Post Category → Books

Dear john we had a lot of good times didn’t we oh boy those were good times anywho I’m seeing someone else

I’m going to take a little break from Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have nothing against it, to be honest. It’s been a great series–it’s just had the unfortunate distinction of being the series I was reading while Dad was getting sicker.

I listen to audiobooks when falling asleep, and for the last several weeks, the soothing sounds of Carl shouting “Goddamnit, Donut!” have been the soundtrack to my snoozes. This has created a bit of an unfair association, and I (well … Sarah and I, actually) realized we should probably listen to something a little more innocuous.

… This reads like a break-up letter to a book series.

Honestly, I just want a change of pace, vibe, scenery, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I need to get my head straight, so I’m just going to start with something new.

In essence: “It’s not you; it’s me.”

I’ll probably come back to Carl later. Maybe as a destination-read or something that will help remove the negative association. Hard to be mad at any book you read on a beach, that’s what my ol’ Nana used to say.

(I don’t believe my Nana ever so much as set foot on a beach. At least not without complaining about it.)

Anywho.

For the last few days, Sarah and I have just been listening to The Lord of the Rings as we fall asleep. It’s a book we’ve both read several times, so we can really just start at any point in the story and not miss a beat. It’s safe. It’s also an audiobook I don’t feel the need to finish, and an audiobook I (probably) won’t associate with my dad dying.

Sarah and I also went to Barnes & Noble today and I looked for books off of my list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which is more challenging than it ought to be. (I know there are a lot of great books out there and shelf space is limited, but we can all agree that bookstores should have at least one copy of The Power & the Glory, right? Right, fellas…?)

I found a slight little thing called The All of It by Jeannette Haien, which I know next-to-nothing about. (The only thing I DO know for certain about the book is that it has a rowboat on the cover.) I’m glad it’ll be my next read because, even if I don’t like it, it’s only around 145 pages.

… and now I’m justifying my rebound novel. I actually called it a “slight little thing!”

Ha! What a world.

She awakens in her aqueous lair and rises through seas lakes and rivers and into the municipal water system where I wait patiently with my pants down

Sarah got me a bidet for my birthday. It’s a little attachment that goes under the back of your toilet normal seat. Not a separate appliance, but just a little one that you add on to your regular toilet. It plugs into the water line like a Super Nintendo only instead of turning to channel 3 the bidet shoots a little stream of water at your B-hole. It feels like a mermaid violently licking your undercarriage and it is a game changer.

Bidets are things that have never really “landed” in America. While the word “bidet” is French (the word means “pony” — it’s a little joke), I’ve always thought of them as an Asian thing. Mostly because that’s where I first encountered and absolutely fell in love with them, but also because of the electric Japanese toilet seat trend that started decades ago and into which bidets were folded.

Sarah and I fell in love with them when we lived in Bali, where our main bathroom had what we called a “butt gun” (not technically a bidet, but the same effect) that sprayed water hard enough to bruise your balls if you didn’t aim it right. It was risky, but I swear my butt crack has never felt fresher.

The bidet we just installed isn’t quite as intense, but it’s still refreshingly firm. Like Poseidon’s handshake!

A lot of Americans will roll their eyes at this, but it goes to show how much people are willing to stick to an old habit even when there’s something better out there. Every person I know who has regularly used a bidet has said they loved it. Several of them have joined the cult of bidet enthusiasts (I’m a proud member!) who go around advocating them strangers both in person and in the blog-o-sphere. I am convinced that not only are they wayyyy more sanitary, but that the majority of Americans would love them if they tried them.

It’s just that once you’ve experienced the feeling of having the shit blown out of your ass by a high-pressure stream of water, you realize that there’s no going back. Conventional toilet paper — even that bougie 4-ply stuff — just doesn’t cut it. All you heathens sticking to your Charmin are missing out.

Time for a reader question!

Humor, definitely. While there are a lot of horrific scenes in the first two books — hello Krasue! — they all work in service to something else. Usually something funny. A lot of times, it’s the descriptions of the mobs that Carl and Donut (his partner/Persian cat) fight, which are “written” by the game-controlling AI in a snarky tone. Think Bill Burr writing the cut scene texts for Skyrim.

Besides, there’s a wealth of horror out there that relies on comedic elements. Most of it, I would argue. Carl definitely has a shared element with the Human Centipede franchise and the whole “gore porn” sub-genre of horror. There’s a perverse humor in asking, “How far can I push this? Just how GROSS can this scene get?” It’s all tongue-in-cheek. A sideshow. A circus.

The whole point of it is to laugh at the bloody, floating prostitute heads with glistening innards dangling down from their neck holes. What else are you supposed to do with characters like that?

Blogging about diseases is boring and sad but I need to remember these things so here we are

I haven’t been reading much. Well, I’m still reading a little, but I’m so preoccupied that in my off time I just veg out and either watch YouTube or TikTok. Still, I’ve gotten through Dungeon Crawler Carl and am currently working through the second book in the series, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. I’m doing the print version and the audiobook (which is interestingly done).

The series is fine. I like the relative mindlessness of it. Blowing up goblins and punching monsters so hard they explode. There are some unique aspects to the plot structure that are worth examining on a serious level — I feel like the arc of the story is built to be understood from a macroscopic lens; characters will make more sense the more books you get into the story. It’s as if the author planned on writing hundreds of thousands of words and just thought, “We’ll get to it eventually.”

As a writer, I’m used to doing this stuff quickly — I’m borderline minimalist. “Get to it!” that’s my motto. Or, as Vonnegut puts it, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Don’t waste words; your readers’ time is valuable and you should use it well. Reading Carl reminds me how flexible these rules are, because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t get or simply wouldn’t do.

It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have more information about Carl’s ex-girlfriend yet, even though you know she’s going to make an appearance (or be brought back up somehow.)

I’m also not a fan of giving readers actual numbers for strength and intelligence. This book will give each character a level and stats, all of which are explicitly told to readers. Is this why they’re calling it “LitRPG?” (Horrible, horrible name IMO. And maybe, overall, just a bad idea.)

Increases in ability should be shown through action not spreadsheets. The spreadsheets were only ever created for RPGs like D&D where you couldn’t easily show strength or intelligence through action. In a narrative, though, all we have is time to show how characters act. That’s the whole point of a story.

I will never read a sentence like, “My strength was at 30 so I was confident I could win the fight,” and think, “That’s some good writing!”

I know, I know, not everything needs to be literary. Besides my gripes at the LitRPG genre in general, Dungeon Crawler Carl has been fun so far.

Anywho.

My dad has a feeding tube installed in his stomach and is out of the hospital, but his condition doesn’t seem to be…improving, or at least not improving rapidly. While he’s glad to be home, he really doesn’t have a lot of energy. I don’t know if that’s from the cancer or if it’s from weeks of not being able to swallow due to the tumor in his esophagus (which is growing rapidly), but it isn’t a good sign.

Sarah, my brother, and I went down to visit yesterday. Dad was able to get up and move around, but not much. He can’t swallow anything at all and chews on ice like they have you do in the hospital. His headaches are getting bad. He has a big red bottle of hydrocodone you can inject in his feeding tube.

Radiation treatments start this Thursday and will continue for most of April. Chemo will start after that, depending on how the radiation goes.

A “home run” at this point isn’t a cure; a home run is shrinking the tumor in dad’s throat enough that he can swallow food. Not only will that make his quality of life much better, but being able to get more nutrition will be an added bonus. Dad loves eating and I hate thought of him missing out on food he enjoys in favor of the flavorless goop that goes right into his belly.

Time marches forward.

School continues. The ACTs are tomorrow and I get to proctor.

Sarcastic yay.

Snowless snow

“There’s no way we’ll have a snow day tomorrow,” I believe were my exact words to students yesterday.

We have the day off.

I knew there was snow in the forecast, but it looked like a small amount and our district is notoriously stingy with “snow days” to begin with, so I figured there was a snowstorm’s chance in hell that we’d actually have a snow day.

While I’m not going to complain — it’s always nice to have a break in the middle of the week — I am confused by the decision. It’s noon now and it hasn’t yet snowed a single flake. It’s cold and it’s gray and it’s windy, but “cold, gray, and windy” describes Nebraska 50% of the year.

I’ve started reading a book called “The Atrocity Archives” by Charles Stross. It’s the first book in a series called “The Laundry Files,” which seems to be about a British IT guy who’s employed by a government agency (“The Laundry”) that fights against extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horrors.

Sounds like a hoot!

I picked up “The Atrocity Archives” because I was hankering a little Brian Lumley, who used to write books with covers like this before he died a few years ago:

“Necroscope” is a series about a guy who can talk to dead people and fights against an intense body-horrorish breed of vampire (Wamphyri!) from an alternate universe. There are about 16 books in the Necroscope series, and I was really into them when I was in college.

The Laundry Files should scratch that particular itch, but I know very little about these books. (Which is pretty fun, actually. I feel like I usually know a lot about books I read before I read them, which helps me appreciate the writing but leaves little room for surprises.) I’m excited to see what The Laundry Files is all about.

Perfect fodder for a snowless snow day.

A vice so nice I did it twice

Over the last few years, I’ve gone to great lengths to rid myself of vices. I’ve given up smoking, alcohol, soda, and coffee. I’ve started trying to eat healthier, to drink more water, and to exercise more.

If I’m being honest, it’s been horrible. More than horrible. Boring.

When I lived and taught in Korea (between 2008 and 2019), drinking and smoking were practically required. It’s a pretty big cultural difference — I went out with coworkers much more frequently than you do in the U.S. People drank, smoked, and generally had a rip-roaring good time about once a week. It made you feel cool.

(In Korea I’ve been stumbling around drunk at 2 AM on a weeknight with the principal of the elementary school I worked at. There wasn’t anything strange about it. Everyone thought it was normal. Good even. In contrast, at my current school, we go out to dinner or something about once or twice each year.)

I feel decidedly uncool. In fact, I’m as square as a set of dice.

I’m pretty sure what I’m describing is called “growing up,” but it hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been trying to get myself to take pleasure in small things — the little daily rituals you do without thinking about it. Basically, I’ve been trying to think of myself as a character in a Haruki Murakami novel.

In case you’ve never read any of Murakami’s work, there are very frequently characters who embrace simplicity and routine as if it were their entire identity.

Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few pickled plums.

Besides being fantastic about food writing, you can see in this excerpt from 1Q84 that Murakami’s characters have a certain kind of presence (as in present in the moment) that I wish wish wish I possessed. I want to be the sort of person who can not only put together a healthy meal, but also enjoy the process.

I’m not there yet, but I’ve been trying for so long that I’ve started to wonder if it’s even possible.

Like a nandle in the nind

I downloaded a little book called The Trauma of Burnout by Dr. Claire Plumbly the other day, hoping (as I always do) to find more information about why I’m having trouble sleeping. And, hopefully, to find ways to improve the situation.

Am I actually burnt out? I don’t know. Being burnt out is more of a spectrum than it is a binary condition (“syndrome,” technically), so I suppose most people who’ve been teaching for a while are. Both mentally and physically, teaching is a tough gig. If you want to see how tough it is, take a little trip over to r/teaching on Reddit and see the horror stories that get posted there on a daily basis.

Plumbly’s book reads like she’s been following me around taking notes about how my day is going, which should make me upset but actually makes me a little relieved. It’s just nice to have a clearer idea of why I feel so crummy and to have some practical steps I can take to fix the issues.

For example, this morning, one of the first things I did after waking up was splash a bunch of cold water on my face, which apparently has some physiological benefits. Did it feel great? No. But my morning did go a little smoother than usual, so that’s a win.

I’ve never been huge on self-help books, but at this point I’ll take advice from anywhere I can get it.

Ooh ee ooh aah aah ting tang wallah wallah Potter

I’m listening to The Prisoner of Azkaban now, and there’s a part of the Full-Cast Editions from Audible that I’m finding particularly strange: The foley work.

Foley work is what we call the sounds produced for movies, tv, radio, podcasts, etc. It can be footsteps, gunshots, squeaky door hinges, coughs, grunts, barks. Cars passing by on a busy highway. Raindrops hitting a window. In visual media like movies and tv, we are so incredibly used to foley that we barely notice — it would probably be strange if the foley wasn’t there (or wasn’t done properly).

In audio books, though, foley work isn’t usually a part of the process. For years and years, audio books have featured nothing more than a single person speaking. There isn’t usually even any atmosphere or ambience done. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and (I think) would involve feedback from the author.

Audible’s Full-Cast Editions of the Harry Potter series, though, are chock full of foley work.

For the most part I enjoy it — it adds to the story when you can hear spells being cast or footsteps running down a hallway or a crowd of people talking excitedly.

It isn’t always…smooth, though. I noticed it first when I was listening to Chamber of Secrets and I was suddenly pulled out of the story in the scene where the Weasleys rescue Harry by breaking him out of his room with their dad’s flying car. While the narrator describes Harry packing up all his stuff, I noticed that the actor who plays Harry was going a little heavy on the grunting.

The kid’s supposed to be packing up clothes and whatnot, but is grunting like he’s trying to juggle dumbbells. It’s in the background, so it isn’t particularly intense, but it does pull me out of the story (which is the opposite of what foley work ought to do).

Since then, I can’t stop hearing it. Sometimes, characters in scenes will just go “Uh,” or “Oh,” or “Ha!” quietly in the background and I think, “Christ, they’re really enjoying their breakfast, aren’t they?”

Home again home again jiggity jig

I was able to keep some food down yesterday (toast, some soup), but I’m still nowhere near back to “normal,” so I’ve decided to take another sick day. I still feel a bit feverish and just so…exhausted that I don’t think I’d be much use in front of a classroom.

I’m a little guilty about it. I always have felt guilty when I’m sick — any time I take day (or two) off of work, my mid-western brain starts beating itself up. “You’re just being lazy,” is a phrase that was always thrown around the house when I grew up, and now it lives rent-free in my head.

People always say your health comes first, but my mind is at odds with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a person wanting to work a lot — if anything, I think I’d rather err on the side of being too hard-working — but that means I’ll feel bad about it whenever I can’t work.

And that’s a stupid way to feel. Like a boxer climbing into the ring alone, punching himself in the face, and then complaining to the referee that the rules of the match aren’t fair.

Sarah and I put a humidifier in our bedroom this winter and, holy cow, all the plants over by the window are absolutely thriving. Apparently they like a little moisture in the air.

Sarah’s taken charge of managing all the plants in the house, and she’s been doing an amazing job with them. Her policy so far has been “The more the merrier!” and it is really working. Nearly every available window has at least one plant nearby. Most windows have more. The biggest problem we’ve had is that a lot of them seem to be outgrowing the pots they’re in, which isn’t really much of an issue when you think about it.

I’ve only noticed these hearty greens because I’ve spent a lot of time in bed over the last 24 hours. Take pleasure in the small things, I suppose.

I didn’t read much yesterday, but I finished A Court of Thorns and Roses this morning and…I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. The book is fine. But that’s about it; there’s nothing really amazing going on.

The characters are a little bland, the prose is a little pedestrian, and there isn’t much happening plot-wise that really turns my crank. I think Sarah J. Maaaaas is steering everything toward a love triangle in the next book, which isn’t exactly ground-breaking.

It’s like a scoop of vanilla ice cream as far as fantasy books go. It’s not even French vanilla; just the plain stuff you get in a gallon-sized tub at the local IGA.

I’m going to give the next book a try — A Court of Mist and Fury — but I’ll have to see if things pick up a bit before committing to the whole series.

I should also keep in mind that I’m sick and I’m probably not going to *love* whatever I read right now.

Oh well.

Fruit is just a dream

Welp. My day yesterday went from me wondering, “Why do I feel so exhausted?” straight into my having to leave my first class to go throw up in the teacher’s bathroom.

Turns out I have the flu. Huzzah!

I managed to find another teacher to cover class for me and headed straight home to vomit in my own bathroom.

Then I took a bunch of Pepto and slept and slept.

I’m staying home from work today to rest, rehydrate, and eat toast with butter. If my stomach can handle it, I might upgrade the toast to fruit. At this point, though, fruit is just a dream.

I’ll see if I can finish up A Court of Thorns and Roses (10% to go!), but I don’t know how much I’m going to feel like reading. Today’s more of a “Watch Wes Anderson films while I writhe around in bed” sort of day.

Level 19 in darkshore wow

Up incredibly early this morning. Not feeling great.

Yesterday, after work, I came home and played World of Warcraft Classic for an hour at my standing desk. I walked on a little treadmill while I did so, hoping that a little more exercise would help out with my sleep.

It didn’t.

Well — I know that I’ve got to make doing that sort of stuff more habitual in order to see benefits. As it is, I only walk like that once or twice a week, which simply isn’t enough. I’m going to try to pick up the pace as much as I can, but work has been rough recently and I am stressed out the the bejeezus belt.

All the more reason to exercise more, I suppose.

Anywho. I finished Twelve Months last night, which was great, but then, when I suddenly snapped awake at like 3:30 in the morning, I didn’t have my next audiobook queued up. In a daze, I downloaded the full-cast edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Audible. Sarah and I listened to The Sorcerer’s Stone a few months ago, so I figured the next book would do in a pinch.

These new full-cast editions from Audible seem like a great idea, although I’m sure they’ll suffer from the same thing that will hit the HBO series when it comes out: Comparisons.

With an IP as omnipresent as Harry Potter, it’s difficult to get away from them. When the original movies came out, everyone compared them to the books. (“DiD yOU pUt YoUr NaME iN tHe GobLet OF fIrE!?!?!?”) Any new version that comes out now will be compared to both the books and the movies.

And can anything stand up to that kind of comparison? The movies are great. The books are even greater.

I want to give these full-cast editions a fair shake, but it’s hard to get away from thinking, “Ron doesn’t sound like that!”