Reading Wednesday anniversary

I wasn't feeling the Reading Wednesday love for quite a while now, but I was checking my archives and saw apparently the very first Readsday post I ever did was exactly a year ago, so I can't pass up that opportunity of an anniversary.

I'm just not reading as much right now -- it's partly being sick (still), partly end-of-year malaise, partly panic at our financial situation....this last not helped at all by seeing those numerous docs about how the end of the global economy was brought about by crooks in deregulated industries. Also I was sick not just with the flu; if you think chronic pancreatitis will not be violently set off by 2 tsp of half-and-half in half a cup of coffee, I am here to tell you HOW VERY WRONG I was you are. Apparently my future will consist of kale and quinoa. Possibly also carrots and cabbages.

Also, while I'm sick, we're mainlining Battlestar Galactica. Yeah yeah I 'never watch TV' and was pretty loud about disliking BSG when it first aired (I bailed the first time through after "Pegasus"), but that's the problem with wanting to watch a series via Netflix streaming: you go with what they have. Actually, as Jacob said on TWOP (and you guys think I'm longwinded) all those years ago, for the first two seasons it's a pretty neat show. It changed into something really different after the occupation, and all the women are now fuckups or baby-fixated (or both), but it's still worth watching at this point for the endless weaselley survival tactics of Gaius Balthar. But -- it began as a show with a kickass female President and a kickass female pilot and other great women characters (even the priest was a woman!), and I miss that. (I just resent the way EVERY science fiction show I love goes for the baby factor -- X-Files, Farscape, Fringe, it's like even the brave brilliant beautiful women aren't worth shit unless they reproduce! Fancy that!)

(Yes, I have warned T several times about the show's ending, I'm not heartless. He loftily assumes that since he knows some main characters -- not which ones -- are really Cylons, he's prepared. I dunno whether to break his heart completely or enjoy the inevitable mayhem that will break out right around the "Let's ditch all technology and start anew!" ending. And that's about half an hour before the other, even more shitty endings. Extra popcorn may be popped on my part.)


Part of the reason I bummed out on the readsday posts was I really grew to hate the fucking format, so I have to think of something new. Maybe writing up capsule summaries of the three-to-five books I read per week on average? SURE, that'll happen....I do still miss Goodreads and the farcebook-like update feed that was filled with notes about what people were reading, and how much easier it was to start drafting a review right on the book's page once you were done with it. sigh. Well, I did that for years, it's hard to get out of one habit and into a new one. I just finished Lovesey's The Circle, which was oddly disappointing not least in its totally unconvincing use of technology-speak, and am just about done with Scarcity, which is one of those nonfiction books you read for its content and not the writing style because that doesn't exist, and I just picked up If Not, Winter again because I need some beauty. ("Beauty will save the world....")

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart....