Absconding With The Tontine Funds

The other day, sarea_okelani, slitherhither, and I decided that we were going to form our own informal book club (because real book clubs are intimidating and there's way too much pressure to be insightful), and reread the Harry Potter series again. Every other time we get together we talk about how we've forgotten so many things from our first reads (mostly me, because my memory is not even a sieve, it's a springform pan that long ago misplaced its bottom), and how we sped through the last book especially just because we needed to find out what happened next. So I've started on the first book again, to read while I'm bored at work and/or avoiding work at work.

It got me reading some of my past Draco/Ginny works again, and while there's definitely room for improvement, I'm totally enjoying some of the things I wrote years and years ago. Which is nice. I tend to go in circles of liking what I write when I write it, being really pumped when I finish and post it, and then, after all the dust has settled, thinking it was complete and utter garbage. It's nice when it comes back around to the part of the circle where I think I'm actually kind of decent at writing.

I also found deep in the recesses of my GoogleDocs a really cute D/G fic about them falling into a choose-your-own-adventure book that I was a few scenes away from finishing. Damn this short attention span and constant writer's block; if only I had finished it when I'd had the inspiration and could've posted it. It's totally adorable, lol. Alas. And the D/G fandom's so dead now; everyone's long since moved on to other fandoms, myself well included, that there's really no point in trying to spruce it up and post it, even assuming I had the time slash gumption slash writing spirit. Ah well, insert dreamy nostalgic sigh here.

Big fat happy announcement, part deux: The Other Guy is now up on Amazon, for all the lovely Kindle peoples out there. Yay!

AMAZON | SMASHWORDS

As with practically everything else, I've gotten on board with The Hunger Games about three years after everyone else discovered that it's amazing. accordingtomel gave me a copy of it a little while ago, but I've only just had the time to read it now since it's spring break (SPRING BREAK! WHOOO!), and as soon as I finished it, I had to hop on to Amazon to buy the rest of the series.

(PS. Why aren't the paperbacks out yet? It's been two years since Catching Fire was published. WTH?)

Am going to see a pre-screening of the movie this week with sarea_okelani, which is super exciting, especially now that I've actually read the book, lol.

Fic is hard to find, though. Well, I mean, good fic. And also fic that isn't spoilery for the latter two books.

In other news, I'm in the midst of an extended showdown with some kind of stomach bug. It's not bad enough to render me non-functional, but it's also very diligent about making sure I know it's still hanging around. Vastly irritating. But you know what this means? Next time I play Pandemic, I get to go first! Whooo.

Was recently just telling someone that I can't bring myself to overlook incorrect dialogue punctuation or blatant misspellings, no matter how popular or well-recced a fic is, though I vaguely recall a time when stuff like that didn't bother me as much (misuse of your/you're, however, has always, always felt like a sucker-punch to the soul); I think this may be due to doing the submission queue at FIA for a few years now, and now that I'm a lot more finely attuned to catching SpaG mistakes I see them everywhere. Which is much worse when it's an actual, published book rather than a fic.

Which brings me to: ( Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. )

Has anyone read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union? I feel like someone on the f-list has mentioned it before but I can't remember who... Anyway, I loved Kavalier & Clay, so I picked up this one right away when I saw it was on sale, and, well, it's a bit slow going (and not really all that uproariously funny as its reviews claim). I should say Chabon writes gorgeously; he's just wonderful at crafting beautiful sentences and images, but I'm almost halfway through the book and I feel like absolutely nothing is happening. Like, is there a plot? Because it's not very, um... there. So, I'm getting quite bored with it actually and wondering if it's worth continuing?

Slumdog Millionaire finally opened here a few days ago, so we went to see it today. I thought it was really good. My barometer for movie enjoyment is whether I'm still thinking about it hours or days later, so I'm pretty sure I liked it. I don't have much else to say on it, though; I'm terrible at reviewing movies except to say whether or not I enjoyed them. To sum up: Good movie.

(Or, if you haven't seen it and would like an actual review, here's Pajiba's. It's where I go for all my movie reviews, since I usually agree with them.)

A question for Dresden Files readers: Do I have to read the books in order? I snagged a copy of Storm Front from the library and liked it a lot, but the next ones that are not checked out are 5 and 6.