Sunday, March 20, 2005

Books, Art and Runaway Fingers



I'm so sorry. My blog entries haven't been themselves of late. I peruse through my own archives and can see that the really good entries were Powered by Angst. I should go out and make those stickers that people put on their souped up rides, except mine would say Riding the Mellow : Powered by Angst.

It'll be the only one in Kuching. It'll be better if I can use the same fonts people use for their Powered by [insert engine manufacturer here] stickers.

Obviously I'm messing around here. But it's true you know. Man's best works of art are powered by angst and pain. I guess I'm no different. Right now, I'm listening to Lifehouse again, and the lush music and lyrics are the bomb, man. I can here the melancholy behind the words and the arrangement. Imagine if Lifehouse wrote happy-happy-joy-joy songs instead. Ewwww....

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I find songs that are too perky to be really, really irritating. Maybe it's just me....

By the way, I'm not implying that I'm an artist in any way. Me no artist. I haven't created anything I would consider artful.

I had a lovely, if rather exhausting day yesterday. Straight off work, I rushed to Elephant to meet up with a bunch of people for a book meet. Jerome was there and Gette was there. Reen got there later. Fariah came also. And Henrick arrived last.

Fariah brought the books that I lent her before and my goodness, I never realized I had so many books. When I got home, out of curiousity I checked out my room and the bookshelves in the living room. Yes, I have a LOT of books.

I was once quite an avid reader. Still am, except that I don't really have the energy to do that anymore. Plus, good books tend to cost, especially the kind that I like.

I'm not much of your orthodox fiction reader. The only fictional books that I've read are the Dragonlance books (Fariah says there are new ones, continuing with the tales of Caramon's daughters ! There's even a female Raistlin in there. I want !), the Richard Marcinko books, some Tolkien and Lone Wolf, Greystar, Fighting Fantasy, Way of the Tiger and Grailquest game books.

I also used to read Transformers comics. But that's a given since what kind of geek would I be if I didn't read Transformers. Us geeks have an image to uphold, you know ?

So what kind of books do I read then, aside from things like Deploying Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and mainboard manuals ?

I like history. I love books on astronomy, archeology, egyptology and zoology. I like books that discuss alternate histories (Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods is one of the finest ever) and what-if scenarios. I read militaria and war stories from The American Civil War, WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam. Books by authors like Stephen Ambrose are the best ones. And I loved The Jungle is Neutral and Kanang.

I like anomaly, paranormal and occult books. I like reading about religion and not just Christianity.

I'm thinking about buying books again, expensive as they may be. They're like musical instruments, the more they age the more valuable they become.

This is so funny, I'm supposed to write about something else entirely when I started this post. My fingers just ran away from me there....

How many bloggers have this tendency ? I do this all the time.

Anyway, today I plan to watch a movie and have dinner with friends. You have a nice to now, ya hear ?

Current Music All in All Lifehouse Lifehouse

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