Moss, of the division Bryophyta.

Why the shit balls arse fuck can't you edit a post from the actual post? Why do you have to go find the post on your feed page to edit it? Have I got this right? Or did I just throw away an entire blood vessel in my brain for nothing?

8.  Most overrated book (s)

Stephen King's Dark Tower books, which bore the daylights out of me, and -- I realise I'm signing my own death warrant here -- everything I've read so far by Bujold. Goodbye world, and really I'm just happy if I've helped one other person out there come to terms with their ambivalence.  

9.   A book I thought I wouldn't like but ended up loving

ASoIaF.  Of course I would.  Of course I would get hooked on a series that's currently averaging thirty years between books.  

10. A book that reminds you of home

The LoTR trilogy.  It's the first high fantasy, truly long series I can remember reading and re-reading and re-reading until I did what all 13 year-olds inevitably do after too much Lord of the Rings which was to write truly awesome fanfiction.    

11. A book I hated

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, which made me dread life and growing older and made me feel the weight of expectation that my parents and extended family had of my generation. It didn't just have cultural correlations; it also had that terrible sense of guilt and passive acceptance that was a very strong part of how my mother's people functioned.  I still can't read the book today without feeling history's foot on the back of my neck.

12.  A book I love and hate at the same time

Probably The God of Small Things again. 

4. Favourite book of my favourite series

The slashiest of Holmes stories: The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, which I think we can all agree was Doyle handwaving plot in favour of subtext hearts and flowers.  This is the one where Holmes smiles an awful lot, calls the good doctor 'My Watson', and flies into a possessive rage over damage caused to Watson's fine, firm body.  Good times.

5. A book that makes me happy

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman.  Literary sunshine in a jar.  Everything about this book makes my life a little better.

6. A book that makes me sad

The line between enjoyable melancholy and maudlin wallowing is almost impossible to describe; all books are demons, and how far in you allow them is so subjective as to invite ridicule.  I'll never read The God of Small Things without ugly crying.

7. A book that makes me laugh

Granchester Grind, by Tom Sharpe.  Not uniformly good, but when it's funny it's unstoppable.

3. My favourite series

I narrowed it down to three, which was already like a knife through the heart.  What do you want, blood?

- My lovely Sherlock Holmes omnibus.  Doyle created the stories for serialisation so I think that's legit, although of course they can all be read as stand-alones.  I love the short, slightly dumb ones as much as the multi-chapter stories; Holmes shows more personality in the former, and the latter let Doyle stretch his narrative legs, such as they are.  People talk about his authorial shortcomings but they're usually the same people frantically writing Holmes slash at three in the morning, muttering yeah deduce the pants off that round arse, so whatever.

- Instituitionalised racism notwithstanding, I've always got time for Miss Marple.  I don't know if she was the origin point of the cozy mystery category, but she will always be a comfort read for me.  Something about her self-possession and studied flatness always calmed me as a young reader; and as an adult I admire how absorbing Christie made her.  

- The Lake Woebegon books, by Garrison Keillor.  It probably needs a bit of squinting to shelve it as a series, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you haven't really been to Lake Woebegon if you haven't read all the books.  Also, your interpretive dance would be affected; what kind of missionary are you, anyway?

Because I'm from the future, that's why:

1.  Best book I read last year

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.  My 2012 comfort read.  It's lulling and haunting and lovely, but there's also an irresistible wickedness and slyness to it.  There's magic, and the prosaic, slow passing of time (which is magic too), and dialogue that could bring the dead back to life.  I love the language best, I think: the lilting, assured charm of it, but I probably like the story better.  Because it's a story about unicorns and how there's no place for them at all in the world, and this is Beagle saying goodbye to them, from all of us.  

2.  A book I've read more than 3 times

A Duke of Her Own, by Eloisa James.  The final book in the Desperate Duchess series, which I only sweated through because I wanted to see my beloved Villiers settled.  And he does, with the best and most fabulous of women.  It's a wonderful read; James's stories don't always reconcile her native wryness with the demands of the genre and very often her stories read like they're struggling to contain her humour, but she channels it effortlessly in this book.  The dialogue is sharp and bright, the characters are warm and sincere, and she does an exceptional job of training all the POVs into a tight, seamless narrative.  I think it's the best HR out there.

Wow.

This is hands down the worst thing I've ever read and I'm loving every painful, godawful second of it.  

Gakked from Steelwhisper.  A test of fortitude and endurance, by god.  I shall almost certainly fail.

I'm pretty tangled up about this thing. The writing is faultless, it has one of the finest examples of tautly maintained characterisations I've ever read (the MC is -- there's no other word for it -- spellbinding) and yet I came away feeling so ill and wrecked from the whole experience I didn't know which way was up for a long while. So hm ... I guess this is your squick/trigger warning: I talk about women getting beat up because, well, the book doesn't does.

My favourite Mondegreen growing up was almost all the lyrics of this one Fleetwood Mac song.  Can you hear me calling, Ultraman? I'd sing, rocking the legwarmers and just generally being the most awesome woman on the planet.  Then the 90's happened and legwarmers stopped being practical ways to buffer the gap between the top of your socks and the bottom of your school uniform and everything turned to dust.  Listen, I'm just no good with SF.  All I hear is rhubarbrhubard planet Fustenberg retaliated with LAZZERRS rhubarbrhubarb.  Consider that your disclaimer.

I liked Miles.  I mean, I think it's probably biologically impossible not to like Miles.  He had moxy and things kept falling uncannily but very satisfyingly into place for him, which is probably the perfect formula for any novel by itself -- but he also had all the anti-hero things I like in my heroes: manipulation by acts of casual omission, a raving psycho for a wingman, rich, bitter moments of self-doubt.  I think what I liked most was how successfully the author gave us a birds-eye view of Miles's family in the beginning; Aral and Cordelia worship the ground he walks on, but it's all pretty awkward and haphazard and you see all the groundwork being laid for a young man straining to define himself away from everything trying to protect him.

The prose is ... baffling.  I'd be mentally whining about how distancing her language was, and how disconnected I felt emotionally from Miles, and then she'd throw in things like this:

Such little wounds, he thought, observing the slight chafing at wrists and ankles, and tiny discolorations under their skins marking hypospray injection points.  By such little wounds we kill men ... the murdered pilot officer's ghost, perched on his shoulder like a pet crow, stirred and ruffled itself in silent witness.

and it would stir me and make me go on.  No-one with that sort of internal dialogue should be abandoned, no?

I'd read more of the series, I think, with the caveat that any discussion about the world building would be me happily lying my face off.  Or, as Stevie Nicks more wisely puts it: you know that I'm frying and I can't get the words out.

Recommended, everywhere.

Heh.

I have no idea how to do reading status updates on this thing (or even if you can), so here's me so far:

About a third of the way through.  I like Miles, he's sassy and all the self-pity is well tempered by his machinating.  I'm really not sure what the long-term strategy is with hiring all these people but it's offering the prospect of a good long story arc.  The love interest is really uninspiring; hope she gets developed later.  Or killed off, whatever.

I'm in two minds about Bujold's writing.  I can see she's come a long way since the Cordelia books but there's still something very flat about her prose.  She uses these short, choppy sentences that feel very utilitarian and I want Miles' more bitter, internal moments to flow a little more.

why is this thing telling me I have zero books

A reblog from Josh Lanyon.  I see his point, though the bit about authors bringing 'everything' to the table might need a little discussion.  Still, these are all my reservations about BL as it exists now.  Every single GR migrant is going to want forums.  I hope BL is listening.

Unable to sleep last night, I began to flip through a stack of Publisher Weeklys in hopes of knocking myself out. I came across an article on Goodreads. Or, more exactly, on the reaction of indie booksellers to Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads. It's sad, I don't deny it, and when I saw the various alternative social media sites listed in the article, I'm happy to support indie booksellers as best I can (as an indie author) I vowed to check these alternative sites out.

BookLikes was one of them.

The problem here is instantly obvious -- there are no forums, there are no authors, there are no forums for authors, there is no real interface and no potential for real interface. This is pretty much like the crash and burn of Shelfari -- but without the potential for entertaining fireworks.

Yeesh.

Can I say this any more plainly? While it is true that authors descend like locusts on any given site and overwhelm it unless the site has established serious boundaries, NO authors means your boundary is the fence around a graveyard. Initially, on a social media site such as this one, it's the authors bringing everything -- from the bread and butter to the key lime pie -- to the table.

Or to be even more blunt: when I have more followers than a social media site, I have to wonder why I would spend time and energy on that site?  

 I'm not saying I'm outta here, but I am saying, I'm not impressed so far. But it's early days, and I'll be checking out all the possibilities, checking out Zola and Riffle and Bookish too, and seeing if any of them are going to add value to the conversation -- or if it's just going to be the same old chatter.

This is what you'll get:

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There are quite a few tutorials on how to change the layout of your BookLikes blog. I figured it's good to have them all in one post, and I'd like to thank all who put a lot of work into making them so others can enjoy BookLikes. 

Let's start with the customization blogs posted by BookLikes: 

• Edit Your Design Theme With HTML on BookLikes 
• Your Blog on BookLikes - Custom-Made

Tutorials made by BookLikers for BookLikers: 

• Litchick's Easy Tips for Customization
• Litchick's How to Change Your Followers/Following to Something Fun
• AnHeC's How to Move/change your Followers/Following conters
• Jane's How to Customize your BookLikes Blog using CSS
• Jane's Customizing your BookLikes Blog Pt.2
• ThreeRs' Blog about Fonts
• AnHeC's How to change font colour (text, link, comment section)
• AnHeC's Background for Search Bar

Note: All links open in a new window and take you to the original posts and their creators. Leave comments, likes and reblog the hell out of them so others can see it too :)