So my thoughts on the film version of Children of Men sort of went like this: Mmmm, Clive Owen. And then, Ah yes, apocalypse, issues being dealt with – I feel like this is a perfect time for Clive Owen to strangle someone with his bare hands. This is shallow, I know, but I just have this reaction to Clive Owen every time I see him. Even in Gosford Park when there was absolutely no chance of his strangling someone with his bare hands, because it was all proper and British up in that movie. My thoughts on the book…
6 CommentsCategory: 2 Stars
So 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 CommentsOh, this started out so promisingly. I loved the idea of a bunch of different people telling the story of this one women. I loved how the book would create a space around her that would leave you wondering and wondering what she was thinking all along – like The Moonstone does with Rachel, you know? There are several different narrators, and they all talk about the mysterious, recently-murdered Athena. The witch of Portobello. I was thrilled! I thought Paulo Coehlo was my Next Big Thing! However, the book ended up sort of preachy, and the dialogue fell prey to…
8 CommentsI know, I know. I know I said I was done with Jodi Picoult. But I was at my aunt and uncle’s last night, and I had The Charioteer but I am in London, I don’t have loads of books with me, and I didn’t want to use up The Charioteer because I love it so much. So I read The Tenth Circle, which my aunt and uncle had on their bookshelf. The issue: date rape. The court scenes: none – shocking, I know. However, there is a murder. As Jodi Picoult’s books go, this is not one of her…
5 CommentsI was just saying the other day that I never find good graphic novels to read by myself. So today I was at the library and I decided I was damn well going to learn how to be independent and find a good graphic novel all on my own. Yeah, and review it here, so other people would know about it too. Mother Come Home is a graphic novel about a seven-year-old boy called Thomas Tennant who loses his mother, and how he and his father deal (or don’t deal) with the loss. I said in my review of The…
3 CommentsOh, dear, the plight of women throughout history has been really dreadful. The Case of Madeleine Smith is a graphic novel (graphic history, I guess) about real-life Victorian lady Madeleine Smith, who may or may not have murdered her lover Emile L’Anglier (though she probably did murder him, the book strongly implies). It’s a straightforward, fairly impersonal depiction of the story – could just as well be the Classic Comics version! The book deliberately (I assume) sets the reader at one remove from the players in the story, so it’s more of a history than a story. I would have…
2 CommentsBlast. I wrote a nice, thoughtful review of this book, and then it somehow got lost when I reviewed Death: The High Cost of Living. Bother bother bother. Suffice it to say – The Queen of Spells is a retelling of “Tam Lin”, which is such a great story that I have checked out or reserved five different adaptations of it, to decide which one is best (apart from, obviously, Fire and Hemlock). The Queen of Spells is not best. The sequence where Janet is hanging onto Tom as he turns into all sorts of things is trippy and nifty…
2 CommentsOh, steampunk, why do you keep breaking my heart? I want to love you, I do. What’s not to love about steampunk? In theory it should be everything good: Victorians, and flying machines, and (usually) fantasy elements too. How can it be that I have never read a steampunk book and really loved it? The Court of the Air is about two plucky orphans who are being chased by assassins, and they’re not sure why. I got bored about 150 pages in and didn’t finish it. There were several reasons for this. First of all, there were dangling participles all…
3 CommentsI got this book out of the library because I put Martin Millar’s name into the Literature-Map website, and Caitlin Kiernan’s name was close to his. This is one of those things that I should know straight away isn’t going to work out for me: every time I do this, I find that the closest authors to the name I’ve entered are people I either haven’t heard of or don’t like, whereas the names of authors I do like are farther out to the perimeter. Douglas Coupland, Neil Gaiman, T.S. Eliot, and Alexandre Dumas are all well out at the…
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