“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Ah. I think I owe myself one of these.

Work — where I read stuff that’s not really that interesting

So. Haven’t been reading much. At first it was because I was busy with work — editing/proofing a 440-page book takes a lot of time, and leaves you feeling like not wanting to read anything ever again, at least when the day ends, and it’s really annoying when the final proof comes from the printers and you notice a full stop is missing. Noooooo. (Don’t be anal, says my team leader. But I can’t help myself.) But anyway. Haven’t been reading much, that what I was saying.

New books

I don’t even have library books checked out at the moment, partly because it’s the fasting month and the library closes early, and I was feeling a bit doubtful that I would manage to return/renew books on time, knowing how late I was staying at the office at times. So I returned the last batch about three weeks ago and haven’t checked out anything since, but maybe I’ll pop in for a visit the next Saturday the library is open.

I do have some new books, though! It’s a debilitating weakness, this, wanting to own so many books. My books on the “to read” shelf is slowly taking over my “favourite books” shelf, and this, surely, should be a cause of alarm. Among new books acquired (hee!):

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• and a new copy of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

Currently reading

I’m currently reading Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter and getting a headache trying to parse it. A short summary: it’s about Macbeth. I don’t think it’s the language; it’s more of the unfamiliarity of the setting and trying to get the characters sorted out right. I don’t understand anything that’s going on in Rome at the moment. (11th century Europe! What was I thinking?) I think I’ll wait for the reading group (at GoK) to catch up and see if the discussions will help with my comprehension. I’m reading ahead and I’m two-thirds finished — discussion is only up to Chapter 4 at the moment.

I’m trying to read other books as well between gnashing my teeth as Thorfinn (aka Macbeth) goes about talking to bishops and the Pope — I want him to go back to Orkney now, where things made more sense to me — but I haven’t latched on to any book in particular yet. I think I’ll go back to YA SF/F and try Philip Reeve’s Predator’s Gold again. Or perhaps I’ll start reading Cloud Atlas.

Weekly Geeks, etc

No new reviews have been posted since Possession (yes, I’m a slacker) and I still haven’t answered all the questions for Weekly Geeks #12! (Slacker!) I think I’ll try to get those as much as I could done for WG #18, which is about catching up, as well as go about updating my TBR list and challenge lists and blogrolls and whatnots. For WG #17 I posted quotes from Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett (it’s an obsession. I’m sorry. And Checkmate isn’t even my favourite book!) and included some links I found useful when I was looking for more information about the quotes.

Promises to myself, hah. I should try harder to keep those.

Statistics — not terribly interesting!

It is now July! I still have a whole backlog of stuff from the beginning of May to post. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll ever get to those. It’s been a combination of lethargy and general disinterest in a lot of things (including books, imagine that) that’s been bringing me down lately, and I can’t seem to shake it off. Oh well.

OK. Just checking in here, then. At the end of June, I’ve read forty-two books this year, eighteen of those from April onwards. Not as much as the first quarter, but that’s not really surprising since I read only three books in June. Still, the one-book-a-week average that I’ve been hoping to achieve looks like it will be met (if I ever start sitting down and concentrating on a book again, that is) so this is a good thing!

There’s also a new page listing the books I’ve read since 2007, sorted by author’s name, here.

There’s still no clear favourite book of 2008, aside from the whole Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett (I don’t think I can pick a favourite book out of the whole series and it probably doesn’t really matter; aside from the first two books, there’s no way for the other books to stand alone and make sense) which still comes out at the top of the list. Other books worth noting from Q2: David Mitchell’s number9dream, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora.

Challenges updates

I don’t join many challenges, simply because fixed reading lists scare me. Sure, I have a “to read” list and I like having it around (very useful when you’re stumped and find yourself quite unable to choose a book from the library!) but I deviate from it all the time.

But anyway. I joined Renay’s 342,745 Ways to Herd Cats challenge, mostly because, well, it’s Nay, and when was the last time I said no to her crazy ideas?, and because it has an awesome list of book recommendations. I like rec lists. It makes you notice all sorts of new books you never even heard of before. And the challenge was simple, recommend ten books you love (my list is here) and read at least three books from the 632-item rec list. I actually finished reading and reviewing three books, but I think I’ll just go on adding books to the list until the challenge ends on 30 November.

For the 888 challenge, I’ve read thirty books out of the minimum fifty-six — a little more than half of the list. Which is good, I suppose, since we’re at the middle of the year, though it’s a bit embarrassing that the “Classics” category still hasn’t been touched yet. I’ve started books — I’m having problems finishing them.

For Dewey’s Man Booker Challenge, I’ve finished three books: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, number9dream by David Mitchell, and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Tentatively, the other three books for the list I’m planning to read are The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Possession by AS Byatt (currently reading and getting a little cross-eyed at the Victorian poetry) and possibly Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard (no, I haven’t given up on it yet). I’d very much like to throw in Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas into the list as well, but I can’t seem to find a copy.

Currently reading

I’m still reading the same books since the last update. Nothing much to say here. The library books are late — they were due on Friday and I was too tired and I hadn’t finished either (sigh), so I decided to go tomorrow instead, possibly renew both Possession (AS Byatt) and East (Edith Pattou). East I haven’t even started. Possession is something of a struggle to read when the Victorian poets make their appearances — I can’t quite concentrate on what’s going on. It leaves me in a sort of “oh, pretty language” kind of daze and I end up not really paying attention to what’s going on.

Game of Kings (the Lymond/Dunnett reading group on Yahoo!Groups) is planning to read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice starting next week as a break after finishing Checkmate (the last Lymond book) before starting Dunnett’s King Hereafter, so I’ll give both books a go, for the sake of following the discussion. I’ll have to admit I’ve never read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice before. Weird, isn’t that?

Uh. It looks like this weekly recap isn’t a consistent thing after all.

Books!

I finished three books since the last recap: number9dream by David Mitchell — man, I’m keeping an eye on David Mitchell; all of his books are in my to read list now — The Changeover by Margaret Mahy and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I liked number9dream most, and now I definitely have to read Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as well. Reviews later! Probably very much later, the way I write those things.

New books checked out from the library this week are Possession by AS Byatt and East by Edith Pattou. I picked up Possession thanks to recommendations and also because it’s a Booker winner, and East because there’s a giant polar bear on the cover. Giant polar bear on the cover! After reading the inside flap, I realised that it was a retelling of the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The story is included in the anthology of Scandinavian folk tales I am reading which shares the same title with the folk tale. (Come to think of it, there’s a polar bear on the cover of that book too, and a girl is sitting on it.) I haven’t gotten to that particular story yet; the stories puzzle me a lot and I am taking an astonishingly long time getting through the book.

Other books in my “currently reading” pile: Tales of the Thousand and One Nights and Empire of the Sun. The progress on the latter is rather dismal — I’m still at chapter four. It’s not that I don’t want to read the book; it’s just that when I come across other books, I just drop it in favour of those new books. I can read Empire of the Sun quite contentedly when there are no other books around, like while I am eating lunch at work. Hmph. It’ll take forever to finish the book if this goes on.

I am also contemplating re-reading all of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books. I must be mad. I am trying to convince myself that if I re-read them, I’ll feel like throttling Nyneave and Elayne ever so often as well as give Rand a clonk on the head, but somehow I am not discouraged yet. We’ll see where this will go. :P

Site updates

Some things have been tweaked and changed in this blog — mostly fonts and alignments (but only for Firefox 3.0) and I’ll have to look at the CSS again and fix a few things for IE one of these days. I keep thinking of redesigning the blog, but I can’t think of a nice enough layout and theme. Sad. I can code stuff, I’m just bad at the actual design stage. All tech skills and no sense for aesthetics. XD

I’ve also added a new page listing all the books I’ve read since 2007. I’m absurdly obsessive when it comes to lists. The current list sorts the books by authors’ last/family names, and I was contemplating a “by title” list but gave it up. The thes and as and ans confused the spreadsheet sort, and I’ll have to figure out whether having a separate field for the articles in front of the title is something I’d want to do before I try another sort. (And I wonder where the time goes. Hah.)

Other things

I kept thinking of participating in Weekly Geeks but I keep running out of time. I’m rather appalled at my progress with the previous “catching up on reviews” challenge issued some time back — I barely made any progress at all. It’s partly due to my insistence of posting reviews in the order of the books read — I told myself once that it was ok to skip books and come back later, but I found out that I couldn’t quite do that. Uh. Obsessive. That’s the word for today, I guess. You’d think someone who has such an obsession to have things posted in order would be able to keep her life in order, but somehow it doesn’t spill over to life outside of book blogs, this order-obsessed thing.

This week’s theme is about challenges, and I think I’ll use that to update my challenge posts. I don’t participate in many — don’t like a fixed reading list much would be the main reason, so the ones I participate in are often the ones that give a good amount of leeway in choosing what books to read. So hopefully there’ll be a post about challenges soon!

I was hoping that I’d be able to participate in the 24-hour Read-a-thon Dewey’s hosting, but I have a weekend trip to Pangkor Island with some friends from university . . . and their families. It’s a bit strange that there are only four of us singles joining in this time. I shall stay clear from babysitting duties; two-year-olds aren’t really my favourite sort of people, however cute they might be.

Anyway. Read-a-thon. Thanks to timezones, had I been able to participate, it would’ve started at midnight on Sunday for me — or possibly one in the morning on Sunday — I’m not quite sure what PST equals to: I thought it would be -8 UTC during daylight savings, but Dewey says it’s -7, so it’s very likely I am wrong. I’m at +8. Hmm. Never mind. I hope I’ll be able to participate next time when something like this comes up.

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.

Well, ok. So this maybe has the chance of being a weekly thing. If another post like this comes up next week, then, well, you know, the idea is a Great Success or something like that.

Yeah, right.

Library visits: why they are always so frustrating

My pubic library — or rather, the community library, as it calls itself (is there a difference? There must be, right?) — isn’t really all that close to my house, and to get there, I have to drive. I have no idea how to get there by bus and I am not adventurous enough to try anyway. Not worth trudging all the way to the bus stop/LRT station in the heat and all. The library isn’t open every weekend — on first and third Saturdays and Sundays of the month, they’re closed. I can understand that, really.

My problem is, when going on Saturdays, it’s always such a hassle to get a parking space. The parking spaces are very limited. I think I’ll just go on weekdays after seven in the evening like I always do, and brave the traffic and hope I find my books before the library closes. (Limited parking space is one of the reasons I don’t like shopping on weekends either; it just causes me so much frustration!)

Other things about the library this week: their website has been intermittently down for quite a number of days, and has been down each time I tried to access it the last few days. This makes me sad because it means I couldn’t check their OPAC and couldn’t find out if the books I wanted to borrow were available. I rather like searching for the books from home, so when I get to the library, I could just pick them off the shelves, or, if I wanted to, I could reserve the books online if they were on loan. Also it makes it easier for me to fill in the new book suggestion form. I’d hate to be redundant, really.

New books this week

Not bought, unfortunately. Just borrowed from the library. I have David Mitchell’s number9dream which isn’t exactly the first choice of mine of books of his I wanted to read — I wanted Cloud Atlas, but unfortunately the library doesn’t have that one. (There’s a picture of Mitchell on the inside cover. He’s kinda cute! :P Also, he was a teacher in Japan!) I have to wonder what is with the library and not having most of the Booker prize winners/nominees on its shelves. Especially since it’s like the major award for writers from the Commonwealth countries and all. Personally, I think they should go and add all the books in the longlist to their shelves the moment the list comes out. Quality fiction, people! Not all of us want to read romance novels (not that there is anything wrong with those)! I think number9dream made the Booker shortlist too, so this also should count for the Man Booker challenge. Poor challenge; it’s the most ignored one yet.

The other book is Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover. This one was in the Herding Cats challenge recommended books list, recced by cumuluscastle, whose reading taste I admire*, and I think I liked Mahy’s books that I read when I was younger. This book won the Carnegie Medal in 1984 — I didn’t know that until I saw the cover.

I really wanted to borrow Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora, but someone had already checked it out. Sad. I blame you, offline website! Otherwise I would’ve known that it’s already checked out and wouldn’t have been too disappointed when I couldn’t find it on the shelf.

Books finished/read this week

• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters — this was also shortlisted for the Booker prize, actually. I didn’t know how to describe this book the first time because I haven’t read it, now that I’ve finished it, I couldn’t describe it either. The first part of the book starts off with Sue Trinder, an orphan, agreeing to help Richard Rivers (otherwise known as “Gentleman”) to seduce a heiress, Maud Lilly, so that they would be able to share Maud’s fortune when Gentleman marries Maud and then commits her to an asylum for the mad. Of course, things aren’t really as they seem, and I enjoyed reading this very much. I’ll be adding the rest of Waters’s books to my list: Tipping the Velvet and Affinity.

I’m starting JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, and I’m only a few pages in, so I still don’t have much of an impression of the book yet. I’m still reading the same short story collection, East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Peter Asbjørnsen — well, actually I still haven’t moved from the last story I was reading, so this one is on the back burner, really, and one should just assume I’m still reading it until I say I’m done. (I can’t make head or tails of a lot of the folk tales, really. Is it just me, or I’m missing something here?)

I’ll probably leave Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain for later — I don’t think I can read two books about World War II almost back-to-back. So I’ve nudged Philip Reeve’s Predator’s Gold up on the to-read list instead, but we’ll have to see if I’ll choose Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter over it instead.

Other things this week

I still haven’t written up my recaps of the books read in April! Man, I am slow. I had hoped to finish those this weekend, but alas! I am headache-y and very, very tired, thanks to spending almost the whole day either driving to or getting back from my cousin’s engagement ceremony (and being at said ceremony, of course). Yes, you read that right. There are ceremonies here. So no reviews this weekend, woe. I’ll try to put something up once I’m not asleep on my feet.

I think I’ll be participating in this week’s Weekly Geeks . . . and talk about video games and fanfiction, of course. I’ll try to have the post up by Wednesday or so. Also, there is also a read-a-thon in June. I’m not sure whether I’ll participate — I’ll have to figure out the time difference and see whether it’s feasible. Not that I already spend my weekends reading, oh no.

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* proof of great taste: she also loves Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci books.