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Laptop troubles
Jul. 28th, 2014 01:55 pmMy laptop was fine late Friday night, and then... just dead, Saturday morning. Or not quite - it showed one light, but nothing else. This is very irksome, because there's lots of things on it, including addresses and scraps of story and ideas for stories and ... lots of things. But it's not a cause for mute despair - it may yet come good, and if it doesn't then... it will be very irksome, but there you go.
It means I have much curtailed internet access, of course, so I will be slow to respond to people's posts - and very slow to sort out the complexities of the NFE, too. :( (which are pretty daunting. But I should be able to get there, eventually.
On the good side, I've been gardening, and also reading a strange assortment of books that came to hand: The Tricksters, by Margaret Mahy, and The Haunting, also by Margaret Mahy. The Haunting feels like a first draft of The Changeover, and not nearly as good. The Tricksters is better yet, and declines pigeonholing - it's more or less about novel-writing, or else about family dynamics, or the power of suppressed truths, or sexuality.
Two other books read - Lord Birkenhead's biog of Kipling, and a scrappy sort of late-in-life memoir - You May Well Ask - by Naomi Mitchison; neither of them brilliant, but both enlightening in the way of small sidelights on history and the literary/political/social worlds of those times. (Kipling and NM would have heartily disliked each other, I'm certain.)
And Maddaddam, the last book in a trilogy by Margaret Atwood, which started by smashing the apparent state of things at the end of Year of the Flood, and then worked its way around to resolve the mysteries and come to a new ending, about which no spoilers. :) . But I thought it turned too much into being a puppet-fable by the end, and don't really recommend the trilogy.
And I got as far as the first part of Pikerty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century - it's a bit frustrating b/c it seems to need to be read in concert with internet access, to get the figures which underlie his bold assertions. Oh, and Cold Comfort Farm, which I opened as a same-period counter to self-satisfied Naomi Mitchison and which, as I have only now understood (thanks to wikipedia), is set in an AU future Britain. (ie future to 1932, when it was published). I don't know why it was written that way (AU future) because there's nothing in it which doesn't fit absolutely in a mock-DH Lawrence landscape.
It means I have much curtailed internet access, of course, so I will be slow to respond to people's posts - and very slow to sort out the complexities of the NFE, too. :( (which are pretty daunting. But I should be able to get there, eventually.
On the good side, I've been gardening, and also reading a strange assortment of books that came to hand: The Tricksters, by Margaret Mahy, and The Haunting, also by Margaret Mahy. The Haunting feels like a first draft of The Changeover, and not nearly as good. The Tricksters is better yet, and declines pigeonholing - it's more or less about novel-writing, or else about family dynamics, or the power of suppressed truths, or sexuality.
Two other books read - Lord Birkenhead's biog of Kipling, and a scrappy sort of late-in-life memoir - You May Well Ask - by Naomi Mitchison; neither of them brilliant, but both enlightening in the way of small sidelights on history and the literary/political/social worlds of those times. (Kipling and NM would have heartily disliked each other, I'm certain.)
And Maddaddam, the last book in a trilogy by Margaret Atwood, which started by smashing the apparent state of things at the end of Year of the Flood, and then worked its way around to resolve the mysteries and come to a new ending, about which no spoilers. :) . But I thought it turned too much into being a puppet-fable by the end, and don't really recommend the trilogy.
And I got as far as the first part of Pikerty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century - it's a bit frustrating b/c it seems to need to be read in concert with internet access, to get the figures which underlie his bold assertions. Oh, and Cold Comfort Farm, which I opened as a same-period counter to self-satisfied Naomi Mitchison and which, as I have only now understood (thanks to wikipedia), is set in an AU future Britain. (ie future to 1932, when it was published). I don't know why it was written that way (AU future) because there's nothing in it which doesn't fit absolutely in a mock-DH Lawrence landscape.
