Ha, Going From Mirah To Nick Cave's Abattoir Blues Was A Bit Whoa. Get Ready For Love Is Really Good.

Ha, going from Mirah to Nick Cave's Abattoir Blues was a bit whoa. Get Ready for Love is really good. I've only ever listened to two (2) Nick Cave songs, both on the first X-Files soundtrack, when I was sixteen. Those were really good too, so. Logic.

Oh good, I'm ten pages into Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and not only is the narrator promising to talk about Seymour's wedding, but it turns out that goofy Walt from Uncle Wiggliy in Connecticut was also a Glass. Poor dead Walt.

Man, Rose Wilder Lane is awesome. She's so brash and her journals are simultaneously raw and wry, which are the best traits to have in a journaling voice, and later on in life she feels trapped and stagnant for seven years straight, and I can so relate. And then she becomes a ferocious libertarian, but whatever, she's still awesome.

In other news, I made a New Year's resolution to write and submit one fiction story every month. Yesterday I finished January's. Rose Wilder Lane wrote two thousand words a day, every day, and often fretted about how unaccomplished she was. Rose Wilder Lane is awesome.

Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, by John E. Miller

This was more academic than Donald Zochert's Laura: it's a very functional biography and it comes across as a lot more trustworthy, even though it clearly pulled some information directly from Zochert. But it was dissatisfying in that it seemed to be written to counteract some of the "Laura was a domineering mother who didn't write as well as everyone thought" stuff in The Ghost in the Little House, which I hadn't yet read. So now I'm reading The Ghost in the Little House. It's the most academic of the three books thus far, although I'm using the term "academic" mostly to mean "snootily written and aware of its limitations." It's also the most gossipy, and let's be fair, who wants measured criticism when dirt is available.

How gauche would it be to say I'm not really feeling Kate Bush's voice on this album? I listen to Tori Amos, for God's sake.

So far I'm finding this album kind of boring, although there were some upbeat songs that were less boring. And "Mrs. Bartolozzi" was kind of wistfully nutty.

It's funny, I now associate the feeling of boredom with Avatar, as in, "Why does this album remind me of Avatar for some reason? Oh yeah, because I'm bored and I wish I were doing something else."

The Angel's Cut, by Elizabeth Knox

I don't know about this book. I finished it very quickly and I didn't want to stop reading for the first 3/4ths of it. There are some lovely moments of prose, just like in The Vintner's Luck, and virtually every time Lucifer met up with Xas and they had a theological conversation, it was super-exciting and revelatory. It turned out that certain things I was confused about in The Vintner's Luck hadn't been completely answered yet, so it was satisfying to get answers to certain mysteries.

But I also felt like the character relationships never really gelled -- not the way Xas and Sobran did, and not even on a more superficial level. Flora was a very interesting character in her own inner monologue, but her relationship with Xas was so passive and undiscussed that I never felt the bond between them as strongly as I think I was supposed to. The same with Xas's relationship with Cole -- I understood the attraction there, but not necessarily the devotion. The Cole that Xas was so intrigued by initially was not the same character that appeared in the rest of the book: he was sketched but then never reinforced.

I also thought the book was more plot-driven than The Vintner's Luck, which was structured chronologically, so when the book ended I kind of felt let down. Wasn't more supposed to happen? But then I realized that, just like with Sobran in Vintner, the book essentially follows Flora from the time Xas meets her to her death, it's just not as rigidly structured. So I feel better about that...but also kind of underwhelmed by Flora's journey in the last 3/4ths of the book.

There's a third book planned that might address some of the new questions raised here (there's a potential OMG moment at the end that I'm very interested to see developed), and anyway I've only read it once, so by the sixth time I've read it I'll probably have a different perspective on things.