dream_book epitome of incomprehensibility A dream_magazine informs me that the latest book by Christian Bök is called AE II. It isn't in his usual avant-garde style with a playful and/or pretentious bent. Instead it's a long lyric poem about imagined future technologies. 241019 ... raze two in the last few nights alone, both with inscriptions from the author, though i only remember one of those now: "for erica, not formerly." i wish i could retain more of what i read in dreams. i think sound has always seeped into me more readily than text, whether i'm awake or not. 241019 ... raze "one small saga" by bobbie_louise_hawkins became a book not written by her, but a biography penned by a close friend instead. it was revealed that bobbie told the providers of a lucrative grant a new book of poetry was finished when she hadn't yet started writing it. later, she admitted the book remained unfinished. at the bottom of one page, her friend wrote: "traveled so far in search of love and found lonely." in the audiobook version, he replaced the word "lonely" with "loneliness". while it was the more grammatically sound choice, i liked it better when he was flaunting the rules of writing, embracing the beauty of being wrong. 241021 ... raze a replacement copy of "the actual adventures of michael missing" showed up smelling of mildew, just as the first one did. 241022 ... rubydee Right now I need this imaginary patchwork book: A smattering of the sweetness of Annie_Dillard, the high absurdity of Tom_Robbins, the immersiveness of TC_Boyle, a little touch of righteousness a_la William_Least_Heat_Moon some scathing misanthropy from Paul_Theroux, a touch of Hemmingway’s prose and the descriptiveness of squalor by John_Steinbeck or Charles_Dickens 241022 ... e_o_i The vine that was really a dream_slide slid me into a dream_book. For children. Illustrated with photo-realistic drawings that sometimes turned into videos where I played a minor part. It was a continuation of The Neverending Story. The protagonist was a boy, I remembered from the movie, but the most powerful "good" character was a girl called Sara. She had the power to change people's dreams and most of the novel took place in a dream world. I decided that she was the inspiration for L. M. Montgomery's "Story Girl" in the novel of the same name. Chronology be damned. But I was aware of this dream_book's timeline. It was set 20 years after the original story where Sara was already grown up...at least 18 or 19...so why did she look so young now? She and her two friends. I'm in a video with the three women. Closer up, I can see a couple of under-eye shadows, but the three still are shockingly beautiful. And that's fair, I think. Just because I look younger than my age doesn't mean I'm pretty. Other people can be pretty. And I like how the author keeps two of the women single; not everyone has to get married and have kids. One of them has a young son, darker-skinned than the mother. He's about four. He asks about the time of the Neverending Story (the Neverending Story Girl)? His mother, who's probably Sara, starts speaking, but I'm out of the video - back in the book - and the voice of the narration takes over. It sounds like the author, who sounds like C.S. Lewis. "This is 1965." Cue a photo montage of poofy hairdos, fluorescent knee-length dresses, and television sets. "Twenty years ago, things were more innocent..." Maybe "innocent" wasn't the word. But something like it. And I think - 1945? The end of World War 2?? Granted, there was less TV. Anyway, it's the Christian author's intention to tell a moral story. The moral? You shouldn't trespass. If you do, a vine from an artificial tropical rainforest will curl around your leg with magical speed and stop you from going further. Or fling you somewhere you can't control. See dream_slide; seesaw back; wake up. 241127 ... e_o_i A large-format hardcover book is leaning against a box on my bedroom floor. My mother is at the door, talking to me about a craft_fair we're going to, but I'm not fully listening because the book title puzzles me: Virginia Woolf in the Time of Trump. If it's the Trump I assume it is, their lifespans did not overlap. Maybe it means reading Virginia Woolf in the time of Donald Trump, sort of like the title Love in the Time of Cholera. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading The Da Vinci Code in the Vatican. (No, that's too on-the-nose: the two things have to be somewhat surprising put together, not merely representative of opposing viewpoints.) Anyway. I'm embarrassed to have my mother see it. She'll think I'm obsessed with the man. Don't I have two other books about Trump in my room already? ... In real_life, I have just one. One that he wrote, at least nominally, called Think Big and Kick Ass. David found it in a giveaway box and thought it would be a funny thing to give my brother one Christmas or birthday (while still giving him an actual, wanted gift). The brother didn't react much, just rolled his eyes and gave it back. Then David said I should write a parody of it, and I came up with a title: Think Ass and Kick Big. I am infinitely creative, you see. But everything_reminds_me... Eh, fuck Trumblebum and forget David Nowbritish. No, don't forget. But don't mope like a dope with no hope of soap, or you WILL plope. (What's plope? I'll put it in my mom's faux-swearing dictionary. In the middle. Before yeesh_kabibble.) 241211 ... raze a work of political satire by mandy moore: "bill clinton, leave mindy alone, or i'll tear out my own eyes". 241222 ... e_o_i My Neighbour Is a Dragon A children's book that reveals bit by bit that the aforementioned neighbour is, indeed, a dragon. It has a refrain-like structure, at first revealing characteristics that are plausibly non-dragon-like and then getting more and more more dragonish, like so: "My neighbour has a plume of smoke floating out from his house..." "My neighbour has a long, spiky tail..." The book seemed very real in the dream, something written by Robert Munsch, perhaps (but that association is mostly from The Paper Bag Princess). In any case, it was something two adults had previous knowledge of and could discuss over dream_lunch. 241226 ... e_o_i Books with an s, this time. Three piles of Nancy Drew books I discovered under my bed. #2 in the original series involved a murder. At first I was surprised since I thought the old series contained zero murder, but then I considered, "Well, maybe the OLDER old ones were more of a free-for-all." The title? Something like "Oh No! A Murder!" It had me giggling when I woke up. 250116 ... e_o_i Then there was one from a later series called something like, "Traitors, Spies, and Lesbians." Also maybe seamstresses. I don't know. I do know that it was marketed as a "Yin-Yin" tale, which didn't refer to WLW pairings but to its narration: it was told from the perspective of the bad guys. I was curious whether Nancy Drew and the woman traitor/seamstress/spy had a thing for each other, but I woke up before I could find out. 250116 ... raze a biography of skip spence. it wasn't the recent cam cobb book. it was something else, with a long title like: "the wild times, high life, and slow slide out of the sky of skip spence". it was almost shockingly cheap for a massive seven-hundred-page-plus hardcover tome. the list price was nineteen bucks in canada, but a red sticker on the head told me it was on sale for eleven (down from twelve). i skimmed it a little and found the appendix to be lacking. there was a strange reference to sting. and there were several pages at the back left blank for notes, with only dotted lines to mark the white space. but it felt like a solid buy. 250119 ... e_o_i (I like the "slow slide out of the sky"! It's always a little disappointing when interesting people get boringly titled autobiographies IRL.) A dream_friend owns a long essay in book form by Karl Marx, published before he wrote Capital and the Communist Manifesto. It explains why he thinks god doesn't exist. But the title isn't obvious. It doesn't say anything about atheism or philosophy. Instead, it has some vague, general word like "methodology," which at one point changes to "mathematics" for no discernible reason. It's frustrating because I have to return this book to the dream friend, and it's hard to keep track of if the title keeps changing. 250120 ... raze a book in the middle of a field: "over the edge (the security shop)". i think it had something to do with the mafia. 250125 ... raze robert forster's "grant and i" was a battered paperback with a reference to joni_mitchell on the final page. i had a hard time tracking down the photo insert. when i did find it, what stood out was an image of robert seated on a drum throne beside a younger woman he was playing second fiddle to at a tiny desk concert, an egg shaker in his hand. the caption read: "being kept in this photo is a crime." one chapter was titled "i, petty". in it, he wrote about a gig the go-betweens played and how he "gusted". i discovered it was a former library book, with the card still in its pouch. in a decade it was only checked out by five different people. a jagged tear kept me from seeing their names. it looked less like a laceration made with the fingers and more like someone took a bite out of the thing before it made its way to me. 250203 ... raze a nameless perspective-shifting ya novel. one character was a second grader who talked about making the nostril of another student "water like a crying eye". i stopped reading at page 106, which was exactly the halfway point. 250303 ... raze two copies of the same white paperback poetry collection, body bowed, with some of the words crossed out and replaced in the author's hand. 250315 ... raze hybrid work by cormac mccarthy — "carved clean: poetry, prose, and other memories". reviewers claimed it wasn't some of his best work, but i wanted to read it anyway. 250407 ... raze a compendium of jim morrison's late-period poems was also a selective biography. i never got a look at the title. 250519 ... ovenbird A slim hardcover with a splash of red on the cover was stolen, along with my pizza, while I was distracted by a wall decorated with tinsel and a creepy clown mask in the used bookstore I was perusing. I don't know what the book was about, but I was looking forward to reading it and was very sad it was stolen. 250519 ... e_o_i Two of mine have been dream mysteries, but when I'm a surprised participant in a dream_mystery, no titles are offered. 250519 ... e_o_i A few days ago, I expressed frustration with my dream_mind for offering me lovesick obviousness and unfulfillable wanderlust. Apparently, my dreams sometimes respond to what I write on blather, because they sent me this palate cleanser. ... At first it's not a book. I'm me, and I'm going through the dark triangular passage I found at one end of the crawl space in my childhood bedroom. (There was and is such a passage in real_life, parallel to the upstairs hall; it led to an unfinished "secret_room" that later got considerably narrowed when my parents used that space to expand their closet.) In this dream, I was a child again and two other children, a boy and a girl, accompanied me. The passage continued and widened into a tunnel bottomed by a black-asphalt race track, a glow-in-the-dark line down its middle. Part of me was afraid. The whine in my ears, something that doesn't usually show up in dreams, showed up. It echoed the median line shading from yellow to red. I feared going this far into the unknown alone. But I wasn't alone. The other kids were with me. We emerged into the sunlight, into a neighbourhood of curving, cozy streets. It seemed to be a product of the boy's imagination since all the street names were variations on "Butt." I told him this was silly of him, and as I walked on the names started sounding like real names. We realized that this was an alternate universe accessible only through certain portals. We became characters in a book, three friends united by our secret knowledge. But this unity was threatened when the other girl, Wanda or Wilma, moved away to Smiths Falls, Ontario. Would there be portals to alternate universes in Smiths Falls, Ontario? Yes! It wasn't the same alternate universe. In different places there were portals to different ones. A book cover briefly glimpsed showed a girl and her dog - maybe inspired by the Wilma in Gail Carson Levine's book The Wish, which is set in a world that's mostly like the real world with a bit of added magic. 250525 ... raze a new biography of paul mccartney was built around his first major interview in fifteen years. paul is apparently less forthcoming in my dreams than he is in the waking world. it looked like there was some interesting information in there, but all i really wanted to do was look at the pictures. there weren't any. 250526 ... ovenbird A man I meet in a very fancy apartment is carrying a copy of the two volume compact Oxford English Dictionary, complete with its box and accompanying magnifying glass. 250526 what's it to you? who go blather from