Who brought the cat?
I've been reading some mass-market kinda stuff lately, which is weird for me (I mean, I could be rereading Dune for the ninth time! Christ!).
Firstly, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was in a box of free books by the side of the road (I also got a medical dictionary from 1937 and a cheesy pre-The-Onion-books satirical book about Spam). I think I'm glad I read this, but I was also fighting the annoyance to a not-inconsiderable extent. I identify with the difficulty in creating things and behaving unselfconsciously, but good lord, the self-absorption.
Secondly, The Blind Assassin, which I paid fifty cents for at the Salvation Army. (It is obvious that I am not that confident in the goodness of books by people I've never read.) This is turning out to be really interesting. I am not done yet, but I am enjoying it a lot so far. It reminds me a bit of Mr. Velocipede, although she may or may not actually enjoy it herself.
I would also like to note that I've seen the cover for this a fair number of times, and only now have I realized that the girl depicted is not missing her right arm. Somehow I'd always read it as a little scarf hiding a stump, rather than a dress detail. Oh well! (In my defense, the edition I've seen the most of is zoomed in a bit and cuts off her right hand nearly entirely. And her dress is featureless black.)
Oh, and then I guess I also was reading The Flamingo's Smile, which is another book of Stephen Jay Gould's collected essays. Some fun stuff in there, although one of the most fun was the titular one (Flamingos, since they filter feed by dipping their beaks into water upside-down, have morphologically upside-down beak structures. This is neato).
Firstly, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was in a box of free books by the side of the road (I also got a medical dictionary from 1937 and a cheesy pre-The-Onion-books satirical book about Spam). I think I'm glad I read this, but I was also fighting the annoyance to a not-inconsiderable extent. I identify with the difficulty in creating things and behaving unselfconsciously, but good lord, the self-absorption.
Secondly, The Blind Assassin, which I paid fifty cents for at the Salvation Army. (It is obvious that I am not that confident in the goodness of books by people I've never read.) This is turning out to be really interesting. I am not done yet, but I am enjoying it a lot so far. It reminds me a bit of Mr. Velocipede, although she may or may not actually enjoy it herself.
I would also like to note that I've seen the cover for this a fair number of times, and only now have I realized that the girl depicted is not missing her right arm. Somehow I'd always read it as a little scarf hiding a stump, rather than a dress detail. Oh well! (In my defense, the edition I've seen the most of is zoomed in a bit and cuts off her right hand nearly entirely. And her dress is featureless black.)
Oh, and then I guess I also was reading The Flamingo's Smile, which is another book of Stephen Jay Gould's collected essays. Some fun stuff in there, although one of the most fun was the titular one (Flamingos, since they filter feed by dipping their beaks into water upside-down, have morphologically upside-down beak structures. This is neato).