stellaluna

I'm only three chapters into Under the Dome, but I'm enjoying it thus far.

(The reason I'm only three chapters in is because it's hardcover and over 1,000 pages, and thus weighs a ton, and there's no way I'm lugging it to work with me to be my commute/lunchtime book. I'm only reading it at bedtime, and taking other things to work with me.)

If you want to see what else I'm reading, have read recently, or plan to read in the near future, check out my GoodReads account, and if you're over there too, friend me if you're so inclined.

...Or post here and tell me about what you're reading, have read recently, or plan to read in the near future.

Health report: I'm still congested, but still feeling better overall. As one of my co-workers pointed out, today was the first time since we all got back from vacation that I didn't spend the entire day with a scarf wrapped around my neck. Progress.

I was thinking the other day that we need a version of the Bechdel test for race, and then I discovered a good discussion of that here and a more general discussion about other versions of the Bechdel test on the NPR site here, which includes several race-related suggestions, including one from The Middleman's Natalie Morales.

Both of those discussions gave me a lot to think about, which is a good thing.

I've recently joined the community 50books_poc, a challenge community in which the goal is to read 50 books by people of color. And so that's what I'm going to do.

(I was originally under the vague impression that this was to be done within the time span of a year, and I was going to say, "Well, I probably won't make the deadline, but I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway," but rereading the community info page now, I see there's no such requirement. Score!)

I've been making a list of books I might like to read for this challenge, and this is what I've got so far:

1. Fledgling by Octavia Butler
2. Kindred by Octavia Butler
3. The Dark Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia McKissack
4. Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson
5. Mojo: Conjure Stories edited by Nalo Hopkinson
6. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters edited by Carla Kaplan
7. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston
8. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
10. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
11. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lord
12. The Viking Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader edited by David Lewis
13. The Good House by Tananarive Due
14. Letters to a Young Brother by Hill Harper

If you have suggestions, throw 'em at me. I've got a good start here with African-American authors, but I want to read books by other people of color as well -- Asian, Latina, Native American, any writers you may know of. (Can anyone recommend books by Australian Aborigines? I recently read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, which sparked my curiosity.)

Oh, and so that I can do the project and still stick to my budget and savings plans, I'm going to finally break down and get a library card, which should help mitigate spending impulses, although some of these I own already, and some I'll probably go ahead and buy if I decide that I want a copy of my very own.

I'm excited about this.

• the season finale of Project Runway (subtitle: shut up, Kenley)



• the American version of Life on Mars (subtitle: Harvey Keitel, how are you so awesome?)



• those YA novel recs I started thinking about doing, oh, months ago



• the upcoming premiere of 30 Rock and the general awesomeness thereof



• the general awesomeness of Pushing Daisies
  
  
• what else I've been watching on TV or reading lately

(Posting this will, with luck, increase the chances of my actually doing so.)

There have been several things that have made me happy lately, some of which I really, really need to make posts on at some point:

• Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor novels



• Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely, and good YA fiction in general



• The Dark Knight. I'm not going to see it until scarletts_awry gets here in a few weeks, and then we are going to see it TOGETHER YAYZ, but I'm delighted at all the good things I've heard, and I am so excited about it.
As I think I've mentioned before, the Bale/Nolan Batman is my Batman, and seeing that finally realized on the big screen, as I originally did with Batman Begins a few years ago, makes me more happy than I can easily put into words.


• the set and costume design on Mad Men (I've been watching the marathon today), which are gorgeous



• The Middleman, which is continuing to delight me. Okay, one comment about the most recent episode, "The Flying Fish Zombification."

( episode spoilers )

Okay, I clearly need a Middleman icon. And one for Eureka and one for Batman. And, while I'm at it, one for Buffy, too.

scarletts_awry asked me to ramble about

( Johnny Cash )

( Mac Taylor )

( Urban fantasy )

Okay, right now I really fail at thinkpositive30. But I'm going to try to backtrack through the week and make up for all the days I've missed.

I'll start with today's good thing, because it's the most important, and I don't want it to get lost down at the bottom of the post.

You've probably already heard, either from the news or from the million times it's been linked to on your flist, but California State Supreme Court has ruled that the same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. Hooray for my state, and hooray for Governor Schwarzenegger, who announced after the ruling that he has no plans to overturn it.

This is a real, true good thing. Seriously, I got all weepy when I first read it this morning, and I'm getting teary-eyed again now just typing this. Little by little, it's changing.

Okay, now for good things from the rest of the week.

Sunday (May 11):

gin200168 and I got up early so we could go to the Studio City Farmers Market, where we bought pumpkin bread and hummus and various other good things. We got Korean pancakes for breakfast, and after we were done shopping, we snagged a picnic table and had them along with some strawberries.

Afterward, we stopped back at my place so we could drop things off, and so we could stop by Starbucks, because I needed my coffee. Then we went downtown to Little Tokyo, and spent the next few hours at the Japanese Village Plaza and Fugetsu-Do Confectionary. We got a ton of yummy and cheap Japanese food, including some of Fugetsu-Do's amazing mochi, and I bought a few pretty dishes in one of the little stores (I'm into mismatched dishware) and a Haiku anthology. We also got...Gin, what were the little pancake things? I can't remember the name. We got hot, freshly-made little pancake things with red bean paste, and sat by the fountain to eat them. By then, the morning fog had burned off and the sun was out, and it was turning into a gorgeous day.

(and scarletts_awry, given your love for Asian food, we should totally go here when you visit next.)

I also appear to have inadvertently started a Maneki Neko (Lucky Cat) collection. I already had two standard ones that Gin had given me, and on Sunday I picked out a fat little purple one in one store, and then the store with the dishes had really cheap lucky cats, so I got one holding a pink marble and a little black one, and then it turned out the little black one came as a set, so...yeah. They're all sitting on my coffee table right now, smiling at me. I'm picky about tchotchkes, but I'm utterly charmed by lucky cats. And I was pleased to discover, after the fact, that the purple ones are supposed to bring a person artistic strength.

It was just a really good day all around, and we spent the evening watching Eureka.

Monday (May 12):

Gin had to go home today, but we had time in the morning to go out for breakfast one last time, and to make another Target run so that I could snag the cardigan I had decided I wanted.

After she left for the airport, I hung around the house, then finally managed to get some writing done, and I was actually able to finish the story that I'd been trying to work on forever. It was such an enormous relief to see it all fall into place, and posting it was a weight off my shoulders.

Now Gin is back home and I miss her, but we had a great visit, and got a chance to have a lot of good conversations and do some sorely-needed catching-up.

Tuesday (May 13):

Back to work today, unfortunately, but nothing had exploded in my absence, which was good.

I also started reading Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely, which is really a most excellent novel.

Wednesday (May 14):

"Taxi" was another great episode in what's been a fabulous season. While I'll be sad to see the season finale next week, I'm also looking forward to it, and looking forward to what will happen next once S5 rolls around.

(Also, I can't believe we're heading into a fifth season, and that they're approaching their 100th episode. Blows my mind, it really does. Where has the time gone?)

...and I believe that gets me all caught up. scarletts_awry, you may have pulled ahead briefly, but don't start counting those chickens just yet.

Yesterday (May 3):

I wrote! I wrote I wrote I wrote!

And I didn't write just any old thing; I wrote the opening to this multi-part story that I've been wanting to do for ages, and said opening was one of the parts that, specifically, I was struggling with the most.

I wrote I wrote I wrote!

Today (May 4):

I'm having a much harder time right now feeling good about yesterday's writing victory, because I didn't write at all today, despite my best intentions. I was feeling crappy today to begin with, and this isn't helping.

...But this isn't supposed to be about that.

Good things: I caught up on the two new post-strike episodes of Grey's Anatomy. (Shut up, it's my guilty pleasure. I know it's a complete medical soap opera, but it is LIKE CRACK.). So, not only were the two new episodes way better than pretty much anything that had aired this season, they ( latest episode spoilers )

I got my tax refund. Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union just came out in paperback, so I got myself that, too.

And in four days, gin200168 will be here for the weekend, which also means that I get some needed vacation time.

For ariesjen:

( Top Five Doctor Who Episodes )

( Top Five Books I Recommend )

( Top Five Fashion Items that Will Never Go Out of Style )

Reading: Kelley Armstrong's No Humans Involved, the latest Women of the Otherworld novel. Necromancer Jaime Vegas raises some very real, and very insistent, ghosts while participating in a reality TV special about contacting the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. I love this series. I love the rotating cast of narrators, and what I really love is that, while there are romance subplots in most of the books, the real focus of the novels is the women protagonists' jobs and struggles to find and maintain their own agency and autonomy -- all within the context of the paranormal detective subgenre. The women are neither defined by their men nor punished for seeking their own adventures and their own standards for living.

Armstrong is particularly strong on characterization. She also knows how to write creepy, and the paranormal aspects are generally played out very well; she also has an eye for creating disturbing details without going over the top with the violence. Haunted is my favorite so far, followed closely by Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic, and I'm really enjoying this one, too.

spyscribe, these and the Kim Harrison novels are excellent alternatives to the faerie porn, I swear.

Speaking of Harrison, her practice of using slight twists on the names of Clint Eastwood movies for her titles has always amused me, and the latest one cracks me up every time I see it: The Outlaw Demon Wails.

Watching: I have hundreds and hundreds OMG TOO MANY episodes of Dexter and Torchwood sitting on my DVR. If I had a brain in my head, I would make some effort at getting through them before all the primetime shows start to come back in the next two or three weeks.

Unfortunately, sometimes I'm a Bear of Very Little Brain, and so they continue to sit there while I channel-surf and go "Ooh, shiny," and watch whatever damn thing catches my fancy.

Listening: The new Mountain Goats album, all of which is just as good as "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" suggested.

Craving: Sushi. And peace and quiet. And a pedicure.

While out spending dead presidents yesterday, I found one of the great bargains of my life.

Right outside the movie complex attached to the mall I go to most frequently, there's a storefront that has most frequently hosted various low-rent discount bookstores. The latest iteration of this is actually pretty awesome: it's a one-dollar bookstore that the owners seem to run as, more or less, an ongoing library sale. They take donations of people's old books, you have to dig due to general lack of order (which is part of the fun), and everything is genuinely one dollar -- with the occasional exception if it's something particularly big or fancy. It's that latter category that my score yesterday falls into.

I got The Complete New Yorker DVD-ROM set for five dollars. No, that's not a typo, and yes, it was brand-new and all sealed up. They had a dozen or so of them that I'm guessing they got as part of an overstock lot somewhere, and (unsurprisingly) it looked like they were going pretty fast.

I've wanted this for a couple of years, ever since it came out, but a hundred dollars is hard to drop all at once on one item, even though the price is completely reasonable for eighty years' worth of the magazine.

Again: five dollars. One of my co-workers and I figured it out at lunch, and it comes out to about six and a quarter cents per year.

I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker a couple of years ago because I never had time to read the damn thing, and the piled-up, unread copies were an ongoing source of guilt, but I still love the magazine. Having all of it available at my fingertips is going to be a wonderful thing. I've also had a long-standing interest in the magazine's history in general and its early years in particular, and I'm really looking forward to being able to pull up any article or story I want whenever the mood strikes.

I'm also reading Joe Hill's collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, which is really excellent. I picked up his novel Heart-Shaped Box on the bargain table at Borders a couple of weekends ago, and it has one of the best opening pages I've read in quite a while, but time and my concentration levels being what they are, I haven't been up to reading an entire novel just yet. Short stories are the way to go.

I first encountered Hill's work when The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (the Datlow and Grant-&-Link anthology) reprinted his story "My Father's Mask" the year before last, and I read it and immediately wanted to know who this guy was, because he was fabulous -- point being, I noticed his work before I found out the Big Secret.

I had the same reaction to reading "My Father's Mask" and the opening pages of Heart-Shaped Box that I've had on my first encounter with other writers like Kelly Link: that sudden happy realization that this person is the real deal, and that there's something new and striking in their voice that I haven't encountered before.

(I think someone on my flist mentioned Hill a while back, but I can't remember who, or even if I'm remembering that correctly.)

Final note for the day: I am wearing a color! Well, okay, the base of my blouse is black, but it also has little pink flowers all over it. And I like it. (I like my entire outfit, actually, but the rest of it falls well within my comfort zone.) I'm very proud of myself.

And stacked heels are much more difficult for me to walk in than stilettos. Who knew?