Skyclad Scribble

Books are my Gods

This breathtaking place is a former Dominican church that was converted into a new retail location for bookseller Selexyz Dominicanen. More at Boing Boing

Tiffany!

Great news from Pterry:

Amazingly, Unseen Academicals is very nearly completion, only requiring one of those most magical of creatures – a five day working week with no other interruptions. But it’s well over 100,000 words and we hope to get it in no later a week after deadline, which by publishing standards is pretty nifty. Work on I Shall Wear Midnight will, in theory, begin immediately, but will probably be held up by the necessity to tidy up the office so we can at least find the kitchen. And the floor.

I <3 Tiffany Aching :D She’s the wonderful antithesis of annoying, uninspired brats like Harry Potter. I wish Terry Pratchett would re-write the stupid Potter books *sigh*

Book Army

Just read about a new book lovers site on Boing Boing:

Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books and we’re gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth. A month into public beta, the site’s already throwing up some curious connections. Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell? Charles Stross and Fyodor Dostoevsky? Anything goes: Bookarmy recommendations are generated by members themselves, who can mix and match similar reads from a full bibliographic database. The site also give readers space to host online libraries of their favourite books — and compares their tastes to refine its recommendations.

I’m not sure about it yet. I know they’re still in Beta (like Gmail is for 5 years now) but there are many small things making it look a bit… unprofessional: They didn’t bother to give their site a title (the browser just says “Default Page”), they use Blogger for their offical blog (Seriuosly, guys) and the site in general looks like a mess. I guess I can’t blame them for the fact that the abstinence porn crap Twilight occupies the first 3 slots of their top reading list and that there are hardly any German books in their database yet but all this put together… *sigh*

The Cement Garden

“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”

"I did not kill my father," this slim novel begins, "but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way." Soon the mother is dead as well, and four children are left to fend for themselves in a secluded house in a dying part of the city.

There’s Julie, the eldest, a ripe & willful beauty who’s almost a woman; there’s Jack, the narrator, a boy bewildered by his growing body & appetites; there’s Sue, bookish & ever-observant; and then there’s Tom, the baby of the family, who actually seems to get younger, regressing as the days go by. These four form an uneasy family, slowly learning to be self-sufficient in this strangely apocalyptic setting.

But an intruder in the form of Julie’s new boyfriend threatens their fragile stasis by asking too many questions. How long have the four of them been alone? And just what is buried under the crumbling pile of cement in the basement?

I read The Cement Garden when I was 14 and did a summer job in a small bookstore where I hardly had anything to do than reading books. It was an intense experience back then and you should give it a try if you’re into this kind of dark “social study” novels. There is also a film, in case you’re too lazy to read ;p And, yes, it has a lot to perv over… including girls looking like cute boys, cute boys dressing as girls, male and female nudity, masturbation scenes and Incest.

Show Me

Show Me! is a controversial sex education book by photographer Will McBride. It appeared in 1974 in German under the title Zeig Mal!, written with psychiatrist Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt for children and their parents. It was translated into English a year later and was widely available in bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic for many years.

A recent review by Dr. Russell A. Rohde claims that the book, “appropriately delves into the issues of breast feeding, adolescence, pubertal changes, menses, sexual anatomies, pregnancy, masturbation, contraception, sexual behavioral disturbances and venereal disease. […] I am not aware of any book comparable to this illustrated primer that fills the needs of sexual education so well.”

D. F. Janssen places it at the one extreme of a late twentieth century visual and textual revolution that enabled parents to illustrate information that up to that time had been transmitted orally. He sees the work as subversive not for its “too frank” portrayal of childhood sexuality, but instead for the primacy that the image takes over the text. In his eyes, the work “comes out of a culture with a long history of pathologising so-addressed ‘primal scenes,’” a history that became manifest in particular with regard to the works of Will McBride.

More at Wikipedia

Luna

I’m pretty sure she is into some kinky stuff ;)