in Life's name and for Life's sake

New Doctor Who. As I've only seen one episode it's totally possible that I will have to revoke this sentiment but something makes me doubt that, so here goes: Matt Smith has what it takes to make it. He's not David Tennant but he knows it and he's not trying to be. He's just being his own kind of Doctor and obviously having good fun with it. EDIT: Just watched second ep and while it doesn't make me like Matt Smith any more or less than I previously liked him, it does make me like Karen Gillan lots and lotses. I like that she's feisty and that it seems like, unlike previous companions, she's going to actually challenge the Doctor and argue with him and stuff. Not just sit there with puppy eyes when he's about to destroy the world and tell him to stop. I read an interview where Karen said Matt was like her annoying older brother, and I think that sort of shows in this ep, in a good way. Why do I have to be out of the country for the next one??

Torchwood. I have heard it is not on par with Doctor Who but seriously, John Barrowman. Need I say more? Also, awesome Welsh accents. I am seriously in love with the breadth and variety of British accents, and not just with that singular concept of "the British accent" (which almost always means the Oxford accent to Americans, including me before I lived here).

Changes by Jim Butcher. The most recent Dresden Files book, which just appeared in my mailbox and promises to be completely game-changing. I'm almost afraid to read it because I know I'll breeze through it in six hours and then be left waiting another year for the next one.

A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane. The most recent Young Wizards book, which also just appeared in my mailbox in the same shipment from Amazon and is only the book I have been waiting for ALL MY LIFE. Seriously. It's been FIVE YEARS since the last YW release and I've waited oh so patiently. This is worse than waiting for Harry Potter because a) there are no movies and b) the fandom is much smaller, so there are fewer people to understand your pain (however, the small-but-dedicated fandom is generally one of the things I love about YW, so I shouldn't complain). I'm definitely afraid to read this one because I have no idea how long it'll be until the next one appears, and I do not know what I will do with myself in the meantime and with the waiting. This isn't like Jim Butcher where I know he'll pop out a book a year, no sweat (which allows me to read them so quickly when they come out). Diane Duane is meant to be savored, in slow but intense portions. I would almost say it has to be read casually, except there's nothing casual about it. In fact, I don't even remember what it's like to read one of her books for the first time anymore. The last time I had that experience, I had only just gotten a livejournal and certainly didn't blog about it. I just emphatically don't want it to be gone.

Preparation for spring break trip will probably take more time/effort/energy than I give it credit for. I mean, I'm gone for 16 days which I'm spending in 5 cities in 4 countries in 2 time zones (though only one continent this time). By the end of the month I'll have seen where the Thirty Years' War started, the Cold War (symbolically) ended, the great temple to Athena was built to command an entire city, a man named Freud revolutionized our perception of selfhood, and the small Greek island immortalized courtesy of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It will be AMAZING. But try packing enough stuff for all of that in a small suitcase and you run into some issues (or at least I will...when I finally start packing the night before I leave).

Finally, it's sunny outside. Why in the world would I want to get things done when I could sit outside in the sunshine and just revel in the world being such a beautiful place?

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Because I don't quite feel like getting back to writing a novel yet -- the top 10 books I read this year. DISCLAIMER: The exact rankings are a little sketchy, and NO ONE is allowed to judge me based upon them. :)

10. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Okay, so I'm a little psycho. Somehow, I really liked this book. Maybe it's because I got into hours worth of conversations about it with my GSI and professor, and their discussions convinced me that it was a worthwhile book. But whether or not I actively enjoyed reading every page, I was actively reading, trying to figure out what was going on and attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Sutpen family... It was my favorite book of this fall's English class, that's for sure.

9. The Faerie Queene (Books 1 and 3) by Edmund Spenser
There are moments where this book was fun, and moments where it wasn't -- another book where analyzing it made it more interesting. I wrote what I felt was a pretty kickass paper about Spenser's allegorical method, and really enjoyed the way this book felt like Disney technicolor sometimes.

8. War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
You'd think that it wouldn't be the best idea to read a love story right after you've been broken up with. But Danica kept telling me this was a good book, and I needed something new, so I read it. It wasn't overall captivating, but there were moments of it that I really enjoyed, and it deserves to be on the list for its originality at the very least.

7. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
This book probably belongs waaaay higher up on the list, but I can't make a definite decision about it because I've only read it once, and rather recently, thus biasing me. I read most of it in one or two sittings, and it was my first exposure to LeGuin. I still don't know entirely what to think, other than to be awed by her command of worldbuilding and to wonder at her sparse yet evocative writing style.

6. Sabriel by Garth Nix
Another book I'd been told to read forever and had never gotten around to until I got to review it for Teens Read Too. The premise and the style are so unique, somehow so clean, and there's something about the characters that makes me wish I could see a little more of them. I've already re-read it once.

5. Paradise Lost by John Milton
The language may seem as impenetrable as a brick wall, but it's also as beautiful as a work of art -- it is a work of art. I read this for an English class, as you might guess, but somewhere along the line, I fell in love with it. Possibly because of the analysis of it, but not to the same extent as with Faulkner and Spenser. This, I would enjoy even outside of the analytical context, whereas I have a feeling that if I encountered Faulkner or Spenser outside of the classroom I would have been too frightened to make anything of them. I'm beginning to realize how much I learn about life in the English classroom -- be it religion, individuality, feminism, you name it, Milton probably had something to say about it, and I'm glad to have read it. (Plus -- where else are you going to get a description of angels having sex in iambic pentameter??)

4. Small Favor by Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden will always make me laugh and sometimes also make me cry, or at least realize the tenderness and poignancy in the world around me. This book did more of the former than the latter, but was just what the doctor ordered. It left me, as they always do, waiting for the next one.

3. Slightly Married by Mary Balogh
I decided to put only one of the romance novels I've been reading on this list, because it was difficult to choose between them -- but this is the first in a series, and includes some of the characters that I enjoyed the most. Again, the mode in which I encountered this novel probably has a decent amount to do with why I enjoyed it so much. Rebecca and I read it out loud together! Skipping all the intensely smutty parts, of course. :) But seriously, I love being read to. It's one of my favorite things. We're now working our way through the series and are on the fourth book of six. (Rebecca, if you're reading this, I miss Gervase!)

2. Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane
So technically I'm not sure this book should count, since this was certainly not the first time I read it by any means. But as usual, Diane Duane played an important role in the process of my life, this time by providing me with something to fall asleep to so I wouldn't have to think about who I wouldn't be waking up to. More than that, she made me cry for all the right reasons and remember that men and women can have healthy relationships predicated entirely upon friendship, even if only in fiction.

1. Riders of the Storm by Julie E. Czerneda
As usual, Julie takes the cake for renewing my sense of awe and wonder at the universe. I think I've probably said enough about this book already, but I suppose a few more words won't hurt. I haven't re-read it yet, but I plan to do so in the new year. Then, I'll know how good it actually is -- first readings are occasionally inaccurate -- but for now I can just say that it's the first time in a long time that I've cried for joy.

...aaaaand now I officially can't procrastinate anymore, not if I really want to get this novel done, which I do, I do! I am so psyched about this!

I am again overcome by a great love of Diane Duane. I'm sure I've told you all a million times that you should read her books because they really will change your life, but I mean it. So much of who I am and who I want to be -- not just as a writer, but as a person -- is within the pages of her books, specifically the Young Wizards series that she began more than twenty years ago.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Deep Wizardry, the second book in the series and one of my favorites. This is how good it is: even listening to the audiobook made me cry, in all the right places and for all the right reasons. Maybe that's more of a reflection of my current emotional state than it is of the book itself, but I don't like to think so. I'm really mad I don't have my own copy of it here, because if I did I'd fill this entry with quotes from it that make me feel more myself. Because there are so many of those...

I read Deep Wizardry for the first time the summer after sixth grade, when I was on vacation in the Caribbean for a week. I'd read the first book in the series, So You Want to Be A Wizard, sometime before, but whenever I read Deep Wizardry I'm brought back to that catamaran that I lived on with my family for a week, the feel of sailing and the ubiquity of the sea. I took it for granted that I had these beautiful warm waters to swim through, dive in, live off of. And then I got stung by a jellyfish pretty badly at Virgin Gorda, five or six days through the week, and I was belowdecks for a while trying to ignore the pain, and reading. I picked up Deep Wizardry and it couldn't have been more appropriate. It was all about the ocean, it turned out, featuring sharks and whales as important characters. But it was -- and is! -- about so much more than that. Whenever I look at the cover of my slightly-battered copy of Deep Wizardry, I'm transported back to Virgin Gorda and Marina Cay and Tortola, reading in beach chairs that had been pulled down into a few feet of water so that I reclined within the rolling-in of small waves.

But the book is so much bigger than that. There are questions from Deep Wizardry that the series still hasn't answered -- pretty impressive considering that it's now going into its ninth book (which I of course cannot wait to get my hands on). And it's not just the questions. It's the everything. Deep Wizardry is about how friendship grows and changes, how children interact with their parents, telling the truth, sacrifice and redemption, facing your death, making mistakes, defying evil, the environment, magic, love, loss, life. It's about people and wizards and whales and a shark or two. It's got a visit to the moon -- the one that I wrote my college entrance essay for Stanford about, the one that sticks with me today so that everything I think about space travel and wizardry is informed by it.

I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not particularly eloquent. But I just love how this book -- these books, really, anything she writes -- can always make me feel alright about the universe. Her explanation of life, death, and afterlife comforts me more than any other one that I've run into. And her idea of wizardry, the purpose of which is, pure and simple, to serve Life, and make sure it keeps on going, is fundamental to my understanding of creation and the world around me. I find it hard to believe that she's an atheist; I get a greater sense of spirituality from her writing than I do from a lot of other people. Not only is there a Creator, but there is an afterlife where "what's loved, survives." This principle seems like a pretty sound one to me.

Now I'm just rambling and I've got a bunch of things I should be doing, like getting ready to go to the book signing in San Francisco later this afternoon (yes, Katherine, I am getting Jim Butcher to sign something for you). I just needed to talk about this, for whatever reason, even if it's talking to no one.

And I lied. I'm gonna leave you with some quotes after all.

***

It hurt, she said.

We know, the answer came back. We sorrow. Do you?

For what happened?

No. For who you are now--the person you weren’t a week ago.

...No.

***

“It must be a crippled life your people live up there, without magic, without what can’t be understood, only accepted--”

--Ed (he's a shark!)

***

But Nita’s mother was looking up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain—the completely bearable anguish of an impossible dream that suddenly comes true after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother’s face at the sight of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light was not—a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold, fierce brilliance that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing noonday high in it, pooling all their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.

***

What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the moon as seen from Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon’s foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but a waning crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce green-blue radiance—a light with a depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea that blue and green were “cool” colors; one could have warmed one’s hands at that crescent. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silver—a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earth’s arms.