I read:
Thoughts:
- Suee and the Shadow Volumes 1 and 2 by Ginger Ly: Reviewed earlier this month.
- Queen Sugar by Natalie Bazilie: Reviewed earlier this month.
- Count on Yourself by Alison Griffiths: I never thought I’d invest my own money. Then I read this book. I now invest my own money and am moving over my mutual-fund RRSPs to manage them myself as well. Now, if I only had some more money (come on book advance for any of my half-formed books).
- McSweeney’s Thirty-Two edited by Dave Eggers: Read for my short-story-a-day-in-February. I continue to dislike compilations with multiple authors.
- Logic Lotty: The Fortune Teller’s Spoon by Paige Peterson: Reviewed earlier this month.
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Us Conductors by Sean Michaels: It made me want a Theremin.
Reading parts of the book, I was like “This is exactly like Gulag” or “This is exactly like The First Circle“, only to get the end and see Michaels listed them as sources. So I felt clever. I enjoy feeling clever.
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The School for Good and Evil: A World Without Princes by Soman Chainani: Wonderful in world building, but failing in everything else. The book is just mindblowing reductive in terms of gender roles. Did you know that girls relying on themselves equates to getting rid of boys with the goal of making them slaves? Did you know that boys, without the civilizing effect of girls or adults, turn into rampant, disgusting pigs who feel the need to pee on everything? Did you know that feminism isn’t a dismantling of patriarchal structures that trap both men and women, but rather women who despise, ridicule, and exploit men? Did you know that, no matter what, doing something like a girl is an insult? Did you know that you can’t have both friends and romantic interests – only one or the other? What a shitty messages to put in a book geared towards pre-teens. There are parts of this book that read like they came straight from a MRA forum.
I am angry I wasted my time on this. I am angry that pretty much on every page I had to rewrite what was happening so I could read it to my six year old. This book had so much potential and squandered it all so we could have a standard tale of damsels in distress, feminazis, and needing men to save the day.
- Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis: Reviewed earlier this month.
- Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: I can’t ever really love Sarah Waters. I find her stories too long. I understand they are supposed to be rich and decadent, like French cooking, but I don’t like French cooking since the sauces are usually cream based and make me sick, and I just want to cut about 150 pages out of every Sarah Waters book I read
- Tita by Marie Houzelle: Reviewed earlier this month.
Favourite book of the month:
Now I don’t know whether I want Leslie Knope or Amy Poehler to be my best friend. Maybe both? How can I get Amy Poehler to be my best friend without me becoming a super-creepy stalker?
Most promising book I put on my wishlist:
So I put it on my wishlist, and then bought it with a gift card I had for Chapters (but I bought it for the kobo). I think that counts as most promising, that I actually went out and got it.
I watched:
Thoughts:
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Darknet: I watched about fifteen minutes of Darknet while washing dishes on a Thursday. Then it got dropped, just like Steins:Gate got dropped last month.
I guess they were worried, in Darknet, that people would not realize they were in Toronto, since they mentioned it at least twelve times during the fifteen minutes I watched. This is why Toronto will never be a world-class city, OMG how needy.
I wrote:
Nothing. At least not anything new. I am focusing on editing what I have. It is tedious and most days I want to claw my eyes out and every day I get myself all pumped to sit in front of the text on my screen and make changes to comma placement and adverbs there is a snow day and Tesfa is home and nothing gets done. For March, I am, regardless of weather co-operation and the fact that the first week of March is Tesfa’s March break and she feels that if I am at the computer that means I want her to loudly and repeatedly ask me questions about things that I have no control over (Why can’t you make the colours rhyme with the animals? What does that even mean?), going to do twenty pages a day until I am done. One file (called big file because naming is totally my thing).
Then I really have to do the same big overhaul for faerie story.
I’m glad I printed out faerie story and big file before my printer ran out of ink. Possibly my printer ran out of ink because of.
Then, once that is done, I can get back to new stories. My story about a devil and my story about wolves and who knows what. A big breath out, aaaaaaahhhhh.