A pleasant evening with the Little Girls last night, who are not as little as they used to be. M seems always to have grown another inch every time I see her, even if it was only six weeks ago, and L has suddenly added a mental year or two. She's moved into the front bedroom, formerly her parents', meaning she has maximum floor space for all her tiny plastic toys, books, notebooks, pencils, and you name it. "L, when you get up in the night to go to the bathroom, how do you avoid stepping on all those sharp edges?" She gave me a haughty eight-and-a-half year old stare. "I have excellent night vision," she informed me. "And my room is very bright because of the street lamps." This is true; but then she decided to lower the blinds, leaving the room in darkness, and I cleared a path to her bed so her parents wouldn't puncture their feet when they came to kiss her goodnight on their return.

Finished JS&MN and Kate Nepveu's Tor commentary on same. This isn't exactly the pleasures of fandom, but something close: a work with scaffolding about it. Though I'm not sure what I mean by scaffolding: something that adds something else to the original structure. It's not just the book I read eight years ago. It's book and discussion of the book, and the BBC series and discussion of the series, and probably a slew of fanfics attendant on that in the course of time. More dimensions than the book, if you see what I mean.

Not that scaffolding is necessary for satisfaction. Ze has none and needs none, but then manga gives you pictures as well as plot. More to the point, Pratchett -- well, does have scaffolding, but doesn't need it. I don't think the movies or TV shows or whatever they are could add to the books; I don't need a visual component; fanfic is nice enough but not a necessity; and discussion... mh well. I have strong feelings about Discworld and no strong feelings about JS&MN; so people's opinions of the former are as likely to upset me as please me. Whereas people can discuss Norrell and Strange and Stephen and Lady Pole quite as much as they like, and none of it touches me.