Tuesday, December 8, 2009

I Bet Tudor Family Reunions Were A Real Delight

I spent a delightful Sunday reading Into The Wild Nerd Yonder, by Julie Halpern. I won't tell you what it's about (because that would be spoilering), but its plot includes Dungeons and Dragons, sewing and sex. Not necessarily in that order.

Saturday, I finished reading The Sisters Who Would Be Queen. Poor Lady Jane Grey had her head chopped off (well you knew that), but oy, what happened to her sisters was almost as bad. Both of them fell in love and got married without that nasty old Queen Elizabeth's permission, and that nasty old Queen Elizabeth (who saw to it that her cousin Mary Queen Of Scots got her head chopped off) imprisoned them and their husbands, who they never got to see again (well, Katherine Grey spent one more night with her husband while she was in prison and got pregnant a second time and then never saw him again).

I'd explain to you how the Grey girls were related to Queen Elizabeth but I couldn't quite follow it myself. But they were, and I bet they wished they weren't. It's like their whole lives were Dungeons and Dragons.

I went to the library on Monday to return The Sisters Who Would Be Queen and resisted taking out a biography of Lady Jane Grey and one of Mary Queen Of Scots. Instead I took out Hound Dog by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which is definitely my kind of book (big print, huge margins and lots of photographs, and not the kind that are all on shiny pages that don't count, but are interspersed with the big print and huge margins).

Scooter and I have the same taste in books- lots of pictures and very little text.

My computer is having emotional issues. For reasons best known to it, it refuses to go on until 10 AM. If it didn't go on at all, I'd accept that it doesn't work and buy a new one, which I'm prepared, albeit reluctantly, to do. But then, just when I've decided it's stopped working forever, it turns on. I have no idea why this computer, or any other, would want to be a late sleeper, an option I don't have, since Scooter wakes me up at 6:55 every morning to play Purr On The Neck.

Which reminds me. I had a very long weird dream last night, which I'll spare you most of the details of, but at one point people were shooting at Canadian geese in a suburban area, and the geese got very upset and flew into a house and demolished it with their wings. The house collapsed from goose attack. This may be the single best visual I've ever had in a dream, and I bet if Alfred Hitchcock were still alive, he'd steal it from me.

For those who are interested, a list which would not include Queen Elizabeth 1 or 2, Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, or Alfred Hitchcock, I set up a section over at thirdmoonbook, where there are links to blog reviews of This World We Live In. Anyone who wishes to make comments about same is invited to, if they do so there and not here. All this is in deference to those who wish to remain spoiler free and yet are willing to read about what I'm reading and the suchlike.

In the beginning of my career, my books would get reviewed in newspapers and magazines right around the time the book was published, and then as my career went on and on, there were fewer magazines and newspapers to review the books, but what there was reviewed it right around the time the book was published. But now the reviews start months before the book is published and continue, as best I can tell, forever. I still see blog reviews of Life As We Knew It and the dead and the gone. There'll probably be more of the latter in the months to come, with its paperback publication in January. And I still get a little nervous whenever I see a review, although not as nervous as I will be the next time I see a gaggle of Canadian geese!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Retaliating Canadian geese sure sounds like a book to me.

W. Slezak

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Just as long as they don't retaliate on my head!

My word verification is "deding." I am now tempted to write a new book- the deding and the goning.

Fear Death By Water said...

Here in Oregon where the temp is a balmy 10 degrees I dreames I was in Hawaii last night. Strange huh?

**turra?!?**

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hallo Fear Death By Water-

I've never been to Hawaii, even in my dreams. And I haven't spent nearly enough time in Oregon.

My word verification is axixify, which really ought to be a word. It looks even better in slanted green letters!