books, real life, New Orleans

[chelseagirl]

So much for my self-proclaimed hiatus -- I commented a lot *less* than I ordinarily would have and missed out on some certain-to-have-been fascinating exchanges, and yet I was never really gone. 'Cause of how that working at home thing gets a smidge lonely, though now that one of the post-semester deadlines is met and the other is underway, I can start having a real life again.

Since I haven't been posting, M. and folks from his job went to New Orleans to work for Habitat for Humanity for a week. He came back with my digital camera filled with wreckage pictures and a sense of the vastness of the destruction down there, and how little is really being done to rebuild compared to the scale of the devastation. (I'm looking at *you*, Mister President.) Also stories of accomplishments and fun, and because he was working outside in the 90s, several t-shirts on which the ink had, quite literally, run.

Met his work buds at his supervisor's cookout over the weekend. Quite liked some of them and especially the artist girlfriend of one of his bosses; think I inadvertently terrified his particular female buddy (who is literally half my age) by making the "ah, so you're the competition" joke. (Not *at all* true, or I'd never have said it.) One of the women and I went for a walk around the neighborhood, which is at the end of 3 line in Brooklyn; what does it say about NYC in this day and age that both of us suddenly became paranoid that we looked like real estate speculators?

Out to Jersey for my goddaughter's fourth b'day party. The cake was fascinating -- Maggie has serious allergies to flour, dairy and most of the things that go into cakes, and yet her mom pulled together a quite creditable one out of ingredients like barley flour and tofu. I wouldn't exactly seek out the recipe, but I got through my slice without wincing once.

Recently read: Sorcery and Cecelia, which was already on my wish-list when queenofthorns gave her royal seal of approval, and was terrific fun (and which has triggered many thoughts out why nineteenth century fantasies tend to be sent during the Napoleonic Wars/Regency period in greater numbers than during the high Victorian era -- speculations on that in another post soon), and The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houllebecq, which was loaned to me by someone I felt the need to be polite to and which I'd otherwise never have picked up. I've heard the author is rather dreadful, and one of his protagonists, Bruno, was likewise (I despise reading about unattractive men and their self-centered ambiguities towards the semi-attractive women who may actually agree to have sex with them, simply because they're not drop dead gorgeous), but the other protagonist, his physicist half-brother, actually had some interesting speculations on human evolution and the nature of consciousness and so forth.


Books read in May:
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (work-based reread)
Censoring Culture, ed. Atkins & Mintcheva
Return to the Whorl, Gene Wolfe
I am Legend, Richard Matheson (book group)
Lajja (Shame), Taslima Nasrin
The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Honore de Balzac (ok, it's a novella)
The Man of Feeling, Javier Marias
To Charles Fort, with Love, Caitlin Kiernan
The Court of the Midnight King, Freda Warrington
Sharpe's Trafalgar, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe's Prey, Bernard Cornwell
The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears
Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800-1865, David J. A. Cairns
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik
Anita and Me, Meera Syal
The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houllebecq
Sorcery and Cecilia, Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

Comments

[silme.livejournal.com]

You're going to laugh because I used Sorcery and Cecilia and the letter game as a basis, back in the late '80s, for high-school kids in a creative writing class in which I had them team up and write a story in letter form. I sorta/kinda replicated it here in England with a module for Year 7; A and I put it together last year and it's still being used! I actually wrote a letter to the authors back in the '80s and heard back from Caroline Stevermer who thought it was nifty! :)

I'm glad the New Orleans trip was good in many ways for M and for New Orleans as well. It really does sound as if very little was done to prevent damage and very little is being done now to repair it. :(

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

What fun! The book feels a little bit slight, partly in unfair comparison with JS&MN, but I liked it a *lot*, and have ordered the sequel. How did the students do with this exercise?

He said entire areas -- districts, neighborhoods -- are completely devasted -- uninhabited and uninhabitable. (But hey,let's send the National Guard to the Mexican border instead.) And, as an economic indicator, while everything in the Market in the French Quarter is going scary-cheap, McDonald's jobs are paying $10/hour (even in NYC they pay $7 and less) because so many people have moved away there aren't the people to take them.

[nessreader.livejournal.com]

Am inclined to blame Heyer for seducing last couple of generations of women into loving the regency flavour.[1] (I know Heyer's books were set across about 80 year period and she does it wonderfully: Arabella is right at the beginning of the evangelical revolution where the young generation goes crusading like Fanny Price, v earlyvictorian, but Heyer's primarily associated with empire line gowns.) I was thrilled that it got away from "vaguely medieval" when I found the book first. Sorcery/Cecelia is much much more Heyer than Austen, despite the note at the head of the book listing influences.

Have you read College of Magics, by Stevermer? It's set in alternate Edwardian, with prisoner of zenda type hullaballoo, wicked uncle, finishing school, threatened royal scion, all that. Hugely energetic read, enormous fun.

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[1] Apparently Bujold's Civil Campaign was an overt homage to Heyer. Or so I heard on one of those discussion lists when I huffed about its being too fluffy.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I can definitely buy that for Sorcery and Cecelia, as it didn't really feel "Jane-ish" other than in outward trappings. Of the people whose early 19th c. fantasies I've been reading recently, I'd guess that Stevermer and Wrede were more influenced by Heyer, Susanna Clarke by Austen (and Dickens), and Naomi Novik by Patrick O'Brian. Though I confess I'm far more familiar with Austen (whom I've read and re-re-re-read, and taught and studied) and with O'Brian; I've only read one Heyer.

More later.

[studiesinlight.livejournal.com]

>"and which has triggered many thoughts out why nineteenth century fantasies tend to be sent during the Napoleonic Wars/Regency period in greater numbers than during the high Victorian era -- speculations on that in another post soon"

I'm looking forward to reading those speculations. I suspect that some element of it must be a British thing, because it's so puzzlingly random from my US perspective ...

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

You'd think so, but of the authors I'm thinking of, only Susanna Clarke's English. The women who wrote Sorcery and Cecelia are Americans, as is Naomi Novik of those dragons-in-the-Napoleonic-wars books. Hmm.

[karentoe.livejournal.com]

Great thing that M went out with Habitat for Humanity. My parents' neighbors went out for a couple of weeks earlier this year, too, with their church group.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Hey stranger! Sorry to hear you haven't been well . . .

It was a great experience for him; I'm just happy he's turning into such a do-gooder.