Partly horticultural
October returns for a day or two, and like Pratchett's trolls I can think again. Still have little memory of the past two days because the cool was muggy as well, and I came in from a mild bout of hedge-clipping this evening soaked to the skin. Actually I was mostly pulling ground ivy, or whatever the creeping plant is that covers my front yard, off the two trees where it's climbed above my head level. This apparently is a good way to kill a tree, and since I'd be just as happy if the linden died, I hadn't bothered to remove it last year. But I contemplate having the arborists in to at least cut back the ironwood's lower branches, and for very shame must do some tree-keeping.
There's a house down Shaw that has a stand of bamboo in its front yard. This climate doesn't really support bamboo, and the plant itself I am told is the Genghis Khan of invasives, so I wonder at the (homesick, maybe?) people who planted it.
Last finished?
Brust and Bull, Freedom and Necessity
-- picked up somewhere as an 'I suppose I should read this sometime' book, begun in a mood of 'get it off the shelf' with expectations of politics, Charterism, and boredom, amazed to find it compulsively readable. Any time politics and Charterism threatened to raise their heads (Prussian gold, agents provocateurs) along would come a secret society and various murders and possible magic. I can live with that- as well as with a heroine called Susan, of whom as Pratchett observed, there are very few. The philosophy went right over my head, and is welcome to stay there.
There were a few Chekov's guns that didn't go off. How come Richard's mother knew so much about the reverend David's affairs (quite literally)? And if X killed baby Y, why did he do it, and why didn't baby Y's father stop it, cause, like, there goes your son and heir, guy, after you've already lost another. And what happened to Kitty's mother? And so on. But otherwise very entertaining, and light enough to fit in a backpack.
Reading now?
Am at a loss. For the time being am carrying Hamabe no Kafuka around, and may even go on reading it.
Next?
Eco, Baudolino, unless something else shows up. But it's a weighty hardcover, so only for house reading.
Abandoned?
Elkin, Flaneuse
-- thought it would be about the joys of walking through cities. Is more about the mixed pleasures of walking through cities while angsting over various boyfriends and trying to write a Ph.d thesis. This is a mindset that is totally foreign to me, possibly because I've never been in a relationship and so have never had that as a major consideration in my life, and certainly because post-grad academia is a hell I've observed from the outside without ever wanting in. And when it's not about her boyfriends and her thesis, it's about revolutionary women like George Sand and *her* relationships, and the class of '68 in Paris. Revolutionaries give me migraines. So, this is very much not my book.
There's a house down Shaw that has a stand of bamboo in its front yard. This climate doesn't really support bamboo, and the plant itself I am told is the Genghis Khan of invasives, so I wonder at the (homesick, maybe?) people who planted it.
Last finished?
Brust and Bull, Freedom and Necessity
-- picked up somewhere as an 'I suppose I should read this sometime' book, begun in a mood of 'get it off the shelf' with expectations of politics, Charterism, and boredom, amazed to find it compulsively readable. Any time politics and Charterism threatened to raise their heads (Prussian gold, agents provocateurs) along would come a secret society and various murders and possible magic. I can live with that- as well as with a heroine called Susan, of whom as Pratchett observed, there are very few. The philosophy went right over my head, and is welcome to stay there.
There were a few Chekov's guns that didn't go off. How come Richard's mother knew so much about the reverend David's affairs (quite literally)? And if X killed baby Y, why did he do it, and why didn't baby Y's father stop it, cause, like, there goes your son and heir, guy, after you've already lost another. And what happened to Kitty's mother? And so on. But otherwise very entertaining, and light enough to fit in a backpack.
Reading now?
Am at a loss. For the time being am carrying Hamabe no Kafuka around, and may even go on reading it.
Next?
Eco, Baudolino, unless something else shows up. But it's a weighty hardcover, so only for house reading.
Abandoned?
Elkin, Flaneuse
-- thought it would be about the joys of walking through cities. Is more about the mixed pleasures of walking through cities while angsting over various boyfriends and trying to write a Ph.d thesis. This is a mindset that is totally foreign to me, possibly because I've never been in a relationship and so have never had that as a major consideration in my life, and certainly because post-grad academia is a hell I've observed from the outside without ever wanting in. And when it's not about her boyfriends and her thesis, it's about revolutionary women like George Sand and *her* relationships, and the class of '68 in Paris. Revolutionaries give me migraines. So, this is very much not my book.