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Gawsh, haven't posted for days. This is because, when not actually in meetings, I've been in the recover-from-marking zombie state. In other words, my life has been very boring and I've played a lot of ShadowMagic. However, I hosted book club last night! As a result of this the kitchen looks like a bomb hit it, I am faintly hungover, I ate way too much ginger cake and strawberry meringue and I had five hours of sleep last night on account of reading Janet Evanovich until 2am. This was, however, absolutely in every sense worth it.
I have commented before on my difficulties choosing books for book club, owing to the bait and switch technique my subconscious tends to pull as a desperate response to my own fears about academic pretentiousness: too intellectual? too frivolous? wild oscillation, and then my brain explodes. (This career angst thing, in which Academia wars continually against my poppy fluff tendencies, is extremely deep-seated). Yesterday, however, I found the perfect solution, which is to cheerily and without self-flagellation occupy the extreme ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Thus yesterday's choices encompassed the severely intellectual (Michael Chabon, Jewish alternate history; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Isabel Allende on eroticism and food) and the completely fluffy (Naomi Novik's Napoleonic dragons; Gail Carson Levine fairy tale; Philip Reeve Victorian space opera; Meg Cabot chicklit), and absolutely no half measures at all. I feel surprisingly good about this. Although I suspect the hapless book club members might have been a bit bemused.
To make up for several days depriving the world of my witterings (poor world), Random Linkery R Us!
I have commented before on my difficulties choosing books for book club, owing to the bait and switch technique my subconscious tends to pull as a desperate response to my own fears about academic pretentiousness: too intellectual? too frivolous? wild oscillation, and then my brain explodes. (This career angst thing, in which Academia wars continually against my poppy fluff tendencies, is extremely deep-seated). Yesterday, however, I found the perfect solution, which is to cheerily and without self-flagellation occupy the extreme ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Thus yesterday's choices encompassed the severely intellectual (Michael Chabon, Jewish alternate history; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Isabel Allende on eroticism and food) and the completely fluffy (Naomi Novik's Napoleonic dragons; Gail Carson Levine fairy tale; Philip Reeve Victorian space opera; Meg Cabot chicklit), and absolutely no half measures at all. I feel surprisingly good about this. Although I suspect the hapless book club members might have been a bit bemused.
To make up for several days depriving the world of my witterings (poor world), Random Linkery R Us!
- John Scalzi not only rips the hell out of the Creation Museum, he hosts a LOL-CreationMuseum thread. A lot of these are hysterical.
- Somebody stuck a camera on an eagle and let her loose. Way overdue, in my opinion. The world needs more things that give me the illusion of flight.
- Because I promised the book club: the answer to models photoshopped to look unrealistically beautiful is celebrities photoshopped to look normal. In a bad way. How do you spell "schadenfreude", anyway?
- And, to explain today's somewhat surreal subject line: New and Improved Stereotypes. To teach your kids.
