felis_ultharus

I came very close to simply giving up and stopping in the middle of David Nimmons' The Soul Beneath the Skin. I'm glad I kept with it, though. It got better after that chapter.

Some thoughts:

( Review continues )

I'm now reading Gentleman of the Road by Michael Chabon. I'm only a tenth of the way through it, but it's already a brilliant novel. No one does historical fiction like Chabon.

Social Life

'Twas a marvellous party yesterday -- I think my most successful in 10 years. Last year, the highlight was the treats montrealais concocted, but greatly suffered from poor planning -- a two-day open-house ensured that no one arrived at the same time.

Things were pretty crowded last night, at least by the standards of entertaining here. I'm getting much better at dealing with crowds of people and loud noises -- I haven't had a panic attack in about a year -- so next year I might open it up not just to friends, but to friends-of-friends.

We'll see if we can fit that many people in this apartment, which is large but uses space strangely (the bedrooms are gargantuan, and the living room is tiny).

Thanks to everyone who came, and thank you for the gifts. I loved every gift I got, so maybe I'm not as hard to buy for as I thought I was.

Being inundated with manga is not a bad thing, the books were great (your friends really know you when you get the only two books by a favourite author you don't own, on the same night), and montrealais's homemade project was both thoughtful and beautiful. Also, I want the recipe for melting_penguin and bananality's Easter-egg-chocolate-chunk cookies.

'Course, no one's going to see me much for the next month, thanks to em_fish's and rougemacabre's gift. If you don't ever see me again, it's your own fault :p

I broke down and bought One of the Boys, the book about gay and bi men in the Canadian military during World War II.

My excuse is that'll help with the novel, which is true. But that's not as compelling as a reason as the fact that this historical stuff is like heroin to me :)

So many books I want to read. I should probably spend the holidays getting a head start on my two courses, but I think I'm actually going to read those two books of Jung, One of the Boys, and this book of archaeology and Norse mythology I keep getting out of the Concordia library, then never reading.

So, lurking on the much-renowned SDMB boards, I stumbled on to this list of 100 books that have been banned or that people have tried to ban in Canada in the last 21 years.

Some were no surprise -- Christian fundamentalists objected both to Harry Potter and to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. The Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro wasn't surprising either, seeing as how it has an unflinching look at sexual abuse. Madonna's Sex, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye always make these lists.

But Laura Ingalls "Little House on the Prairie" Wilder? And the Goosebumps series for kids?

Some amused me. Four antigay passages from the Bible were officially declared "hate speech," when used in an advertisement in a newspaper in Saskatoon. The the paper and the guy who took out the ad were each forced $4,500 in fines.

Andrea Dworkin was also a funny one. This woman's attacks on pornography prevented Canada's "obscenity laws" from going the way of the dinosaur. Thanks to her, Catherine Mackinnon, and LEAF, the courts gave Canada Customs free reign to censor whatever the hell they felt like coming over the Canadian border.

Turns out Dworkin's books Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Woman Hating were themselves declared "obscene" by Canada Customs.

I'm also amused that my idiot creative writing teacher, W.D. Valgardson made the list. Maybe now, someone will read his work.

In other literary news, only 12 days, 4 hours, 25 minutes, and 50 seconds to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.