“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Some poking around and reorganising going on.

The results of this include:

• OpenID now works!
• So does Gravatar.
• Some changes to the categories. I’m just afraid one day the sidebar will be three metres long thanks to the many categories. (Possibly there’s a collapsible version of it out there? Surely I’m not expected to write my own plugin?)
• Also modified the page displaying all the tags and categories so that all tags are listed instead of the top forty-five.

I think that hierarchical categories is the best thing ever since threaded comments! Hmm. Maybe I should have another go at that threaded comment plugin.

Other things I’m thinking of doing (but who knows when I’ll actually do it) include creating a WordPress theme. Possibly something sensible!

Now I shall go back to reading and pretending to write fic.

Because I’m not, uh, fastidious enough to do things like this every month, we’ll just pretend that I’ll do it quarterly!

Statistics first: As at the end of March, I’ve read twenty-four books, including four graphic novels. (Here’s the list of books read in 2008.) I think this is good! It certainly beats the one book per week average I set out to accomplish at the beginning of the year, so I’m rather pleased. On the other hand, the list include some books by Christopher Pike (it still baffles me how I could have liked his books when I was thirteen, but hey, I guess everyone grows up), which I probably read in a matter of hours, and that makes me feel like I cheated a bit, haha.

Otherwise it’s been a mixture of YA lit (The Penderwicks and Starcross are now high on my favourites list) and historical fiction/alternate history (the Temeraire books and Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles; the latter came out of the left side and surprised everyone, myself included).

I also completed my first challenge, the Speculative Fiction challenge. Yay me! I wanted to make a separate post for it and go through the books I read, which I will, after I post this. It was fun, though it would’ve been better if there had been more discussions. I think I’m spoiled by LJ’s threaded comments, because I just can’t get used to the usual chronological comment format Wordpress/Blogspot uses to start discussions.

Other challenges: I’ve read sixteen out of fifty-six books for the 888 challenge. That’s like 29% so I guess it’s a good number for the first quarter? Actually, I’m just inserting the relevant titles into the categories as I see fit. Not surprisingly, I’ve read almost none of the books from the more “literary”-ish categories, including the classics and the Booker winners, as well as the books my sisters recommended. This is mildly worrying! I joined the challenge to diversify the genres I read, but it’s not working very well this quarter! I think I’ll start Empire of the Sun soon, just to get those categories moving along.

For the Man Booker challenge — well, this one is even worse. I’ve read one Booker winner, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and it’s not even in my original list. I think literary fiction is probably just not the genre for me? Not that I’m terribly sure what “literary fiction” is — I chuck everything I can’t classify as anything else (especially those with awards) into that genre, and read with bemusement the discussions going on in other people’s blogs, since said people are more literary-minded than me. We’ll have to see how this will go.

Next — my resolutions (oh man I really don’t like that word. would something else do? like, you know, aspirations? then you have no obligations to fulfil them, as long as you try. i think?) for the next quarter:

• Read more books! Pity the old TBR list. Also read “other” books, not just SF/F. Or YA lit. This time for realz. Well. Not non-fiction, though; I’m not brave enough for that. Maybe next year?
• Try to keep the backlog of reviews to a month at most. Or, you know, just clear it weekly. It can’t be that hard, right? (HAH.) Also I should skip a particular book if I can’t write anything about it instead of holding up the queue. Sometimes I insist on order so much it’s absurd.
• Discussions are good! Participate in them! Me = not good in critical discussion, so I tend to sit and watch. I think it’s beginning to become a bad habit.

As for other stuff: if you are not interested in bookclubs, you may not want to join this bookclub, since it is not a bookclub. (I swear that makes sense.)

Despite being a voracious reader, I was never one for libraries. It’s probably because when I was younger, it was such a hassle to go to the library — it was so far away (on the other side of the island! the other side, I say, and it’s not a small island!) and no self-respecting parent was going to let his or her children to go by bus on their own. I think I only went to that public library once, along with a friend’s parents. In university, I got along well enough with the libraries, despite their limited material in the fiction shelves. (Hey, an engineering campus! Let’s fill all the shelves with books on rigid body mechanics!) Most of the time I was borrowing engineering reference books from that library, though I never . . . really read them.

Well, that was a lifetime ago and I’m living somewhere else now and I no longer have access to the university libraries. I finally went to our community library, after a lot of pondering and studying Google Maps. If nothing else, I’m pretty bad with directions here; I haven’t drove around much and traffic jams are the bane of my existence. Here’s the website of the library: the Petaling Jaya Community Library. The library wasn’t hard to locate, and is about twenty minutes or so from our house, but that route is just a magnet for traffic jams on peak hours on weekdays, so that makes me go :(. It has three floors, fiction is housed on the first floor and the selection isn’t as large as I had hoped it would be, but I guess it shall suffice. Children/YA books are on the ground floor — and they obviously don’t really care what is actually for kids and what’s YA because it’s a mess. Some of the YA books you can find on the ground floor, some of them are scattered along the general fiction shelves. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded if all the YA stuff were filed along with other books in general fiction (you can’t find the Harry Potter books unless you’re willing to patiently go through the shelves and poke within the vicinity of JF ROW in a room on the ground floor which is painted in bright colours, but Susan Cooper’s books are in general fiction upstairs, neatly arranged under F COO) so then I wouldn’t have to traverse two floors just to check what’s being held where.

The classification system makes me scratch my head. The non-fiction works seem to be sorted according to the Dewey Decimal System. For fiction there’s just “fiction” and “junior fiction”, arranged by author’s last name — that’s it. There’s no way to browse through category; you’ll have to walk through the shelves and hope you remember the authors’ names right. Everything fiction is preceded with an “F” and followed by the first three letters of the author’s last name. The OPAC — online public access catalogue — works and is accessible through the internet, but some of the information seems out of date: some books I’ve seen on the shelves simply do not appear on the system. (Well, there’s a possibility it’s because they got the title or author wrong in the system; I didn’t really try searching using the other parameters — but those should have been correct in the first place.)

Joining fee is RM 31, yearly renewal is RM 15. I got a library card, a lanyard and a brochure after registering. My sister registered as well. You can borrow two books and two cassettes/CDs/whatevers from the AV unit for two weeks each time. My first reaction was Two books for a fortnight? Two books? But I read one book in a few hours!, but I guess there’s nothing I can do about that.

All that complaining aside, there are enough books there to keep me occupied for a long time, I think. We checked out four books between us (the AV material doesn’t interest me much) so now I have with me Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade and Black Powder War from her Temeraire series (the library doesn’t have the fourth book, Empire of Ivory, and surprisingly, the first one as well, so I’ll probably fill in the book request form for those, just for completeness sake), David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness which I have already finished, and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine.

There are a few books by Margaret Atwood that I’ll pick up some other time, along with Patricia A McKillip’s Winter Rose, which I was looking forward to read. Maybe I’ll give the children’s section a more thorough look and see what gems I could find there. Expect another visit from me at least within two weeks’ time!

Eh, I didn’t want to do this before I finished blogging about the rest of the books I read in 2007, but I figured I could always come back and link those recaps later. Full list of books can be found here.

Last year had the honour of being a year for reading young adult fantasy (and some science fiction) books, though I hadn’t planned it to be that way. I found authors others had been enjoying since childhood and was ruing the fact that I hadn’t been introduced to these books earlier. I also learned that short story anthologies can be good, especially when they’re by authors I enjoy, and I still suck at reading non-fiction. Oh well.

Top five of the year (and I’m cheating, ’cause the first two are actually a series of books):

• The Chrestomanci books by Diana Wynne Jones

  I read all the Chrestomanci books this year, and enjoyed them immensely. My favourites were Conrad’s Fate and The Lives of Christopher Chant, and the other books follow very close behind. I also loved the short story “Stealer of Souls” from Mixed Magics. Now, if only DWJ can write endings (all the endings are pretty . . . odd, at least to me. Not the resolution of the stories themselves, but the last epilogue-like chapter or maybe the last few paragraphs leading to the very end of the books often leave me wondering why she ended it that way), then I would be the happiest reader in the world.

• The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper

  Funny how I never knew of the existence of these books earlier in my reading life. This is almost your standard coming-of-age, Light versus Dark story, but not quite. I loved Greenwitch and The Grey King best.

• Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

  This was a surprise favourite! I picked the book up knowing nothing about it, and fell in love with the characters and the countryside where Willie is evacuated to at the eve of World War II in England.

• Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

  I went into this book with expectations it would be something like Larklight. Boy was I wrong. Fast paced adventure and flawed human relationships, and a future so bizarre (traction cities moving across the continent eating each other!) pretty much convinced me that I’ll have to get the rest of the books to the series. Somehow.

• Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space by Philip Reeve and David Wyatt

  Mr Reeve has the honour of appearing twice on this list, because I love his work in Larklight as well. And the illustrations! And space adventures in Victorian times!

Notice how all the books here are YA, and most of them are YA science fiction/fantasy? Broadening horizons, that’s what my 2008 resolution should be.

Other honourable mentions: Stardust and Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Ilium by Dan Simmons (which comes with a caveat, because I didn’t like its necessary sequel, Olympos, as much).

Best reread (only one, since total rereads were, like, three books):

• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

  I felt like I missed so many things the last time I read this. And I keep dissolving into laughter every other page. And Howl and Sophie! Howl and Sophie! How can anyone not love Howl and Sophie and Calcifer and Michael and everyone else in this book. Even my mother liked this book. It definitely gets a ringing endorsement from me.

Fortunately, there weren’t many books that were terrible (and I think I set my standards pretty low — I am mildly ashamed of this! I should be more discerning!) but two stood out as being not good enough that I remember that they were Not Good Enough:

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

  Seriously, this one bored me. I think my last comment about it was it was too self-absorbed. I also had issues on how easily the author went off tangent about so many things. It also didn’t help I wasn’t familiar with a lot of things that was going on . . . his world is nothing like mine, I suppose.

• Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

  Uh. This one just suffers from “too much action/adventure” syndrome, in my humble opinion. I’d like to know my characters more, please. Even the unlikeable ones should have more personality. And too. Many. Sentence. Fragments. Seriously.

Overall, not a bad year, I say.