Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

 I am so liking the new job. I work three days a week from the office and one day a week from home, which is about my WFH sanity limit. One day a week feels like I'm borrowing space from my home to work in. More than one feels like my work has moved in like the assorted boyfriends of several past flatmates - you start off thinking "ah, so-and-so's here again" and before you know it so-and-so has taken up semi-permanent residence on your sofa, controls the TV, never does the washing up and pays zero towards the bills. 

Recently read: I just got to the end of Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls, which I read many years ago and have been wanting to re-read ever since but could never remember enough about the book to find it again. It turns out, having found the paperback at my mum's house, that I'd misremembered a) the cover b) the protagonist and c) the setting so that probably didn't help. Anyway, it's a sort of ghost story thriller, nicely done.

Currently reading: Lots of Tolkien. Very much back into Tolkien, thank you Rings of Power for reawakening this. The Silmarillion, in its shiny new illustrated edition that Mr eye_of_a_cat got me as a wedding anniversary present. (There's a lot of gorgeous new Tolkien editions about at the moment!) And 'The Lay of Leithian', the unfinished epic Beren and Luthien poem in one of the 'History of Middle-earth' volumes. 

In non-Tolkien material: also reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is a memoir of growing up on Orkney and returning there; and listening to Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a nonfiction book about the impact of humanity on Earth and what would happen if we all vanished tomorrow. 

Currently singing: after a lengthy back-and-forth on the Tallis 'If Ye Love Me', in which we were going to do it for somebody's appointment(?) as an acolyte and then didn't because the Archbishop who has to actually do the acolyte-ing got called to London for the Queen's funeral, we are now back on it with the intention to sing it for when he becomes a Deacon.

However! The acolyte-appointing happened last week when I was on the rota as cantor, to sing the psalm - and we fully sing the psalm, it's not spoken. (Technically it is chant rather than singing singing but, if I'm reading music to do it, I'm singing.) I was absolutely terrified about this, because while I don't mind speaking in front of a crowd, singing on my own in front of a crowd is nerve-wracking enough, and the church was really busy because of the acolyte thing and the Archbishop was there, and while the Archbishop is nice enough he is also pretty musical himself and it turns out! was a choirmaster when he worked in Rome. NO PRESSURE. But anyway it went really well and I am really happy with how well I sang it! 

Currently watching: Willow, the new series (although we did rewatch the 80s film first), on Mr eye_of_a_cat's suggestion that we watch it because "the people who hated that Star Wars film and Rings of Power seem to really hate this and therefore it seems like we'd probably like it". It's so good! It's just lovely. Highly recommend. 

I fell out of doing this once a day so will do a few of the rest soon to catch up.

Previously:
1. Favourite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain

3. One with a blue cover
For this I pick George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. I have this edition, which has a very blue cover as part of an alien-looking landscape with purple land and clouds, a massive moon crescent in the distance and what I think peering closely is a futuristic city in the background and piles of wrecked cars and animal skeletons in the foreground.

It's an odd choice of cover art for this book. It is science fiction, but it's not the alien-planets kind of science fiction, and it's very much the opposite of futuristic-domed-cities science fiction.

It's post-apocalyptic fiction where the apocalypse, in the form of a devastating plague, happens off the page in the first few chapters. (The main character, Ish, is alone in the mountains studying for his ecology graduate work in 'the relationships, past and present, of men and plans and animals in this region' and returns to the city to find almost everyone dead.) Survivors gradually band together and start trying to rebuild some kind of community in the ruins, and as the years pass Ish in particular tries to preserve and pass on all the old knowledge of civilisation - geometry, economics, the broader country around them - to push back on the superstition he sees growing among the next generation of his community.

But it doesn't work. The knowledge isn't immediate and relevant to his children, who half-humour and half-respect him but nevertheless value the knowledge that means more in their lives instead, hunting with dogs and hammering coins into arrowheads. At the end of the book, as an old man, he travels with his great-grandchildren to see the ruins of the city he once lived in. They camp near the university library, and he wonders if he'll be able to sleep without dreams of 'a million books passing in endless procession, looking reproachfully upon me because after so long I have begun to have doubts in them and all that they stood for'. There are no futuristic cities. But Earth abides.

Okay, you've got me. The reason I don't like The Da Vinci Code is because I'm religious. And naturally, being religious, the very idea of a story where Jesus is portrayed as human sends the icy chill of insecurity down my spine. The kind of story I want would feature a vague, mystical Jesus, whose messages were too cool to be spread around the common masses, whose bloodline would be so important that people would kill over it, and whose descendants would all be royalty because of his magical DNA!

No, wait. That is The Da Vinci Code.

All right, then. The real reason is because I'm religious and therefore very conservative about the appropriate role of women, and I can't stand stories about Mary Magdalene being an important apostle. No, indeed! The kind of story I'm after is one where she's merely a receptacle for sperm and babies, defined entirely by her reproductive capacity and included among the apostles just because she was somebody's boyfriend.

No, wait...

( Okay, here's why. )

There's a meme going around where you grab the nearest book on your desk and post the fifth sentence from page 123 in your livejournal. This seems interesting, but too abrupt. Ten sentences from ten books would be better.

So, this is what my desk (and the stacks of books within grabbing distance of the desk chair) would like to say:

HEDGEHOG - To dream you see one, denotes you will meet an old friend whom you have not seen for years. 'The Origins of Popular Superstitions and Customs', by the excellently named T. Sharper Knowlson, published in 1930.

During the early seventies, in a similar effort to promote greater discipline and dedication among the troops, Catholic charismatic leaders in Ann Arbor, South Bend, and elsewhere began setting up what they referred to as "covenant communities." - 'American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty', Michael W. Cuneo. If there's a limit to interesting books I can pass off as needed for my university work, I haven't found it yet.

On closer inspection of the infants, however, I saw that their fur was not electric blue but was certainly a sort of Persian cat blue. - Gerald Durrell, 'Beasts in my Belfry', about his first job as an assistant zookeeper. The infants here are bear cubs.

'God does not play games with His loyal servants', said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice.' 'Good Omens', by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, who thoughtlessly placed only three sentences on page 123 - this one's from a randomly chosen page.

'In the first place, the argument depends on an unreasonably pessimistic view of what we can know.' James Rachels, in 'The Elements of Moral Philosophy', taking apart Kant's categorical imperative. He's right, but I still love Kant.

'This might be, for example, alternate weekends and all bank holidays plus two consecutive evenings every week, or you might be in a position to take a whole week off work for uninterrupted application to your research.' - Estelle M. Phillips, 'How to get a PhD', which is easily the most pointlessly depressing book on the subject anywhere. But thanks, Estelle, I'll remember that about the bank holidays.

'How long must you be dead before your body becomes no more than an archaeological relic?' Joe Simpson (the author of 'Touching the Void') discussing the ethics of finding dead climbers in 'The Beckoning Silence'.

'He said, 'God!' in a tightly controlled whisper, but he managed to put seventeen exclamation marks after it.' Isaac Asimov's 'Complete Stories' - this one is called 'Hostess'.

'This dream was sent.'. Aeschylus' 'The Choephori', the middle play of the Oresteia, the Best Tragedy Ever. The speaker is Orestes, having heard that his mother's dreamed of giving birth to a snake.

''Exactly,' said Dirk, 'bravo!' Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, possibly the best book ever written about time travel and Electric Monks.

'Of course, I wanted to hear my future, get my charm, change my bad-luck future. Amy Tan, 'The Kitchen God's Wife'. I don't care if all her books are the same book with differently-named characters - it's a good book, and she can write it as many times as she likes.

Friend Who Lives In The Real World: So, what have you been doing lately?
Me: I just wrote the final draft of an eleven-thousand word chapter, in a week! It's almost done apart from bibliography and footnotes! omgwtfeleventyone!
FWLITRW: Oh, okay. What else have you been up to?

Um, slept?

That's not entirely true. I saw The Incredibles at the weekend, which was fun if a little bit too close to the mess Prince Charles got himself into recently, and I went to hospital with my housemate (who lost a toenail, btw - the only two things in the world I'm squeamish about are toe injuries and seafood). Also, I re-read The Handmaid's Tale, which I hadn't read since I was 17 and frantically memorising every useful-sounding line in time for my A-levels.

It's as scary as I remembered. Not scary in a this-could-happen sense (although places like Afghanistan suggest it could), but in what it says about what people are capable of allowing. My A-level class was all-female, which the teacher said made the discussions less interesting - in previous years, there'd been some good arguments about whether men would really let this sort of society form, even if they weren't directly forming it themselves. To our credit, we did notice that the society wasn't just created by men - it's a difficult point to miss, especially when we all agreed on the ceremony where a mob of Handmaids willingly tear a man to pieces as the most disturbing scene in the book - but I don't think I saw until this time round just how much of it was done by women.

When I was seventeen, we didn't like Offred much. We would have preferred it if the book had been about the first Ofglen instead, who could've talked just as much about that society from a Handmaid's perspective, and who seemed far more interesting because she was part of Mayday. And who wants to read about a man character angstily going along with the system when you could be reading about one who's trying to bring that system down from within? (I still wish we'd heard more about Mayday - the people at the end call it a 'quasi-military organisation' that's separate from the underground railroad, and then go back to being haughty and superior academics, which I can do all by myself thankyouverymuch.) But with Offred as the narrator, it's a much more interesting book. Dystopian futures as external forces of oppression aren't difficult to write, and they're easy to feel smug about - we all want to think we'd have been like Ofglen in that situation, sacrificing our lives to fight against it. Except probably we wouldn't. Offred's self-conscious enough to realise she's buying into the mindset, but that doesn't stop her buying into it, and 'Serena Joy' is no more of a real name than 'Offred' is. She doesn't fall for it completely; she just falls for it enough.

I remember the film being pretty terrible, though. Still, there aren't many film adaptations that work as well as the books do.

Funniest Movie Moment:
Toy Story. Yes, shush. All pretenses to great levels of sophistication went out of the window when I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas a few years ago.

Woody: You are a toy! You're not the real Buzz Lightyear, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!
Buzz: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell.

Most Intense Movie Moment:
If we're going for 'scariest', then I can't watch - literally cannot watch, have to walk out of the room during - the scene in Stand By Me when the boys are being chased by a train. Trains don't scare me in any other context, and I have no idea what bothers me so much about that one. Second, the scene in Don't Look Now when Donald Sutherland catches up with the little figure in the red raincoat. Otherwise, I don't think many things in films do scare me any more; I was a devout X-Files follower (co-founder of my school's 'Mulder and Mulder's Hair Appreciation Society', aged 14) for too long, my academic work has centred on Scary Stuff for the past few years, and I think somewhere along the line I just got jaded, which is a shame.

Non-scary: The scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy for the final time. Maybe 'non-scary' isn't really appropriate, since although it's not frightening in an edge-of-the-seat way, it's utterly terrifying on its own level.

Also, the first time I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I didn't know Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's son and was still young enough to scream "No!" at the screen.

Most Heart-Wrenching Movie Moment:

The scene which should have been the last one of The Shawshank Redemption. Red's last words, after setting off to Mexico to look for Andy: "I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake him by the hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope."

The film ruins the impact of this, IMHO, by showing Andy and Red meeting up again in Zihuatenejo, which is so not the point. The important thing isn't that Andy escaped from prison; it's that Red, for the first time in his life, has hope. Although it's a pretty heart-wrenching film all round, this moment wins for making all Andy's suffering before it (which was itself well-handled and non-gratuitous - learn, Mel) worthwhile.

Best Dance Number in a Movie:

I blame every single teenage sleepover party I ever went to for this one: Dirty Dancing, after the "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" line.

Best Adaptation of a Classic Work:

I like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which does a very nice combination of keeping dialogue mostly intact and transposing the action to a completely different setting. (I especially loved some of the minor details - the prince being replaced by "so-and-so Prince, Chief of Police" in particular.) However, Clueless wins, for managing to be sweet enough to make Jane Austen's 'a heroine no-one but myself will much like' as likeable as Emma is in the novel and for being the only romantic comedy which doesn't make me roll my eyes.

Favorite Bond Moment: Revoke my citizenship, do what you must, but I don't actually like Bond films all that much. Either every scene with Judi Dench as M, or Q in Tomorrow Never Dies. (Bond has just discovered how to use the phone-operated car, and zooms it about at ninety miles an hour before bringing it to a screeching stop inches away from hitting both of them. Q, deeply unimpressed: "Grow up, 007.")

Greatest Martial Arts Moment:I know nothing about martial arts, and therefore I'm interpreting this one as 'fight scene', in which case the duel from The Phantom Menace (yes, shut up, I like the prequels, and 80% of the Star Wars fans should stop grumbling that Star Wars isn't as good as it was when they were eleven, thank you) wins. The lightsaber duels in the original three films were okay, but here you get the impression that the people involved seriously want to hurt each other, and it's much more effective for it.

( And applying the meme to books: )