Possibly we are employed by the boring sort of dragon

[rushthatspeaks]

We being myself, eredien, and lignota. eredien and I are temping at the company lignota works at all the time, labeling and relabeling lots and lots of expensive yet excessively tacky jewelry. I have learned that absolutely anything can be made a great deal more tasteless by the addition of diamond chips. It is brain-shut-down work and I get to put in a full eight-hour day tomorrow, but the pay is very good indeed, and it may well last into next week. This is the first employment of any sort I've had since leaving school, though the first money I made after college was from my fiction sale, a fact which makes me happy.

I am only a little worried about mental state or health causing me not to be able to do the job, since it is sit-down, but it's a sign of how much better off I am than I was even two weeks ago that I can affort to be only a little worried.

Enough of that.



Frankly, none of these are terribly obscure, but this is a good cross-section of my comfort reading (sans author duplications).

1. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. -- Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home

2. Polly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed. She rather thought she had read it after all, some time ago. -- Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock

3. Asleep?
No. Awake. I was told to close my eyes. And wait, he said, till you're asked to open them.
-- John Crowley, Engine Summer

4. 1801-- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord-- the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. -- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

5. I am the princess Harueme, daughter of Fujiwara no Enyu and the emperor we now call Go-Sanjo. More to the point, I am old and I am dying. -- kijjohnson, Fudoki

6. I figure that Mom and Dad were having some kind of trouble and needed to go away by themselves. -- Daniel Pinkwater, Lizard Music

7. Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. -- Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast

8. Joe Cardone, twenty-two, bodybuilder, big, mad, and my brother, screeched into the driveway in his black Camaro, roared in the front door, and bellowed, "Where is he?" -- Gordon Korman, Losing Joe's Place

9. Farrell arrived in Avicenna at four-thirty in the morning, driving a very old Volkswagon bus named Madame Schumann-Heink. -- Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air

10. I remember everything.
Yes.
I remember everything perfectly. -- Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Comments

[trifles.livejournal.com]

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." -- Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle.

A rather long and excellent excerpt of the first chapter here.

[jedibl.livejournal.com]

Can you explain the end of Fire and Hemlock to me? I really like the book, but the end always feels somewhat like a letdown because it loses me...

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

*squints* It's been years since I read it, but it's the Tam Lin retelling, isn't it? And I felt it did map that fairly reasonably--are you familiar with the ballad? (You may well be, and I may be misremembering the parallels I thought I saw in the book and the ballad.)

[jedibl.livejournal.com]

I'm familiar with it in a passing "it was in a book of 'feminist' fairy tales I had as a child, and has been the basis for a few of the books I've read as an adult" kind of way. It wasn't the bits that were like Tam Lin that were confusing me, but rather, the bits that I saw as departures from the ballad.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Take a look at the comments to this community post. It's several people working through the ending, and some of the explanations are useful.

[jedibl.livejournal.com]

thanks! Some of those were actually really useful. I didn't know there was a Diana Wynne Jones community. That makes me happy.... :-)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Always Coming Home! Engine Summer! Lizard Music! Gormenghast! The Folk of the Air! The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman! Evil Sekkrit Twin! And I think I've run out of exclamation points thank goodness.

Seriously, it's amazing how few people I know who've read Lizard Music and The Folk of the Air. I love that opening of WH, too -- it's so dry and sardonic, such a funny prelude to the super-Romantic Gothicism within.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I always knew I had an Evil Sekkrit Twin somewhere. It's good to have an idea... and yeah, I totally wish Lizard Music were better know. Folk of the Air is actually one of those books I give out to strangers on streetcorners.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Evil Sekkrit Wonder Twin powers, activate!

Thank goodness Pinkwater and Beagle both seem more well-known now than when I first got into them -- for years I couldn't find a copy of Lizard Music anywhere outside a library....

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

My copy of Lizard Music randomly appeared in our house when I was about twelve years old, and no one knows how it got there. It may well have been misfiled in a box of used books someone bought, or something, but I've always preferred to think of it as some kind of Cosmic Pinkwater Karma.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's awesome. I'm pretty sure I got mine from the local public or junior high school library, but no idea why I picked it up....

[sovay]

I am very fond of The Folk of the Air, primarily because of Farrell, but I think my favorite Peter S. Beagle opening is actually the first two paragraphs of A Fine and Private Place.

". . . He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn’t, and in either case there isn’t very much you can do about it."

Daniel Pinkwater. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Fat Men From Space. Yay.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Huh. I have all those books. Although Lizard Music only as of today.

[mixedborder.livejournal.com]

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
--David Lodge, Changing Places