Uncreated Conscience

My dearest, most darling Sofa is travelling in Europe for three weeks, seeing her family in Belgium and enjoying the sights before buckling down to attend law school. This means I am apartment sitting, which means I am living in Manhattan part-time to make sure her abode doesn’t…I don’t know, burn down or something. (Sofa has a deadly fear of fires.)

It also means that I have no access to the internet, and as we all know, JJ crumbles without internet access. No wi-fi means that JJ spends the entire day re-reading THE SWEET FAR THING by Libba Bray. Upon rereading the GEMMA DOYLE trilogy, I liked them a lot more. The first time I read them, I wasn’t especially enamoured—although I thought each book got better. THE SWEET FAR THING remains the best (and the one that caused me to leave a semi-incoherent fangirly comment on Bray’s blog at 3:00am after I finished) and I sobbed like a baby at the ending.

What is this? I grow more sentimental with age, it seems.

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Thanks to everyone who recommended books to me. I have not yet taken up everyone on their recommendations (I am totally running out and getting Catherynne Valente’s PALIMPSEST when I get the chance), although I did spend part of my birthday giftcard on two books to read on my road trip down to North Carolina. (Amazingly, I did not get carsick.)

North Carolina was the furthest south I had ever been in the United States (excluding Disneyworld, Florida, which in all honesty, is not part of The South) and boy was it enlightening. Bear and I took the I-95 from New Brunswick, New Jersey, all the way down through Philadelphia (which has the highest number of billboards on the highway), Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C. (where we took an accidental detour through the Capitol that delayed us for an hour and a half), and the entire state of Virginia, which seems to be the longest state ever.

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Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Smart Bitch Sarah of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is totally my heroine. (Not the Old Skool Romance Novel Too-Stupid-To-Live heroine, of course.) The fact that she and Candy are out there in the world being snarky, intelligent, and awesome makes my life so much happier. They’re incredibly smart, but not in any way pretentious and are not above making fun of themselves, which makes their reviews and blog entries a joy to read. (Their cover snarks are my favourite, but I’m still waiting for the day we get another bit of LOLPorn.) Her essay on Edward’s appeal from the Twilight saga is incredibly insightful.

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