“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

This has been a restless weekend. I sit down to read and I find myself thinking, “Oh, maybe I should garden instead.” I’m yanking out weeds and I find myself thinking maybe I should tidy up the house. I start sweeping the floor and a cloud of dust comes up and I start sneezing and I give up, and try to read again. I read four pages and then I start thinking I should write reviews. Et cetera.

High speed connection? What is that?

This week has been plagued with internet problems! Connection has been very slow the last few days, but especially so for Google and related services. My main email is on Gmail, my RSS reader is Google Reader, and neither has been eager to load for me. Sad. The connection speed seems to have improved somewhat. Better, but still sluggish. It was not too bad for Gmail, since I still could use it when I switched to its HTML mode (and I kept forgetting to hit refresh to check for new mail), but Google Reader was absolutely dead. Not fun since I follow most blogs on Reader. See, friends and neighbours, this is what happens when you entrust your online life to one entity — it fails, and you grind down to a halt. :P

The library is also still not back online! This is not a good thing. Perhaps I should write to the city council about this.

New books this week

Sometimes I swear the only way to control the book population on my shelves is by banning book buying. Which I will never be able to implement in my lifetime, so, alas, there will always be too many books on that shelf. I already have a pile unread, and I still buy a few more when there’s a sale — I can’t help it! This time it was a warehouse clearing sale and I got four books:

• The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake — this one keeps coming up on recommendation lists, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll — a new copy to replace the missing old one. Or is that copy with my sister?
• The Haunting of Alaizable Cray by Chris Wooding — steampunk London with airships! YA. Seems to be a dark mystery of sorts.
• Siegfried’s Murder — one of those very thin Penguin Epic books, focussing on one “scene” in epics. It looks more manageable than trying to read the Nibelungenlied in full. (I partly blame at least two video games for this one.)

Currently reading

No books finished this week!

I thought I would have finished David Mitchell’s number9dream by today, but I’m still at the last part. I’m putting Mitchell in the list of authors that I want to check out their other works — this has been a dizzying, enjoyable read with a likeable, quirky protagonist. When you pare it down, it’s basically a story of a young man searching for his father, but this ends up being so much more. Among other things, God appears to a hen-woman on a surfboard in this one. Dude.

I was about to start Chapter 4 of JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun when I switched to number9dream — I can’t quite remember why I chose to stop there. Empire of Sun reads very slowly right now, and it’s rather dry. The war hasn’t quite started yet by Chapter 4. Now I’m afraid I won’t be able to finish this on time for the bookclub that doesn’t exist, and it’s doubly bad because I recommended we not read it. None of this should be a problem, of course, since we are not a bookclub, so of course no reading is going on. Man, this will set a bad precedent.

I started Philip Reeve’s Predator’s Gold as well. I think the first chapter has a higher body count than Mortal Engines as a whole! That’s saying a lot — people kept dying in Mortal Engines. I stopped after the chapter and went back to Mitchell. Who also had a high body count when the Yakuza came in. Oh well.

Tales from the Thousand and One Nights is now my “to read at dinner table” book. It stays there on the table, and I read the stories during breakfast, or lunch (rarely), or dinner, and I’m about a quarter through it. I’m surprised at how many of the stories are new to me.

Miscellaneous stuff!

Newly posted reviews for books read in March: Postcards from No Man’s Land, The Thief, The Looking Glass Wars. All YA. Also a post for Weekly Geeks about other forms of storytelling, in which I blather about video games.

This week’s Weekly Geeks is about catching up on reviews. I have a lot to catch up on! Anything without a link in this list hasn’t been reviewed yet. I hope to get at least to The Forgotten Beasts of Eld in the list by the time I put up my wrap-up post, but even that is probably a lofty goal, considering how slow I could be.