Words by Frances Rowat
I shall not argue on the Internet when sick and annoyed. First, I might get mean. Second, I might misunderstand. Third, I will probably not be thinking clearly and may make logical arguments which I am later embarrassed to have attributed to me.
…it helps, sometimes, to remind myself of this.
Haven’t been posting lately. Need to fix this.
Why do you own the books you do? I mean, why did you buy them instead of take them out of the library; why did you keep them instead of reselling or trading or giving them away?
What makes them worth it?
…and by “this”, I mean “me”. Just got in from the late showing of The Avengers. We were going to the earlier one, but it was sold out, so we all went for dinner and hung out for a bit. And now are home.
Some quick notes, not spoilery:
(1) Much love for Banner. More the more I think about it, actually. I… really bought him. Been there, know that guy.
(2) Heee, the lines.
(3) Liked Loki and Thor much better than in the Thor movie.
But yes. And aside from that, something happened on the way to the movie:
I ran into a friend.
This hasn’t happened in… years?
I mean, I see people, sure. But I don’t meet them by chance–and no, I don’t count meeting a knitting friend that I know from knitting at the knitting store where we both go a fair bit as meeting by chance. Meeting the knitting friend that I know from knitting because she is headed one way after dinner and I am headed the other for a movie and our paths happened to cross? That is meeting by chance.
Nice feeling. Makes this place seem a bit less lonely.
Right. Sleep is in order, now.
I had a couple of ill-advised over-enthusiastic book purchases this year, and my number of owned-but-utterly-unread books is edging uncomfortably close to triple-digits. (In fact, I think it might be over triple digits, but I am not checking at the moment; the list of eighty-six is quite unnerving enough without entering the books from one particular bookcase.)
(The list was actually at eighty-nine as of April 30.)
In light of this, I’m making a serious effort to read what I own. I liked them enough to buy them, and as flip as I may occasionally be about this, that’s not a casual thing. And an untouched book strikes me as a horribly sad thing.
I just finished Terry Lamsley’s Conference with the Dead yesterday. I discovered I’d read a couple of them before–this isn’t atypical, I’ve read horror anthologies and magazines for a couple of decades, and it’s actually getting a bit hard for me to find an anthology or collection that doesn’t have something I’ve read before. Still, it was long enough ago that I decided it was worth a reread.
His writing seems quite plain–not in a bad way, but plain in the way M.R. James is quiet. The later stories in the book are slightly weirder; there’s the same calm explanation as always, it’s just relating how reality is doing a quiet little fever-dream melt and slip. They never quite end up portraying the misunderstandings of a character as reality, though–it’s something I associate very much with Ramsey Campbell, and with him writing the introduction, I was a bit anxious about the possibility.
Overall, a very good read.
(Please understand; I like Campbell’s writing, but I’d settled into the quiet ghost story mood of he collection, and I don’t think the style would have fit.)