4-year-old language

Atty, to his little sister: "Let's chase our chuthers!"

They proceed to chase each other.

Mockingbird

Have just finished reading Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis.Was a good read, dystopian sci-fi in the style of Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World. It portrays a world where reading has been forgotten; robots run the world and humans are educated to be stupid and ignorant and purely driven by sensation; and one man learns to read and that has large consequences. It has that feeling of abstraction, of a world without real texture, only really there to serve the message he's trying to get across, a gross exaggeration of a trend he's seeing in the world that he doesn't like. It still ended up being a decent story, with the characters gradually gaining some dimension as the story progresses. Of course, the gaining of dimension was kind of the point of the story; but a bit more texture in the society portrayed would have made it more real.

A worthwhile read.

Redefining his identity

Atty: "Daddy, you don't know my name"
Me: "Yes I do, I gave it to you"
Atty: "What is it then?"
Me: "It's Atty!"
Atty: "No, it's not. It's Superguy... Dragon"
Me: "Hi there, Superguy Dragon"
Atty: "Hi"

Not how I remember it...

This was seriously not the take-home message I got from listening to Holst's The Planets.

The Book of Skulls

Just finished reading The Book of Skulls, by Robert Silverberg. It's quite an amazing book - technically in the Fantasy genre, but more an exploration of the minds of four young men. Definitely one of the better books I've read recently. I'd definitely recommend it, and I'll certainly read more Silverberg in the future.

I found a great book shop in Tea Gardens when we holidayed there. It's just a shed in a guy's back yard, but it's wall-to-wall with books (all in plastic zip-loc bags to keep the bugs and sea air out), all at good prices. I get annoyed with all the second hand book shops around that seem to charge 80% of the book's original price - when I grew up we were often at markets and garage sales, and the price of second-hand books was a dollar or two. The books in this shop were mostly $3-$6, so we ended up getting nearly $100 worth. It's on the main street of tea gardens, the one you drive through town on to get to Hawks Nest. If you're in Hawks Nest and like books, go visit it.

The Delta of Venus

I recently read the Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin - it was a re-released version in the old-style penguin orange cover, so I bought it out of curiosity. We were on holiday up in Hawks Nest, so I was doing a lot of reading. I find I get a lot of reading done on holiday, away from the distractions of housework and computers and so on. I should read at home more often, like that.

The book was quite an eye opener. I've never read "literary erotica" before; I've never really read erotica. I found it quite an odd experience, gratuitous smut that would normally make for a dodgy X-rated movie, but couched in elegant language, some of it beautifully written, and often of the most degraded scenarios imaginable. The first story (it is a collection of occasionally linked short stories), "The Hungarian Adventurer", was a rollicking, sordid tale of lust out of control, and left me rather stunned and lost for words at the end. Nin states in the preface that her model for writing was the existing erotic literature that she had access to, written by men for men, but the characters that actually come across as real people with real desires were the women.

It was an illuminating read, and it has certainly broadened my horizons. Nearing the end of the book, I recall thinking about the book, and realising that a certain perversion hadn't yet been written about, only to find it lovingly described several pages later.

Nifty app

Found Reader Notifier, a handy little tool that sits in your menubar and tells you when you have new items to read in your Google Reader.