Weekly Geeks 4

#1. What are you passionate about besides reading and blogging? For example, are you crafty (knitting, woodworking, scrapbooking, model building)? Do you cook? Into gaming (computer or board)? Sports (player or spectator)? Photography? Maybe you like geocaching, rock climbing? Or love attending events like renaissance fairs, concerts? Music? Dancing? You get the idea.
Tell us why you're passionate about it. Post photos of what you've made or of yourself doing whatever it is you love doing.

Oh my. I'm a magpie. I pick up interests, and put them away again, neglected. I do, however, have a few that have stuck. Outside of reading, they are cross stitching, movies, jigsaw puzzles and word finds and crossword ... and I would have said TV but my column has just been canned by work, so not so much. Sigh. So not particularly exciting interests. I'd like to say something like Extreme Archaeology, but .... I'm doing a bit of cross stitching on and off, but I can't do it at all when Patrick is up so it's on a go-slow. Movies I love, although I don't talk about that here very much. I also love to do jigsaws, but I'm limited to doing them online at the moment, which is oddly addictive.
(Aside: Could I SOUND like a bigger nerd???)

#2. Get us involved. Link to tutorials, recipes, Youtube videos, websites, fan sites, etc, anything that will help us learn more about your interest or how to do your hobby. Maybe you'd like to link to another hobbyist whose work you admire or tell us about a book or magazine related to your interest.

Hmmmm .... oddly, maybe, I don't visit a lot of cross stitching blogs. But when I'm looking for charts to buy, here is where I go:


http://123stitch.com/ http://www.abcstitch.com/ and of course http://www.trademe.co.nz/ which has a pretty comprehensive crafts section.
I've never looked it up on YouTube, and I have no idea how to embed videos, if there are any, but googling it led me to this video: http://www.wikihow.com/Cross-Stitch which is a step-by-step. I find it easy and relaxing, when I'm watching TV. I should do it more when I'm watching TV, but I've been very, very lazy.
This is what I'm working on right now:

It's Circe, by Jill Oxton, after a painting by John Waterhouse. This isn't my work, obviously ... for one thing, it's finished and mine's not. But that's approximately what it will look like, I hope.

I have many, many other works in progress, but I won't show them here, because they'd take over the whole post. Ahem.

As for the others ... for movie news and such, I mainly go here: www.darkhorizons.com and if I need to know when the movie I want to see is starting, then I go here: www.readingcinemas.co.nz And I just bought a book called Stephen King at the Movies, which goes into the backstories of five film adaptations of his works. I'm sure I'll think of others, after I've put this up.

For online jigsaws I have three sites that I visit every day: www.jigzone.com, www.crazyforjigsaws.com and www.thinks.com, which also has links for word puzzles and suchlike.

Oh! And www.freerice.com I love playing Free Rice :)

As for Extreme Archaeology ... I'm an armchair adventurer. So that's mostly through the History channel, on our satellite network:

http://www.skytv.co.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=208

#3. Visit other Weekly Geeks. Link in your post to other Geeks who've peaked your interest in their passion. Or maybe you might find a fellow afincionado among us, link to them. Back later in the week for this one, I think :)

Happy Weekly Geeks. Live long and prosper.

Meme-tastic

The Guardian newspaper has just run a series of 1000 books you must read, divided into subjects. The lists begin here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/1000novels

Below are the 124 science fiction/fantasy books and I blatantly stole the meme from Carl at http://www.stainlesssteeldroppings.com/?p=1070

Play along, if you feel so inclined :)

Bold the ones you've read and I'm going to throw caution to the wind and italicise the ones I want to read :)

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
7. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
11. Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
13. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
25. Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
29. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
30. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
32. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
36. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
37. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
38. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
39. Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
48. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
49. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
59. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
80. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
90. Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
110. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
118. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
119. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
120. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

Weekly Geeks

The explanation for this week's Weekly Geeks is here:
http://www.weeklygeeks.com/

I'm answering one, two and three; and will probably do number four later in the week if I remember.
Okay. So. How do I feel about classical literature?
Here's the thing. I feel the same way about everything that I read. I hope I'm going to get a well-told story that will take me out of myself for a bit.
Having said that, I do have my personal challenge to read one classic novel a month, which range from The Count of Monte Cristo (still kicking my ass) to Brideshead Revisited to A Wizard of Earthsea.
My definition of ''classic'' is very broad, and not one I've ever tried to quantify.
As for recommending classics to someone else ... one of my favourites from last year was A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. So that one.

I'll read at least one chapter of the Count of Monte Cristo this week, so that'll cover that.

Now. Cousin Myrtle. I"m going to assume that Cousin Myrtle and I are close. Because before we went into the bookstore I'd tell her to harden up, stop being a snob, and pick something because I'm not spending however-long-the-holiday-is listening to her complain about how she has nothing to read.

Hopefully I can get around the other Geeks and find yet more reading ideas. :)

Not the Count of Monte Cristo

Sigh. I did read a book in the past two days. It was not, however, the Count of Monte Cristo. We're stalled there, with the Count about to visit Albert Something in France.

What I did read was this:

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

Nick and Norah meet one night at a music club, when Nick asks Norah to pretend to be his girlfriend _ temporarily _ when his ex-girlfriend walks into the club.

What follows for both Nick and Norah is an extraordinary, life-changing kind of a night as they start to maybe, probably, fall in love.

The Nick/Norah chapters are written by Levithan and Cohn respectively, in alternating first person points of view.

I loved it. I really did. There is a lot of swearing, I think, but I work at a newspaper, so I'm not the best judge of what constitutes a lot of swearing. The alternating chapters gives a good insight into what Nick and Norah are thinking, and that although for the most part they're on the same wavelength, that the same gulfs of communication can exist between the most in-tune people.

I'm probably above the legal age limit for knowing who most of the bands they reference are, but I recognised enough of them to be able to ask where the garden of my aunt is located.

It's a YA novel, but one for anyone who has had one of those epic nights that you never want to end. Or, you know, who just enjoys a good story.

The Reading Week

Sigh. The Count of Monte Cristo is kicking my ass. I'm not even halfway through it and I keep finding other things to do.

If I had realised how long it was, I would have swapped it for a classic from later on in the year. Ah, well. As one of my workmates would say "take a teaspoon of cement and harden up"!

The thing is, The Count of Monte Cristo is really, really, really good. But if I want to get any OTHER reading done, it's going to have to intrude on February's book _ The Pillars of the Earth. Also a long one, but I have two weeks off at the end of February, so I might just read it then. H'm. That'd work, wouldn't it?

What else is on the menu? Nation, still. I read the prologue today and the first page ... do you ever get that feeling, when you pick up a book that you're just going to be yanked down the rabbit hole? Yeah. I have to be careful, I think, when I pick that one up, because I'm not going to want/be able to put it down. Just a feeling.

I have a bunch of library books as well. Some easy-reads: a couple of Monica Ferris Needlework mysteries, and some CSI novelisations, so I won't be too upset if I don't get to those before they're due back. One that I DO want to read, however, is Let the Right One In; a vampire novel set in ... Sweden. It's by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

But that'll have to wait for some spare daylight time.

I'm wussy that way. :)

Weekly Geeks 2

For those who have been with the group, either from the start or joined within recent months, what does being a member mean to you? What do you enjoy about the group? What are some of your more memorable Weekly Geeks that we might could do again? What could be improved as we continue the legacy that Dewey gave us?

Hmm... I've missed maybe two Weekly Geeks since its inception but I don't know what to answer to what it means to me. For me, it's a fun thing to do once a week where I get to virtually hang out with lots of like-minded people :)
So that's the first two questions answered in one easy paragraph.
I really enjoyed the Weekly Geeks where we interviewed each other about what we were reading _ I'd be happy to see a repeat of that one.

Oh! And the quotes one, where we posted a quote a day on a specific subject. That was a lot of fun too.

I have no improvements for suggestions. You're all doing a great job at keeping Dewey's Weekly Geek legacy alive.

The Heretic Queen plus Dragonlance shortie

I had one of those "is it me?" moments with The Heretic Queen. I enjoyed Michelle Moran's first novel, Nefertiti, but wasn't in love with it. And I had a similar reaction to The Heretic Queen, the sequel.

The trouble is, most of the reviews I've read are pretty glowing and it makes me wonder why I had such an "eh" reaction. That maybe I'd missed some kind of secret awesomeness somewhere. It's possible.

Anyway. Historically speaking, Nefertari was the wife of Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. He ruled ancient Egypt longer than just about anyone and instituted massive building programmes.

However, I'm getting off-track. I do find Ramesses' story fascinating but this is meant to be Nefertari's story. And it's fine as far as it goes. It's well-researched and gives fairly vivid descriptions of what life might have been like. But I can't get ahold of the characters. For such a vivid historical figure, Ramesses is reduced to little more than a king pawn between warring queens.

Warring queens that I felt were barely sketched in themselves. Nefertari is the narrator of the story, and although her historical origins are lost to time, in The Heretic Queen she is the niece of the notorious Nefertiti and carries that burden ... and carries it ... and .. have you ever wanted to say "oh, pull your socks up and stop whingeing!" to a ficitonal character? Yeah. I wanted to say that to Nefertari.

The half of the book she's not mooning after Ramesses, she's complaining about her personal history. Sigh. And in between times she's being manipulated like a pawn on a chessboard, which made me feel like I didn't really have a lot of insight into her character.

Having said all that, I read The Heretic Queen in two days. Moran's writing is very compelling and she really knows how to put a story together. I just wish there were a few more ingredients.

I also read Book Three of The Dark Disciple: Amber and Blood; a Dragonlance novel. There have been many, many, many Dragonlance offshoots. The Dark Disciple trilogy follows on from the War of Souls trilogy and picks up Mina's story. It seemed to take aaaaaaaaaaages for Amber and Blood to come out in paperback and I thought I was going to have to go back and re-read the first two books. But my retention was better than I thought :)
I did enjoy Amber and Blood. It wrapped things up nicely, had the required good guys/bad guys/angsts and hand-wringings you'd expect :) It was well-written, well-plotted and easy to read.
If you haven't read any Dragonlance novels, the first one is Dragons of Autumn Twilight. :)