19 July 05
Hurrying Through Harry
Not long after Pica finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday did I take it up, and finished it myself around 9 PM this evening. It’s a far better read than its predecessor, which was in need of about 200 pages worth of excisions. And lines are already forming, or at least should be, for the release of the seventh book. There are, as they say, major plot developments in need of resolution.
I also found today that Wikipedia has a great set of articles discussing the Harry Potter series. And yes, they’ve been updated in the past couple of days!
17 July 05
Tour de France or Harry Potter?
In July, my mornings tend to go like this: I get up, get the tea on, get online to check on the Tour de France website to see what’s going on. The time lag between California and Europe means that normally I can catch the last hour or so; there are newsflashes every few minutes.
A friend brought over my copy of the Half-Blood Prince last night. She stayed to have a bowl of gazpacho with us. I stopped reading around eleven; got up around 7, intending to intersperse my TdF newsflashes with Harry.
It was not to be; the intense heat has driven a lot of ants indoors. They were swarming over one of the catbowls. This is the hardest day of the Tour, with six brutal Pyrrenean climbs. I caught the end and George Hincapie’s stage win.
I finally finished the book at 2:30 this afternoon. Several readers of Feathers of Hope are reading it too, so I will say nothing except hurry up so we can talk about it…
15 July 05
Hot 'n' Harry
It’s hot, the kind of heat that if you go jogging in at six pm you’re risking your life. We are getting the Delta breeze at the moment but it’s still really hot.
But it’s a dry heat.
Barring Alaska, Hawaii, and a few other Pacific islands, the west coast is the last place on the planet to get hold of a copy of Harry Potter legitimately today. There is a free showing of the third film at the Avid Reader which started about 45 minutes ago, and which will end pretty much at midnight in time for readers, young and not so young, to be able to pick up their copies and lug them all over Davis with them all weekend.
We’re off on a drawing class tomorrow at the Sacramento Zoo, and I can’t stay up till midnight tonight. So the earliest I can get my copy is around five tomorrow afternoon.
See you at the other side of this.
13 July 05
Resh
Yesterday afternoon a friend happened to mention she was starting Advanced Beginners Hebrew that night. (Davis is a great place for contradictions in terms.) I decided to join her. No long, thought-out language learning strategy, here. I seem to remember I started classical Greek in much the same impetuous way.
This class is only an hour long, once a week. This means there is lots of work outside, but 8-9 on a Tuesday I can handle.
Aleph. Bet. Gimmel… Mem sofit.
9 July 05
Fetishizing Reading
I’ve never been a big fan of the Levenger catalog. I know many people who read a great deal who are: they get it regularly, look through it (every single page) each time it comes, even though as far as I can tell it doesn’t change a lot from one to the next. Lots of nicely finished cherry book stands, lots of highly laquered fountain pens, lots of lamps you can’t possibly read a book without. It seems to sigh “I’m upper middle class but intellectual too, you wouldn’t catch me hanging around with those C-grade Yalie louts.” Though I fetishize pens myself, I write with them. The better they write, the better the pen. Not the most laquer or gold.
These friends who read a lot rarely buy anything from this catalog: nothing in there turns out to be indispensable to reading. I think it’s a pleasure, a secret pleasure, in its own right, a bit like the late J. Peterman catalog, which was ludicrously over the top but well written and somehow able to convince readers they really were world travellers from the 1930s without the inconvenience of world wars or non-existent air conditioning.
One of these well-read-Levenger-catalog-reading friends sent me a link to a New York Times piece on the Levenger catalog. I think I get it now. This is to books and letters what Martha Stewart Living is to tablecloths and housedecorating.
It’s a good thing, people.
23 June 05
Arguing About Dashes
I’m working on the biggest publication project I’ve ever tackled. I’m doing the design, layout, and production editing for the California Wildlife Diversity report to Congress. This is hitting my desk a chapter at a time, and my job is to turn it into something that looks good, incorporating about 50 maps. The report will then become a book, about 300 pages, and the book will include 4-color photos.
The editor, a good friend of mine, is excellent. We see eye to eye on most details, I catch a lot of things she misses and vice-versa, and it’s a pleasure to work on this because it’s a project that’s being well managed. (My next two weekends will probably involve a lot of office time, but I had planned on my entire June being a nightmare, which it absolutely isn’t.)
Barbara and I cycled back from a friend’s house tonight arguing about how you punctuate the following four words, used to describe one of the bioregions in the report: Central Valley Bay Delta. Central Valley is one entity; Bay is a second; Delta is a third.
Barbara thinks it should be Central Valley—emdash—Bay—endash—Delta. I think the endash should be a slash, though I dislike them (they’re untidy and ugly, a bad combo). We discussed this heatedly for about a mile and a half, as the California fuchsia by the side of the road starts to come into bloom and the sun already sets a few minutes earlier than it did just two days ago…
2 May 05
Countermeme
Only because my blogson says (in an attempt to dismantle the internet):
“Which book, out of the millions ever published, do you most wish never to read again?”
Lots sifted through my mind this afternoon, mostly books that have a cop-out last line, but a whole BOOK of cop-out rose out of the Aegean Sea: John Fowles’ The Magus.
It’s just a nasty novel.
On to you, Maria. Sorry. You sent me the Fahrenheit 451 meme…
17 April 05
Imaging A Treasure Trove
Classicists are rejoicing now because a new infrared imaging technique is enabling scholars to decipher a massive and previously illegible collection of papyri of Greek and Roman texts. This collection of 400,000 fragments was found at the end of the 19th century in an ancient rubbish site in a town in central Egypt. It is possible that deciphering these texts will lead to a 20 percent increase in the number of classical works in existence.
31 March 05
Passing the Book Torch
Maria of Alembic has passed the stick along to me for this book meme.
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Since this involves memorizing an entire book and I’d have no hope ever of doing that for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus which would be my first choice, I’ll take Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, lots. Sargeant Angua, the female werewolf on the Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, and Stephen Maturin of the O’Brian series come to mind as the most recent.
The last book you bought is?
The Zen of CSS Design and CSS Cookbook
What are you currently reading?
Faithful, an account by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan of the 2004 Boston Red Sox which I need to finish by Opening Day (Sunday); Enemies of Promise by Lindsay Waters; Behind the Curve, a sailing whodunit by Steven Chance, to whom I’m related and would otherwise not be reading it at all; The Zen of CSS Design; Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer which I started at DocRoc’s and which is an astonishingly gripping account of the fall of an empire; Jingo by Terry Pratchett; and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I may give up on the Chance pretty soon, though I’m told it contains a reference to my grandparents in a slightly salacious way. I just can’t plod my way through till I get there. Oh, there’s another one, it was at the bottom of the pile and never quite got finished: Starhawk’s Earth Path.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Since we’re all going to be on the desert island and everyone else already has the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the collected Shakespeare, I’ll bring a natural history of greater Oceania or whereever the island is, complete works of Chaucer, the Divine Comedy, Proust, and Cervantes.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
DocRoc, because she reads widely and well; Chris R., because she does too; and Chris Clarke, because I know the answers are going to be so unlike mine and will, I hope, include paleontology and things. He seems awfully busy these days, though, exposing the tears in our civic fabric.
12 March 05
Bookstore Luck
Returning from a trip into town on this glorious spring day, we stopped by the used bookstore near the food co-op. And we found three Terry Pratchetts we’ve not read yet — Lords and Ladies, Small Gods, and Jingo. She never gets them in at the bookstore, she told us, and she didn’t really expect them to last the four days on the shelf that they did. We’ve pretty much exhausted the library’s collection, so there we go.