In An Attempt To Distract Myself...
Apr. 14th, 2003 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaks... I will remind myself that there is a summer coming up, in which there will not be papers on drainage in ancient Athens (well, there may be, but I won't be writing them), and that there are books coming out over the next year to which I am looking forward. Man, October is going to be spectacular. In October we get the new Dark Tower book, the new Lois McMaster Bujold, the new Robin McKinley, and two new Pratchett. Happy. In November we get what Orson Scott Card swears up, down, and sideways is the last of the Alvin Maker series, the one in which he, you know, resolves stuff. I will believe it when I see it. Sometime next week we get the new Diana Wynne Jones, which is a reward I shall give myself when the paper is over. The only dark spot I can see to the upcoming year in science fiction/fantasy is the fact that for the latter half of June and probably most of July it will be impossible to get inside the doors of a bookstore without being trampled by a bevy of berserk Harry Potter fans, in hibernation since their last apotheosis, screaming and waving their 897-page new acquisitions madly in all directions in a manner injurious to life, limb and sanity. And those will be just the adults. I will probably read the bloody thing. Sometime in August. When it's safe. And in a bookstore, thank you, as I have never bought a Harry Potter book yet and I would never buy an 897-page book without reading it first. Repeatedly. An 897-page book is not just a commitment, it's a life partnership. One needs to plan space for it, factor moving it into every time one moves from that day on, worry about its eating one's smaller books and spitting the pages all over the floor (didn't you ever wonder why Gibbon is so big? And why so many households seem to have a copy of it even though it isn't exactly light reading in any sense? It's a parasitical life form that feeds on other books), swear at the binding when it inevitably decides to disintegrate. Hope it keeps the same hours in the morning that you do. (Betcha anything the new Harry Potter will be one of those annoying Perky Morning Novels. Really.) Realize that it will always take all the blankets and bark your shins repeatedly when you trip over it in the middle of the night. And at the end of it all, it's going to run off with one's nice new edition of Les Miserables, distracted by all that French charm and historical allure, leaving one sitting, alone, miserable, trying in memory to reconstruct even one footnote... I'm sorry, I'm bitter, I was jilted by a box set of Proust as a child. You don't get over things like that. It drove me to Kafka. Repeatedly. And, worse, Baudelaire. The fickleness of classic literature...
Actually, I've never read Proust. I'm not sure I would respect myself in the morning. Not when every time I turn around they've retranslated and changed the English title of 'A la recherche du temps perdu'. It's on account of the imperfect tense, which cannot be captured correctly in our language's built-in conceptions of time. Aggravating language. (It's all right. The English language told me I could see other lexicons, as long as I kept my mouth shut about that silly little thing it used to have going with Faulkner. Take it to the grave, I will. Never said whose grave.)
Of course, if it finds me doing anything really wrong, it'll misplace all my modifiers and leave dangling participles where I can trip over them, and I won't even be able to blame it on my books. I haven't bought a thousand-page novel in years. I suppose I could blame it all on J.K. Rowling.
Actually, I've never read Proust. I'm not sure I would respect myself in the morning. Not when every time I turn around they've retranslated and changed the English title of 'A la recherche du temps perdu'. It's on account of the imperfect tense, which cannot be captured correctly in our language's built-in conceptions of time. Aggravating language. (It's all right. The English language told me I could see other lexicons, as long as I kept my mouth shut about that silly little thing it used to have going with Faulkner. Take it to the grave, I will. Never said whose grave.)
Of course, if it finds me doing anything really wrong, it'll misplace all my modifiers and leave dangling participles where I can trip over them, and I won't even be able to blame it on my books. I haven't bought a thousand-page novel in years. I suppose I could blame it all on J.K. Rowling.
