What I did this weekend to make my room PRETTY.

So, last week I started installing shelving in the closets to get at least some of my clutter out of the way.

On Saturday I got home from wandering around, and the sun must have got to me, because I said, "Self! You know how you're not crazy about having the desk in front of the window because it's the first thing you see when you come in, but you don't have a better alternative? If you moved the manga drawers by the bed like a sort of night table, you could slide out the dresser and move the desk behind there!"

(I really liked the desk when I first got it, but it's too big, and I'm realizing that stainless-steel-and-glass isn't really my style. Plus, the chair is not attractive. Meh.)

My idea did not actually work. But once I started moving furniture, new possibilities kept suggesting themselves, till I finally hit upon a configuration where the futon was at the center of the room, and yet... I think it sort of works. And if it doesn't, too bad, because I'm not rearranging it again.

Not least because one of my bookshelves started teetering ominously. I think this is the one that came from Target, and it has outlived its useful life. Much as I don't want to replace cheap chipboard furniture with slightly better cheap chipboard furniture... that's probably where I'm going.

And then today I went to IKEA and bought a shelf and some boxes to put my knitting stuff in, which will free up space on my bookshelf (when I get rid of the plastic thing it was in before, anyway.)

What's left, I think, is art and curtains.

And, without further ado, ( some pictures! )

Tiptree Awards

I've just found out that one of the winners of this years Tiptree Awards is "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness; the other is "Filter House" by Nisi Shawl, which I haven't read yet.

I read Knife last year and I don't know why it didn't occur to me as a Tiptree candidate. It's all about masculinity and violence, how we construct them as being intertwined, and what that means for men; what that means for women; what that means for those who are in positions of powerlessness; what that means for girls, and especially for boys.

I tried to make an argument, when "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" came out, that if it didn't succeed on any other level, it did at least succeed in starting to deconstruct this image of masculinity where a man is someone who is capable of violence. And you can prove how manly you are by killing something.

But "Knife" is certainly better at that critique than "Sing-Along Blog." I like the book tremendously, for its marriage of suspense plot and introspection, for its not pulling any punches, even for how Ness has a genuine ear for regional dialects and the small variations between them. Really, though, it's only half a book, and I hesitate to judge half a book.

"The Ask and the Answer", the sequel, is coming out May 2009 in the UK, and not till September in the US; that's long enough to wait that I'm sort of considering ordering it overseas...

Honor list here, at the bottom. The only book on the list that I've read is "Tender Morsels," and I can't decide if it ought to have beaten out "Knife"; I had it picked as a Tiptree candidate because of the different ways the three main characters grow into womanhood, and as a feminist book I think it's a very good one, and on an aesthetic level -- as good as Knife is, I like Tender Morsels even more. But I don't think it explores or questions gender to quite the same extent as Knife, so I'm not entirely displeased.