Mangela Lansbury

Murakami is big into the boku narrator, which is basically a guy casually telling you a story. There are a few exceptions (After Dark, Underground, and some short stories come to mind immediately) but he generally does that male novelist thing quite a bit so maybe he's just not the guy for you. He's also probably not for you if you don't like protagonists who describe in intimate detail how they make their spaghetti or why they decided to drink cheap scotch. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was 2 books originally and neither are really very good. Stick 'em together and it just gets worse. I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster on plane rides recently. They were both pretty great for that purpose, but Chandler was better. I'd never read any of his stuff before and really enjoyed it. Does anyone have any recommendations for where to go after the Big Sleep?

The head of the NRA calls the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. The NRA is an actual parody of itself, but I've still met plenty of people who are card carrying members. The focus on "protecting yourself" I've seen from those people is really disturbing. They encourage you to basically make your home unit into a mini-militia ready to protect itself against the hordes of crack fiends and meth heads just breathing down their middle class suburban necks. It's a really weird rhetoric that just hinges on the question, "Don't you want to be safe?" Then there's the misinformation they peddle. Stuff like "Obama is trying to take our guns" when last I checked the only gun related laws enacted during his presidency have expanded second amendment rights. It's just a gross organization in general, really. As non-controversial as "torturing animals is bad" is as a statement, these people do kind of have people to protest against. Torture is defined differently for everyone. Some people will lecture you on how tying your dog up in your backyard is torture, then go home to a designer dog they happily bought from a puppy mill. There are still dog fighting rings and cock fighting rings, and it's still mandatory that you test any cosmetics sold in China on animals (until the end of June, anyway). As ridiculous as the animal cruelty protestors seem at times, things like medical testing on animals is a very real grey area. I grew up right up the road from an animal research facility and while I personally think the good outweighs the bad at that site, I don't think it's ridiculous for them to show up and protest the things that are actually happening there that they don't agree with. Maybe I'm confusing actual protestors with whoever you're referring to with that anti-kitten-burning coalition thing, but America can't even seem to agree where the line is between interrogating and torturing people, so assuming that everyone defines animal cruelty the same way is a pretty unrealistic expectation.

I grew up about 10 minutes away from Stone Mountain. You'd be surprised how bumpkin that part of town (the whole Tucker, Stone Mountain, Lilburn area) gets. There's some great putt putt and an awesome roller rink right next door to each other, though! I really want Ubisoft to show a little respect to where they're choosing to set their game, but I'm sure that they're going to do things like call all of your guides -- and only your guides -- Sherpas. It might be done in an attempt to make a statement about appropriation or othering of other cultures, but if that's even in there it's going to come second to blowing shit up with your rad ass nuclear elephant.

I went through the same thing, but with maybe an extra caveat. I played one of them until I got to some tower and went through dialogue to have sex with a girl for no real reason that I can remember and the encounter was just reduced to "Congratulations! Have a trophy to commemorate your sexual conquest!" It just all felt weird and gross and I took a break from the game and just never got back to it. The other one I just played for a while and it got rote and boring (basically run at enemies while left clicking fight mechanics with a story that I felt like I'd seen a million times before) so I stopped one night and just never picked it up again. I figure there's something I'm missing since they're almost universally lauded, but I couldn't get into them. I might take some of the advice in here to try again some time soon. That there's a point in Witcher 1 where things ramp up a bit is encouraging because that means maybe I just didn't give it enough of a chance.

I'm too young to really remember when the earring thing mattered too much, but I remember the sing-songy phrase "Left is right and right is wrong" from the early/mid 90s. I'd completely forgotten about that weird little interaction. Thanks for pointing it out.

If the gratuitous sex stuff bothered you, I really don't know how you could make it through an entire book named Blood of the Fold. (sorry, the really terrible inadvertent pun of that title still entertains me more than a decade later) I've been laid up for a few days, so I've gotten some reading done. Mostly just pulpy light books, but I'm finally getting around to reading some Arno Schmidt. I've really enjoyed his short stories so far, but the way he throws around punctuation marks like they're going out of style (I guess he just felt colons were underutilized or something since he just throws them in at seemingly random places) will probably end up driving me away. The content of the writing is great, but his style. Oof. I love experimental fiction and it's still grating on my nerves.

I was laid up on the couch for a few days with a gnarly head cold or something, so I actually finished Cold Days and then went through Skin Game.

Most discussions of Molly talk about how Harry doesn't really see her as a sexual being, but then goes on to describe in vivid detail how attractive she is. This happened at least 3 times in Cold Days, if I'm remembering right. The whole dance scene with the fae at the beginning of Cold Days has paragraphs of descriptions of female fae in nearly no clothing, then doesn't describe the men past, "Well, they weren't wearing much either, but I don't really care about them so let's talk about boobs some more." This is before we see Harry's brother and he talks about his rippling abs and model good looks, so I guess at that point you can half buy that he doesn't sexualize men in the same way he does women. Even that little fairie, Lacuna or whatever her name was -- the one that Harry accidentally captures and then traps in the oven? Even she's sexualized to a really weird extent. I don't know if she ever walks around naked, but she asks Harry why he wears clothes and then implies that she'd rather just go around naked all the time. For no reason. It's just thrown out there, and then the other little fairie dude starts hitting on her a lot. Basically, every woman that's introduced in Cold Days is sexualized in a weird, kinda gross way. I feel like there's something to be said about the point of view it's written from and the male gaze, but I haven't put the thought in to know what it is.

A friend of mine has been bugging me to read this entire series for a while, so I've picked up a few over the last year when I want light, easy reading. They're enjoyable pulpy action books, and that they spend so much time recapping previous entries is good for someone like me who just picks random books from the series to read. I've only read maybe 4 or 5 of the books picked at random from the lot, but something has been bugging me throughout them that's kind of come to a head as I work through Cold Days: Dresden's interactions with women, and Butcher's descriptions thereof. So much of it just strikes me as obviously thoughtless and gross, but I never really see it brought up when I see these books discussed. Am I just seeing something that isn't really there?

I kept up with industry-related news or, when that failed (news flash: the lighting industry is not a fast-paced world, more after this incremental LED efficiency improvement), just news in general. I also spent time doing "professional development," like online courses for what I was employed to do, or doing cross-training for other positions so I could take on more responsibility to eliminate that downtime. But mostly Twitter and the news. A whole lot of Twitter and the news.

Save JR for last. The way it's written makes it a bit difficult to approach, to say the least. I've been trying to get into Tao Lin lately, but failing miserably. He has interesting ideas and characters, and I understand what he's trying to do with the monotonous, flat language, but... well, monotonous, flat language gets pretty uninteresting over the course of 250 pages. I think I'll just stick to his short stories after I'm done with Taipei. I don't think I can take another book written like this.

The art is amazing in Casanova, but the writing is VERY Matt Fraction. It's alright sometimes, but like a lot of Matt Fraction projects it gets real bogged down with referential humor for referential humor's sake and inane little in jokes. I wouldn't say it's a good idea to read it if you don't usually dig the guy.

Pablo Neruda is great. So is Rumi. Both wrote a lot about love and did it really well. Rumi can be very devastating to read if you think about it too much (Like This used to be a poem that cheered me up and now it's a poem that just makes me feel completely drained), but it's beautiful however you choose to think about it. The only Neruda collection that I can't recommend is Spain in the Heart. It's a collection of poems he wrote about/during the Spanish Civil War and it just feels rushed and lackluster, and requires too much study of his life to really get much out of it. It's maybe one of the most personal collections of his poetry for this reason, but it takes too much effort. One poem is just a list of cities/towns, which can be meaningful if you research it but on first read it's just tedious. I think the standard leaping point for Neruda is Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which is a truly breathtaking work. If you ever went through that goth phase in high school, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell always makes me think fondly of how ridiculous that time was. Alexander Pope is a really fun read to me, but a lot of people consider him dry. He was a really fascinating guy who wrote really interesting poetry, though. An Essay on Criticism was the first poem I read by him and I think it's still my favorite.

The Recognitions by William Gaddis was far and away the best book I read last year. It had a lot to say about a lot of things -- authenticity both in art and in relationships chief among them. For a book that was written in the late 40s and early 50s, it still has a lot of very relevant messages for the digital age. Beyond that, its influence on writers like Thomas Pynchon, David Markson, and David Foster Wallace (some of my favorite authors) is obvious once you've read it. Gaddis was far ahead of his time and it's a true shame that he's been largely forgotten. The book does ask a lot of the reader, but I found it worth answering the call. I read it in the middle of last year and I still find myself thinking about it fairly regularly and going back to my copy to revisit passages. JR was incredible as well, but it's so unapproachable that I have a hard time recommending it to anyone. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of his books, but I haven't gotten around to them yet. But it wasn't my favorite book. That's a tie between two other books. One has to be A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. For a book that dealt with such heavy issues (largely, everything having to do with how out of control America's prison system has gotten), it was surprisingly funny and, at times anyway, light-hearted. It hit a lot of points and navigated some very complex issues adeptly, without ever getting too bogged down in philosophy. I liked the way it played with the way it told its story. Most of the book is told with a typical narrative, but some things are covered using courtroom transcripts, letters, epic poems, or unmarked dialogue. These techniques weren't just used as some post-modern artistic wankery either, but generally to show how a criminal defense lawyer tries to distance himself from a case that he's working on, successfully or not. It was a very rewarding read, but I agree with the politics in it very strongly, so I'm definitely biased in my opinion. The other favorite would be the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I struggle with depression, anxiety, and generally feeling alienated, and Pessoa approaches those feelings in a beautiful way. It took me a while to get through it, but that was just because of the way I chose to read it: I kept it by my bed and read a little bit of it before going to bed for about a month. It's just a collection of short thoughts and anecdotes, sometimes connected to each other and sometimes not, so I think reading it in that way added something to it for me. Pessoa as a literary figure had interested me for a while but I'd never read anything by him before this, and I'm glad it was my introduction to him. I've read some of his poetry and other works since, but nothing else is really as good as this was. And just to throw it out there because they feel so literary, the comics of Andrew White were my favorite comics I read last year. I'm absolutely blown away by what he does with the form. We Will Remain was a fascinating collection. Black Pillars is incredible as well, but it's still unfinished -- the second part is coming out some time in February, so I can't remark on it as a complete work yet.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/WHTaft Force me to actually play Dota 2 with people! I'm terrible, but at least I speak English? I guess I have other games too, if you're into that kind of thing.

That sounds familiar, and Jessica being unable to open a door is pretty unsurprising. The woman even manages to get locked in a literal castle dungeon at one point.

Kingdom Hearts II was just enough to whet my appetite. I'm talking full-on Murder, She Wrote fanfic-cum-game style project. Mystery games are very nice, just as long I force myself to forget the horrible mistake I made in buying that Nancy Drew game once.

Hello, folks! I play video games and also have an appreciation for Angela Lansbury. Maybe one day the two will meet and it will be glorious. Until that day, I'll just play what I have.