The Aviary

Things:

- The thing about spending a couple months reading essentially nothing but comic books is that people at the library have a tendency to say things to library staff like, "So, what have you been reading that's good lately?" and I have to pause for a moment and then tell them that I've been reading a lot of superhero comics from the 70's and 80's. At which point, they ask my coworkers because no one actually wants to hear all of Sara's Thoughts on the New Gods.

( - I have a lot of Thoughts on the New Gods. I don't know how that happened - it is not something I asked for. Also, did you know that in the 80's there was a comic where the Teen Titans teamed up with the X-Men to fight Darkseid and the Phoenix? Apparently in this comic, they all live in New York in the same universe and just...never run into each other. Huh.)

- As part of the Summer of Learning, many of the kids at the Bainbridge library have been learning about yarnbombing this week. So the library has been increasingly more and more covered in yarn and random bits of knitting and crochet. It's pretty great. I'm a little sad that the project is over now and there won't be new things to discover every time I go to work. I'm hoping they leave the yarnbombing up for a good long time.

- Tomorrow, Katie and I are going to attend this years final performance of Star Trek in the Park. They are doing Mirror, Mirror this year and I am super excited. Hurrah, free nerdy entertainment!

So. While on vacation, I watched a lot of the TNG with my mom. Which caused me to realize, again, that I have actually not seen a lot of TNG. I always think that I have, because my parents watched a lot of it when it was on for the first time and because it's essentially been around for as long as I've been alive and got replayed a lot, but literally every episode I watched on vacation was one that I couldn't remember having seen before.

So when we got home, I started watching some more TNG on my own. And it's totally fun and I love Star Trek and I have a whole lot of Trek novels that I downloaded a while ago, so I put a bunch of TNG books on my kindle. As well as a few random other things that looked interesting: some Mirror universe stuff, the first novels of a couple spin-off series, the first couple books of the DS9 relaunch.

You can see where this is going, right?

I did read a TNG novel! I totally did! And then I started reading Avatar and oh, Kira, hi, I love you, Kira! DS9 is the Trek of my heart*, y'know? I like other Star Treks - they are lovely - but they lead inevitably back to DS9.

I think I was somewhere in season five the last time I was watching. I should pick that up again.





*Which is really the problem that I have getting my mom to watch it. Because TNG is the Trek of her heart, so when we watch DS9 she is always thinking, "Well, this is lovely, but why are we not watching my show?"

Things that are better than stabbing people:

- I bought cheesecake brownie ice cream and it is delicious.

- Mom and I have started watching Voyager, on my sister Katie's recommendation. We are two episodes in and, y'know, thus far it's actually pretty good. I don't know, I have this idea that Voyager isn't good but I'm realizing that I haven't actually watched enough of it to really form that conclusion. I do want to punch Tom Paris in his smug smarmy face a good bit and Neelix gets on my nerves but Janeway and Tuvok and Chakotay are pretty awesome. And Harry is made of adorable. So. It's not DS9, but it's pretty fun. (The only problem is that I can't watch any more tonight because Mom is tired and I'm not allowed to watch ahead.)

- Sometimes, I go through periods where I knit to audiobooks instead of tv. Usually, these end up being Discworld audiobooks because I have a lot of them and they're consistently entertaining. I have recently finished relistening to The Truth. About which two things: 1) Since I normally use Discworld audiobooks as bedtime listening, I very rarely end up hearing the climax. I vaguely remembered how badass Otto gets to be at the end there, but I had forgotten the details. Totally awesome. 2) I realize this is probably a minority opinion but I would seriously read a whole book that is nothing but Mr Pin and Mr Tulip having ridiculously violent adventures in crime and art appreciation. It would be great.

- Relatedly, after I was done with The Truth, I went and reread Neverwhere. Sort of. I...look, the setting is pretty and all and the plot is okay but Richard bores me to tears. He's so passive and clueless and irritating and I just have no desire to read about him any more. And Door is only slightly less boring because she's actually from London Below, but all the hints of interesting remain only hints and I don't care. The Marquis is nifty and Hunter is all right and Islington is pleasantly creepy but I will freely admit that my rereading of Neverwhere consists of paging through to the bits with Mssrs Croup and Vandemar and just reading those. (I would also read a book that was wholly their adventures. It would, like the hypothetical book mentioned above, also contain crime, violence, and art appreciation but would be significantly more disturbing.) Despite this, I am tempted to acquire a new copy, as mine is falling apart. Tell me that buying a new copy of a book that I only read selected bits of is silly. Because it is.

- Other than bits of Neverwhere, I have been floundering between books of late. I finished Well Witched by Frances Hardinge a few days ago (highly recommended) and have been poking at a few collections of horror stories, but today I brought home Kraken by China Mieville because China Mieville writing about squids. What could be better than that? Four chapters in, it is pretty awesome. So now I am going to go read more of it.

Dear the internet - I come to you seeking book recommendations! Y'know, if you want to provide them. I have two categories of books I'm looking for and they're both kind of weird and oddly specific but I figure it can't hurt to ask.

The first is Star Trek novels. Because, like everyone else on the internet, I saw the Star Trek movie (twice now) and loved it. And I haven't actually read many Star Trek novels (other than the ones that bethos has handed me at various times and said, "Read this!"), so I would like some guidance as to which ones don't suck. I am mainly looking for Original Series but I would not be adverse to TNG or DS9 recs. (...maybe I should read Millennium again. Heh.)

The second is...well, basically Dracula fanfic. Long and long ago, before I discovered the internet and fandom, I read a lot of published Dracula fanfic. (Also published Sherlock Holmes fic. Sometimes both at the same time.) I...do not remember most of it, as that was middle school, when I read kind of voraciously and did not retain as much as perhaps I would have liked. Like, y'know, the titles of the books I have already read. (Possibly, I should be writing these things down.) Possibly, there are other people out there who read a lot of published Dracula fic and recall which ones were good? And would be willing to tell me about them?

A corollary question - are the Saberhagen Dracula books any good? I seem to recall liking The Holmes-Dracula File but I liked a lot of things when I was 13 that later turned out to have been bad ideas. Did it have some sort of weird thing with Seward and plague and the Giant Rat of Sumatra, or am I thinking of another book? (I'm pretty sure I've read some sort of Holmes-meets-Lovecraft pastiche with the Giant Rat of Sumatra in it as well. There's probably a rule that if you have Holmes and horror, eventually you have to do something with the Giant Rat of Sumatra.)

My library has none of the Kim Newman Anno Dracula novels and this makes me very sad. I seem to have lost my copy of the first one.

Anyway! Any ideas or recommendations, O Internet? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.