Just Readin'

Once again, I'm super behind on the popular books band wagon. For example, I just read Outlander by Diana Gabaldon two months ago (which, I remember, was super popular approximately six years ago). In that vein, I just finished reading Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, I'm aware that it became super popular circa 2004 and that the movie version is a cult classic. So, on average, it takes nine years for me to get around to reading a popular book. Anyway, I read  Howl's Moving Castle  and I absolutely loved it. I found it to be a charming and very sweet novel. In contrast to typical high fantasy novels, I found it to be a straight forward, enjoyable story. The book begins with  "In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three."   I was drawn into the novel immediately; the story was intriguing and funny and a joy to read. Jones mast...

So, I think Neil Gaiman is a genius -- and also a deeply disturbed individual -- and here's why. I just finished reading one of Neil Gaiman's newest books The Sleeper and the Spindle . I make it my business to pay attention to everything Neil Gaiman writes, however, if you haven't heard of this book, suffice it to say that it is a really, really twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty story. The premise of the story is that, about seventy years ago, a princess was cursed by a witch, causing her to sleep forever. The sleeping curse, which had previously been contained to the princess' castle, suddenly begins to spread throughout the world, causing many thousands of people to fall asleep and not to wake. A young queen -- who remains nameless -- sets out to wake the princess and lift the curse. I won't go into the details because I don't want to spoil the story, however, the conclusion of the story is basically the opposite of the Sleeping Beauty story in every wa...

So, I recently discovered the novel Katherine by Anya Seton. I don't know what it is, but there's something about historical fiction that was written in the 1950s that's just irresistible. I simply devoured this novel. Seton writes with true mastery and style (rare in modern historical fiction); she has a flair for description, and incorporates fact and fiction seamlessly while adding a deft touch of humor and magic. In case you don't know, Katherine is the best known work of author Anya Seton, a true master work in many respects, and considered a classic by many. The novel follows the story of Katherine Swynford, the mistress of the famous John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Considered one of the greatest true medieval love stories, Katherine was Gaunt's mistress for nearly decades before he married her in what can only be described as a fairy tale ending. This fascinating book tells Katherine's story through war, revolt, heart break, and reconciliation. ...

I came to this wonderful book in a convoluted way. A few months ago, I set a google alert for Downton Abbey , because, let's be honest, who doesn't want to see who Mary Crowley marries? Anyway, the alert turned up a lot of interesting articles about the show, but it also turned up a few articles about Jessica Brown Findlay. Findlay played Sibyl Crowley on the show, but she left in season three to explore other acting opportunities. I'm so glad she did. A little while ago, I read an article about Jessica Brown Findlay's new role in BBC One's TV series,  Jamaica Inn . I was like, 'hm, that sounds interesting', and proceeded to look up the show on Wikipedia, whereupon I learned that Jamaica Inn was actually based on a book of the same title. I have since read that book and let me just say: It was amazing. Maybe it's just that I haven't read a book for pleasure in a while, but I can honestly say that Jamaica Inn was one of the best written, ...

So, I'm not usually a big fan of short stories, but recently I've been reading Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things , a collection of short fiction. Now, I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again: everything Neil Gaiman writes is genius ! And Fragile Things is no exception. It's one of the strangest books I've ever read, but I loved every minute of it. It was just so wonderfully weird. I mean, the only way I can really even explain this book is that it was like taking a walk  through someone else's dreams. It was that surreal. Actually, given the cover art, I think that that is actually quite a good analogy. Whoever designed the cover of this book had a really good idea of what it was about and what it was trying to accomplish. I love how it looks like the contents of his brain is draining out onto the book. It's such a powerful image. Really good writing, I think, should be a walk through the writer's mind, and I think Neil Gaiman accompl...

In case you don't read my main blog , let me tell you that I'm a huge fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire series and the Game of Thrones TV series. One of the reasons I like it so much, is that the characters are so realistic and well rounded, especially the female characters. So often in fantasy novels that take place in a medieval world, the female characters take one of three forms: the tough but noble  do-gooder, the evil queen, and the locked in a tower princess. I think this is partly because  medieval writers had an extremely limited vocabulary when describing women, so fantasy writers who look back to that time period think that only two types of women existed in the medieval age: the paragon of virtue and the disgrace to the human race. What's so often ignored is that no one individual embodies any one of these archetypes. Real people aren't just evil queens or damsels in distress; they're a mixture of both. And no character exemplifies that princip...

I was first introduced to The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff by the movie version of the book, The Eagle . The Eagle was a great movie, mostly because it involved face paint and Channing Tatum. So, after I saw it, I decided to read the book, and, after I read the book, I hated the movie, because the book was so much better. The Eagle of the Ninth tells the story of a Roman centurion, Marcus, stationed in Roman Britain. Marcus comes from a long line of soldiers. His father marched with the Ninth Legion, which disappeared in the old Roman province of Valentia. Marcus is haunted by the memory of his father's legion and longs to lift this shame from his family's name. After Marcus is injured in battle and forced to leave the army, he decides to journey north of Hadrian's wall to try to recover the lost Eagle of his father's legion. What follows is a stunning adventure that spans the length of Britain. The story is that the author actually based the book o...

So, the other day I was on Facebook, you know, like your typical college student with three billion pages to read a night, and I found one of those list challenge where you go through a list of things and mark all the things on the list you've done. Anyway, I found one that was called '50 Books to Read Before You Die'. Anyway, I read a lot, so I thought it I would try it, but out of 50, I'd only read 19, and, while most of the books on the list are famous and well known and note-worthy, I don't think my life would be significantly different if I hadn't read Frankenstein. Which, by the way, was like the dullest book I've ever read. I don't really like this whole idea of list of "necessary" books. It's hard to create a list of books that everyone should read before they die because, obviously, not everyone likes the same sort of thing. That's not to say that I don't think dark or boring books can be valuable. For examp...

I realized today that it's been a while since I wrote one of these favorite book blogs. So, today I want to tell you about The Voyage of the Dawn Treader . The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of the books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, technically, it's the third book in the series (in publication order), but it makes the most sense to read it as the fourth book. It frustrates me that, when people think of The Chronicles of Narnia , they automatically think of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe . Not to say that it's not a great book, but the Narnia books are so much more interesting, so much more complex that. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is so monumental in scope . They made a movie version of it, but it didn't really capture what the book was all about. They tried to make it an adventure story, which it is, but it's so much more than that. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we see so much more of Narnia than ever before. It really begins to tak...

So, to combat the great injustice done unto the human race by Showtime when they denied the world a fourth season of The Borgias , I set out to read all the books ever written about the Borgia family ever. That goal lasted about five seconds because, let me tell you, there are a lot of books about the Borgias. They're so delightfully scandalous. Anyway, before I totally gave up on that goal, I was able to read Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant. Normally, I don't read recent releases, but I have to say, in this case, this book totally lived up to the hype. Blood & Beauty is a compelling, vividly imagined portrait of renaissance Italy at it's best, worst, and smuttiest. I loved it. Blood & Beauty wasn't the first book I read about the Borgias, so I knew the basic plot line going into the story, but what shocked me was the depth of emotion that Dunant was able to summon when writing about people so long dead and, more importantly, so long disliked. Like, I h...

When I was working on my historical fiction blog last week, I noticed that my original list of recommendations was like 90% Jean Plaidy. Quite simply, Jean Plaidy is the queen of historical fiction (which is funny because she writes about royalty a lot). In case you've never heard of Jean Plaidy (not her real name), she was an English novelist who wrote tons of books under a bunch of different pseudonyms, but her historical fiction was mostly written under the name Jean Plaidy. The first book I read by her was Victoria in the Wings , a novel about the succession crisis that resulted in Queen Victoria's birth. With a title like Victoria in the Wings, you would think that the book would mostly be about Queen Victoria, however I was surprised, though not disappointed, to realize that that was not the case. Like a lot of her novels that I later read, Plaidy approaches the historical figure by first firmly establishing the political and familial setting. I appreciate that ...

So, in the spirit of continuing on the theme of 'historical' blogs, I have decided to give you some historical fiction recommendations. As you may have guessed from my frequent rants on history and historical inaccuracies, I rather enjoy reading about history. As a result, I read a lot of historical fiction. And, when I say a lot, I mean a ton. So, without further ado, here are some of my recommendations for good, historical fiction reads.   1) The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory - This was one of the first historical fiction novels I ever read that was written for adults. While it was quite a shock for a twelve year old, after re-reading it as an adult, I have to say that is quite an entertaining book. It tells the story of Mary and Anne Boleyn, two girls locked in a fatal battle for a king's affection. I think the struggle with historical fiction is always, first and foremost, humanizing the characters. This book especially does a wonderful job of humanizing Henr...

I recently finished reading a book that I didn't think that I would like. The Night Gwen Stacy Died was an unexpected gem. I originally checked it out of the library because, excusably, I thought it was about Spider Man. Incidentally, I still think that someone should write a novel about Spider Man, but I'm glad that Sarah Bruni wasn't the one to do it. Her novel so was so much better, so much stranger, sadder, and romantic. The story follows two unlikely allies: 'Peter Parker', a man who has spun a comic book fantasy life in his mind and believes himself to have something akin to 'Spidey Sense', and Shelia, a high school student who dreams of escaping her small town life. The two throw their lot in together when they rob the gas station where Shelia works and run off to Chicago to save the life of a man that Peter has been dreaming about for months. Peter's dreams have a nasty habit of coming true and, after having a premonition about a man who tri...

The most terrifying book I've ever read was written for 9 year olds. I just finished reading Coraline , by Neil Gaiman and let me tell you that Frankenstein and Stephen King and the movie Gothic (which was perhaps the most disturbing thing I've ever seen) have nothing on this book. In case you are unfamiliar with the story of Coraline; the book is about a little girl who finds a doorway in her house that leads to an alternate world where everything is the same but different. There, Coraline meets her 'other mother' and 'other father' who have buttons for eyes. Anyway, Coraline's other mother kidnaps her real parents and tries to make Coraline stay with her forever and sew buttons into her eyes and make her play with singing rats (not singing rats in a cute way either, singing rats in a Kujo sort of way). The other mother has a whole closet full of dead children and she keeps their souls in marbles. The weird thing is, if I read this about eight years ...

So, today I saw the new The Great Gatsby movie, to which I say "eh". I love the novel, but the movie version of The Great Gatsby sort of disappointed me. Sure, the movie was really cool from a visual standpoint, but it wasn't The Great Gatsby as it was written. They really took the substance out of the story and made it one long frat party, set to hip-hop music. Which didn't make a lot of sense to me, given that The Great Gatsby is supposed to be set in the 1920s. Apparently, no one told Baz Luhrmann. The problem with his adaptation is that Luhrmann was so heavy handed with the story. I mean, if the metaphors were any more obvious, they would jump out of the screen and beat you over the head with a herring. However, all those things are forgivable. What was not forgivable was the casting of Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. I say that not because his acting was bad, but because there is no place for Spider-Man in The Great Gatsby. Seriously, that was practicall...

Poet William Blake once said of John Milton's Paradise Lost , "he [Milton] was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" (side note, I actually had to write a short paper on this quote for one of my English classes a few months ago and it was a thoroughly deplorable experience). Though I'm not going to talk about Paradise Lost today, this quote rather reminds me of a book I recently read: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. That's not to say that the angels are the bad guys or anything like that. Actually, if I had to pick, I'd say that the demons come across as rather villainy (shocking, I know). However, they're not the real villains of the story. Actually, thinking back on it, I'm not really sure who the villain is in this story.  In a nutshell, without giving away anything, the book is a comedy about the apocalypse, the son of Satan, and an angel and a demo...

So, I just finished reading Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris, the last book in the Sookie Stackhouse series (actually called The Southern Vampire Mysteries , but I don't like that title, so I'm going to ignore it), a series I only started reading after I watched the TV show, True Blood . Now, I have to admit that, while usually I'm a proponent of the whole the-book-is-better-than-the-movie thing, I liked the first season of True Blood more than I liked the first book. And I definitely liked the second season way, way more than I liked the second book. Despite it's unabashed use of profanity, gratuitous violence, and the tendency of many of it's characters to do unfaltering things with their hair (season one Eric, I'm looking at you), I like True Blood . But after season three, the TV show definitely took a bit of a nose dive. The sixth season of True Blood is about to start and I'm definitely up to giving the show another chance, but it seemed to ...

So, yesterday I read Lysistrata (I can say that because I've recently discovered that if you cut out video streaming on the internet (aka YouTube), you can read a lot more), and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. Not only was it a quick read, but the version I read had illustrations by Picasso, which was a real treat. Considering that, previous to this, my only exposure to ancient Greek drama was when I read Oedipus Rex , Oedipus at Colonus , and Antigone in 9th grade English. Now, I understand that most people would probably consider Lysistrata slightly inappropriate for high school, given that it's essentially about a sex strike. However, I have to say, I think The Three Theban plays are far more disturbing. I mean, if it's okay to read a play centered around incest, I think it's okay to read a play about a bunch of women who decide to go abstinent. I think that's a better message for high school kids. Besides, the play is defined as a comedy, so I t...

So, I read a lot. I read a lot of different genres and a lot of different authors and I have to say, I have never stumbled upon a writer I identify more with than Neil Gaiman. I mean, when I read his writing, I just get it. It's like "yeah, my sentiments exactly" or "yeah, I know whatcha talking 'bout". Well, maybe not exactly like that. Anyway, I'm working on reading all of his novels and I just finished reading Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch . I'm going to write a full review of it later, but I don't think the apocalypse has ever been so funny. In fact, I usually find it to be rather somber and distressing for some reason. Huh. I would say that it sort of reminded me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , but I don't like comparing books in that way. Let's just say, that if you like the Hitchhiker's Guide, you'd probably like Good Omens . Actually, if you have a basic understand...