Keyboards and novels

Logging in from my new keyboard, whee! I like the shape of it, though the keys are a bit harder to press down than my last keyboard. And it's slightly more angled thanthat was, so I'm missing keystrokes every once in a while. Also, I keep hitting Page Down instead of End.

I also dropped by the library today to renew The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilord, which I checked out but haven't actually started yet. After all, I'm still at the last quarter of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a third of the way through Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, and about twenty pages into Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. Not to mention the twenty or twenty five fiction books I started before I went to college and still haven't completed yet, even though I'm finished.

While I was at the library I was seduced by the open sign in their used book buy-back store, where the price of one's soul is measure in amounts ranging from 25c to $3.00. For 50c each I picked up four books, and donated an extra dollar out of the guilty sensation that they probably couldn't even afford the electric and cleaning bill for this room with the meager amounts they make from it.

Based on the first sentence of the excerpt/summary on the back of each of these books, which should I start after I finish the ones I mentioned above?


"Dog of a Saxon! Take up your lance and prepare for death!"
-Ivanhoe

Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy is an epic of eighteenth-century Yorkshire life, and perhaps the most capriciously written classic of all time.
-Tristam Shandy

Selected in a readers' poll in 1975 as the greatest novel of imagination of all time, DUNE's creation of a richly detailed world utterly unlike our own is only the beginning of its achievement.
-Dune (my second reading of it, after 6 years)

Lyric and sensual, D. H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century.
-Lady Chatterly's Lover

[Poll #830936]

Edit: Not having read either, my mom votes for Tristam Shandy and my father for Ivanhoe... the first because it looks fun and the latter because "it will give you something to move happily away from with your next book."

Dancing With the Stars

Dancing With the Stars - my general thoughts from the first three weeks...


People who should be in the top 3: Mario Lopez, Joey Lawrence, Willa Ford

People who will be in the top 3: Mario Lopez, Joey Lawrence, Vivica A. Fox.


The reason I called out those three is that Mario, Joey, and Willa are three who look like dancers when they dance. They have the walk, the movement, the sinuous grace of their professional partners. But right now Mario suffers from his partner's bad choreography choices (she should know the rules) and Willa suffers from being a pretty little blond thing that's not quite as famous as the tv actors.

If it comes down to Joey and Mario, it will be the judge's favor and the fun routines of Joey's team verses the dimples and the smooth-as-silk cooperative movement of Joey and his partner.

I think Vivica will make it way to the top, because she's good and she's a judging favorite and she's pretty famous. But I don't think she's quite as natural at dancing as the other three are-- we see how hard she works to compete. It's impressive, but I don't think she'll be able to win.

The football player, Smith... he's good, certainly charming, but he doesn't have that full-bodied movement that Mario and Joey and Willa have.

These are my predictions. Damn my parents for getting me hooked on this show. Damn!