Avernus

...boy, good start on the restarted blogging front there. Well done.

So, I finished work on Friday, so I got a nice shiny cheque to pay in to the bank (and which the nasty machine in the bank managed to eat, but the nice man behind the counter produced the relevant key and fished it out again for me, so *that* was all right.) Finishing work also means I'm back at home (no more London air and noise! Hurrah! Back in the bosom of my family! Hurrah most of the time when they're not prodding me to tidy things when I want to read!), and have got rid of The Mind Numbing Boredom, at least until the *next* time when I am forced to steel myself to the Dullness due to the necessity of Cash. I have somehow managed to decant the majority of the boxes full of university stuff that have been sitting in my room all summer onto a variety of shelves in my room (all the boxes were full of books. Where the hell did I manage to get them from??), despite the fact that there is no spare shelf space whatsoever in my room. Ah well, double-shelving is my friend. Means I can't actually *find* anything any more, but it's better than my mother glaring at me any longer because she can't hoover fifty per cent of my carpet.

Going through the boxes has also shown me just how many books I have that I really really want to read at the moment, which was a slightly sobering experience. They're currently piled up in two teetering heaps on my bedside table, and I'm just waiting for some sort of Flat Stanley-esque cave in to occur in the small hours of the morning.

All other books are, however, being temporarily put on hold due to the fact that I am at present wading through Quicksilver, which is not quite as dangerous as it sounds. Not that it doesn't read well, or that I'm not very much enjoying it, because it does and I am. It is still, however, over 900 pages long, and my reading speed is nowhere near Onee-sama's, and I suspect has deteriorated in the last few years. Le sigh. It means that a 900+ page doorstop of quite densely written and intelligent prose takes me rather a lot of concentrated effort. I made it through about 250 pages today, but that was mainly due to single-minded attack, levened occasionally by a quick round of Devil May Cry 3 (which I have to play in brief bursts as otherwise the sheer @_@ *dokidoki* effect of playing video games does bad things to my adrenaline levels. It could be said that I play video games a little too whole-heartedly.)

I shall not, however, squee about Quicksilver here, as I am only a third of the way through it, and a sizeable proportion of the regular readership of this blog have either already read or damn well ought to do so ^_^ I shall simply squee briefly and concisely about my illogical love for Isaac Newton. He's just...so screwed up in so many creative ways ^_____^ And I know it's the fangirl in me talking, but I love his relationship with Daniel so, so much. Any scene with them in gives me the biggest Warm And Fuzzy Feelings. The bit with Daniel finding the beautiful portrait of him sleeping that Isaac's drawn, and then tracking him down in the chapel nearly mad with puritan guilt...and the gorgeous bit where Daniel goes from all the blood and short-sighted eccentricity of the Royal Society out to Isaac's beautiful country house surrounded by apple trees in blossom, performing beautiful experiments about examining the light of Venus:

'When Isaac had got his prisms situated in the window and blown out the candle, Daniel was blind, and painfully embarrassed, for several minutes - he was anxious that, lacking Isaac's acute senses, he would not be able to see the spectrum cast against the wall by the light shining from Venus. "Have due patience," Isaac said with a tenderness Daniel hadn't heard from him in years. The thought stole upon Daniel, as he sat there in the dark with Isaac, that Isaac might have more than one reason for wearing those golden spectacles all the time. They shielded his burnt eyes from the light, yes. But as well, might they hide his burnt heart from sight of Daniel?

'Then Daniel noticed a multicoloured blur on the wall - a sliver, red at one end and violet on the other. ... When Daniel looked, he realized he could see not only the spectrum from Venus, but tiny, ghostly streaks of colour all over the wall: the spectra cast by the stars that surrounded Venus in the southern sky. But spectra were all he could see. The earth spun and the ribbons of colour migrated across the invisible wall, an inch a minute, pouring across the rough plaster like shining puddles of quicksilver driven before a steady wind, revealing, in gorgeous colours, tiny strips of the pictures that Isaac had drawn and scratched on those walls. Each of the little rainbows showed only a fragmnt of a picture, and each picture in turn was only part of Isaac's tapestry of sketchings and scratchings, but Daniel supposed that if he stood there through a sufficient number of long cold nights and concentrated very hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case.'

Yes, I know, it's the sappiest bit in the *whole damn book* and not what you'd call generally representative, it still made me *so* happy I had to quote it ^___^ There are many, many other things I love about this book so far, but Isaac and Daniel, I'm slightly ashamed to admit (and thereby live up to my stereotype), top the list. And yes, I'm absolutely certain that things are going to go Drastically Wrong between these two at some point, mainly because dear Isaac is a freakin' loon, but at this stage I don't care.

Also, this bit. This bit made me laugh:

*Charles II and the Court are hanging about Daniel and Isaac's college in Cambridge and have decreed an Entertainment. Daniel has gone to winkle Isaac out of his alchemical experiments to come and socialise with potential patrons, and Locke has volunteered to give a summery of the play so far - he has not seen the play itself, but has seen several others with virtually identical plots and characters.*

'Locke: A ship has run aground in a storm, near a castle, the seat of a foppish courtier probably named something like Percival Kidney or Reginald Mumblesleeve -
"Francis Buggermy, according to the Playbill," Daniel put in. Isaac turned round and glared at him.'

It's just...so wonderfully Isaac ^______^

Yet again, that didn't turn out nearly as brief or concise as I'd hoped. Ho hum. I was intending to get some fic writing done tonight as well. *muses* What would little Puritan Milliard make of carnival Venice on his grand tour, I wonder...?