mostly harmless books

Because it has Zelazny in its invitation, I joined HiveMind. A social network for SFF fans. To be honest, I’ll probably forget about it in a short while, since I never got the hang of all this social stuff… but who knows. I already found a fellow Zelazny fans, so it looks promising.

Friend me here! I want to be the most popular girl in class… er, on the internet.

(Yes, yes, books and reviews, I know. But I’ve been away to two festivals the last 2 weekends, and I’ve had to make up for the work I missed, and I have a new baby character in WoW that’s so fun to play and…)

From Larry’s blog. Because I should be working and I don’t feel like it.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own so we can try and track down these people who’ve read six and force books upon them.

Notes: I didn’t LOVE any of the books on the list, so I underlined those I liked. I haven’t read many of the classics and probably never will.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling (nope, haven’t even read the first one.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (more…)

All right, it’s probably only funny to me, but… Another list of “sci-fi books you must read”. 32 this time. Nothing spectacular in the list itself - some I like, some I don’t, many I haven’t read.

But the comments are brilliant. There’s about 2 or 3 who congratulate the author on the list, then another couple dozen to tell him that book X or author Y is the best since sliced bread and it’s a crime not to include it/him. Oh yes. A guy who admits he hasn’t read all the “classics” puts out a list and a bunch of people with nothing better to do try to prove him wrong… Isn’t it obvious that everyone thinks his or her favorite should have been on the list omg you don’t know anything about this genre!

*yawn*

The one thing this list did was remind me of the Einstein Intersection for some reason. It’s not even mentioned there, and I got the book in my head before the one Delany name drop. But I don’t have the original, and given the track record of that particular collection of books I’d rather not re-read the translation, since it probably sucks.

So I am off to bed (fucking 2 AM…) and starting Shadow of the Wind. It’d better be as good as people said…

Backlog: 3 or so books. No time. Not getting much work done either. Too much raiding (but it’s so fun!).

Two tags in a row. That’s a bad sign for a blog… it screams “they don’t have anything to write about!”. But I do. About 4 books. But I also have a lot to write at work, which is keeping me from blogging here.

So this is a tag from Larry again. And it’s that obnoxiuos one that’s been traveling the Romanian blogosphere too (sorry :P). But I felt that my version was a bit twisted so I had to post.

What you get when you tag a foreigner is… you guessed it… foreign books! Even more so since I am at my boyfriend’s place, who has more Romanian than English books (and the English shelf is furthest away from where I am sitting now). So, I am supposed to grab the nearest book and turn to page 123. Write down the fifth sentence, post it, and then tag 5 others to do this.
- Nu-mi mai pot permite sa pierd timpul, a zis, coborand din camioneta.

And now the short lesson in Romanian :P Dialogues always start with a “-”, not inverted commas, and the sentence means “I can’t afford to waste time, she said, getting off the truck.”

It’s from Triceratops Summer by Michael Swanwick, in one of the Year’s Best anthologies by Gardner Dozois. And I’m sorry to say that the book wasn’t near the bed because I was reading it, but because I used it as a laptop stand (it overheats and I have to prop it up in order to properly ventilate).

Since I can’t find the time to write about the 4-5 books I’ve read since the one in the last post, here’s a tag from Larry.

1. What is the name of the book you currently are reading/are contemplating reading?
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Because I saw half the movie and it was great, and then I went to Ukraine. And people keep saying he writes good stuff, so why not? So far, so good.

2. Do you picture Vogons being cat or dog lovers? Why so?
Whichever tastes better.
[Fun tidbit - well, fun for me. There are some mobs in World of Warcraft (in Karahkzan, for those in the know) who have a spell called "Bad Poetry" that puts you to sleep.]

3. Would you read a Klingon version of The Little Prince and/or the Bible? Why or why not?
I don’t see the purpose of making up a language in such detail. So I wouldn’t read anything in Klingon or Quenya or Sindarin or whatever. Really, learn something useful.

4. What foreign language would you like to learn that you don’t already know? And would you speak it to a lover, a religious person, or to a horse?
French (first and foremost, learn how to speak it; then, remember all the grammar and vocabulary I forgot) and German (since I find myself in Vienna quite often, visiting a good friend, and it sucks not being able to understand anything…). I am planning to start classes for one of these in autumn.

I would speak it to whatever natives I can find, if they are nice enough to try to understand my beginner sentences.

5. What author are you thankful is sadly underreviewed on the web today?
Since I don’t like reading reviews… I have no idea.
(I tend to change my opinions if I read other people’s, so I never read reviews before reading a book to avoid getting an impression before hand).