Battlestar Galactica: Sine Qua Non...

What is the title of this episode referring to?

This is maybe the first episode of Battlestar Galactica that I really didn't much like, except that Lee Adama was beautiful. ( But the characters... )

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library...

I have always loved libraries. Real libraries and fictional libraries. I have a mental list of special, magical libraries that I have read about: the library of Alexandria, the library of all the books never written that Morpheus keeps in The Sandman, the library of Ankh-Morpork with its orangutan librarian, the booby-trapped library in The Name of the Rose, the beautiful library in Checkmate where Lymond and Philippa have a showdown. Does anyone have others to suggest?

Add the Doctor's 51st century library to my list. A whole planet as a library - I have to love it! And it's beautiful. I couldn't disagree more with whoever it was in the Confidential - Phil Collinson, I think - who said that libraries were frightening and intimidating places, especially for children. As long as I can remember, libraries have been places of peace, comfort, refuge and excitement for me.

So... this story. ( I love the use of 'silence' as a threat, and something to fear. More than darkness. )

I nearly started this post by saying I had nothing to say about this episode till I saw the next part, as it's so much set-up for action and revelations still to come. Good thing I didn't embarrass myself by actually saying that.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (3x05) - Homecoming

Buffy 3x05 - Homecoming
~ ~ ~

The notion of "Homecoming" as in "Homecoming Queen" is a strange and foreign concept to me, familiar only from American TV shows. I don't even know what the word actually means. Never thought about it before.

This seems to be a continuation of the theme "How Buffy wants to be normal" and as such, I didn't feel very sympathetic with her in it.

( So, making the best of things... )

Booking Through Thursday...

From May 29, 2008: What is reading, anyway? Novels, comics, graphic novels, manga, e-books, audiobooks — which of these is reading these days? Are they all reading? Only some of them? What are your personal qualifications for something to be “reading” — why? If something isn’t reading, why not? Does it matter? Does it impact your desire to sample a source if you find out a premise you liked the sound of is in a format you don’t consider to be reading? Share your personal definition of reading, and how you came to have that stance.

This kind of question makes my head ache; It's all just semantics, isn't it? Normally I'd say reading is ingestion of information through the written word. But I might talk about having read an audiobook, which is entirely aural. And if someone had read a book aloud to me, I might say afterwards that I'd read it, even though the process wasn't literally a matter of reading. I'd say this because the material was originally in written form.

But if anyone wants to use another words, that's fine with me, too. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear, does it make a sound? If a book isn't made up of written words, is it still a book to be read?