books

Saturday

I had my yearly performance review at work yesterday, and while I was a little nervous about it — those “where do you see yourself in x-number of years?” questions are always a little tough — I think it went well. I’m looking forward to 2014, even if the next couple of months are going to involve a lot of work.

I spent about four hours doing some of that work today, actually, which is not exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend. But I’m losing Monday, since I’ll be at a conference for work, and this review report really needs to have been finished weeks ago. The closer I can get it to finished, the better.

It wasn’t all fun and work games, though. Yesterday I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, which just made me sad all over again that he’s no longer with us. And today I finished Are You Mother? by Alison Bechdel, which made me want to re-read her earlier book about her father, Fun Home. This “comic drama” is very good, too, although there’s a lot of distancing with all the talk of D.W. Winnicott and Virginia Woolf, maybe by design. In some ways, it’s a book about psychoanalysis as much as it’s a book about Bechdel’s psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother. I liked it, but I seem to remember liking Fun Home a lot more.

Although I really do like that this is now the status of my Goodreads reading challenge:

Screenshot 2014-01-11 at 11.37.33 PM

Finally, this evening I watched Ultraviolet, which is maybe the worst movie I have ever seen. (And I saw Jonah Hex only two weeks ago.) It’s such a ridiculous mess of a movie that it’s painful to watch, and it’s a regret I’ll take with me to my grave. To make it worse, I watched it on Crackle, who kept interrupting the movie with the same three or four advertisements — all of them terrible — and making the experience just that much worse.

Polar vortex

It got very cold today, although how much of that was due to the so-called polar vortex I really couldn’t say. All I know is, it never got warmer than ten degrees today.

But at least our little bug problem at the office seems to have been taken care of.

Meanwhile, I finished reading the young adult novel All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn. It was a Christmas present, not one I would have chosen for myself, but…well, here’s what I wrote over on Goodreads:

If I had discovered the book, or one like it, some thirty years ago, when I was squarely in its young-reader audience, I think I might have liked it better. And yet it’s not exactly exciting or engaging by those standards, nor especially scary, at least not once it becomes apparent that it’s going to follow a very predictable route. It’s a quick read, however, and while there’s little to no character development, the characters themselves are likable enough.

And that was Tuesday.

So again it’s Sunday

Yesterday I took down the Christmas tree in the living room, boxed up the ornaments and tinsel and lights, and then disassembled the tree into its many components (“branches”) and returned that box to the attic. It was exactly fun, but it needed to be done.

Later that afternoon, I finished reading my first book for the new year, My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon. I liked it, and the nice thing about having now discovered Simenon is that the man wrote close to 200 books in his lifetime, so I’m unlikely to run out any time soon. Though I am somewhat disappointed to discover that so few of his Maigret mystery novels seems to be available in English translation, much less in this series design I rather quite like. I enjoyed My Friend Maigret, though like Inspector Cadaver, which I read last year, the book was less of a murder mystery than a leisurely stroll through the detective’s mind.

Then yesterday I watched Passchendaele. It’s not a perfect movie, though I did like it considerably more than Paul Gross’ first film as director, Men With Brooms. He and Caroline Dhavernas are both quite good in it, no surprise, and there are moments of real beauty in the film, both in specific lines from the script and in the scenery. (Seriously, I’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and can attest to their wonder, and Heather has been known to post a photo or two in her time, but there are scenes in the movie, set in the foothills of Alberta, that are just achingly beautiful.)

Again, not a perfect movie, maybe occasionally a little too on the nose about the horrors of war and a little muddled in its storytelling, but well shot and grounded in very good performances.

Today I wrote a little:

She wasn’t afraid of anything except for dying, and since that had already happened, Lisbeth said, she was fearless. Those who knew her — and there weren’t many, maybe just a few handlers at the agency — knew it was a lie, but it was a lie they were happy enough to let her keep if it meant she got results. She acted fearless, and the act was all that mattered. The results were all that mattered. If a lie was needed to keep those results coming, then so be it. She wasn’t likely to encounter the thing she really was afraid of in this line of work, not anymore, at least not if she kept her head down and focused on the job. No one at the agency was going to help her do anything else. What she really was afraid of was the thing that had killed her, and that thing was long dead as far as she or any of the official files were concerned. Fearlessness was a lie, but it was a lie that won out in the end.

That had been before Hobbs’ End, of course, and the murders that had happened there on Lisbeth’s watch. It had been a mistake to send her, her handlers said, and Lisbeth herself had been reluctant to go. The case was too familiar, too much like the events that had led to her death, five years earlier, and that had led her now to be in the agency’s employ. She had never been to Hobbs’ End, never even heard of the town, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t afraid, she said — of course she wasn’t afraid — but it was a coincidence that hit a little too close for home.

But they’d sent her, and because the lie of fearlessness was all she had to guide her, she went. At that point it was only a disappearance, or rather two dozen, a high-school class that had vanished on a field trip. A teacher, two parents, and all of the students but one. By agency standards it was almost run-of-the-mill. There was no reason to suspect the same thing that had happened to Lisbeth five years earlier was happening again.

No idea where it’s headed yet, if anywhere, and I’m not entirely in love with the way the last sentence underlines the fact that Lisbeth is not really a character so far, just someone that this is happening to. But it was free-writing well spent, I think. Better forty minutes of mediocre, or even terrible, words actually on the page, than years of theoretically perfect words never let out of your head.

So that was my weekend. A lot of the snow has melted, first in yesterday’s sun and then in today’s rain, but I’m still glad I won’t have to head back to the office until Tuesday.

Favorite books of 2013

I read too few books this year, down considerably — laughably, even — from last year. I’d be tempted to blame the longer novels on my list for eating into my time, and they did, but I also saw my attempts to zip through a pile of very short books from the library backfire. (Seriously, a couple of those two-hundred-pages-or-fewer books seemed to take me forever.) There was also some re-reading, listening to audio books of the first four Dark Tower novels, and submissions to Kaleidotrope that also ate into the final count, but whatever the cause I reader fewer books than I wanted to this year.

With a good fair-sized helping of comics and graphic novels, I managed to get the count up to fifty. Of those, these were probably my favorites:

Winter vacation, day 7

I did some writing today, and although it wasn’t on the ongoing short story — and although it wasn’t necessarily any good — I did feel good to get back into it.

“In this life, there are winners and losers,” Saul said. “There are the people who find true love, and then there are the people who wind up playing second fiddle at the lonely hearts club’s Christmas party. There are the people who make it in this business, and then the people who history gladly forgets.”

This was just one week after Patchwork Media had gone public; it had been an impressive opening, and the company’s stock was performing well, but Todd thought it was a little early to be making grand pronouncements about winners and losers, much less which half of that divide history would place them on. Deep Earth Zombie Bugs had been their only new game released this last quarter, and the sales were still a little below projections. Reviews of the first-person shooter had been mixed. Todd wasn’t going to panic until all of the global numbers were in, and there probably wasn’t going to be anything to panic about, but he also wasn’t going to start celebrating just yet.

But that’s what made Saul the idea man, Todd guessed, and what made him the less interesting money guy. He managed expectations, massaged them if necessary, while Saul laughed in their face. It’s why Saul could make an impromptu speech like this to the troops — half bombast, half pep talk — while Todd just wanted to get back to his office and find out if yesterday’s sales numbers from Taiwan had filtered through yet.

The game had been a risk, a year of development on which they’d staked their IPO and maybe the company’s future. Todd had only played it twice himself, once in prototype and once at the floor of the trade show where they’d debuted the game. DEZB was fun, and novel in that you could play it from the zombie bugs’ perspective, but it wasn’t the revolutionary experience he felt Saul had promised — and had kept promising. Gamers liked, but didn’t love, it, and it hadn’t sparked the kind of sales the company had wanted. It hadn’t been the must-but Christmas present everybody at Patchwork had been banking on.

And there were the rumors that the underlying design had been stolen. Todd wasn’t even going to try talking to Saul about that. He had more important things to do.

The writing prompts here, chosen by the three of us at random from three different magazines, kind of got away from me. I think in my haste to keep Deep Earth Zombie Bugs from straying along maybe too obvious lines, I also avoided anything like an interesting plot. But forty minutes of blah writing is still writing, so I’ll take it.

Afterward, I went to see Captain Phillips, which is very good, though it owes most of that to Tom Hanks. It would still be a modestly gripping story without his performance steering the ship, but he’s definitely what elevates it, particularly in its amazing final moments. (Spoiler warning for that link, obviously.)

Then I read a little this evening. I am laughably behind on my 2013 reading challenge, and being on vacation never seems to help with that, so it was nice to get involved in someone else’s writing for a while.