muninnhuginn: (feather)
While was commenting elsewhere on books only partially re-read, I suddenly realised how much of my life was the fault of T H White. I'm sure I'd never had the same inclination to study mediaeval literature if I hadn't read The Once and Future King; nor attempted falconry, but for The Goshawk; and I'm sure the plan to acquire bees is as much to do with the bees in The Book of Merlyn as anytihng else.

The Goshawk is probably my desert island book.
muninnhuginn: (Default)
I can't remember the last time I actually felt sick with worry about the fate of the characters in a novel. It was such a strong feeling that I almost gave up on the book. I read it in sections over a few evenings to keep my stress levels low instead of bingeing in one night to "get it over with".
That makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the book. Rather, the experience was beyond enjoyment. I'll probably put it in the regular re-read category, although, to make a comparison with A Wizard of Earthsea,Mild spoiler )
muninnhuginn: (Default)
I apparently have a large TBR pile. Actually several, online in open browser tabs, on the Kindle, and in a bookcase. Except these aren't the to be reads: these are the started, part reads, stalled partways.... I don't ever give up on a book. I merely place a bookmark, or two (for which, the explanation is coming), and move on. I'll come back to it. The bookcase, the "a-reading" collection, the open tabs: these are the reading equivalent of the knitter's UFOs (unfinished objects [and don't ask me about those!]). My actual TBR pile is virtual: the Amazon wishlist, for the most part, and bookmarks of reviews in Diigo (I'll leave my username for the guessing ;-).

I don't ever give up on a book.

Last night I finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. I'd begun it sometime in the late summer/early autumn, put it aside, and picked it up last night an got through the remaining two thirds. Six months, maybe, elapsed time. Partly, this was the inconvenience of it being a physical copy, rather than electronic. But mostly, I just got stuck.

Or, another example, perhaps the most extreme. I was given, by a very dear friend, a copy of The White Guard by Mikael Bulgakov. It was my nineteenth birthday. Twenty years or so later, I sat down and finished it. But, at least, I finished it, the right way round.

I'd really rather finish a book than not and whilst I have the storage space and feel no guilt in having a large backlog (it does not very often call to to me like a heap of unfulfilled commitments, broken promises) there is something to be said for finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read.

I was very careful with my wording of the end of that last sentence--"finishing a book before you've completely forgotten much of what you've read"--not saying, as I might have done "getting to the end of a book before you've completely forgotten what happened at the beginning", because I have a method that sometimes prevents a book transitioning from read in a few days to decades-long haul.

I confess, judge me as you will, that I always read the last page of a book pretty much as soon as I've read the first few pages. It's partly a habit borne of undergraduate years with a week to write an essay on a novelist or theme in the dim, dark days before the internet provided helpful summaries and full-text search to help with the speed-reading and digesting. It's also that I've found with non-fiction that I can get a good handle on a work by its index, appendices, bibliography, glossary, concluding chapter. I've written that way round, too: if the software's not done, but there are specifications, a legacy system, it's often possible to define the terms for the glossary, create some appendices, even before the meat of the text can be constructed.

I'm not, it appears, hung up on linearity. I've read many trilogies starting with book 2, or even book 3. I hop around hypertexts.

In sum, I do not feel bound to start a page 1 (or even page i: I read all the front matters [and hate how the Kindle takes me straight to the start of the main text so I have to go back to the front cover]) and read through to the end. That being said, at some point I set my eyes on the first line of the first chapter and start reading a book. Mostly, and in reasonable time, I whizz through and finally savour with more appreciation the final few paragraphs on the concluding page that were somewhat meaningless, somehow mysterious when I'd sampled them before.

Except, when I don't. I stall. I attempt to push forward. I read a page over. The next occasion I pick up the book, I re-read that page. I plough through the next, realise I've taken nothing in, read it again. Bogged down I consign the book to the shelf or leave it to sink down the list in the a-reading collection, supplanted by newer works.

When this happened with a David Brin, probably The Uplift War, I didn't put the book down. I was invested enough in the story to want to know how it got to the end. So interest was I that I went back to that last page that I'd already seen and read it again. I think the final chapter was short, so it seemed quite reasonable to read it in its entirety. And the penultimate chapter. And the ante-- After a handful of chapters, I had seen more conclusions to stories I'd hardly seen framed that I went back to the sticking place and shot through much of the remainder of the book. If I felt I was flagging, I marked my place and read another chapter back from the end, before returning to the more usual order or progress. I finished, or read all of, the book, and, I think, enjoyed it.

Several points arise from this. The first is the need, when dealing with physical volumes, for two bookmarks for any book getting this treatment. Not all do. Some just wait on the bookcase until I come back to them afresh.

The second is the interesting metric of where the two bookmarks meet. Since I always read the last page early, there's an implicit second bookmark just before the end of every book i read. So, if the start of chapter 1 is 0% and the end of the last paragraph of the final chapter is 100%, then no book I read hits 100%. Most hit as close to 100% as makes no odds. The others, the ones where the second bookmark slips back a few pages, whilst the first bookmark progresses in fits and starts, are more interesting.

Take Piranesi. I read part one with a little effort. And gave up awhile. When I restarted last night, I read maybe two or three pages into part 2 and then knew I was unlikly to go on. I reread the last page, and this was sufficiently interesting (exciting, even) that I read the final part. At the point I took the plunge and read the parts in reverse order finishing the rest of the book in a single sitting. Of course, it's not really about finishing, is it? It's about whether I enjoyed the book, which I did: I will re-read it sometime sooner rather than later. Have I somehow cheated? Spoiled something of a build up, a gradual revelation that had been carefully constructed by the author? Did I miss out on sharing Piransi's putting together of his story as he experienced it? Maybe. Perhaps I had a different set of a-ha moments: this is the point where x, who did y further on, is first introduced; this is why z happened later. More meta? That would probably be me (blame those undergraduate English days).

Piranesi gets a score of around 15%. I think it works that way. The only other book that would score on quite such an extreme would be Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss where I think I read two chapters in before heading to the end and working back. In that case, I think the book was improved by the reordering.

I'm going to call my technique the "Finnemore Method".
1/1241
muninnhuginn: (Default)
Interesting review here of a possibly interesting novel. However, I'm slightly puzzled by the fact that no mention is made of the protagonist's name: Marguerite Duras. I can't believe it wasn't a deliberate decision to use a novelist's name, and that novelist. Or maybe not. I'm just surprised the reviewer doesn't make some reference to it. It'd be like reviewing a book with a protagonist named Virginia Woolf and not talking about it.

May 2016

Jun. 1st, 2016 11:44 pm
muninnhuginn: (alien kitty)
Read:
Shorts:
- Out of the Black by KC Myers (DSF)
- Only A Little One by Patricia Ash (DSF)
- Sleepwalker by David Ryan VonAllmen (DSF)
- I miss the Before by Robert Reed (DSF)
- The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton (http://www.tor.com/2016/04/20/the-destroyer/)
- 17 Amazing Plot Elements... When You See #11, You'll Be Astounded! by James Beamon (DSF)
- La beauté sans vertu by Genevieve Valentine (http://www.tor.com/2016/04/27/la-beaute-sans-vertu/)
- Best Friends Forever by Michelle Ann King (DSF)
- Divine Optimization by Chris Ovenden (DSF)
- Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters by Alice Sola Kim (http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/hwangs-billion-brilliant-daughters/)
- The Spider by Rahul Kanakia (DSF)
- Miranda, Joe, and the Little Green Man by Michael Haynes (DSF)
Novels:
- Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley (K)
- Stonemouth by Iain Banks
- The Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston
- Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (K)
Knit:
- Tavia (socks)
- the odd hexipuff
muninnhuginn: (alien kitty)
Six Brookners take up about 70mm. If I replace them on the Kindle (now more of the early works have made it onto the platform: I swear they weren't there a couple of weeks back), that'll be £25.95 for the 5/6 that are available.

That's 37p per mm.

Incidentally, the winning of a Booker seems to add a premium: "Hotel du Lac" costs a whole £1 more than the others.
muninnhuginn: (alien kitty)
Eggs!

Elderly hens ahve not been laying this winter.

So, eggs!

Also, this had me laughing out loud. For reals ;-)

    "... at this moment Aunt Hester returned.

    "Timothy," she said in a low voice, "Timothy has bought a map, and he's put in—he's put in three flags."

    Timothy had ….! A sigh went round the company.

    If Timothy had indeed put in three flags already, well!—it showed what the nation could do when it was roused. The war was as good as over."
John Galsworthy, In Chancery, Chapter XII
muninnhuginn: (alien kitty)

So, is there any reason to have on my shelves, pretty much untouched since 1988, a complete Chaucer in paperback, Oxford T&C, Penguin T&C, several standalone volumes of different Canterbury Tales?

(Note, I possess a facsimile Kelmskott Chaucer for the pretty and would only now want to re-reread on an electronic device: bigger text on tap and lighter on the wrists.)

muninnhuginn: (Default)
not as long as some )
muninnhuginn: (Default)
The hens are soggy. Mrs Fred, especially, loses her extreme fluffy buffness and looks much reduced in volume. Jack, however, does the water off a duck's back thing: the drops that gather on top of her glossy black feathers do look like little crystals. Time methinks to put the larger winter cover over their run.

The weekend, apart from forays to Looby Loo's music class and a pleasant lunch at Efe's, was rather dominated by adaptations of 19th-century novels. I'd missed the beginning of the rebroadcast of the 1990s BBC Pride and Prejudice space (when are they going to do the proper one from the 1980s? Colin Firth is not my idea of Darcy), but enjoyed watching most of the last three episodes. Looby Loo was captivated, so I may have to acquire the relevant DVDs (yet again, she shown just how girly she is). I guess she'll have to watch the repeat of Jane Eyre too. I don't think it will be any more frightening than Doctor Who. I suppose if she can enjoy having Sherlock Holmes stories read to her, Jane Eyre wouldn't be too difficult either. (I think I'd heard it on the radio before I read the novel myself when I was ten or so.) Of course, as with Jane Austen's works, I don't actually own a copy. I read those books when I could still borrow the copies from my parents' bookshelves (300 mile long arms I do not have). Having watched the programme on romantic novels on BBC four, I'm rather tempted by the "revamped" covers on offer for the Jane Austen novels. I assume that a similar reissue of Jane Eyre. (I'm impressed today by the Dragon's ability to cope with book titles and authors names with almost no intervention. I really don't need to type very much these days.)
muninnhuginn: (Default)
So, yesterday I bought a book called, somewhat uninspiringly, Planting Patterns: from the air". I'd spent much of the evening prior to my purchase staring longingly at the cover in the distance and speculating as to how I might knit it up. Yes, really. Once I'd actually picked the work up -- no mean feat: it's more of coffee table than a coffee table book -- there was no going back as the pictures inside, reminiscent of Rothko's canvases, were stunning. I'm now uncertain as to whether I should write poems about them or continue with the knitting idea.

It's an entire book of aerial photographs of fields in Switzerland and France for the most part, including pasture and greenhouses and even saltworks. They've all been very carefully shot to line up with the rectangle of the page which enhances their geometry. Some are quite bizarre. For example, a bare field littered with the hoops and poles for a planned poly-tunnel looks like the result of serious digging on the part of some mad palaeontologist, a litter of huge bones against the bare earth. Another poly-tunnel example has the arches erected, but almost invisible; the shadows instead resemble an arrangement of fish-hooks.

There are pictures of success -- harvest and the gathering in of crops -- and failure too -- frost-damaged brassicas, failing wormwood. Yes, wormwood. I'd never really thought about how field of wormwood might look. No green fairies inside.

I dumped the book in front of Looby Loo this evening and suggested she might find it interesting. Her immediate rejection of the notion (it is after all mandatory to say no to anything. Parent suggests) was instantaneously transformed into a gasp of delight as she opened a page at random.

I'd never have imagined that fields could be quite that interesting and beautiful.
muninnhuginn: (Default)

As are my shoulders.


With the addition of some of Looby Loo's, plus many of mine that I've passed on, we've scooted up placewise from the high 380s to having the 274th biggest library.


Now, ain't that such a childish thing to care about.


Oh, and I've more of her books, plus the rest of the books in the front bedroom, plus the one's I'll be acquiring second hand in the autumn which might take me into the dizzying heights of the top 200. (We have 2000 plus books, but the plus ain't that big.))

I Wish...

Aug. 21st, 2006 02:19 pm
muninnhuginn: (Default)

... for a numeric keypad with an X--for all those pesky ISBN check digits.

muninnhuginn: (Default)

Prompted by [livejournal.com profile] lark_ascending's comment about their love at first sight (if that's the way to put it?) experience with some books, I was beginning to muse about my methods of finding new authors, when not following other folk's recommendations or reviews: my browsing methods. These were, I'd always thought, pretty unexceptional. All the same, when I've mentioned them to folk they've not been unanimously in agreement. In fact, some quirks were deemed to be actually morally reprehensible methods of selecting books (and probably other things in life, tho' my strategies vary according to what I'm seeking).


So here, to my shame, are some confessions of bad book buying and book owning habits (in no particular order, although alphabetical would probably be virtuous):

  1. I read the last page in the book shop. Always.
    I honestly can't think of a better way of choosing a book about which I otherwise know nothing. If I don't want to get to that last page, why bother starting?
  2. I read the first page with my proof reading eyes in. Always.
    If I find a typo, I put the book back on the shelf. This applies equally to authors I don't know--Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space I rejected several times because of the misuse of the word "crescendo" on one of its opening pages--and to old friends--there's a Brian Stableford (don't know which one, can't check, see mood below) I didn't buy for ages, despite my love of his writing, because there was some horrid misspelling or substitution on the first page.
  3. If it's got a thick, black spine I'm almost always sold.
    Well, it's probably why I gave in on Revelation Space (which I eventually acquired and enjoyed). It's also my excuse for *whispers* Stephen Donaldson. One of them. I've made many over the years. I am unrepentant.
    And yes, for several years, I shelved all the black-spined books separately, above the head of my bed. (Now I just display the Folio Society volumes more prominently than the random books of humour folk have gifted and I can't quite persuade us to get rid of).
  4. I can't get rid of, even unwanted, books. Ever.
    Some things smack too much of sacrilege. Period.
  5. I overbuy books.
    The result of which is the unread piles. These fester against a party wall so they don't even pass for extra insulation.
I know the last one's hardly news round here. I don't think I know many people who don't have that problem. Still.


That's me done. In the spirit of mutual filthy(-ish) confession, what bad book buying/book owning habits do other folk have--and are willing to own up to?

muninnhuginn: (Default)

I've often wondered how one finds favourite authors, how they leap out still unread from the mass of other writers we pass by, whether on bookshelves at home, or in libraries or bookshops. It's all the more intriguing watching the process going on for someone else.


I'm in the middle of cataloguing, sorting and shelving the books as they come back from the cellars of Cherry Hinton and this entails piles of dusty tomes lying around the place. Accidentally, during the process of moving out of the way of builders and then out of the house during reflooring and decorating, odd volumes popped up in strange places. I'll never quite know how In Viriconium ended up on Looby Loo's desk (nor how I found it in the clutter of Hama and dissected sheets of paper and Skoobidoos that breed there). Amongst the various piles of unpacked an LT-ed paperbacks this afternoon, I built a small footing of M John Harrisons. Looby Loo picked up the top one--A Strom of Wings--and said "I love it" in that I will brook no argument: this is how the world is and ever shall be tone of voice that would have me doubled-up with laughter except she'd be hurt. Somehow, out of all the piles and heaps and crates, these are the books she's choosing. Perhaps I should leave a copy of Light lying around prominently: she might finish it.


So, before adding it to the pile of books to read to her, I'd better check A Storm of Wings is suitable. There's no hurry: I got her hooked on the Clive Merrison starring Sherlock Holmes adventuress on BBC7 over half term, so we're reading those first.


But, why? How? Will the attraction survive the encounter with the texts within?

Books

Dec. 10th, 2005 11:13 pm
muninnhuginn: (Default)

One more: I got a lie in!


no comments: it's just a list )

Books

Dec. 8th, 2005 08:54 am
muninnhuginn: (Default)

Two more: there's nothing like being stuck next to a feverish, dozing girlie for getting a long novel finished.


haiku and hiking (kinda)... )


The cow, taking a big
dreamy crap, turning
To look at me
Jack Kerouac

muninnhuginn: (Default)

This would seem to mark an end to a brief, tho' chunkily fed, fiction binge, but for the fictions in the grammatical treatise.


another one bites... )


The shade of sadness we call the blues can take a singular or plural verb, since anyone who has them can't be bothered to look it up, or to be consistent about whether it is--or they are--in pieces or in a solid hopeless mass.
"Agreements", from The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, Karen Elizabeth Gordon


Coming into a clearing in the forest that did not appear on the map, they tilted their puzzled heads heavenward to discover a corresponding tear in the sky.
"Phrases", op. cit.

More Books

Nov. 27th, 2005 11:22 pm
muninnhuginn: (Default)

cut price acquisition during xmas shopping )

muninnhuginn: (Default)

the first lot of birthday books to be finished )

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