To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I finally got around to reading Sinclair Lewis's Main Street this week. Lewis took 500 pages to say what Kate Chopin took 150 to say in "The Awakening" twenty years earlier, but even so, I liked it. (Okay, okay, it had a bit wider scope than "The Awakening.") I saw a little too much of myself in the dreaming dilettante Carol, and I found the satire of Good Old Small Towns On The Prairie very thorough and biting.

I also brought home a bunch of paperbacks the other day from the Local Used Book Emporium, including the definitive Collected Robert Frost for only three dollars(!). (That was originally going on my Christmas list, but now that list has been condensed to "all three seasons of Fringe." I'm looking forward to all the vids I can make! :D) I've been meaning to read more Frost for, oh, three years now. While I'm thinking about it, have one of his lesser-known works, which happened to be the first one I flipped through when I brought this volume home.

And I have ONE SQUILLION eleven books either out from the library or waiting on the holdshelf for me. So I will be busy for the next month or so. Whee!

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Just for the hell of it, some WIP snippets. And by "snippet," sometimes I mean half the fic. (Some of these may never actually see the light of day in any kind of finished form, so...yeah.)

( Body of Proof, Northern Exposure, Babylon 5 )

I felt the need to augment my lazy, sunny Sunday with some high-octane cuteness/nostalgia, and decided that this would fit the bill. Besides, I've never done one of these before. It's fun!

Under the cut, you'll find a Caroline/Richard picspam/quotespam, with linking narration and captions for newbies provided by moi.

( Cuteness! )

Rats. I had just four things on my to do list for the weekend, and I only did one of them (my ironing). Dear self: get better at working with self-imposed deadlines.

On the other hand, this past week I've had a grand time reading many, many books, which is largely the reason I haven't been around much. I work only two blocks from the downtown library, which is definitely feeding my bibliophile habit.

Recs: Heresy, by S.J. Parris (Elizabethan Oxford, heretic monk, Catholic intrigue...great combination, nicely-plotted mystery) and, to a lesser extent, Dark Echo, by F.G. Cottam. The man has a habit of writing only in short, declarative sentences, but the ghost story/historical mystery was good enough that after a while I didn't care. Well, I cared, but not enough to stop reading. It was spooky and cool.

Anti-Rec: Diving into the Wreck, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. With a title like that and a plot involving a female captain of a space salvage operation, I was expecting at least some kind of connection to the Rich poem, even if it was obliquely, but no, not only did it not come through for me on that angle, it was just a terrible book. It was originally two short stories, and it showed. The actual interesting part started on, oh, the last page, too. Plus the author could not go more than two sentences without starting a new paragraph. Being fond of the single-sentence paragraph myself, I assume it was mean to up the tension or underscore importance, but the effect was much like highlighting every sentence in a textbook. Bah.

I've also been spending my time...uh, well, this requires some context in order to make myself feel less embarrassed. Once upon a time, like back in middle school, I used to watch Caroline in the City. (Don't judge me, I was thirteen.) I quite enjoyed it at the time, so, having little better to put in my Netflix queue, when I saw that it was out on DVD, I stuck it in there. And, you know, for a sitcom, it's held up quite well. Okay, so it was never actually objectively good, relying far too much on clichés, love triangles, and plots where the conflict would be over in two seconds if people would just talk to each other like sensible human beings, but, you know, for all that, it's still entertaining. (Did I mention I was watching this with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia firmly affixed to my face?) The characters consist of a cartoonist, her assistant, a greeting card executive, and a dancer, and it's nice to see characters on American TV who aren't variations on cops, doctors, lawyers, or soldiers. The show's, and especially Caroline's, combination of sweet/cute/spunky/sincere hits me in the same weak spot that Nora Ephron movies do (DON'T JUDGE ME), and Richard the Black Cloud of Despair is always highly amusing.

And they're so cute when they finally get together. So cute. LIKE PUPPIES AND KITTENS AND RAINBOWS EXPLODING ON THE SCREEN. Look at the icon on the LJ version of this post and tell me they aren't adorable.

Anyway, uh, there might be fic someday soon. Although given that at the moment Caroline and Richard are debating the merits of burnt umber versus burnt sienna, it's possible that I just wanted an excuse to write about art supplies.

So. How have you all been?