A bookworm's lot

[resonant]

In case anyone's wondering why I'm making terse podfic announcements and otherwise not participating in any way, I've got some odd illness whose only symptoms (after one day of debilitating fever) are tiredness, the inability to digest much of anything, and a sort of olfactory hallucination that makes everyone and everything smell like the dumpster of old cooking oil out behind a fast-food restaurant.

I'm functional but have no energy to devote to anything not absolutely critical, such as the acquisition and reading of books.

I'm pleased to have friends in fandom who'll understand this story:

At about two this afternoon I completed Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.¹² I napped for a bit, and then suddenly woke up filled with worry: the library was going to close in a couple of hours, and after that it wouldn't be open again until one tomorrow! That was a long time to be without books other than the several hundred books that are scattered around me on every surface! So I got up and went to the library to check out some more books.

¹ Nothing like a minor illness to help you get briskly through a 780-page book. I liked JS&MrN very much, but probably would have enjoyed it less if I had read it at the rate I normally read books and taken a month rather than a week.

About a third of the way in, it occurred to me that Norrell is a very Rodney McKay-like figure. If you say that fandom is 30% more gentle with McKay than canon is, then Norrell would be what would happen in a work that was 30% less gentle with McKay than canon is. And yet the resemblance is still there -- chiefly the lack of social skills, of course, but also the passionate devotion to his work, and the equally passionate devotion to his high esteem of himself, and his absolute helpless inability to perceive that the two could be in conflict.

Having seen that, it was not so great a stretch to see Strange as a John Sheppard-like figure. This enhanced my enjoyment.

²The html code for superscript is [sup], which makes the raw text look like my coding is greeting me.

Comments

[twistedchick]

I think you've got whatever has been going around the last two weeks; I heard from several cousins that they all have it. Not pleasant.

::offers tea, your choice of flavor::

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

That's actually very reassuring. I found the lack of symptoms unsettling; weirdly, I would have been less worried if something had hurt. (Usually if something goes wrong with me, it goes wrong from the nose up -- that kind of pain I'm used to.)

[twistedchick]

There's some very weird stuff out there; I suspect older viri are mutating oddly.