Category: Books

the jester and the monk went out one night

Sunday, 16 March, 2008 at 10:52 pm

New layout. Yay! After I complained in some previous post that I had no inspiration for a new layout I went out to a scrapbooking store (for class supplies) and saw a paper design that I liked (the diamond pattern) so I matched it up with this image I’d found earlier while on the lookout for old woodcuts (for class). I like it all right at the moment. Will probably tire of it soon. But I think I can wrangle the layout into a non-overflow one once that happens.

I still have to work on style for the text. It’s what kept me from making this post yesterday when the layout went up, but since I spent most of today working on my book (for the same class mentioned previously), I never got around to finishing it, and would rather say yay new layout before it’s done than a few days after it first went up.

I’ll probably split the “sidebar” into three sections instead of two. I’ll probably toss in the RSS feed from LibraryThing and Last.fm. I feel somehow like I’m following the latest trend by doing that, but oh well. It’ll make this blog look less abandoned in between posts. XD;

I also want to add a colophon. Why? I’m a dork I guess. I love the idea of it. I first read one in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I had no idea what it was, but I liked knowing what typeface they used. It edged me a little bit deeper into loving book design. *grin*

Madeleine L’Engle’s Chronos and Kairos

Thursday, 6 March, 2008 at 1:23 am

I really have to work on posting entries when I first think of them. I’ve got a few ideas waiting to be written. This is the first one! (Chronologically speaking in order of when I thought of them, as well. Funny.)

I read through my Madeleine L’Engle books over the past couple months, seeing which ones I really didn’t have an interest in any longer. (Of course I read through them chronologically: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, A Ring of Endless Light, Troubling a Star, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time. I don’t have Meet the Austins or Dragons in the Waters.)

It turns out this is harder than I expected. If I were to go solely by story, I would get rid of The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, and Troubling a Star. But if I were to consider the whole book, the only title I’m still willing to give away is The Young Unicorns. It’s because the other titles have characters connected to the books I’m not giving away. Argh! Me and my sentimentality!

A bit of likely unnecessary backstory: the books I’m considering disposing of I’ve read only once or twice before this winter (except Troubling a Star, which I’ve read a few times), and probably bought only to read more about Ms. L’Engle’s characters. For the most part, I find them somewhat dry and dragging. Possibly because of the printing. If it looks like it came from the ’90s, I tend to read the story as dry.

Seriously, newspaper-quality paper and thick type? Come on! How much money were these publishers trying to save here? How much money did they really make in the long run? Especially A House Like a Lotus. I don’t know what typeface was used, but it looks like a modern typeface. In a book? Yuck.

Back to the original topic. If I take into account the characters in the books, I really want to keep Arm of the Starfish because it has Polly (Poly?) O’Keefe in it. Don’t really care for the story (never liked mysteries; once I read it the first time, the re-read value goes down by about 95%), but I like seeing how different she is from in AHLaL. I see growth, change, damage from your average high school setting.

Since I’m keeping Adam Eddington’s story before ARoEL, I feel like I should keep TMbN for Vicky. Zachary Gray is also in TMbN, who’s also in ARoEL and AAT. (Ooh, even longer period of development!) After that, I begin to think I should keep TaS just to wrap up the whole Adam/Vicky story, although I figure I can just remember that they stay connected. (One time I tried reading TaS again and I couldn’t even finish it. Do you know how rare an occurance that is?)

So I end up giving away only TYU and TaS. TaS is a fairly thick book; I’ll gain lots of bookshelf space giving that book away. Which is the main reason I’m reading through the books. (Mum made me a new bookshelf last summer for the foot of my bed where I can put my comics and some DVDs and CDs, and already I’ve got a stack of books about two feet tall with no place to go!)

AotS and TMbN are thin books, they won’t take up much shelf space. But it bugs me that these books are sitting on my shelf that I never ever ever plan to read ever again! Unless I’m really bored with whatever else I have. *twitch*

A comment about the two later Polly books: I know the two fit into two different series (does AHLaL go in with the Chronos books? it does have Zachary … but then he shows up in a Kairos book as well…), one is more grounded in reality and the other is more of a fantasy. But still. Does Polly feel like a completely different character in each book? Or is it just my mind yet again getting influenced by appearances (this time the covers), so AHLaL feels more dry (the type doesn’t help either :P) and AAT is rich and fun?

I know in AHLaL she’s recovering from a deep hurt, and she’s around people who aren’t her grandparents (everyone cleans up for their loving grandparents, right?), but still. The AAT Polly seems younger. And some other stuff that would come to mind better if I weren’t writing this at 1:30 in the morning. Wow, I typed a lot. Why do I always do that? And writing school papers just sucks hardcore! I’m lucky if I come up with the bare minimum required.

B Is for Buy

Thursday, 17 January, 2008 at 9:42 pm

I couldn’t help myself. I bought Neil Gaiman’s M Is for Magic. I was browsing the children’s section of Borders (research for book design class) when I saw it and started staring at it and the “First Edition” line on the copyright page, and trying to figure out which stories I had and which ones I didn’t.

I think I have almost half of them. Which means that almost $9 was technically wasted. But I spent more than $9 on new Neil stories! woot! Should tide me over until his next book comes out.

(I wonder what it means that I don’t go more than a few months without buying something Neil has written. Is he prolific? Am I obsessed? Both? I bought The Absolute Sandman vol. II and Stardust: A Visual Companion [where he is quoted or something, and Maddy shows up too :b] within the past, I’d say, three months.)

Stardust

Thursday, 20 December, 2007 at 11:48 pm

I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust recently, and like any good fan also went to see the movie when it came out. (Oddly enough, this is the only story of his I’ve read twice, if one doesn’t count short stories.)

First time I read the book, Stardust didn’t thrill me that much. One of my lesser-liked books of Neil’s. (Apparently, according to my 2005 book list, I read it about two and a half years ago.)

The movie on the other hand, I loved dearly and can’t wait to get the DVD and watch it again. It was so much fun, so magical.

I thought to myself, if I liked the movie so much, why didn’t I care for the book? Which is why I decided to read Stardust again. My conclusion: it must be Neil’s writing style. While reading it I would feel sort of ho hum and wonder what book I was going to read next. But when I would imagine parts of the book as the movie

[edit, January 3, 2009:] … What the heck? What happened to the rest of this entry? Did I not write it? Did WordPress or my server lose it? I probably wanted to say that the story … came alive. But I don’t remember what else I was going to say.

no virus is gonna take me alive

Sunday, 28 October, 2007 at 7:43 pm

Agh! I keep feeling like I’m in my bedroom at home; in my mind there’s a wall directly to my right. My brain does a serious reconfiguring when it realizes there’s no wall, but a lot of space. *mind boggles*

Umm, what else can I talk about … I uninstalled Norton Antivirus 2007 from my laptop because it would seriously slow performance down during scans and during/after my computer shut down it would pop up errors of memories not being written. I’d already contacted Symantec once about that problem, and the advice I got fixed the one error, but then others popped up afterwards, and I didn’t think it was worth the hassle to get it corrected.

Instead I installed ZoneAlarm. It got second on Consumer Reports’ latest anti-virus programs reviews. It was $10 cheaper for the program and for subscription renewal than the number one program, and it also had better virus detection. It was second because it had lower ease of use and speed, and a third category that didn’t really catch my attention. So yeah. I thought the second one was better for me.

After one week of having the program, my opinion is: yeah, the scanning speed is dang slow. It took three plus hours last night. Although I’m not sure if that’s because I put the laptop to sleep (ZoneAlarm didn’t alert me to the fact it was scanning! o_o). But it’s still a bit faster than Norton, so I am quite the happy customer. I had Windows Media Player, FileZilla, Firefox, and Photoshop open, and didn’t really catch on until maybe after half an hour that my laptop was lagging a bit, and oh maybe it’s because ZoneAlarm is scanning!

But right now a complaint has popped up. I have the same programs open (and more, but those are the bigger memory hogs), and my laptop is still a bit slow to respond. That makes me a sad puppy. I am hoping that ZoneAlarm is still getting used to my computer and program usage, and that after a while this slowness will disappear. Otherwise I’m satsified with the program. :) I’ll probably give my NAV 2007 to Mickey.

(I still have NAV 2006 on my desktop. Only my laptop’s dinosaur age and speed made me choose another program. Just in case anyone thought I despised NAV. I don’t. Exactly.)

On another note, I saw a sign that the holiday season is near: there was a display of Ferrero Rocher chocolates at the end of an aisle in Staples. Of all places! Hm. Oh well.

At dinner tonight I finished reading Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. I really liked it. The plot wasn’t anything mindblowing, just following the lives of two couples. It was those two couples that made the story different from anything I’ve read. Okay, I haven’t read much, considering how many authors are out there (nevermind how many books), but these characters were still new to me. I’ve never even met anyone in real life like any of the characters. (Again, I haven’t met many people, but still…) Well, Guido is probably the most normal, and I probably have met someone similar to him. I can’t keep going on about how the characters are so interesting, so I will just say that they truly are different, without being out of what you would think of as ordinary.

And to think this book was randomly reshelved in the bookstore and what caught my attention at first was the author’s last name being out of order. haha!