I <3 Junot Diaz AND books written in 1/3 Elvish.
(Source: gimmepizzauoldtroll, via bg5000)
I’ve started getting more into audiobooks lately because of my commute — I just downloaded Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter from Audible.com and am enjoying it immensely. I recommend it if you enjoy Anthony Bourdain, or if you’re just looking for a really beautifully written memoir. It’s worth the price of purchase just for her description of Andre Soltner preparing a perfect omelette — I actually teared up.
Hamilton also narrates the audio version, which is kind of neat!
"No man is brave that has never walked a thousand miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as a medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection."
—
The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss, p. 847.
I’ve rocketed through this book, the second in The Kingkiller Chronicle, in just a few days. It’s pretty remarkable; mostly it’s remarkably readable. The only problem is that the final volume might be released around the same time as The Winds of Winter; which is to say, never (or at least five years in the future, which might as well be never).
I don’t know if I can handle this.
I CAN’T DECIDE WHICH ONE TO READ FIRST!!! It’s like SF/F Book Christmas! Amazon delivered three days early! I am overjoyed!
I might have to go with REAMDE first because Stephenson is easily in my top five author list (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are favorites; I would also recommend The Baroque Cycle to anyone who enjoys GRRM, the books are hard work but satisfying). Plus, I hear it’s a fast read and more of a thriller than a tech-fantasy.
BUT I’m really excited about Rothfuss and obviously I’m a sucker for serial fantasy. I’m just not sure if I’m ready to weather another full-world immersion, since I’ve spent so much of this year all up in Westeros and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar universe. (I’ve also been half-heartedly reading Gabaldon’s Outlander, but it hasn’t really engaged me.)
I wish I had been this excited about 1,800 pages of reading when I was in grad school.
Can you believe that I am only just now reading MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me?
NO.
NO YOU CANNOT.
IT IS INCONCEIVABLE TO YOU THAT IT HAS TAKEN ME THIS LONG.
YOU ARE NOW CLICKING OUT OF THIS BLOG IN SHAME.
What Books are Worth Owning Twice (or Thrice? Or even multiple times over!)
So that John Waters quote that’s been floating around Tumblr inspired me to go rearrange our books last night — which mostly means spraying some Pledge at the whole mess and promising myself that I’ll go to Iliad Books “like, tomorrow!” to get rid of all those fucking late-90’s/early-00’s hardbacks that I bought in grad school and hated immediately. (I.e.: DeLillo, Franzen, Frazier, Nifenegger, sorry Everybody Ever on the Internet, but ugh, KILL ME.)
Anyway. We have a lot of books. We put them in our second bedroom, which is not really a bedroom but instead a veritable Narnia of sci-fi paperbacks, math textbooks, 20th-century American poetry, and the aforementioned Fucking Late 90’s/Early-00’s Hardback Literary Fiction. (Sometimes I want to visit my fifteen-year-old self, shake her real hard, and say “JOHN IRVING???? REALLLLLLLLLY???)
But so we have a lot of books! And you know what? The duplicate copies are the most interesting phenomenon of all. I have two (or even three) different editions of a bunch of different books, but despite my killer-culling instincts lately, I guess there are some books you just need two copies of? Let’s examine:
- Two identical trade paperback copies of DeWitt’s The Last Samurai
- One hardback and one paperback The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Ditto on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (one belongs to an honorstudent! I still haven’t finished it, Matt, but I love it!)
- Several variations on Shakespeare’s works — including two of those terrible B&N leather-bound monstrosities that nobody ever reads but your parents still gift them to you anyway, plus a very readable and useful Penguin/Pelican paperback anthology (edited by my favorite Shax professor ever ever ever!), plus about sixteen thousand individual paperback plays (mostly the Penguin series again, <3 u Braunmuller!).
- Four editions of Chaucer’s Compleat Works, including the hardback RIVERSIDE EDITION (where my English majors at!), a terrible “Modern English” translation, and a dog-eared, marked-up, precious paperback student edition of Canterbury Tales, which will remain one of My Most Favorite English Classes Ever.
- Paradise Lost. Who do you guys think should play Warrior Jesus in the movie version??? Jeremy Renner, maybe???
- The DaVinci Code. Not because I am the worst person ever, but because sometimes terrible, terrible things happen when you combine book collections with your boyfriend.
