This weekend momebie alerted me to this project that a bunch of fellow editors and whatnot were planning on called Filling in the Gaps. A list of a 100 books that you never read but felt that maybe you should, books that you maybe wouldn't read if left to your own devices. I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but my list isn't so much books I SHOULD read as books I really want to read but never got around to for various reasons. Also I'm not giving myself a time limit (for now, at least), partially because I feel I can read 100 books in WAY less than 5 years. But we'll see.

This is my list. The top 20 or so are books I own but haven't read yet or books I've read about half of and then never finished for various reasons -- could be the library knocking down my door, could be I lost interest and/or focus, could be I put it down and forgot I was reading it. Some are a bunch of books by the same author and I am set to read at least one (aside from the Thursday Next books and the L.A. Quartet of which I intend to read all).

At some point I will probably add more books to this list, especially instead of the ones I've never finished. God Is Not Great and Wicked in particular are some I have about half a dozen at most chapters left of, so they feel kind of like a cop out.

( The List. )

First things first, Aly and I wrote another, well, I'm hesitant to call it fic, but at 3000 words, what else is it? For the female Fight Club 'verse, anyway. Can be found here.

This comm is where we are going to be posting all the snippets and discussions about this verse, so if you're interested you should follow it. I kind of feel like I should tell you right now, though, that these aren't actually finished, polished fics. This is mostly Aly and me emailing each other back and forth, and really the only beta process they go through is me trying to catch all the weird word choices and misspellings and grammar fail as I post them. It's rough, is what I'm trying to say. And maybe it'll be finished, polished fic out of it some day, but today is not that day.

From, well. My flist really: "This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes
3. The Belgariad by David Eddings
3. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
4. The Truth by Terry Pratchett
5. Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi
6. Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones
7. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
8. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
12. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
13. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
14. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
15. Glasblåsarns Barn by Maria Gripe

Yesterday I had a meeting with my contact person at the employment agency and he was kind of marvelous and lovely in every way, so I went away feeling pretty good about that and not anxious at all. Weather was wonderful -- not very sunny, mind, but about 20 or so degrees and I went out in a hoodie and no jacket -- and I read Crime and Punishment all the way down. No one told me that was actually a decent book.

( My day yesterday, plus a photograph. Birches are getting leafy, so you can imagine how I feel. )

Today, I was feeling lazy, contemplating to go to the social insurance office but being anxious and stupid about it and watching Hairspray videos of my favorite songs (Zac Efron, stop being charming right this minute!), and my doorbell rang. Bzuh? I thought and went to open the door. My mail man stands there, saying, "I have a letter for you, but it's huge, so I'll bring it up for you later."

( There is no amount of flail in the world to convey how much I love today as well. )

When I was about, oh, nine or ten years old one of my very, very favorite books to read was The Secret Garden, also by Hodgson Burnett. I knew she had written other books, but that was my happy place to come back to again and again. Even now, reading about little Missee Sahib Mary brings me back to being ten and almost being able to smell India -- although I mix that book up with another of my happy places, which was a Harlequin romance of a young Indian girl, and I always start thinking of tigerlilies for some reason. Anyway!

But A Little Princess, now. It's not quite what The Secret Garden is, and I suppose it never could be since so much of my childhood lives inside that book, but it is a perfectly lovely story once you get into it. The story, however, takes a long goddamn time to start, and I was kind of bored with the lack of progress in almost the full first half of the book. Allow me to spoil it for you: Sara Crewe is sent to boarding school, wears lots of pretty dresses, is a perfect, lovely child, pretends she's a princess and makes friends.

It does give you that warm, glowy feeling inside, though, about how little Princess Sara is all alone in the world and is sent out to do slave work for no gratitude just because she's unexpectedly poor. It's like every fairy tale ever told -- poor little orphaned girl who is treated horrible and gets her comeuppance in the end. It's the kind of book that leaves you with a satisfied sigh, just like a child's book is supposed to. It's a proper happy ending for everyone involved, except the bad guys. I think I would probably enjoy these books more if it weren't for the, shall we say, problematic view of the Indian natives. A product of its time, I suppose.

In the end, lovely book, makes you happy and fuzzy, but lacks a certain something in the pace department.

Grade: B-

One of the things I always notice when I read Palahniuk is that I always get this feeling like there's a space behind the words, something big and dark and echoing and not exactly scary but unsettling. Reading this guy's books will invariably leave me unsettled, and in many cases also kind of squirmy. Physically uncomfortable.

Haunted, however, takes the cake in this respect. The worst thing about a book is that you can't look away. Squeezing your eyes shut won't make the damn thing go away, you can't just wait for the scene to change. You have to read through it, or you skip it and possibly miss something in the book.

After the first chapter and the story about Saint Gut-Free, "Guts", you are however almost desensitized to the rest of it. No matter what kind of gore happens in the rest of the book -- to teeth, to fingers, to genitals, to rectums (don't ask), to eyes, to all those things that most people in the world are afraid of losing or hurting, because dying is honestly so much better -- nothing beats Guts. By 2007, by Palahniuk's own account, 73 people had fainted as he read that short story.

Haunted is made up of 24 short stories about a bunch of people locked inside an old building. At first, the short stories seem almost trivial -- gory, oh, yes -- but the further they go, the more interesting they get. They're upsetting, but of course they are, this is Horror with a capital H, and many times I was left shouting at the book in frustration. I do this sometimes, it's not unusual.

However, this is the first time that I dearly wished that the entirety of the main cast would just DIE already. Well. Miss Sneezy and Mrs. Clark could live, I liked them, and maybe also the Missing Link, but all the rest of them could just hurry up and kick it. This doesn't happen often. As far as I recall, I've only ever read one book -- or really, series -- where I wanted the majority of all the characters to just fuck themselves and that was when I read the Dragonlance chronicle back in high school.

It came to the point where the short stories -- although invariably about death in one shape or another -- became a relief and a fresh breath from wanting to bang my head against the wall. This has nothing to do with shoddy authorship, mind you, no, Palahniuk did a splendid job with MAKING me hate their guts. But already in the first couple of chapters, their greed and want for fame and sheer IDIOCY drive them to a point where I was just gaping at the page, spluttering.

Aside from the rage (I have very little patience with stupid, greedy people, which is why I heartily dislike, for example, characters like Denethor in LoTR, it's a thing) and headdesking, it's actually not a bad book, even when it approaches gorn in levels of grossness. It's definitely worth it, if you can handle that sort of thing. I'm not very sensitive, but it took me a week to get over the GROSS WRONG TRAUMATIZED FOR LIFE reaction to above mentioned first chapter and could safely read on. It's been a month, at least, since I started reading it (look at all the books I got in while avoiding it) and I'm STILL incredibly grossed out and squicked by that chapter. Just. Augh. *shudder*

Grade: B+

So! Middle of the night last night I finished Let The Right One In (which I refer to by it's English title, despite having read it in Swedish, it's easier that way), and I was dead fucking tired so I thought I'd save the review to the morning. After a night of restless dreaming about it -- no, seriously -- here we are.

This book is fucking amazing. If you like horror, you should read it. If you like vampires, you should read it. Hell, if you like BOOKS, you should read it. I was amazingly creeped out by the whole thing, and honestly there are not even that many deaths. It's kind of gory in some places, but in a way that just sends chills down your spine (my twitter feed and Facebook saw me flail all over the place yesterday, "THE EAR OH DEAR GOD THE EEEEEEEEEEAARRRRRRRR").

I think what I found most amazing is that you sympathize with these characters. Almost every single one of them, at least the ones that we actually get to see the world out of, all the POV characters, are all sympathetic in one way or the other, even when they do completely despicable things. For example, Håkan, the murderer at the very beginning, is a pedophile and completely pathetic, but even through the revulsion at what he's doing, I couldn't help but to feel for him, some shred of sympathy. And that, my friends, is a pretty fucking good quality to have in a writer. Lindqvist manages that, and I have no idea how. Even the bullies somehow make sense.

It is a very Swedish book, or at least I think so. There's that feeling of Swedish suburb, of 1980's, of the... brownness that the 80's never really managed to sweep away. The dark and the snow and the middle of Sweden with it's Stockholmness and whiny dialects. But it works for this book, and it keeps working it until I was so freaked out last night that I jumped a mile when the neighbors made a noise, convinced somebody -- vampires! murderers! -- was in my very dark living room.

So, yes. In short, read it. Now.

Grade: A

I bought books today! I shouldn't have, I know, but I figured it was a bit of an early birthday gift to myself, so I could indulge a little. I've got about 1600kr left on my account, so I allowed myself. I bought a paperback called The Honoured Society which is a history of the Sicilian Mafia, and a paperback copy of Let The Right One In (initial impression: "good, interesting, AUGH AUGH PEDOPHILIA AUGH, goddamn Swedish authors, JESUS," though it isn't actually half bad). I wanted to buy Mötley Crüe's The Dirt and Jenna Jameson's autobiography (two in a package! both by Neil Strauss!) but I would really rather read The Dirt in English, since I started reading my brother's copy and kind of got caught that way. Wouldn't mind checking through Jenna Jameson's book though, since I really do enjoy Neil Strauss' writing.

Therapy went well, we talked about methods to deal with my depression -- the general, crippling sadness that comes over me sometimes and that almost made me burst into tears over an article about the fall of the Berlin Wall today -- to see if there's anything I can do without resorting to drugs. I have to say, though, that I am curious about what it would be like to not feel so sad I can barely move and if medicines could help me with that. Might be nice.

Lastly, I wasn't going to initially, but then it's been kind of an... intense weekend. Week. Month. Whatevs.

characters of love

This is the fourth book off that list I'm finishing off and this was yet another one of those that felt like a personal triumph. Originally I was to read it for my history of literature and culture class but I only got through half of it that time, despite it being a short, short thing of 110 pages in paperback. I still managed that class though, so, hah.

But anyway, Heart of Darkness. It was first published in 1902 so of course it's fucking racist, with more than one reference to cannibals, savages and witch-doctors, but despite all this I actually really liked it. I like Conrad's style, despite the unreliable narrators and jumping back and forth in the timeline at odd points. He manages to set the scene very well -- the heat, the forest, the mud and fog and the flies -- and the beginning of the last chapter, when they find Kurtz, is deliciously sinister. (The heads! Oh, the horror, the horror!)

I'm not going to say much about it. It's an okay book, not fantastic, not the kind of book that makes me sigh when I close it, wishing for more, and not the kind of book that leaves me with one hand on the cover, staring out at nothing while I try to convince my brain to stop trying to crawl out my ears. But I like it, so.

Grade: B

I finally, finally finished Language Myths -- another one of those God Is Not Great type books that takes foreeeeeever to finish -- and my iTunes, in a fit of stunning appropriateness, started playing Händel's Hallelujah! from the Messiah oratorio.

What to say about Language Myths, though. It's not a very heavy book as such, it's just a collection of 21 essays on various myths regarding language, but it is a textbook and you know how dry essayists can be. The myths are on everything from how Americans are destroying the English language to how some languages have no grammar to how black children are verbally deprived to how women talk too much. This being me, I really enjoyed the chapters on the cultural aspects; I found maybe especially the chapter on differences between the sexes interesting -- men actually talk more than women in a mixed gender conversation, but the social belief is that what men say are of the utmost importance, while women natter -- and the chapters on racial differences.

It's a very interesting book if you're at all interested in languages, no doubt about it. I originally bought it as course literature for my sociolinguistics class, and even though I only trudged through the first half before I started that class, I still found it fairly helpful. I was also forcefully reminded of the conversations I've had with Steph and Bee about accents and American English, especially the last chapter on Americans ruining the supposed sanctity of the English language. It also hit me just then how often we end up at linguistics in our conversations, at least Steph and I. Oh, well, everybody geeks out about something, I suppose.

So. All in all. Interesting book, not stellar. Some essays better than others, definitely, and some so very, very dreary. I mean, it did further my education, but in general terms it's actually a pretty forgettable book.

Grade: C verging on B-

I posted Calle's (the nephew) Easter card earlier and I'm fiercely proud of him right now -- he's not even 5 years old and he can spell his own name, that's pretty cool, I think. I learned to read and write when I was 5-ish, and I'm very pleased that Calle seems to have an interest for it. Neither of my cousins did -- my youngest cousin still reads and writes pretty poorly, and she's 9 -- so it's reassuring that he's interested in it.

But I started thinking about it, and man, it's gotta be really fucking weird to learn to read. I don't know if what I'm remembering is the actual sequence of events -- I remember sitting on Dad's lap with a Pippi Longstocking book as he sounded out the words for me, and me getting incredibly frustrated and angry because all I saw was black scratches on a yellowed page, smelling that way old books smell, and I knew that there was a secret to it, a secret inside the book, because my sister and my mother used to read what I saw as virtual tomes and I wanted to know what was so special with it. I mean, I've loved stories since I was a kid, I've made up stories since before I can remember, so to have stories told to you without having to whine Mom and Dad into reading them for you was incredibly tempting. I got angry, I gave up, all the damn time, only to five minutes later come back and do it all again with a stone-faced expression and a glare that DARED Dad to say anything. Stubborn as anything, but of course. I'm my parents' child.

In my memory, it's spring, but I may be wrong. In my memory, the kitchen table is still standing in the middle of the kitchen, the way it used to before Mom decided she needed more room and bought a kitchen island. In my memory, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table, chin in her hand, watching us, Dad is sounding stuff out, I'm on his lap, holding the book, frowning and trying my damndest. In my memory, the page is nothing but a mass of sticks and halfmoons, until it isn't anymore.

I don't know if that was the way it really happened. Probably not. But the way I remember it was that it went from confusion to clarity in an instant. One second the letters made no sense, the next... "Hennes hår hade samma färg som en morot och var flätat i två hårda flätor som stod rätt ut. Hennes näsa hade samma fason som en mycket liten potatis, och den var alldeles prickig av fräknar. Under näsan satt en verkligen mycket bred mun med friska, vita tänder..."

Hey, Pippi Longstocking. She made sense.

I remember shouting, "Mom! I can READ!" and Mom laughing and Dad sighing in relief. And from there on out there was just no going back. By the time I was 11 or so I had -- and believe me, I counted, several times -- read 700+ books, counting the children's books with pictures. And then I didn't even BEGIN to count all the books I had ever borrowed from the library.

It took me another three years to puzzle out the mystery of that magical device, the clock, and that was only months after I had learned how to swim. I was 9 before I learned how to ride a bike. Everything else was kind of blah and whatever. But reading? That's possibly the only thing I've EVER been stubborn about learning, ever. It's the only thing I've been wanting to know how to do NOW, right fast and pronto.

So yeah. And here we are.

What the actual fucking fuckhell? What kind of terrifying drugs are Amazon on?

If you were in any way unaware -- Amazon has been stripping sales figures and accompanying rankings of a bunch of erotica, LGBTQ books and romance, completely arbitrarily and without seeming thought. This means they won't show up in searches or whatever and it's being a royal bitch. To wit: the Playboy Penthouse something or other book featuring, I assume, half-naked girls in bunny suits is still there. Lady Chatterley's Lover isn't. John Barrowman's biography isn't. A queer YA novel isn't. Student lit and the history of homophobia isn't.

Somebody over at Amazon has shit for brains, so right now I'm helping out in hitting them where it hurts, which is their PR department. Amazon Rank over on Smart Bitches is where you can find more information on this crap.

This post brought to you by Smart Bitches and Google Bombing. Have good night all.

ETA: I just sent a pretty snippy email to Amazon at ecr@amazon.com. The sum of it was basically, "you suck," but I was actually a little polite. I only used the word "disgusting" once!

Good morning all, and happy birthday to Mr. Gerard Arthur Way (esquire) and Miss Maryam, idktbh.

I've got shit to do today -- room to clean, etc. -- so I figured I would get this over with now, before I forget. (I kind of feel like my LJ is getting really dull lately. I blame twitter.) Anyway!

I managed to finish Vanity Fair last night! *waits patiently for the applause to die down* You're impressed, I know.

So Vanity Fair, what to say about it? It's a behemoth first of all. The paperback I have is nearly 700 pages long and the text is fairly tiny. It's not something you notice, at first, but then you've read 200 pages and it feels like you've gotten nowhere. That's kind of the problem with writers of that era, I feel. They're some verbose motherfuckers. Thackeray's working it, though, because Vanity Fair was worth every penny spent.

The book details the lives, more or less, of not!heroines Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley. Becky is a poor, unfortunate girl who wants nothing more than to get somewhere in life and she is completely amoral. Lying is like second nature to that girl. Amelia on the other side of the coin is Becky's complete opposite, passive wallflower type person, completely emotionally devoted and dependent on her dickhead husband and initially pretty horrid son. Considering her for a moment, she really is no more pleasant than Becky is, but we can pretend.

I'm not really sure what to say about Vanity Fair. It's a monster, that's for sure, and it's not something you wish to read if you want sympathetic characters -- the one truly sympathetic character is William Dobbin, and he's love's bitch from start to finish -- or a truly happy ending. But it is actually a good book, even though it takes FOREVER to get to a point. It's a satire and social commentary, so Thackeray spends almost 700 pages dripping sarcasm over everything, and it still works is the thing. Most of the names and the digs within them fly over most of our heads today (Becky Sharp's lawyers are called Burke, Thurtell and Hayes, named after three murderers of the time), but hey, it's still funny. I thought it was funny. Might just be me.

Even as I spend at least half the book wanting to slap characters left, right and center (admittedly not uncommon for me, I spend most books feeling this way), you can't help wondering what will befall these creatures. The language is fantastic, it's actually FUNNY (which, in my opinion, most comedies/satires of this time are not), and it really details the spirit of the time. Personally, I loved the bits about the war and Waterloo and the mad dash to get out of Brussels when it looked like Napoleon was going to cream the English army.

All in all, I recommend it, but it is a book you want to take your time reading. If you're short for time, the Reese Whitherspoon movie is actually not half bad and as a synopsis it works fairly well -- and hey, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys Myers and Rhys Ifans (who may not be hot like burning, but is a fucking awesome actor to make up for it). Romola effing Garai. God, it's Eye Candy City down there, and JRM gets to be very haughtily unpleasant, which is always fun to watch. He's got a face made for sneering, that boy.

But that is really beside the point. To make a very long and not very well put-together review short, I liked it, you'll like it too, read it, go on. *shoos you*

Grade: B+

I've always noticed that one of the best way to make me remember a book -- no matter how horrible -- is for me to write some sort of a review on it, and I intend to do this for as many of the FitG books as I can.

I managed to finally get through the last chapters of Christopher Hitchen's God Is Not Great a little while ago. This is a book that takes the concept of religion and completely disassembles it. It's not flawless, far from it, and the last couple of chapters are pretty heavy handed with the author's concept of the Enlightenment, but overall it's very, very interesting.

There are chapters on how religion is hazardous to your health and on how religion takes the concept of sexuality and turns sexual frustration into something approaching a weapon. There are parts about how religion actually doesn't make people better, but instead promotes war, torture, totalitarianism, the end of the world, child abuse and sexual violence. There is even a chapter on why religion hates pigs.

This isn't a book to read if you're very fond of your religious convictions. My first impression when I started reading this was that this guy had balls of steel. He doesn't make excuses for being an atheist, on the contrary, and he isn't afraid of outlining point for point exactly what is fucked up with not only all of the major (and not so major) Western religions, but with the so called Eastern solution, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well. Say what you want, but you gotta be impressed with a guy who will stand up and say, "Gandhi did a lot of good things, relatively speaking, but he was also kind of a dick," just for example.

All in all, it's a great read, and it's really interesting if you're at all interested in religion. It takes up ALL the things that are not so good with religion, and it's an excellent counterargument to all sorts of religious texts.

Grade: B

"[Catholic] Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more importantly) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler's invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War."

Am I the only one who kind of wants to write an alternate history now where the entire Catholic church turned Nazi and, like, went on another crusade or something along the lines?

Also!



The best of both worlds I feel. Seriously, read the first three chapters here.

Drive-by book rec.

Swedish literature isn't big out there, unless your name is Astrid Lindgren and you've written Pippi Longstocking. Believe me, though, if there is one book by one Swedish author you want to read, it's this one.

Popular music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi. To quote the review I just linked: "More generally, Popular Music from Vittula offers a tender glimpse into a less trendy Sweden: Miles away from the urbane Stockholm or fashionable Malmö in the south, Vittula is almost another universe, surrounded by tundra and taiga, forest and potato field. In Vittula, one is as likely to speak Finnish as Swedish, and young boys and old folk alike may distill homemade alcohol from yeast and sugar." Here, have another review I found hilarious.

When I read this book for the first time, it didn't matter that Pajala is 300km east and closer to the Finnish border than where I grew up. It didn't matter that the book details a boy growing up in the '60s. It didn't matter, because when I read it, all I could think was, "yes. This is it, this is IT." I kept quoting it at everyone who wanted to listen, saying, "this is how it was, this is what growing up was like." Reading it was an experience, to say the least.

And I kept laughing, because yeah, men and women alike really are that manly where I'm from. It could have been a story of my own family 30 years later for all the ridiculousness it details.

So, yeah. Read it.

You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base.

Look, with my track record and fondness for the scum of the Earth, is it any fucking wonder I have a kitchen kink the size of Nebraska? Why are there not more AUs along these lines? Guys? Anyone?

So here's the thing. Considering my condition, I should not be reading postmodernist work. I shouldn't be reading horror stories. I shouldn't be reading books that play on my emotions like a fiddle, scraping them raw and leave me feeling vaguely paranoid and weirded out. I shouldn't, because considering my depression, if I was depressed and anxious and panicky before, these things should make me even more so.

So, I shouldn't want to read Palahniuk right now, right? The mindfuckery and twists of those books should leave me feeling so paranoid and weirded out and anxious that I should be wanting to check out any minute, to be completely fucking frank.

It's not just Palahniuk, of course it isn't. Postmodern lit in general is pretty fucking depressing, because a nihilistic world view is kind of a staple for the genre. Nothing gets better. There are no happy endings. Ever. We're inevitably heading for death and pain and suffering, and life isn't pretty, so literature shouldn't sugarcoat.

"Everybody wanting the same mass-marketed crap. Saying it's for their kid, but really it's not. All these fat, middle-aged dumbshits just want something to kill time. Nothing dark and edgy or challenging. Nothing artsy.

Just so long as it's got a happy ending."

The opposite of that kind of stuff, you know what I mean? Oh, I'm generalizing, of course I am, genres are never that simple, but generally speaking, you pick up these kinds of books -- one of the ~artistic~ ones -- you'll always leave feeling creeped out of your skull. "[T]he discomfort and the feeling at the end like someone reached into your skull and grabbed a chunk of your cerebral cortex in their fist, that's probably how you know it's literature".

Of course, every time I finish one of these things, I should, rightfully, be ready to hide under the covers and moan about the futility of life and the black pit of despair that is my soul etc. etc. for a week before I'd shake the funk off and repeat the process because I'm a masochist and a moron. And yet, and yet.

That never happens is the point I'm trying to make. Doesn't matter how awful the subject matter of how much it makes me feel like my brain is curling up in a corner to whimper pathetically, I've never thus far where I've reached the point where I go, "OH GOD WHAT IS THE POINT?" and hide, shivering for a month. On the contrary, at the end I usually end up more, "huh" than despairing, and creeped out though I may be, I always reach for the next one.

I suppose this is what people who love roller coasters feel like. Slow build, adrenaline pumping, and then the plummet, again and again. And to think I never liked roller coasters at all.

By the end, it's almost like. I don't know. A new resolve, perhaps? A creative boost? Something that makes you think, that makes you feel, that makes you appreciate on another level. I can't read a book without adapting something from it -- the mood, the speech patterns, whatever, I even Tyler Durden'd at Bee before, that was fun. There's always something I take with me. By the end of Fight Club I looked up, took a deep breath and felt like I wanted to give the entire world the finger.

Also, it's pretty sad when you realize that Ryan Ross' brain suddenly makes PERFECT sense. Maybe this is why the idiot can never surprise me that much, outside of his really rather macabre sartorial choices.

Palaaaaaaaaahhniuuuuuk.

I'm starting to get that creeping feeling of "augh, my brain is trying to crawl out my ears" that signals the impending mindfuck, but man, I have BOOKS. Using my Ryan icon, because I feel he's my ally in weirdass post-post-modern lit (also, I really want to read Kerouac again for some reason).

In other words, I have books, I'm reading them and I'll be checked out from reality for the nearest week or so. &BOOKS;

Remember how I talked about pictures before? Well, here they are.

( Getting the mail today was a little bit like Christmas Eve. Presents? FOR ME? )

Merry Christmas everyone! Man, I miss you guys. I have to admit though, I'm a little daunted by the sheer amount of entries on my flist. What have I missed the past what, three or four days?

Got books for Christmas, books and CDs (Tom Waits! !! !!!! *flail*). Have been reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Secret Garden and now I'm in on Palahniuk's Diary, facepalming all the way through it every time I see a "Just for the record, the weather today..." On the upside, it's a great book. On the downside, nihilism is one serious mindfuck, as much as I love it. I got Diary and Rant for Christmas by my siblings, and the grin on my face when I tore off the paper was epic.

I'm writing again, in my own diary. I have ideas for stories too, but my NaNo is stuck where it is. I'm thinking of making it a New Years Resolution to finish it. Had a moment today, where I was convinced of my own creative uselessness. I'm not a very good artist in any way, though I certainly have enough shittiness to spare.

Anyway. Christmas with the family is not so conductive for keeping up with fandom and the flist. Hopefully I'll be back more after New Years, we'll see. I miss you all, anyway. ♥