Friday, December 4, 2009

Cool Links

Hitting gear cap in WoW has been a good thing. Suddenly I'm spending time doing something else, like trolling the internet.

Some cool stuff:

http://birdbook.org/
The site is awful but the birds are amazing.

http://v1kram.posterous.com/liu-bolinthe-invisible-man
Illusionist+Artist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3wmWT-sb8&feature=related
Lipizzaner Stallions. We went to see them a few weekends back.

On the job front I FINALLY got a call back from Barnes and Noble. The position is seasonal so there's a chance I'll be done with it by January, but I can use the money, and an excuse to get out of the house.

NaNo was a bit of a bust, but not entirely. I neglected it for the entire month of November, and on the 30th decided to make a go for it. I ended at 18k words, not nearly enough for me to win, but impressive considering that they were all written in about two days. The story itself started picking up too, so I may actually have something.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I can't run a business because subtraction gives me hives.

Last Sunday I finally managed to drag myself out of bed and scrounge the area garage sales for books. I figured while I was looking for a job I might as well occupy myself by seeing if reselling for fun and profit is a possibility. So far it's been fun (found a number of fantasy titles, including some obscure Tolkien paperbacks) but there's no telling whether or not it will be profitable. Thanks to the internet I have a better chance of selling, but no thanks to the internet everything is cheaper now that it is all more available.

None the less I received my first order via Amazon for a near new copy of Green Eggs and Ham, have packed it up, and am all set to ship it tomorrow. I bought the book for 75c, charged one dollar (There were 50 some listings for the same book, the uncontested mean of which was 1 buck) and am hoping that Amazon's packing credit will help me break even. In other words I don't think I'm making any money out of this book at all. But I'm not surprised. I figure I'll test the waters, get a feel for what moves and what doesn't, and if I think I can make a profit of any sort out of it I'll keep going. The used book business is a business of high volume and spotty return if my research is correct, so having only 5 or 6 titles available means that the likeliness of my seeing any real activity is very low indeed. I could buy up the tons of romance crap that seems to litter flea markets, but I don't know the market, don't care to, and have a feeling that most of those books are worthless simply due to the fact that they have over saturated the market.

Ideally I'd like to work at (or own!) a store something like Between Books in Delaware, where there is a focus on Fantasy and Sci-Fi titles. That is, if I end up in the bulk used book business and not in antiquarian books or archival etc...

And while all this is going on I'm still waiting to hear back from the office job, and still hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to forgo a very good salary and a decent position to pursue a much less lucrative but much more fun profession... or just go to graduate school.

Decisions decisions.

Friday, November 13, 2009

@#%@$!@$

Turns out the graduate open house I had signed up for was yesterday and not tomorrow as I had thought.

Fuck.

Whatever. I think I am going to just go for the graduate degree. I had an interview for one job that paid a decent salary but it's office work turning over applications for ESL students and I'd be a dick if I took a job that required training and left six months later to go to school.

So I guess it's time to take the GRE and send in some applications.

Of course I don't know if I'd get in to the schools I'd apply to either so this may just be a huge effort for no return.

Basically what I'm saying is that I'm ROYALLY PISSED at missing that open house, particularly since I've been thinking about it since the month started, and I am currently in 'oh god I'm so worthless I have no redeeming qualities and will live the rest of my life on minimum wage and in complete defeat' mode.

I'm also doing horribly at NaNo.

I need a tub of ice cream.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Moving

Today so far has been a productive day. I woke up around 8, had my clothes hemmed for the big interview tomorrow, tore up a ton of paper that's been piling up for months, and now am going to make yet another attempt at cleaning my room. For motivation I'm taking a picture of it every half hour to see if there are any changes.

I think the only reason I'm being productive is because I'm avoiding my Nano, but I figure I'll run with it.

Here's a before picture, let's see if there's any difference in a few hours.



Saturday, November 7, 2009

Movement

Things are looking up for me, maybe.

I was offered a job in Arkansas, but because it was minimum wage and in Arkansas I decided to decline. I'm in the process of being screened for the exact same job an hours drive away but don't know if I'm going to accept that one either. Location is pretty big for me.

I have an interview with another company, one that might pay me like I have a BA, this Monday. The only problem with that one is that they want a fluent Japanese speaker and I have not been a fluent Japanese speaker for almost three years now. I've been hitting the books to keep from making a total fool of myself.

This morning I finally got off my ass and trolled around the various garage sales in the area looking for resellable books. The idea is that I might be able to make a small bit of income from dealing in used book of a focused genre, most probably fantasy/sci-fi and travel/language books. I spent the better half of today figuring out Amazon and eBay, and if this first haul turns a profit, I may serious consider devoting my time to acquiring stock and setting up an online store.

My Nano is lagging, but it has started, and I plan on finishing.

Since coming back from Florida I has spent a minimum of time on WoW, and am hoping for that trend to continue. I think I'm comfortably at a point now where I can do a few dailies, raid, vend, and log out without hours and hours of badge farming or whatever. That means more time to reaquaint myself with coding, writing, etc. Good deal.

I am struggling through Frank Norris' The Octopus. Damn thing is so wordy. And I have 3 or 4 books that I still need to review and note as finished. 52 books this year is probably impossible now. I'm at something like 20.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Guess what this post is about!

Employment!

For the last week I've sent in one submission a day. Hell I don't even remember where I submitted the last few days. Barnes and Noble (I ALWAYS write it Nobel), The Strand, Labyrinth Books, Oxford University Press, etc. The over/under qualified issue is still a big one. I either have to be a student or I have to have 4 years experience. Someone should have told me I'd need to be working full time as a student to get a job I was qualified for once I graduated. But whatever, I'm just going to keep applying. I cleaned my room a little more and am starting to consider selling off my high school manga. The ones I really liked I can keep, but for a spell there I was buying every title on the shelves. It got me a place as a columnest and bagged me preview swag, but not it's all taking up space and will never be reread. I figure I can try out the online book selling circut with my overstock (which, true to its name, is overflowing in this house)

So today I was doing my usual trolling for jobs and checked the Seattle Library system and suddenly there's a job availiable that pays 16-22hr and only requires a GED or higher. There were only two problems, it was a technical position that wanted previous experience troubleshooting electronics, which I only had informally, and the deadline for applications was in three hours.

So it turned out I was underqualified again, but this time in a different area, but with only three hours to decide if I was going to apply anyway I applied anyway.

There's really nothing hard about troubleshooting networks, and almost all of the hard crap about it has to do with the fact that computers are like babies, and the hard part about fixing them is figuring out what's wrong with them in the first place. I don't have formal experience with teaching people how to use computers, but I have a ton of informal experience? Doesn't that count for something?

I suppose I'll find out if it does in a few weeks. If I do get the job I'm moving to seattle and applying to to the MLIS program there. If I don't I just keep sending out my resume.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Update

After much planning my trip out west is finaly prepared. I'm going on a whirlwind tour down the coast, and will be checking out prospective employment as I go. This will be my last big trip unless I end up going to Disney, in which case -that- will be my last big trip. Either way, the push for employment starts in earnest on the 7th, the day I get back from San Diego.

Friday, August 7, 2009

August Update

A month of August has passed already, and not much has happened. Obviously I have been remiss in my posting. It's surprisingly difficult to keep track of what you're doing when you aren't doing much. A quick update:

Denver was great. My initial impressions were all wrong and I fell in love with the city. If I thought I had a chance of employment somewhere I would be moving there, but I will probably apply from affar and see what happens. Spent a lot of time with Fides which was definitely the highlight of the trip.

After Denver there was almost a month long drought of nothing. I was trying to get my Dad to make plans for Taiwan, because for the first time in 16 years he, my brother and I could all go together. We ended up making it there for about 10 days at the beginning of July. The insanity is recorded elsewhere.

After coming back we hit the duldrums again. Particularly in the area of food, we found ourselves wishing we were still in Taiwan. Eating is so convenient there. You step outside and there's a place to eat every five feet. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we lived in the city, so again I found myself swearing up and down that I had to move into a metropolitan area or die trying.

Last week I finally got off my ass and went to NYC with my uncle to scout out bookstores and inquire about employment. I had intended to follow up by now but again I'm slouching. I had lost my resume in a computer wipe, and am building it back, but see to only be able to write a line every 24hrs.

On a lighter note, I was going through a book of photography today when I saw a picture of a leapord labeled 'cheetah'. Unable to let this lie I obtained a second opinion, and then did a quick spot check via the internet. I'm 100% certain the label is wrong, because it's refering to an animal with rosette shaped spots in two tones.

I wonder if I can put on my resume for library work "Dedicated to finding the correct answer for everything, even when no one gives a crap."

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Denver, Day 1

It's 10:30 and my first day in Denver is over. After spending the day before in a sweaty rock gym shouting over club music loud enough to clear my chronicly clogged ears and coming home at midnight to pack franticly for a 7:00AM flight, I managed to sleep the majority of the way to the city. The stopover in Dallas was perfect. Just long enough to grab something to eat and get onto the next plane.

As we were decending into Denver Airport I started to finally realize what was going on.

Denver is in the middle of nowhere. I know I joke about how Hamilton is for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere, but Denver is actually in the middle of nowhere. I went from the most densely populated state in the union to the 37th, and apparantly more than half of Colorado's entire population is in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. I've flown over this area of the US a number of times now, and have always been facinated by the vast tracks of quilted farmland stretching out on both ends of the horizon, with nothing but a few pitiful dots of forest and some jagged rivers for diversity. This time I ended up landing in it. At that point the 'what the hell have I gotten myself into' part of the trip hit me.

It was about 2PM by the time I was into the city and ready to explore. Some quick stats of day 1:

Beggars seen - 6
Ratio of people who asked me for change compared to those who were just hanging around with signs - 1:1
Libraries Found - 1
Bookstores Found -1
Libraries and bookstores that informed me that the chances of my getting a job there were worse than 0 - 2
Pictures taken - 5
Times I've gotten lost - 0 (A miracle and an anomoly all at once)
Overall opinion of the city so far, after 3 streets, and a few hours (from 1 to 10) - 3

Like Jersey and Hawaii, the state of Colorodo is in a hiring freeze. The chances that I will end up in a public library are very slim at this point, and besides, there would be an LIS to get first. I still have a number of bookstores to check out, and the college campus. There's apparantly going to be a festival on Saturday, so I'll go there too. I think at this point a lot is depending on the campus itself and the vibe I get there. This city is so tiny I don't know if I would be able to manage living here for any length of time, but life is nothing if not a series of interesting challenges!

The Photos from Today:

I wasn't very dilligant in playing the tourist snapping at everything. The area the hotel is in looks a little tougher than the metropolitan heart of the city, and so I took the inconspicuous route for the time being.

"Yaki Soba Tofu" I guess you could call this that. It wasn't bad. The tempura was surprisingly edible, considering how picky I am about tempura.

Some guy in the Japanese place playing with a twin lens reflex camera. After passing laundrymats, liquer stores, and similar institutions of the baser elements of city life, seeing someone with a TLR was my first whiff of something interesting in the city.

Interior of the Japanese restaurant. The menu was injet printer fare, did not look like any Japanese menu I had ever seen, and the man in front of me was asking if Kirin beer was some sort of Japanese lager. I had some misgivings.


A view of the Denver skyline. That's pretty much all of it. Behind that is the Rockies, which is a much more impressive view. The image of nothing but flat farmland on one side of you and a gigantic wall of snowy mountains on the other commands an apprecation for the amazing diversity of the country and geography in general.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Starting up the Rest of My Life

Well, I have been home for something like two weeks with very little done in comparison to my grand plans. I realized that the most recent version of my resume had been wiped with the change from Vista to Win 7, and haven't sent any applications for job out yet. My excuse is that I'm waiting until after the trip to Denver to get going on all of that stuff.

Denver is the one thing that I said I would be doing and actual am going to do. On Sunday I'm getting up at the godforsaken hour of 5AM to catch a plane, and will be landing in the Mile High City some time around 2PM. I'll be there for a week to explore the city, check out the campus, and try to decide if it's a place I would like to live for the next 4 years or so. I'm not sure I'm ready to settle for any longer than that, but in 4 years, who knows? After that I'll be checking out Seattle/Oregon, and then maybe some place in the south. St. Lewis perhaps.

Friday, May 1, 2009

The Kindle

I have been eying e-readers

Progress indeed

The Kindle and Snobbery Via the times. They are missing out on one important fact here. At $300+ per, you don't need to know what someone is reading on a kindle to know where they stand on the literary snob meter. The fact that they put down 300 dollars plus to read when you can pick up a good book for 25c at a library sale is itself a good indication of the type of reader that they are.

I wouldn't want a kindle anyway. I don't want to marry a single company just to use an electronic device. I don't care how convenient (read:easy to spend more money) they make it. I was looking at the sony reader and the cybook, and there is the possibility of reading on my DS which would be nice considering I don't use it for anything ever. In particular I'd like to try out this 100 Classic Books Collection.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Notes

In an attempt to keep the blogging going, I present more awesome things part two!

More awesome things include:

  • Having a pigeon try to land on the front wheel of your bike while you are riding it. Dumbest pigeon I have ever seen.

  • Sleeping

  • Mochi Ice Cream



The semester is almost over. Throughout I've had many meandering thoughts, questions, revelations, etc... but I have been very bad at writing them down, and when I sit in front of the computer all sense of productivity leaves me. On occasion I'll bother to write down a scrap of something into a notebook, and that's all I have as proof that my mind was working for the past four months.

Such random notes include "Philosophy is to be consumed and absorbed until it becomes manifest in one's own breath," another feeble attempt to outline a parable I have been mulling over in my head for years (statues are self aware, but can only understand themselves through men, philosophy ensues), "Past-laden presents bearing various possibilities." (To be fair I think that may have been a transcription of something else), and a dozen admonitions to myself on the vein of "GET THIS DONE FFS," "Stop sucking", "WTF is this shit?" and a few "GDI"s thrown in.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Things I love in Life

  • Midget Tandem Bikes. The people in the car with me refused to believe that we had passed one until a fortuitous red light forced them to look twice, and then a third time. Pretty damn awesome.

  • Cinnabon. So delicious.

  • Kicking a habit. I am so done with WoW.

  • Eternal Recurrence, aka the purging of regret.

  • HTML. I love a good puzzle.

  • Bikes. I need to bike more.

  • Libraries. While every other passion of mine has died down or been put on the back burner for more "pressing" priorities, my love for the library has only grown.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Looking for Work and the Employment Gap

This was day one of my hit the ground running employment search. I'm graduating in about a month, and so it's time to start preparing for the next big phase of my life. Step one in that preparation is getting a job. Of course, I've been doing job research for years before this on the Publishing and Library science industries, but now I am looking for particular contacts and actually destinations for my resume.

The biggest problem so far has been that I am either over or underqualified for every job offering. Internship is big in the publishing industry, but in an effort to get free labor without being sued for exploitation, most companies will give internships to people who can be 'paid' in college credit. Therefore, if you are not a college junior or senior you can't get in on a lot of these programs.

The next most common job offers are for senior level positions. Managers, executives, etc... These usually come with the caveat 'Prior experience required.' Luckily for me, I do have some prior experience because I wormed my way into getting a position at the university press, but that is not the two to three years that most people are looking for, and at 10 hours a week it has given me experience, but not enough for me to be experienced.

All of this is making me feel as if I am being punished for graduating in four years. I worked hard to concentrate on my studies and my studies alone so that I would graduate with a minimum of debt, but I now fear that this has actually hurt my chances of employment at the moment. I'm in the ugly position of having not that many extracurricular accomplishments to illustrate my passion for books and learning, and at the same time leaving the place where I can develop my resume in that direction.

But all is not lost. The job search is frustrating for everyone right now, but if I keep at it and keep all of my options open I still have a chance at finding my in. If I can't find any traditional listings that I fit, I will simply start sending out direct e-mails to places that may be hiring, and once I graduate I can start doing that on foot. There are jobs if you look, that's what I'm hoping. Even in a recession some things just need to get done, and the world needs good people to do them.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

I've been doing a lot of employment research, and sometimes looking through the mistakes of others makes me feel a little bit more confident about what I can achieve. I found a good example of this today via NotHired.




When I saw this I started thinking of a similar situation I ended up in last year when I was looking for a summer internship. I had sent in an e-mail inquiring about working for a smaller publishing house in New York and received back an e-mail so riddled in errors that I crossed that house off my prospects list immediately. What's crazy is that in this case the error went the other way around, and it was the publisher that failed, not the applicant.

Monday, March 2, 2009

March Madness, aka Ulysses

There is a group on Librarything that has decided March is best spent twisting one's brain up into knots with Ulysses, and I've been invited to partake in the insanity. On top of studying for my Japanese class more (read: studying for Japanese, period) and keeping up with my reading in other classes, finishing this 700 page behemoth is going to be a challenge indeed.

I'll be updating with reading notes daily if I actually manage to adhere to the schedule I've set for myself.

And without further ado, I will now read out loud, onto digital paper.

It feels like I'm climbing in hard mode. I'm zooming through my last semester in college and reading constantly for school, and yet somehow I think I can make some time to read Ulysses. I was never very good at knowing my limits.

I think I'll hold out on reading critically for the second time around and spend this one in blissful, leisurely ignorance.

Anyhoo, it's been interesting to see the things that have stuck for other people as they read, so I'm planning on doing something similar.

I don't have many expectations in terms of the content of this book. In fact, the most concrete facts I have now are from the court decision included at the front of my edition, in which is stated, "In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his seasons Spring."

OK, Celtic, Spring, Sex. I guess I should start reading (and writing) in true stream of consciousness fashion.

... stumped on the second paragraph? Really? "I will go to the alter of God." Ok, after a quick flip through the pages it doesn't look too bad. Some Latin here and there, some French, some... I don't know what that is, but I'll deal with it when I get to it.

I think I should have picked up the 'Annotations to Ulysses' in the library. I've had too look up a term or phrase four times within the first page!

"The scrotumtightening sea." Hmm, I think I will enjoy this book.

"epi oinopa ponton" Wait... maybe not.

Someone who had the book before me has left little graphite signposts along the margins, but they're all illegible. Very depressing.

I don't remember enough of Portrait to recall Dedalus' mother dying, or his reason for refusing to pray for her. I'll have to look all that up later.

P. 12 "Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat." "May the crowd of joyful confessors encompass thee; may the choir of blessed virgins go before thee." Phrase spoken during the Recommendation of a Soul Departing. I can see where firm knowledge of the Latin mass would come in handy here.

"In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." I know that one! Jesus be praised!

"Et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam." "And I believe in One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church"

p. 22 "The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind." I like this quite a bit. Malachi really is sounding more and more like the devil.

p. 24 Seems that Malachi is very witty but Sephen doesn't think him very wise. I guess even back in the early 20th century people who wanted to sound fancy quoted Nietzsche!

Stephen leaves thinking of the last rites again, but I don't know why.

And then the scene abruptly changes at the next page, so I think I'll take my rest here.

Seems like easy going so far, save the boulders of Latin and Catholicism strewn about my path, but I assume I'm moving quickly because I am at the base of the mountain.

The Bloomsday Book is making more solid the few suspicions I have about themes and roles and so on and so forth. It's a very nice, concise guide. I'm very glad I picked it up.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Semester 8 Rundown

It's now almost halfway through the semester. My schedule has solidified (but not my sleeping habits) and I have gotten into the general groove with my classes enough to make a pass at guessing my grade in each.

Japanese 401 - Advanced Japanese Reading
What was I thinking?! This is a class similar to the one that DESTROYED me in Japan, and by destroyed I mean that it caused so much mental anguish that I developed a severe case of insomnia and was wandering the city like a madman during class hours because I could no longer bring myself to actually go.

Well, it seems that history is repeating itself.
The chances of me getting a good grade in this class are next to none.

Chado Practicum
Talk about a neat class! Twice a week about 15 of us make our way to a teahouse build by a prior grand tea master of Japan and learn the art of the tea ceremony through hands on practice. The class is fun, it's a real education, and you get to drink lots of tea.

Literature and Philosophy
Another great class. So far I have been introduced to Borges, Kafka, and Calvino through it. It would be nicer of more than say 3 or 4 people spoke in class, but that's generally how classes like this go. A few of us will be willing to put our opinions on the line, and the rest will either listen quietly, too afraid to say something wrong, will not know what the hell is going on and thus not speak, or, and these are always the frustrating ones, will not know what the hell is going on but not know that either and end up talking a lot anyway.

Luckly we have very few of that last catagory in the class.

Modern Japanese Society
This class is difficult to suffer though. The professor's lectures leave me cringing constantly, with her constant mangling of grammar and her tendancy to repeat the last pharase of whatever she says multiple times.

And example of the crap I have to sit through involves phrases like "As far as to the others, there were much warriors who did not acustom well to the change in government, the change in government."

For an hour and fifteen minutes I have to listen to that. I live in dread of this class, not just because I have to listen to this mangled English, but because I'm terrified that I may adopt some of it as part of my own broken speach. Truely terrifying.

Modern Chinese Politics
This is the exact opposite of my Japanese Society class. Unlike the Japanese class, where the professor is a 'native speaker' but does not know how to speak English, my professor in this class is not a native speaker but is well spoken. He has a heavy Chinese/UK accent, so that even the English he speaks isn't American English, but his grammar is perfect and his lectures easy to follow and easy to remember. I look forward to this class every week, but it can be a bit of a struggle to sit all the way through, considering the fact that it is about 3 hours long.

So that's my final semester. Two classes that drive me nuts for completely different reasons, and three that I love to death. I think that's an excellent ratio considering my previous years' experience.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Foundation and Empire

The premise of the Foundation series is that even if the behavior of individuals isn't predictable that of large groups of people is. The great Psychohistorian Harri Seldon uses this to to create a Foundation that will tighten the gap between peaceful eras in mankind's history and provide a second Empire after the first has inevitably fallen.

The only problem is that the first Empire hasn't quite fallen quite yet, and Empires are not in the habit of welcoming their replacement with open arms. Luckily for the Foundation, Seldon's predictions remain true, and they survive against a complete bombardment by one of the Empire's brightest generals.

Fast forward a few generations. The Empire has finally died and the Foundation is on the verge of Civil War. This has all been predicted by Seldon. But then something strange happens. The war never happens, and into the picture comes a mutant capable of twisting one of the fundamental assumptions of Psychohistorical analysis, that the psychological makeup of mankind will remain relatively the same. Much of the book is spent on the struggle against this new threat.

Compared to some of Asimov's stuff I find the writing in the Foundation series to be a little dry. There are some good turns of phrases, and the characters are always fun to read, but I was not blown away as I have been by some of Asimov's shorts. The identity of the Mule was obvious from the beginning, though I forgot I had known all along by the end and was surprised when it was revealed for a moment. I didn't expect the -method- Asimov used to reveal this secret.

Part one and Part two of Foundation and Empire were initially published seperately. They're lackluster alone, but work very well together. The assumptions that Asimov builds up in the first half are all torn down in the second. I am certainly eager to see if Seldon's science prevails in Second Foundation, or if the Mule is the one thing that can destroy it.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Lincoln and other links

http://www.lincolnportrait.com/#
Lincoln was a sexy guy.

The American Cargo Cult
http://klausler.com/cargo.html

http://www.librarything.com/work/7924060
Exhibit 1 for why I no longer buy manga in bulk. Exhibit two would be the fact that buying all the manga available in the US no longer equates to 3 titles total.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudodoxia.shtml
Debunking age old superstition.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Reading Gap

via The Millions:
What is the biggest, most glaring gap in your lifetime of reading?

Most people who responded had a complete list, and as much as I want to follow their lead it would be more challenging to find one single gap and leave it at that. So I've been thinking about this for something like a week, and have finally decided that if I were told that I could only ever read one neglected part of my reading for the rest of my life, I would have to start concentrating on world myths, legends, and religious histories. My biblical education is painfully lacking. I went through the Catholic system, and was a confirmed Methodist, but I really don't have the christian myths down pat. And this doesn't just include biblical stories, but the epics that sprung from them, including Arthur and his holy grail.

Don't even get me started on anything outside of the Christian cannon. For a period of time I was obsessed with the Egyptians and Greeks, and managed to pick up quite a bit of their mythology, but I was more interested in using their civilizations as backdrops for my own imaginings than I was in remembering faithfully what I was learning. Same with Norse mythology. My Japanese fan phase got me acquainted with quite a bit of far eastern mythology, but when it comes to China or Taiwan I'm still very much in the dark. And if you say Russia or Africa or the Middle East I say forget about it.

Last semester I managed to pick up a ton of Campbell's mythology books during a library sale. The hope is that once I've finished with them this particular hole will be plugged and I can go work on the next one, contemporary fiction.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Books at BnN

For Christmas one of my bosses gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card. That's an excellent gift to give someone who is a compulsive book hoarder, and today I finally decided to take the bus up to my nearest store and pick something up. Since I get enough non-fiction from the university library and through my myriad courses, I went straight to the Sci-fi/Fantasy section, hoping to find some additions to my reading bread and butter. The only stipulation that I gave myself was that I didn't want to choose any books from a well known name like Salvatore, Lovecraft, etc, since I could easily find those books in the library, and besides, us small timers have to stick together.

The only problem was that I could find no titles that caught my eye. Every book looked like every other book. Every cover seemed to say the same thing. I ended up prowling the four shelves that made up Barnes and Noble's speculative fiction section a dozen times with no results. Every book was either all about sexy demons in a dirty city, a fantastic medieval world + magic, or a mundie going about his life and suddenly falling into one of the two. The only books that were consistantly drawing my eye were the Warhammer titles. I've yet to read anything from the Warhammer universe, but again and again I would see the cover, or read the back, and think to myself 'oh, this is different', and then notice the Warhammer icon. I had grouped well known series' into the well known authors catagory however, so purchasing a Warhammer book was a no-no for this particular excercise. And that left me with almost nothing.

Luckily I had scribbled down the name of a title Bantam Dell had been trumpeting in my inbox, and upon bringing it up to the help desk found a single copy of the first book of the series hidden at the bottom of the shelves, Scar Night by Alan Campbell. The back cover was torn in two places, but I was out of options, and this was one of the few books that did not bore me within the first three words of the synopsis. Because one paperback did not nearly cover the total of my gift card, I went back to scrounging and eventually settled on A Magic of Twilight by S. L. Farrel, mainly because the words 'relative newcomer' were printed on the back of the book and the cover illustration was not some random person posing with a big weapons in fancy armor.

I've read the first chapter or so of Campbell and it looks promising. Haven't even opened Farrel yet.

Book List 2009: #4 Ficciones

The following is cross-posted from Librarything.com.

Reviewing a book by a 'master' of literature always feels like a dangerous undertaking, so I am going to call this a response instead.

I read Borges for a class called Philosophy in Literature. While I'm not a total Philistine in literary matters, I would be lying if I said I caught half of Borges' references without having to look things up. Once I -did- look them up, my reading became much more enjoyable. Borges is utter nonsense unless you can figure out how to catch somehow the things he is throwing at you, and although I am sure that I've let the lion's share of the meaning in his work slip through my fingers on my first reading, what I did catch was delightful.

Borges is playful to the extreme. The stories in which he shines are those where he takes some strange idea and runs with it straight through. My favorite in the anthology has to be "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." The premise stripped bare of Borges' elaboration is idiotic, but the story is a great one none the less. I can hardly understand it.

While I read Ficciones I was constantly torn between crying out, "This is so stupid!" and "Oh god, this is genius!" at the exact same time. I'm inclined to think that his greatest stories are both.

There are also a few stories in Ficciones that are not nearly as interesting as the others. Perhaps if epic shorts like "Funes, the Memorious" had never been written, a story like "The Form of the Sword" would still be great fiction, but when compared to their neighbors, there are a few stories that do not incite nearly as much masochistic mental glee as the others.

Regardless, Borges is a master of imagination, and for that I tip my hat to him.

I've got three books vying for the next to-read. One, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is required reading for class, so the chance that it will win out is high. I'm still slipping in chapters of Foundation and Empire here and there anyway.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

A Book a Week Resolution

My New Year's Resolution for the past three or so years has been to read at least a book a week. For two I managed to accomplish just that. My year in Japan threw a wrench in those plans, as I only realized that the campus library had a collection of English language books late in the semester, and even then, I was having a hard time simply doing the minimum of my classwork. For 2008 I ended up short by 20 books. Considering that a book a week makes only 52 books, this is not a good record at all.

But I'm right on track for 2009. So far I've read three, books, Deryni Checkmate, A Robot Anthology, and Nickel and Dimed. I enjoyed all three.

Next up is Ficciones by Borges. As it is the first required text for my Philosophy in Lit class, I may be cheating a little, but it's a worthy book in its own right and worth reading. Plus, its relatively short.