Ben showed me this awesome volunteer program he’s doing, and after looking it over, I signed up right away. Basically, you act as an e-mentor and penpal to a 3-5th grader. The kid reads books throughout the schoolyear, and you read the same books. Then you write letters to one another discussing those books.

The idea is to both get the kids excited about reading, as well as help them improve their writing and vocabulary by modeling it through your letters. It sounds great!

I’d been snooping around for volunteer opportunities because I feel like that is one area of my life that is lacking these days. It is difficult, though, with the busy and often erratic schedule of a game developer to create time for a regular commitment. This is something that I can slide right into my life and keep up with.

I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it until now, and I wonder how common it is in grade schools across the country. I will have to suggest that my teacher friends look into it.

Hey! Teacher friends! You should look into this.

I’ve been keeping my brain filled up on books, but I’ve been slacking in my intentions to give my thoughts on them. My two most recent excursions have been A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins.

A Confederacy of Dunces was a bit of a rough read, not because it was bad or anything. On the contrary, the dialog brought its characters to life in impressively distinct and colorful ways. It’s just that most of the characters are so dreadful and hate-able that it’s hard to endure their presence for very long. I kept thinking “if these people don’t each get theirs in the end, I’m going to be really upset.”

Fortunately, I was not upset! The ending wrapped things up in the most pleasing way it could, and I was satisfied. However, I don’t think I’d go on that adventure a second time.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, on the other hand, I enjoyed very much from start to finish. Tom Robbins has a way of pouring out words in buckets, and my brain had a way of lapping it all up into order. It’s strange, too, because some wordy authors I don’t like at all, I just read too quickly and get tangled up in the words. With Robbins, though, everything synched up, and I ended up being delighted by his wordiness. Not to mention the fact that the story was engaging and the characters all felt real.

It was also fun because Josh, who lent it to me, had written notes in the margins and underlined phrases throughout. I love it when that happens in books, because it makes me feel like I’m spying on the inside of someone’s brain.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a new book to read, I’d highly recommend the Robbins book, but approach A Confederacy of Dunces at your own risk.

I have a few art reference books that I have no use of anymore, but I remember how very valuable they were to me when I was drawing and learning the ins and outs of rendering anatomy and all that, so I’m selling them (hopefully to some artsy folks who would get good use out of them).

Prices are cheapsville, with shipping costs on top.

If you’re interested in one, shoot me an email (since my journal propagates to so many sources, I don’t wanna play the timestamp game with comments) – wertle at wertle dot com

Art Books for sale back here

It’s easy to take for granted, but the library is pretty much the greatest thing ever.

I haven’t just been focusing on games since moving to LA; there are plenty of books I’m plowing through. Living right next door to the library has inspired me to use it, it would seem. Here’s what I’ve finished so far.

Moby Dick, which I’d never read before. I liked it a lot! Even the whaling sections! I think it has to do with my insanely fast pace at reading: it made all those informational chapters feel like pleasant asides, nothing that I had to plow through. As I mentioned in a status update before, it could just run in the family (my brother is a big Melville fan).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I always got this and To Kill a Mockingbird mixed up, because they both had birds in the title. I enjoyed this read quite a bit as well, even though I foresaw the inevitable end. It was tough, but fascinating and well-contained.

Shardik. In spite of Watership Down being my favorite book ever, I realized I’d never read any of Richard Adams’ other stuff. Shardik was a focused journey story, and had a lot of the same feel as Siddhartha to me. I think I prefer Adams’ animal-POV stuff, but it was a good read nonetheless.

Next up on my plate are The Forever War and another Adams’ book, Traveller

After seeing this particular xkcd (which I can strongly relate to) I realized that, while I know the story of Don Quixote through parodies and pop culture, I’ve never actually read it. So I picked up from the library and gave it a try.

At first, I was very amused at the silliness of the language, and the fact that the antics were just as ridiculous as portrayed in any parody. But the depth of the story never really changed. There was a shallowness and redundancy to the plot that made it feel less like reading a book and more like watching TV – in particular, like watching a painfully mediocre sitcom.

Occasionally there would be long pages of what was obviously social commentary and satire on some topic from the time it was written, and before long I would skip entire chapters. It’s kind of like when you watch a really dated movie that has pop culture references, you think “oh, that’s commentary on this thing that happened,” and shrug and move on.

Don Quixote is very straight forward, and pretty flat. There’s really no change in any of the characters, and the plot devices and antics never really change, either.

When I found that the incident with the windmills happens in the very beginning of the book, and is pretty unimportant to the story as a whole, I was puzzled. But after reading on, I figured it was because very few people probably read much further than that 🙂

So, Don Quixote, I gave you a solid attempt! It just wasn’t working out. Sorry!

So, in an effort to acquire new fiction for my mind to devour, I checked out Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, as recommended by Drew on my LA visit.

The story world is a brilliant sort of non-Tolkien-derived fantasy, complete with science-magic, math-magic (Scott, you would like it), and a splash of steam punk for good measure. It is gripping, exciting, and in the end, rather rough. I just finished it tonight and feel shaken and slightly ill-at-ease, but in the good way that happens from immersive books.

My brain feels refreshed and newly hungry, after going quite awhile re-reading stories that I’d known already. Fortunately for me, there’s more to the series.

I have to sit for awhile, though, and digest and ponder what I’ve read before I subject myself to another. Back to the library with it!

Okay, so, I have this thing about the Masque of the Red Death. No no! Hear me out on this…

I feel like I’ve talked about this before, but if I have it’s been ages. I think I read the short story first in the 8th grade while we were doing a segment on Edgar Allan Poe, and have re-read it many times sense.

In spite of my frequent reviews of the story over the past 13 or so years, and in spite of Poe’s specific description of the many rooms in the suite where the story takes place, I can NOT wrap my head around the way the place is laid out. I’ve gone so far as to scrawl maps onto grid paper, and I still can’t grasp it.

Part of the problem, I think, is my ignorance of the typical architecture of the story’s time. I don’t even have a basis to begin with to imagine what a *normal* imperial suite would have looked like, let alone Prospero’s bizarre rendition of one.

I’ve often contemplated doing some renderings of the rooms and the layout, but I think this is the year I’m actually going to sit down and do it. You will not conquer me, Poe, not this time!

Likely, the internet could help me in my need of a map, but somehow I feel like this is something I have to generate straight out of my brain. Will I succeed? Mystery! Intrigue!

The best way to stick to a goal is to keep people posted on it!

Today I got rid of my printer. My poor old laser printer kept me running all through undergrad, and even when it started gobbling paper and getting jammed such that I had to feed paper through it one sheet at a time, I still held onto it. 8 years in the running isn’t bad for a piece of technology these days, and the poor thing was in dire need of retirement. May its recycled parts rest in peace.

I also donated a way a large stack of books, including (though there was much inner debate about this) my Dragonlance novels. I’d given them a read-through last spring, and found that I’d outgrown them, which made me quite sad. Hopefully some youth will pick them up and enjoy them as much as I did when I was young.