Tag: reading

I Need to Get Back to Knitting

Or crocheting or embroidery or something. The Wheel of Time series is starting in less than a week and I always used to knit or crochet in front of the television.

I have a bunch of projects that I’ve started and that I haven’t touched in ages. I started a sweater for Mila from Seamless Knits for Posh Pups that I need to get back to, particularly since it’s starting to get nippy and I want to take her out walking in the autumn weather.

I’ve bought some glass beads towards making a weighted blanket, but the yarn I wanted to thread it onto (the yarn from the blanket that I’m unraveling) is just a little too thick. I was going to make that blanket a gigantic mitered square, but I now have another blanket that’s falling apart, so I think I’ll use a slightly smaller needle and make a big square from the center out. Unraveling those blankets will take quite a while and I want to wait until it’s colder to go back to that project.

I was thinking about making a sort of string bag out of black crocheting cotton and fishing line. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to knit or crochet it, though.

I’ve been trying to get to the dog sweater pattern book that I have on Amazon, but my typing fingers have been a pain today. You’ll know by the time you get down here if I’ve been able to get to it, since it’ll be today’s Germane Amazon Link, but I figured I’d point out how frustrating it has been.

My Favorite Wheel of Time Character The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1

I was going to write about my favorite character, but I kept going back to the beginning and explaining the terms I was using in that post. So I guess I have to start with the most basic of basics. The Aes Sedai (the official organization for female channelers in the Wheel of Time books) —

Okay. More basic than that. The Wheel in the Wheel of Time is driven by a power known as the One Power*. Some people have the ability to use the One Power, an activity known as “channeling.” Ones who channel are “channelers.”

As the book opens, the only channelers who are allowed to channel —

Crap. This is turning into a different post than the one I intended to write. So let’s retitle this “The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1” and start from there.

3,000 years before the Wheel of Time starts, the Aes Sedai were a coeducational group with both male and female channelers. Their symbol was the Taiji (known commonly as the “yin yang” symbol). The white half was for the female channelers and the black half for the male.

This is because the One Power doesn’t come from the same place for male and female channelers. In one of the things that irks me the most about this series, it’s a stereotype of male/female sexual relations. The male half is active and the female half is passive. Now, I’m Ace, but I’ve read enough to know that sex is, in fact, more complicated than that.

Then the male channelers, led by Lews Therin Telamon (a/k/a “The Dragon”) did . . .something in an attempt to destroy the Dark One and the Dark One struck back and tainted the male half of the Source, causing the male channelers to “go mad” (sic) and break the world.

Like, physically break the world. People had to leave their homes because some places that had been dry land became the ocean, or vice versa. Mountains cropped up where none had been before and mountains that had been there disappeared without a trace.

To give you a frame of reference, Jordan said that his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina would eventually be the area whence our protagonists hale — the Two Rivers. The Two Rivers is on the western half of the continent in the Wheel of Time. Kind of like where, I don’t know, Nevada? Utah? Colorado? is in the United States in our world. So most of what is now the United States is under the Aryth Ocean.

Once the land stopped heaving and oceans stopped flowing around and things, they discovered that this taint was still there, and every man who learned how to channel eventually succumbed to mental illness. So, the female Aes Sedai set out to find all of the men who can channel and cut them off from that ability before they can succumb.

This is where the Ajahs come in. 3,000 years ago, ajahs were temporary alliances to achieve a goal. Jordan doesn’t really go into what that entailed, that I can find, but I’m imagining an ajah forming to maybe rescue victims of a genocide scheme, or construct a large structure or whatever.

The biggest and best of these projects were created by men and women working together. Which is, of course, no longer an option.

At some point in the intervening 3,000 years, the female Aes Sedai separated into permanent groups based on their interests and skills. They also used the name “Ajah” to refer to these groups. The largest group of them dedicated themselves to finding and “gentling” men who can channel. This is the Red Ajah.

The other Ajahs are:

Yellow, who have talent and interest in healing and medicine;

Green, who train and wait and hold themselves ready for The Dragon to return and fight the Last Battle against the Dark One;

Blue, who dedicate themselves to “causes of honor and justice”;

White, who value logic above all else;

Gray, who value diplomacy and politics; and, last but never least,

Brown, who are dedicated to study and research.

And I’m, like, a whole Ajah of bookworms? Sign me right the heck up for that!

I mean, as a paralegal, I did kind of toy with the Gray for a while, but really there was no actual contest.

Oh, and there are rumors of a Black Ajah dedicated to serving the Dark One, but that could never happen, right?

*Things that happen later in the series have me believing that the One Power is electricity.

Foreshadowing and Prophecies

This contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time and The Scholomance (or at least the first two Scholomance books, since the third hasn’t come out yet). I think the spoilers are fairly mild, but still, if you’re like me and want to go into things unspoiled, you might want to read something else for now.

In books, television shows, etc., there’s almost always some form of foreshadowing and, in the kind of books, television shows, etc, that I like, there’s a good chance that there’ll be at least one prophecy.

Like, one of my favorite television shows in recent years was Gravity Falls (OMG. So good!). In Gravity Falls, twins Dipper and Mabel Pines are sent to stay with their Grunkle Stan for the summer. Dipper finds a book with a handprint and the number 3 on the cover. Soon, Dipper is noticing all sorts of weird things about Gravity Falls and he wants to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, Mabel is willing to help Dipper, but mostly she just wants to have fun. Alex Hirsch, the creator, foreshadowed things and dropped clues, and so on. When a group of the fans started poring through the series, Hirsch is quoted as saying that he created an army of Dippers.

I’m a Mabel. I’m along for the ride, just having fun. Sometimes I’ll catch a line that sticks out to me, but like as not, I won’t actually say, “Wow. This will be important later.”

This is not to say that I don’t have fun on rereads finding the foreshadowing. But for my first reading/watching, I like finding out things as the author intends to reveal them.

Strangely, though, I tend to worry at prophecies like a terrier with a rat.

In the Wheel of Time series, it is predicted that Rand will “break the world again,” and everyone’s terrified of what he will do, etc., but after people have been fleeing their homelands and settling elsewhere, someone is all, “Rand will break the world,” and I’m, “dude, he already is breaking the world.”

The exact words of the prophecy are “and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind.” I mean, people leaving their homes and moving to new places and putting down roots there? The characters are clearly expecting a physical breaking, but the breaking that Rand brings is more of an interpersonal breaking.

This is brought on by my recent read of The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik. In the Scholomance series, we find that our protagonist, El, is the subject of a prophecy in which El is supposed to “destroy” the enclaves of the wizards. I think I know how she’s going to do it, and I can’t wait to find out if I’m right.

I’m Nervous About the Upcoming Wheel of Time Series

What follows are some mild spoilers (should be mild spoilers) for the early books of the Wheel of Time series. I’m avoiding one major one that I’ll be going into in more depth later, because dammit.

Specifically this article, which says that the series won’t introduce characters and then have them disappear to bring them back later. Our initial group is Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Moiraine, Lan, and Thom.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene grew up together in the town of Emond’s Field. Rand, Mat, and Perrin are almost exactly all the same age and Egwene is two years younger, but everyone in town expects her to marry Rand.

At some point, Thom disappears and then returns later. They’re going to circumvent this by having Thom not show up at all until “later.” Does this mean that the plot point where Thom disappears won’t happen at all?

Will Rand just . . . have a flute? Thom’s flute shows up a lot. Mat and Rand get free room and board at a number of inns thanks to Thom’s flute.

Alanna (rant deleted) is supposed to be a major player from early in the series even though she doesn’t (spoiler deleted) until the sixth book in the series.

Welp. There’s nothing I can do is watch the show and see how they work it all. out.

Reading Creep

Book creep?

It seems like there should be a term for how you can accumulate books in progress. I started out with a reasonable number of books — a hard copy book, an ebook, and an audiobook.

Now, suddenly, I have, like seven books in progress — three ebooks, three hard copy books, and an audiobook.

I’m going to have to scale back a bit.

The audiobook is the second Wheel of Time book, so that one is staying.

My three ebooks are Run, the third book in the Fearless series; The Deceivers, the second book in the Greystone Secrets series; and The Winterbourne Home for Mayhem and Mystery, the second book in the Winterbourne Home for Valor and Vengeance series.

I think I’m going to knuckle down and finish Run, then I don’t know. I actually have the Greystone Secrets one on my old phone and the Winterbourne Home one on my new phone, and I’m kind of tempted to leave it that way. That’ll leave me with two ebooks.

My four hard copy books are Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, by Erma Bombeck; Cash in a Flash, by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen; and Eyewitness to History, by John Carey. I also have been working my way through the Young Wizards series and I’m kind of eager to get to my reread of Wizards at War and I have a copy of The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik that I’ve been holding off on because I’m really worried that it won’t be as good as I hope it is.

I may have the Bombeck one done tonight or tomorrow. I’m rereading Cash in a Flash because it’s the book that got me book blogging in the first place, and I’m hoping to find a way to monetize this blog besides just the Germane/Gratuitous Amazon Link thing. So I guess I’m jettisoning Eyewitness to History for the time being.

Well, five books isn’t three books, but it’s not seven books, either.

Book Casting

I don’t know why this is, but my brain casts characters in books without my actual input. Subconsciously, as it were.

Since we’re just a 17 days from seeing the characters of the Wheel of Time as actors, I thought I’d talk some about the actors that my brain has put in the roles.

Not unfitting, given my early young adult fixation on Classic Doctor Who, a lot of the characters turn up as actors who were in Classic Doctor Who episodes.

Hey! I just figured out that there’s a way to stick a table in a WordPress blog. W00t!

Unfortunately I cannot find any good pictures of the actors in question that gives photographer credits so we’re just going to name names and y’all can look up the actors if you don’t know who I’m talking about.

Starting from the beginning of the series, the actor that my brain first latched onto and said, “this one” was Mummy-era Brendan Fraser for Perrin (which means that, yes, Perrin’s eventual wife is Rachel Weisz, and no, I didn’t have to force my brain to that decision — my brain went “These two are going to end up together. Have some Rachel Weisz and I was, like, “Don’t mind if I do.”

Moiraine is Mira Furlan, who played De’Lenn on Babylon 5.

Min is Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, in the first season of Doctor Who, as she appeared when she was on Doctor Who. Another Doctor Who actor, this one was only in one episode, but explain that to my subconscious, Hilary Ryan, who played Rodan in the Tom Baker episode The Invasion of Time, is Nynaeve. I don’t know. I just work here.

And it goes on like this for some time. Elayne, Galad, Morgase, . . . . A lot of characters are as yet uncast in my brain. Strangely, that includes Rand and Mat. I’m one of those who sees the events of the book in my head, but my brain kind of puts an NPC with the physical description of those characters in their place.

After playing around with Doctor Who episodes on Amazon, my Germane Amazon Link ended up being The Mummy. Why do they not have the season boxed sets for DVD that they have for Blu-Ray?

I Went Downtown Tonight (November 1, 2021)

I sat around all day, working on my reading and writing blog posts (this is my fourth post for today, and will go live on November 5), but not getting any exercise, or any reading on The Eye of the World.

I was so close to having The Eye of the World finished and I figured that a trip from my house to the Pearl and then walking downtown from the Pearl and then reversing the trip should be enough time to finish The Eye of the World and, just maybe, get started on The Great Hunt. And it was, too. Yay!

I was a little nervous a couple of times during my walk, but I mostly enjoyed the walk. I saw a couple of Christmas trees while I was out and about, but mostly it felt like a nice, autumnal evening.

I enjoy taking night photographs in the city because the play of light and shadow is so interesting. During the daytime around here, everything’s so bright. We get an occasional darkly overcast day, which makes photography interesting, but mostly it’s just . . . sunny.

Tonight’s picture of the Alamo. There were people standing in front taking family photos, so I decided to get an angled shot for this one.

Unfortunately, even after all of that walking, I’m still 2,000 steps short and it’s 10:45 at night. Let’s see if I can knock some of that out before bedtime (which is about an hour away).

Reading Speed

I’m in an interesting place right now with regard to my reading speed. I’m sort of trapped in between two memes:

And

Today I’m leaning towards the first rather than the second. I realized today that I’ve read over 100 books since the beginning of NaNoWriMo last year and that’s by my calculation about 20% of the total hard copy books I own. I’ve got probably another hundred or so ebooks* and a few audiobooks that I haven’t listened to.

I may someday have to stop listing “tsundoku” as one of my hobbies.

Of course, probably 90 of those hard copy books are history books that I bought specifically to slow down my reading speed because back in the Before Times (there seems to be a dividing line right down my cancer treatment in 2001/2002 where my reading speed and cognition are concerned) I was going through books *so* fast that it was starting to get expensive.

So it may take another year or so to go through those 90 books. Unless my reading speed is picking back up to the point where it was in the Before Times. That would be interesting.

Not that I’m significantly impaired or anything. I’ve done a bunch of online testing and test pretty highly for my age group. But in my mid-30s, my mind definitely went from a laser to, like, a maglite or something.

I just stopped and took a cognitive function test and I’m “at or above average” for my age group. So there’s that.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have Heist Society, the first book in the Heist Society trilogy by Ally Carter. Heist Society is a series on the adventures of a “crew” of teen art thieves who get together to steal items that were originally stolen from their rightful owners. The Heist Society books are not a series with an overarching story, like Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, so it may stay at three books, but there may be further books down the line. I hope there are further books down the line.

* I just checked. I have 154 books on my Kindle.

I Should Be in Bed

I really should. I have to be up in a little bit, but I just finished Hollywood: Photos and Stories from Foreverland, by Keegan Allen and I have thoughts.

I bought this book from the discount table at a store. I’m pretty sure it was my own store, but maybe it was a different Walmart. I started it a while ago and really enjoyed it, but something interrupted my reading and I just found it again and decided to sit down and read it cover-to-cover.

It is a truly fast read — most of the book is photographs — but it made me think things. So I’m going to try to capture some of my thoughts before they disappear.

I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of pictures of people. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a sign of autism* or of facing some of the abuse I’ve faced in my life or if it’s just how I am and there is no real “why.” So, when the first few pages of landscape turned into pictures of people, I was kind of disappointed. But Allen clearly loves to photograph people and somehow it shines through in the beauty of the people he’s photographed in this book.

Not everyone in this book is conventionally beautiful. There are old people and scarred people and one guy with a forked tongue, and somehow, they’re all beautiful. I wonder what his secret is. Maybe it’s just love.

There are also poems and little vignettes written by Allen that are stories of the people who come to Hollywood. Some are running from something and some are running to something. Some achieve what they dream of and some do not.

And as I read them and empathized with them (yay for reading!) I also reflected a bit on my own past. Recently one of my friends posted a quote about how we become what we need to be to survive. And that is very true in my case, but it’s time to expand beyond that, I think.

My whole childhood, I wanted to write. One of my first pieces of fiction was a story I wrote when I was in . . . second grade? . . . about a friendly black widow spider. I’d just learned about venomous spiders and they frightened me, so I decided to take away the fear by making the spider a friend.

A few years later, I discovered the Nancy Drew books and decided that writing adventure/mystery books in that vein would be a good way to become a writer. I was horrifically embarrassed by my first attempt, in which my girl hero was visiting Egypt and got attacked by a lion. My uncle knew that I wanted to be a writer and he asked me what I was writing. I was afraid to tell him because, well, a lion? Really? He asked me if I knew where lions were from, and I said, Africa, and he asked me if I knew where Egypt was, and I said Africa. He told me that why would I think it was stupid to have someone attacked by an African animal in Africa. That made me feel a lot better. Rest in peace, Uncle Edward.

The next big turning point in my writing was in high school. My freshman year, my mom was not impressed by my high school’s newspaper**, so she encouraged me to apply my sophomore year. So I did, and by golly, the only people who got in were those who had had straight As in freshman English. I hadn’t; so, so much for that. I very briefly considered journalism after that, but gave up on that idea quickly because if I couldn’t get into my high school’s newspaper, what was the point?

My junior year, I sweated blood over a short story about a girl who worked in the local ice cream restaurant (based not-so-loosely on the Baskin Robbins down the street from my house). Several of my friends loved the story and I submitted it to my high school’s annual literature magazine and it didn’t get in. My friend Donna was incensed. She actually went to the teachers’ lounge to ask the faculty advisor why it hadn’t gotten in, and the advisor said that it was a great story, but it was too long, so they couldn’t publish it.

My senior year, I had a creative writing course, and several of the things I wrote for that class did get into the magazine, despite my not having submitted them. My teacher submitted them, which was amazing.

Then I had a hard time settling into college and by the time I got it back together, I was an A student in Education and my writing fell by the wayside for those years. I toyed with a novel about two teenagers with hyperactive and distracted ADD (I didn’t realize that was what I was writing, but yeah) who go on a fantasy adventure and find themselves becoming friends, but that never really went anywhere.

I got my writing back together in the mid-9os when I discovered fanfiction. I wrote a lot a lot of stories during that era. Then Thomas and I split up and . . . so much for that.

That brings us to the current era, when I’m having trouble writing fiction. When I found myself needing money, I made a few hundred dollars writing for content farms. I wrote some history, some travel, some . . . gardening? And really discovered that non-fiction has some appeal for me. If you’d’ve told 13-year-old me that I’d enjoy writing history and travel so much, I’m not sure I’d’ve believed it.

I’m now considering some fiction. It’s like, oh, maybe a Rubik’s cube or something. I take my fiction out and fiddle with it a bit and then put it back. I then return to my history and travel writing and book reviews.

The two fiction things I have at the forefront of my mind right now are a fantasy novel that started out as historical fiction about a world where Chinese explorers discovered North America before the Europeans do and a steampunk story about a sibling pair carrying classified information cross-country from their dad to their mom. I’ll continue playing with these and who knows? Maybe someday I’ll be a novelist.

I might even actually write that ADD-kids book I wrote two chapters of back in the 1980s.

=======

*I’ve never been diagnosed and I’ve done online screenings that say that I probably am not diagnosable, but I do have some traits that people on the spectrum have. If I’m on the spectrum, I’m on what one of my friends calls the not-inconvenient end of it.

**Now, I’m paraphrasing here, since this was, oh, dear God, 41 years ago, but she said something about how the newspaper read like it had been written in a foreign language and translated badly into English.

In Searching for a Tagline . . .

This is going to be a short post to make up for missing September 16.

I’ve never chosen a tagline for this blog because nothing really appealed to me. So I just put “A Blog in Search of a Tagline” up there.

That being said, I may be on the track of something usable. I read a study once that said that people who spend their money on experiences are happier than people who spend their money on things.

And, well, I definitely spend my money on experiences — travel and books. And now I’m blogging about travel and books. So I think that this weekend I’m going to dig through Google for that study and see if there’s any quotes I can make punchy enough for a tagline.

In other news, a new series based on the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson is coming out on Amazon Prime in November, so I’m thinking that maybe that’ll be a theme for NaNoWrMo this year. Maybe not the only theme, but definitely a theme. Some posts will be basic plot summaries, some will be in-depth looks at the characters, some will be squeeing about spoilers.

I need to come up with some idea of how to mark spoiler posts. When I first started blogging, I was told that it was polite to use cuts so that people visiting my blog wouldn’t be overwhelmed by text and scared off. So I did. And what traffic I did have plummeted. I went back in and removed the cuts and it went back up. So I don’t use cuts anymore. Maybe someday I’ll get steady traffic and will be able to keep it with cuts, but for now, no. I don’t think it’s very professional to use ROT-13 in a blog, but that may be my best solution just so no one can see that (choosing random surprise ending from a movie here . . . .) Rand’s been dead all along.

So I guess that today we’re having a Germane Amazon Link: The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan. I’ll probably not have Germane Amazon Links all month, though, just in posts where I talk about events of one single book. For posts about character arcs and so on, I may do Gratuitous Amazon Links.