I read:
- The Snow Child: This was a novel that could have been a novella, that maybe could have even been a short story. One of those books with too many words dragging it down. Not that it was bad, just wordy. I could get away with reading maybe three words per paragraph and still know what was going on.
- The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making: I read the first third of this book while on prescription pain medication and it was awesome. The it in the previous sentence is key. It might have just been awesome to be on prescription pain medication since I’m not one hundred percent sure I just didn’t make up what happened in the first one hundred-odd pages. For example: I put a marker in for a page with a wonderful quote, and now have read and re-read that page off medication and cannot find any quote there that really needs marking. And I didn’t enjoy the last two thirds at all. Morale: to enjoy fantasy, I need to get on drugs.
- A Marker to Measure Drift – This is one of those write the books you want to read; this is the book I want to write, the ability to write about monstrous happenings without exploiting or trivializing them and without using horrible events as a shortcut for emotional or character development (see my earlier complaints about Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us).
- Harriet the Spy: Discussed here.
- The Bear: The shtick of the five-year old narrator becomes grating around the fiftieth page. Then I got annoyed. Then I stopped enjoying it.
- Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: This I enjoyed reluctantly since it was obviously google-porn. The google stuff was so aspiring to be Microserfs almost it was funny. Maybe I’ll dig up my copy of Microserfs and read it again. It’s much more interesting to read about a tech company with a critical and satirical eye rather than a fawning one (Seriously, does the the author of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore work at google? Did they pay him or something?)
Now spoilers (highlight to read):
I’m not sold on the code being anything more than a simple substitution cipher, even if they try to present it as notches on the letters rather than the letters themselves. For instance, the example they give is that lower case X has four notches and four notches corresponds to something (say T). But then, if all lower case X’s have four notches, than that’s just the same as lower case X corresponding to T. They’ve just run it through an isomorphism. Even if, as they say there are some more complications, like certain double letters (example in book is ff) having notches corresponding to other letters, there are some really complicated code breaking techniques that can still account for things like that, even some not so complicated ones, like frequency analysis and doing it over things like single letters, pairs, triples, etc., that might catch things like that.Unless every single letter in the typeset was different each time, I don’t see how this isn’t anything other than a substitution cipher.
And that’s all my cryptanalytic complaints laid out in full.
- Tiger, Tiger: I continue to read more about pedophiles, this one a memoir.
- Plain Jane: Talked about here
- Hollow City: Another book, like The Bear, that had a shtick, but while the photos were sort of novelty in the prequel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, they seem forced here and overdone.
Best book:
I still love this book as much as when I was a kid. I read it to Tesfa. She thought it was all right.
Most promising book put on my wishlist:
And since I won a copy from goodreads, I’ll actually for once read my most promising book put on my wishlist promptly.
I watched:
- 30 Rock: I got to the end. It took me a week to get through the finale, which was the only reason I started watching the show because of a clip from the finale (Thank you, America, that’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, ’cause we got paid anyway, which I thought was kind of cheeky and piqued my interest). Even after all of the episodes, I feel nothing. I cried in the finale of The Office and I cried when Ben and Leslie kissed in the smallest park in Pawnee and I even felt a little bad when Ted got left at the altar, but 30 Rock made me feel no feelings at all.
- Parks and Recreation: I don’t know how they’re going to come back from the season finale. It seems so perfect for an ending. Maybe I’ll just end up hating the final season.
- Silicon Valley: Discussed here.
- Mad Men: Mad Men is like comfortable slippers that remind me of last year when Tesfa was still in Montessori and I was still a bit more hopeful than I am now.
I wrote: I worked on my post-modern story about a fan and some faerie work. Zero publishing news, unless rejections count.