Year 2- Day 213 (I think?) Another Sunny Day!

[shadowkat]

Since I was working remotely again, I decided to take a long walk at lunchtime resulting in a Cold Brew Milk Shake (basically a coffee ice cream milk shake - which is actually better than either vanilla or chocolate). Hand made by the tiny Korean woman behind the counter - in the Carvel Ice Cream Shop. It's an old school ice cream shop. No seats. Just the counter and the ice cream.

I needed it to stay awake and for that extra oomph. I'd not slept well the night before. It was a medium shake, so nothing too major.

Didn't get much work done due to technical difficulties. Every time I upgrade Citrix, it disconnects multiple times. I'd say it was my wifi, but I'm positive it's Citrix.

**


Anyhow, found this amusing thread on book twitter:

Cat Sebastian's twitter thread, along with various others...about an idiot who opines that if anyone who doesn't finish a book is insulting the writers...

Here it is:

Cat Sebastian
catswrites
thank you to the absolute maniacs at the independent for finding the one opinion so batshit that it unites us all

Quote Tweet
Victoria Richards
nakedvix
· Oct 14
'It's an insult to authors not to finish every book you start' - strong stuff from my excellent colleague ruhawksley (I took 'A Suitable Boy' away on holiday ONLY so I had no choice but to read all 1,349 pages - I loved it). What do you think, lit twitter?https://independent.co.uk/voices/books-r

So the Independent.co.Uk is apparently the Brit's take on the New Republic and Fox News?

Notably - everyone disagreed with Victoria Richards. My response?

"Consider many many many authors insulted then. Particularly during the past year. I doubt they'll mind though - or notice. Dead ones certainly don't."

Then there's...

Rupert Hawksley
ruhawksley
Replying to
aiabx
and
nakedvix
So many books improve after 20 pages but you’ll never know

LOL!

And so many many get worse. Seriously, a lot of writers have no idea how to end a book. Or the acquisition editor just reads the first twenty pages, and doesn't bother with the rest...Horse Whisperer, anyone?

I've lost count of the number of books I hoped would get better and got worse. Actually I got into the habit a long time ago, of skipping ahead to see if the book got any better. If it didn't - I gave up. "Me Before You" - it got worse, I gave up fast.

Reading is subjective. And moody. I might like a book one year, and hate it the next. It all depends on my mood. As a writer - I've learned not to care. Heck, I get nit-picked constantly on my writing at work at the moment. I got frustrated copy-editors as managers at the moment. God knows where they find the time to play copy-editor on business letters, but whatever.



Ah, Twitter. I find it amusing at times. I particularly like the lit writer and booktwitter kerfuffles.

Cat Sebastian for those who don't know - is an independent romance writer, who writes mainly LGBTA, non-traditional historical romance pairings. I've read two of her heterosexual romances, which were off-beat and quite good.
I find her charming. Also, great name. I wish I had that name. My name is rather boring.

Here's a funky carrier pigeon, whose picture I took on my walk to the grocery store after work. His owner, got him to pose for us.



Did laundry today - went down before lunch - and ran into two other people, neither wearing masks. Both tiny women. I towered over them, even slouching. Honestly I'm surrounded by tiny people.

I told this to mother, who informed me that she kept surprising folks who'd only seen her in a wheel chair before - with how tall she is. They react to me in the same way, I get up - people are shocked. I'm high waisted, and my height is entirely in my legs.

Anyhow, I gave up, since they were using all the washers, and the one who removed her stuff from the washers - had rugs, which take forever to dry.
I decided to come back after lunch.

This turned out to be a smart move - no one was down there, and the washers and dryer were vacant. I was able to do three loads with no issues. (Well outside of the fact that I accidentally overlooked a towel and three pairs of socks in one of the washers - and had to dry them separately for an additional 26 minutes after everything else was done. I discovered them when I came downstairs to remove the stuff I'd just dried.) There was another woman down there - she was wearing a mask. Asian-American. Asians tend to wear masks for the most part. It's usually the Eastern Europeans and the Bengali who don't for some reason, also the Hispanic. I'm not sure why those three cultures have issues with it.
The other one is the Orthodox Jews - they will refuse, and the Jewish school rarely has folks in masks. Everyone else is a mixed bag.

Most people don't wear them outside any longer. I rarely do, unless the streets are crowded. And I'm beginning to wear them less and less inside my apartment complex. For the most part because I'm alone, it's rare I cross paths with folks, which is most likely why others aren't wearing them. Why bother - if you rarely see anyone? People tend to stick to themselves in my complex, which is a good and bad thing. Even more so now during the pandemic. I can go weeks with barely seeing a soul inside said complex.

**

I didn't sleep well last night, been having leg cramps, so I was overly tired today. But the sunshine and the warmth helped. It was in the upper 70s, low 80s today. Tomorrow a storm is supposed to blow in along with a cold front, pulling the temperatures down to the 50s and 60s.

**

Been watching Baking Impossible on Netflix, which is basically engineering meeting baking. It's a lot of fun. Although I think the lead judge just likes smashing the contestants masterpieces. Two of the challenges involved just that. They had the contestants erect tall buildings and city scapes out of cake and edibles, then put them on an earthquake simulator to see if they could cause the buildings to come tumbling down. The other challenge was to build a five foot tall car, out of cake and edibles, with a desert in the trunk, that can safely hold a test dummy - and crash it into a wall. If the dummy survives - that helps your points, also the car should look cool, and the desert be yummy and survive the experience.

This is far more entertaining to watch than the baking and cooking shows that depend on taste. This thing doesn't depend on taste that much at all. Two of the judges are engineers, only one is into taste.

I don't find these competitions stressful at all. Mainly because I don't really care that much who wins. I root for folks of course, but honestly? It doesn't matter. It's just cake.

This one is only eight episodes long, with the last two dropping this week.

***

Final random photo of the night...or rather photo I took on my walk today.

I took this while a dog walker crept up behind me and startled me when she told me that I could get closer if I wanted to. Apparently it was her house and yard.

Comments

[mtbc]

The pigeon's cool! Interesting find.

[cactuswatcher]

Must finish books:
To be honest I think that attitude is a little immature. In school you "must" finish the books the teacher asks you to read so if you're a good little boy or girl you do that. If you are not so determined, you may find that not every book is worth reading for you personally at a particular stage of your life, and faking it for a book or two over your school life may be a better option. Hearing what the rest of the class thought might make you want to think about trying it again in a decade or so, when your tastes might be a little different. But again it might not.

There are some genuinely bad books out there. Plowing through them just "because" is insulting yourself. Life is too short to think you owe someone you will never meet to read every word of a book they didn't catch your interest with somewhere near the beginning.

[cactuswatcher]

I should add that it is best to try to read everything that is assigned. I read through a number of books from high school through grad school I wasn't fond of. But at least in my grad studies it was clear I personally needed to know about the books, which is not at all clear or even the case in high school.

I can think of Great Expectations which everyone in my school had to read. I remember eagerly reading about half of it, and then noticing I was having more and more difficulty reading it at all. I think I skimmed the last few pages. I'm convinced we only read it because it is Dickens and it's short. I've since read Oliver Twist, David Copperfield (both of which most people like) and Bleak House (which a lot of folks don't like), and enjoyed them all.

I enjoyed Literature classes in high school. But I can't pretend I liked or even finished everything, and don't think I missed anything important.

[yourlibrarian]

I have that Baking show in my queue but haven't tried it yet. And while I don't read much Romance, I agree that Cat Sebastian has some good ones out.

[shadowkat]

I kind of agree.

I'm not in school any longer, and no longer have to write essays or book reports on what I've read. Or meet with the teacher to discuss them, and prove I've read them. Unlike a lot of kids I went to school with - I enjoyed reading and finished books I was assigned in school, and read a lot outside of school. I read slowly - dyslexic - but I still enjoyed it and devoured books.

I knew a lot of folks in school who bought cliff notes on books and read that instead. (Which honestly, I can understand doing with "Moby Dick". I remember a guy who did it with that book. I never was assigned that book, so gleefully skipped it.)

And I was an English Lit major who was assigned to read about twenty-thirty books in the space of a month. (I went to a school where you had a different class each month, instead of having say four to six classes altogether, we had one each month. Sometimes the class would be for three months. As a result it was kind of intense. It was called blocks or the block plan. Two colleges do it in the country. I think Cornell may be the either one? Colorado College started it in the 1960s or thereabouts.) Anyhow, as a result, I got assigned books that weren't too lengthy and lost of short story collections. However for one course - I had to read Catch-22 in the space of a weekend, I can't remember the other ten books on the reading list. I did a lot of skimming - and I was helped by the fact that I had read the play.

Also for James Joyce? I had to read Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and selections from his other novels in a month. At least the Ulysses course was just for that book, nothing else. We'd analyze a few chapters each week, in depth. Like, I said, intensive.

I can't say I remember half the books I read. I don't like Dickens. He's an author I've never made it through any of his books. I just don't like his writing style - it puts me to sleep. And I don't find the characters or situations interesting. But I did love Jane Austen, which I know you and others don't like. Didn't like Thomas Hardy either. I think I disliked pretty much all the writers who wrote in the Victorian Period, including the American writers. It's the writing style. I despised it. I can't think of one that I liked. And I've read most of them here or there. You'd think that would have made it torturous to be an English Lit Major - but I lucked out, I went to Colorado College and apparently most of the English Lit teachers there agreed with me - and did courses on Literature that was either long after the Victorian Period, or way before it. So I was able to skip over it for the most part. I did Shakespeare, Marlow, Fenimore Cooper, Austen, Richardson, Dickenson, Thoreau, Emerson, Locke, Hume, Sartre, Voltaire, jumped ahead to Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, then ahead again to Gibson, Vonnegurt, Jackson, Walker, Morrison. Just the ones I remember. I basically read the 18th, early 19th, mid-20th century, skipping over the late 19th and early 20th, except for a few short stories in there and well, Mark Twain, and the poets and dramatists. (I actually liked the poets of that period. Edgar Allen Poe's poetry was easier to read than his prose. I read all of Poe, but I didn't like his writing style at all - it gave me a headache. My dyslexia despised the Victorian style of writing - I felt like I was reading gibberish.)

If you dislike a literary period - it's not hard to avoid it completely if you want to. I had better luck avoiding it than I've had avoiding mathematics. One cannot avoid math.

I don't think anyone can make anyone else read something they don't like or want to read. Guilting or shaming them into it - is not going to work.

[shadowkat]

I've not read all of Cat Sebastian's - I'm not into the m/m romances - which are her main deal. But if you are...

[cactuswatcher]

I actually like reading Austin, though it's because she's a very good story teller. Her skill with the language is a different matter. But as a story teller she overcomes it... She's just not an author I'd care to analyze seriously or deeply. J.K. Rowling is somewhat the same way, a great story teller whose writing could use more editing. She doesn't make the outright grammar mistakes Austin did, but she falls into patterns that are just annoying once you see them, like insisting on repeating "Harry, Ron, and Hermione" in that order, over and over instead of writing something like "the three" once in a while, and even avoiding "they" at times.

I never could get far into Fenimore-Cooper before my eyes glazed over. Sartre was even worse for me. But if we all liked the same things it would be a dull world.

[shadowkat]

I can't say I liked Fenimore-Cooper, does anyone? I mean...my god, he was hard to read. Talk about flowery. And racist, and sexist. Ugh. I only read Last of the Mohicans. Sartre wasn't much easier - but I took French, so that may have helped? I only read a little of Sartre.

Also, I never analyzed Austen nor did I read her for any classes. Writing wise? You have to realize that you most likely aren't reading the original version, and that she wrote in a style specific to that age. In the 18th and early 19th, they wrote in the epistolary style. Basically a highly formalized letter writing style. She was obviously skilled for that time period - since she's among the few writers from that time period that lasted. And she didn't have great editors, if any at all.

I read Austen for pleasure in high school, much the same way I read Georgette Heyer, Rosemary Rodgers, Ken Follet, Frank Herbert, JRR Tolkien, Issac Asimov, Andre Norton, CJ Cheryyth (sp?), etc. She wasn't necessarily my favorite.

And Dickens...sigh. The king of the run-on sentence, Dickens. It's not quite fair to compare Austen to Dickens for a host of reasons - the main being, that Dickens had editors, Austen didn't and she mainly self-published much like Emily Dickenson did. Most of Austen's work, unlike Dickens, was published near her death in 1817. Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. And a good majority of her early writings has been lost. It was either published by her father, or at her father's bequest or after her death.

Per Wiki on Austen

Keep in mind, women struggled to get anything published back then. And Austen was an unmarried woman working in what was considered a predominantly male profession in the late 1700s early 1800s. Her writing style is typical of that period - and she was most likely among the most skilled of that time period, since not many of her contemporaries have lasted the test of time.

Charles Dickens in stark contrast was born when Pride and Prejudice was published. And started publishing his works in serial format in magazines in the 1830s long after Austen's death. Charles Dickens was a popular writer, similar to Stephen King, in a way, or serial writer not unlike a soap opera writer. And his plots, you have to admit are rather operatic. He got fan mail. He had editors, got paid for his works during his lifetime, and got acclaim. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women the same way that Dickens wrote his books, they were more contemporaries I think? People would write in letters begging for certain characters to end up together or survive. They had fan mail. (I've not been able to get through either.)

Is there a perfect writer who doesn't make grammatical errors? Not that I've found. Some just have better editors. ;-)

I preferred literature written after 1940 something - or a cleaner more minimalist writing style. John Steinbeck's prose I preferred to Dickens.