I don’t think it is fantastic. The wings aren’t aligned correctly, the head is slightly turned, and the neck feels weak to me, but I ran out of time to make a completely new second dragon, so it will have to do. I would definitely make another dragon for friends with kids and think that the next time around I will be able to correct some of the mistakes I made this time around. Hopefully despite its flaws it’s well received.

Do you ever find yourself wanting a book to take longer to read, because you just want it to keep going and going? Would you neglect your children (if you had any) in order to finish the chapter you’re on, and then read “just a little” into the next chapter, hoping they won’t notice? Do you find yourself thinking of who else needs copies of this book, and how you can afford to buy each and every one of them their own personal copy?

Yep. It’s one of those.

Ready Player One is the nerdiest 80s nerd book I’ve ever read. In the first chapter, there’s about a dozen offhand references to things I loved that originated in the 80s, starting with The Breakfast Club and Heathers. At some point, one character says to another “We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind.” There are puzzles to solve that involve being obsessively knowledgeable about things like Quest For the Holy Grail or WarGames.

The whole thing reads like one giant text adventure. There’s crazy Blade Runner technology. There’s a terrible future and a beautiful virtual reality. There’s a quite touching romance, and a tournament that everyone in the world wants to win. A ragtag group of mavericks fighting an evil cabal who wants to destroy the purity of their world.

It’s just a whole damn lot of fun. Stop reading this post and go find it at your local library. Or buy it. It’s definitely a book worth buying. I’m probably going to buy a copy for myself.

Why yes, that is a quilt! It’s something I’ve been working on for about a year.

What you see in front of you actually started out as the back for a different quilt. When I was done making the back, I realized that I liked it a lot more than the original quilt, and started on a new project with a better quilt top.

I’ve “made” other quilts before. What I mean is that in the past, I have made a quilt top, put it in a plastic bag, delivered it to my quilting mother, and maybe a month or two later, a blanket would appear that looked vaguely like the thing I’d started with, but a billion times cooler and more useful. This time around I did everything.

Which is why this quilt is tied. I don’t really have the time or patience to actually quilt. Sewing a sandwich together for months on end seems like something I wouldn’t thrive at. I almost had a little meltdown when Mom told me I had to hand stitch the binding. (Binding is the border around the outside that glues it all together in one pretty little package.)

One of the nice things about the tying and hand stitching process was that it involved many hours of standing in front of a television. I watched all of the first season of Downton Abbey and most of Misfits which doing the hand tying. The hand stitching was mostly done while watching Archer.

Another nice thing for me about having a quilting project is that I spend my days moving form fields around on a computer screen; making something more blue; or possibly inserting, updating or selecting data from a database. When I go home at night, I can’t really pick anything up and say “This is what I did today”. I guess I could put the subversion repository on a USB stick, but it’s not the same thing. This thing takes up physical space. You can pick it up, throw it across the room, wrap yourself up in it, pretend you’re a quilt monster. Read books under it. That’s kind of cool. I can’t do that with my medical billing software. No matter how cool that database query was.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it. I don’t really need another quilt, and I probably shouldn’t start on another project until this one is out the door. Bonus points to those of you who stopped to look at what books were on our bedside tables.

I don’t care that apparently everyone on this planet loves this book. I didn’t. I finished it yesterday and I have already forgotten who characters were and what motivated them. It just didn’t stick with me.

I think I’m done with reading Vonnegut for a little bit.

The only problem with being a ring man is that ring men are allowed to bid on things. Thus began the process of Dad bringing home oddities every now and then. He would store them in the barn and bring them out a couple of times in the summer for a yard sale. Then gradually the yard sale became semi-permanent. Then it was moved inside the barn. Eventually he converted the barn into what is essentially a barn-shaped warehouse, where he operates an antiques / oddities / furniture emporium on weekends and whenever else he feels like it. He really enjoys it, and he seems to break even I think.

One day this summer I was back home for a visit, and as I always do, I toured through the barn to see what I could take for my apartment. Usually there’s a couple of odds or ends that would be nice to have. On this particular day, I was oohing and aahing over this desk I wanted to take home with me when I looked down.

On the floor, under this beautiful desk, were eight terrifying lawn gnomes. Snow White and seven dwarves. All were about half-painted. All were missing facial features. All were terrifying. I asked my dad who the hell would ever purchase such monstrosities. Dad just smiled and cryptically said he had plans for them.

When my Dad says something cryptically with a devious little smile on his face, you know something good is about to happen. Something fun. Maybe not to the person it’s happening to, but for everyone else. I pestered him about what he had up his sleeve until he finally told me he was going to prank some family friends when they were on vacation.

I know these two people. The husband is about the same age as my Dad. They go to church together. She sings in the choir, and they’re both retired teachers. He was my teacher in grades seven and eight, and my folks have been friends with them for as long as I can remember. They were guests at my wedding last year. This couple has a lovely home with beautiful gardens and a nice pool in the back yard. They both have wonderful senses of humour and appreciate this type of thing. It was going to be great.

Dad and I spent about half an hour bouncing back and forth with what he should do with these gnomes. Dad wanted to put one in a tree, but they’re pretty heavy. I wanted to put on in the basement, but Dad didn’t have a key. I suggested putting one in a rubber dingy in the pool, but Dad didn’t want to risk damaging the pool. He knew where he was going to put most of them already, but he was trying to place the last few. We don’t know who finally came up with this idea, but we’re both taking credit for it, so you know it’s got to be good.

Dad hid Snow White and Six Dwarves.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

When I was in high school, I loved the Harry Potter books. I thought they were wonderfully imaginative and the world that J.K. Rowling built, especially Hogwart’s, seemed so well fleshed out and beautiful. As the books went on and I got older though, one thing started really bothering me. Harry Potter isn’t a good wizard. Neither is Ron. How is it that a trio containing two mediocre child magicians can take down the most powerful of the world’s adults? And please don’t say something like “Love” or “Bravery”, that’s overly simplistic. The more I read of the world that Rowling wrote, the more cartoony and caricaturish it seemed. The teachers could all be pulled from after school specials. The ancillary student characters, with a few notable exceptions, were all fairly one-note, and the ending of book seven seemed all wrong to me. And don’t even get me started on the epilogue. Ugh. I know that the book follows the basic hero’s journey and all that blah blah blah, but… the books haven’t stuck with me. I saw a couple of the movies, and have no interest to see any of the others.

Seeing as my last experience reading a fantasy book about life at a school for magic left me feeling unsatisfied, it was with some trepidation that I dove into Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. To me, it was a breath of fresh air. There were some tried and true fantasy novel tropes, but this magical world was firmly planted in a world more nuanced than what I’ve read before.

Our main character is an unsympathetic guy named Quentin. At eighteen years old, he gets sucked into Brakebills, America’s magical boarding school. By making the students older, the author is able to explore more adult themes earlier in the story. The years fly by, and Quentin and his friends don’t have to face down a terrible evil at the end of the year while at the same time studying for finals.

In The Magicians, magic is hard. It’s for the brainiacs, the select few who can obsessively practice an art form to the point of perfection. It’s for those few geniuses who have the ability to wield their austistic hyper-focus on making their fingers wiggle in exactly the correct pattern time after time. You don’t just pick up a wand and flick it around, and have awesome things happen. The main character in this book isn’t a hero, nor is he an anti-hero. It often seems like he is just going through the motions, and his life is being propelled by unseen forces. He’s a bit of a sad sack. Obsessed by a Narnia-esque children’s book, the world into which he is flung just doesn’t seem quite right for him. His circle of friends doesn’t seem to be friends only because they were flung together by random circumstance.

I appreciated that this book takes place over more than a decade. It gives a lot more opportunity for character growth, for people to fall in and out of love, for jobs to because dull and pointless. Quentin’s circle of friends all graduate from Brakebills, are flung into the real world, and flounder. One of them stumbles upon a magical artifact that allows them to travel to alternate universes, and they go to a Narnia-esque world with no real plans for what to do.

The Narnia adventure and final showdown didn’t grab hold of me quite as much as the rest of the book. It felt like the tone did a one hundred and eighty degree turn from where it was originally. It didn’t feel tacked on, but the adventure-story aspect of the time in Narnia didn’t sit as well for me. It wasn’t as fascinating as watching this sad sack of a character fight to find meaning in a world that doesn’t fit him quite right.

The Harry Potter books are excellent, but they aren’t really meant for adults. The Magicians is written for adults who loved the Narnia books and Harry Potter books, but who have been slapped around a bit by the real world. I’m looking forward to getting hold of a copy of the follow-up, but I’m concerned that it all might take place in Narnia.

All three concerts were significantly different. I believe they only played one of their songs at all three concerts (Lucky Man). The first night was very much a radio hits singalong night. The second night they played a lot of B-sides and rare songs, and the third night was a mix of the two. I finally heard them play Light Years, which has been a favourite of mine for a long, long time. We had great seats every night, and in Hamilton we had floor seats right at the front of the second block of seats, which meant we had tonnes of room and could see really well.

I forgot how much incredible music Pearl Jam’s made. I don’t tend to listen to a lot of straight-out rock any more because I’m old, have no street cred, and new music is so bad with the exception of Wilco. In the weeks since the concert, I’ve sifted through all of their albums again. There’s so much depth and so much musicality. With the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, I also sifted through all my Foo Fighters (I’m not actually a Nirvana fan), and they’re also wonderful.

I feel so old that I’m all like, “Remember when music was good?” and all that. I felt old when I just wanted the opening act to be quieter but they were just so loud and uninteresting.

Cat’s Cradle

Player Piano

The Sirens Of Titan

Vote in the comments. Feel free to suggest any book ever, and if I feel like it, I’ll try and get a copy to read. I’ve got a couple of reviews ready to write – one for something incredible I just loved, one for something I couldn’t even finish. And I’m going to try and tell you about the fun stuff I did in September soon too. Vote vote vote!

I like good books. They make me very happy.

First of all, LOVE your work. Downton Abbey is SO GOOD. I love it. I love that you always give Maggie Smith awesome things to say, and that your costumers have decided that she should look a bit like a bird. I love how mean everyone is to each other, especially O’Brien and Thomas, and I love how you make sure that Mary always messes everything up. The show is so pretty, and the first season was wonderful. I love that you picked that lady who played the British Prime Minister in Doctor Who to play against Maggie Smith. The sets are so beautiful, and I’m glad that the first episode of this newest season has lived up to what you did in the first season.

But.

If you do anything to mess up the relationship between Mr. Bates and Anna, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you.

That being said, how awesomely evil is Vera Bates?

And I know we’re in WWI now, but please, please, please don’t kill off anyone. Please. I don’t know if I’d be able to handle that. Anyways, the first episode of season 2? So good. Keep up the good work.

Yours truly,
Shannon