Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Everyone!

Also, Hi! I'm not dead.

Life has been interesting, busy, and largely unrelatable since July. Well, really all of last year. I either had nothing to say, too much to say, or no idea where to start with all the things I should have said. Suffice it to say, I am at a point where I do not know how much of ( Read more... )

Haven't been up to much lately. Little bit of reading, little bit of gaming, nothing worth talking about. Work is fine as well, no issues, and I'm settling in to my new position. Boring stuff.

Been playing around with Pandora, which I hadn't even known existed. I am exceptionally pleased with it's ability to gauge what type of music I am ( Read more... )

It's been almost three months since I last made a Les Mis post. ... That's just sad.

Chp. 4
Not much to say about Chp. 4 except that Fantine sees what she wants to see instead of what's really there. However, I did find this description interesting: "...the setting sun glowed over their joy, and nothing could be as enchanting as this caprice of ( Read more... )

Turned in my last final today, procrastinated, as per usual. Last paper I'll ever have to write (at least, until I go for another degree). This should feel freeing. Instead I just feel...empty.

As much as I hate writing and being told what to read, I love school. I love learning. I love sitting in a room and listening to someone who knows more ( Read more... )

Had an excellent conversation with jackspade64 this afternoon, both about the book and life in general. We covered a lot of ground (les mis, learning types, old posts, female gamers, etc.), some of which will reappear in future posts, but mostly it was just good to converse and share ideas ( Read more... )

Just came back from watching ArgoInteresting movie, definitely worth seeing. And scary as only real life can be. Some of the scenes (the protestors storming the Embassy, people pounding on the van, the confrontation in the bazaar, the psychological games played on the hostages) were particularly poignant and tense. It makes me very glad that I am ( Read more... )

Just watched the 2011 film version of Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus. The movie was remarkably well done. The language is Shakespearean, so you have to be paying attention, but the setting is modern, which makes it easier to follow and really allows the human element of the story to shine. (Also, a little bit a historical knowledge about the ( Read more... )

I have to admit, as much as I love the story of Les Mis, I didn't expect to enjoy the book this much. I expected Hugo to read like Dumas or Verne, wandering certainly, but lacking complex insight, full of... Well, there's a style - a "taste" - unique to that period which can make the story slow, difficult to digest, and shallow. It has been a ( Read more... )

As mentioned previously, I'm reading Les Miserables with jackspade64 (Modern Library Classics edition with translation by Julie Rose). The current plan is to read one chapter a week and then discuss over Skype. In that regards, some things from Gopnik's introduction that I found interesting:

"[Hugo] believes in individual acts, even heroic individual acts, ( Read more... )

“We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in modern fiction, and it is always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and meant to be an end in itself. With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are ( Read more... )