and a man with a caged bird for a brain

One of the drawbacks of the academic lifestyle (apart from frustration, futility and intellectual snobbery) is, quite simply, paper. Piles of paper. Enormous tottering piles of books, printouts, photocopies and scribbled pages of notes occupy every surface in my study, and occasionally come slithering down in even more confusion under the paws of the cat that curiosity killed. Even worse, such pillars of prose tend to bury beneath the verbiage those less muscular works of innocent fiction that can't fight back.

Which is why I've only just now unearthed, from beneath the feral strata of Angela Carter criticism, China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, a copy of which tsukikoneko gave me for my birthday, lo these many moons ago. I'm half way through, and it's amazing! While not quite having the political kick of his adult fantasy, it's a powerful ecological fable framed as an alternate-world narrative whose closest relative, I think, is Alice In Wonderland: word games, social inversions, precise nonsense illogic, quirky illustrations and all. The heroine is currently questing madly in the company of a trio of embodied word-creatures (Cauldron, Diss and Bling) while dodging packs of evil carnivorous giraffes.



Also, there are binjas:



I am a very happy reader.

Last Night I Dreamed: that someone hired me to play a fairly major supporting role in a TV sitcom, in full knowledge of the fact that I have the acting ability of a stunned herring with stage fright. Apparently I only needed to play myself.