reading and writing (no 'rithmetic, thankfully)

[rivendellrose]

Fic-writing hates me right now - last night when I tried to work, I pretty much got nowhere other than more convinced than ever that I need to completely scrap what I've been trying to do and start over again. Eep. There's gotta be a way to salvage this thing... I just haven't figured it out yet.

In other news, I've been reading up a storm the last few days. Finished "The Feminine Mistake" a while ago, finished "Otherwise Normal People" (about competitive rose gardeners), and this morning finished "The Beauty Myth." Oh, and I read "Sorcery and Cecelia" last 'weekend.' So that puts me... hmm. Sixteen books away from my goal of having 100 books read by March 13. I'm not sure I can do 16 books in a month... but the count for the year is still pretty impressive, I figure. And I like keeping track, anyway.


1 Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett
2 The Telling, Ursula K. Le Guin
3 Going Postal, Terry Pratchett
4 Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
5 Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett
6 Daily Life in Civil War America
7 Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emecheta
8 Stiff, Mary Roach
9 Just Add Hormones
10 Second-Class Citizen, Buchi Emecheta
11 Culture as Given, Culture as Choice, Dirk Van Der Elst
12 The Swamp Thing: Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore etc.
13 The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria, Victor C. Uchendu
14 And a Time to Die, Kaufman
15 Carried to the Wall
16 Jingo, Terry Pratchett
17 The Middle Man (vol. 1)
18 Fast Food Nation
19 Fantasy Girls, Elyce Rae Helford
20 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol 2, Alan Moore
21 Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kelley Armstrong
22 Spook, Mary Roach
23 Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie Nataro
24 The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
25 Rules for the Unruly
26 Guests of the Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
27 Smoke and Ashes, Tanya Huff
28 Fast Girls, Emily White
29 Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
30 Pledged, Alexandra Robbins
31 Somewhere to be Flying, Charles de Lint
32 A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
33 Smoke and Mirrors, Tanya Huff
34 Consuming Kids, Linn
35 Dancing at Armageddon, Mitchell
36 Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris
37 The Birthday of the World, Ursula K. LeGuin
38 The Last Days of Dogtown, Anita Diamant
39 Club Dead, Charlaine Harris
40 Blood Price, Tanya Huff
41 Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin
42 Blood Trail, Tanya Huff
43 The Thief-Taker, ?
44 Expendable, James Alan Gardner
45 Trapped, James Alan Gardner
46 Hunted, James Alan Gardner
47 Ascending, James Alan Gardner
48 Radiant, James Alan Gardner
49 Vigilant, James Alan Gardner
50 The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin
51 The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist, Mary H. Manheim
52 Gravity Wells, James Alan Gardner
53 Mirabile, Janet Kagan
54 Bitchfest (10 Years of Bitch Magazine)
55 Mort, Terry Pratchett
56 Maskerade, Terry Pratchett
57 Spiderman: Until the Stars Go Cold, J. M. Straczynski
58 Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, Joss Whedon
59 Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous, Joss Whedon
60 Gypsy Demons and Divinities, Elwood B. Trigg
61 Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
62 Familiar Strangers: Gypsy Life in America, Marlene Sway
63 A Book of Pagan Prayer, Ceisiwr Smith (nom de plume much?)
64 The Science of Aliens, Clifford Pickover
65 Thud, Terry Pratchett (yes, again)
66 The Mummy Congress
67 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
68 Elf Defense, Esther Friesner
69 Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
70 Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
71 Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
72 Fables: Legends in Exile, trade #1
73 Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett
74 The Ape and the Sushi Master, Frans de Waal
75 Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, James Boswell
76 Goblin Quest, Jim C. Hines
77 Dealing with Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede
78 Astonishing X-Men: Torn, Joss Whedon
79 Calling on Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede
80 One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Rebecca Mead
81 Sorcery and Cecelia, Patricia C. Wrede
82 The Feminine Mistake
83 Otherwise Normal People, Aurelia Scott
84 The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf

Expect a review / discussion page for The Beauty Myth (probably with diversions into The Feminine Mistake while I'm at it) at some point in the near future. For now, I have to go beat a fic into some form of submission. And submission-quality. Argh.

*Coughs* I can tag HTML. Really. >_>

Comments

[galeni.livejournal.com]

"Otherwise Normal People" sounds fascinating. (I grow roses but is a rather dissolute and laissez-faire manner.) What did you think of it?

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

It's great fun, if you like the sorts of books/stories that examine all the different kinds of people that are obsessed with a particular thing. The author does a good job of teaching all about roses and showing them and all that through what the people who she interviews tell her, and also presents all the people she talks to in a realistic, sympathetic, but nonetheless amusing sort of way.

Her descriptions of the competition prep and cycle were really interesting, but I think my favorite bit was a chapter about people who 'rescue' old rose bushes from places like cemeteries and sides of highways. I adore old fashioned, tough-as-nails roses - the whole point of a rose, for me, is that it's one of nature's most beautiful creations... and absolutely tenacious, to boot. ;)

I seem to recall that the book is supposed to come out this May - I definitely would recommend it if roses are one of your hobbies.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good read. It was in part the old roses that I loved best in The Secret Garden. I have a catalog of heirloom roses, but I don't have space for them so I just dream of the fragrance. What I do have is a 12' raised planter in front of the half-basement window full of miniatures (but we're talking full square foot bushes, not the tiny grocery store pots) and one older rose variety (runnels?) that has thorns like crazy, blooms twice a summer, and has long canes that get furiously cut back every winter. It was one of the parents of a rose I bought which failed but the parent is a deep rose color with a nice fragrance. Not very displayable when cut, so I leave the flowers on the cane, but gorgeous to look at.

I used to have four flora-tea roses from JPerkins, but I moved and had to leave them. They were wonderful.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

The long-caned dark rose sounds lovely - same as it sounds like you feel, I like roses for beauty, but love them for their fragrance, and the dark reds seem to have something to their scent that no other rose has.

For the moment, I'm living in a rental house, so I've avoided putting a lot of work into the garden on the theory that I'd just miss it when I left. But we have one very pretty bright salmon rose that is tenacious enough to survive any amount of neglect it's put through, a huge beautiful magnolia tree, irises, fennel, rosemary, a plum tree and some other assorted random plants. So I get my greenery fix, one way or another. ;)

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Sounds gorgeous. I know the neglect part better than the "I must garden" feeling, if only because there are so many cool books to read. And because I don't like bugs.

My rosemary was doing well until our near-hurricane and several feet (not all at once, thank heavens) of snow. I'm hoping it will come back after I trim it back next month.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading a short article in the Atlantic about Dove's Real Beauty marketing campaign. (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200703/postrel-beauty) The campaign flips the Beauty Myth upside down and claims that all women are beautiful and don't realize it.

It seems like the idea is both cloying and cheapens the idea of beauty. The author of the article points out, however, that most of the women in the ads fit the criteria of beautiful already and only when compared to airbrushed supermodels do they seem less than perfect.

It's interesting, as the author points out, because there is clearly a scientific, established advantage to beauty that hasn't changed much throughout most of human history. Biology selects for healthy people with the highest chances of reproduction.

To promote a loosely defined counter-myth that all women are beautiful rather than changing the focus from beauty to intellect, achievement and self-reliance, it seems like Dove gets to keep selling creams and soap, leaving the focus on the external and marketing that weird, vague notion that all women are linked together not by their common interests, but by biology. It doesn't allow for self-understanding and instead promotes the idea that there is something wrong if one looks in the mirror and doesn't see perfection.

The new beauty myth is more murky than before. It seems far more dangerous.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Well shoot. I guess the whole thing isn't available to non-subscribers. If you're interested, I can sent the rest of it to you.

We should have a beer sometime. Are you free in the near future?

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I should be able to work something out. What days are good for you?

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh, yes. I read this article last week, I think. On the one hand, I like the Dove campaign for making at least a token effort at presenting women with bodies, skin-tones and shapes that aren't generally seen in beauty ads - gods know we could use more of that.

However, as the article points out, there's an evolutionary and genetic basis to beauty that is, by its very nature, not universal. I can be a size 2 all I want, for instance, but bad skin and imperfect bone structure will always prevent me from being a true beauty. To which Naomi Wolf wants me to say "big deal"... and I agree with her about halfway. It shouldn't be the biggest deal in my life that I'm not drop-dead gorgeous (and it isn't), but it also is an issue because no amount of changing the media or culture will change the fact that beauty is an advantage, and lack of it is, to some extent, a disadvantage in life. The problem is the idea that beauty is all that matters - that a woman is somehow worthless or not worth paying attention if she's not pretty... whereas I don't see that attitude with men. The general media allows men to be average, or even downright unattractive, without punishment. Whereas every woman you see on TV is either a caricature of "bad," or beautiful. Which, to be colloquial, is so totally lame, as well as just plain frustrating for a sort of a "blah" average-Jill kind of girl.

Terminology there... "Average Joe" is a good thing, but there's no way to say that a girl is "average" that doesn't either bring to mind a model pretending to be the girl next door, or that has "downright ugly" written above it in indelible ink.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Bam. You put it exactly. I feel like the obsession with looks is starting to extend to men, though, as the unfortunate sweep of media -based ideals keeps rolling forward. Hurrah for the media.

Anyway, I'm free Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. If you like BSG, I also go to a weekly Battlestar party on Friday nights.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Very true, and entirely disturbing. The only thing worse than women feeling like we have to be perfectly beautiful or worthless is everyone feeling it. The good news is, there's possibility that once men start to realize how much it sucks, something might actually change. For the moment, it just screws up my dating life more than usual - I can't abide dating a guy who looks like he spends more time on his appearance than I do on mine, and given that I don't spend a lot... yeah. :P

Hmm. I haven't seen BSG at all, so that probably wouldn't be a good idea for me... Wednesday or Sunday is probably our best bet.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Sunday sounds good. Is your email account still the same one at hotmail?

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

It is - it's in my user info if you need a reminder. I might have to ask that we push it to next week, though - I keep getting a feeling that I was supposed to see my dad and stepmom sometime this weekend, but I've been out of touch with my cellphone.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Hey, I sent you an email, but my mail host is being absolutely ridiculous. I just got a flurry of mail that should've showed up a few days ago. Now I don't trust it. Anyway, Wednesday sounds good. Want to check out Duck Island?

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Argh, I'm such a dip about messages of all kinds, lately. Anyway. You're right to mistrust your server - I never got the email.

What's Duck Island?

(Oh, and if you need to get hold of me, my other email is jrosegreen at gmail. And that one I can even occasionally get away with checking at work, which I can't say of Hotmail...)