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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Julian Yap's LiveJournal:

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    Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
    3:20 pm
    NPQiYBM
     "It is late now . . . It may even be too late, but shall we walk together a while, you and I?"
    Monday, February 13th, 2012
    10:19 am
    NPQiYBM
     Not a literary quote, but I liked it: In the context of the Greek Debt Crisis (but really, applicable to so much more):

    "It's almost like some people think if you squeeze a society enough, it will turn into a diamond instead of explode in your face."

    from @amaeryllis, Twitter
    Friday, February 10th, 2012
    8:13 am
    NPQiYBM
     [info]charlie_ego reminded me how much I like Slings and Arrows, this is not a quote from the show, but rather one of my favorite Shakespeare monologues from the show:

    To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

    And look: it's the scene:

    Thursday, February 9th, 2012
    3:35 pm
    NPQiYBM
     We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

    You have never spoken before.

    From Embassytown by China Mieville. Which everyone should read.
    Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
    7:24 pm
    NPQiYBM
     "You can think and you can fight, but the world’s always movin’, and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance"

    From Maurice and his Amazing Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
    Monday, February 6th, 2012
    12:41 pm
    NPQiYBM
     “The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”

    Do people like trying to guess these? I could just start putting the quotes in with attribution.

    This one is from Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow an amazing book if you haven't read it.
    Sunday, February 5th, 2012
    12:59 pm
    NPQiYBD
     “The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”
    ― Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree
    Saturday, February 4th, 2012
    1:52 pm
    NPQiYBM
     Work got a little busy, which means I've gotten shockingly behind on putting quotes in my blog, so thanks to [info]charlie_ego, [info]pantsie, Heather, and anyone else who has been picking up the quoting slack.

    To make up for it, I'll add in a couple of weekend quotes. A favorite couple of stanzas from a favorite poem:

    'O stand, stand at the window
    As the tears scald and start;
    You shall love your crooked neighbour
    With your crooked heart.'

    It was late, late in the evening,
    The lovers they were gone;
    The clocks had ceased their chiming,
    And the deep river ran on.

    ( Full poem behind the cut )
    Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
    7:40 pm
    National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month
     Another February, and yet another National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month. A little late in the day to play my regular guessing game, so I thought I'd just put up the entirety of a great poem I was introduced to recently. I was going to say "I especially like the Xth verse" but then I realized I like it all, equally.

    Poppies by Jennifer Grotz

    There is a sadness everywhere present
    but impossible to point to, a sadness that hides in the world
    and lingers. You look for it because it is everywhere.
    When you give up, it haunts your dreams
    with black pepper and blood and when you wake
    you don’t know where you are.

    But then you see the poppies, a disheveled stand of them.
    And the sun shining down like God, loving all of us equally,
    mountain and valley, plant, animal, human, and therefore
    shouldn’t we love all things equally back?
    And then you see the clouds.

    The poppies are wild, they are only beautiful and tall
    so long as you do not cut them,
    they are like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg
    but will scratch you if you touch back.
    Love is letting the world be half-tamed.
    That’s how the rain comes, softly and attentively, then

    with unstoppable force. If you
    stare upwards as it falls, you will see
    they are falling sparks that light nothing only because
    the ground interrupts them. You can hear the way they’d burn,
    the smoldering sound they make falling into the grass.

    That is a sound for the sadness everywhere present.
    The closest you have come to seeing it
    is at night, with the window open and the lamp on,
    when the moths perch on the white walls,
    tiny as a fingernail to large as a Gerbera daisy
    and take turns agitating around the light.

    If you grasp one by the wing,
    its pill-sized body will convulse
    in your closed palm and you can feel the wing beats
    like an eyelid’s obsessive blinking open to see.
    But now it is still light and the blackbirds are singing
    as if their voices are the only scissors left in this world.
    Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
    9:01 pm
    Favorite Books of 2011
     It's not too late to post about my favorite books of 2011 is it?

    So, in reverse chronological order, my favorite books I read last year are:

    1) Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy by John Le Carre. "There's a mole, right at the top of the circus." I actually don't recall it that line's from the book or the new movie, but Tinker, Tailor is the best spy novel I have ever read. It is, famously, the anti-Bond, with Le Carre's most famous character, George Smiley--an old, bespectacled spy who cleans his glasses with the fat end of his tie--and a focus on actually spy craft rather than running around and shooting things. Wonderful.

    2) The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. YA. If you've ever liked horses, Ireland, or interesting takes on traditional myths (in this case Kelpies) Then you should definitely read this book. Entrancing book set in a fictional Irish island where the men hold an annual race on carnivorous "water horses" that come out of the sea. The hero and heroine's voices are remarkably well developed, and Stiefvater does a great job making you feel like there's a lot beneath the surface of even the minor characters. Totally compelling. Plus the heroine has red hair, so Charlene and Nina, you definitely have to read it! Seriously though, this one was just fun and fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

    3) River of Gods by Ian MacDonald. A sprawling, multi-character, self-contained novel set in India 50 years from now, River of Gods is a tour de force. I ended up reading River of Gods because it was one of two books (the other being Hyperion which showed up on the "desert island" list of 5 different science fiction authors. This is one of those books which creates a future world which seems both incredibly different and yet completely plausible, and MacDonald does a great job in keeping you interested in all of his various narrators and weaving their stories together.

    4) Doc, a Novel by Mary Doria Russell. There was no way I wasn't going to love this one. The life of Doc Holiday, before Tombstone, as written by the author of The Sparrow. Lyrical and vibrant.

    5) Embassytown by China Mieville. My favorite Mieville book since The Scar and possibly my favorite Mieville book period. Embassytown is basically a classic high concept science fiction novel, but written by China Mieville. Amazing storytelling that makes you think about the nature of language.

    Honorable mentions: Guy Gavriel Kay's Under the Banner of Heaven doing fake history in the way only the master can, this time in fake China. I really liked it. The Best of Bicycling by various authors collecting the best essays from the last 50 years of Bicycling Magazine is a must read if you like bikes. It would have been in the top 5, but I understand that not everyone shares my biases. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Cat Valente would have been the best YA book I've read all year if The Scorpio Races hadn't come along, but is totally worth a read. I'm a sucker for Mike Swanwick, so it will come as no surprise that I really enjoyed Dancing with Bears. Special non-fiction prizes to Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn, Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, and The Big Short by Michael Lewis (but then I'll read anything by Mary Roach and Michael Lewis.)

    Dishonorable mention: I mention this because it's gotten a lot of good reviews. Ready Player One is the most pandering novel I have ever read in my entire life: high-school kid obsessed with 80s geek culture beats the man, wins the prize and the girl. Not to say that it isn't filled with some cool things, it is. And not to say I didn't enjoy it to some extent-I did. But it left me feeling terribly used afterwards.
    Monday, May 23rd, 2011
    4:44 pm
    What I'm Up To
     So, been a long time since I've posted, for which I really have no excuse. But anyway, I did want to do a quick post to give a little life update. As of today, I've moved down to DC and started my new job at the Office of Legal Policy in the Department of Justice. It looks like it will be a fun and challenging job, so I'm looking forward to it.

    Of course, right this second, I'm mainly looking forward to getting some sleep having come off slightly more than 24 hours of travelling.
    Saturday, May 7th, 2011
    9:23 pm
    Saturday, March 26th, 2011
    8:15 pm
    This makes me really sad
     Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

    There's really nothing I can say about this that other people aren't going to say better. But Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Hexwood were my favorites of her books.
    Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
    11:18 am
    Fun Student Movie
     You can sort of tell that it's a student film (set on campus, slightly pretentious), but I thought this was actually pretty good.

    Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
    9:18 am
    Bonus Quote
     I went to see Tom Stoppard's Arcadia last night, which is playing in New York for the next 15 weeks. It's a brilliant play, one of his best, with a great cast and I highly recommend you see it if you get a chance (I'll likely try to go again.) In any case, this quote stuck with me after the play, so I thought I'd share it

    "We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
    Monday, February 28th, 2011
    3:49 pm
    NPQiYBM: Closing quote
     Sonny said, "What'll we do with all that money? Huh? What's the first thing we'll get?"
    Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to fresh nightfall. The birds quieted as the last light darted away. Ree stood and stretched. Twilight dimmed the snow, but icicles overhead held that gleam.
    "Wheels."

    These are the last lines to Winter's Bone one of the best books I read last year.
    Friday, February 25th, 2011
    4:11 pm
    NPQiYBM: First Line Friday
     I had something else planned for today, but this opening paragraph was just so well written:

    How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?- planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is a matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.

    EDIT: This quote is the opening line to Ursula LeGuin's Rocannon's World. Her first science fiction novel (and really closer to fantasy than Science Fiction in many ways). I love LeGuin's prose.
    Thursday, February 24th, 2011
    4:38 pm
    So my computer is out of commission right now, and posting from my phone us a huge pain. So I'm afraid that identification of yesterday's quote will have to wait. For today, some attributed quotes about food.

    "Ye, the first parents of the human race, whose gourmandise is mentioned in history, you who ruined yourself for an apple, what would you not have done for a truffled turkey?"
    Jean Antheleme Brillat-Savarin
    Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
    5:47 pm
    NPQiYBM
     Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need- a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to live and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing

    EDIT: This is from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in A Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Which is a fantastically funny novel from the Victorian era. And also a partial inspiration for Connie Willis' also brilliant Historian Time Travel novel To Say Nothing of the Dog
    Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
    10:52 am
    NPQiYBM
     I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Concise History of Infinity (which I must freely admit is kicking my ass). This quote isn't from the book, but the book reminded me of it.

    It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
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