| st. louis |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|09:22 pm] |
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I'll be in the St. Louis area the weekend of November 7th. Do I know anyone there? Is there anything you think is worth seeing? |
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| some books |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|11:35 pm] |
My new year's resolution more or less involved giving up reading as a sort of an experiment, but at my birthday (the halfway point) I reconsidered. I surely dropped a couple, but here's the past few months. If I can't sleep another night I might revisit some of these.
...wow, it's really been two years since I last posted about books? What happened to 2008? There are some others on my discard shelf that I'm sure I read in Ireland so they don't make this post-July cutoff.
"literature":
Eco, The Name of the Rose: I kind of hated Eco after slogging through Foucault's Pendulum, but I actually really enjoyed this one and left it mulling signs and signifiers. (These words I'm typing are made of graphical symbols that represent sounds that when combined represent words which in your head represent concepts that may or may not represent real things!) Between this and Anathem I have decided when I grow up I want to be a monk.
DeLillo, Cosmopolis: wish I had read a review in advance so I wouldn't have wasted my time.
Lightman, Reunion: Maybe it was Braid that got me thinking about him again; no real lasting impression beyond strained passion. I'd probably give another one of his a go.
Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go: One of those books where what's really going on is only implied for the first two thirds but the "twist" is kinda obvious. Not really sure why it got all the awards.
Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: I'd been avoiding this one because I knew it was autobiographical and would thus be a downer, but then I forgot this and confirmed my expectation.
Pynchon, V. (not finished): I've tried this three or four times but always lose interest. I think I've read The Crying of Lot 49 three times because I keep hoping I'll warm to other Pynchon or make some sense of it.
non-fiction:
Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: More research about what makes people happy. I knew much of this from other books; the parts I didn't I thought were interesting anecdotally but I didn't derive any life lessons from it.
...and some brain candy (somehow I've spent a lot of time on planes lately which is how I managed all of this in the past few months):
Simmons, Hyperion: four books derived from a short story. The essence of the short story was good, the books increasingly not.
Banks, Consider Phlebas: Space opera adventure weighs down what is otherwise a collection of interesting ideas and a bit of horror for good measure. (Spoilers:) once the story's over and hero's dead, the appendix is an encyclopedia-format historical summary of the greater struggle the hero was involved in and how meaningless his involvement or the struggle at all was; it's kind of a negation of the book as a whole and it's really stuck with me.
Zelazny, 24 Views of Mt Fuji, by Hokusai: (Confusing title is confusing.) Cute, kinda random, overall unmemorable.
Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Some interesting ideas but it's hard to swallow when you hate all the caricatured characters.
Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep. This was actually just great. I mean, it has cartoon aspect I dislike in most SF, but that is far outweighed by the neat things going on. Where can I find more like this? |
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| 28 |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|10:34 am] |
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( 28 ) |
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| muir woods, olympic national park, hot springs |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|09:03 am] |
I visited Muir woods again recently (the third time? the fourth time?). I somehow got a new appreciation for their idea of preserving wilderness this time. I guess historically public land has been preserved but always in a human-sculpted form as a nice park with plants and pathways and grasses, while the people who founded this reserve knew a hundred years ago that plain old wilderness was something that will become increasingly rare.
Despite growing up in Washington, I never (after childhood) went out to the western half, which is completely dominated by an enormous park. There's even a rain forest (as defined by volume of rain) on the western side. Meena and I went out there last week on a vacation.
The highlight was probably the olympic hot springs. It's a short hike (2.4 flat miles, some of it along a decaying abandoned road) but long enough to filter out casual visitors. We had this beautiful pool to ourselves.
My other bit of vacation trivia is that there is in a rain shadow behind the mountains along the north coast. Sequim, despite being in overcast western Washington, claims they get 299 days of sun a year.
Every time I visit the northwest I find myself missing the air, weather, and greenery again. California and particularly San Francisco sure is nice but I'm not sure it's the right kind of nice for me. |
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| break-in |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|10:31 am] |
Someone broke into our place a few weeks ago. It seems they used a screwdriver to pop the front door and our apartment door; we've not been good about using the deadbolt, especially in this sort of circumstance where Matt left home mid-day and knew I was returning in the afternoon.
My life philosophy has "own nothing worth stealing" as a sort of unintentional side-effect but that mostly means I mooch off of my roommate. I lost nothing while he lost a laptop, mac mini, projector. The worst was that they stole Meena's camera and laptop, since she's (a) a poor college student and (b) had no backups of her eight years of photographs. (It seems some of them are scattered across various online services so it's not as bad as it first seemed.)
The whole thing hasn't upset me as much as I would've expected. It seems, with a few weeks of reflection, that I think of crime as a sort of natural consequence of mixing vastly different incomes in such a small place, and San Francisco has that worse than any other place I've lived (my street = million dollar houses; 3 blocks away = tons of homeless). I guess I have a sort of sad resignation about it and I'm mostly glad nobody was hurt. |
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| Boston |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|09:33 pm] |
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I'll be in Boston tomorrow through Sunday. Any places or people you recommend? |
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| motivation |
[Feb. 18th, 2009|10:04 pm] |
Dear internet,
What keeps you going? What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
Genuinely curious,
Evan. |
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| what else is there? |
[Jan. 31st, 2009|11:40 am] |
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What Else Is There?, Röyksopp featuring Karin from The Knife. (As Dan said: awesome video, not as sure about the song. But that woman has a rad voice.) |
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