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Nov. 15th, 2006

Fall

Nov. 15th, 2006 07:10 pm
brigdh: (autumn leaves)
The trees are changing color here. It seems ridiculously late to me, to have all these ochre-bright colors a week before Thanksgiving, but perhaps it's just a result of the country-wide lack of winter temperatures we seem to be having, and I'll certainly never complain about that.

I love how the fall leaves, in their parks and gardens, look against the browns and grays of most of the buildings. They seem all the more vivid for it, yellows and oranges and reds like streaks of paint. There's a row of trees a block away from here, and each one is plum-purple on the top, fire-orange in the middle, and banana-yellow underneath. I was going to take a photo of it, but I'm certain I'd never convince anyone that it wasn't just a trick of the light; I have no idea what kind of trees they are, but I never knew they existed, that trees could have such colors in such distinct stripes.

I like the fallen leaves, too, and the crunchy noises they make when you walk through them. I was doing that thing this morning where you're so tired you dream of being tired (and this is why you shouldn't go to bed at 4am, my dears, though I seriously hadn't meant to stay up that long), except it was more like being half-awake and daydreaming of sleeping, and I had turned so I could look up out of the window. Lying on the bed at that angle meant the only thing I could see was gray sky and the black branches of a tree, shaking in the wind, and leaves falling straight down at me in spirals, so I nearly expected them to hit the window.

I like the rain, too. Of course, I hate the rain, because every time it rains my umbrella blows inside out five times and I get soaked, but it's gorgeous, especially at night. I've never known rain to be so lovely. Clouds hang low enough that the top of the Empire State building usually disappears, and a few other tall buildings leave only their lights, smeared to a streak inside the clouds. When the rain catches in the glow from a streetlight, it doesn't look like it's falling, but like there's a texture to the air, something endlessly shifting and changing but motionless; it seems like if I could reach it, I could touch it, like it would feel like fur or silk.

Ah. I must be feeling better; I haven't subjected you all to one of these purple prose posts in months.
brigdh: (books)
I just finished Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, and it is a fantastic book. It's an epistolary novel, set in England in 1849, and is full of secret political movements and spies and murder and philosophy and so many other wonderful things. There's a tiny bit of magic, but it's never clear if it's real or simply the characters being superstitious, so I wouldn't call it fantasy; it's just an excellent historical novel.

I adored the characters; they were intelligence and competence and highly skilled at being witty and clever to hide anything they're really feeling. And of course they're really feeling a lot, because this book certainly provides the angst. My favorite was Susan, who was so brisk and independent, but very funny about it. If I was living in the time period, I'd want to dress as a man and go hang out in pubs at Oxford to get secret information, and be friends with Fredrich Engels (I loved that he was a character in the book), and so on. I kept changing my mind about James, but by the end I just wanted to pet him, poor boy.

I've read several epistolary novels recently, and it's a form that really appeals to me. I love seeing how the different characters describe each other and themselves, the ways they view events, even how they speak. And there's always something fascinating in trying to guess how much of the truth they're telling, and how much they're leaving out. It makes me wish I had an excuse to write long letters to people, even though I know it'd only be fun until something serious happened, and then I'd be terribly thankful for the speed of phones and email. Still, it seems like such a neat thing to do, and then I might actually get mail. I love mail!

Brief spoiler for the end )

Now tell me what to read next clearly it should be one of the giant pile of books I need to read for classes, but, you know, other than that.

[Poll #868692]

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