Anyway, the soda fountain: we would go buy our books and then sit down on the red vinyl stools at the soda fountain counter and look at what books the other people bought. We would order chocolate malts, and there was always some leftover in the metal thing, and they also had these little pointy paper cups that had their own metal stands, and we would drink water and our malts. It is hot, and I have birthday book money, and so I wish I could do that today. But I suppose
This was all in the mid-'90s, by the way, so soda fountains did not entirely disappear in the spring of 1964, never to return.
Anyway. Reading.
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn. Sorry, guys, I liked Tamsin better. Or alternately, you were right, guys, I liked Tamsin better.
Jim Butcher, Grave Peril. Third in the series. Still good fun. This was definitely a mid-series book of a series with large plot arc, though: all kinds of things are coming down on the main character's head as the book closes. I find I'm fine with that. I'm quite grateful that
Mark Holloway, Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880. He left out many of the bits I found most interesting, I'm afraid, but it was well enough as a starting point for this batch of research. It's also a fairly old book -- mid-60s copyright -- so it's missing a lot of perspective on communal living experiments recently. On the one hand, this is good, because it's not trying to make Fourierists exactly analogous to hippies. On the other hand, it's bad, because it makes it far too easy to treat communal living experiments as things people used to do.
Herta Laipaik, Wind Chimes. This was a birthday gift from
Rex Stout, Black Orchids, Over My Dead Body, The Second Confession, and Where There's a Will. I got in a groove of sorts, and
Charlie Stross (
Elizabeth Wein (
Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, Pay the Piper. I don't think that having heard people read should make me like a book more or less, but this did: having heard Jane Yolen read, I do not screech when her characters don't know what words mean and have to look them up, because she reads it like it's character rather than Educational. Does that make sense? Often when a character has to look words up, it's because the author is going to sneak vocabulary words in while those dear little angels think they're reading a fairy story, but really they're learning! they'll never notice! oh, the wholesome deviousness! bleh, gag, hurl. But Jane Yolen isn't like that. Not even a little bit. She tells stories to people, and some of those people are bigger than others, and that's okay.
Not that the whole book was characters poring over a dictionary. I don't mean to make it sound like that. Just that that's one of my pet peeves in children's/YA, and it actually didn't peeve me this time, and that's notable. What I wouldn't have given for a high school full of kids who thought folk-rock was cool, when I was that age. But never mind that part. I really liked what they did with the fairy tale middle child as the main character (and also the other major character's resonance with that). I will go look at whatever else they do together -- Troll Bridge is out, Amazon says. We'll see.
Oh, Dragonsept adults: I will gladly lend this one to K. and B. I think they'd like it -- K. in particular, is my guess. We can arrange this when we arrange for ice cream, yes?
And now I'm reading Joanna Kavenna's The Ice Museum, which is about all the different places that have been called Thule or Ultima Thule. I will note that I hardly ever get the urge to read about warm places for the sake of reading about warm places, even when it never gets above zero for the whole week in January. But this just looked cool and refreshing. The observant might draw conclusions from this.