libraries – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0034/????]

This is another hell of a week, but at least (mostly) not for me? Thin comfort.

The trilogy that started with Ninefox Gambit stayed mostly excellent, although I wasn’t completely enamored with the conclusion. Still, worth a read. I also read a bunch of other books too.
Other book notes the first: I actually quite liked Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is apparently Not The In Thing, but whatever. (I’ll freely admit that its core “schtick” is one I’ve thought a lot about, which alters my judgment.)
Other book notes the second: Fortune Smiles is a fantastic short story collection by Adam Johnson. One of the stories is very dark, but it warns you pretty close to the start, and if you read the book in chronological order you’ll be warned earlier anyhow. This was another one of those “pick it up at random in the library” books that I almost certainly wouldn’t have ever picked on my own, so: yay library displays!
Other book notes the third: I’m in the middle of reading Harlan Ellison’s seminal sf collection Dangerous Visions; I can see how it would have been pretty damn transgressive in the late Sixties, although with the benefit of hindsight it occasionally has a whiff of Trying Too Hard. Most of the stories are excellent, though, and as a whole it holds up impressively well. My favorite bit so far isn’t one of the stories at all, but Ellison’s introduction where he tears into the whiny Old Guard and their complaints about how the new sf just isn’t the same as the old. The fact that it could be taken almost verbatim as a tear-down of the modern “crisis” in sf that, for a while, centered around the whole Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy/etc. thing is delightful. Everything old is new again, kids.
Despite continuing to read at a rapid pace, I also continue to check out library books at an even more rapid rate. Half of my couch is covered in them. I have thirty-five checked out right now, many of them huge tomes full of short stories that will take me forever to finish. what am I doing
We had an extended game night Tuesday. We played Concordia, one of my favorite games, and I did very poorly, coming in last. Part of that was an idiotic play on my part in one of the final turns that cost me something like fifteen points. I acted like a complete jerk at the end, though, so… I’m afraid I’m not a lot better about that whole situation than I was when I wrote about it last. Ugh. I’m not happy with myself about that.
Finished up Bojack Horseman season 5, which was amazing, and Jessica Jones season 2, which was… fine… I guess. Started on Luke Cage season 2 and Orange is the New Black season 5. I may actually drop that last one, which is veering dangerously close to the sort of “everything is miserable and you get to watch” modern take on TV that I just can’t handle.
I weighed myself on Thursday for the first time in, uh, almost a year, I guess? I’m at 271 pounds; my best guess for how much I weighed when I started on this diet in late April is somewhere between 330 and 360 pounds, so I’ve lost something in the 60-90 pound range over a bit more than five months. (In case you’re wondering, my goal weight is 180, which is technically overweight from a BMI standpoint but is actually on the line where I go from looking healthy to looking less so.) That’s pretty damn good progress, even though I’ve got a long way to go. I was also reminded that I should never, ever own a scale. They ruin my will with the irregular ups-and-downs.
Lots of puzzles, too; I’m finally getting to a point where I’m relatively confident in my Kakuro solving, and I continue to work on several other books and magazines on a one-off basis.
No prose, although I did finish up my Guide to the Cardpocalypse series.
I also came up with the core idea for my NaNoWriMo novel. My current plan is to share that here as I write it (although probably not as body text, which would be overwhelming). We’ll see if I still feel that way come November.
Mostly just the usual on the videogame front, although the launch of Hollow Knight on the PS4 made me buy it (again) and play it, since I find that sort of game way more suited to a big TV and recliner than my computer. If you like Metroidvanias, I strongly recommend it.

Well, that was excessively long, so, uh… until next time!

Weekly status update [0033/????]

What a week.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday: the storm that didn’t really hit us. I had thoughts.
Most of my weekend time–and, actually, most of my time during the week as well–was spent reading. I think I read something like twelve novels in the last seven days; I know for a fact that I read three just yesterday. It was nice. I particularly want to note the three Seanan McGuire novellas that start with Every Heart a Doorway and the three Ben H. Winters novels that start with The Last Policeman. They were all particularly pleasant reads. I’m currently in the middle of Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, the first in another trilogy. It had a bit of an impenetrable start, but I’m over halfway through it and enjoying it thoroughly now.
I also got back (at least temporarily) into watching television. It’s Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the morning, then the just-released season of Bojack Horseman and season two of Jessica Jones in the afternoon. Both of those are almost done, though; I’ll move onto Luke Cage for sure, and probably finally start the second season of Fargo as well.
Several of my old coworkers (and some that would be new, were I still working) were in town this week, and I was invited to a pair of group events. Those were nice, but honestly the best evening was Tuesday, which involved just three of us having a long conversation about science fiction over dinner at the best local Tex-Mex place. It’s always nice to catch up with folks, but I do much better in small groups than I do in large ones, and I’m delighted that someone reached out to plan that dinner. (Thanks, Mike!)
The downside of said dinner: despite getting through a dozen novels this week, my library stack actually grew (in word count, if not volumes) thanks to suggestions-slash-recommendations from that extended conversation. Sigh.
Puzzles provided a nice series of interrupts over the course of the week. Not just for me, too; I had Amazon ship a fat stack of puzzle books to one of my cousins back home, who had expressed interest in them back when I visited in April, and spent a couple of hours on the phone over the course of the week helping her work through some of them. She seems pretty hooked, which gives me a good feeling. Puzzles are awesome.
Nothing exciting on the video game front, though; I’m mostly taking a break after the heavy Creeper World action from the past few weeks, just maintaining my dailies in the handful of free-to-play games I still muck around with. I really, really need to put Let It Die to bed.

I’ll finish up my Cardpocalypse series this coming week. I know my tiny readership isn’t big on commenting, but: this is your final chance to get me to cover anything you think I’ve missed. So, uh, get on that, I guess?

Biblio tech

I’ve been spending most of my time this past week reading; I tore through an entire book yesterday, stopping only to go to Fercott and play games for an hour and a half (Lamb by Christopher Moore, which was very good), and this weekend I read both collected volumes of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 800+ pages of manga that completely entranced me the whole way through. I currently have a pair of teetering stacks on my sofa, waiting to be read.

And they’re all from the library.

I think that, at least here in the US, there is a common… not disrespect, necessarily, but intentional devaluing of the services that libraries provide, particularly among those that consider themselves “middle class.” Even I have gone in and out of heavy usage periods with local libraries, and the general not-really-logic over the years has often been something like:

I have a job that makes pretty decent money.
Books are really nice objects.
I know the library has most of the books I want, but not all of them…
…and I can afford to buy books.
And then they’re mine. Mine! For all eternity.
So I should buy my books.

Up until that last point, there’s really nothing particularly flawed with that reasoning. But that last step is not all that far removed from the old “then a miracle occurs” comic strip. While it’s absolutely true that any reasonable rate of book collection is unlikely to bankrupt someone of even modest means, it’s also almost always unnecessary.

The big reason is utility: if you buy a book, read it once, then put it on a shelf, what exactly is that book doing for you the other 99.995% of its lifetime? Nothing, really. And don’t get me wrong, a lot of the books on the shelves of a modern library don’t get checked out very often… but that’s still a lot more utility than the ones sitting dusty in the far corner of your bedroom.

There are others, too; inter-library loan, or things like the Cardinal system here in North Carolina, can get you the books that your local library doesn’t have. And libraries have a ton of other things besides, DVDs and CDs and paintings and public computers and sometimes even board games and video games. But I think that libraries also often have a whiff of the desperate, the needy, the plebeian, that a certain middle class mentality frowns upon. “That’s nice,” it proposes, “but not for me. It’s for other, less well-to-do people, and students.”

Well… no. You pay for your local library with taxes. You should use the hell out of your local library.

I’ve made it an intentional habit that, whenever I put a book on hold (which is often) and go into the library to pick it up, I also browse the New Book shelf and the science fiction section. Librarians will almost always have some books on those little display rack things, and I end up picking up one or two or five of those because they look interesting; the last time I went to the library I picked up my one on-hold book and nine others I had never even heard of. And you know what? Some of my best recent reads came from that sort of random browsing. I just finished a book called The Comedown that was a solid bit of modern literary fiction… and a book I would have never read “on my own,” because it’s in a genre I pay basically no attention to. But it was on the New Book rack, I took a chance on it, and that chance paid off.

That’s not to say that I never buy books any more. There are a couple of authors (Scalzi, Stross) whose books I still preorder as sort of a vestigial “I really like them and want to support them” thing. And sometimes someone recommends a book to me, I poke around on Cardinal and see no live copies, and so I pick up one used on Amazon for $5. But I try to keep that all to a minimum; my house is already way too cluttered with board games to make a whole bunch of room for more books, and the vast majority of what I want can be found at the library anyhow. I was the first person to get Stephen King’s most recent book (The Outsider, which was quite a delightful read) at the local library, and I got it maybe a week after it came out. Not exactly long-delayed gratification.

Now, I know I’m a partisan. I was on the Board for the local library until politics drove me off, after all! But even if you’re not as passionate about libraries as I am, the next time you think about placing an order on Amazon for a book you’re likely to only read once, think: couldn’t I just pick this up from the library?

And maybe you’ll find some other life-changing book waiting for you on one of those little racks when you do.