weekend hangovers, now with more allergens

Your trusty BondGirl is experiencing some hellacious allergies and has given up trying to do anything but monitor the weather channel's to do over Katrina (be safe, coastal kids), finish up the LBC reading and eat the occasional chunk of spectacularly beautiful Italian plum and sage focaccia from our local farmer's market. Again, if you've written me and I owe you email, I apologize and will be trying to dig myself out of the email hole over the next week or so. Once that's done, I'll likely be taking a two week or so rest period from the blog to finish up the book, which is demanding more time be made for it.

Anyway. The Grimm Brothers is a terror of mediocrity, all the more sad because it could and should have been wonderful. We also finally got around to watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which was the perfect anecdote; I loved it even more than I expected to. I disagree with all those who felt this movie wasn't up there with Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums: it is.

Two of the very best YAs of the year, Holly Black's Valiant and Cecil Castellucci's Boy Proof, have made the Book Sense Fall Kids Picks. (Eagle-eyed literaconteurs will note Dale Peck being recommended to the 9-12 set. It's never too early for "My First Altercation While Lunching.")

Darby over at Thumb Drives & Oven Clocks wants answers: Google comes up blank when you search for the phrase "literary representations of motion". This is a hole that I'd like to see filled, and I'm drawing a total blank. So I turn to you, oh vast, infinite, sexy Internet, and ask: where have you seen motion best depicted in fiction? (Or, really, in any written form; but I really want examples drawn from fiction, for reasons I can't quite explain.)

Jeff Ford's new book The Girl in the Glass (gorgeous cover, huh?), which I can't wait to read, is reviewed in this week's NYTBR, quite favorably--even if he is a bit bemused by some of the reviewer's reading. This reminds me that I've forgotten to point out something so long you probably already know it by now: Jeff has a new livejournal, worth checking out for a number of reasons, not least for the chupacabra update. (Chupacabra story here.)

Tricksy dictionary and encylopedia makers.

Best road signs ever. (Via Holly Black.)

Ben posts an overdue and hilarious little WordCon report, complete with Plaus Fab Hugo Award snippet:

My "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes", lost the Victor Hugo Award for Best Plausible-Fable With Philosophical Aspirations, to the marvelous "Djinni Wallet" of Lelly Kink. Lelly and I sat in the auditorium with Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer's-Alley, a jovial and clever, if somewhat tragic, figure. Soma was some kind of delegate or prisoner of the gargantuan rogue Wisdom Regent of Tennessee, Athena Crowe, whose excellent autobiographical vignette I had expected to win in our category.

It is always a dangerous thing for an office-holding political figure to become a writer, and there seemed to be a not insignificant chance that poor Soma would be eaten ("refactored" was the euphemism employed, I believe) for his audacity in failing to bring home a little silver rocketship; our concerns for him being somewhat allayed, however, by the competence and spirit of his wife Gwenda-With-The-Martini-Glass-And-.25-Beretta-In-Garter, who had a plan.

Pointers to some excellent, recent fiction online over at Short Form -- all worth checking out, and reminded me about the Saunders.

Abigail Nussbaum with more excellent recommendations, this time of short books that pack a wallop. Her recs will make you happy, but not give you hand pain: what more can you ask for?

And a quick reminder: Tomorrow's Kate Atkinson's drop-by at the LBC. The Fall selection will be announced September 15 and hopefully things will pick back up over at the site. Back to the blankety blank reading that goes along with all that....