Back from the darkness

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So, the repeat of radio silence was due to a week of nights, my body seems to have largely come to understand that when I randomly say “nope, you’re confused, it’s night now“, it needs to sleep because otherwise I get to awake the next day with a whole new level of exhaustion.

Which is good, but it’s now the end of the week and I feel suitably ropey having had too much caffine to ensure that I stay awake for the majority of today. I’m not planning anything much more demanding than a bit of xmas shopping (online) and some book scanning (delicious library development) and maybe ringing my mum.

I have spent the last few weeks sucking in the content of a variety of books… mostly this is the fault of Nikki and Kate who dragged Kathryn and I into Borders in Bristol* where they demonstrated the true awfulness of the current technology of e-books, and a failure to actually have any of the books on my wanted list****.

E-books, well, the e-book reader they were demoing suffered from one fatal flaw. Speed. It sucked like a dyson, but in a bad way. It took substantially longer than my average page turning time to change page, and added to this was the fact that you get less text on the ‘page’ and only one of them (as opposed to your standard Book 2 page spread), so you’d have to turn twice as many pages – and painfully slowly each time.

The menu system on it seemed archaic, non-intuitive and clunky, and I just thought ‘no’. Incidentally, as with vinyl, what I want is to buy a book and get a free e-book copy with it. Then I have my nice textured tactile experience object, and my convenience one in one purchase. Of course, that would be far too sensible.

Anyhow, after a brief confubulation with Kathryn we left the shop with 2 books – my half of the buy one get one half price offer being Scat; Carl Hiaason’s latest book – which is apparently a teen book and interestingly covers the gap between Flush (the excellent children’s book written by him) and his adult novels; even including one of the adult-novel-characters.

As usual, I found myself devouring the book, it taking me away from the latest Cory Doctorow novel. I’m not sure whether it’s just the online reading experience (Big Brother I read cover to cover as rapidly as I could manage, and then read again, but I had that as a proper paper experience; I was reading Makers as a PDF. I will probably go back to it, but it didn’t suck me in in quite the same way. Possibly it’s because I found it hard to suspend disbelief for such a future when I’m so the-world’ll-be-f*cked-when-we-run-out-of-oil*5). It’s good, but anyhow…

…The problem was, having asked in Borders about Rosemary and Rue, which was occupying mental space on my wants list without actually making it onto the real one, and discovering that Amazon had it at a price that could easily be justified (Borders did not have it in stock), and having then dinked around looking at ‘books that have been on my wants list a long time’ and noticed that some of them are actually going out of print…

….err, yeah, I also got “The Dyke and the Dybbuk”.

I can recommend all of these.

Rosemary and Rue is a fairly light, but great read; Kathryn’s discomfort with Changlings being defined differently than in popular literature not-withstanding; I found it very engaging. I don’t think it’s the next Wordsworth, but I rather like the main protagonist*7 and will be buying the second book in that series (in March, apparently).

And then came The Dyke and The Dybbuk – I’ve read this through my week of nights and am conflicted: I wish I’d saved it until I wasn’t on nights so I could enjoy it to it’s full potential but I’m awesomely pleased that I read it. After so long languishing on my ‘to read’ list after it was suggested by Rachel, it’s a really excellent book – and I’m so pleased it finally made it off the ever so long ‘to read’ list and into my somewhat sad ‘read’ list.

Anyhow, I think that’s enough of my rambling for the time being. I’m going to get back to lazing by the fire and doing sod all.

* Which I actually found a somewhat saddening experience, largely because I was previously under the impression that Borders was a bookstore. In fact, last time I went I recall it being almost entirely bookshop in nature, but this time it was DVD and Games and Music and Overpriced-Cheap-Tat-Plastic-Crap**.
** I felt like Thursday Next going into Bookworld***.
*** I think that’s what it’s called.
**** Okay, more accurately, a lack of books that I actually wanted to buy from my list at that moment. They did have a cool member of staff though.
*5 Bearing in mind that travel, plastics, medicines and food are all largely dependent on petrochemicals*6.
*6 And obviously ignoring my nascent fears of the impact of climate change.
*7 Bloody straight protagonists.

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.