Flight into Fantasy

• 1. Sometimes I wish there was more I could do to help. Especially since I know keenly what certain situations are like.

• 2. I would like Needful Things a lot better if the characters weren’t all dancing around on puppet strings. I’m also fairly certain I’m *not* going to like how it ends.
• 3. People who play other people’s pets in role playing games and treat them like actual characters need to be forbidden from doing so ever again on pain of red hot pokers through their noses.
• 4. The day started out badly. It is not improving.

I haven’t reported my book reading for a while, so will do so here.

Books 27-29 were the remaining three books in Louise Rennison’s series about Georgia Nicolson. They’re called Knocked out by my Nunga-Nungas, Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants and Away Laughing on a fast Camel. There’s another book out, but it’s not anywhere where I can access it. The last three books in the series were quick reads. Rennison clearly is putting out product now, and is more likely to make jokes about knickers than tell a good story. And I hated Georgia with each passing moment.

Book 30: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. I struggled through this book, too, because at the time I had nothing else to read. I found lots of the themes disturbing, and not in a pleasant way.
The climax of the book concerned the two main characters, Lyra and Will, falling in love and, well, having sex. Those characters were maybe twelve and thirteen. I thought the very idea of that was creepy. And the anti-religion stuff annoyed me, even though I’m not religious myself.

Book 31: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. I love this book. It took me ages and ages to get into it, and I’m moving through A Clash of Kings at about the same pace, although that’s because someone else has A Storm of Swords checked out from the library already. Anyway, once I got all the people straight in my head, AGOT was a wonderful book. It’s not light reading, and nothing happens as you’d expect it to. Martin draws his characters well. There is no real good or evil, just a lot of moral ambiguity, which I like because, yes, that’s how things are in the real world.

I suppose I should come up with something coherent to say. However, as that never happens (as those of you who read me should well know) let me offer up a few things.

• 1. A Song of Ice and Fire might possibly be the best fantasy series ever written. I’m glad I stuck it out even though it took me a hell of a long time to get into it. On that note, Brienne the Beauty (who appears in the second book) might be the best secondary character ever. When I stole a look at the appendix and discovered her name, I thought she’d be one of the “fierce fighterMary Sue” types. But she’s not. She’s a fierce fighter, but she’s ugly as sin, physically, and knows it, and that makes her self-conscious. (And that’s another thing I like about Martin. Not all of his characters are good-looking, and the best characters are often the most repulsive physically… Take that, all you silly amateurs!)

• Jolt Cola tastes incredibly flat. I can’t imagine voluntarily drinking the stuff more than once, caffeine or no.
• I cannot believe I entertained a crush on my little brother’s best friend. He might have a few redeeming qualities, but he needs to ripen a little more on the vine before I’ll have much use for him.
• I wish my sister wouldn’t be nearly so open about her sex life with me.
• I should do a random stupid poll.

So I’ve been back for a few days now. The computer issue got resolved, finally, and now I’m back up and running.

It’s nice to be able to feed my Internet addiction again. What’s not nice is that I finally really got into a series of books I’ve been reading of which the third book is not available from the Library of Congress. Also not nice is the fact that I don’t have the money to get a subscription to Audible, which would solve *that* problem quite nicely.

In other news, my sister’s boyfriend is still not moved in. I don’t know if he actually *will* move in anytime during my lifetime. At this point, the odds seem heavily against it.

Other than that, I’m well. And despite the fact that I had a million posts in my head when I didn’t have computer access I don’t really know what else to say.