Romantic Willimantic

I live in Connecticut now.  They have pretty flowers here, sometimes.  I took this picture last summer, so I'm not actually convinced that this happens regularly.

A Book a Week: Failure Recap

Well, that was a failure of a reading streak.  Life is so distracting.

I did read:
The Hunger Games (and #2 & #3) by Suzanne Collins
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
The Shunned House (short story) by H.P. Lovecraft

I also started reading
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
In Search of the Castaways by Jules Verne
but got distracted and/or couldn't stand them.

A Book a Week: Phantoms in the Brain

A few weeks ago, a good friend and mentor of mine said that she could imagine me becoming a neurologist.  Her assessment was based completely on my personality (not my interests or anything that I'm actually particularly good at) and she also suggested ophthalmology and rheumatology.  However, I don't own any pop-science books on opthalmology or rheumatology, so I am exploring neurology first.

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee explores questions of consciousness, memory, perception and self through the science of the brain.  Through analysis of the symptoms when something goes awry (most often due to head trauma or a stroke), neurologists are able to deduce the function and mechanisms of the human brain.  This book has just the right balance of technical terms (with further clarifications in the endnotes), humor, and philosophical ramblings to make a lovely read.  It is an older book, from 1999, so I expect that some of the theories have either been disproved or further explored by this point, but I am sure it is still fairly accurate.

Recommended for those with interests in science and philosophy.

A Book a Week: Absolute Midnight

Finally finished my book for week 2 (just in time).  This was my first week back at school, and I was sick, so I can pretend that those are good excuses.  Really, the first week is always the easiest (although finals week is a close second) and being sick should have meant that I was reading all the time.  Instead, I mostly watched TV and stared into space.  Blaghh.

Abarat: Absolute Midnight by Clive Barker is the third book in the Abarat series.  They are set in a magical archipelago, where each island stands forever at a different hour in time.  The first two books (Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War) are really great.  They are magical, whimsical, and very strange.  The paintings which accompany the text give life to the words and the complex, detailed world they describe.  These first two books have as much dark in them as they do light, with some pretty terrifying villains and monsters.  There is, overall, a great deal of life in these books, some of it vibrant and beautiful, some of it putrid and malevolent.

Opening sentence: "On the early coast of Idjit, where two a.m. looked south over the darkened straits toward the island of Gorgossium, there was a house, its facade much decorated, set high upon the cliffs."

Where the first two books are a captivating mixture of light and dark, Absolute Midnight has very little of the light.  The beautiful world which we have just barely glimpsed is being destroyed.  The book is filled with long, detailed descriptions of truly horrific beasts and sights.  I got bored.  I found myself skipping paragraphs, skimming for something of interest to come.  The paintings were more jumbled than in the earlier books and they mostly made be anxious.  I suspect that was Clive Barker's intention; I suppose I am just not into horror.  I will read the remaining books (there are supposed to be five) when they come out, but I do not have high hopes for enjoying them.  Recommended if you have read the first two and either really need to know what happens or like bizarre fantasy/horror.

2012: A Book a Week

I know that everyone is posting about resolutions & goals this month, so I really hate to join in...but, I am anyway.  As a great lover of lists, I am constantly adding to and revising my goals.  This time of year there is nothing really fun to do so the impulse to be unrealistically ambitious comes on extra strong.  As a general rule my mid-February ennui will bring about the end of ambition, but there's no harm in trying (this.  There can be harm in trying some things, like tightrope walking).

Of course, I have new (years) goals regarding all sorts of things, but they are ill-formed at this point and would always be boring to read about.  Most of them center around being less of a slob.  The only one I will be blogging about, or keeping track of in any consistent way, will be this: I would like to read a book a week.  School books do not count, because there is no way I would read a whole one in a week anyway (and because they are a sub-category of my 2-year goal of getting into medical school).

So, yeah.  Books.  In middle school this would not have been a goal I would have even considered.  Who needs incentive to read books?  With this in mind, I am also adding the requirement that I read one non-fiction and one classic(ish) book a month.  Of course, I have a fairly broad definition of classic so that will help.  For example: if I had not already read the Harry Potter books (several times) they would count, due to their important place in modern fantasy and children's literature.

As part of this quest, I will be blogging (eventually) all of the books that I read, with any comments, interesting sentences, or recommendations.

Right now I am working on Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which is some sort of cross between regency drama and fantasy novel.  The story follows the careers of two men, Mr. Strange and Mr. Norrell, who would actually like to practice magic rather than simply discuss it.  I like the story, but the prose is extremely slow and dense.  The female characters are few and all play supporting roles due to the setting and the focus on the semi-respectable profession of magic in high-society London.  I am on page 450 (of 782).

Opening sentences: 

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.  They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic." 

I would recommend this book for people who love both fantasy and historical fiction.  If you actually enjoy reading things like Jane Austen (which I can completely understand if you don't), then you will be able to handle the density of the prose and possibly be able to keep the characters straight.

Ambrosia (Caramel Sauce)

I made caramel sauce!  And it was unbelievably amazingly wonderfully delicious.  And actually pretty easy.  I've done it twice now with little mishap.  The second time it crystallized a bit, so the sauce had a slightly grainy texture, but was still so tasty that it didn't matter at all. 

I've put the recipe and further details over on the family food blog Y'unz Can Cook.

Hard Tack Candy

I put up some pictures on the family food blog Y'unz Can Cook of our hard tack candy production last winter. It is a fun but very sticky process.