seryn

When I was a kid I really admired the Dewey Decimal system for libraries. But I was hideously disappointed to discover that it's only for non-fiction. Obviously the categorization would be a nightmare if you really tried to shelve fiction based on the topics covered in the work. But as a child I really didn't care/understand how much work something was, adults were always making themselves out to be these super beings who deserved to have complete control over the world. So why weren't they doing things properly?

When I was in college, I discovered the Library of Congress system and just figured no one knew what the fuck they were doing. When I asked someone, she said that Dewey was easier for patrons to remember so most non-research libraries tended that way. I didn't ever remember what the various numbers in Dewey meant. I always had to look my number range up in the card catalog. A lot of the organization seemed prejudicial too and subject to bias. There wasn't any authority designating official Dewey numbers. So if you went to another library, you might very well have to start your lookup from scratch. (This is something that has improved somewhat. Even if there isn't an authority for the official numbers, they do seem to have standardized.) But as long as the patrons need to look up the numbers for self-service browsing anyway, why not use the real schema?

But we're still running across the lack of organization of fiction.

Of the people who read, I suspect the vast majority read exclusively fiction. Many of those probably only read popular fiction.

I understand that schools are supposed to educate people and teach them to understand what they read, so there needs to be demonstrably worthy works to start that foundation of analysis. But I talk to people over and over again who say they haven't read a book since high school English class. A lot of them have degrees, sometimes masters or PhDs. They chose their career path based on an avoidance of reading because "all books are boring and reading is a waste of time." And considering some of the books we read were boring... I have no idea why they're "classic" because I couldn't comprehend the characters' choices and the setting is archaic; most of them seem to be classic because the people on school boards were forced to read them when they were children so they need to make sure the pain is passed down to future generations. But when the only things schools teach is how to loathe reading, not how to find entertainment value in it, we lose something. Maybe they shouldn't teach regular pulp paperbacks as literature, but couldn't they at least have some sort of organization to the school's fiction library? Couldn't there be a concept of "dessert" books for after you've eaten a whole plate of burned broccoli that requires serious jaw muscles to chew? Couldn't literature teachers say, after teaching The Scarlet Letter, "Are there examples in recent books you've read that echo these themes? Do you see references to this work in movies? Do you think people still suffer the stigma of sin differently if they are poor or wealthy? Are there examples of women raising children on their own on television, how are they portrayed?" Not saying that's specifically how it should happen, but bringing in other media, not treating "real books" as completely separate from books people read on their own... these things would really help.

(That would actually help for non-fiction as well. I remember believing that you couldn't be president, ever, because the only presidents we'd heard of were dead. So in order to become president, you had to be dead already.)

When I go to my local branch library, I can't find things to read very often. I get books, but it's a self-fulfilling search. I want great fantasy fiction and all they have are mysteries, so the librarian said they don't order science fiction because their circulation numbers for those books are very low. Well, yeah, if you get fewer than a dozen new sff books in a year and get 300 new mysteries, chances are pretty good that you're not going to have a high circ for the sff books. And because those of us who read sff those go to other branches when we want to browse (I try to go at least once a year, but it's a huge hassle.) the few sff books they get tend to be chosen based on catalog blurbs put out by the publisher and therefore they suck.

I'd like a better way to find books. I would ask for recommendations, but there aren't a lot of people like me around me. Most people don't read sff books except those people I know who read everything. I'm too lazy of a reader to even wonder if I should ask.... to be honest, that scene in the first HP movie where Hermione drops this huge tome onto the table and says "a little light reading"... and everyone stares at her... that speaks to me because even though I'm a reader, I'd be one of the staring people. When I'm talking light reading, I'm talking vampire romances, shapechanger fantasies, pulp series mysteries.... but the universal constant in my choices is that I never want to read a book about someone who has children as her main focus. So I don't do amazingly well when I can't browse in person or don't have a good source for recommendations.

Other than the books which are written by foreigners (I'm not great at detecting the country of origin for modern authors, but some like Dumas are known to not be American.) but which the library has plastered with "African-American" stickers on the spine, I don't do amazingly well detecting books that are going to be offensive. But with library books, there's no real financial risk. I just return it if it doesn't work out.

It seems like we could do a lot better at organizing fiction reading just by having more topics listed. Or if we could have a NOT sort available.

werewolves NOT horror NOT historical
fantasy AND magic NOT swords
science fiction NOT post-apocalypse NOT horror

Instead I get friends who tell me I will like Lilith Saintcrow whose books suffer from the "demons are evil, you can tell because they're called demons and we all share a common culture based upon Christianity and that's their word for nasty monsters" and a main character who abandons her friends to a vicious death in case it might save a child from being returned to her loving father. In the one LS book I read, the main character got 7 of her best friends killed violently while failing in her (stupid) goal. I can't imagine why anyone would read that book, let alone why anyone would recommend it. It's not like LS is Charles Dickens or even dead, so the classics rule where you torture other people just so you weren't the only idiot stupid enough to read that book applies.

I must be having extremely mediocre reading taste lately.

I actually liked Maid For the Billionaire despite the tell-not-show characterization and really bizarre setup.

But what's convincing me that my good sense is deserting me, I'm really enjoying the latest Black Dagger Brotherhood book. Honestly, these are best sellers? Really?

( BDB ramblings )

I'm attempting to read some new k-book Mayne Attraction, but I don't remember what it was supposed to be about anymore. I have a sneaking suspicion it's not actually about were-lions.

I washed a scarf today. Yay me. It's still drying. The joys of bulky-weight wool yarn during the winter. After a day, I needed to move the scarf to a dry towel.

Today I read a book. The new Diana Wynne Jones one. It was decent for a kids' book. Could have been a lot better if the same story had been rewritten for people who can use multisyllabic words. Reading the book was a lot like being a kid because stuff seems to happen randomly, but as an adult I realized that it hadn't been really random, but the events were based upon subtext that was vastly over my head at the time. This book had a lot of that, but it's narrated, not a first-person story. So I'm wondering where modern authors get their stock of butt-stupid narrators who have no clues whatsoever. It's like Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes mythos, only the narrator here doesn't have any interest in explaining things to the reader. I was annoyed.

I also watched last week's House. I really dislike the new girl. I hate the House-Cuddy relationship, though I do believe that House pined after her and no one else would really suit his preferences. The episode was the slave ship one. Interesting that Bones does a slave thing and House does a slave thing in the same week? More like cheap of Fox to reuse the sets. I didn't think this episode had good medicine in it, and I thought everyone was OoC. I realize canonical episodes cannot, by definition, be OoC, but this was. This episode was so bad that I'm glad we recorded the Chuck instead and I'm about ready to drop Chuck entirely from my viewing menu.

This week's NCIS was the second of the two-parter and I cannot figure out what happened. The first part was tolerable, at about the same level as most of the NCIS episodes lately have been. The second half was random, bizarre, and pathetic. It was full of flashbacks and inside jokes and had Ziva being smarter than the average bear. I guess when your team is up 21-zip, you can send in the JV and let the other team score on you a bit since you're going to win anyway and that way your good team is rested for next week?

I'm watching the movie Breakfast With Scot. (via Netflix streaming.)
I discovered that Hulu has the first three seasons of Doc Martin so I don't have to fight with my cable box refusing to change to PBS. Blood Ties is available online, which I found via Hulu redirecting me somewhere else.

I finished 3 books:
a re-read of Dark Lies by Vivi Anna.
The Trickster by Kathleen Nance
Wolf In Night by Tara K. Harper

I still think Vivi Anna is ill-served by being published in a pulp romance. It could have been much more than that.

The Trickster is the first in the Olympians series and I'm a little meh. about it so far. I like the premise that Zeus decides to make things up to the long-lost descendants of his paramours whose lineages were cursed. Admittedly this had a rather grating heroine. It's still set in Louisiana, but despite being pre-Katrina it's really mystifying why anyone on Earth would live there purposefully. I ordered the rest of the series, so I obviously liked it well enough.

I've read all of the Wolfwalker series by Harper. Either there was a long gap or I missed this one. It's okay. But the main character is like superpowered. The alien world they live on is really strange but has an overlay of business-as-usual politics like you'd see on any western. This one doesn't have a lot of funny surreal disjointed crap with the alien birdpeople that made one of the Dione (previous main character) books seem like a drug trip combined with smoke inhalation. Well, the copyright date says 2005, and the first book's copyright date says 1990, so 7 books in 15 years isn't horrible, but it sure feels like the gap was much longer than that. Since nothing was really resolved, I'm not sure anyone should bother reading these. She'll probably die with the series unfinished like Robert Jordan did.

I was asked how there could be story without heap-big plot elements:


A lot of the non-genre fiction I've read has nothing that happens beyond the everyday normal stuff. People grow up, they do kid things, they grow up more and do adult things, other characters cycle in and out... but there's not a big war, no big tragedy, no gigantic crisis that defines the whole of that character's life. It's [supposedly] interesting in its banality.

It's like reading first person historical drama set in a time before all the people are dead.

I will be the first to admit that I cannot find a decent non-genre fiction book to save my sanity, but really, all of them have been like that.

I don't get the point. If I wanted to read about everyday things happening to everyday people, I'd, you know, make actual friends and have actual conversations with real live people.

But when I'm reading a science fiction book or a fantasy book, the author has invested so much effort into creating the "everyday" aspect, I just think it's a waste that there's always a war on. Or some danger of mass imminent deaths.

It seems like we could spend whole books having a tour and meeting the people who have banal lives in a world where the gods walk among the people and there are talking animals and the sun sets in a purple sky with 3 moons overhead.

And it seems like there's no point in reading yet another Garrison Keillor book where not only is everything banal, you could go there (or somewhere so incredibly similar as to be indistinguishable) yourself and live an equally trite existence.

Stuff doesn't need to change in order for it to be interesting, but it does need to be different. Tons and tons of non-genre fiction proves that all the time. And I think it's backward. Books about the now starring regular people should have to have plot to justify their existence because otherwise there's nothing different there.

I know it's almost impossible for authors to imagine how to show what's different without a plot framework to stretch the world around. But I'm tired of reading about people who have much much bigger problems than I do. My problems are sufficiently insoluble for me and when I can find an hour to relax, I'd rather have a family of talking animals wondering if it's going to rain on their picnic or shapeshifters seducing mundane women where they're given a handbook on how to fit in to the new culture because everyone wants them to feel welcome.

Everything I read is so violent or so tragic or so damned hard for the characters in the stories, it's just exhausting.

I would really like a tags drop-down. I noticed I have variants on several things, which is going to get annoying very fast.

Finished Lord of Misrule which is the Nth Rachel Caine YA book about the Morganville Vampires. When I read the first one, my reaction was "well, at least Caine found her writing's level." Because I've read 4 of her Weather Warden series and thought it was nonsensical and puerile to the point of offense. The first YA book used simpler words, a less complex plot, and relatively ordinary conflicts (though couched in a paranormal framework). There wasn't a lot of potential for over-reach.

However, after a handful of books, I'm bored with the conflicts from the first book not being resolved in any fashion. I'm bored with simplistic plots dressed up with obfuscation. But mostly I don't think any of the characters has grown. Skimpy characterization is reasonable for a short novel. After 4 books (I think this is #5 but I missed one, so 4 to me.) the characters are still cardboard. After two medieval-size wars, the characters have not developed any mettle or sense or grounding.

But mostly I don't think it's reasonable for two teenagers to live in the same house and sleep in the same bed for years without giving in to sexual tension. The abbreviation I have seen for it is UST which comes from unresolved sexual tension, but many people thought it was "unrequited". I can easily see unrequited sexual tension staying platonic, heh.

No idea what I would want the author to have done, because I'm not hugely keen on anyone promoting teen pregnancy and no author can withstand the firestorm if teenage characters have sex on the page while using protection. But I don't think it's realistic to drag out sexual tension across years. That kind of sexual tension kills relationships. But maybe not for cardboard characters without any real feelings. They'll probably go on for another 5 books without doing anything because they don't care about themselves or each other.