I have bought four used books for 25 cents each from Aspen Hill library, meaning I spent a dollar altogether. Two are really corny fantasy choose your own adventure books... like D&D for the antisocial. I bought them for amusement value. There are blank sheets in the front where you can write in your own stats. Apparently the previous owner of this book had a bow and an axe, a rope, a lantern, a potion of.. I can't read this.. lognospian?? .. a quiver with six arrows, five fireseeds, a psychic ring, a signet ring and a war hammer. I like reading other people's character sheets- it's kind of like peering into someone else's life, like in archaeology. You take a look at the inventory and it's like, this is an exact snapshot of what was in this guy's backpack five, ten, twenty years ago when some other fantasy dork was reading this book. I wonder where he is now.. college, a career, marriage, children, a house?

Also.. I have a Forgotten Realms book (first in the Avatar Trilogy; you know a book is trashy when it has an excerpt in the front) and some children's book about a guy with plague. Hurray.

Have finished Terry Goodkind's "Pillars of Creation," which, despite having a promising beginning, severely blew chunks. This is my thirty second recap of Pillars of Creation.. "I'm running away from soldiers! I'm running away from soldiers! I'm having kinky sex! I'm running away from soldiers! Oh, wait, there aren't any soldiers. The end."

Walked to Rockville library this afternoon to pick up Terry Goodkind's "Pillars of Creation." Good book, but easy to make fun of- I have labeled some of the chapters, which are currently only numbered, by my general impressions and by the vast quantity of bodily fluids described.

Chapter 1- Oh Those Dark But Seductive Voices In My Head: Graphic Descriptions of a Dead Man
Chapter 2- Sexual Tension: Burying a Dead Guy And Looting His Body
Chapter 3- Four Pages: Nothing Happens
Chapter 4- She's So Perfect: Sappy Family Scene
Chapter 5-Exposition, Dinner, and Freezing Rain: Generic Herbs For Every Medical Necessity
Chapter 6- Expendable Characters: Artistic Blood Spray and Severed Body Parts
Chapter 7- What The Fuck: Bastard Angst, Squirming Farm Animals, and Frozen Poo.

That's as far as I've gotten.

I don't understand Madame Bovary's financial situation. I mean, yeah, in general, she has a lot of debts and she goes deeper into debt as she keeps buying crap and not paying Lheureux back. But what's up with all these IOU type promissory notes? They're IOUs, but how come they keep getting bigger? It annoys me that I don't understand this. Hell, I'm not even sure what I don't understand.

I know that's not the point of the novel, but still.

I'm so pressed.

Do you know? I'm reading five books at the same time and it's fairly annoying. Long Fuse, Madame Bovary, Building, Midwife's Apprentice (which Lianna recommended in the library), and When Knights Were Bold. Let's just get Long Fuse done with.. I'm so sick of it.

I'm reading "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin right now because people repeatedly says it's good. I'm a bit wary though because it's the first book in a series- I hope it's stand-alone. It's good, but it's sort of cheesy... it's very similar in tone to the Farseer Trilogy. You know, gritty "Fantasy Realism" (I invented that term, but now that it's been invented I'll use it a lot), Sex and Violence, a Nameless Evil, People Bickering Over the Succession, the Seven Kingdoms (like the Six Duchies except, LOOKIE! There's another one for Ye Olde Discount Prices!) and of course, Lots of Bastards.

(National Bastard Day- where you show your appreciation for all those bastards who Saved The World.)

I registered Time and Again and Dragonshadow on Book Crossing. It's not that I'm particularly generous, it's just that they're not books I want to keep, and as Nick has proved, who on ebay wants them? Even my local library probably doesn't want them.

Finished Wyrd Sisters. Will have to start something else. It will either be Ender's Shadow or the sequel to Time and Again, since Nick is reading it. I started, but never finished, because it was rather boring. I bought it several years ago because it was on sale at the dollar store. And apparently he doesn't go back in time to kill Bismarck.. he goes back in time to kill Kaiser Wilhelm. Sorry, folks.

Finished reading The Green Rider. Nobody's read it, so nobody cares, but I feel a compulsive need to blog every book I've finished for some reason (I finished the Josephine one a while ago). I don't know why I picked it up, actually.. I felt this compulsive urge to read it, despite the campy cover art. It was good, but I think I'll make fun of it anyways. Especially since the first half is like..(as someone summarized the FotR movie..) "I'm running through the woods!!! I'm running through the woods!!!!" Actually, no. It was like... "I'm running through the woods! I'm running through the woods! ... I'm having tea with a dead guy!... I'm running through the woods!.. Deus ex Machina! ... I'm running through the woods!... I fall asleep in the bath! .... I'm running through the woods! ... Some guy tries to rape me!.. I'm run-" Okay, you get it.

Murphy's Law of Fantasy Book Monarchies: Whenever a king is sick/dying, you can count on there being no heirs, or too many of them. Usually, among these heirs, one of them will be an evil asshole, and one of them will be bluff and kind-hearted. Like clockwork, you can count on the second guy being shafted and thrown into a dungeon of some sort. Or exiled. But not killed. Because if he were, that'd be the end of the book.

I swear to God. No more Discworld, or fantasy for that matter, until I finish all these books I've bought and never bothered to read. First up.. "Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe"... What a stupid title. It's about the ... adventures.. of Josephine Bonaparte.. I have no idea what it's about, actually. Josephine, presumably. But the cover is pretty, which is why I bought it. I'm stupid. Then it's Ceasar's Legions.. all 160 pages of diagrams with pantless, well-muscled Roman men. Hmm, that won't seem so bad, but the text though..this book being in the same series as the Hoplite Warrior book, with the author who can't spell "waggon" right. Hooah. Then I have to read "Girl With the Pearl Earring," historical fiction based on that Vermeer painting. Christy said it was good.. but she doesn't read books usually. Ever. This either means she has really bad standards, or that it's a great book to be enable to get her to actually read.

Go fry an egg. MATE! heh. Silly Brits. You know what is an utterly lame word? "Lifemate." In fantasy/sci-fi. For God's sake, if it's your husband or your wife, SAY so! If you're not married, it's boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/lover/mistress/paramour/concubine/fiance/significant other/"my gal"... LIFEMATE??? unless you're some sort of monkey, that term is such a piece of turd.

Spent all afternoon looking at oil paintings. Oooh, here's a good one! Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners.

And reading Guards!Guards! in between loading times. Slow computer. Stoopid. *bap*. My poor Vetinari-poo. This book just makes him a normal, garden variety evil. You know, with black robes and everything. Shame. The good thing about him in Jingo and 5th Elephant was that he was there, but not. You know, like, neutral conniving dude that ran the city but didn't make it clear. But this is an earlier book. It's sort of odd to see all the characters de-evolved, like the literary equivalent of those pictures in textbooks where there's this walking monkey that slowly turns into a walking naked guy, with his dick cleverly concealed by his forward leg. But in reverse.

Oh, and apparently, Vetinari *isn't* married, even though he looks like a bondage freak. Um. Terry Pratchett's words, not mine. "Nothing wrong with whips and needles, in moderation" Good God, is it 4:30 already?

neeed... moreeeee.. disssscwwwooorlllld... Whaddya wanna bet Nick is gonna forget "Jingo" tomorrow? I should remind him. Loudly. Wolfgang is kinda cute. In a deranged homicidal werewolf type way. Yes, I finished "Fifth Elephant", which actually has nothing to do with an elephant. Watch me flunk my math test tomorrow too. Too many tests. It's not that I don't care, it's just that it wouldn't surprise me. BTW, yes, frictional coefficient is 2.3. They should have something for books called a "fictional coefficient" represented by the made up Greek letter "Moo", the amount by which disbelief is suspended. If it's 0, the thing slides right down. If it's.. say.. 2.3, disbelief is not only not suspended, it plummets through the center of the earth and out the other side. It's not a measurement of how outlandish a book is, just how well the writer can carry it off. Like, Discworld is fine, despite it hurting my head whenever I think of a world without a horizon. But some novels really push it... "Look! A giant ferret falls out the sky and rips the villain to shreds!" (I swear to God I'm not making this up) ... "Look! My wand has a never-before-mentioned unique quality of creating beams of golden light when the Bad Guy comes!" Fictional coefficient times the mass of the book = the amount of force needed to get me to read the damn thing.