun; tonight we're seeing Ginny and Kas because this week it's better for them than our usual Saturday hangout.

Tomorrow the (very) wee farmers' market that's only a few blocks away is getting underway for the season. I have ambitions of actually rolling out of bed and walking over in hopes of strawberries, even though tomorrow and Sunday are also Eevee community day in Pokemon Go, so I'm also hoping to leave the house those afternoons. Leaving the house twice in one day is not exactly a thing that happens often, and as a result, the prospect of it is exhausting. ^^; But here's hoping!

There's been zero doubt for a long time now that my only actual investment in Pokemon Go is the pursuit of shinies, and community days are the best chance to get shinies of a given critter, and Eevee, see, has EIGHT possible evolutions, so if there's any faint hope of ever having a full set of shinies of those, well, it's this weekend.

(I can't remember if I've said here that this is a crystalized perfect demonstration of why it's really, really good that I don't gamble. I'm usually pleased when I catch a new-to-me Pokemon, but it's pretty minor. But rather than setting the game aside, since it mostly hasn't resulted in me actually getting outside and walking much more than I had been, the hope of catching a shiny critter keeps me opening it back up. Nobody get me into slot machines, okay? [That sounds facetious, but I mean it very seriously.])

That's all I've got right now. Stay well, friends.

thoughts in a changing world

4 Jul 2025 01:12 pm
silveraspen: blue rose with wheel of time quote caption (wot: a spoonful of hope)
[personal profile] silveraspen
I went back and checked, and it's been five years since I wrote here with anything approaching regularity. I guess the pandemic did more of a number on my creative voice than I realized.

So there's that. Anyway.

Today is July the 4th. The current administration in the U.S.A. is not something to celebrate. Yesterday the deadly budget bill passed the House (again), having somehow become worse than before in its little trip through the Senate.

(Oh, wait. I know how. We all do, really.)

These are dark times and I'm pretty sure they're going to get worse before they get better. That said, I'm not giving up. I may not be able to change the world as a whole, but I can make a difference for people around me, or at least I can try. Or keep trying, actually; there's that, too.

(My team's been hit hard by what's going on at the NIH. I'm doing the best I can to keep everyone employed. It's something.)

For today, I'm going to take a little time for myself to do personal things rather than work things, and then J. and I are going to grill burgers on the terrace and drag toys around for the cat and enjoy the evening.

For the occasion, I'm wearing a T-shirt from Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour, which we saw last Friday in Gelsenkirchen (and which was absolutely amazing in many ways).

It seems appropriate.

Rebuilding journal search again

30 Jun 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
umadoshi: (lilacs 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
With Canada Day rudely falling on a Tuesday, [personal profile] scruloose and I both booked today off. I haven't managed a whole lot of manga work yet, but hopefully between today (as soon as I finish this post) and tomorrow I'll get a reasonable amount done. While I'm doing at-my-desk things, [personal profile] scruloose is working on the next step(s) in getting a dedicated hose set up for our individual townhouse.

Last night we finally got around to switching the desk chairs in our offices, cut for the uninterested )

It occurred to me very late in the game that I might do better at spending non-work time at my desk (where, y'know, most of my writing used to happen) if I didn't hate my chair; I've been attributing the fact that I spend 95% of my evenings down in the living room these days to the fact that Sinha's such a lapcat, and that's definitely a huge factor, but...being able to sit comfortably in here would sure help.

Another pleasing tech-related development has to do with my phone keyboard. again, cut for the uninterested )

Speaking of things that feel so much better now, Saturday also involved Ginny chopping my hair off for me. I've been leaving it alone (other than the undercut) since whenever the last time we buzz cut it was, and maybe a month ago I found that it was long enough to easily ponytail. That was pleasantly novel for about a week, even though the front bits weren't long enough to get into the ponytail and quickly started to need clips or something when it got hot. By last weekend, I was very, very done with the whole thing, and this weekend Ginny was able to deal with it. Such a relief.

My younger nibling and their spouse of eight months or so stopped by a few days ago to pick up a few years' worth of my spare comp copies from Seven Seas. Only one box, since I've technically scaled back my freelance workload (and I think there's also a backlog of comps that I should be getting sooner rather than later), but a hefty box that was bulging a bit at the seams, so it's nice to have that all sent off to a new home. It was lovely to see my nibling and meet their spouse, however briefly. (They politely rolled with the "we're going to stand in our driveway and chat while masked and overheat more than a little" element.)

A final thing before calling this a post and getting to work: last weekend [personal profile] scruloose and I gave the Sensation lilac a long-overdue aggressive pruning (and it should probably get the same amount cut out of it in a year). The poor thing was all spindly limbs and mostly-high-up blooms, so hopefully this will help it for next year.But what to do with the mutant hybrid? )

Two weeks' worth of reading

29 Jun 2025 03:16 pm
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from [personal profile] skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)

Profile

minkhollow: view from below a copper birch at Mount Holyoke (Default)
not a perfect metaphor

January 2016

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
2425262728 2930
31      

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 13 Jul 2025 12:30 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios