In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 2/52

I've been reading bits of lots of books, so I haven't finished many recently.

Throne of Glass has been sitting in my unread pile for a while (which is now down to 126 - I need to get a move on to get it below 100 before the end of the year!).  It was okay; a fantasy story about assassins competing to be the top assassin, and ancient magic and a love triangle and whatnot.  It's part of a trilogy, but I don't feel particularly inclined to read the other parts.  Think I gave it a two or three out of five.

Disney Hits is sheet music for Disney songs.  It's a good book for beginners; it includes the vocal line and some basic chords - in essence, the melody someone would normally sing and a bit underneath it to give it depth.  It's not what you'd play if you wanted to sing it, but it's simple and recognisable.  Easy to Play the Nineties is another book of sheet music, which includes things like Always, Words and Un-Break my Heart.  Again, vocal lines and chords.

Roadwork I read as part of my challenge to read Stephen King's novels in order.  I wrote a slightly longer post about it here.

Finally, Use Your Loaf is a book on bread-making.  It's very in depth, explaining things like how yeast works, proper kneading technique, etc etc.  The first half or so is all about technique, and there's a couple of recipes at the end.  I've made some bread rolls from it already, which were delicious.  I might have a go at the actual recipes, but it's more fun to work with the formula and techniques given and try to perfect those than to use it as a recipe book.  I had a lot of fun with it - it's one of my favourite food books now!

In Which We Discuss Tattoos

I have two tattoos so far; a red butterfly on my ribcage, and ivy on my inner thigh.  I got them both done at the same time, a few years ago, and I adore them.  I'm planning to get another soon.

My red butterfly - nicknamed Patrick - was inspired by the Project Zero/Fatal Frame games, particularly the second one, Crimson Butterfly.  It was really anything to do with the game itself - it was the end song, Chou or Butterfly.  There's a line in which I first saw translated as "See, I can flutter better than you thought".  I liked the song, and I liked that sentiment.  Other parts of the song - particularly the start of the chorus which loosely translates to "burned down/burn on" also appealed to me.  I've struggled with depression since my early teens, so this idea of burning, destruction, etc, followed immediately by the idea of "see, I can flutter better than you thought" spoke to me.  It spoke of recovery and hope.

I started using the red butterfly as a custom smilie to sign off forum posts.  I was about seventeen then.  When I was twenty-one or twenty-two and getting my ivy tattoo, I asked them to take five minutes to put my butterfly on me. It was a spur of the moment decision which was exactly right.

My ivy was a little less straightforward.  I started planning that tattoo out in early 2007 when I was eighteen.  I knew I wanted it to be a twining ivy design on my left inner thigh.  I liked the idea of it being slightly seductive; you'd see the edge of it below a miniskirt and wonder how high it went.  I also wanted my tattoos to be somewhere I could see them, and I preferred them to be somewhere that was hidden by default.  Not because I'm ashamed of them; because I like to customise my look with wigs and different outfits and make-up, so I didn't want anything permanent on display.

Ivy as a symbol had been in my head for a while.  I associate it with my maternal line; my great-grandmother's cottage was covered in it, and there are paintings of ivy in my grandmother's current home.  It was always around when I was a child.  I also like that it's tenacious and stubborn.  That appealed to me too.

I decided to have my tattoos done after I was raped for the second time.  It was part of recovering; I wanted to reclaim my body as mine and I wanted it to hurt so the knowledge really burnt into me.  The tattoos I'd been planning for years seemed the best way to do that.  I'm glad I didn't try to be too 'deep' or referential with them; I could so easily have gone for a relevant quote or something more objectively symbolic which was easier to explain, but also less personal.  That wouldn't have been right for me.

I've often thought that the way I feel about my tattoos is the way I'd like to feel about anyone I marry.  The voice in your head should say "YES THAT ONE" as loudly as possible.  When they ask "I do", the response should be "You're damn right I do".

Since I've been struggling with another bout of depression recently, I've been thinking of getting another tattoo if I reach a certain date.  I'm thinking November.

I want a castle on a hillside.  The hillside will be my right hip, and will follow the curves of my body.  The castle will be a rook, ie, the chess piece.  It's a castle imitation.

The main idea comes from the song Castle Imitation, which appears at the end of the game Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter.  You see, in that game, there's a bonus dungeon.  Fifty floors of battles, no saving, limited inventory, starting with a level 1 party.  Takes about eight hours.  I completed it over a weekend; the first time, I died on the fiftieth floor, so I tried again the next day and finally made it through.  Then I defeated the final boss - which was MUCH easier - and finished the entire game.

The basic premise of Dragon Quarter is that the entire society lives underground.  Your party are trying to reach the surface and the mythical 'sky'.  You start 1000 metres below ground and work your way up. 

So, the end of the game; the combination of my having spent sixteen hours over two days finishing that damn dungeon and the fact that my characters finally got out of the darkness and felt the sunlight for the first time in their lives...it was a good moment.  I had a sense of complete and utter relief when I heard that ending song, Castle Imitation.   I still feel that when I hear the song now.  Just a sense of...it's over, it's done, you did it, you can rest now.  I've felt relief on other occasions, of course, but this was the most distilled version.  Every other time, it was tempered with something else, and it was more complicated, and it wasn't really over.  This was a game; it was a discrete experience that wasn't connected to anything but itself.  That's why that feeling wasn't diluted, and that's why that's the memory I want to commemorate.

It reminds me of my favourite line from A Streetcar named Desire; "Sometimes, there's God, so quickly". I've used that on occasions when I've felt that feeling of relief; on suddenly having a job offer, or receiving money when you didn't know how you were going to pay all the bills that month.  I'm an atheist and I'm not a huge fan of the play otherwise, so I don't want to ink anything more strongly connected onto me.  It's just a nice little bonus in this case.

The song has a line in it; "Ikite, ikite, ikite, ikite, ikite...".  It translate to "I live, live, live, live live...".  I like that.  It reminds me of other things, most notably my favourite line in my favourite novel, Jinian Footseer.  Jinian is depressed, and is suffering from total emotional numbness.  Bartelmy shocks her back into feeling, and asks if she would rather be alive than dead, even if it hurts.  Jinian replies;  "I would rather be alive.  Even if it hurts".

I would rather be alive.  Even if it hurts.  That's the other thing I want my tattoo to say.  I'm alive, and I'm okay, and I got through it, and when bad things happen sometimes there will be god so quickly, and I would rather be alive even if it hurts.

In Which We Discuss Roadwork

See, I said I'd get through them a bit faster.

Roadwork was Stephen King's 10th published novel, in 1981.  It covers a man slowly backing himself into a corner while trying not to think about what he's doing.

I think I must have read this before, since I'm sure I read the entire volume of Bachman Books when I first got it.  And certain parts of it - Olivia mostly - rang a bell.  Other than that, it didn't particularly stand out to me.  It's short, I'll give it that - around 320 pages.  The last hundred went fastest.

Again, James Smythe offers far more insight than I can.  Apparently, the novel was King's response to watching his mother die of cancer.  He hated it at first, but has since come to consider it one of his favourite early novels.

There are also links to other novels; the Blue Ribbon Laundry, which Barton runs, shares a name with the one Carrie's mother works in, as well as the one where the Mangler came to life in Night Shift.

Next up is Cujo, the novel King doesn't remember writing because he drank his way through it.  King was drinking and doing drugs heavily in this period of his life, and an intervention was staged after the publication of Cujo.  King didn't become fully sober and straight until the late 1980s, before writing Needful Things.  We should bear this in mind through the next few novels.

While researching that, I learned that King's daughter, Naomi, is living with her same-sex partner.  Good for her!

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 1/52

These are the four books I finished in the week since turning 26, on the 12th of August.

The Myth of the Money Tree is a book I've read before.  I actually reread for my feminist bookclub - it was my suggestion.  Unfortunately, I was the only one who was able to make it that weekend, so it didn't happen.  Shame; it's quite an interesting book, about some of the issues women typically have with handling money due to social attitudes.  It was originally published in 1998, so not as relevant today as it used to be, but it still spoke to me.  Interestingly, new copies are going for almost £2500 right now while second hand copies are a penny.

I picked up the book on keyboards because I got myself a keyboard for my birthday.  I've found it the best way to distract myself from being depressed.  Last time it got this bad, learning to play the guitar worked pretty well so I guess I'm trying to repeat the trick.   This was a decent guide for total beginners, and a good refresher for people as rusty as me.  It talked through the basics of music theory and playing the keyboard, and it has some easy sheet music at the back to practice on.  I borrowed it from the library, which is probably best as it's about sixty pages long and shouldn't take more than a few hours to work through.

Ancillary Justice, I read for a bookclub, which I wasn't well enough to attend in the end.  It was okay; I couldn't really pay attention to it at the beginning, which made it a bit trickier to follow later on.  I wrote a fuller review here.

I finally finished Firestarter.  I've read it before, but this time I listened to the audiobook, which was nearly fifteen hours long.  I guess I just got really into listening to music for a month - I started this on the 4th of June and didn't finish it until the 17th of August.  I listened to about eight hours of it last week, most of it on 1.5 or double speed, which I hadn't done before.  Turns out, it's actually easier to focus at that speed.  How strange.

Firestarter was never one of my favourite King novels, although I've now read it three or four times, which puts it ahead of most of the others.

At the moment, I'm reading quite a lot of books at once.  Mostly non-fiction, because that doesn't make me feel stuff.  I should be able to mark a few of them as finished soon.

In Which We Discuss Books I've Read Recently

I kind of lost track of noting down the books I'd read each week.  I'm tempted to begin again; I recently turned 26, right between Into the Fourth at Trebizon and The Myth of the Money Tree, so it wouldn't be too difficult to do posts on the books I read every week aged 26.  I'll think about it; I'm already one and a half behind for that.

You can see I've been rereading the Trebizon series.  I read a couple of them as a child, though I never had the entire set.  They're £2.99 each on Kindle, and they take about half an hour each.  They're set in a boarding school in Cornwall, and were originally published in the late eighties and early nineties.  Very simple, but sweet.  They're quite comforting.

I'd been meaning to get ahold of a copy of Alison Bechdel's Funhouse for ages.  I bought it from Foyles in London.  I've been stressed and depressed recently, so a friend took me down there first class, installed me a Canary Wharf apartment, gave me £200 and a pre-loaded Oyster Card and told me to have fun.  It was fun, until I realised that I was actually still pretty depressed and got taken to hospital.  Funhouse probably seems an odd choice in those circumstances; it's autobiographical, about Bechdel dealing with her own sexuality, and her father's sexuality and suicide.  It didn't bother me, mostly because I didn't personally relate to the issues of Bechdel's father.  I've never struggled with repressing aspects of my personality - my issues are more to do with my impulsiveness.

The scooter book I read because I took my CBT at the end of July.  Didn't pass - couldn't get the hang of the throttle in the short time we were allowed.  Authority and Looking for Alaska I read for bookclubs.

Mounted by the Minotaur  I read purely out of curiosity.  Someone at one of the aforementioned bookclubs had pointed out the existence of dinosaur and mythological erotica on amazon, and I couldn't help but read some of it.  It was free!

Plague of Angels, Last Girlfriend on Earth, Amanda's Wedding and Jemima J were all books I love, and I found it comforting to reread them recently.  I woke up early, the first night I spent with a man I really - loved?  Wanted? - and read a hundred pages of Amanda's Wedding lying next to him.  That's over now.  Plague of Angels was also for a bookclub, this Sunday.

On Gold Mountain by Lisa See was quite interesting.  I've read and loved a few of her books before, and I didn't realise she was mixed.  It was quite interesting reading about the history of a Chinese family in America.  I'm mixed Indian/British, so my family history isn't the same, but there are parallels with other mixed people.

Sharp Objects and The House We Grew Up In are both by authors I've liked in the past, so I thought I'd give these new novels a go.  I didn't like Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects as much as Gone Girl but it was pretty good.  The House We Grew Up In was pretty good too, but not as good as my favourite Lisa Jewell novels - One Hit Wonder, or A Friend of the Family or The Making of Us.

Soul Identity  had an interesting premise; it's about a world in which people can track reincarnation by the pattern in your eyes.  There's no way to recover memory or experiences, beyond leaving a diary for your future self, so that form of reincarnation doesn't seem to have any practical value.  If I don't have my body or my memories or my personality, am I still me?  Purely because the pattern in my eyes is the same?  I'm not totally sure I'm on board with this.  I'd rather gain immortality by not-dying, personally.

The two cookbooks I mostly read in order to get them off my unread pile.  Nothing too special in them, although I did finally use my slow cooker for something, which was nice.  Finally, the poetry; I have a collected edition of Sophie Hannah's poems, but they don't include anything from Hotels Like Houses.  Plus, the man I mentioned earlier was talking a lot about joining the 27-club, and I wanted to show him Your Death is Not Allowed.  He turned 28 last Sunday, so at least I don't need to worry about that.

In Which We Discuss Ancillary Justice

Let's go to wikipedia.

Ancillary Justice is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her "Imperial Radch" trilogy of space opera novels. The novel follows Breq — the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery, and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness — as she attempts to revenge herself on the ruler of her civilization.

I read this recently for a book group.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the actual discussion, so I'm going to write a brief review here.

At first, I wasn't that into the book.  I just couldn't pay attention to anything in the first chapter or two, which meant I was hopelessly confused as to what was happening where and when and to whom later on.  Even with that, the novel really picked up and became quite absorbing towards the end.

I did quite like the fact that the Radchai empire didn't differentiate between genders.  Leckie got around this by using all female pronouns.  It was an interesting and slightly disorientating technique; I pictured the majority of characters as presenting as female, even though characters from other societies explicitly read them as male.  I'd have been happier with 've' personally, but it's such an unusual conceit that how it was executed is less important right now than that it was.

What was interesting about that was that it made me constantly misgender characters by picturing them all as female-signalling.  Ve or Ze wouldn't have had that effect; I'd have remained aware that I couldn't picture any gender signals because they weren't apparent/Breq wasn't picking them up.

I enjoyed the general set-up that we could see of the Radchai empire, and I liked the way it was ruled by one person in endlessly cloned bodies.  I'm not totally overwhelmed with interest, so I'm not sure yet whether I'd read the other books or not.  Glad to have had the experience though; think I gave it three stars.

In Which We Discuss Male Benefactors

At the latest meeting of my feminist bookgroup - we read A Room of One's Own - I had a realisation.

I've recently been rereading A Little Princess at work, and a comment in A Room of One's Own made me think of it, and of Ballet Shoes.  Both books focus on female characters.  There are only one or two male characters, and in both books, they are the benefactor.  Their disappearance - and the disappearance of the money - is a huge factor in moving the plot along.  The heroine(s) suffer through hard times for a while, struggling along and learning things and then - happily - the benefactor comes back and brings the money with him.  The money is still needed; although the main characters have struggled through adversity and found their own ways in the world, they were still approaching disaster without the money.

This post has been sitting here unfinished for a while, so I'll just leave that thought here for now.

In Which We Discuss Firestarter

I first read Firestarter several years ago, in a collection with Eyes of the Dragon.  I'm not totally sure why they were lumped together especially considering that Firestarter came out in 1980 and Eyes of the Dragon came out in 1987.  They're not similar in theme, either.

Firestarter is about a man who took part in an experiment while in university, along with his future wife.  The drugs they were given gave them psychokinetic powers.  They have a daughter who has stronger powers, specifically, the ability to create fire.  The entire book is basically them running from the US government.  More specifically, they're running from The Shop, which is also the agency who tried to contain Captain Tripps in The Stand.

It isn't one of my favourite King novels.  This time, I listened to it as an audiobook, and it took me more than two months.  I just couldn't get into it.  I love the ending, but the book just doesn't interest me as much as some of his others.  James Smythe explains it all rather better.

At the end of the book, King mentions that both the USA and Russia have spent money in investigating paranormal and psychokinetic abilities, which he seems to find both terrifying and fascinating.

I quite want to read another collection of King's short stories, but it'll be 1985 before I get to one.  Here's the updated list with the dates I finished them this time round.  The ones in red I have read previously, while the ones in blue were new to me.

Carrie - 1974 -  June 15th 2013
'Salem's Lot - 1975 - June 30th 2013
The Shining - 1977 - July 28th 2013
Rage - 1977 - July 31st 2013
Night Shift - 1978 - August 28th 2013
The Stand - 1978 - March 20th 2014
The Long Walk - 1979 - March 23rd 2014
The Dead Zone - 1979 - June 2014
Firestarter - 1980 - August 16th 2014


- Checkpoint -

Roadwork - 1981
Danse Macabre - 1981
Cujo - 1981
The Running Man - 1982
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 1982

Creepshow - 1982
Different Seasons - 1982 
Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983

The Talisman - 1984
Thinner - 1984
Skeleton Crew - 1985
It - 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1987

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - 1987
Misery - 1987
The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky  - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989

Four Past Midnight - 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands - 1991 
Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992

Nightmares & Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996

The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997
Bag of Bones - 1998
Storm of the Century - 1999 

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999
The New Lieutenant's Rap - 1999  
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999
Blood and Smoke - 1999
"Riding the Bullet" - 2000  

On Writing - 2000
Secret Windows - 2000 
The Plant - 2000      
Dreamcatcher - 2001
Black House (with Peter Straub) -2001

Everything's Eventual - 2002
From a Buick 8 - 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - 2003  
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah - 2004
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower - 2004

Faithful - 2004
The Colorado Kid - 2005
Cell - 2006
Lisey's Story - 2006
Blaze - 2007

Duma Key - 2008  
Just After Sunset - 2008 
Stephen King Goes to the Movies - 2009
Ur - 2009     
Under the Dome - 2009

Blockade Billy - 2010
Full Dark, No Stars - 2010
Mile 81 - 2011    
11/22/63 - 2011
American Vampire (with Scott Snyder) - 2011

"Throttle" (with Joe Hill) - 2012
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole - 2012 
A Face in the Crowd (with Stewart O'Nan) - 2012
"In the Tall Grass"  (with Joe Hill) - 2012
"GUNS" - 2013

Ghost Brothers of Darkland County - 2013
Joyland - 2013
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem - 2013
Doctor Sleep - 2013
Mr. Mercedes - 2014      

Revival - November 2014
Finders Keepers - 2015

...that's nine out of eighty-six (!) which puts me 10.47% of the way through.  I divided them into groups of five to make for easier counting.

Putting the dates on makes me wonder what on earth I was doing for the second half of 2013.  I'm going to make an effort to read some of my current King novel every day, just to speed this up a bit.  It's taken me over a year to get 10% of the way through - this needs to go a bit quicker.

In Which We Discuss Reading for Book Clubs

You may recall, I attended a bookclub several years ago.  They were reading Frankenstein, which I'd been meaning to get to for years.  It was an okay evening, but the next few books were things I'd never felt any interest in, so I stopped going.

I've often felt resentful over being forced to read things I'm not interested in.  I think this stems from being forced to read specific books at school.  We'd always read as a group, and it was so slow.  If I'd been allowed to read myself, it would have taken half the time.  But, no, I had to listen to some eejit stammering over words and taking ages to come out with the simplest things.  So frustrating.  So I think I probably had a similar issue with bookclubs suggesting I read things I didn't want to.

My feminist group started a bookclub about a year ago.  At first, my attendance was patchy - couldn't always afford the book, couldn't always get time off to go, sometimes just completely forgot.  Now I'm working the first problem's solved, and I've booked those days off as holiday for the rest of the year.  I get most of then back as my natural rest days anyway.

It helps that it's a small group, and it's amongst people I know and it also helps that it covers a topic I like, so I find reading the books quite interesting and rewarding.

I've started going to another bookclub since then.  A coworker recommended John Scalzi's Red Shirts to me, and when looking at MeetUp a little while later, I noticed a local group was planning to read it.  I enjoyed that meeting, and went to the next one, since it was sci-fi themed and I was free.  Also, because the book had happened to be sitting on my unread shelf for a few years.  Again, it's a small group of people that I like, and the books are things that I'm interested in.  Since we're all fairly fast readers, they've started a midweek book group, as well as the general one, which I've also been going to.  So that's three!

This month, I've actually chosen two of the books.  Sheri Tepper's Plague of Angels, and Colette Dowling's Myth of the Money Tree, both books I've read and enjoyed previously.  I'm quite looking forward to discussing both of them!

I've also been rereading The Dice Man, which I haven't read in a good five years.  I'm still listening to Firestarter on audiobook, though I stopped for a bit.  Making it a daily habit on HabitRPG has really helped me get back into it.  I'm also listening to The High Lord intermittently.