Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe
Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe

Thank You, Jeeves  by P.G. Wodehouse
Jeeves and the Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

Carpe Jugulum: A Discworld Novel by Terry Pratchett
The Wee Free Men: A Discworld Novel  by Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies  by Terry Pratchett
Witches Abroad  by Terry Pratchett   
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett   
Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett   

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 

I've been keeping the list updated on "Goodreads".  I find the interface less obnoxious than LibraryThing. 

I've sorted the books by author here rather than the order I read them.  I already talked about The Book of the New Sun.   All the Terry Prachett books are ones that feature Granny Weatherwax and the witches.  There's at least one more left, Maskerade, but after reading Carpe Jugulum in two days (and most of it last night) I feel rather like one who's had a whole chocolate cake at once.  P.G. Woodehose is delightful, and there are some thoughts knocking about in my head to compare the merits of the novels and the TV show.  I like both a great deal but in different ways.

The Harry Potter was a re-read, or rather, re-listen.  Half-Blood Prince is definitely my favorite of all the Harry Potter books, and it's nice to clean the house and knit while I listen to a book.

Good Omens suffers from both the faults of Gaiman and Prachett.  Prachett often loses me in the middle of his novels.  Between the 2nd and 3rd act in the drama there is often a lull where I cease to care about the side characters that he insists on dragging into things.  Gaiman seems to like to end his novels with a dressed up version of "and then she woke up," which is obnoxious.  It's the same thing in American Gods.  Still I read it all and it was diverting. 

You're unlikely to ever see a book I didn't like on my list, because if I don't like a book I don't finish it.  College is where I learned to leave books unfinished and it's a wonderful thing.  It's for the mind what leaving a meal unfinished is for the body. 

Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats

And then someone actually went and made it into a song.

Last night I finished reading Gene Wolfe's best book (cleverly disguised as two or four books, depending on how you look at it), The Book of the New Sun. It was my third re-read, and it got even better this time.

My three favorite novels in the world are Dune by Frank Herbert, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I bet that many of you have read, and many more have heard of, the first two, but I wonder how many have read the last. The Book of the New Sun is less accessible than The Name of the Rose and weirder than Dune. The mind-bending future world, where the sun is so close to dead that you can see the stars in the daytime, is on par with Dune in its richness and complexity. The (mostly religious) philosophy, which the characters often discuss in casual conversation without it seeming contrived, is on par with The Name of the Rose or better. But the characterization is better than either. Although the main character is male, the female characters are far more real, vivid, and varied than almost anything I've encountered in fiction, and particularly science fiction.

The book is full of hints and allusions and puzzles. Despite what some readers may say, all the pieces are there and it's quite possible to put them together, though it might take a second read-through and some thought. I think many readers come away frustrated because they read the first volume alone and find that they have more questions than answers. There's also Gene Wolfe's love of obscure vocabulary--he doesn't make up words, he just resurrects them. I liked learning that an epopt is the opposite of a neophyte and that a carnifex is another word for executioner. You can get by with context, but if you're a word nerd the OED will beckon you. Every now and again the narrative pauses while the characters read a story from a book of tales or have a story-telling context. The narrator-main character tries to fool you into thinking that it's just an interlude included for his sense of completeness, but like many of things he says, it's just a subtle lie or perhaps self-deception.

It's one of those books that I wish fervently my friends would all read, because it's such a pleasure to discuss. I'm not sure I've done a good job of convincing anyone, but if you're a fan of difficult pleasures, this is a book for you.

I got top-whorl drop spindle last week and have been teaching myself to spin. So far I have made one skein of unbelievably ugly yarn and one skein of shockingly ugly yarn. Right now, the spindle is filled with what seems to be merely very ugly yarn. I'm definitely improving.

Spinning seems a lot easier than knitting, but a very different sort of skill. There's a very compelling feeling to drafting out the fibers and feeling the spindle drop and spin and pull them out at just the right rate. It reminds me of when I learned to yo-yo, and the feeling of yo-ing was stuck in my brain in a strange way, so I could hardly think of anything else, and hardly keep myself from yo-ing.

This morning, as I napped on the bus on the way to work, I visualized all the steps of spinning, and by visualized I mean felt as well as saw, and even in my vision the thread kept breaking. I observed what I was doing and why the thread was breaking and realized that I was pulling straight up only with the drafting hand, when I should have been making a little triangle with the fleece. So I tried that, and it worked better.

When I came home I practiced what I had learned in the dream-spinning, and I was pleased to discover it worked with real fleece too.

There's a soft sound, and a pleasant sensation between the fingers, and a comforting smell that I can only describe as sheepy.

From the Stumptuous blog today, I got this wonderful slide show of high school aged women who are competitive weightlifters. Lots of great photos of 15-17 year old women putting giant pieces of metal over their heads. There's also a voice-over interview of the women talking about what it's like for them to lift weights and how they got into it.

All these are from a Japanese book of 300 crochet motifs. Each motif is diagrammed, which is a much better way to convey doily directions than paragraph form, and makes Japanese crochet books accessible. Which is good, because English language crochet books are almost universally hopelessly ugly or designed for complete novices. I can't remember a time when I didn't crochet, and I started out with thread crochet in the round. My doilies didn't use to lay flat, but then, I wasn't following a pattern.

This might be my favorite Throbbing Gristle song. Not these versions maybe, but this song. I could listen to it over and over and over. And I have. It takes me back to the memory of something I never quite had.

This is, as best as I can remember, and as much as I can manage in chronological order, the list of books I read in 2007. I might be missing some. I think I might have read some Terry Prachett early on in the year that I didn't make a note of, and who knows what else.

1. Old Man's War. John Scalzi
2. Class, A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell.
3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
4. Women of the Golden Dawn: Maud Gonne, Moina Bergson Mathers, Annie Horniman, Florence Farr by Mary K. Greer.
5. The Big Sleep. Raymond Chandler
6. Farewell, My Lovely. Raymond Chandler
   
7. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. 1973. Nonfiction.
8. Mysterium Sigillorum, Herbarum and Lapidum, "The Mysteries of Sigils, Herbs and Stones." by Israel Hibner. 1698
9. The High Window. Raymond Chandler
10. A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
11. Les Guerilleres. Monique Witting.
12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling
13. The Hearing Trumpet. Leonora Carrington.
14. Knitting Without Tears. Elizabeth Zimmermann
15. Last Call. Tim Powers
16. Woman Hating. Andrea Dworkin
17. The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10. Roger Zelazny
18. Witch World. Andre Norton
19. The Long Goodbye. Raymond Chandler
20. The Little Sister. Raymond Chandler
21. The Dream Master. Roger Zelazny
22. Pippin's Journal. Rohan O'Grady
23. Gateway. Frederik Pohl
24. Ghost Brigades. John Scalzi

Japan is the world's leader in cuteness. Their cats may give them a natural advantage.

Watch this one first. It's BunnyCam level cute. You may feel a moment of distress when you first see the kitten in the pot, but please be assured that nothing bad happens to the kittens.



I would be much obliged if any of you who know Japanese could give me the general idea of what the intertitles say.

Cats in clay pots seem to be such a big craze that Japanese TV had a hard-hitting investigative report on it. I get the general idea, but again, some input from Japanese speakers would be much appreciated. My favorite part is when they put the box and the clay pot side-by-side in some sort of science experiment to see what the cat will choose.

They watched me go out and didn't say goodnight. I walked down the long corridor to the Hill Street entrance and got into my car and drove home.

No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care.

-- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Linking up to Barbelith.

I'm in this for about 5 seconds.

Scientists and Experts have installed a zombie homing beacon at the San Francisco Public Library and will activate it tonight at 7:30pm in order to draw the hordes of undead into one convenient location for containment and neutralization.

I plan to go the help stem the tide of undead, since, as we have determined before, I am a first or second level cleric and should be able to hold my own against the zombies. If, however, I should fail, and become zombified, I trust that my friends will know what to do. You know I'd do it for you.

Dante's Divine Comedy is basically Bible fanfiction.

As some of you know, I am not from this country, and so I missed a lot of the television that helped formed the young psyches of my contemporaries. Usually this is no big loss. But in this case, I'm glad that the Internet is here to break down the Iron Curtain in my heart and show me the Cthulhu episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon.



This clip is probably only awesome if you are familiar with the works of Lovecraft, and I imagine that the more you know, the funnier the offhand in-jokes are.

Please note how stylish the cultists are. I really like their head wear.

It may have been cool once, but these days Burning Man is by turns boring and physically uncomfortable. I guess if nudity (of ugly men) or overfigured large installation art impresses you, you might like it.

I don't even know how many people I saw having a horrible time on drugs. I wish someone would send a memo: a dangerous desert prone to whiteout conditions is not a good place to do drugs. I know "dangerous" doesn't convince people, but how about this: it doesn't look fun either. I'm sure that if what you want is an outdoor rave, you can have a lot more fun in a meadow somewhere.

If you're a woman you can forget being treated like a human being out there. You are nothing but a piece of meat with exchange value. The money economy may be banned, but the sex economy is going strong. Frankly it's enough to make a one consider a burka as a fashion choice.

It's hard to fully express how physically miserable it is out there. The dust is caustic and very fine. It gets everywhere. Yes, including your sleeping bag and underwear. Since you have to put on sunscreen every day, but yet can't wash properly, you get these nasty bits of sunscreeny goop pilling on your skin. You can forget all about your hair. During most of the day it's too hot to move. During the night it's freezing cold.

Bringing your own water doesn't sound that bad until you realize that you have to take all your gray water home. You can set up an evaporation pool, but unless you invest a lot of money and resources into it, it will only create a nasty sludge. Then you have to take that home.

Maybe if the art was really cool or the "gift community" was really cool it would be worth it enduring the physical hardships. But actually you can kind of get used to the physical hardships a little (except for the prota potties), and it's the lameness of the art and "community" that makes it really suck in a deep way.

Maybe the regionals are better, but Burning Man is over. There's no good reason to go anymore.

Edited to Add: If you get your period while you're out there (and for some reason the harsh conditions make a lot of women get it early so don't think you're safe), you're going to have to keep the dirty tampons or pads with you and take them home. Fun, right?

I got a practice amp! I do not think even an electrically amplified guitar will trick anyone into thinking that I rock, but I am having a ton of fun.

The High Window. Raymond Chandler
It's Raymond Chandler so you can't go too wrong. Nonetheless it's just not as good as The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely. Reading this one kind of broke my Chandler streak, but I know I'll go back to read more.

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
Popular non-fiction in the vein of Freakonomics and just as glibly argued. Still, I felt better about my messy ways after reading it.

Les Guerilleres. Monique Witting.
I guess it's science fiction. It's all about women fighting the gender war. No, literally; there is a war. This books is not written in a normal narrative style, but more like a series of sort-of-poetic vigiettes. I liked it but wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling
If you've read all the others you might as well read this one.

The Hearing Trumpet. Leonora Carrington.
The stand out gem of this month's reading list. The Hearing Trumpet is a very funny book about and from the point of view of an 92 year old woman who is put into an old folks home which turns out to be a sinister cult. As far as I can tell this book was written especially for me as it has: 1. an argument about knitting vs crochet 2. old women 3. nuns 4. heretical nuns 5. magical bees 6. alchemy 7. a planisphere 8. the north star. Everyone should read this book.

Knitting Without Tears. Elizabeth Zimmermann
I'm kind of cheating because I haven't finished this book yet, but I'll forget by the end of the month so it's going to be listed here. Elizabeth Zimmerman waxes most poetic about knitting while giving some great technical advice. I think the first 20 pages of this book could be of interest to anyone based on the beauty of the prose alone. After that, it gets pretty technical and I don't think non-knitters would care. But if you are a knitter you already know about this book and Elizabeth Zimmermann, so I don't need to tell you about it.

I was really hoping I could put Magick Without Tears on this month's list too, just for the humor value of having it next to Knitting Without Tears. But then it turned out I don't care enough about humor value or Crowley and I read several novels' worth of Snape/Hermione faniction instead.

Malvina Reynolds' civil rights protest song "It isn't nice" has been stuck in my head since Thursday nonstop. Since it's my theme song lately, I don't mind so much. But I'd really like to get the chords for it so I can play it to my hearts content. If I were awesome I could listen to the song and write down the chords. It's obviously really simple. But I am not awesome and O.L.G.A. is down again due to legal trouble and the rest of the internet only cares about "Little Boxes" which is a theme to a popular TV show right now.

All I really have to go on is this video of someone else singing the song, but it cuts away from the fingers for long periods of time so I can't quite get it.

The S.C.U.M. manifesto by Valerie Solanas is a hateful, nutty, misandrist rant. Most feminists go to great pains to distance themselves from it. Many anti-feminists hold it up as an example of man-hating feminism, and try to use it to characterize all feminists as misandrists.

I'm pretty sure Ms. Solanas meant for her manifesto to be taken seriously. Her hate was real.

But for me, the S.C.U.M. manifesto is a mirror image of the misogyny women encounter in literature and in life. Ms. Sloans has managed to pack the hatred, inconsistency and nuttiness of the misogyny of literature and pop culture into one rambling manifesto. Its value is as a mirror.

If you are a man, I'd like you to try a thought experiment. Read the first page or so of the SCUM manifesto and as you read it, pretend that Ms. Solanas point of view is the majority point of view. Pretend that perhaps she's more forthright in expressing the view than some other people are, but that most women reading it say to themselves "well, I wouldn't take it quite so far, but she's basically right." Pretend that the women who held this view have the power to enforce it. Pretend that you must always be on your guard against women who hold this view and might harm you or kill you. Pretend that anything you might say to defend yourself will be discounted as lies or "just trying to be like a woman," or "pussy envy."

Now, maybe you have a little bit of an idea of what it's like to be a woman reading Freud or Nietzsche, or better, H.L. Mencken, Jim Goad or Dave Sim. And to know that for most of history, most men have agreed with them, and many men still do. And then they act surprised when some women hate them back.