The Thessaliad Redux

( Screw this. I'm counting the sourcebooks. It's not like I'm not reading them cover to cover. )

Just Finished
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Total: 34

In Progress:
The Bhagavad Gita
The Bible
The Name of the Rose
The Canterbury Tales
Labyrinth

Currently Reading:
Labyrinth

In other news, I voted. Took part in The Process. And I'm all for making my voice heard, but I don't recall my voice saying anything about "Give the Tories more seats in my borough". *groan* I can't even say, "at least my section of the borough isn't Tory", mainly because West Finchley, my constituency, had a Labour majority. Not sure which is worse anymore.

Look, I'm all for being active in politics. However, due to life stuff and a general desire not to spend my entire life beating my head against brick walls and ranting and raving in a slathering rage about how no one who actually wants to be involved in politics should actually be permitted to run for government because they're all a bunch of power-hungry, lying, cheating, backstabbing, headline-grabbing, blinkered scandalmongering morons, I don't pay very much attention to what's going on in government. When I do, it tends to be big stuff -- national and international, for the most part -- and stuff that touches me in ways I can understand. NHS mismanagement. Public transport mismanagement. Foreign policy. That kind of thing. And seeing that, I am well aware that local government, whatever it might actually try to do, will get nowhere with national government grinding it into the ground with its bootheel, saying "I don't care if it's best for your people; you will do what I think is best." So if voting in a local election, I would have to vote from a position of total ignorance bar a few vague ideas about party politics, probably derived from cheap tabloid press (Metro) and 'Wot I 'eard from some bloke down the pub', or as close to that latter as I ever get. I don't really like making decisions like that from a position of ignorance so, once again, I was pretty much determined that I wasn't going to vote this time around. I don't want to be a part of the real failure of the democratic process, which is not so much apathy as voting in ignorance. After all, people voted Tony in again. People voted Bush in again. Why? Because, I have to believe, they were either completely stupid or hopelessly naive. Possibly both.

However. I was not given the option not to vote this time. Well, technically I was, because it's my life and I'll do what I please, but ... ever had basically the whole damn world guilt-tripping you? I even had Michael wagging a finger at me and telling me to vote. Then I came home and complained to dodgyhoodoo and got that "Well, you should; it's a duty and blah blah blah". It's a duty if you choose to make it one; if you really believe in who you're voting for, of course you believe it's your duty to go and do your part to put them in the seat you believe they deserve. But I haven't got anyone to believe in. I barely know what the parties do in local government, or would do if they were properly funded and managed with even a little bit of common sense. Last brush I had with local government was a three-week stint with Leicester City Council about ten years ago. I don't believe, and I can't exactly feel like it's my personal duty to go into a booth and randomly put checks in boxes. I tried to explain but ... well, upshot was I stormed out of the house, went through the process, put my ticks in various boxes (not Tory or Labour, obviously) and left feeling like a complete and utter fake. And I still feel like a fake. I feel cheap. I feel ignorant. I feel guilty for having been pressured into making a decision in ignorance, even if it ultimately doesn't seem to have made any difference, because if I am going to take part in a process that guides the country in which I am, through circumstance, forced to live, I would like to do it properly, and as it happened, I was unequipped. I let people bully me into doing something I wasn't comfortable with. And why? So I could avoid the reproachful looks and the statment of "You have no right to complain; you didn't even vote".

Well, suck it, the lot of you. I voted, fat lot of good it did, I feel terrible about it and I don't even know what I voted for, so I'm in the same position as I would have been if I hadn't voted at all. But I fucking well voted, and will bitch all I like.

I want to go home. So not in the mood today. Want to sit somewhere shady and not talk to anyone. Feh.

Bought a copy of The Name of the Rose while on lunch break. I'm coming to the end of The Sicilian now, you see. It's kind of a shame that I'm not counting RPG sourcebooks in the 50bookchallenge thing because I'd be halfway there by now, the rate I've been going. So far it's been The Shadow Court, Inanimae, The Autumn People, Nobless Oblige, Commoner's Luck (all Changeling), Spectres, The Risen (both Wraith) and Book of the Wyrm. That's an extra eight books I could add. But I'm not. Gah. Maybe I'm being silly about it, but they just don't seem long enough to count.

Most of the rest of today has involved sending out reminder letters to people who seem to delight in refusing to respond to requests to do reviews. It's probably about all I'm equal to today anyway, though I think I need to go out to get stamps. Or so Michael tells me. I hate going to get stamps. But maybe the cold air will wake me up a little. So anyway, it's looking like "Get this lot of reminders out, scan those decisions that have come in, send them off to Ham-Fisted Editor and Lady Competence, go and make up the list of stamps we need and then go buy them". Hopefully by then, it'll be time to get the hell out of here.

Plus somewhere in there, there must be coffee. I desperately need caffeine.

Read:
Devices and Desires
Holistic Herbal: A Safe and Practical Guide to Making and Using Herbal Remedies
Cunninghams's Encyclopaedia of Magical Herbs
House of Leaves
The Bloody Chamber
Tipping the Velvet
Furnace
Neutron Star
Neuromancer
Memoirs of a Geisha
Lolita
The Secret History
Total: 12

In Progress:
Dune
The Bhagavad Gita
Beowulf
The Bible
The Sicilian

Currently Reading:
Dune

Next Up:
The Sicilian

I really enjoyed The Secret History; my favourite recommended book thus far. Neuromancer and The Furnace weren't bad, but Neutron Star just really didn't do it for me and House of Leaves, recommended to me greatly by dodgyhoodoo, really did leave me cold. So thanks for the suggestion, weaselbitch.

I may have to put Dune aside for awhile. Herbert seems to have this thing about chucking you headfirst into the middle of this really complicated universe without so much as a how d'you do and lets you sink or swim on your own. I don't seem to be sinking too badly, but it's a bit of a slog and a trial. I'm sure I'll get into a rhythm with it eventually, though. After that I'm going to polish off The Sicilian, which I picked up from one of the local charity shops the week I was ill (yay, me), so I've got at least that long to decide what I'm going to read next. The listed books I see in front of me include Slaughterhouse 5, Catch-22, The Wasp Factory, Ulysses, Paradise Lost, Tales of the Cthulu Mythos, The Koran, The Bible and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The religious texts are probably not going to be read in one go. The Milton is a bit hefty for a commute read. I really should at least polish off Beowulf and The Bhagavad Gita before I read anything else, though. Maybe I can go back to those when I need a break from Arrakis.

The other thing I've read recently is V for Vendetta; don't know if that one counts, though. It's fairly long as these things go, but it's still a TPB and I promised I wouldn't count those. (If I did, I'd have to count Those Left Behind, the first of the Serenity comics, and it was really too short.) In any case, it was a fantastic story and now I'm looking forward to the film more than ever.

So many films coming up that I'm looking forward to. Well, relatively; this is coming from the person who only saw three films at the cinema in the last 12 months (Serenity, Saw II and Land of the Dead). But given that I have plans to see at least three films that are coming out in the next couple of months (V for Vendetta, The Proposition and Silent Hill), it's looking up this year. Note to self: stock up on painkillers. Cinema always gives me migraine.

So now that I've been book shopping, another update on how the 50bookchallenge is going.

Read:
Devices and Desires
Holistic Herbal: A Safe and Practical Guide to Making and Using Herbal Remedies
Cunninghams's Encyclopaedia of Magical Herbs
House of Leaves
The Bloody Chamber
Tipping the Velvet
Furnace
Neutron Star
Neuromancer
Memoirs of a Geisha
Total: 10

Currently Reading:
Dune
The Bhagavad Gita
Beowulf
The Bible

Next Up:
Lolita
The Secret History

I realise looking back that Neuromancer was not on my original list, though it was a dodgyhoodoo suggestion when I did the original list. I'm thinking that, in light of this kind of thing, my list needs to change a little. I'm not going to leave out any books that I read this year that weren't rereads, sourcebooks or manga / graphic novel stuff. So the list has expanded just a tad. Let's see how long it takes me to get to 50 on that basis. Doesn't mean I'm not going to read every single book that was on the original list of 50; I'm just going to be more thorough in my count. Anyway, Dune isn't so bad, as these things go. I mean, yes, it's throwing a lot of world at you in one big chunk without explaining a great deal, but these things happen. I'll keep hacking away at it and see how things develop.

I am not a very happy or well Thess at all. I hope I manage dinner okay. Lunch seems to have made me extremely nauseous.

I'm not sure I get how judgement calls are made in this office. After the week I've had (with Michael checking over every goddamn thing I do every couple of days, which is a little frustrating but I suppose it proves that I am not the doofus here), you'd think that there was a zero tolerance policy on not keeping people informed on work-related matters. I really don't think this is the case, because James is getting away with murder.

James has a peculiar schedule; he comes in three days a week, generally whichever days he feels like, and tells no one which days he won't be in. This is irritating, but we cope. So a few weeks back, I see that Angela and James have both signed themselves off on the week of 13-17 February and remember that I meant to take the week of my birthday off. I talk to Michael (with James in the room), clear the leave time with Michael, and mark it on the board. James then says, "Oh, I'm off for most of that week too; I cleared that with you ages ago. I just forgot to write it on the board." Never mind the fact that a) he'd obviously remembered to write down the previous week, b) Michael obviously didn't know a thing about it and c) that left Michael with no cover on the admin side whatsoever. But Michael just let it go without saying a word. James has now been off for a week and a half and was supposed to be back Monday, as far as we knew. He did not show up on Monday. He did not call in on Monday. It's obvious to me that he took Monday as one of his two days off per week, but he never said as much to anyone else. He's not in today, either, and hasn't rung or anything.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened. James has booked off time, said, "See you Monday" and gone swanning out of the office for an already extended weekend, only to come swanning back into the office on Wednesday, two days after he said he'd be in, and say, "I did say ... oh, didn't I? Must have forgotten; heh." And Michael lets this slide. Wonder if it's going to be the same thing again when / if James comes swanning into the office tomorrow. Shame I won't be there to see, as he comes in an hour before I do. Well, he's supposed to, at least. I hope this doesn't reflect badly when I want to take time off in early April.

Anyway, today is yet more work, followed by drinks and basket food at the Oliphaunt with dodgyhoodoo and weaselbitch. I hope I'm in any kind of mood for drinks and basket food by the time I get out of here. I'm sure there'll be any amount of fun conversation and the company of good friends, though, so I should at least make the effort. Besides, given what I heard about the meet-up I shunned for Sims 2 last weekend, I should have many giggles from the idea of Skank and Lucius barricaded in a tiny room in Ceoris and Lucius turning around to Skank and saying, "You know, we never talk anymore..."

Also made a start on Memoirs of a Geisha. I'm quite enjoying it; it makes a change from the sci-fi that I've been focusing on of late.

There's more to gripe about as regards work, but I'm getting a little sick of sitting here and grumbling how it's not fair. I mean, it's not fair, but that doesn't mean I have to bore people about it. Life's not fair, so I really ought to just suck it up and cope. Though admittedly, it does gall me how my predecessor's mistakes (like forgetting to give copy editing the hard copy of a paper that was accepted for publication in June, leaving it to sit in my file cabinets for the last eight months because I didn't know it was there) are accepted with a "no big deal" shrug. I know she's gone and everything, but at least it would have been a balm for my battered sense of self-worth to see Michael being marginally annoyed at someone other than me. But he wasn't, so I will just have to soldier on. For one thing, I desperately need this job.

Anyway, that's enough griping. I did a great deal of very hard, very good work today. Tonight I can go home, possibly cook dinner, maybe faff about with Sims 2 (that's if Mod the Sims 2's server will actually decide to work for a change) and definitely get some sleep. Gah. Knackered.

Oh, and I finished Furnace. As I was saying to dodgyhoodoo yesterday, I have a hard time empathising with characters who are ignoring the big scary problems in the hopes that they'll just go away, and that was my initial problem with the story as a whole. When the protagonist actually started doing something, instead of just having things happen to him, I got more interested. So another book bites the dust and it was more enjoyable than I thought it would be mid-way through. I should probably finish Neutron Star or Beowulf at least before I start in on anything else.

And there was a luciusmarwood column waiting for me when I checked up this afternoon. Yay! So to dodgyhoodoo and nadriel at the very least, I point out the icon. I really do have to make that text more legibile.

The meeting went about as expected. Michael told me all the things that were going wrong (neglected T-card updates, which I started improving at least a month ago, papers that were 'stuck' because no one was responding and I was too busy trying to track down other stuck papers to notice those ones, missing referees for which I never got help with the address or author name from Ham-Fisted Editor etc), didn't listen to any of the improvements that I had already made to stop any of those things from happening again or the fact that I can't take back the fact that things didn't happen when I was trying to find my way around things and set up my own systems, and generally got a sound bollocking.

I also got told that, because of the stuff he brought up, Michael doesn't feel that my work is good enough to justify taking me off probation. So he's extending it to May. If things don't improve by then, well ... you get the picture. So because I don't generally have the time to file everything in triplicate when I'm trying to do three things at once, and because Ham-Fisted Editor can't get certain things right, and because of a learning curve that's only showing up problems now because of turn-around time, I may lose my job in three months. Needless to say, I'm not exactly happy. Lady Competence has had nothing but praise for me, and yet. Everything's on the computer, and it's not exactly rocket science to run a search and get all the details right then and there, but another thing that I got bitched out about is not having a copy of everything I ever send out about a paper in the folders. When they could just ask me to look in the Sent file, or do it themselves if I'm not there. But Michael doesn't seem to think that's a reasonable way of doing things, so...

The orders are as follows: I have to keep hard copy documentation of everything the editors send me, in chronological order and on file, and mark off what I've done on each after it's been finished, to be reviewed in May. I have to go over all the T-cards (going on a hundred) once a week to make sure no papers are 'stuck'. I have to print off not only everything that comes in, but everything I send out, and file it in the folder of the paper to which it relates. I'm trying but it's already slowing me down to the point where I think I'll be in a pretty bad position come the end of the week. (And no, I don't think the five minutes it'll take to type this will make much difference.) And of course, if I end up in a hole work-wise, it'll be pretty bad come May. Which will say nothing but bad things about my work performance, which will have me either on further probation or outright sacked. I just want to curl up and die.

In the only positive news of the day, I picked up a copy of Tipping the Velvet while on lunch. I'm enjoying it one hell of a lot better than Neutron Star, I can tell you. I guess I just don't get along with hard fantasy; not enough people dealing with people and too much people dealing with machines. I guess it's predominantly writing for geeks who don't like dealing with people and prefer machines (no offence, y'all). Not that I'm not going to finish Neutron Star; I said I would and so I will. It's just not my bag, and I guess it never will be.

Hmmkay, so looking at my request for lit suggestions and the replies I got, I think I have my ten books to complete the 50-book challenge.

( Cut for friends lists )

So that's all fifty books. That should keep me going for a few months.

Okay, now my challenge to you all. I'm going to list my ten all-time favourite books (of the moment, anyway). Pick one of them that you haven't read, letting me know in comments which one you've chosen, and read it. It seems to be a horizon-expanding exercise, this 50-books-a-year thing, and I'd like to return the favour a little.

So here's the ten I've picked:

Anne of Green Gables, by L M Montgomery
Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami
Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami
Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
Prozac Nation, by Elizabeth Wurtzel
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

Is anyone game, then?

In the spirit of the whole 50bookchallenge thing, here are 40 books I really want to read this year (because we all know I'm going to beat the crap out of 50 in 11 months).

( Books! )

So out of the 50 books I'm challenged to read, I've listed 40, and will be checking them off over the course of the year. You'll notice that I'm 10 short, less if I count the books I listed last entry (and I'm not). I did that to leave some recommendation room from my friends. I know I'll never notice all the books out there, after all. So ... help? Any suggestions to fill those last ten spots? I know I'll fill them with something in the end, but I'd like some suggestions that aren't just my "I was too lazy to read that one" list...