Fall 2012 – Week 2

What I did this week:

Purchased new (mini) laptop.
Purchased corkboard + dry erase board (for inspiration board purposes). 50% off, win.
Got new laptop set up (feel like this took an entire day… updates much?)
Created dissertation Scrivener project; set up provisional chapters.
Downloaded thesis “template” (nitpick: not actually a template! just a document!) + instructions from thesis office. Saved my own copy; started setting up front matter, adjusting fonts, etc.
Performed blog maintenance: updated various pages, top menu, widgets, etc.
Worked on The List of authors + books. eta: Ok, good enough for now. Will sort out the rest as I go along.

Project 366 – Week 36

246/366
stay up late to read
ignore scratchy sleepy eyes
must finish this book

247/366
and so it begins
back to school, not exciting
as it used to be

248/366
day 1 of the fall
semester. where to begin?
anywhere. just start.

249/366
September issue
of TC— just one Snark Zone
away from wrap-up

250/366
outside, it’s warmer
than I expected. summer
lingers, teasing me

251/366
this morning, skip the
procrastination, get straight
to writing, finish.

252/366
one last day of sun
without a chill behind it,
enveloping heat

13: N is for Noose

N is for Noose by Sue Grafton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Purchased at Beacon Books in Sidney on my way to the ferry.The kind of place you could get lost in for hours! And yes, there was a cat 🙂

Previously on The Remainder Table, I wrote about S is for Silence and T is for Trespass. So with N is for Noose (1998), we’re taking a few steps back. Though in Kinsey’s timeline, this means months, not years.

In my T is for Trespass post, I wrote:

Here’s the thing. I know Kinsey Millhone isn’t great literature, but also know if I come across another in the series, I will probably read it. It’s reading junk food! nomnomnom It’s not even so much about the series itself, but about the fact that reading it also reminds me of reading the first books in the series, back when my favorite TV show was Remington Steele and my career aspiration was to be either a police detective, a private investigator, or a cat burglar.

Haha, yes. I loves me some reading junk food. I’ll keep reading these even though they’re flawed. There are different kinds of good.

Anyway, N is for Noose got off to a good start. For most of the book, I thought this would be the Kinsey book I’d give three stars. And then I got to the ending. Augh. Not the only time this happened this year and not the first time I’ve wished for half-stars.

In this book, Kinsey is in the Sierra Nevada, so the location is different than her usual, though she does make a quick trip home mid-story. She stays in a terrible motel that conjures up Psycho and every other movie/TV episode featuring a cabin-style motel and a sinister plot. Ok, so the sinister plot goes without saying. Has there ever been a comedy featuring a cabin-style motel? When that doesn’t work out, she ends up staying at her client’s home, which has its own challenges.

The client, Selma, has hired her to investigate what her husband, Tom, was working on prior to his sudden death. Selma is supposed to be terrible–everyone in the town dislikes her–but she’s not really. She does have wildly inconsistent cooking habits, a mixture of inedible mid-century shortcut “foods” (Jell-O with fruit cocktail and Miracle Whip? um, what?) and from-scratch baked goods. But I guess that does convey a woman of a certain era. (She is fifty-ish; this is 1986.)

There was a lot of nerd detective work in this one (digging through messy files, searching newspaper archives) and the main plot thread is the search for Tom’s last work notebook, which is missing. So that was all good. But the ending… yikes. Off the rails. Let’s just say it involves drugged brownies.

P.S. Speaking of Remington Steele, KVOS is currently showing it at 8pm weeknights. So awesome. I didn’t remember it being so campy.

Ignoring

This:

How you can be saying to someone, “You are the most important person in the world to me,” and yet be ignoring the small thing closest to his heart.

—Joy Castro,
quoting from her memoir, The Truth Book

September issue of Toasted Cheese

The September 2012 issue of Toasted Cheese (TC 12:3) is up! And I remembered to post about it 😉

New Toasted Cheese! Just in time for the weekend. Enjoy.

It includes a not-so-snarky Snark Zone by me.

Fall 2012 – Week 1

What I did this week:

Cleaned up school/work email.
Scoured bookshelves for books I already have. Total: 15/~100. (thank you, past VPL book sales!)
Speaking of: checked VPL calendar–fall book sale Oct 25-28. Added reminder to my calendar.
Researched laptops (want a smaller one; need one that doesn’t have a dead battery ;)).
Started a Goodreads shelf for dissertation texts and added aforementioned books (so I don’t pick up duplicates. I ❤ the GR mobile app)
Printed a copy of my preliminary booklist (hmm, this needs work).

Mini-Vacation

So I said I was going to take a vacation and I did. Last weekend I took the ferry over to Victoria, stayed in fancy-pants hotel, and visited my oldest friend. It was awesome. Alas, a week of fancypantsing was not in the budget, so the rest of the week was a staycation. Sleeping! Reading! Putzing around! Ok, so that was pretty great, too. I’m all caught up on sleep and ready to tackle my dissertation.

Here are some photos:

12: In the Woods

In the Woods by Tana French

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

I purchased this at Munro’s Books when I was in Victoria for my mini-vacation. I’d brought some reading material with me, but when I got there, meh. I wanted a Vacation Read. So I exited my fancy-pants hotel, strolled along the inner harbor in front of The Empress and along Government Street, navigating around tourists and buskers alike.

Munro’s is owned by Jim Munro, first husband of Alice. Yes, that Alice. It’s in an old bank building on Government Street in the heart of the touristy area (maple syrup? stuffed animals in Mountie outfits? T-shirts with CANADA on the front? you’re in the right place). I used to go there all the time when I lived in Victoria, so I got all verklempt (j/k) as I browsed the fiction shelves (still in the same location in the store) remembering a younger me standing there in days of yore.

Over the past year or so, Tana French’s novels kept coming up on the lit blogs I read, so when I spotted this on the shelf, I was like a-ha! That’s the one. A mystery, but not a cookie-cutter one. Perfect. And when I took it to the counter to pay, they even gave me a lime-green bookmark that matched the cover. Well played, Munro’s!

In the Woods is the first of a series about the fictional Dublin Murder Squad, though I understand the series is not typical in that each book has different narrator. In this story, there are two mysteries: a present-day one and one from the past of the narrator, police detective Rob Ryan. Ryan has hidden his past from his employers (this is a stretch, but ok) so part of his motivation is keeping his secret.

I liked French’s writing style; the overall atmosphere of the book was creepy and delicious. The interplay between the two main characters, Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox, was also compelling. The book falters a bit in the ending, but it’s not as bad as some reviews I’ve read have made it out to be. I gave it 3 stars at Goodreads, but it’s really more of a 3.5 (half-stars! get on that, Goodreads).

The thing is, I think the mystery here is more of a device through which to get to know the characters. It’s not really the point—it’s a macguffin, basically. My favorite kind of story 🙂 So I’m less critical of how the story ended here than I would be if it was a straightforward detective story where you have certain expectations of the ending.

Hope that’s neither too vague or too spoilery! I’ll definitely be checking out the sequels to In the Woods (there are three so far: The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor).