But the Royal Shakespeare Company is making a DVD of David Tennant’s Hamlet! YES THEY ARE. A DVD. And, okay, yes, Hamlet is not historically my most favorite one of Shakespeare’s plays. I have been known to say that Hamlet needs to for God’s sake DO SOMETHING ANYTHING EVER; I have been known to quote Oscar Wilde about critics of Hamlet; I have been known to tell the story of how my senior English class drove any possible liking I might ever have had for that play out of me by spending days and days and teacher-sanctioned days discussing whether…
5 CommentsAuthor: Gin Jenny
I started out liking this book a lot, and then I liked it progressively less and less. Fie to Philip Pullman who thinks it is so wonderful – this is just the sort of book you would think he would like. Bah. I agree with GeraniumCat that it’s a really interesting and genuine depiction of the dead, but I didn’t like the book taken altogether. I got tired and depressed reading it, which I don’t think is the effect books are meant to have. Plus, although Tarot cards didn’t feature prominently, I often didn’t like the interpretations of the cards…
1 CommentSo, okay, admittedly I am having trouble facing the idea of human interaction these days on account of being totally down in the dumps, but still it seems excessive for me to have read all the rest of the Fables volumes since Tuesday night. It went like this: I got the fourth volume from the library near work on Wednesday, read that; went to two different libraries on Thursday to get one and three and read those; then on Saturday I went to Bongs & Noodles and read two, and that evening I went to the main branch of the…
1 CommentMy sister has talked so much about Fables for months (I mean, not ceaselessly, just when it came up), and yes, I mostly ignored her; and I also mostly ignored Nymeth, who has been saying how good Fables is (are?) for a while too. So now I am sorry that I ignored y’all, because I grabbed a volume the last time I was at the library – I really wanted Goodbye, Chunky Rice but they didn’t have it – and I read it last night. It was the fifth volume, which isn’t a genius way to start out a series. …
5 CommentsLook, I’m as fond of my home state as the next person – probably more than many – and this book is set in Louisiana. And although part of me was mad because I read a review that called Thursday’s Children “goopy treacle” and compared it unfavorably with The Dancers of Sycamore Street, and that part of me wanted The Dancers of Sycamore Street to be rubbish, I was mostly hoping that I was about to read an undiscovered gem, and not only would I enjoy it hugely, but I would also feel pleased and proud that it was set…
Leave a CommentThis is the hugest book ever. I have been reading it and reading it. It’s about Edward Murrow as you might have imagined, and I will just tell you now that Edward Murrow was quite a person. He wasn’t always perfect (of course), but I admire him tremendously. Everyone I know is now tired of hearing Edward R. Murrow stories. Like the one about when he went to Buchenwald with the troops, and people there – people who were in Buchenwald – recognized him and asked if he remembered them. And the one about how someone asked his four-year-old son…
2 CommentsI read about this on Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s “Writer’s Table” – authors pick out books that are supposed to have “shaped their writing”, and they write little reviews in a few words. I can’t remember why I was looking at Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s Writer’s Table – although Nick Hornby is absolutely inextricably linked in my mind to the month I spent in London in 2005. There was a heat stroke in the second week of July, and the dorm where we were staying didn’t have air conditioning of course, and my room was on the third (American fourth) floor, so…
4 CommentsI’ve been meaning to read this since the trailers for the film first came out; but of course at that point, everybody else had the exact same idea, and all the copies were checked out of the library. And I felt a little sheepish checking it out in the first place because I am older than its target audience, but not by a comfortable enough margin – like when I was in elementary school and I still watched Sesame Street but I couldn’t admit it for another few years yet – so I didn’t want to put the book on…
8 CommentsMy university’s book fair came round again. Last year I bought a number of books, and felt very happy about it, but last year was not the same, for two main reasons. One, I didn’t have as much money to spend at the book bazaar last year; and two, I didn’t have an empty bookshelf to fill last year. This year I had a bunch of money budgeted for it, and I was also recently given an empty bookshelf. It’s sitting at work waiting to be taken home. All empty. I went three times on Thursday, because I had the…
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