Nature is trying to kill us
It smells like a campfire everywhere I go. This is going to be a very, very bad fire year, and there's not much anybody can do about it, at least in the short term. I wanted to go running last night, but according to the local news, I might as well smoke fifty packs of cigarettes and save myself the wear on my running shoes. Maybe by this weekend.
At least the bad air might have saved me from a run-in with a coyote. Because there are COYOTES ROAMING MY NEIGHBORHOOD. (Which, I must mention, is smack in the middle of San Francisco.) I'm not particularly alarmed, but I am surprised. Apparently they are migrating south, across the Golden Gate, stopping in a wide string of parks on their way down the peninsula. The signs that someone has put up ("COYOTE ALERT!") amuse me, partly because, like most such signs, the instructions amount to "don't be an idiot," but mostly because the last item on the list of things to do when you see a coyote is something like, "You are allowed to throw one small rock toward, but not at, the coyote." I suspect there are some protected species laws behind that odd wording, but still, it's so specific! One rock.
* * * * *
TV Stuff:
I saw these episodes a couple of weeks ago, so they're not as fresh in my memory as I'd like, but I figured I should post on them before I see the next ones.
Babylon 5 2.10 - "GROPOS"
Steven is the teflon character. The writers throw everything at him! Helping the underground psychic railroad, a questionable romance with a patient, and now, an estranged father, a career military family, and Steven's ambiguous feelings about his own military service. You'd think that would make Steven interesting. But somehow, none of it sticks.
The most annoying thing about the Steven Problem, in this episode, is that his family history and his personal history are both great ways of illustrating Earth's relationships with other planets leading up to and through the Minbari war: the previous clashes with alien civilizations, the arming of Babylon 5 now, the role of the military in ordinary life for Earth citizens, and the way the Clark administration seems to be preparing for coming trouble, taking sides with the stronger factions in smaller conflicts, making the kind of realpolitik decisions that cause a lot of destruction in a lot of far-off places.
Babylon 5 straddles the worlds in this episode: it's a diplomatic station, but it's run by the Earth government, it accepts Earth armaments, it houses Earth troops, and it's getting drawn into the mess just like everything and everyone around it. The costs of those choices are clear: we met the ground pounders just in this episode, so it was obvious that they were doomed, but I like that the show made a deliberate choice to illustrate the carnage of just one military operation by killing off people instead of numbers. They weren't all saints, either; a couple of them were even assholes. And Dodger was fun: unapologetically interested in sex, realistic about what she wants, zeroing in on Garibaldi, understandably annoyed by his scruples. (Oh, Garibaldi. I know now that you're a closet romantic, but would it have killed you to have a fling? No, no it would not have.)
Two final points about this episode. I really, really did not like Delenn's helpless need to be rescued when she started getting menaced, and I also didn't understand it; this is a very self-possessed woman, someone who is sure of herself and knows how to school others. And, hi Keffer! Since you're in the credits, it's nice to see you get some lines.
Babylon 5 2.11 - "All Alone in the Night"
First of all, how awesome is Lennier? Pretty awesome.
I was initially a little confused by some of the developments here because I had mistaken General Hague for Sheridan's friend the rogue captain, and spent some time wondering when he got so serious and well-connected. Oops. But it was interesting to learn that Santiago maneuvered for Sheridan to be appointed as Sinclair's replacement, because his record was deceptively hard line and would appeal to Clark. Sheridan's entire adventure aboard the Streib ship reinforces Santiago's judgment: Sheridan approaches problems tactically, like a military man, but his instincts are for cooperation and collective problem-solving. (As an aside, I much prefer the Stargate explanation for the little gray men.) And now there's something else to connect Sheridan and Sinclair: a capture, lost time, mysterious experimentation.
Something I noticed and appreciated about this show right away, and am really coming to actively adore now, is that while the writers give the audience information, they're also giving the characters information--and the characters think about that information, and wonder, and eventually put the pieces together. Santiago's death was too convenient. Sheridan and Garibaldi and Ivanova know about the amazing disappearing evidence, but it now becomes clear that people on Earth have also suspected a plot, and the machinations of the Psi Corps haven't gone unremarked. When Sheridan and Ivanova and Garibaldi (and Steven! The Lurker's Guide reminds me that he was there too) come together at the end and agree to basically break all of their military oaths and training and take a huge risk on a dangerous conspiracy, it's a moment that's been earned, an agreement among people who have seen too much evidence of bad things happening on Earth that they can't ignore, people who have seen enough of one another to be able to trust the others in that group.
I have no idea what it means that Sheridan is the hand, or how Kosh is involved, but as far as cringey dream sequences go (I am sorry, but that is not one of this show's strengths), this was much better than Ivanova's dream about her mother.
I wasn't that surprised by Delenn's removal from the Gray Council; I sensed the last time she met with them that things were headed that way. Still, Mira Furlan really sold her disappointment and fear. Delenn took a terrible leap of faith, undergoing that transformation; to lose her position on the Gray Council was one thing, and a risk she seemed willing to take, but to lose her position on Babylon 5 would have meant that she had nothing to show for it, including a relationship with her own people. She's made herself different, set herself apart, in the most fundamentally physical way. It's a great symbol, and an indelible mark that alters her interactions with everybody. As much as I hated her shrinking violet routine with the menacing GROPOS, it proved the point that she's neither fish nor fowl now. (At some point, I will try to put into coherent form some of my thoughts about the prevalence of hybrids on science fiction shows, and the symbolism of melding peoples together; BSG and Farscape both use this idea very heavily too.)
It strikes me that we are seeing, one by one, government by government, the tipping over of all of the major participants in the Babylon 5 Council toward militarism. Santiago's assassination; Londo's use of the shadows' attacks on the Narn to manipulate the ascension of a military faction to power on Centauri Prime; now, the vote among the remaining Gray Council members to replace Delenn with a member of the warrior caste, tipping the balance (and indicating, by the division of votes, that someone who is not a member of the warrior caste wanted this). As big as the forces operating in this universe are, they're all the outcomes of choices like this, taken one at a time for various selfish reasons, and that's something that rings very true to life.
* * * * *
Food Stuff:
I live alone, so I don't do a lot of baking, although I enjoy it. So I'm intrigued by these two links, because they involve single-serving desserts that you can freeze.
Pies in jars! Cup pies! (Although it seems like there's a high ratio of crust to filling in this setup, which is probably not ideal...)
Ice cream cupcakes. Genius!
* * * * *
Meme Stuff, as seen in brynnmck's journal:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
Two were taken out of the list because they were repetitive (Hamlet & The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I read the first one and never really caught the bug.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I grew up in the Deep South.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass is sitting in my To Read pile as we speak.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - I tend to favor the more cynical Dickens over the sentimental stuff; see also Bleak House.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read about half, probably.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot - I adore this book. It's probably my favorite Victorian novel. Well, that and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Collins and Eliot both dealt with class and gender in a way that was surprisingly interesting, considering the cultural context, and they certainly both wrote more well-rounded, complicated female characters than Dickens did.
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -- I could never get into this book, though I loved East of Eden. Hm.
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I thought Anna was kind of silly. Does that make me a bad person?
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen - I just finished The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, and that book drew my attention to the fact that I've never read Emma. I plan to fix that soon.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Blech.
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - also sitting in the To Read pile.
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - we had to read this in high school, and my teacher gave quizzes on whaling trivia to make sure we were reading. I actually was reading, but I didn't pass the quizzes, because I apparently have no memory for whaling trivia. Yeah, I'm still bitter about that.
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce - also in the To Read pile; in fact, I think it's one of that pile's oldest current inhabitants.
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - I love me some 19th century British snark.
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I started it a couple of times but got bored quickly.
* * * * *
Random stuff:
Has anyone heard anything about the Stargate audiobooks with actors doing the voices? I ran across the link to this somewhere, and I'm curious about the quality. Because on the one hand, I would pay good money to listen to Claudia Black read the phone book, but on the other hand I have discovered that I would not pay good money to listen to Claudia Black read a Moonlight script. It's a dilemma.
At least the bad air might have saved me from a run-in with a coyote. Because there are COYOTES ROAMING MY NEIGHBORHOOD. (Which, I must mention, is smack in the middle of San Francisco.) I'm not particularly alarmed, but I am surprised. Apparently they are migrating south, across the Golden Gate, stopping in a wide string of parks on their way down the peninsula. The signs that someone has put up ("COYOTE ALERT!") amuse me, partly because, like most such signs, the instructions amount to "don't be an idiot," but mostly because the last item on the list of things to do when you see a coyote is something like, "You are allowed to throw one small rock toward, but not at, the coyote." I suspect there are some protected species laws behind that odd wording, but still, it's so specific! One rock.
* * * * *
TV Stuff:
I saw these episodes a couple of weeks ago, so they're not as fresh in my memory as I'd like, but I figured I should post on them before I see the next ones.
Babylon 5 2.10 - "GROPOS"
Steven is the teflon character. The writers throw everything at him! Helping the underground psychic railroad, a questionable romance with a patient, and now, an estranged father, a career military family, and Steven's ambiguous feelings about his own military service. You'd think that would make Steven interesting. But somehow, none of it sticks.
The most annoying thing about the Steven Problem, in this episode, is that his family history and his personal history are both great ways of illustrating Earth's relationships with other planets leading up to and through the Minbari war: the previous clashes with alien civilizations, the arming of Babylon 5 now, the role of the military in ordinary life for Earth citizens, and the way the Clark administration seems to be preparing for coming trouble, taking sides with the stronger factions in smaller conflicts, making the kind of realpolitik decisions that cause a lot of destruction in a lot of far-off places.
Babylon 5 straddles the worlds in this episode: it's a diplomatic station, but it's run by the Earth government, it accepts Earth armaments, it houses Earth troops, and it's getting drawn into the mess just like everything and everyone around it. The costs of those choices are clear: we met the ground pounders just in this episode, so it was obvious that they were doomed, but I like that the show made a deliberate choice to illustrate the carnage of just one military operation by killing off people instead of numbers. They weren't all saints, either; a couple of them were even assholes. And Dodger was fun: unapologetically interested in sex, realistic about what she wants, zeroing in on Garibaldi, understandably annoyed by his scruples. (Oh, Garibaldi. I know now that you're a closet romantic, but would it have killed you to have a fling? No, no it would not have.)
Two final points about this episode. I really, really did not like Delenn's helpless need to be rescued when she started getting menaced, and I also didn't understand it; this is a very self-possessed woman, someone who is sure of herself and knows how to school others. And, hi Keffer! Since you're in the credits, it's nice to see you get some lines.
Babylon 5 2.11 - "All Alone in the Night"
First of all, how awesome is Lennier? Pretty awesome.
I was initially a little confused by some of the developments here because I had mistaken General Hague for Sheridan's friend the rogue captain, and spent some time wondering when he got so serious and well-connected. Oops. But it was interesting to learn that Santiago maneuvered for Sheridan to be appointed as Sinclair's replacement, because his record was deceptively hard line and would appeal to Clark. Sheridan's entire adventure aboard the Streib ship reinforces Santiago's judgment: Sheridan approaches problems tactically, like a military man, but his instincts are for cooperation and collective problem-solving. (As an aside, I much prefer the Stargate explanation for the little gray men.) And now there's something else to connect Sheridan and Sinclair: a capture, lost time, mysterious experimentation.
Something I noticed and appreciated about this show right away, and am really coming to actively adore now, is that while the writers give the audience information, they're also giving the characters information--and the characters think about that information, and wonder, and eventually put the pieces together. Santiago's death was too convenient. Sheridan and Garibaldi and Ivanova know about the amazing disappearing evidence, but it now becomes clear that people on Earth have also suspected a plot, and the machinations of the Psi Corps haven't gone unremarked. When Sheridan and Ivanova and Garibaldi (and Steven! The Lurker's Guide reminds me that he was there too) come together at the end and agree to basically break all of their military oaths and training and take a huge risk on a dangerous conspiracy, it's a moment that's been earned, an agreement among people who have seen too much evidence of bad things happening on Earth that they can't ignore, people who have seen enough of one another to be able to trust the others in that group.
I have no idea what it means that Sheridan is the hand, or how Kosh is involved, but as far as cringey dream sequences go (I am sorry, but that is not one of this show's strengths), this was much better than Ivanova's dream about her mother.
I wasn't that surprised by Delenn's removal from the Gray Council; I sensed the last time she met with them that things were headed that way. Still, Mira Furlan really sold her disappointment and fear. Delenn took a terrible leap of faith, undergoing that transformation; to lose her position on the Gray Council was one thing, and a risk she seemed willing to take, but to lose her position on Babylon 5 would have meant that she had nothing to show for it, including a relationship with her own people. She's made herself different, set herself apart, in the most fundamentally physical way. It's a great symbol, and an indelible mark that alters her interactions with everybody. As much as I hated her shrinking violet routine with the menacing GROPOS, it proved the point that she's neither fish nor fowl now. (At some point, I will try to put into coherent form some of my thoughts about the prevalence of hybrids on science fiction shows, and the symbolism of melding peoples together; BSG and Farscape both use this idea very heavily too.)
It strikes me that we are seeing, one by one, government by government, the tipping over of all of the major participants in the Babylon 5 Council toward militarism. Santiago's assassination; Londo's use of the shadows' attacks on the Narn to manipulate the ascension of a military faction to power on Centauri Prime; now, the vote among the remaining Gray Council members to replace Delenn with a member of the warrior caste, tipping the balance (and indicating, by the division of votes, that someone who is not a member of the warrior caste wanted this). As big as the forces operating in this universe are, they're all the outcomes of choices like this, taken one at a time for various selfish reasons, and that's something that rings very true to life.
* * * * *
Food Stuff:
I live alone, so I don't do a lot of baking, although I enjoy it. So I'm intrigued by these two links, because they involve single-serving desserts that you can freeze.
Pies in jars! Cup pies! (Although it seems like there's a high ratio of crust to filling in this setup, which is probably not ideal...)
Ice cream cupcakes. Genius!
* * * * *
Meme Stuff, as seen in brynnmck's journal:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
Two were taken out of the list because they were repetitive (Hamlet & The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I read the first one and never really caught the bug.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I grew up in the Deep South.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass is sitting in my To Read pile as we speak.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - I tend to favor the more cynical Dickens over the sentimental stuff; see also Bleak House.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read about half, probably.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot - I adore this book. It's probably my favorite Victorian novel. Well, that and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Collins and Eliot both dealt with class and gender in a way that was surprisingly interesting, considering the cultural context, and they certainly both wrote more well-rounded, complicated female characters than Dickens did.
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -- I could never get into this book, though I loved East of Eden. Hm.
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I thought Anna was kind of silly. Does that make me a bad person?
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen - I just finished The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, and that book drew my attention to the fact that I've never read Emma. I plan to fix that soon.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Blech.
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - also sitting in the To Read pile.
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - we had to read this in high school, and my teacher gave quizzes on whaling trivia to make sure we were reading. I actually was reading, but I didn't pass the quizzes, because I apparently have no memory for whaling trivia. Yeah, I'm still bitter about that.
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce - also in the To Read pile; in fact, I think it's one of that pile's oldest current inhabitants.
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - I love me some 19th century British snark.
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I started it a couple of times but got bored quickly.
* * * * *
Random stuff:
Has anyone heard anything about the Stargate audiobooks with actors doing the voices? I ran across the link to this somewhere, and I'm curious about the quality. Because on the one hand, I would pay good money to listen to Claudia Black read the phone book, but on the other hand I have discovered that I would not pay good money to listen to Claudia Black read a Moonlight script. It's a dilemma.