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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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10:54 p.m. - 2005-04-29
Ahem…Everyone have their squishy foam rubber mallets? Yes? Good. The second meeting of the D-land Book Club will now come to order. The first item on the agenda is to remind people that this is my diary. The opinions expressed in here are mine. This should be self-explanatory, but since I rarely use nice-nelly language like: ‘In my humble opinion…’ or ‘You may not agree, but…’ it bears repeating that what I say is not commandment, law, or necessarily correct. Of course I would like it if everyone saw things my way, but I don’t insist on this. (However if you are a flaming right-wing nutball you can take your Bible, your outrageously simplified world view and your feeding tubes elsewhere. I have enough problems. I do not need your kind of agita.) So when I say that LoTR bores me to snores, I mean just that. I do not mean other people shouldn’t like it. Or that I think you are a horrible person for liking it. And considering Tolkien spawned a freaking industry devoted to elves, dwarves, hobbits and gave acne splattered fat kids a reason to live, my not liking LoTR puts me in a distinct minority. The second item on the agenda is about tone. (We’ll get to books in a minute, I promise.) The problem with print medium such as diaries is that quite often tone doesn’t come clear. It’s astonishing to me how often my snark is mistaken for absolute sincerity. I do my best with italics and whatnot, but it’s seldom that the wry, sly or sarcastic is seen for what it is. To that end I have decided to do a reading at JournalCon. I know this will be heard by a whole 35 people, but it’s important that at least a few of you hear how my entries sound in my head. In fact if you ever are hard up for entertainment read my entries aloud. I think if you read them aloud you might ‘get’ me and my warped perspective. Of course you do have to read them aloud in a vaguely Jewish New Yorky vaudevillian accent with a rim shot after every paragraph. Bah-dump-dum-ching! So without further ado, let’s discuss books. I never said that Anne Rice in any of her incarnations was a good writer. I just said if you want to read porn posing as something pretending to have literary chops try some Rampling. I have read a lot of Anne Rice. I think the most interesting thing about her books is the way she writes herself into corners then blithely ignores her own mythos and gives her readers attitude for daring to question her wonderfulness. Also with her books I find it amusing and a bit sad that her characters are completely bewildered by love. They don’t see it. They can’t understand what’s wrong with them. In Anne Rice’s world it’s far easier to be a vampire than it is to be in love. “I’m a vampire? Okay, sure, whatever. Does this mean I don’t have to have a real job anymore?” Yet some poor schmuck who’s head over heels will flee the country, set himself on fire, or fling himself into some freaky-ass alternative lifestyle and agonize for 300 pages how he has some preternatural debilitating character flaw. Since getting the new bifocals I have gone on an orgy of re-reading old favorites. I am a habitual re-reader and missed my old friends a lot while I couldn’t read. I have exactly one new book to talk about and most of the recent re-reads are major comfort food. Simple, easy, well worn with very little literary merit or distinction. Just now I went around the house and looked at the stacks in my fave reading venues. Here’s the list of what I’ve read this month: Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons - Lorna Landvik I also spent some time reading the phone book and the dictionary. Seriously. Reading either of those will send my mind off on the most wonderful tangents. I haven’t been able to read them in months and my imagination got very flabby. What I have NOT ever read is Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Sorry, Petrouchka. I know, that’s pitiful. I just haven’t gotten around it. There’s some serious gaps in my contemporary classics list. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get past the MUST READ feeling and actually want to read something. Dichroic wrote about a similar problem some months back. It’s like a particular book is force-fed to the entire world and we stubborn babies keep out lips firmly shut and refuse to take it in, no matter how good for us it’s supposed to be. The forum is now open for discussions on any of the above titles, old business from the last entry, recommendations, and general book talk. ~LA
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