21, 22: Feet of Clay & Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

Feet of Clay: the City Watch & golems.

Hogfather: Death! I love Death. And Susan. And some pigs! And even a giraffe, I believe. Lots of pigs.

I Am Reading...

...too many things at once.

Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay

This is the one most likely to be finished next.

J.H. Donner's The King: Chess Pieces

I've been re-reading this collection of essays by a former Dutch grandmaster.

Wilson & Albertson's 333 Tricky Checkmates

Something to go with the Donner. Both these are inspired by recent online games with Vikram and Mark. I'm easily swayed in my reading habits—something that must be abundantly clear to all my dear, dedicated readers. (Hi, Karen!)

John Keats' Fugitive Poems

Re-reading.

Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness

I'm only two-and-a-half essays in. The first two were brilliant (In Praise of Idleness and 'Useless' Knowledge).

Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

Only 40 pages in. I don't find it as absorbing as Island of the Colorblind, perhaps because I have more other things vying for my attention now.

Dan Morgenstern's Living with Jazz

Also only 40 pages in—out of 700.

I'm also browsing Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style, completey ignoring a large pile of neurology and anatomy books, and occasionaly glancing quite guiltily at Allen's Middle Egyptian.

Of the above, the only book that stands a good chance of getting finished within the next week or two is Feet of Clay. How depressing.

20: Maskerade, Terry Pratchett

Witches. Opera. Pratchett.

19: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, Thomas McNamee

The subtitle is so long that blogger won't let me fit it all in this post's title: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution


So. Alice.

The woman clearly has taste:

[...] Alice went out looking for a place of her own. In Hampstead, her eye was drawn to a tall Victorian house with a turret. "I've always loved turrets," she enthuses. There was a sign out front advertising a room to let, and the room was at the top of the turret! [...] "There was no central heating. You fed a space heater with shillings. The kitchen was in a closet across the hall—a two-burner hot plate with a tiny broiler underneath. I didn't care. I was living in a turret."

And later:

"She lived in a ship's captain's mansion."
"With a turret!" Alice exclaims. "Just like in London, but much grander."

She is an indefatigable perfectionist:

In Alice's vision, Chez Panisse would never be grand, but it would never compromise on quality. The utmost in craftsmanship and effort would characterize its every creation. If the staff worked as hard as she did, and with the same meticulous care, they would be well rewarded; if they did not, they would not last. It was simple: "No corners cut," she told everyone. "Ever."

And scatterbrained at times. An event planner Alice interviews remembers:

And when [Alice] opened the binder, all the pages fell out, and she was also talking, and she couldn't concentrate on what she was trying to say, so I took the binder from her and said, "Why don't I do this while you talk?"

Or, in the words of a radio and television producer friend of Alice's:

Alice likes to be a presence, but being on a stage just gives her vertigo, makes her levitate. We always say, "Did you stay in your body that time?" Sometimes I watch her words come out of her mouth like little birds getting hatched. It's so painful to watch her find her words. [...] When only the simple phrase "thank you" needs to come out, her nerves are jangling and she bumbles her next line, and she'll say, "I'd like to thank mmm..."—and it just gets lost.

Her aesthetic (mismatched silver, oak chairs and tables, french crockery, elaborate flower arrangements, organic vegetable still lifes) reminds me of a friend's and her mind that runs a hundred miles a minute, sometimes dropping things, not being able to focus on everything at once, struggling with sentences, reminds me of another. Her striving for perfection reminds me of both.


What about the restaurant then?

I want to go, much as I did before reading the book.

18: Gladiatrix: The True Story of History's Unknown Woman Warrior, Amy Zoll

Pop archaeology, but I learned a few additional bits of Roman history.

Suffers terribly from not having any illustrations: no photographs, no diagrams, no maps. Why not? Rights? Time? Rather a shame.

17: Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany 1944, The Foreign Office

Historically interesting. It's also really short, so an easy way to boost the number of books you read in a year—not that I'd ever stoop so low as to read a book solely for that reason. Maybe.

I'm a Girl—unsurprisingly

Via Ken Jennings's blog, using broswer history to estimate gender. One wonders what its success ratio is.

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 89%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 11%

Site          Male/Female Ratio

google.com         0.98
youtube.com        1
wikipedia.org      1.08
amazon.com         0.9
facebook.com       0.83
evite.com          0.67
netflix.com        0.79
npr.org            0.98
emusic.com         0.85
rei.com            1.11
gmail.com          0.9
allmusic.com       1.35
plaxo.com          0.82
televisionwithoutpity.com 0.32

Television without Pity is apparently way girly, while All Music is the most testosterone laden thing up there.

16: Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett

It's vacation time, so I'm breezing through some fiction. Whee!

Rincewind (mostly). Cohen (some). The Luggage (a little). Death (a little). In the Aurient (almost entirely).

Next up: Maskerade.

Oakland Bookshops

Audrey and I are house-sitting in Oakland/Rockridge/Emeryville. While she slaves away at architectural drawings, I stay home and read. Occasionally I sortie and invade a local bookshop.

Diesel, a Bookstore (Oakland)

Mixed used and new. I didn't find anything I wanted. The used books are disorganised, as far as I can tell. Some are mixed in with the new.

Pendragon New & Used Books (Oakland)

Mixed used and new. Much better organised than Diesel, and with more used books. Purchased: The Sizesaurus, Stephen Strauss; Living with Jazz: A Reader, Dan Morgenstern; Divided by a Common Language: A Guid to British and American English, Christopher Davies; Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide through the Writer's Labyrinth, Karen Elizabeth Gordon; and Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, R. V. Branham, which is typeset and laid out just as atrociously as the title would make you believe.

Mrs. Dalloway's

Upscale neighbourhood store focusing on gardening and literature. There were quite a number of cook books and such, too. Not cheap, not large, no used, but a fine selection. Purchased: Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany 1944, reproduced from the original issued by The Foreign Office, London; Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution, Thomas McNamee; and Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: A History & Guide, Mitchell Schwarzer.

Dark Carnival

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Mystery. Also some True Crime, Science, Art, Graphic Novels, and what-have-you. Huge collection of Uglydolls, Giant Microbes, and other trendy and not so trendy things you may see Japanime addicted teens and Jeff Albertson collect. Purchased: Maskerade, Terry Pratchett and Gladiatrix: The True Story of History's Unknown Woman Warrior, Amy Zoll. The latter has an absurdly grandiose subtitle, but fighting chicks are hott.

Next week I may venture farther out and try (the other) Pegasus & Pendragon and Black Oak (I used to love the SF location, just South of Golden Gate Park).