The pot calls the kettle black, but they're both sitting on Hobbes.
... so earing is to niddy-noddy.
Following the Rushdie recommendation; Richard Powers' _The Gold Bug Variations_. Not particularly SF, but it has a startling proportion of the virtues SF claims. I think of it as non-SF written by someone who probably reads and understands SF but doesn't want to write it.
Lots of people loathe TGBV, though; read the first few pages before taking it home, and trust your judgment on them.
One of my high-school textbooks had a bowdlerized _Romeo and Juliet_ and no mention at all that it had been abridged. Oh, I was outraged.
The Nurse sounded punchdrunk, they'd taken out so many of her lines.
Well. It's the baristas who get all the hot steamy love—aren't they hired for charm everywhere?
Seattle nostalgia: Gosh, I miss the Last Exit.
Ha! I was looking for earlier examples of knitting and came across this:
"Although the origins of knitting are obscure, old woodcuts and medieval illuminations place its ascendance in Europe at about the same time that the game of chess and the mathematical approach of algebra became known to Westerners.a0 Indeed, among the earliest knitted textiles discovered in Europe are two Islamic-inspired knitted cushions, whose patterns one of whose patterns suggests castles on a chessboard.[1]"
Loosely connected, the hefty recreational mathematics in some Victorian ladies' magazines coincided with complicated clothes that they did a lot of their own drafting for.
Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts, in Knitting in the Old Way, says knitting is only known to date back to AD 1100, which is old but surprisingly new for non-capital-intensive clothing technique. Well, surprised me, anyway.
I have just taken up tatting, because I love knots, but unfortunately it aggravates keyboard-induced tendon trouble. Next comes bobbin lace, which (I hope) will be independent of tendon trouble, and full of knots; but is annoyingly sessile.
To reduce the amount of vegetable pain needed to support my existence, I would of course be a vegetarian, as meat animals live on more plants than it takes to support me.
Conversely, I wear leather boots in order to reduce my eco-footprint, as I can make them last so much longer than any synth ones I've ever tried that I think it likely the total externalized cost is less. Wild-hair back-of-envelope calculations, though.
Kristine, perhaps an angora rabbit? They're very calming pets, and your son might learn to spin off the rabbit, which I think is one of the niftiest things ever.
(I believe The Steel Bonnets cites a Border Marches lord who fought well into his nineties. )
I slice the milder cases of Mary Sue-ism by, as has been said above, how much the narrator assumes the M.S. should be loved by the reader and everyone else. That's where I think the later McCaffrey and Cordelia Vorkosigan lose me; frequently I'm thinking "What a smug thing to do" while the narration is announcing either that everyone wuvs her or that anyone who doesn't is a big meanie.
The midlife-crises-adultery genre has a preposterous number of English professors. Ars Poetica and Small World and The Mind-Body Problem are good novels anyway.
Eloise - point taken abt. Movable Type (or any other platform) not being a zero-effort solution, even with a 'plug-in'.
I just glanced at the MT-plugin pages, and the three book-related plugins I saw were all Amazon-based. This annoys me because the printed world extends far beyond the ISBN-possessing universe in which Amazon is potent, but it's not like the OCLC is public either, although at least it's nonprofit and many of its members are public.
OTOH, your poor library! In either sense, that is. My city library has its catalogue online, in a bearable format. Anyone with a library card can request a book from any Web terminal, e.g. the dedicated ones in the library, and it *will* be sent to the branch specified, and they send you an email when it gets there and will hold it for a week. (And most, maybe all, the branches are open till 8pm at least one night a week.) There are some things that worry me about the Seattle public library, but I should remember that they do do many things well.
It seems to me that a story avoiding Teresa's (1.) and (2.) likely falls into the "Illuminatus" genre.
And (5.) doesn't bother me because no fantasy novel I've ever seen has had weirder names than a proper representation of the real language Kwakiu'tl requires.
Isn't there a wishlist feature for Movable Type? I'm not totally un-fond of Amazon, but OTOH I don't feel like not owning my data on my server. And I like long-out-of-print books; not Amazon's strength. (My library replaces most of what is Amazon's strength, come to think of it - by the time I have read a shiny new book from the libe & decided that it is a keeper, it's probably available cheaper from abebooks &c and I don't need fast shipping. )
Patrick, that sounds like an excellent post, do please write it.
There's a relevant Auden poem, but I can't remember the first line. Speaking of a political opposite, he says something like:
He reminds me that there must be blood
I remind him that it must be innocent
But without the blood, the wall will not stand.
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