A Story
As you can see, I haven't been eaten by a wolf yet.
I have, however, encountered a ghost. (Not really.)
What actually happened is that about five days into my shift, I walked into my room after work to find that the light was on and there was a pair of earplugs on the bedside table. I dropped off my coat, thinking that the cleaning staff had just left some stuff behind, and went to eat supper. When I went through the entrance area, I made sure to check the whiteboard where room changes are noted, just in case I'd missed my name being on it when I walked in, but there was no sign of it.
After supper, I walked into the room, and there was a cup on the desk that I definitely hadn't left there. Confused and abruptly frantic, I at first barricaded myself in the room for about five minutes, then finally got a handle on my ridiculousness and sped back and forth down the hallway to check the whiteboard a couple more times.
By the time I'd done that, I was a bit more calm, and the camp staff was actually in the office for once, so I went to talk to them about the mysterious cup of water materializing out of nowhere when my name was clearly nowhere on the board, and there wasn't a new key laid out for me anywhere.
It ended up that I'd been in the wrong room since I'd arrived, and I was quickly moved to a different one, right across the hall.
EXCITING, I KNOW.
Some Links
As of this month, I've finally finished playing Final Fantasy VII all the way through. I've had a somewhat bizarre personal connection to this game since around 2002, but only finally started playing it last year. Yes, I know it was released way before then. And yes, it took me a really long time to finish. Since I'm not much of a gamer, I used this walkthrough, which was pretty sweet.
To my really extreme distress, I didn't manage to register for San Diego Comic Con this year. I've never actually gone to a con, and would really like to, so if you have any suggestions about cool ones that are happening this summer, please recommend them!
And now some authors, who make me very sure that I'll never be as cool as they are, but make up for it by being so fucking cool that it doesn't matter: Neil Gaiman and Charlie Stross.
82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Uncomfortable Plot Summary: A man speculates about his grandmother's sex life.
Year Published: 1971
Pages: 557
First Sentence: Now I believe they will leave me alone.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)
Review:
It turns out that A Bend in the River was a literary brutality of a kind that I've never encountered before. It took five books to finally cleanse my palate and replenish my enthusiasm for The List. Not even the absolute certainty that there are masterpieces not far down the line could bestir me to read anything else that might potentially be as dispiriting as A Bend in the River.
Five books, though, including one that I've been wanting to read for a couple of years, and which didn't disappoint, and I was finally ready for Angle of Repose.
Except that I wasn't ready at all. The subject tags that I found in the book's library catalogue entry weren't exactly alluring: disability, family history, the West. Everything to suggest pretentiousness.
But instead, I found the book that I've always wanted to write: a personal history of someone's life, someone small but well-loved and somehow distinguished.
In this case, that someone is Susan Ward, a 19th century illustrator married to Oliver Ward, an engineer (!) whose calling is to shape the American West. Susan's biographer is her grandson Lyman Ward, a retired history professor now crippled by a bone disease (and hence The List's first disabled main character), and trying to make sense of his own life by exploring its context. Susan was a genteel Victorian lady, intelligent and talented, who followed her husband around the western frontier of the United States, as he tried to get them established. Lyman is living and working in the place that Oliver eventually did establish, dictating his grandmother's story from letters that she wrote and papers kept in her office.
Stegner paints a vivid picture of a woman that I think exceeds what Arnold Bennett did in The Old Wives' Tale (though Bennett had a better follow-through and more consistent story—Angle of Repose has a sort of weak ending). Stegner also gets props for his treatment of the engineering profession, respectfully but not worshipfully, and his own personal Saskatchewan connection, i.e. a few years of his childhood spent in Eastend.
Having grown up on the Little House books, this book felt something like a mature version of those, with a much deeper emotional focus, and more responsible themes involving the built vs. the natural environment, the ethics of development, and the horrible things that people do to each other.
But I have to admit that a big part of why I loved this book so much was that I brought it with me when going up north to a jobsite for the first time. The work, the remote location, and the demographics meant that I could identify with both Susan and her husband, in many ways even better than I could identify with my coworkers (it's sometimes tough to be an engineer who reads). At times, this book felt like my only ally, one lone comforting voice in the midst of a wilderness. Now I'm starting to get settled in a bit better, but I'm glad I had this book with me that first time.
And yes, I'm madly in love with Oliver Ward.
 |
| Canadian Tire money bookmark ftw? |
Pages: 557
First Sentence: Now I believe they will leave me alone.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)
Review:
It turns out that A Bend in the River was a literary brutality of a kind that I've never encountered before. It took five books to finally cleanse my palate and replenish my enthusiasm for The List. Not even the absolute certainty that there are masterpieces not far down the line could bestir me to read anything else that might potentially be as dispiriting as A Bend in the River.
Five books, though, including one that I've been wanting to read for a couple of years, and which didn't disappoint, and I was finally ready for Angle of Repose.
Except that I wasn't ready at all. The subject tags that I found in the book's library catalogue entry weren't exactly alluring: disability, family history, the West. Everything to suggest pretentiousness.
But instead, I found the book that I've always wanted to write: a personal history of someone's life, someone small but well-loved and somehow distinguished.
In this case, that someone is Susan Ward, a 19th century illustrator married to Oliver Ward, an engineer (!) whose calling is to shape the American West. Susan's biographer is her grandson Lyman Ward, a retired history professor now crippled by a bone disease (and hence The List's first disabled main character), and trying to make sense of his own life by exploring its context. Susan was a genteel Victorian lady, intelligent and talented, who followed her husband around the western frontier of the United States, as he tried to get them established. Lyman is living and working in the place that Oliver eventually did establish, dictating his grandmother's story from letters that she wrote and papers kept in her office.
Stegner paints a vivid picture of a woman that I think exceeds what Arnold Bennett did in The Old Wives' Tale (though Bennett had a better follow-through and more consistent story—Angle of Repose has a sort of weak ending). Stegner also gets props for his treatment of the engineering profession, respectfully but not worshipfully, and his own personal Saskatchewan connection, i.e. a few years of his childhood spent in Eastend.
Having grown up on the Little House books, this book felt something like a mature version of those, with a much deeper emotional focus, and more responsible themes involving the built vs. the natural environment, the ethics of development, and the horrible things that people do to each other.
But I have to admit that a big part of why I loved this book so much was that I brought it with me when going up north to a jobsite for the first time. The work, the remote location, and the demographics meant that I could identify with both Susan and her husband, in many ways even better than I could identify with my coworkers (it's sometimes tough to be an engineer who reads). At times, this book felt like my only ally, one lone comforting voice in the midst of a wilderness. Now I'm starting to get settled in a bit better, but I'm glad I had this book with me that first time.
And yes, I'm madly in love with Oliver Ward.
- - - - -
Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn't believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were—inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.
Even places, especially this house whose air is thick with the past. My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall down.
R18. I Thee Bed… by Jule McBride
It feels really strange to finally be posting another one of these romnov reviews. I wrote this one in May at the absolute most recent. The cat that I mention in the first paragraph belongs to my sister, and I haven't lived with either of them since then. What I'm trying to emphasize is that I wrote the review prior to July's great fiasco. I have one other review that was written before then, and then we'll get into some new reviews that I'll try to be more careful about (but I haven't actually written any of them yet). Hopefully we can all still have some fun with this, anyway. -M.R.
Pages: 204
Pairing: wedding planner and paparazzo
First Sentence: "All rise!" (*snicker*)
Climax: And then they were gone.
Review:
Horrific. One of the more depressing feelings I've had lately is to be in the mood to curl up on the couch with a book and a cat, and this is the book. Kills the mood pretty quick. Makes me wonder, yet again, why I'm doing this to myself.
This book took all the overblown writing of Apache Nights and the plot holes of Twin Temptation and then took it all way too seriously. For example, the following: "And then she broke. Senseless words erupted. Suddenly she was begging him, her shattered mind coming completely apart, like broken glass. Like a ribbon, she was undone." I know, right? But I really don't think Jule McBride is kidding.
The macroscopic view of the book "makes sense." Jimmy Delaney waltzes into Edie Benning's wedding planning business, Big Apple Brides, calling himself Seth Bishop. He's using her to get pictures of the wedding she's planning for a wealthy hotel owner's daughter and her NHL hockey player fiance. Of course Jimmy throws his plan out the window pretty much instantly when he falls for Edie... pretty much instantly. This seems to occur chiefly because they are both "[h]eadache rather than stomachache people," a distinction I wasn't even aware of, which is belaboured in the book to an extent that I wouldn't've thought possible.
It turns out that the wedding is actually Edie's dream wedding, so it's pretty convenient when, the evening before the ceremony, bride-to-be Julia Darden, gets fed up of receiving threats, thanks to an 11 year-old taking the role of the paparazzi and one of the hockey players being an idiot. This is all way too complicated for a 200 page book about sex, and is mostly covered in about four pages of exposition at the end. But yeah, Julia Darden gets fed up, and decides that she still wants someone to get married.
By this point, Edie and Jimmy have known each other for two weeks, and Edie has just discovered his deception. She's angry at him for his lies, but still wants on him, so when the wedding opens up, she of course forgives him in a matter of minutes and then they get married and make plans to have lots of babies. Oh, and by the way, Jimmy only started taking pictures of celebrities to pay his mom's medical bills, so he's really not such a bad guy after all. And universal health care scores another one.
Like I said, that all makes sense, in the twisted parallel universe where all of these romnovs take place. The nonsense is in the details, such as the Rate the Dates reality show where Edie or her twin sister appeared opposite "Cash Champagne," or the mysterious "Benning wedding curse" that is alluded to but never explained. I have to cut the book a bit of slack, because it's the third in a trilogy, but good Lord. Also, there were about as many clothing descriptions in this thing as you'd find in a bad fanfic.
Ugh.
Quotations:
When he'd first seen the identical twin sisters together, he'd been able to tell them apart immediately. The women were identical, yes. And yet, there was something so different about their essence. Both were about five foot five. Both had worn their feathered blond hair blown straight, and both had blue eyes the color of robins' eggs on a foggy morning.
Edie shrugged as he used the chopsticks to further fish around the platter, her throat tightening as his knee suddenly knocked hers under the table. It instantly corrected itself, pulled away, changed its mind, then found hers again, this time pressuring firmly. He had nice knees, too. Big and hard. More square than rounded.
Even from here, he could see the pulse vibrating in her throat, and now he realized she was chattering because she was nervous. So was he. Especially since he was lying to her about his identity.
A romantic at heart, she'd read countless novels about love, and she'd even memorized some of the world's greatest poetry.
He'd always been so damn artistic for a guy, too emotional. Passionate. (NB This is Seth/Jimmy's interior monologue. -M.R.)
Pairing: wedding planner and paparazzo
First Sentence: "All rise!" (*snicker*)
Climax: And then they were gone.
Review:
Horrific. One of the more depressing feelings I've had lately is to be in the mood to curl up on the couch with a book and a cat, and this is the book. Kills the mood pretty quick. Makes me wonder, yet again, why I'm doing this to myself.
This book took all the overblown writing of Apache Nights and the plot holes of Twin Temptation and then took it all way too seriously. For example, the following: "And then she broke. Senseless words erupted. Suddenly she was begging him, her shattered mind coming completely apart, like broken glass. Like a ribbon, she was undone." I know, right? But I really don't think Jule McBride is kidding.
The macroscopic view of the book "makes sense." Jimmy Delaney waltzes into Edie Benning's wedding planning business, Big Apple Brides, calling himself Seth Bishop. He's using her to get pictures of the wedding she's planning for a wealthy hotel owner's daughter and her NHL hockey player fiance. Of course Jimmy throws his plan out the window pretty much instantly when he falls for Edie... pretty much instantly. This seems to occur chiefly because they are both "[h]eadache rather than stomachache people," a distinction I wasn't even aware of, which is belaboured in the book to an extent that I wouldn't've thought possible.
It turns out that the wedding is actually Edie's dream wedding, so it's pretty convenient when, the evening before the ceremony, bride-to-be Julia Darden, gets fed up of receiving threats, thanks to an 11 year-old taking the role of the paparazzi and one of the hockey players being an idiot. This is all way too complicated for a 200 page book about sex, and is mostly covered in about four pages of exposition at the end. But yeah, Julia Darden gets fed up, and decides that she still wants someone to get married.
By this point, Edie and Jimmy have known each other for two weeks, and Edie has just discovered his deception. She's angry at him for his lies, but still wants on him, so when the wedding opens up, she of course forgives him in a matter of minutes and then they get married and make plans to have lots of babies. Oh, and by the way, Jimmy only started taking pictures of celebrities to pay his mom's medical bills, so he's really not such a bad guy after all. And universal health care scores another one.
Like I said, that all makes sense, in the twisted parallel universe where all of these romnovs take place. The nonsense is in the details, such as the Rate the Dates reality show where Edie or her twin sister appeared opposite "Cash Champagne," or the mysterious "Benning wedding curse" that is alluded to but never explained. I have to cut the book a bit of slack, because it's the third in a trilogy, but good Lord. Also, there were about as many clothing descriptions in this thing as you'd find in a bad fanfic.
Ugh.
Quotations:
When he'd first seen the identical twin sisters together, he'd been able to tell them apart immediately. The women were identical, yes. And yet, there was something so different about their essence. Both were about five foot five. Both had worn their feathered blond hair blown straight, and both had blue eyes the color of robins' eggs on a foggy morning.
Edie shrugged as he used the chopsticks to further fish around the platter, her throat tightening as his knee suddenly knocked hers under the table. It instantly corrected itself, pulled away, changed its mind, then found hers again, this time pressuring firmly. He had nice knees, too. Big and hard. More square than rounded.
Even from here, he could see the pulse vibrating in her throat, and now he realized she was chattering because she was nervous. So was he. Especially since he was lying to her about his identity.
A romantic at heart, she'd read countless novels about love, and she'd even memorized some of the world's greatest poetry.
He'd always been so damn artistic for a guy, too emotional. Passionate. (NB This is Seth/Jimmy's interior monologue. -M.R.)
Current Distractions, Belated January 2011 Edition
A Story
I was away on a remote jobsite somewhere north of 55 degrees latitude for the end of the month, given about one day worth of notice, and without a good source of internet access during the evenings, so I'm unfortunately posting this a few days late. It was the farthest I'd ever been in that direction and before I left I wasn't really sure what to expect, besides a complete lack of 3G coverage. (So I guess you could say that my expectations were met.)
The evening before I left, I texted my friend Anne that I hoped I wouldn't get eaten by a wolf. I was mostly joking.
When I landed at the site airport at the end of a much-delayed flight, accompanied by a sense of impending adventure and the naked sensation of not carrying a cellphone, one of the guys from my company picked me and the other newcomers up at the terminal's back door.
"Welcome to site," he said as he drove us toward our lunch. "It's fucking cold and there's wolves all around us."
Because the former was true, I had a nervous feeling that the latter might be, too. And it was. I found out in orientation a few hours later that there was a wolf attack here not terribly long ago. A matter of years, but still.
So seriously, let's hope I don't get eaten by a wolf when I go back. I'll keep you posted.
Some Links
I spent the better part of January trying to get myself to stop wasting all of my free time on the internet. Getting sent to the wilderness will be just the kick in the pants that I need, but in the meantime, maybe I can pass my addictions along to the rest of you?
First, I spend way too much time reading The A.V. Club. In fact, just by going there to get the link, I ended up spending ten minutes reading stuff just now. The best tv reviews around (okay fine, the only tv reviews that I read), interviews, and entertainment news that's so sarcastic that it makes you forget you're reading entertainment news. You guys should all know about this.
Next, I've somehow been getting more into the skeptic, um, movement (?) as I simultaneously fall further down the gender issues and geek rabbit holes. Skepchick is the blog I follow most closely at the moment, and I'll keep you posted if anything else comes up.
And I know I've mentioned The Cinema Snob in another one of these posts, but why not just go check out That Guy With The Glasses in its hilarious entirety? I recommend... everything on there. For reals.
Finally, if I could link you to my Tumblr dashboard, I would. But Self Care is probably my current favourite web-based breath of fresh air. Point your SAD in this direction.
I was away on a remote jobsite somewhere north of 55 degrees latitude for the end of the month, given about one day worth of notice, and without a good source of internet access during the evenings, so I'm unfortunately posting this a few days late. It was the farthest I'd ever been in that direction and before I left I wasn't really sure what to expect, besides a complete lack of 3G coverage. (So I guess you could say that my expectations were met.)
The evening before I left, I texted my friend Anne that I hoped I wouldn't get eaten by a wolf. I was mostly joking.
When I landed at the site airport at the end of a much-delayed flight, accompanied by a sense of impending adventure and the naked sensation of not carrying a cellphone, one of the guys from my company picked me and the other newcomers up at the terminal's back door.
"Welcome to site," he said as he drove us toward our lunch. "It's fucking cold and there's wolves all around us."
Because the former was true, I had a nervous feeling that the latter might be, too. And it was. I found out in orientation a few hours later that there was a wolf attack here not terribly long ago. A matter of years, but still.
So seriously, let's hope I don't get eaten by a wolf when I go back. I'll keep you posted.
Some Links
I spent the better part of January trying to get myself to stop wasting all of my free time on the internet. Getting sent to the wilderness will be just the kick in the pants that I need, but in the meantime, maybe I can pass my addictions along to the rest of you?
First, I spend way too much time reading The A.V. Club. In fact, just by going there to get the link, I ended up spending ten minutes reading stuff just now. The best tv reviews around (okay fine, the only tv reviews that I read), interviews, and entertainment news that's so sarcastic that it makes you forget you're reading entertainment news. You guys should all know about this.
Next, I've somehow been getting more into the skeptic, um, movement (?) as I simultaneously fall further down the gender issues and geek rabbit holes. Skepchick is the blog I follow most closely at the moment, and I'll keep you posted if anything else comes up.
And I know I've mentioned The Cinema Snob in another one of these posts, but why not just go check out That Guy With The Glasses in its hilarious entirety? I recommend... everything on there. For reals.
Finally, if I could link you to my Tumblr dashboard, I would. But Self Care is probably my current favourite web-based breath of fresh air. Point your SAD in this direction.
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