vale[ blog ] diary of the last hollow soul

I've finished Children of Dune. It took more than usual, this i started on friday and yet only finished it now on the way to the uni. It was good, for sure. But i have problems with it, just as i had with Dune Messiah. There are disturbing stuff, the characters taking something we don't know a bit about for granted, and most of all, that they are almost omniscient and omnipotent, somewhere near gods, though they're only humans (more or less) with specially trained cognitive (and in some cases physical) abilities, but still just a being started as a homo sapiens. The story is fascinating, though it's nowhere near the first and one and only Dune, nor is the story, but creating a masterpiece when it's about a series is not an easy task. Harry Potter is an example.
Now i'll start Brave new world by Huxley, i hope it'll be as good as famous it is.

Blogging again after the day of God, which i spent learning spanish all afternoon, after coming back from Recsk, where my grandfather died at the labour camp (know the phrase gulag?), during the travel and in the breaks of spanish reading Children of Dune (the third book in the series). Last week i forgot to mention that i finished the book i got from my ex-girlfriend, Vercoquin et le plancton by Boris Vian. I couldn't find an english title, so i guess it wasn't yet translated—though that'd be very surprising, since it's a fantastic one. A bit hard to digest, but hilarious. The ill sense of humour in every single bit of it (pay attention to the names!) almost made me fall off the chair—and that would've been troublesome, as i was on a stuffed bus on the way to the capital. On the one hand, it's very funny, but on the other hand it's a bit too much, that's why it took a year to read it. The style's not that charming, rather grotesque. The latter Dune books aren't as good as the first one either, though they are still better than many i've read, but not unputdownable (a word my sis' seen on an ad back in London), because there are many inconsistencies, references to stuff unknown and new phrases of which i can't decide if they're just a different translation of a known thing or something new. This sounds as if i didn't like them, but that's not the case at all. I'm lovin' it!

Not exactly how i planned, but not that bad either, thanks for asking. In my free four hours i checked an exhibition of cars from the traditional retro age ('40s-'70s), bought milk and bread at the local Tesco and brought back the Dune Messiah i borrowed monday from the nearby library. The exhibition wasn't exactly how i expected it to be. At first, i didn't know it was about retro cars—rather thought it'd be about concepts and such really interesting stuff, especially since it was the design week not so long ago here. It wasn't bad anyway, just not what i wanted to see then, and not at the price i'd ever be happy to pay for something unexpected. You can go and see the cool cars for yourself, they have a website too.
But at least i could buy what i wanted in the Tesco. It's surprising how disgusting people can get, supercilious and rude and… the typical jerk—it'd be if it wasn't a woman. How's the universal word? Butt? Anyway. I was really tempted to annoy that chick out of her skin, enrage and humiliate her, but i managed to withstand it.
And i couldn't borrow the Children of Dune because someone did so before me, and hasn't yet returned it, so i'm Dune-less right now. And dead tired. In the morning i didn't have a (co)coffee because i didn't have milk for it, so i wasn't surprised i was like i woke at dawn, but that i'm again like that at 11pm, after drinking a tea, that's a surprise. I really need to go to sleep early today.
Tomorrow i'll skip about the half of my math intro lecture, and will probably be late from the practice too because i'll be attending another lecture on cloud computing and sociology one of my teachers told me about. It'll be dozen times more interesting than that math stuff.

The day of the dead. It's so much different here than in the States or especially in Mexico. Every year we go out to the cemeteries where my maternal ancestors are buried, to another town and a village in the county. Today i didn't go, and naturally i regret it—as always when i don't do something. I wanted to stay to study, either learn spanish or do my homework to be handed in next week, but i instead just lay on my bed and read. And read. Oh, and i also read.
But before that i played a bit with my computer, because my firewall messed up, and it wasn't exactly the simplest thing at first to figure out what the problem was and then how to solve it. Finally i managed to uninstall and reinstall it, and works fine ever since. Its luck.
I was reading Frank Herbert's Dune. I read the first about thirty pages yesterday, but the remainder of the first book (roughly three hundred pages) i read today. Instead of working, naturally. It's almost as addictive as the spice.
I've also read this week scanlated chapters of Bleach and Naruto, and it left me with controversial feelings. The Naruto was better than the Bleach for sure, but the happenings are not exactly of my liking. I just hope it won't turn out as it did last time. And in Bleach, i finally want to see a bit of the desert world again. I'm reading the Dune, after all.