I was over at Kmkat’s. She always puts up wonderful links, and really – I delete more than I post. She put up a link to “Chaos & Mayhem?” one of those places I don’t go to because I spend way too much time in the rabbit hole.

I accidentally clicked through on the “Extravagant Consumption: Reading Vs. Buying” link. What!? I’m actually reading the last book I bought, and the one before that, and I’m going to read the book that’s coming – but I think I’ll pass on the library book that is currently in my bed, and I kinda wish I could pass on the book Daughter lent me – but it is entertaining (although exhausting) rewriting every. damn. sentence. (YA? Paid by the word? Discuss.) And maybe I need more bookshelves, because I don’t have room for my Medieval collection (not that it’s so big – I just don’t have room).

Currently I’m reading The Morphology of the Folktale, a systemization of folktale themes and memes. I haven’t gotten very far into it, because I discovered that if you substitute “tail” for “tale”, things become much more interesting.”Before throwing light upon the question of the tail’s origin, one must first answer the question as to what the tail itself represents.” Aside from me messing with my own head, it’s an interesting book, making my minimal studies of philosophy worthwhile.

But the one before – that’s the interesting one. I’d picked it up at the library, or maybe read a short-story precursor to the novel, and I hadn’t liked it. But since I’d spent the money, and since it’s an author I generally like, I pushed on.

2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Amazing, like his stories are. And hopeful, which I didn’t expect. Set in 2312, of course. He calls our current era the Great Dithering. Anyway. Hopeful. Awkward, in some ways. A little forced, on occasion. I think the ending was . . . unnecessary, maybe. But worth reading. He does things, swooshing gently from one POV to another, softly, like a goldfish in still water. Parts of lists, like messages bobbing up in an eight-ball.

So I have to finish Morphology, and then Christian Materiality, and then I’ll be free! I’ve only got 20 or 30 on my headboard.