The Rose's Grove

Snagged from cyranocyrano and seachanges, quite the best little fairy tale I've read in a long time:

The Grammarian's Five Daughters.

Happiness is a complete, unabridged audio collection of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to listen to at work. ♥ Good audio books make me so very happy.

Blame the spring - I seem to be wandering in a mental forest of "stuff that's coming soon (...or not quite)." I didn't really notice this as a trend in my life at the moment until Monday morning, when The Boy and I were discussing the impending release of Final Fantasy XIII. He'd been debating for months over whether he wanted to buy it, reading reviews, griping about various features and other things he'd heard... and then, Monday morning, he said something about if he was going to take a day off this week, it'd be Tuesday. "Why?" I asked, perplexed. Funny day to take off from work, Tuesday. "Because that's when Final Fantasy comes out."

I admit it - I laughed at him. "So you're still getting it? Even though you don't think you'll like it that much?"

Well, of course he knows well enough to counter with my own obsessions. "You still buy the BPRD comics even though you don't like Guy Davis' art."

"That's different," I pointed out. "I know I'll like them even though they won't be pretty. You know FFXIII will be pretty. This is like... this is like if I was bouncing up and down to buy a comic that, yes, was back to being drawn by Mignola, but just happened to have been written by Frank Miller. Or RTD," I said, trying to ward off the mental image of the Hellboy universe as written by Frank Miller. Of course it failed, and now I'm stuck forever with the mental image of Liz and Kate in fishnets and short skirts. I suppose not that much else would change, but it's still a horrifying mental image. :P

And then it occurred to me. That is what I'm doing with a lot of things that I'm looking forward to right now. I keep shuffling back and forth between giddy and horrified about the upcoming season of Doctor Who ("Yay, Doctor Who! New season of Doctor Who! ...With Matt Smith, omg, and everything's different, I'm going to go crawl under a rock for a while..."), and my constant neurotic desire to find out exactly who they're casting for the upcoming Hobbit movie... so that I can spend the next year and a half panicking, most likely, because the chances of me approving of all the choices they make on this are pretty much just shy of nil. And then there's class, where I would probably be looking forward to next quarter if I could just get over the nagging, neurotic feeling that it's a total waste of time that's sucking up money, eating my weekends and driving me insane. It's part of looking forward to something, I guess - thinking of all the ways in which it could disappoint you, and then completely disregarding them in the thrill of getting something new. So I'll keep twitching and refreshing news sites and hoping for details on things... and all the while reminding myself that while it might not be exactly what I'm hoping for, I will most likely enjoy the hell out of it nonetheless. Case in point - The Boy is actually quite liking FFXIII so far, despite a character I have dubbed The Pink Thing who has the most obnoxious personality of any character I've ever seen anywhere, and some seriously dubious racial politics. At least it's pretty, and something new to distract him from work-angst.

Speaking of which, I'm reading my first-ever China Mieville book, and it turns out that I'm loving it. Straaaaaaange book, but wonderful. ♥

...Now if only I could get that horrible Frank Miller thought out of my head.

(Also: You know, I really need this season of Doctor Who not to suck so that my only active current fandom isn't a comic book that only two other people I know read. It's just plain boring and lonely.)

"The path of light is laid, the sacred test. 'It's a damned line of iambic pentameter, he said suddenly, counting the syllables again. 'Five couplets of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.'"
- Angels and Demons, page 272 (paperback edition).

Iambic pentameter.

It does not mean what you think it means, Langdon.

Iambic pentameter has nothing to do with couplets. Couplets are a pair of rhyming lines that go together. The final four-line poem that he ends up with is two couplets of iambic pentameter. I'm a little rusty on the English lit side of my education, but I am absolutely certain about this. The "penta" refers to the five "feet" (pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables) in one line of iambic pentameter. And the "iamb-" bit refers to the stress/unstress pattern. I would say that the word he's reaching for is 'sonnet,' but that wouldn't be right, either. So no, just plain wrong.

Seriously, I don't care if people don't know what iambic pentameter is. I really don't. But if you're going to use it as a plot point in your book? Please look it up. Or just ask someone who knows. Because otherwise, it just grates on the nerves of everyone who really knows.

Also? I am deeply amused that he associates this with Langdon having gone to Phillips Exeter Academy. I went there for a summer (on scholarship - too damned expensive for me to have gone full-time or for any longer, alas). Good school. If Langdon had gone there, he'd know what iambic pentameter really is.

For the record, since there seems to be a bit of confusion on this - I am not against anyone else liking Dan Brown or Angels and Demons. More power to you. I just don't like it myself, and take a perverse pleasure in reaming books that I don't like, particularly if I have to read them whether or not I like them. It's a habit leftover from school, where at least if I hated a book I had to read for class, I could write a nasty essay about it.

And I don't know how people are getting the impression that I don't like it because it's trashy literature. I enjoy trashy literature. This is just not my kind of trashy literature. Give me an urban fantasy, historical romance or cheap sci-fi novel any day. Thrillers and mysteries are not my thing, and in general I get bored by even the good ones.

The second round of tardis_bigbang has been released, and I wanted to take a moment to pimp the whole collection of fic and art, but most especially the two I had the pleasure of reading while they were still in beta:

Centre of the Universe by azarsuerte. In the aftermath of the Time War, a wounded TARDIS brings a dying Doctor to the one person who might be able to save not only his life, but also his will to live: Nyssa of Traken.

Old Horizons, New Skies by lorannah. During a fight with a figure from his past Jack is transported to a parallel Earth - faced with alternate versions of his Torchwood teams, both old and new, he begins to wonder whether Torchwood only ever ruins people's lives. Can he avoid drawing them all back in to the danger and madness again? And will he get home?

Check them out, and be sure to let the authors know what great jobs they did!

Congratulations to the wonderful Terry Pratchett, who was knighted today! ♥

Also... stupid-American question: There's a bit of a debate going on over here, among those of us who know and care about this, whether the whole being-knighted thing consists of just a proclamation, or if there's still the whole ceremonial thing with the sword. Anybody know the answer?

And! Happy New Year!!! I know a lot of you have been putting up with all sorts of unpleasant crud this past year, so I hope 2009 is lots better for everyone!

Dear Seattle Library System: Why does your search interface suddenly suck? We didn't always have this problem. How is it that you now think, when I search by author name, that it is somehow acceptable to return keyword type responses mixed in with the list of author responses? If I search for an author, I - gasp! - only want the things that author has written. Stop being stupid. How hard can it possibly be to list the actual author responses first?

PS: I am deeply unamused by your decision that a video recording of a Depeche Mode concert is an acceptable response to my author search for Richard Dawkins.

If you'd accepted my offer of a first initial, rather than only giving me three really stupid responses to that query, we wouldn't be having this problem. Not funny, library. Not funny at all.

...*Puts hold on desired book. Wanders off, grumbling about how she misses the university's online catalogue, which actually made sense.*



Finished re-reading "Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," now reading both "Why Gods Persist" (horribly dull writing style, but interesting content) and Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" (decently well-written for historical romance). Almost done with "The Ancestor's Tale."

Happy Birthday, nekokoban!

I already said as much in your entry earlier, but I hope you have a wonderful day (off work, too, lucky duck!). Writing was being problematic, so the fic you requested will, instead, be posted on my birthday, along with the rest of the batch (I hope).

After picking up a handful of paperbacks at Half Priced Books, I've been going through another Discworld kick - read Lords and Ladies and Reaper Man over the last few days, and today I'm working on Jingo. I've read all of them before, but they're three of my favorites out of the whole series.

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.

( Finished since March 13, 2006 )

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. >_>