katiesbooks.org

Here are (unseasonal) pics of our Christmas tree, plus a cat photo thrown in for good measure:

Hi!! How are you?? I haven’t seen you in so long, oh my God! I know, I know, I’ve been awful. It’s so good to see you, though - you look great! Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Reading

• I’m reading the third book in the original Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey. Good stuff, man!
• My latest from LT Early Reviews was Olive Kitteridge - I found it so-so. You can find my review on LT, and I may post a bit more about it here.
• I’ve just begun Jodi Picoult’s Vanishing Acts, and it’s promising to be another pleaser.
• I read Libba Bray’s Rebel Angels over the holiday - and I preferred it to the first in the series

I’m working in general on being nice to myself, and that includes not judging my own reading. I wish I was reading all highbrow literary fiction, heavy-hitting history, poetry both modern and ancient, but nope. I’m reading mysteries and historical fiction and young adult and fantasies. I think I’ll always have at least a little problem with this - but I’m trying!

Crafting

• One of my biggest craft projects recently has been the little gifts I gave out to my co-workers. I made paper bird ornaments with pretty decorative papers and lots of glitter, and attached them to Paper Source pillow boxes filled with a Trader Joe’s nut mix. It was more work than I thought it would be, but also a lot of fun. And the leftover birds went on my tree!
• The log cabin throw has slowed down a lot, but I’m still moving. Hopefully I’ll be on the last round soon.
• I’ve been making a lot of bookmarks, and I’m going to use my Christmas gift certificates to get more papercrafting materials. Hopefully some neat stuff will be posted soon.

Speaking of posting, one of the reasons I’ve been posting so little recently is the photo issue. I’m finding taking/managing/posting photos to be a real pain. I’m going to look around and see if anyone has any good advice about workflows for this…

Oh! And I’m on Ravelry finally - I’m ladypeter there, as I am on LT.

Sometimes I feel like the weirdest mix of the masculine and feminine, and I think that this collision is illustrated in my blog reading, which is split between content that’s aimed specifically at women and other content that’s aimed pretty much at men. I mean, this is what I’ve read today:

Cute Overload
All my knitting sites, including Mason Dixon knitting
All my general craft sites, headlined by the Craft Magazine blog

Then there’s BoingBoing, not totally masculine, but getting there.

And then, what’s this? My new blogroll category, infrastructure! Here’s where I have completely gone over the edge into Boy Country:

Telstar Logistics, the blog about “The Technology of Land, Air, Sea, Space”, etc. I spent a few happy minutes listening to their audio of a pissed-off JFK ground traffic controller trying to figure out who’s supposed to be going where, when. Awesome!

There’s aslo gCaptain (”for mariners, by mariners”), from which I followed a link today to Popular Mechanics. They had an infographic about a container ship captain.

Man, it’s not that I’m a boy, it’s that I’m a complete, 50/50 boy/girl hybrid. Are other people like this? I can think of one friend, I guess, who’s similar (points if you can self-identify, person!). But it seems like an anomaly in our culture. Guess I should just enjoy what I enjoy, but it creates a bit of a cultural disconnect.

This makes me remember a craft project in which I actually brought together these two sides of myself: I made an embroidery based on an architectural drawing by Robert Mallet-Stevens:

Now I want to create more things like this, and bring together male and female!

OK, I couldn’t resist. Even though I’m avoiding the movie like the plague, I liked the Dark Materials books a lot, and now there’s this cool web toy where you can learn what your daemon is, and then your friends can weigh in! SO - do you agree that I’m an osprey?

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/?669571

Oh shit.

The shame!!

Where have I been?

Well, things have been a been stressful here at katiesbooks HQ the last few weeks. I apologise for the sad lack of posts. Here’s what I’ve been reading and making:

Reading:
I’ve had trouble finding things I can really get into. I had high hopes for Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight”, but man, I was displeased. I was right in there until I learned that this was going to be about a grand conflict between vampires and warewolves, and that the heroine would have romantic interests on both sides of the conflict. Haven’t I read this before??? Now my real question is, what is the ur-text for this narrative? Who thought it up first?

Thank God for Naomi Novik, though. “Empire of Ivory” is a total joy. That’s got me occupied for now, and I have my next Maisie Dobbs and Kushiel’s Legacy books waiting in the wings. I’ve also got a good-looking Mary Stewart romantic thriller. A steady diet of reading pleasure!

Crafts:
Work on the log cabin throw goes on apace. I slacked off a little last week, but I’m back in action now. I’m a few rows shy of halfway through my second of three bands, and it’s getting huge! It’s already a generous lap-warmer while I’m knitting.

I’m also well into the leg of my first sock. I’m knitting it cuff-down on two circular needles, and it is a small miracle. To see what is obviously a nascent sock coming off my needles is something I’m still marveling at. May this be the first of many!

I have materials for some Christmas crafts that are taking some time to get off the ground. Maybe this weekend while M is studying…

About 100 pages in.

The tone was more lyrical and mysterous in the early part of the book. Now I feel it is dragging. I’m sorry Andrea Barrett! And I’m sorry, LT! Can I review a book I haven’t finished?

I’ve begun “the Air we Breathe”, which I got from LT Early Reviewers. 

When I first picked up the book and began to read, I was in love. The setting of the scene in the first pages had that strange power of really good opening lines; as I read the first words, I felt myself flying down over the setting like a bird, viewing the scene from above just as the author wrote it. I have a penchant for novels that begin this way- starting with the landscape in which the events are set. The effect can be too heavy-handed, sure. But when it is well-done, everything just seems to flow out of the setting completely naturally. And that was how I felt about the book for the first 50 pages or so. 

I liked the third person narration, too. I went to a small girl’s school for 13 years, and I recognized the voice as one I sometimes have used. At the time I would have said that everyone was an individual and that, although there were cliques and factions, we didn’t all feel one way together. But when I tell M stories about those days, I find myself using a similar “we”. “We all thought that she had done it”. “we used to do this silly thing in the locker room after classes ended”. Was there really a “we”, then? Or is time just amalgamating myself and all the other girls into one being in my mind? Do I just say that because it makes me feel like I belonged to the group (which I seldom felt at the time)? So I can feel the comfort of the voice Barrett uses. And I found it very interesting when the voice broke up. At the beginning of one chapter, they say, “some of us want to say one thing, and others of us want to say another” (that’s a paraphrase, not a true quote). I’m curious to see if this voice goes unchanged throughout the book, or if it will be challenged. 

I said that this is how I felt for the first 50 pages or so. Now that I’m over the initial infatuation of the beginning of a good book, I’m into the (sometimes hard) work of getting through everything that happens before the climax. I’m not enjoying it as much as I was. The neat narrative voice has become commonplace, and I feel like I can see just where everything is going. Sure, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen which each plot, but I feel like everything is going to come to a fairly predictable crisis, and then people will go on, most of them alone and relatively unhappy, some satisfied with the things that happened. And no big truths will be revealed. 

I seem disenchanted with the “whimper” that ends most contemporary literary fiction. I’m of the opinion that “literary fiction” is just another genre, like mysteries and epic fantasies. And I have to say, I feel a little like I did when I decided to finally read Jordan’s “Wheel of Time”. In the first volume of that series (as I’m sure many people know), a young man and his father (? - perhaps some other elder figure) head off on a journey to another village or something. The young man is inexperienced and excited about seeing more of the world. They encounter these mysterious and somewhat dangerous entities, “dark ones” or “others” or some other kind of creature whose black hood covers their faces, or who have skeleton hands coming out of their sleeves, or something. They get out of the encounter unscathed, and as they continue on their journey, it becomes clear that the father/elder knows more about these creatures and the whole situation than the young man does. And at that point, I just had to stop. It was too too similar to a dozen stories I’d read before. This is an archetype that I often like, but when you read a story and all you experience is the archetype and there’s nothing unique about this particular telling, then you may as well read a folklore dictionary. So anyways, what I’m saying is that all of a sudden, while reading “the Air We Breathe”, I had a premonition that the last paragraph would involve [male character] watching [female character] walk slowly up the road towards [dwelling place] and then heading to the [mass transit port]. Or possibly [female character] watching [children or group of friends] [playing or recreating] on the [lawn, beach, park], then silently turning around and [starting supper, pouring a glass of water, wiping kitchen counter]. 

I mean, am I totally off here? Of course, this particular book could surprise me. And this has a lot to do with the “reading mood” I’m in. But as far as the tropes of the contemporary novel, does this ring true? Seriously, leave a comment. 

Thanks for reading!

Just finishing up “Daughter of the Empire”, a classic fantasy of manners. Mara, a teenager thrown into the leadership of her clan, must fight for survival and (no less important) honor. It’s a little unfortunate that, after her first major stumble, Mara doesn’t make any tactical mistakes: scheme after “just crazy enough to work” scheme ends with her enemies shaking their heads and saying, “well played, rival. It seems there’s more to you than your lithe young form would indicate”. But still, there’s a satisfaction in that, right?

Coming up next in the reading pile, the new book in the Temeraire series! Yay!