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| Does anyone out there know anything about Jewish holidays? I have to pick books from a list and all I know is that I've already got a gazillion Hanukkah books...
ETA... I've got a midnight deadline on this. *bangs head on desk*
ETA I think I've got it, thanks to everyone who helped or offered to!
*topples into bed* | |
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| http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14681A very old travellers advice book, which I think is going to become one of my favorite references for fantasy travel into wild country, despite its archaic attitudes. Well, maybe because of them. I keep reading and reading and trying to get my eyebrows down from out of my hair as I goggle at the next outrageous example of ethnocentrism or sexism. But it does make me want to play Castle Falkenstein again... | |
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| Now this article raises an interesting question for me. If I were asked to make a list of the top ten books I'd ask straight away my top ten or the world's? Do I choose the books which have influenced my thinking the most or the ones which I reread with the most delight? Do you want "literature" or just pleasure reading. The website for the book under review doesn't help. Although it does give me a list of titles I mean to read, and incentive to go out and buy the book for the summaries. And even if I came up with ten titles, putting them in order would be... well, difficult. If I were to ask the question, I'd say, name ten books which you think will still be of interest to readers in fifty years... Here are mine. Mind you, I'm restricting myself to books I've actually read! The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Even though I like Tom Sawyer better, myself.) The Lord of the Rings (Because I can't imagine it going out of style!) The Canterbury Tales (Because they make the middle ages real!) The Sherlock Holmes stories. (Because a good mystery is always worth reading.) Shakespeare. (As if I have to explain that one!) Les Miserables (Utterly absorbing, actually, once you take the time to start reading it.) Homer (Both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's hard to argue with that many centuries of storytelling goodness. I'd add in the Aeneid by Virgil, but I must shamefacedly admit that I haven't read it. Although the new translation by Robert Fagles has gotten the kind of reviews that tempt even a lazy soul like me.) The Secret Garden and A Little Princess (Ah, my love of children's books overcomes me.) The People of the Deer or Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat taught me to love the arctic tundra.) A Christmas Carol (Never mind that it was meant for a bit of holiday fluff, if you ask me it's the best, tightest writing Dickens ever did.) Mind you, that's a very different list than it would be if I'd asked myself which books I wished would still be of interest to readers in fifty years. Guadalcanal Diary anyone? Edited to add ( Okay, great literature aside, here are twenty-one (or so) books which (if I owned them all) you would have to pry out of my cold dead fingers because I live in the certainty that it would be a stone bitch to replace most of them. Books I love to reread, or which have left me shattered or amazed and unable to forget them. ) | |
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| http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14823087/Little essay on why we don't need reading. Get into the comments and you can see that the bobo responsible thinks he's writing satire, but he's failed to realize that his arguments are likely to be used otherwise. | |
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| http://www.librarything.com/If I can actually make this thing work I'm going to have to get a cellphone... ETA: It seems fairly simple, but it's down at the moment. Looks like everyone found out about it at once! I'll try again in the middle of the night. | |
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| For that next hurt/comfort fic I might write...
It's ridiculously easy to overdo, once you start to feel better.
Ah, well.
Spent part of the day rearranging my bookshelves. I've got about a third of the shifting done now, but it'll have to wait for tomorrow before I tackle any more. I figure that since I can get the shelves now I should put things at least sort of where I want them to be. No fine sorting, in spite of the librarian thing. I just want the fiction over here, the cooking over there, the music around about here, the folktales and poetry somewhere near yonder and the rest of the nonfiction over thataway. Except for the nonfiction that is all about some collection of fiction... mostly... which may end up in with the fiction. *ooh, lookee! Sherlock Holmes!*
I have an edifice of just the pocket sized paperbacks in the middle of the living room, which I intend to sort more finely once I've got the hardbacks and larger paperbacks in their respective homes. Haven't got all of them in the pile yet, and it's already taking on alarming dimensions. By the time I finish building it up I expect I'll be able to throw a blanket over the top and tell people it's the sofa. They'll all end up on the shelves again, naturally, eventually... I just have to stop stopping to read!
;) | |
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| Is it time to go beyond Beaufort?
Mind you, I love the Beaufort scale. It has done tremendous good for weather prediction and for the understanding of the casual weather buff, but I'm beginning to think that we should find new ways to describe Hurricanes and Tropical Cyclones, which is more comprehensive than a definition by wind pressure.
As I understand it, these are the factors which need to be considered...
Wind Speed in the eyewall (present system)
Forward speed of the system
Central pressure
Wind Swaths (by hurricane level, then TS)
Rainfall potential/Inland flooding potential
height of storm surge (length and width? Do storm surges have swaths and can we predict them? Can we measure wave size like a tsunami if we have the buoys in place?)
So, descriptively, the six scales would be
1. as is (Windy, Bad, Worse, Horrible, Disastrous, Catastrophic)
2. Stationary, Meandering, Walking, Trotting, Running, Galloping
3. Pothole, Cellar, Death Valley, Coal Mine, Submarine, Marianas Trench
4. (These describe the zones of affect, ie., if you can expect at worst, tropical storm force winds you're in the "shutters" zone.) Shutters, Tape, Boards, Prayer, Last Will and Testament, Coffin
5. Damp, Wet, Soggy, Soaked, Immersed, Drowning
6. Sea Turtle, Dolphin, Orca, Humpback, Godzilla
No seriously, to show these factors to the public you would probably need a visual rather than a descriptive method. So, use hexagons divided into six triangles (like a Trivial Pursuit gamepiece) and distribute them like pixels across the weathermap with the same color scale for each kind of threat displayed for the location. I'd go from purple for no threat and via blue etc to red for high threat. A glance at the map would show that some areas have a lot more red, and a person could assess their risks by color. Because they're pixels, you can get fine detail as you go further in, so if most of a town is at yellow for flood risk, but the downtown area is at a lower elevation then a closer map would show that part with more orange and reds near the river or inlet which might flood.
Does this make sense to you at all? Because If I try really hard I might manage to draw a picture.
Thanks for all the hard work! | |
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| One of the things about Katrina is that it's making me think more seriously about what I would need and want to have on hand in a crisis where I either needed to bug out or last for a while without a lot of support. And I've found a book I think would benefit anyone else whose thoughts are going in the same direction. Roughing It Easy by Dian Thomas. Not only does it include a great deal of information about cooking over a fire, and tons of recipes, it also includes directions for making your own solar cookers and a lot of other basic things you might need, either on a camping trip, or in case the power is out for an extended period. Lots and lots and lots of pictures and diagrams... ISBN: 0962125733 | |
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| 1) Total number of books owned? roughly 3000, plus whatever's in the boxes. That doesn't count zines, either. 2) The last book I bought? Something From the Oven by Laura Shapiro 3) The last book I read? Last one I read for the first time: More Perfect Than the Moon by Patricia MacLachlan Last one I re-read: A Little Princess4) Five books that mean a lot to me? - Good Night, Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian - The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien - A Solitary Blue (and the rest of the Tillerman books) by Cynthia Voigt - Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken - Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers Mind you, that's a scant fraction of the books I'll reread at the drop of a hat, and if you ask me in a week I'll probably give you five different titles, but those will do for now. 5) Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their LJs: (If they want to, anyway. And haven't done so already, I may have missed them!) ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) belegcuthalion fictualitiesmarioleclever_hobbiti_o_r_h_a_e_l | |
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| Banned books meme. Bold = read it. Italics = read excerpts (at least one chapter or ten pages) Underlined = hated after three pages. ( Read more... ) | |
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| Snowing out, and I'm stuck in, and I can't seem to write or concentrate worth beans. So I'm memeing. gacked from melanieatheneCopy this list of 10 authors. Remove the ones not on your bookshelves and replace each of them with ones that are (replaced authors are in bold, make sure to remove the bold if you match me). 1. Terry Pratchett 2. Stephen King 3. J.R.R. Tolkien 4. Arthur Conan Doyle 5. J.K.Rowling 6. William Shakespeare 7. Mercedes Lackey8. Carl Sagan 9. Edgar Rice Burroughs 10. Anne McCaffrey | |
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| gacked from azur_infinieGrab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...
...along with these instructions."And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him," said Sandyman, the Hobbiton miller. What? You were expecting me to be reading War and Peace? ;) | |
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| gacked from fernwithy
Title: Night Calls (and the sequel Kindred Rites)
Author: Katherine Eliska Kimbriel
Setting: Frontier US, Early 1800's, in an AU where magic works, ghosts and werewolves are a fairly common threat and George Washignton was crowned King.
Main Characters: Alfreda Sorensson, Marta Donaltsson
Plot blurb: As a friend of mine once said, suppose Laura Ingalls Wilder was a Shaman…
Why I like it: Alfreda is a wonderful first person narrator, whose personality comes through. There are tons of details which bring you right into the time and place, and even the "bad guys" have qualities you can sympathise. In the first book Alfreda is just coming to puberty and the realization that she has inherited the same Gifts for magic as her grandmother when her beloved brother is one of several boys in the town who is infected by a werewolf. She also is taken as an apprentice by Marta – a practitioner who is related to the family, and faces her first real test when she and Marta visit a small town which is being haunted by the ghost of a murdered child. In the second book she continues to learn, and is kidnapped by a strange clan of practitioners and only Death can help her survive.
Why (else) I think my f-list, particularly, would like it: Well, actually I think some folks on my list will like it and others will shy away because the books do treat magic seriously. But it's a great coming of age story and a good adventure.
What's not so good about it: Finding the books, actually. The publisher (HarperPrism) marketed the first one as horror and the second one as fantasy when they both belonged firmly on the YA shelves. I guess they just thought they were too fat for teens to read. *rolleyes* | |
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| Did you ever refuse to read a book because it was a classic? Or because it was some genre you were sure you didn't like? In spite of your mom and your sister liking it?
Well, I refused for years to read Georgette Heyer. Even a glowing compliment from Garth Nix didn't completely convince me.
Harlequin has started reprinting her books, though, so I bought one to send to my mom, and since it was the only thing in my bag on a long train ride, I opened it.
Y'know what? I was an idiot when I was a kid. | |
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| This is what happens to the book meme when a librarian gets her hands on it. ( Read more... ) | |
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