Rosie is Now Internet Famous!

Inspired by westie_servant over at Animal Lover, I give you a picture of my dog.

This is Rosie the Wonder Corgi, caught in a rare moment of a quiet relaxation, enjoying the poetry of e. e. cummings. Possibly, she is absorbing the poetry through some form of canine osmosis.

Guilty Pleasure Books

This past week, I've been rereading The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. I'm mildly ashamed of that. See, they're not terribly good books. The main character is pretty much the biggest Mary Sue that ever lived, at least half of the plot is utterly ridiculous, and the world building makes pretty much no sense. Plus the covers pretty much broadcast to the world exactly what I'm reading - a vaguely silly fantasy story that wants so much to be Dark and instead is halfway to being a romance novel. Every time I read them, I tell myself that I shouldn't like them as much as I do.

But I love reading them. They're fun, they're mindless, and they have a happy ending. The bad people are killed in satisfying ways, the good people get properly rewarded, the estranged couple end up together. Plus, there are telepathic wolves and a honking big dragon. What more could anyone want out of a junk food book? Reading The Black Jewels Trilogy is like sitting around in my pajamas and eating a big bowl of ice cream - it's not terribly good for me and I'm sure there are more productive and improving things that I could be doing but, at the time, it's incredibly enjoyable.

So tell me about your junk food books. If you don't mind sharing your guilty pleasures, that is. 8)

My favorite part of AV is the A

Y'know what's fantastic? Audiobooks. Audiobooks are one of the best thing in the world. See, I love being read to but it's hard to find people who want to sit still and read to me for hours on end. Especially when I'm trying to go to sleep or when I'm going to be crocheting for a long time. I'm an audiobook junkie. My favorites, I've ripped to my computer so that I can listen to them whenever I want (or put them on my iPod for use in the car). I love the Discworld audiobooks though, alas, the older ones read by Nigel Planer are a little hard to find and my copy of Men at Arms kind of sucks. The newer ones read by Stephen Briggs are fun, as well. (I am incredibly amused by the fact that his Carrot is Welsh. I'm not sure why that's funny.)

Good readers are incredibly important. A bad reader will turn me off a recording at lightning speed, even if it's a book I dearly love. I tend to avoid books that are read by the author for that reason. Reading well is a difficult skill to acquire (one that I've never manged, myself) and a lot of authors don't have it. Neil Gaiman does fairly well on his own books, though. Fortunately, one of my favorite readers (George Guidall) is incredibly prolific. And even if he weren't, seeing as he's read Dune, American Gods, Crime and Punishment and most of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I'm pretty much set.

And Constance, I know you've mentioned C. S. Lewis and Narnia recently - have you heard the audiobooks? Dawn Treader's read by Sir Derek Jacobi and is amazing and, although I'm perhaps overfond of Silver Chair anyway, I really like Jeremy Northam's recording of it. I'm very fond of his Puddleglum.

Audio drama? Also good. The BBC has a fantastic full-cast dramatization of that I was addicted to as a teenager. (Eventually, someone gave me a copy as a gift. The tapes are still under my bed, close to the stereo in case of audio emergency.) Audio drama is almost more fun, for me, than television. TV's all right, as far as it goes, but I tend to watch tv in an odd way, where I don't actually look at the screen much. Especially when I'm crocheting or doing something else with my hands. (I fidget. A lot.) So I end up missing a good bit of the narrative because it's visual. With audio drama, I get the acting, I get all of the narrative, and I get really good special effects because my brain generally has a bigger FX budget than most tv shows. 8) Also, I can listen in my car. (Audio dramas don't work at bedtime, though. Too exciting.)

I don't really have that many links for audio drama* but I can give you a nifty one for straight audiobooks - audiobooksforfree.com. Bunches of books on which the copyright has expired, all available for free and immediate download. The sound quality isn't fantastic, perhaps, but the selection is nifty and hey, it's free. (Also, the files are very small indeed so you can fit several books on even the smallest mp3 player.)




*I have one link for audiodrama but it's a bit specific and a little weird. Anyway. If you are a Doctor Who fan who doesn't know about Big Finish Productions, hie thee there immediately and find yourself a way to acquire a copy of Jubilee. You will not regret it.

(Yes, it stars the Sixth Doctor. Yes, you probably think you don't like the Sixth Doctor. I don't care - you will like Jubilee. And here are three advantages that Jubilee has over actual Sixth Doctor episodes: a) better writers, b) neither Peri nor Mel are anywhere to be found and c) you can't see the coat.)

del.icio.us

Today, I am playing with del.icio.us. I'd heard of it in my internet travels before the whole krl 2.0 thing but I'd never been quite sure what it was. Looking at it now, with a better understanding of it, it's pretty much totally awesome. I've actually set up two accounts - one for work and one for my internet leisure time. 8)

For work, having resources I regularly use (and a network of other people who are also listing useful sites) right at my fingertips has obvious advantages. At home...well, I have a huge and intimidating folder of bookmarks at home. I save a whole lot of things - recipes, crafty things, stories of all kinds - and then, when I want to go back to them later, I can never find them. It's going to take weeks to categorize and tag all of my bookmarks but the end result will be well worth it. God, I love tags.

And in the mean time, I get to rediscover all the stuff I thought was worth saving.

(Though I have to say, I find the name off-putting. I mean, I know most people just say "delicious" but it's get all those periods in the middle! Surely, one is meant to pronounce them in some way. Are they glottal stops of some kind? Since the "icio" and the "us" are split apart, is one meant to pronounce them more separately? These things bother me.)

Making Money

Yesterday, I had several hours of free time which I spent in reading and now I have finished Making Money. I shall endeavor to post a bit of a review without actually posting spoilers.

Generally, I liked it. I don't think it's Pterry's strongest work - this and Thud have seemed to lack the coherence that books like Feet of Clay or Hogfather had. Still, it was a lot of fun to read and if it does occasionally seem to be bouncing all over the place, at least it isn't trying to be two distinct and seperate books. (Oh, Reaper Man, I loved Bill Door but what the frell was going on with the shopping carts?)

The two Moist books are especially fun because we get to see characters that we're attached to from a completely different point of view. I'm a Watch book girl, primarily, and so seeing Vimes and Carrot through Moist's eyes is very entertaining. Vetinari is a slightly different character with Moist than he is with Vimes. (Also, we get to see a lot of him with Drumknott, which I'm particularly partial to.) And Moist making fun of William de Worde is comedy gold.

And the new characters are fun, Mr Bent especially. (Well, for me.) The Lavishes aren't my favorite villains ever but their rather banal brand of low-grade evil works for a book about banking. And I love Moist. And Spike. And Moist and Spike together.* 8)

I love the continuity the later Discworld novels are developing, where the fallout of the last novel still has effects in the next one, even if it's only in tiny ways. In Making Money, we get mentions of Devices and the Low King which, even if they're not important right now, make me wonder what effects of Thud we may still be building on.

All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon and I think it will be rereadable. I'll have to see if I can get the audiobook next. (Oh, Stephen Briggs, I am terribly fond of you.)

And now I have to go and find another book.



*I always want to like Pterry's romances but for the most part, they don't work for me. I don't care for the Witch books in general, the Death books don't do romance, I do love Vimes and Sybil but the romance we often get in the Watch books is Carrot and Angua and oh Lord, but I hate Angua. Which leaves me with William and Sacharissa (who will never actually happen) and Moist and Miss Adora Belle Dearheart. Spiky and snarky no-nonsense romance is one of my favorite kinds.

Campfire Stories

All right, friends and neighbors, it's October 12th. Which means that we're nearly halfway through October. Which in turn means that it's nearly Halloween. It's scary story time. So let's play a game: I'll tell you about some of my favorite scary stories and then you can tell me about some of yours. It'll be like campfire time at summer camp. Feel free to chime in with anything in any medium: book, short story, film, tv episode, song, picture, internet urban legend, actual campfire story. They're all good. I'll give you three stories in three different mediums.


First: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. First of all, let me say that this book is a bit challenging to read. There are multiple entwined narratives, footnotes that may not refer to the page they're printed on, pages that you have to hold upside down or sideways or up to a mirror in order to read. If you're a fan of non-standard and non-linear narrative, this is the book for you.

The book opens with our narrator, Johnny Truant, being brought to the apartment of a dead man, Zampanò, who has left an enormous manuscript in a battered trunk. Johnny takes the manuscript home and begins to read it. From then on, we alternate between Johnny's narrative and Zampanò's manuscript.Johnny Truant's story is horrific enough - he is eventually driven mad by the manuscript he's discovered. But it's the manuscript itself that's the most interesting part of the book, to me. It concerns a nonexistent documentary called The Navidson Record, filmed by Will Navidson who discovers that his new house is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. 1/4 of an inch bigger, to begin with. Now, I know that doesn't sound terribly frightening, on the face of it. (My first thought was "oh, the house is dimensionally transcendental" but that's because I'm a giant dork.) But think about it - we trust our homes to be safe. That's why the haunted house is the archetype it is. We trust reality to be solid, reliable, to act by certain rules. When those rules fall apart, nothing works anymore. House of Leaves is about being betrayed by reality. Eventually, that betrayal becomes much more spectacular and the house sprouts impossible endless hallways and cathedral-sized caverns. But the most frightening moment, for me, comes early on when a pile of books go tumbling off their bookshelf because it 's no longer flush with the wall.

House of Leaves isn't a traditional haunted house story. There are no ghosts in the house, no monsters that the human characters don't bring there themselves. The house is alien, unknowable, and implacable. The horror here is classically Lovecraftian* - there's no malice. The house won't destroy you because it hates you. The house destroys because it doesn't know you're there. Which is much more frightening, to my mind.


For my second story, I'm going to have to go to a vaguely dorky place because I'm going to talk about an episode of an obscure science fiction television show. Anyone out there ever watched Sapphire & Steel? It's an odd little British show from the late 70's/early 80's starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley. Sapphire and Steel are...well, actually, no one really knows what they are but what they do is fix problems with time. But don't worry about that - it's not important right now. What is important is that the second arc of the show - "The Railway Station" - is a nearly perfect ghost story. An abandoned railway station is being haunted by the spirits of dead soldiers and it's Sapphire and Steel's job to get rid of them. By any means necessary.

I'm not going to spoil any of the story here but I do want to talk about atmosphere. Sapphire & Steel, as a show, moves very slowly. This is great, as it allows for build. There are very few big scare scenes - nothing jumping suddenly out of the shadows - but there's a constant and ever-building feeling of creep. The railway station is dimly lit and full of neglected rooms that echo with long-dead voices. The lamps are burnt out and the potted plants on the platform are wilted and dry. Except for when they're not. The other advantage the show has working for it is its lack of budget. Seriously, this thing had less money than Doctor Who and, unlike Doctor Who, its makers didn't react to this by trying to make convincing monsters out of bubblewrap and potted cacti. Instead, they decided to rely on the power of suggestion. The human brain is capable of conjuring horrors greater than anything that can convincingly be shown on screen, if you let it work. Sapphire & Steel lets your brain do all the heavy lifting.

The pacing is, as I said, very slow and the credit sequence is, I regret to say, a little embarrassing, but the show itself is well-worth making the effort. We don't have it in the library, alas, but it can be rented through Netflix, if you've got an account. "The Railway Station" is disc two, if you decide to seek it out specifically, though all of the show is worth watching.


Lastly, I leave you with a song. Sussex Ghost Story, by John Wesley Harding. (To download, click on the link, find where it says "download link", and click.) It's short, it's shivery, and it's an eminently singable little ghosty revenge story. It is our anniversary and you cannot run away from me...


So, greater blogosphere, what are some of your favorite scary stories?




*Well, perhaps not quite. There's nothing squishy enough to be perfectly Lovecraftian. 8)

Brief Nuts and Bolts Question

Does anybody out there in the greater blogosphere know how we're supposed to find out if people reply to our comments? I managed to find the setting where I can get email notifications if someone comments on my blog but is there any way to find out if there's a reply to a comment I make elsewhere without actually going back to the post I commented on and physically checking? It seems to me that this would make continued conversation much easier.

More than likely, this is an impossibility. But still, it never hurts to ask.

So...here I am on blogger. ::waves to the blogosphere::

I suppose introductions and explanations are probably in order. Hi! My name's Sara. I work at the Kingston and Bainbridge branches of KRL and am embarking on this blog as a result of our new KRL 2.0 program, which is all very exciting. I am not precisely new to blogging but haven't really spent much time on blogger in the past. I have a tendency to ramble and a terrible habit of over-using parentheses. I'm calling this place The Birdhouse because a) thinking of names is terribly difficult and b) I'm fascinated by corvids in general and crows in particular. So there's a mild crow theme thing going on.

Since this is a blog at least vaguely connected to the library, I should probably use it to talk about library-ish things. The 2.0 program, for example, and babble about whatever it is I'm reading that day. It's a good plan, anyway, and I suppose that what anyone reading can expect to begin with. (If anyone reads this...)

So! To begin - yesterday, I started the new Discworld novel, Making Money. In it, we see the the return of Moist von Lipwig, last seen in Going Postal. I liked Going Postal a good deal (it's not Nightwatch but then, what else is?) and so I'm glad to see the character back. I'm only a few pages into it but it seems enjoyable already. I imagine I'll update as I get further into the book.

::rereads:: Not terribly bad for a first post. 8)