Some of you may recall Heidi Heilig from her previous duology, TIME TRAVELING PIRATES (also known as The Girl from Everywhere and The Ship Beyond Time), and she has returned with a whole new series that won my heart before I ever began it by including music and script pages and letters as well as the straightforward narrative. For a Muse of Fire is about a girl called Jetta whose family is the most renowned troupe of shadow players in Chakrana. She and her parents hope to use their art to gain passage on a boat to Aquitan, where it…
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Oh how I love a book that can speak unhysterically about the hysterical awfulness of living with a severe mental illness. Em and the Big Hoom (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is a son’s story of his manic depressive mother and his family’s life with her. Through conversations with his mother, Em, about how she met his father and the course of her mental illness, we see the toll that Em’s illness has taken on her and on her family. Hat tip to Shannon for the recommendation! Though the book is occasionally disorganized, as Pinto jumps around in time…
10 CommentsBefore writing about people writing about parenting, can I say, happy anniversary to my own lovely parents? Happy anniversary, Mumsy & Daddy! Y’all are the best ever! Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, who are married and writers, both wrote books of essays about parenting and family. I checked them out of the library together. Waldman’s book, Bad Mother, had eighteen chapters and an introduction, and Chabon’s, Manhood for Amateurs, had thirty-nine chapters. So I would basically read a chapter of Bad Mother and then two chapters of Manhood for Amateurs until I had finished them both. This was very pleasing…
34 CommentsRemember when I said I love y’all? And one of the things I said was that y’all have offered me books just because I said I really wanted to read them? Well, Poppy Shakespeare is one of those. raidergirl at an adventure in reading reviewed it a while ago, and I had a moan over the fact that my library hadn’t got it and wouldn’t order it (my library has a function where you can ask it to order books but they have never, ever listened to one of my suggestions; meanwhile a good friend of mine says they order…
44 CommentsThe word “grandiose”, in my family, is a loaded word. When one of us uses the word “grandiose” to describe someone, we understand that we actually mean “might possibly benefit from medication; updates as warranted”. I bring that up because if I had been traveling in Communist China with a girl I didn’t know very well, and she had started talking about the project she was working on that was going to be important to national security, I’d have called home and said, “Claire is waxing grandiose,” and my parents would have said, “You get her on a plane and…
41 CommentsY’all, at some point, I’m going to do a mental illness reading challenge. Is there already one? I’m going to do one if there isn’t already one. I love mental illness (I mean I do not love it. It is awful and ruins people’s lives. I just find it very interesting). As soon as I think of a clever name and invent an adorable button, I will be all over this, and Swallow Me Whole is one of the books you can read for it. PREPARE YOURSELVES. I read Swallow Me Whole for the Graphic Novels Challenge! Swallow Me Whole…
29 CommentsI love a memoir, y’all, and you know what I love more than a memoir? A graphic novel memoir. Delicious. My library has a new section on their ever-growing graphic novels shelf, which is Biography. When I went in yesterday (collecting films for my poor sick little sister and lots of excellent books for me), I took three of the five books from the new wee little section. Including Fun Home – which I remember the library not having last time I checked, and I was well cross about it. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel‘s memoir about her father, a…
11 CommentsMy graphic novel experiments continue! I checked this out because I opened it up and I liked some of the things the artist did with panels. I still do actually – there’s a page I remember, where the whole page is the character’s face, and it’s broken up into panels with dialogue across it. It’s a good effect, how the dialogue washes across the character as he’s deep in thought. Maybe it’s because I read Scott McCloud’s books, or maybe it’s because there were some rather flashy art choices (not flashy in a bad way!), but I noticed panel divisions…
2 CommentsSo when I was a wee lass, struggling with greater than/less than and detesting long division that ended with remainders (this is why I don’t like math! – because lots of things end up with solutions that are very untidy and not whole numbers AT ALL), the BBC was creating a miniseries about a DJ at a mental hospital radio station and the patients there, called Takin’ Over the Asylum. And although I was too wee to care at the time, they were being surprisingly careful not to be an asshole, and getting their actors to perform four major mental…
4 CommentsI love books about the Victorians. It’s Oscar Wilde’s fault for being one. And I like books about mental illness, as long as they do not do that stream of consciousness thing, which I absolutely can’t stand. So when I read about this on the other Jenny Claire’s blog, I was pleased as punch to read it; and yes, I did mess up my don’t-check-out-any-more-library-books thing in order to get this book. And, okay, yes, since I was at the library anyway, I may have gotten a few other books as well. An Inconvenient Wife is about an upper-class American…
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