Two Things

Musicwise, I sent off my Mixmania CD today. I am now paralyzed with self-doubt. It's not really evil enough, it's boring, it's stupid, it's horrible. The process was plagued with such technical troubles that 1) DrBob had to burn the CD for me, and 2) He's seriously talking about buying a new computer for me, a year and a month before I'm due (every 3 years = tax deductible). Wow. Anyway, I got it done, and sent it off. I hope the person who gets it doesn't despise me completely. Or if she does, I hope at least that she doesn't say so on her blog.

And bookwise, I may have found something. I wrote awhile ago about the difficulty of finding really good books to keep Ignatz engaged in reading. He has a phenomenal talent with language, I've never seen anything like it, but this talent has to be fed with cracking stories by brilliant people who love language. This is difficult, there are a lot of really great premises out there, brought to near-life by mediocre wordsmiths like Mary Pope Osborne and Holly Black and even Lemony Snicket. There are also a lot of brilliant wordsmiths who write books that are just too creepy for an eleven-year-old. Barbara Hambly is one. I've never been a big Stephen King fan, but he may be one as well. So anyway, I buy a lot of kids' books, trying to find the Right Stuff, the perfect combination of style and substance. Eoin Colfer and Philip Pullman are almost, but only Almost. (DrBob asks: are there any kids' books that aren't fantasy? alala replies: hellifiknow, it's all I read from age ten until... um, college, I think.)

So here's a good one: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie. Yeah, him. Which creates one foreseeable problem, as this is Rushdie's only children's book, as far as I know. And Ignatz is really not ready for the Satanic Verses. Hm. I wonder if Umberto Eco wrote anything for kids.

And the song du jour of the day. Bound in a Nutshell, by the Lightning Seeds.