“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

“Did you mean to search for ‘yeti’ instead?”

Hullo. My name is Yati, and it is quite likely this isn’t the page that you’re looking for. Just in case it is, well, I’m female, in my twenties, and I like reading and playing around with web design and keeping detailed lists of things. I’m an engineer by education but I work in publishing (it’s mostly law-related stuff and we definitely do not publish fiction, so don’t ask me how to get your novel published, because I seriously don’t know the answer), and I live somewhere near Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia.

Fiddle-de-dee?

Sometimes I read. Sometimes I even post about the books I read, so voilà! That’s where this blog comes in. I post when I can, I post when I remember to. Most of the time, I’m just too lazy to type things out (and sometimes it’s just because I haven’t read anything, so there’s nothing to write).

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (and What Alice Found There) by Lewis Caroll are among my favourite books. I can quote random passages from them if I wanted to. Though I won’t. Because we all know that we’re all mad here.

For anyone who’s wondering what’s up with the blog title — I started a WordPress.com blog without giving much thought of its content, and it had all sorts of nonsense in the beginning, so “fiddle-de-dee” seemed to be an accurate enough name! The blog was originally titled “What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?”, a quote from Through the Looking Glass, but it was a bit too long and annoyed some parties, so I relented and changed it to “Finding Wonderland”, which is also, obviously, Alice-related.

But why a book blog?

I just like keeping records of things, really. And pretending that there are people listening to stuff I’m saying, haha. I’ve had always kept a partial list of books I have read and books I wanted to read somewhere — in a notebook, in spreadsheets, in text files — and I kept losing the list. So now I have a list online. And the “to read” list grows alarmingly longer each day.

I read a lot — well, at least I try to. I made a conscious decision to read more in 2008. I try to vary my reading. Most of the time, however, I end up reading books marketed for young adults, and YA fantasy is my favourite genre. Fantasy comes next and then science fiction (I’m a speculative fiction sort of girl, really), and everything else just comes after that. Non-fiction comes lowest in the list. I, uh, I’ll try harder? I’m learning to appreciate historical fiction more, thanks to Dorothy Dunnett, and now I have a wealth of new authors to check out after I finish her books.

I’m not good at literary criticism, and neither am I much good at being critical. I can’t dissect a book and point out what works and why it does and what doesn’t and why it does not — I’m not entirely sure how I go about doing that. So what you’ll get here is a simple book recap, and my thoughts about the book, and the occasional flailing about as I fall in love with a book and I try to explain myself so that I’d get more people to read it with me. Not that my flailing about works much. Sigh.

But there’s a rating system!

Yes, but it’s not that important. I never actually mention how many “stars” I give a book in a recap/review; though I tag it with something on the scale from 0 to 5. A 2.5 means it’s just OK — right smack in the middle of the system. Anything lower than a 2.5 means it’s bad in my books (look, a pun!). But it’s just bad to me; someone else might love it.

Look at it this way: what I think is wonderful is perhaps not someone else’s cup of tea. I try to be coherent on why I don’t like a book, so that someone who’s looking to read something with those things I don’t like will probably find the book to their liking. Or something like that. (But then again, I have problems writing critical reviews. You can just see this whole thing going in circles.)

But the rating’s not important! That’s what I’m trying to say.

Aaaah! A spoiler!

Nah, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one. I don’t like spoilers. I try to avoid both reading and writing them. If I do write something that contains spoilers, I’d say so in the entry, and give a warning to stop reading before you get to them. Generally I cut them off from the main page using the <!--more--> tag and place some whitespace between the warning and the actual spoiler. Unfortunately, though, the space is styled using CSS, so it doesn’t appear in RSS readers. I find the fact that the whole entry appears in RSS readers as rather surprising — I had always thought anything after the <!--more--> tag got cut off.

Just pay attention to the warning and you’d be safe. Really. No spoilers to sneak up on you around here.

Also available elsewhere!

You can also find me on Goodreads here. I don’t add books I read a long time ago into the library there, but it’s a nice way to keep track of what I’ve been reading recently! It’s also updated faster than this blog — it’s more likely to find a two-line review on the book the day I finish it on Goodreads than to expect a mention here — backlogs sometimes go over a month around here. Whoops.

I also have an LJ here, which is updated a bit more often than this blog, and most posts here end up in the LJ anyway. Yes, multiple instances of similar content, I know. It’s not really about readership — more about me experimenting with WordPress and posting about books is a good experiment as any, and I like WordPress very much so far. And I like the idea of having a blog just for books.

To contact me, feel free to leave a comment or email me at fiddlediddledee{at}gmail[dot]com.

Enjoy your stay. Take what I write with a grain of salt — it’s all about me anyway. :p

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