Babylon 5 4.1-4.12

( spoilers )

Can someone go ahead and lay out the order of the post-series movies and where Crusade (I think that's the one) falls in for me?  At this rate, I should be there in a couple weeks, barring Netflix delays/bad discs.

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Set in 1930s Paris, Truong filters the world of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas through the eyes of their gay Vietnamese cook, Binh. Stein and Toklas, of course, were real, while Binh, I believe, is mostly fictional, based on the fact that the women did employ an Indo-Chinese cook.

The book is in first person and alternates between both past and present tense and in several settings and timeframes-Binh’s life with Stein and Toklas, his difficult childhood with an unloving father, and his time at sea in between, all seemingly narrated to a lover. While the first person present tense was handled well, it remains one of my least favorite narrative devices, and I often found it difficult to follow the tense and setting changes, especially as the different storylines weren’t in chronological order. This made it especially confusing to follow Binh’s relationship with Stein and Toklas, as his attitude towards them changes throughout the book, and so can seem inconsistent.

Binh’s voice is excellent and engaging, and the book well-written with a captivating world, but I’m afraid the stylistic approach often worked against me, I think more because of the tense changes than due to not telling Binh’s story chronologically.

I angst about the strangest things.

So, I'm reading Wide Sargasso Sea (note: Reading for a chat and dreading the fact that I will be reading about Rochester, even an appropriately negative take on him, but I really like Jean Rhys's writing so far.  Thoughts on her other books?) and I got it secondhand, and it has this passage from the first part underlines with a star beside it:

There are more ways than one of being happy, better perhaps to be peaceful and contented and protected, as i feel now, peaceful for years and long years, and afterwards I may...

And that is the only underlined passage in the whole book!  There are a few other bits with marks beside them, but nothing else underlined, much less with a star beside it, and the only writing in it  is a scribbled " safety    dream    p.60" at the very end.  (I'm not to page 60 yet, so I don't actually know what's being referred to.)  And so, naturally, instead of actually reading, I have spent the last while sitting here trying to figure out why they underlined it and what they thought.