Camille took her metal-tipped walking stick and her copy of The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft. It was the sort of thing she most liked to leaf through at special moments -- at breakfast, in her coffee break, or whenever she felt her heart sinking. ... It was an exhaustive listing with sections on compressed air, soldering, scaffolding, lifting gear, and scores of similarly promising headings. Camille read every entry from start to finish, including detailed specifications like jumbo weed hog, 1.1HP petrol engine, antirecoil bar, low-vibration solid transmission with reverse thrust, electronic ignition, weight 5.6 kg. Such descriptions -- and catalogs were full of them-- gave her profound intellectual satisfaction (understanding the object, how it fitted together, how it worked) as well as an intense lyrical pleasure. On top of the underlying fantasy of solving all the world's problems with a combined-cycle milling machine or a universal chuck tool, the catalog represented the hope of using a combination of power and ingenuity to overcome all of life's shitty obstacles. A false hope, to be sure, but a hope nonetheless. Thus did Camille draw her vital energy from two sources: musical composition and The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft. Ten years younger and she had also drawn on love, but she had really lost interest in that overused well. Love could give you wings, but it also knocked you off your feet, so it wasn't much of a bargain overall. Far less so than a ten-ton hydraulic jack, for instance.

"The Joy of Cooking" Irma S. Rombauer
"How to Kill" John Doe

supergee

class SpringGreetsTheWorld {
public static main(String args[])
{ return "Hello World!"; } }

Raka just strikes me as being another of those people who thinks it's appropriate to try to silence women by vicious attacks, and having run into that kind of online bully before, I'm (a) grateful Raka does not know my real name (b) uninterested in reading anything else Raka has to say.

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Breakfast of champyons - "Look at this bewildered kitteh and his mouf all covered..."

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• Earth's Children (series), by Jean M. Auel - The Mary Sue Adventures of Dr. Quinn, Cavewoman: filmed for Showtime late-night soft-core.
• Cerebus (comic book series), by Dave Sim - Mostly interesting for the story of its creation, the work itself swings wildly between brilliant and vein-tuggingly awful. Yes, vein-tuggingly. Imagine a small, painless incision, through which someone has hooked one of your more visible veins. Now imagine them tugging on that hook; not in a sharp, tearing manner, but in a persistent and determined way that introduces you to new and altogether unwelcome realms of tactile sensation. That's how bad it gets when it's not being brilliant.
• Dorsai (series) by Gordon R. Dickson - So you want to write sci-fi about geniuses-- world-changing, knock-yer-socks-off, walking buckets of brains. There are three standard ways to go about this:
  1. Write out the thought processes and dialogue of your cerebral superstars, clearly demonstrating their superior intellects. This is tricky, since you actually have to have some significant head-horsepower at your disposal. You don't have to think as quickly, completely, or correctly as your fictional creations; but you do have to do better than (regular character + thesaurus) - social skills, which is how Hollywood typically manages. Disch's Camp Concentration is a fair example.
  2. Focus on the spectacular results of the geniuses' efforts, directly touching upon their process and methods only in vague and oblique ways. Done well, this creates a sense of grandeur, like seeing the distant and hazy outline of something imponderable and awesome (like Herbert's Dune). Done poorly, it creates a bunch of nonsensical mystical claptrap (like everything in the Dune universe subsequent to the original).
  3. Place your eminently average yet sociopathically overconfident "genius(es)" in a universe populated with sub-morons. Spawn some implausibly unbalanced situations. Have your protagonist propose a solution that is either basest common sense, or stands defiantly against all rational deduction, induction, and probability. Write that the solution worked marvelously, which proves that your protagonist Just Knew Better All Along. Arthur Conan Doyle, I'm looking at you.
  Dickson invariably goes for #3, and is hailed as a giant of the sci-fi world as a result. Huh.
• Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan - Picture a boat. A boat that is slow. A slow, repetitive boat following an overfamiliar route, slowly and repetitively, on a boat. A boat that is slow. Then Nynaeve tugs her braid and crosses her arms beneath her breasts. On a slow, repetitive boat.
• The Black Company (series), by Glen Cook - It's unkindly reductive to describe Mr. Cook merely as the anti-Jordan. I'm just saying that if they ever shook hands, you would want to duck.