fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-11-09 02:27 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-11-09 02:27 pm
(no subject)
Very slightly better today--so far--I managed to do a load of dishes, anyway, which is not much as it's just putting them in the dishwasher but still, progress. I feel like a Sim whose environment score has just gone up. The weather is much nicer today, which also helps; I've thrown open all the back and side doors and breathing actual air makes me feel less dead and mouldering.
There are things I should do, both outside and at home. There are also computer problems of a potentially terrifying nature, which I really don't need right now. And there is The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff, my sister's ancient childhood copy of which I found while searching for my copy of The Phantom Tollbooth after catching up on some recent New Yorker issues and reading that article about it. When I was little, me and my sister each had our own set of books, defined by whose room they were kept in, but I read most of hers too. I hadn't read this one, though, or Tristan and Iseult which she also had, both in lovely Sunburst editions with wonderful cover art. I miss YA cover art from the mid-eighties and early nineties, it was so tasteful and inviting and interesting. It didn't have words floating over the art or art that stretched across the back cover, which are things I hate in both older and newer books, and the books just looked so good on a shelf--creamy white or some other light-colored background with dark-colored words in an evocative font, that faint gloss that book covers seem to be losing these days, all lined up like packages waiting to be opened. And the art depicted real people, and faces! Now it's all too-bright colors and sprawling cartoons, or a dark background with a single glowing object. Clearly these are objectively bad choices, unlike the design choices of my childhood, and the world is going inexorably downhill. Oh, I am so old and shriveled inside, it's terrible.
Anyway, the book is amazing and perfect and beautiful and so forth, and good enough to make the inevitable pangs of why can't I write like this, why can't I write fade into the background. I have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and I am unwisely spending part of it on three more Sutcliff books--tragically, none with beautiful 1990 covers, but such is life. I hope at least the fonts and page layout are as good.
There are things I should do, both outside and at home. There are also computer problems of a potentially terrifying nature, which I really don't need right now. And there is The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff, my sister's ancient childhood copy of which I found while searching for my copy of The Phantom Tollbooth after catching up on some recent New Yorker issues and reading that article about it. When I was little, me and my sister each had our own set of books, defined by whose room they were kept in, but I read most of hers too. I hadn't read this one, though, or Tristan and Iseult which she also had, both in lovely Sunburst editions with wonderful cover art. I miss YA cover art from the mid-eighties and early nineties, it was so tasteful and inviting and interesting. It didn't have words floating over the art or art that stretched across the back cover, which are things I hate in both older and newer books, and the books just looked so good on a shelf--creamy white or some other light-colored background with dark-colored words in an evocative font, that faint gloss that book covers seem to be losing these days, all lined up like packages waiting to be opened. And the art depicted real people, and faces! Now it's all too-bright colors and sprawling cartoons, or a dark background with a single glowing object. Clearly these are objectively bad choices, unlike the design choices of my childhood, and the world is going inexorably downhill. Oh, I am so old and shriveled inside, it's terrible.
Anyway, the book is amazing and perfect and beautiful and so forth, and good enough to make the inevitable pangs of why can't I write like this, why can't I write fade into the background. I have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and I am unwisely spending part of it on three more Sutcliff books--tragically, none with beautiful 1990 covers, but such is life. I hope at least the fonts and page layout are as good.
no subject