He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.
Molly McCarthy. 2013. The accidental diarist: a history of the daily planner in America.
A dense read, but one that sparked a lot of thoughts, and made some surprising connections across history, especially in the late 17th C. Just think about the fact that a 1690s colonial almanac publisher included a 10 page editorial on the "new" Copernican cosmology.
It also brought to mind the day planners distributed by the student council when I was an undergrad.
I think I may have found the solution to reading my blog feeds on an eBook reader.
Get a Boox. It is an eBook reader that allows you to install apps. Think a tablet, but with eInk. So, I can install not only the Kindle app but also Scribd, and Feedly, my RSS reader.
And the showroom is in my neighborhood!
#Boox will help me take full advantage of my Scribd subscription! (Have always been reluctant to read novels on my iPad.)
Part of the SF Masterworks Collection. Despite being nearly 60 years old the narrative around the manipulation of the truth feels incredibly prescient. Wondering whether David Whitaker had read it before he came up with #DoctorWho story The Enemy of the World. #Books#Bookstodon#SciFi#PhilipKDick
One of those books that always appears on must-read lists that has nonetheless sat unread on my pile of books for many a year. I regret now not getting round to it earlier. I found the storytelling to be incredibly vivid and though I’m not a great one for re-reading things I can imagine myself coming back to it at some point.
For the most part I really enjoyed this. For an 18th century novel it feels quite modern and it’s interesting how it references the great influence Laurence Sterne had on it. There’s enough amusement in the way the apparently simple story of one man telling another about his past love keeps getting interrupted by other tales to make it enjoyable albeit I was a little weary of the style by the end.
The influence on Orwell’s 1984 is obvious and there are lots of great ideas and passages within the story. That said while I appreciated it I can’t say I ever felt gripped by it or as engaged with the characters as in 84 or other similar works.
A find in a charity shop that I picked up largely as I had a vague memory of reading bits of it for my A-Level studies. It remains pretty readable and it’s a nice not too involved overview of the Stuart dynasty.
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks
The Essential Alan Coren
I was a bit young at the time for Coren’s writing and so really knew him as the very funny man from Radio 4’s The News Quiz or Call My Bluff with Sandy Toksvig at the time. This collection shows why he was considered to be one of Britain’s great comic writers. Some of his early stuff has language that wouldn’t be used today, but it mostly stands up very well.
A really interesting read. It’s I think very successful in achieving what it is trying to do and the characters are incredibly vivid. By the end I was starting to find it quite tiring spending that much time with so many unlikable characters, but it does sort of feel like that was always supposed to be the point to some degree. I’d say I’m glad I’ve read it and I’m also glad it’s ended.
Penguin Plays: Four English Comedies
Volpone by Jonson
The Way of the World by Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer by Goldsmith
The School for Scandal by Sheridan
A nice little collection as part of the Penguin series. Definitely found the two later plays came across better on the page, but there was something to enjoy in them all.
The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Jem Roberts
Finished coincidentally on what would have been the great writers 71st birthday. I’ve read Jem’s other comedy biographies of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Blackadder, Fry & Laurie and The Beatles and as a comedy geek enjoyed them all.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan
Really effective. Manages to add context and a new perspective to the changing power dynamics of world history in a really entertaining way. I took a lot from it.
Not my first read of it, but my first for a very long time. Has its strengths as it adds more depth to the Holmes character and the mystery works well enough. On the negative side the Watson-Mary ‘romance’ is pretty weak and obviously there are elements that haven’t aged so well. Overall it’s enjoyable enough without being Holmes at its absolute best.
Another day, another interminable ride, this one slow and awkward, the horses picking their way over roots and fallen logs along what used to be a path. Probably. At some point.
Above us, the trees of the Myrkviðr are living up to their reputations. Dark and tangled and strange.
“A story?” I turn to look at Þrúðr. She’s stiff-backed and stern, eyes focused ahead and knuckles white around her reins. Still, this is the most she’s said to me since we left, so: “Uh, sure. What kind of story?”
“Of Father,” she says, still pointedly not looking at anything. “I wish to know . . . something the skalds do not sing of.” She’s especially not looking at her brother, and the way he’s trying to catch her eye with an expression even a blind jötunn can read as What are you doing, fool girl?
When Þrúðr Þórsdóttir had been very young, Váli Lokason pushed her into a river.
She’d been sitting on the edge when it’d happened, studying the shine of her hair in the water. The only warning she’d had was the sound of wicked laughter, and a single flash of red across the corner of her eye.
The next thing she knew, she’d been wet, some very startled salmon brushing cold scales against her cheeks. By the time she’d struggled to the surface, Váli had been nowhere to be found.
Sigmund never did manage to figure out the logistics of their flight, not really. Because the Earth was round, and huge, and hung in the vast black void of space. Not to mention Sigmund had been on airplanes before and he knew—empirically knew—that everything above the clouds was cold and bright and empty.
It certainly wasn’t full of leaves. Or branches. Or . . . was that a herd of deer?
“Where the bloody hell are we?” he asked, hands gripping the edge of the gondola window as he peered out beyond Hrímgrímnir’s feathers.
“Passing between the boughs of the World Tree,” Hel replied.
“Oh. Right.”
The drop below was . . . long. Oddly, Sigmund wasn’t frightened of it. Yeah, falling would suck, but a dragon wasn’t an airplane. It was alive, and thinking, and it would catch them if they fell.
Unusually for one of the gods, Thor was sparing in the number of children that he sired. He had three, all—despite some rumors to the contrary—mothered by his wife, Sif.
Magni, the middle child, was all too eager to follow in his father’s footsteps. Besting jötnar as a toddler, with all the arrogance of a firstborn heir. Meanwhile Móði, Thor’s youngest, grew soft and uncertain. No match for his brother in physical prowess, he instead turned to magic to make his mark on the world. Magic, it must be said, is a woman’s art, but Móði’s grandfather, Odin, was its master and so, too, was Móði able to learn with only a minimum of disapproving gossip.
Thor’s eldest child, his daughter, Þrúðr, inherited her mother’s hair. Sif’s hair was not the hair she had been born with. Instead, it was a magic wig of sorts, rooted in her scalp and growing strands of purest gold. Literally gold. Unlike her mother, Þrúðr needed no wig, and rumor was her hair was even finer for it.
More time passes. I spend it staring at the ceiling, wishing I had my cell phone. Or, at the very least, a fucking cigarette.
I have neither, however, so instead I occupy myself with delusions of rescue. These mainly involve Sigmund, dressed in some suitably revealing “armor,” kicking in the door to the cell, crying my name in an anguished way, then coming to rub himself all over me while stroking my horns and telling me how brave I am and how worried he was.
01: Mary Robinette Kowel - The Spare Man
02: Becky Chambers - The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet
03: Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice
04: Jule Owen - The Kind
05: Jule Owen - Elidir
06: Stephen Baxter - Flood
07: Stephen Baxter - Ark
08: Ann Leckie - Ancillary Sword
09: Ann Leckie - Ancillary Mercy
I will soon have finished Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Memory and have to go back to more books I have already read.
They’d watched every single Die Hard and half of RoboCop by the time Hel’s arm-scort made it to the gates of Ásgarðr.
Actually, if he thought about it, Sigmund really couldn’t be sure how long they’d been traveling. Time seemed to work differently here, outside of Miðgarðr, fading in and out until even the trudging of the náir and the bellows from the Helbeasts became routine.
Maybe Sigmund was just too desensitized to the extraordinary, raised by a lifetime of comic books and video games. And Hel’s army—Sigmund decided to give up trying to pretend it was anything else—Hel’s army really was something straight out of a game, monsters and undead and tattered banners, flapping in the breeze. The golden road glimmered beneath their feet, and when they passed, the land around them fell to blight and rot.