Journals, Magazines, Books

Nesting, purging, de-cluttering continues. (Although I am still a little skeptical of the term nesting. After all, Dr. Crazy is cleaning too these days.)

1.

If anyone would like a bunch of old issues of the PMLA, in good condition, let me know.

Or, if you’d prefer a bunch of old issues of Wired (”from back when it was worth reading”), plus a few newer ones, in beat-up condition, we’ve got those too.

2. After four and a half years of cohabitation, the need to make room for baby has motivated me to combine the some parts of my fiction collection (the parts that have nothing to do with my research) with my husband’s.

Our duplicates are:

The Lord of the Rings

Frankenstein

The Handmaid’s Tale

Dubliners

Prince Caspian

The Magician’s Nephew

Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons, Downtown Doonesbury, In Search of Reagan’s Brain, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, A Tad Overweight but Violet Eyes to Die For, An Especially Tricky People, As the Kid Goes for Broke, And That’s My Final Offer, Call Me When You Find America, Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy

There would be more duplicates if most of the books I owned before college had not gone missing over the years (Doonesbury collection and LOTR being salient exceptions, because I must have taken them with me to college). All the duplicates (except LOTR, to which we are too attached, and all of which are too beat up to donate anyway) are going to the local literacy group’s book sale. The magazines will most likely be recycled. I will send a note to my department’s listserv about the PMLA, but who will want a ton of paper when they can print out whatever articles they need from  J-Stor?

At the Bookstore

Is it just me, or is the title Top 100 Baby Purees ambiguous? The subtitle did clarify that it was about purees for babies, and there is the whole context thing. It must just be my fuzzy brain.

If there are multiple copies of Babywise on the shelf is that because it sells well, so they carry a lot, or because it isn’t selling well, so they are stuck with the stock? Moxie says it is a bad, bad, book, Arwen says the theological basis is all wrong, and it is the only method mentioned by name–as something to avoid because it is dangerous for infants’ health–in the information packet from my hospital–so I hope it is the latter.

I was at the store to look for a copy of Husband Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth for my class. Maybe I’ll write about my reaction to that book after I finish reading it (or perhaps after I actually give birth*, though I’m thinking I’ll be otherwise occupied then).

*Standard disclaimer here about dead baby thoughts,  counting babies before they are hatched, knocking on wood, inshallah, gods willing and the creeks don’t rise, and so on.

When Geeks Marry

Mr. Luo is re-reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I was unable to renew my library copy of Fiasco because there was a hold on it, so I picked up a battered copy of The Fellowship of the Ring from our shelves. So we are both rereading thousand-page trilogies, which the other partner has also read more than once. This means we sometimes ask or receive updates on the action: “Daniel’s father just got blown up, or “they’re in the Old Forest.” That means we can have conversations like:

Luo Lin: Sam just threw an apple at Bill Ferny.

Mr. Luo: “Waste of a good apple.”

Luo Lin: You remember that quotation?!

Of course, I once impressed a fellow grad student (male, English department) at a party by quoting more or less accurately Aragorn’s line to Eomer: “Thus we meet again, though all the hosts of Mordor lay between us.”

This was around the time one of my friends commented that when she was in high school, she was the only girl that read sci-fi. She was the one who got me hooked on Babylon 5, then moved away, taking her cable subscription with her.

Ah, grad school, where geeks meet their future spouses (except me, of course).

Note:  I wouldn’t have considered myself a “geek,” as the word had a science / engineering connotation to me, but Mr. Luo once explained to me in great detail the true definition of the word and why it applied to me as well.