Been awhile. . .

since I last posted anything. I really meant to post at least once a week. But, as it so often does, life intervenes. I had to wrap up the semester, which always means a little extra work, and then a family member passed away, and I had to fly out to Oregon for a week. I'm also very aware of my impending move at the end of the summer, and I'm already in full planning mode for that. I'm taking a new job this fall, and that means that I've also been trying to get new courses organized and planned in advance. And now that I'm tenure-track, I'm trying to professionalize a bit and get back to my scholarly publishing schedule. So no, the blog just didn't get fit in for a few weeks.

A few things in passing:

Favorite Run of the past few weeks. . . was a few weeks ago on the Oregon coast. I ran from the beach house my parents had rented in Yahacts to the bay in Waldport about 8 miles north and back. Beautiful weather. The tide was coming in on my way back and that made for a challenging last 3 or 4 miles.

Favorite Book of the past few weeks . . . had to be Ursula K. Le Guin's anthology of early work Worlds of Exile and Illusion. I had ready Frederick Pohl's horrendously dreadful At the End of Time shortly before this, and Le Guin's early novels reminded me that yes, good writing and science-fiction are not mutually exclusive. Le Guin's work vaguely reminded me of the Asimov's Foundation novels--in their wide sweeping vision of a populated galaxy--but Le Guin's novels, even in this early period, are more elegant, more imaginative, and well, just BETTER.

A few other reads: The House at Riverton--picked this up off the wife's massive stack of new releases (the wife--if I haven't mentioned this before--gets sent massive numbers of just released books for free as a perk/requirement of her particular occupation). If you like Edwardian stories about butlers, maids, valets, cooks, and kitchen maids (and you can explain the difference in those positions) then you'll probably enjoy the novel. But you might just want to rent The Remains of the Day or Gosford Park or watch some Upstairs/Downstairs reruns, because there's not a whole lot in this novel that's new or different from them. Some of the characters seem to have been directly copied from Up/Down.

I'm also reading The Philosopher's Apprentice--another random pick from the massive mounds of hardbacks with which my wife insists on surrounding our bed. (Come to think of it, there's a metaphor for my life in a marriage bed surrounded by books, but I don't really want to go there right now). The book--the tale of an ABD philosopher-in-ethics who manages to teach a genetic clone to have a conscience, and the subsequent aftermath, is an interesting mess. If you enjoy a lot of references to Heidegger, Decartes, Jesus, and Plato while reading about armies of cloned aborted fetuses tormenting the parents who cast them away, then this is the book for you. It is an interesting read, I just think it should be packaged with the pot that is so obviously necessary to its complete enjoyment.

Oh yeah, then there was Pohl's At the End of the Time, but I think I mentioned that that sucked. Seriously, that book was BAD and left a bad taste in my mouth for weeks.

I also reread Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? which I'm pretty sure is brilliant. But that's for work, and I'm trying to keep work out of this.

Also good: Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. Yes, I watch PBS, and their television version got me interested in the book. It's not so much a novel as a patchwork of interrelated short stories, but if you enjoy Victorian fiction, then you'll probably enjoy this. If you enjoy the dramas they make out of nineteenth-century fiction, which are always cutely loaded with a romantic comedy with costumes, but aren't so sure about the actual books themselves, I can't gurantee anything. The cutesy love story from TV is completely absent in the book.

So, in about 45 minutes I'm going to wander downtown and pick up my race packet for the marathon. I'm surprised to find myself so excited. I've gotten so geeky about this running thing. If you'd told me that I'd be this way about a race five years ago I would have asked you what drugs you were on, and if I could have some.