EntropicalVacation

Heterosexual men want to look at boobs. If she thinks this is “weird,” I feel she needs something explained to her.

I’m reading The Garden of Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu. It’s a collection of very strange and seemingly unrelated short stories, interspersed with chapters about a traveler in a Mediterranean city who ends up taking part in a human chess game. The publisher’s description says, “With many strata to mine, The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness, the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.” If you like Kafka, or Italo Calvino, this might be up your alley. Me, I’m not too sure yet.

I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. It’s told from the point of view of Tookie, an ex con who works at a bookstore in Minnesota owned by an author named Louise. Tookie is now married to the tribal cop who arrested her, she has a fraught relationship with her step daughter and with the ghost of a former bookstore customer who died while reading a book that is now in Tookie’s possession that she thinks may be cursed. It takes place in 2020, and COVID-19 has just struck. I love Louise Erdrich, and this is much more engaging than the Karasu.

One of my many favorites is The Cave by José Saramago. It’s an indictment of capitalism, bureaucracy, and commercial development couched as a sort of realist fable. Saramago is compassionate and tender toward his protagonists and wryly sardonic in his social criticism.

For SF, I recommend anything by Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first of her Wayfarers series.

Greebles. They’re often on the ceiling at our house.

“She had six strong legs and it frightened me. She had insect eyes but I could still see that the look she gave him you give to me.”

Why would he want to? The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Enjoy what you enjoy—life’s too short and there are too many other books out there to waste time on what you don’t enjoy! I have no qualms about not finishing a book, no matter how far along I’ve gotten. I’ve been known to skip to the last chapter or last few pages just to see how it ends, then move on.

On the other hand, for books that you have to read (for school, e.g.) set a goal of X pages per day, and reward yourself when you make the goal. I also find it helps to read more interactively: take notes, argue with the author, think about what you read and whether it’s total b.s. or whether there was anything, however small, of value in it.

I love doilies, and this one is amazing!

The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (no, I’m not reading anymore Donna Tartt), Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

It’s an unwieldy word, which I think was a deliberate choice.

I had a cat that was maybe 6 or 7 years old when she suddenly started having seizures. After a seizure, she’d be wobbly for a few days, then eventually back to normal… until it happened again. Vet couldn’t figure out what was going on. We decided to try to track when she had the seizures—was it when she ate something out of the ordinary, got exposed to something unusual, on a recurring schedule? That sort of thing. We quickly found out that within a day or two of giving her a dose of Frontline flea treatment (the kind you drip on the back of their neck) she’d have a seizure. We stopped giving her Frontline and she never had another seizure.