Came across a site I hadn't heard of before: Fail Blog. It shows real-life examples of "fail" -- pictures of accidents or mistakes, mostly -- in one convenient location, with comments enabled for easy mocking.

Most of them are pictures, and I don't find most of them amusing, because we've all been that person who totally wiped out and fell face-forward onto hard, rainy pavement. So a picture of that happening to someone else elicits mostly pity and "ouch!" from me, not laughter.

But this actual example of an entry has me... laughing, I guess, even as I fear for the youth of today. Read on:

book rental service?

was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like…video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person had read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc

Oh, wow. There really only is one thing to say:

FAIL. 

Just finished reading a fascinating, although disturbing, article from the October 2007 LA Weekly: The Life and Death of Jesse James. Author Harlan Ellison features as a side character in the central story of a real-life case of internet identity fraud and emotional victimization. (Article contains some strong language.)

A handy reminder to us all: You should try to actually meet someone in person before becoming romantically involved with him/her. As the article so wisely says,

Ever since we crawled out of the mud and started hitting each other over the head with rocks, attraction has worked this way: I see you across the room. You see me. Something clicks. We approach. We talk. If there’s some kind of connection between our inner selves — even if it’s just a mutual desire to rub chocolate pudding over each other’s naughty bits — we get on with the business at hand. But the Internet has turned things upside down. Now, things work the other way around. Our inner selves meet and connect, and then we get to the raw, physical-attraction thing. And while it’s painful to learn that someone you find physically attractive doesn’t go for you, how much more painful to find that someone whose soul speaks to you across the series of tubes that make up the World Wide Web doesn’t go for your fat ass and spotty face.

But the story is much more interesting than that. It's a very strange window into the world of a very strange, sad, twisted person who preys on the honest emotions of others. You should read it.

And, in the chronicles of synchronicity, Andrew got home a bit ago and, after hearing about the fascinating article I had just finished, showed me the book he had literally just finished a few minutes before, Isaac Asimov's book "Murder at the ABA," which is dedicated to none other than Harlan Ellison.

It's a Harlan Ellison Fest around here, I tell you.

Now I'll actually have to read some of his stuff... Feel free to comment with your outrage over me not having read any Harlan Ellison before... but only if you tell me what to read first, OK?

It seems that Miskatonic University is online, and has been for some time.

Why was I not informed? And more importantly, what is their fight song??

Here is a quiz thing that's been going around. The point is to measure how well-read you are in The Classics. (Not the Classics I majored in, Latin and Greek -- "classics" as in Moby Dick.)

Apparently the list is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded but you never actually crack the cover. I have to say, though, that some of these are not "The Classics" as I would define them.

The directions:
"Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. (I did both where I read the book in school, but I had already read it on my own beforehand.) Put an asterisk (*) next to the ones you'd read again or recommend to someone, even if you originally read them for school."


There are a lot of books that aren't on this list but should be, IMO. Ah well. Mine not to quibble with the silly internet quiz thing.

I did not complete a book in March to review for your delectation. What can I say. There were Things going on. Lots and lots of Things.

I may have set myself up for failure, though. I attempted to read Godel, Escher, Bach, which is not fiction, is extremely long, and is (to put it nicely) challenging.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it -- when I manage to read parts of it. I ought to enjoy it, after all -- a few months ago I took some random OK Cupid test (which I don't seem to have saved here on my LJ, for some unfathomable reason), and I tested "as" this book. (Again, for some unfathomable reason.)

So I figured I ought to eat this book up with a spoon.

In February I managed to finish Children of God, the sequel to The Sparrow, which I read in January. Woo hoo; go me!

I didn't like Children of God nearly as much. I think there were several reasons, but they can be boiled down into trying to do too much in one book. I feel she should either have truncated and shrunk the plot -- which I don't recommend-- or else broken the action up into two books, thrown more nuances and wrinkles and action into the plot, and in general spent more time doing things a bit better.

And now for the spoilers.

 

I managed to read a novel in January, "The Sparrow," by Mary Doria Russell, thus tying my entire consumption of novels for 2007. (From here on, it's all gravy!) As promised, here is my review.



There's a sequel, "Children of God." I've been assured that it redeems some of the tragedy suffered by the characters in "The Sparrow." I hope I can find the time to get started on it in February, because I hate to leave things this way in my mind. 

At this point, having committed literally scores of children's books to memory after reading them hundreds of times, I consider myself a conissieur of the genre. And I'm here to tell you that some truly dreadful writing somehow makes it into print. Come on, people, just because it's a book for kids doesn't mean you can just phone it in! Put some effort into it!

We own a big thick book called "Fisher-Price Reader Readers: Stage 1: Preschool - Grade 1." I forget where we got it; it may have been handed down or bought at a thrift store. It seems to be a compilation of stories that weren't good enough to be published on their own. I suppose it's unfair of me to pick on a book like that, but honestly -- come on, Fisher-Price! Don't buy 10 bad children's stories and publish them as a compilation and expect not to get mocked. Not when the stories are this bad.

In a recent post I bemoaned the effect that an infant and a two-year-old are having on my intellectual life. Well, things just got a whole lot more literal.

In a lot of the end-of-2007 quizzes I'm seeing on my friends' pages, they list something like "Best book" or "Favorite book" of 2007.

I thought back... racked my brains... racked them harder... and realized that I read ONE book last year, as far as I can remember. One.


(EDITED 01-06) I just remembered that I also read "The Five Love Languages" in 2007. As a how-to fixit-type manual for relationships, it doesn't count as a novel, but I'm relieved to have increased my 2007 tally by 100%.

TWO books isn't quite so pathetic. Is it? Is it?

:-P

Fall's been my favorite season ever since I can remember. Pretty leaves, not sweating, getting to go back to school, seasonal pumpkin- and harvest-related festivities, and pretty stars at night in the chill air.

I can tell it's fall here because the sun is now setting before the hypermuffin's bedtime (currently 8 PM). And because my feet  are cold.

The girls are both sleeping; or at least, the wren is sleeping in her crib in our room, and the hypermuffin is in her room entertaining herself with toys. She'll finally decide to sleep in an hour or so. I love that she can decide on her own when to sleep, and climb into her bed and fall asleep all by herself.

Andrew's off at Rachel's "Seventh Sea" game, probably to be home around midnight or even later; I've already solved the Tanga puzzles for the evening, and the "Kingdom of Loathing" game site is down for its nightly maintenance.

tatterdamelion is off at a Firefly-themed party at the Wayward Coffeehouse, and none of my other friends are online right now for me to bug them over Instant Messenger. Probably  because they all have lives. It is Saturday night, after all.

I'm off for a hot bath and a bit of lit-rit-choor before bedtime.

(later) Read the classic 18th century play "The School for Scandal," smiling at all the various bon mots. Remembered that I'm not as alooooooooooone as I was feeling a few hours ago; Ian visited me earlier in the evening for at least an hour and a half, and tomorrow I'm attending one game from noon to 5:00 and then hosting another game from 6 to whenever it ends (usually 10-ish).

So, decided to enjoy my evening of solitude instead of pouting about it. :-)

Stealing this from splagxna, because it is just too good to pass up an Important Civic-Minded Lesson to be taken Seriously. Yes.

I've been going through my books and old school papers these past few days. Let me tell you, it's not easy to get rid of some of this stuff. But neither do I want to keep storing it.

My criteria for what to keep: If I can imagine reading it again, or referring to it for some reason, or if it has a sentimental value, or I think it'd be good for the girls to have in 10 or 20 years, it stays. The others all go.

And I had a lot of "others" -- expensive and yet required books for classes, gift books I enjoyed at the time but whose time has passed, etc.

The hardest category of books to deal with: Books I bought because they fit an image of myself that turns out not to be true, or that was never true in the first place.

So, my alma mater, St. Olaf College, had a February "online book discussion" that I participated in. We had to read "Giants in the Earth" by Ole Rolvaag and participate in the web-based discussion.

I'm very disappointed with the quality of St. Olaf's technology! I can't even figure out how to "log out" after I'm done -- and the layout certainly can't compare to how a discussion board should look. Fun, easy-to-use discussion boards are all over the internet -- here's one -- so what's so difficult about just using that software? I bet it's even open source, meaning FREE.

I was also disappointed with the discussion itself. There seemed to be a lot of older Oles who logged on in the first few weeks in order to speculate about the type of food eaten by early Norwegian immigrants, whether net emigration from the Midwest can be reversed, etc. But they didn't seem interested in discussing the characters or the plot of the book -- which was kind of the whole point (to me, anyway).

Also, I was checking people's graduation dates, and I was the youngest person I noticed. And at 29, I'm not really that young anymore. Maybe all the other young people were too busy with life to bother with a web-based discussion board. Or maybe anyone with a clue would have taken one look at the format of the board, realized that it would be more trouble than it was worth to participate, and walked away...

Maybe I'm one of the few people who actually enjoyed school and who does miss it. I hear that not everyone feels that way.