Ampersand Duck savors the pleasures of re-reading, but not too soon. She keeps a list of books she wants to return to over the years and has a sense in her head of how long the interval between reads needs to be. There is also the point, that she makes, that the reader you are now is not the reader you were last time you tackled that book. Which is something I'd agree with but which I am finding less and less applicable as I move further into middle-age.
Two weeks ago my post in this category was titled "You Can Look (But You'd Better Not Touch)" and reading Scott Westerfeld's blog today I realised I should have used that title for this post instead. Ah, well, this song-title will have to suffice.
John Birminghan's gone and done himself some damage, making typing difficult and painful. Needing to churn the words out he has invested in "MacSpeech Dictate", some Apple software that transcribed speech into written text. Easy, right? Well, no actually. John struggled early to come to grips with the software but seems to have got the hang of it now. As we used to say in the software trade - and as he readily admits he should have done - RTFM. And yet I never seem to do that.
Lisa Hill is getting into Gerald Murnane, in particular The Plains and Inland. I haven't read Inland but The Plains is one of the strangest, more interesting short novels published in Australia. I state in the comments section that it has some sf elements, Lisa contends that Murnane is more about intellectual paradoxes. I'll just have to go back and re-read it. And isn't that what all these discussions are about?
