Sunday!
Like all college sophomores, I spent my fair share of hours reading Zen koans and trying to figure them out. Some of them were laugh out loud funny, some of them confused the heck out of me, and some of them were things to chew on… like, if I could understand this, I could understand everything.
As a sophomore, I couldn’t really tell the difference between “profound” and “I’m a college sophomore and this is profound”, of course. Sadly, I’m still not in a place where I can tell the difference between those two things. But, with that said, I am 43 and this is profound: The King and the Sea: 21 Extremely Short Stories. It’s a collection of little vignettes where a little king has a little conversation with something in his domain. The first story is the eponymous one:
“I am the king!” said the king.
The sea answered with a whoosh.
“Hmm.” The king cocked his head thoughtfully.
“I see,” he murmured.
And he stood there quietly, listening to the waves.
[amazon template=image&asin=1877579947]
There are 20 more of those, including conversations with a cat, a shadow, rain, a ghost (that one is my favorite), and all sorts of entities. Some of them are laugh out loud funny. Some of them will confuse you. A couple of them will get stuck in your head and you’ll be chewing on them for a while.
Appropriate to read before bedtime with a little one, appropriate to leave on your bedstand to read before you fall asleep. And, if it ain’t to your taste, I’m sure there’s a college sophomore going to be on Winter Break who will totally love to get it and take it back with them to college.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
I’m finishing The New Jim Crow this weekend.
Good stuff.Report
On the minus side, I spent some time yesterday hopefully correcting a mildew issue endangering a bookcase of books that are currently in a sort of ‘storage’ at my house.
On the plus side, there’s nearly a full shelf of ‘to-read’ books there that I had kind of forgotten about that I think are more inspiring than my current ‘to-read’ stack. I hope to get rolling with my (offline) book-reading again in 2016. I know that I will not be able to regain the tempo I used to maintain for quite some time, but if I can get through a book or two a month that’d be good.
After watching the first Avengers movie I kind of swore off on superhero movies (so I never saw the second).
But then I ended up really liking three of Marvel’s superhero-or-superhero-adjacent TV shows (Daredevil, Agent Carter & Jessica Jones), so Friday night I watched Guardians of the Galaxy (which again, might be considered more superhero-adjacent). It was a lot of fun, sort of Firefly-esque, and I thought it had a very distinctive visual style.
Although I’m the kind of pedant who wanted to point out a much-played cassette would never last that long, and wonder where in the galaxy you get fresh AA’s.
I already sang the praises of Fargo S2 last week, but I watched the first twenty or so minutes of ep. 1 again last night, and with the benefit of hindsight was gobsmacked at how much detail and plot and theme-foreshadowing were packed into it. I’ll probably start a rewatch of the whole thing with the wife.
Ash Vs. Evil Dead remains ridiculously gory and silly. And for some reason has Lucy Lawless in it now.Report
Just finished watching the Fargo S2 finale, and they absolutely nailed it. I think this may be the closest I’ve ever seen to a perfect season of television; I’m racking my brain and I can’t think of another, and I’m a massive TV aficionado.Report
I’m watching it tonight, and desperately trying to avoid spoilers today.Report
OK, that was pretty fantastic. I don’t know if I am going to have the time to write something up on it but if you do, I will put it up as a guest post.Report
Revolutions! The podcast, that is. The French Revolution is kind of complicated. No politics.
Not sure what comes next. Maybe back to Tom Clancy. Since we’re going South for Christmas, I might go with James Lee Burke.
I haven’t watched grown-up TV shows in a very long time.Report
Well that’s annoying. I did a random check on Audible to see if I’d be able to find presidential biographies on random presidents. Every last one of them I checked for had one. But apparently nothing between Jackson and Lincoln except one book about Polk that’s not quite a biography. (No politics.)Report
I’ve just started Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands last night.Report
We are watching season 2 of Broadchurch, not sure if it will be as good as s1, but so far enjoyable and possibly more morally complex, not sure.
Started reading John Crowleys Little, Big. All I can say is fantasy can be really good and literary if put in the hands of a master, which Crowley is. Highly recomended.Report
I’ve finally gotten back to watching Continuum, and I am remembering all the reasons why I liked it when I was watching it before. (Also remembering the plot, which after any drama-watching hiatus always comes back to me fairly slowly, even with the helpful hints provided by those “last season on…” thingers.)
I read approximately a jillion more kids’ books, of which my absolute favorite* was Leo: A Ghost Story – a short and sweet tale about a ghost who finds a home that is about 100 X better because of the 60s style nearly-one-color-palette illustrations. The story balances just the right mix of melancholy and jauntiness. Weirdly reminiscent of 101 Dalmatians, though much shorter.
Tonight I’m in the middle of the Best American Science and Nature Reading 2015. I am a Best American fangirl and will cheerfully read any of them except the short story ones. Just can’t swallow that many short stories in a row. I think Science and Nature is my second-favorite, except in the years where way too many of the pieces veer into content-less polemic. (Weirdly enough, my first-favorite is Nonrequired Reading, which often features polemics! But they tend to be more fun to read than the scitech polemics are.) THIS year’s (edited by Rebecca Skloot) has yet to feature a *single* content-lacking polemic, so I am delighted with it so far.
*Technically I liked the King and the Sea better? But I read that at the beginning of the week which feels like it was approximately 4 years ago, and also Jaybird already told y’all about that one.Report
Had a restful weekend and met up with LeeEsq for dinner on Sunday. He was in Minneapolis on business. Great conversation and good food, was a good end to the weekend.Report