Nico's Journal

Since someone has this book on their reading list, I thought I'd finally get round to expressing my opinion of it before I take it to the SPCA charity shop.

I've enjoyed a lot of Robert Sheckley's classic work so when I saw this Star Trek novel, I grabbed it. However either the guy can't write any more or he's hired a very, very bad ghost writer, pretty much what I also suspect of Larry Niven who used to be a favourite.

This is a DS9 story featuring a beautiful alien called Allura. [rolls eyes] ( Read more if you dare. )

From nwhyte via communicator, the 'best' SF and fantasy novels of the 20th and 21st centuries from the Locus poll. Bold means I've read it, italic means I didn't finish it, and struck out means I didn't like it.

( The list )

I wrote pitifully little in 2011 but I read about 80 books. I can only list 69 of them here because almost all came from the library and my on-line reading history isn't complete (for the first time ever): several just say "no information available". I have no idea what's missing. The Patrick O'Brian books I own, the entire collection bought second-hand, and I just inserted those at intervals.

I've bolded the ones I liked best, but really, I enjoyed all of them but one which I stopped reading fairly early on and therefore deleted from the list. I doubt I'll read as many this year I now have a Proper Job, but it's a good trade-off.

Feel free to ask me about any. :-)

( List of books )

For those who wanted to know: this was a great book: a fun, quick read full of fannish geekiness, black humour, lots of Trek, and with a hero called Jim Pike. I've been feeling down this week and it made me laugh a lot. I'd recommend it to anyone (especially Star Trek fans) who doesn't have a deep attachment to Houston. ;-)

These are copied and pasted from my library reading history, and I added a few more books I either bought or borrowed from a friend. There are 76, 10 more than last year, and the usual mix of SF, fantasy, and light detective. Feel free to ask me about any.

[Edit] I bolded the ones I liked best.

( List of books )

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been feeling very down (for the usual reasons: no job, stuck at end of world etc etc) and can't think of much to say. So hey, here are seven American library cats for you, combining two of my favourite things.

Dewey is the most famous. In 1988, after being discovered in a frozen book return bin, Dewey Readmore Books became the official mascot of the Spencer Public Library in Iowa. He attended meetings, greeted patrons, and inspected every delivery until he died in 2006 at the age of 19. People drove hundreds of miles to meet him, and Library director Vicki Myron wrote a best-selling book, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. The first chapter is on the site and I first read it last year and it made me cry then. I did this time too. :-P

Squeakers lived on the campus of Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, for ten years before becoming Willet Memorial Library’s library cat. She was about 23 years old when she died in 2008 which is damn good going. Squeakers spent most of her time in her later years sitting in a comfy chair near the library entrance, so she could see and inspect everyone who came in.

Nyx is amazing because she was born without eyes in 2008 yet gets around as easily as a sighted cat, sitting on the back of chairs, playing with toys, jumping on counters and desks, batting pens and pencils onto the floor, and unwrapping and eating librarian's lunches. Like a bat, she uses echolocation--she makes sounds and calculates how far they travel when they bounce back. She also has a super-loud purr (notice how she knows where the camera is) and is spoiled rotten by the staff and patrons with attention and toys.

Browser has lived at the Pine River Library in Minnesota since 2002. He even moved along with the library to their new building. There are photos of him on Flickr; skip the Halloween stuff and go to pages 5 and onwards.

Max was thought of as the Library Cat at the Hastings Branch Library in Pasadena from the early 80s until 1996, even though he never actually lived there. He lived nearby but visited the library so often the librarians issued him his own library card. Max would go and wait at the library door until someone opened it for him, and once inside, he ruled the roost. One day, Max’s visits stopped. The A concerned library staff investigated, and discovered that his family had moved away, taking Max with them. I hope he found another library.

Addison is the resident cat at the Nash Library at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Their site has moved and I couldn't find anything about him on the new version, but here's a photo of him fund-raising for his favourite charity.

TLC (Top Library Cat) lives at the Broken Bow Public Library in Nebraska where he has a fireplace. And, it seems, his own reading matter and some Lolita sunglasses.

I wasn't going to do this because I just don't have good answers for a lot of the questions. But I decided I do have enough to make it worthwhile.

( 20 questions )

We went to Whitcoulls bookshop last week so that I could spend some vouchers. I rarely buy books unless I know I'll reread them, so I looked at DVDs. There again, unless I want to watch them more than once, I'd rather rent them. I did fancy Doctor Who: War Games, and would have bought it too, but it was twice the price of the other old Who serials there--and two thirds the price of a whole season of new Who. So I wandered around disconsolately, wondering what I could use my vouchers on. I was sniggering at a book of Barack and Michelle Obama paper dolls when I saw it.

The Book Seat.

I've got a lot of use out of it already. It's a great design which holds a book firmly and still lets you turn the page easily, and I use it on the table when eating and on my lap. It stops my hands getting sore when holding up a large book for hours and I can drink tea and read. :-)

( Let Vic show you how it works )

I should talk about the books I've read lately, but I'll just mention the Discworld ones.

Going Postal was great, and against all my expectations, mostly caused by his name, I liked Moist von Lipwig a lot. Yes, he did remind me of a certain thief with his particular brand of ethics and charm. :-)

Thud however I have mixed feelings about. ( Minor spoilers )

I read China Mieville's The Scar a couple of weeks ago, and though I've been able to recognise the mythical origins of several Bas Lag species like the vodyanoi (Russian for watery ones), I thought Mieville's avanc had its own original name.

I'm now reading Silver on the Tree, the last of Susan Cooper's Dark in Rising series, one I never came across as a kid, and whaddaya know, here on page 69, Bran says that "Arthur is supposed to have pulled an afanc, a monster, out of a lake up there," and since F is said as V in Welsh, I recognised it. Cool! I'll have to look up some of the other creatures.

Speaking of F being V, it wasn't till I came back--and it had fallen apart--that I realised that I'd gone all round Wales with my Fila shoulder bag. I might have to find another one so I can be fannish in Welsh. ;-)

I've now had two of the three books on my library waiting list (outstanding is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I'm working my way up that queue).

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer at first made me laugh quite a lot, then made me cry, and it's been a while since a book did that. It's a lot darker than I'd expected in a couple of places (and even darker than the Enemy at the Door series about the Guernsey occupation. I was also amazed that an American author wrote a book so flawlessly English; it's beautifully done, and it's a pity she didn't live to see how popular it is. I do highly rec this one: the characters are vivid, eccentric, and loveable, and all write in different style. It also actually made me want to read some of the authors mentioned.

I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. Flavia de Luce is a fun narrator, but though I can believe she'd have an extensive chemical knowledge given her private lab, her obsession with the subject, and no apparent need to go to school, I can't believe an 11-year-old would have that sort of vocabulary and writing style. Also, unlike Shaffer, Bradley didn't bother to get his text Brit-picked, so he has a lot of North American intrusions into his 50s England, like poison ivy, tobogganing, and pigtails (I'm sure Bradley meant plaits) and several stray gottens. Also, Flavia would not refer to an object as cunning, nor would Dogger, a British ex-soldier, ever use "copacetic", an odd American word I had to look up a few months ago. It's a pity, because those slips threw me out of the narrative--and I'm not even British. Apart from that though, it's a fun story, well told. I decided that Flavia grew up and emigrated to Canada, and wrote using her adult vocabulary. :-P

In other news, since reccer sallymn probably didn't read my last post, I've finally seen an ep of Inspector Montalbano. I like him! I'll have to see if I can buy the season 2 DVDs. I also saw New Tricks. I do love those old guys.

Craving WW2 stuff after finishing Enemy at the Gate and reading Enigma, we've been watching a documentary about Bletchley Park, Station X. It's excellent, and I'm enjoying the interviews with people on both sides. After that, we'll see the Derek Jacobi play about Turing, Breaking the Code.

Last night however, we saw the first part of three of The Making of Blake's 7, the documentary series B7E (I think) stopped them adding to the DVDs as extras. It's amazingly good, made in 1999, I think: very informative, and interviewees include Terry Nation (some of these interviews must have been made a lot earlier), Gareth Thomas, Michael Keating, Jan Chappell, Jacqueline Pearce, Chris Boucher, Vere Lorimer, Matt Irvin, David Maloney, and several others. I don't think it was ever shown because there's a time counter running in the top left corner, but it's properly edited and, unusually, actually kept Greg watching, it's so interesting. It's well worth seeing. This part covered S1, and the next two S2 and S3. They never made one for S4, but that's no great loss. ;-) For those interested, it's on The Box, like the others.

What else? I went out to dinner (delicious Italian) on Saturday night, I've made Greg a very cool late birthday present scarf, and I'm reading Pompeii by Robert Harris, which is as good as I suspected it would be.

I haven't been posting much lately. I haven't even reviewed the last two Pretender eps I watched a while back, which I'll try to get round to today. I've been feeling rather blah, with nothing much interesting to say about my life. I have a few hours of underpaid work a week which is so crap and boring I don't want to talk about it, and this is very discouraging when I once thought I'd never be out of proper work with my degree and other qualifications. :-(

So I've been taking refuge in the world of books, one of the best escapes I know. I've read the first in the Gentleman Bastard series, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch and thoroughly enjoyed it, though it was a little slow to start. Great characters and world building, and Lynch does seasons and months on another planet right.

I've just finished Enigma by Robert Harris, another one I really enjoyed: code breaking and skulduggery at Bletchley Park, a fascinating place I visited in 2004. azdak, Turing was only in the book briefly, at King's College with his teddy bear Porgy, then he was off in the US and only mentioned in passing; he certainly wasn't misrepresented. I can hardly remember the film, but the book is definitely worth reading for the atmosphere and conditions at Bletchley. I've decided I wouldn't have wanted to be there with the sexism that relegated brilliant women to clerks while men got to be cryptanalysts.

I've just started The Truth by Terry Pratchett as I felt like something light. After that, it's back to Robert Harris andPompeii, then his other Roman books eventually.

What else? Oh yes, Jasmin went to the eye specialist yesterday for a final check-up (which is why it rained (it always rains when I go there) and she's healed up amazingly well. She and Ashley are getting quite big,and Ashey's a year old in a couple of weeks. They're both very cute and playful and extra cuddly now the weather's getting cooler. Right now all three girls are curled up in their fleecy snugglers in the TV room, and Vic's upstairs on the spare bed. :-)

I loved his first one, Aberystwyth Mon Amour--so blackly funny, as is the second in the series--but Malcolm Pryce doesn't like cats much, does he? I'm only about 30 pages into Last Tango in Aberystwythand he's already drowned a mother and kittens in a throw-away comment and run over another cat in passing. There isn't even the slightest plot reason for it. If he wants to show what a mean and violent society his AU Wales is, there are ways I'd find less repellent. I mean, it doesn't fit with the eccentric deadpan humour of the rest.

Otherwise: cool series and I love the weird stuff he makes up like gossip contests and toffee apple dens.

I also want to know how to pronounce the name Ionawr? Is it like Iona (eye-owna) or Yona?