A New Semester Looms, and 2017’s Reading Goals

Actually, the new semester doesn’t so much loom as exist.  ‘Cause it technically begins today.  Only my class is Monday-only, so I get a week’s reprieve.  (Although on seeing that the syllabus is 46 pages long and the professor expects us to read it all…I kind of want to drop already.  I won’t, but…dang.  Guess I need to put it on my iPad and read it over the next few days.  Blargh…)  Not sure how much I’m going to be able to dedicate to my classwork, since I’m still working full-time, which is a new experience for me.  Eventually, they’re going to hire someone else, so I can can cut back to part-time, but who knows when that’ll be.

Obviously, the presence of school work on top of all that work work should lead me to become even more ludicrously lacking in my blogging.  But I’m hoping to prevent that.

One way I’m gonna do that is by posting more book reviews.  Like, of almost every book I read.  (Not counting, y’know, manga and stuff.  ‘Cause that would start getting silly, given how much of it I read.)  In order to give me a little more direction than “oh, that looks interesting!” or “how can I resist a book with the words ‘transvestite’ and ‘Achilles’ in the title?” (no, not making that up), I’m going to take part in the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge this year.  Some of the genres are definitely new to me.  (I thought “a book about sports” was new to me, but then I realized that kendo is a sport, and I’ve read the entire manga of Bamboo Blade, not to mention that martial arts in general count as a sport, and I’ve read the entire manga of Ranma 1/2 (which is a lot of reading, btw, ’cause it runs 36 volumes!) so that one won’t be too difficult to fill.  Probably.)  In picking the books for the challenge, I plan on leaning towards LBGTQ+, people of color, Latinos and women, but I won’t be above listing a book I read for class even though it’s written by a straight white guy.  (C’mon, one of the 24 categories is “set within 100 miles of your location” and I’m taking a course on local history!  It’d be silly not to list one of my school books for that one.)

Repost: 122 Pages…

Sep 6: 122 Pages….
…is actually quite a lot to read in a single day.

Especially given the book in question. The pages are about twice the size of those in a standard paperback novel, and the text is considerably less interesting than in the average novel. (It’s more interesting than some I’ve read, though.) On top of that, some of the pages are half–or more–taken up by informational footnotes, which have a lot of really interesting and pertinent information so I can’t just skip over them, but the text is about half the size of the rest of the text, meaning there’s twice as much there, and it thus takes twice as long.

I still have almost thirty pages to go today.

And I still won’t even be halfway through until about bedtime tomorrow.

I did accomplish something today, though. I replaced my laptop battery. That’s important.

I also fixed up a very important scene in my Trojan War novel, specifically the scene where Patroclos convinces Achilles to let him wear his armor into battle. There was this great bit in the Iliad where Achilles expresses his wish that the Greeks and Trojans wipe each other out so that only he and Patroclos are left, so they can take the city together, just the two of them. It’s this great “are you insane?!” moment that I can’t believe I didn’t put in the first time around, but with the way I write it’s usually really hard to insert things like that into the flow of a conversation. I figured out a way to do it, though, so I’m glad of that.

But I’m also not glad, because it’s really made me realize that despite how long it’s been since I wrote the first draft, despite how much I’ve put into the re-writing effort in the last eight months, the book really isn’t ready yet.

I have got to get some beta readers! I need to know what works and what still needs fixing up.

I wonder if I can somehow find some through the English department at school…?

It’s worth a try, right?

I’ll have to look into it next week.

Right now I have almost thirty more pages to read.

Sigh.

Repost: Am I weird?

Aug 26: Am I weird?
Or is it everyone else?

I went out to lunch today at a fast food place. (Which one doesn’t matter.) It was a bit past prime lunch hour, so there weren’t too many other patrons in the place. There was a guy using his laptop computer, an old man just eating, and two men sharing a table and talking to each other. (Yes, I was the only woman in there other than the one behind the counter. That, too, seems a bit odd, but isn’t my point right now.) So what was I doing? I was reading the Aeneid, Fitzgerald translation. Not reading it online, or on my Kindle or my iPad, either. I was reading a good, old-fashioned, paperback book.

So, am I the one who was being strange?

I mean, I know it would have been weirder if I was reading my hardback copy, the one that’s in the original Latin. (But I haven’t tried reading any Latin in about 15 years, so I don’t think I’d understand much of it other than “Timeo Danaos et dona ferens.“)

I’m not sure if it was the fact that I was reading a book at all that made me feel like there was something fundamentally different about me compared to everyone else in the joint, or if it was because I was reading Virgil. (Though, truth be told, I’d much rather read Homer.)

I felt like the staff were giving me weird looks. Not like “is she going to draw a gun and rob the place?” kind of looks, but more the “she’s walking around with a fishbowl on her head” looks, even though I was not wearing a fishbowl on my head, nor was there anything else odd about my outfit. As far as I know. But no one at the vet’s office was looking at me like that, and the other patrons at the fast food place didn’t so much as glance at me, so I don’t think it was anything about the way I was dressed.

I don’t really have any point about all of this. Just wondering if I’m crazy, or if it’s the rest of the world.

Also, I would like to comment that I’m very sick of it being this hot.