Rodomontade: Extravagant boasting or bragging; bravado; boastful or bombastic language.
This word comes to you from Perfume. It kind of makes me think of gardening tools.
Perfume actually had a number of words I wasn't certain about although I didn't get the chance to write them all down. Most had to do with fragrances unsurprisingly.
Civet: A substance used in fragrances. Yellow or brown, "unctuous", and harvested from glands located in the anal pouch of the African Civet cat.
I don't think I need to comment on that. And my mother wonders why I prefer body sprays. I'm fairly certain they don't contain unctuous secretions from a cat's anal pouch. Wait, I gotta go check.
Anyway let's move on. I have a long day tomorrow.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I loved this book. Fair warning; it takes time and energy to read. A young man, Johnny, has discovered a manuscript that examines a film about a house where odd things were happening. It's not entirely clear that the film ever existed although the manuscript contains many references and reads very convincingly. A photographer and his family moved into a house in rural Virginia where a door appears out of nowhere that leads into a vast, dark labyrinth. The film is about the photographer's family and the exploration of the exploration into the frightening black space. The manuscript analyzes the film and the people in it. Johnny decides to edit what he's found and his project seems to cause a descent into madness. There are footnotes on top of footnotes and the original manuscript is interspersed with Johnny's increasingly incoherent ramblings. It's an impressive exercise in writing tales within tales. I have a fondness for the surreal.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I think everyone has read this trilogy by now but I still want to mention it. I found this book, as well as the two following, very engrossing. If you want a conspiracy story this is far better than Dan Brown. Again though, you need to have patience. All three are thick books and there is material that could probably have been cut out or streamlined. However, there's something about Blomkvist and Salander I found very engaging. They're different from your more usual hero and heroine. Neither are really interested in conforming to other people's views but they're not in your face about being different. Blomkvist is a very earnest person who wants to see justice done but he does it his own way. Salander just wants to be left alone but she still has a surprising number of people she can count on who ultimately pull together to help her. The books are well-plotted and the ending is very satisfying.
Fudoki by Kij Johnson. I'm going to slip this one in there. This is a magical-realism story set in ancient Japan. It's more like a fairy tale or a myth and mimics the logic you usually find in such stories very well. A fudoki is explained as being a cat's tale, the story cat's pass on to one another down through generations accumulating moments from each life. The cat the story follows loses her family and home in an earthquake and thus loses her fudoki as well. She sets out to find a new place and a new fudoki. Along the way she turns into a woman, a huntress, and she meets and deals with many people and not-people along the way. This isn't always a nice book; she's a cat after all and even human she acts like a cat. The fairy tale mist this book seems to wrap itself in dampens the occasional violence. I enjoyed it a great deal.
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