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Category: Reread

Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers

Strong Poison is a comfort book of mine.  I bought it at Bongs & Noodles one time on the way back from a doctor’s appointment regarding my tendonitis.  It was a very trying year – I was doing four AP courses and two honors ones, and I was very stressed about getting good grades so I could get into college – and anyway, we stopped by Bongs & Noodles and my mother suggested Strong Poison if I was after a new book.  I read it under my desk in calculus (bad, I know, but trust me, nobody was learning anything…

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Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, Pamela Dean

I do not appreciate casual slaps at the South for being racist.  I do not mind delineations of particular racist things the South has done and continues to do (that’s fair, although I don’t know why the North always gets such a pass), but I just can’t stand this unsupported assumption that the South is full of people ten times more racist than the rest of the country.  So I didn’t like it in this book when the Mysterious (read: deeply aggravating and nobody in her right mind would ever bother with him) Boy Next Door, Dominic, says a few…

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Death: The High Cost of Living, Neil Gaiman

For a quick interlude between new books, I paused and reread Death: The High Cost of Living.  Neil Gaiman has written two graphic novels about Death, and this one’s the one that’s actually about Death.  Although Death: The Time of Your Life is also very, very good.  In this one, we get the story of how Death becomes a human once every century, for one day.  This time, she meets a bored, slightly suicidal kid called Sexton Furnival, and they go around town looking for fun.  They look for the heart of an old, old woman called Mad Hettie, and…

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The Ordinary Princess, M.M. Kaye

I am so pleased I got this book!  I got it in hardback!  For eight dollars!  At Bongs & Noodles, totally unexpectedly!  This, and jPod, and a hardback of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (I know, right?), and a nice new copy of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and The Annotated Alice (the annotations are ever so interesting), and for twenty dollars altogether total, all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia on CD, read by cool people like Lynn Redgrave and Kenneth Branagh.  But of all these things, I am the most pleased…

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Well Wished, Franny Billingsley

Don’t you love it when you re-encounter a book you’d completely forgotten about?  I found Well Wished at the book fair, and as soon as I opened it I felt like I had been flashed straight back to second grade.  I read Well Wished for the first time in the library of my elementary school, one afternoon when I was stuck there for what felt like forever.  I don’t remember why I felt stuck – I like the library – or why I was there at all after school hours, but I remember this book.  Well Wished is about a…

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The New Moon with the Old, Dodie Smith

Ordinarily I only ever read this book when I have just finished I Capture the Castle and I need my Dodie Smith fix to continue.  It’s really not the most fantastic book you’ve ever seen, but it’s rather charming.  I am susceptible to its charms even when I know the entire book is totally far-fetched and these things would never ever happen. The book is about the Carrington family, whose father goes on the run for vague and unspecified money-type crimes, just after he has engaged a secretary/housekeeper type, Jane Minton, who plans like Thoroughly Modern Millie to marry her…

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Thursday’s Children, Rumer Godden

I forgot to write a review of this.  I was reading A Map of Home, and something about the family dynamic reminded me of Thursday’s Children – funny because it’s nothing at all alike – and I was suddenly possessed of an ardent desire to read Thursday’s Children again.  I have loved Rumer Godden since I was a little, little girl (Daddy used to read us The Story of Holly and Ivy around the fire, when we were small and it was Christmas), and this may be my favorite of all Rumer Godden’s books. It is all about the Penny…

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Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman

Aw, Season of Mists is great.  I like it so much.  It makes me nostalgic for Past Jenny, who was young and dumb and had yet to discover most of her now-favorite films and music and TV shows (including, of course, the other six volumes of Sandman).  Oh, wow, that’s really, really true.  I hadn’t discovered Joss Whedon yet, or The Office, or Doctor Who; I hadn’t yet seen any of my current five desert island DVDs (fifth series of Buffy, MirrorMask, Empire Records, Angels in America, and Before Sunrise); I didn’t know the Decembrists, the Shins, Neko Case –…

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The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones

I love the hell out of this book.  I read it to my sister when we were younger.  It’s all about this world, and it’s a fantasy world, and a bad, wicked man called Mr. Chesney is using the entire world to give people from the real world tours.  And so the entire world has to do what he says: the elves have to pretend to be wicked, and the wizards have to be Dark Lords and be defeated by the tour groups dozens of times every year; and the cities have to get sacked.  And some wizards get tired…

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Dream Country, Neil Gaiman

Evidently the stress of writing a nice coherent plot in The Doll’s House proved temporarily too much for Neil Gaiman, and he took a break to write some single-issue self-contained stories.  And these are some damn good stories.  Except I don’t like “Façade”.  I remember not liking it so um, I sort of skipped it this time.  I know!  I could read “24 Hours” but not “Façade”?  I don’t know what’s wrong with me. No, actually, I know exactly why I did that.  Lately I’ve been getting ready for bed around eight, then lying in bed reading for several hours. …

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