The Ink-Pot and the Palette

At some point a few years ago, Twitter became magically addictive to me. Prior to that I could take it or leave it, but something-something-SPN-fandom-something happened, and I got hooked.

Periodically since then I've quit, but I swear it's like quitting smoking. Just one peek at my notifications and within two weeks I'm back up to a pack a day.

A couple of weeks ago it was time to quit again, and so far the abstinence is paying off. My goal wasn't simply to stop wasting my life (I mean...hours per day!), but to read more books. To recapture the magic of reading.

It seems to be working. Since I deleted my Twitter app, I've finished two and a half novels and chunks of two nonfiction titles. (I'm talking actual text-on-page books here. My audiobook game has never wavered.) A side benefit is slowly-returning attention and focus in general.

Finished:
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (the one he published after Cloud Atlas)
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (queer Edwardian magicians solving a mystery--loads of fun)

In progress:
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (his prose deserves the two Pulitzers he's won)
History in English Words by Owen Barfield (very old, but kind of charming)
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas (survey of Western philosophy; not easy reading)

Up next:
The "Capitola" novels of E.D.E.N Southworth (mid-19th century American adventures featuring a feisty girl protagonist named Capitola. Southworth was the most popular author of her day, publishing 60 novels between 1849 and 1915.)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (to continue my project of reading all David Mitchell's novels in 2022.)

It is wonderful to be reading again.

( Listening to fiction )

( Listening to nonfiction )

( Watching TV )

( Watching a movie )

( Reading things )

And, a propos of very little:

My fellow Fanmericans - The State of Our Union is...#SuperSleepy is canon! May God ship you & may God ship the United States of Fanmerica

(@TheOrlandoJones tonight on Twitter)

Productive weekend.

( More power! )

( More light! )

( More books! )

Current audiobook: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, read by Juliet Stevenson. I never felt the faintest desire to read Eat, Pray, Love and my only exposure to the author's work is her well-known TED talk on creativity. I'm glad I took the plunge. Signature is a terrific novel (so far--I'm about a third of the way into it).

( The Signature of All Things )

Current Bingewatch on Netflix: Arrow Season 1. Cheesetastic but good in unexpected ways. The acting is stronger than I would have expected from a CW Parade of Beauty, and the writing veers all over the place from comic-book operatic to really solid. I'm way more interested in it than I thought I'd be.

Current Book: Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion. Published in 1954, forgotten by 1965, and revived in recent years. Powell has a snarky, trenchant style, a bit Dorothy Parker-esque, very New York. My niece living in New York City recommended it and I can see its literary worth while not, strictly speaking, enjoying it.

Current Fic: I'm off fic at the moment. Open to suggestions, though.

Current Shows: Agents of SHIELD is growing on me a little. I said I'd give it six eps, so it's got one more chance to really hook me in. The new season of Grimm started off with a bang last night. Still enjoying Elementary. Loving Sleepy Hollow in spite of myself.

Current audiobook: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education And Was Shot By the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai. I bought it on the strength of Malala's speech to the United Nations, and because the audiobook reader is Archie Panjabi.

Malala's personal story is interspersed with political, geographical and historical detail. It's hard to escape a sense that this young woman is being swept along by the western publicity machine--maybe willingly, as she makes no secret of wanting to be the next Benazir Bhutto--but her story comes across as authentic all the same. I've learned more about Pakistan and the Taliban in a few hours of listening to this audiobook than I picked up in all the years after 9/11.

Malala herself reads her prologue, and it's interesting that Archie Panjabi, in reading the rest of the book, chose to replicate her youthful tone and, to some degree, her accent. It's very nicely done.

Current book: Captive Prince, Volume 2 by S.U. Pacat. It's good--everyone who recommended it was right. Self-published on Amazon and now picked up by Penguin, it's a fast-moving sort-of-medieval-alternate-universe where there's a lot of slavery and a lot of non-heterosexual sex and a whole lot of political intrigue. There's a long, slow-burn romance between the two leads (the captive prince of the title, and his captor, the crown prince of the enemy state) that is really compelling. The characterization of the crown prince is fascinating, and I can't be the only reader picturing Tom Hiddleston playing him. (Yes, Tom's too old. So what.)

My only real quibble with it--one that I hope an editor at Penguin will help sort out--is that it's slightly under-written. Its narrative is so stripped down, and so many characters, important places, plot points and political factions are introduced with less than a full sentence, that I've felt completely lost a few times. Had to go back and re-read Volume 1 and half of Volume 2 before I could continue. Not that I minded.

In fact I'm not quite finished with Volume 2 and I'm trying to stretch it out, because there's a Volume 3 that isn't out yet.

1. Posting from my phone. This works slightly better with the latest version of Chrome for Android than it did before.

2. Reading the Felix Castor books by Mike Carey. Urban magician, kind of, except he's more of an exorcist, and there are ghosts and zombies. In London. Good stuff. A long arc underlies the individual story in each book. I'm on book two and it's getting more intriguing as it goes along.

3. I made oatcakes for dinner and ate them all.

4. The weather here in Stumptown is PERFECT. I can't get over it. Bright and warm in the day, cool in the leafy shade, cool at night. Breezes are keeping air quality high. It's wonderful.

5. Eleanor O is in the shop overnight, having her brakes adjusted and getting a new bungee for her rear rack. This means a couple of bus rides for me, but I don't mind because it's just so nice here right now, nothing seems bothersome.

Just finished my third and probably final pass through Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.

I first listened to this one about three years ago, and one of the authors' key findings left a big impression: that your position in your social network a) has a lot of influence over your well-being and b) is partly heritable. If you're peripheral (few friends, weak ties, less able to benefit from the network), there's an even chance that you were born that way.

This notion planted a seed in my brain that's borne some interesting fruit. A vague sense that asexuality and "attachment disorder" (god I hate that term) might be related to network position has led me to a lot of research and some new ideas about myself and how maybe I don't need fixing. (My post about my simple mind the other day may be loosely bound in this constellation too.)

It's a fascinating book. For a short version covering the high points for free, Christakis gives an entertaining TED talk, and a more sciencey TED talk.

I've been reading a lot in the Teen Wolf fandom lately (a lot a lot). Here are three Sterek recs:

First, Last, and Always by sffan
Explicit rating
13,000 words

( Read more... )

this boy, half-destroyed by M_Leigh
Teen and up rating
25,600 words

( Read more... )

the blood blooms clean in you, ruby, also by M_Leigh
Teen and up rating
48,000 words

( Read more... )

In both of M_Leigh's stories there's a strong and cohesive plot thread involving Alphas and magic and all the most interesting things from canon. But what the author does better than the show's writers is make the story arise from the deeply flawed characters who inhabit it.

Both stories have that rare quality in fanfic: re-readability. I'm going back to re-read them tonight, in fact.

( Five things on a Sunday night )

Back to work tomorrow. Work is evil. I can hardly wait for the Singularity.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, is my latest foray into long, paradigm-shifting nonfiction. My last major such foray was Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, and there's an interesting common thread in the two works.

Both examine long spans of history to discover evidence for the trends they are talking about--in Pinker's case, that human violence is decreasing, and in Kelly's that technology is a seventh order of life; both suggest that the trends are inevitable and natural (in fact, that's Kelly's primary thesis), and both find hope and beauty in human life as a result of their examinations.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through Pinker's massive nearly 800-page (32 hour) tome, so I don't yet know precisely where he's heading (except towards the thesis defined by his subtitle), but he writes engagingly and with humor about the fascinating and repellent subject of human violence.

(There is a TED talk here where Pinker summed up his ideas a few years ago, clearly in the early stages of his writing this book, and it covers some of the book's key points. Warning for shocking illustrative images and descriptions.)

It's prudent to mention that in order to make his case, Pinker has had to describe some really horrific forms of violence, though I'll give him credit: you need to understand how bad it's been to follow his larger argument, and somehow past gories are easier to hear/read about knowing that the whole point is that We Don't Do Those Things Anymore.

Good book. I'm enjoying having my mind expanded in hopeful and positive directions.