Things I miss from my old apartment

not to scale rendering of the kitchen/living area. bedroom & bathroom not included.
imagine there are kitchen cabinets above the counters I've shown here

• My kitchen, which had roughly four times more counter space and kitchen cabinets as my current one, as well as a neat little nook for my trash can so it didn't stick out like a sore thumb. One side of it was a long countertop which served as a table & was fantastic for baking/cooking. I really miss that kitchen.
• My walk-in closet. It was this little cube off my bedroom that was like four or five feet square, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the use of space was so economical. There was a rack on each side, with a flat shelf on top that I put my sweaters on. I now technically have two little closets, but there's a lot of wasted space due to my house's weird shape & design choices. My current closets are too short to have a top shelf above the top racks. 
• My hall closet, which was small but fit a lot of things. It had one tall open space for a broom/mop, and the rest was partitioned off into shelves 10-12 inches apart & square. I have no storage area whatsoever in my current house. There is a metal garden shed next to my house for my use, but it's rusty and creepy and full of spiderwebs and really hard to open. 
• the turnaround time for things to be fixed. I got to know my apartment's handyman pretty well. It takes forever for my super to send somebody to fix my stuff, unless they might be in liability (aka that one time my carbon monoxide alarm needed a new battery and they thought I meant my smoke alarm). 
• My electric stove, which was sleeker and easier to clean (not to mention safer) than my current gas stove.
• the fact that I lived near families and got to see other people's holiday decorations and had children come trick or treating every Halloween. Every weeknight at 7 pm or so a child from the family who lived below me used to practice their trombone. My house is in a secluded place where I just have like 20 feet of empty land surrounding my house in two directions and 12 in another. It's pretty isolated and has kind of a neglected air, despite my best efforts. If any children go trick or treating on my street, they are too scared to approach my house. I don't miss the noise or my former neighbor's cigarette smoke or having to watch the amount of noise I made, though. 

Book review: Dream Thief by Stephen R. Lawhead

closest thing to my copy's cover

I believe this one was a thrift store find; it's been so long since I bought it I can't really remember. Summary from the back of the book since the Internet does not seem to know this edition of the book exists:

Someone was messing with Spence's head. Every morning Dr. Spencer Reston, dream-research scientist on space station Gotham, woke up exhausted. His head felt like an overripe cantaloupe ready to burst, and he had the nagging feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Only later, with all of civilization hanging in the balance, does Spence find out that he has become a vital link in a cosmic coup masterminded by a mysterious creature known as the Dream Thief. 

I'm going to stop there, as the rest of the 'summary' goes on to praise this book to the heavens, then calls DF "the most ambitious science fiction novel to be written by a Christian since Lewis", comparing this book to CSL's Space Trilogy. If you want to compare your Christian-flavored sci fi novel to CSL's Space Trilogy, you'd better have something to back up that claim. There are a lot of people who don't consider the Space Trilogy to be science fiction, since CSL is obviously more interested in the Biblical myth aspect of his stories than the actual science, to the point where I can't really disagree with critics who say the trilogy is just fantasy in space. However, I still really love these books and the way they combined Christian and Biblical myth with interplanetary travel and other well-worn loved sci fi tropes. Does Dream Thief live up to the Space Trilogy? Not really. Lawhead does weave Christian belief into his Mars exploration story, but not so much the dreams aspect, which is the driving force of the book. I liked the Mars aspect and what he did with that, but as cool as I found the Martian influence in certain figures in Indian mythology when I was actually reading it, it feeds into the whole "we don't believe brown people are capable of doing cool things so instead we're going to believe aliens did it" thing.

I found the pace of this book rather plodding. The Mars portion and race across the world portions were fairly well-paced, or at least not so poorly paced that I noticed the pacing, but the rest kind of dragged. It was all "bad dreams, am I losing my mind? Life on a space station, blah blah blah, that girl is cute but I don't want to fall in love with her, what is going on with me??" stuff for like half the book. Another plot point is Spence's struggle to believe in God.

The writing style was very mid to late twentieth century sci fi; even though this book was published in 1983, it felt a few decades older, to the point that the now-antiquated way of writing science fiction made me think the book was taking place in the late seventies or early eighties, even though it clearly wasn't. I would read about something having taken place x number of years ago, and I would think, "so that happened in the 1950s, maybe?" and then remember the book is set in '42 (2042? 2142? 3042? who knows) in an enormous fully functioning space station. The tone kept me from believing the story was taking place in the future, as did other things written into the book. For instance, Lawhead falls into the trap many other sci fi writers have of imagining communications technology as being way less advanced than even today. Spence's experiments' data is captured on paper scrolls (seriously) as well as being put into a computer because Spence likes doing things the old-fashioned way. Scrolls!? What is this, ancient Rome? Lawhead did get videocalls (skyping) right, though. Apparently they also eat aspic on this futuristic space station (a weird savory meat-based jelly very popular in the 1950s). Like ok.

The characters all feel like they're from some 1970s book; they're somewhat flat and trope-y. There's the all-American intelligent hero, the blonde blue-eyed babe he falls in love with, a burly giant Russian who speaks in an accent, a wise Indian guy who calls the hero Sahib for some reason even though this isn't a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel and if anything he outranks the hero and has twice as many degrees as him, etc. I just wikipedia'd Sahib and while it's definitely associated with British colonial rule, it's actually a respectful honorific. Adjani didn't start calling Spence that until they became friends, so maybe that's why. Still weird to me though. Besides the Indians Spence encounters in India, the only two characters of color are Adjani and his friend Dr. Gita, who is a fat, turbaned caricature. There are only two named women in this entire book that takes place in the future, and they are Spence's love interest and her mom. And they are totally described as looking like sisters. Yeah. Ari is also, it will not surprise you to hear, a damsel in distress. At least she's kind of smart, even though the only reason she's on the space station is because her father is the president of the space station. This is the future! It can't possibly be just one woman on that space station. It can't possibly be just one person of color on that space station. Spence shows some very twentieth century standard views on women, as do the villains, even the one that's very advanced. Oh, and they have to travel through India to stop the bad guys and it's just every horrifying, gross poverty-stricken stereotype about India that you have ever heard. Orientalism and othering abound. Would things really not have changed at all in the future? The entire period seems stuck in the past. All that stuff kept taking me out of the story.

Anyway. I sort of enjoyed it, and it definitely passed the time, but it should have been 2/3s of the length it was. I don't really like this cover; I think this one is more sci-fi-ish and interesting, as is this one, although I don't like the un-canon shape of the space station.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: body horror, gore, violence, casual sexism, racism. Clean of cursing and sex.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 27-29
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away