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Category: 3 Stars

Palimpsest, Catherynne Valente

I love the word "palimpsest".  I like how it sounds and what it means.  When I read Nymeth’s review of this book, and she was all, It reminded me of MirrorMask!, I knew I had to get it.  Catherynne Valente‘s Palimpsest is about a city called Palimpsest, a sexually transmitted city – people have pieces of a map of Palimpsest, like tattoos, somewhere on their bodies, and when two people with the marks on them sleep together, they go to Palimpsest for the night.  Like a dream, except that it isn’t a dream.  The book is about four people who…

6 Comments

Iran: A People Interrupted, Hamid Dabashi

When I was in high school, and my mum was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology, she used to read us excerpts from her textbooks.  Sometimes these were interesting, like about Jesus’s genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew and how it’s implying that Mary was sexually suspect.  But mostly she was reading bits aloud to us as an illustration of theologians’ complete inability to express themselves clearly.  I have no patience with writers who can’t make a sensible sentence – read C.S. Lewis, people!  You could all learn a thing or two from the book that is C.S. Lewis! …

2 Comments

The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies

You know what my favorite thing about this book was?  And don’t think I’m saying this in an anti-Rebel-Angels way at all, because I’m not and I loved Parlabane even though his (spoilers, I guess?) farewell letter was silly.  My favorite thing about this book is that the main character (I think I can call her that), Maria, has a mum that reads Tarot cards, and she reads the Five of Coins (our Pentacles) to mean a loss, but a far greater gain is coming.  The very next day, I was doing a reading for my sister, and I realized…

4 Comments

The Thirteenth Child, Patricia C. Wrede

Verdict: Not racist! (Phew.) I read somewhere that The Thirteenth Child was racist, and it stressed me out because Patricia C. Wrede was one of my favorite authors when I was coming up, and I didn’t want her to be racist.  Especially because she’s the other author besides Jane Yolen that I wrote to in my youth, and she wrote me back a really nice email telling me to keep on reading and pay close attention to the things my favorite authors were doing, and that’s how I would get to be a better writer myself (which is what I…

5 Comments

Jane Yolen’s Alta books

So when I was about thirteen, I thought these books, Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna were just about the best thing in the entire world.  I got them from the library after my sister gave me Dragon’s Blood for my birthday, and then I wanted to get more Jane Yolen books, and seriously, I totally loved them.  My sister made me a white sweatshirt that said Jo-an-enna in black letters, and she had a black sweatshirt that said Skada in white letters, and that’s how much I loved those books. They are all about a girl called Jenna…

5 Comments

The Patron Saint of Butterflies, Cecilia Galante

Cecilia Galante is a lovely name.  The Patron Saint of Butterflies is quite good too.  It’s all about two girls in a religious commune, Honey and Agnes.  As children they were the best ever of friends, always racing and playing and having a jolly time together, but now that they are a bit older, Honey has begun to rebel against their religious leader, while Agnes is getting ever more scrupulous about her religious observances.  When Agnes’s grandmother comes to visit and discovers that the commune people (communists?) are being abused by their religious leader, she becomes determined to take Honey,…

6 Comments

Making Comics, Scott McCloud

Again with the piles of information!  I had to read this one chapter at a time and then take a long break to think about all the things contained in each chapter.  In Making Comics, Scott McCloud gets down to discussing the specifics about creating a comic book – everything from the placement and spacing in word bubbles, to the construction of panels in a way that’s intuitive to the reader, to the interaction of words and pictures.  There can never be too much discussion about the interaction of words and pictures.  Seriously. This book made me sad I can’t…

6 Comments

Smoke and Mirrors, Barbara Michaels

For some reason, I’m attached to Smoke and Mirrors.  It’s not one of Barbara Michaels’s most elaborately plotted books, and there don’t turn out to be any ghosts, which is one of the things I tend to like about her books.  I think I like it because it’s all set in a political campaign, and I think that that is interesting.  Every time I read this book, I’m all I should work on a political campaign! before I remember that the two politicians I really like, my mayor and the President, have already been elected.

2 Comments

THE SEVENTH FABLES BOOK MWAHAHAHAHAHA

I mean, not really mwahahahahaha.  I didn’t particularly need an evil laugh there, just because I finally read the seventh volume of Fables; though it was nice to read it, and it reminded me how cool and fun the Fables books are.  I stayed up last night to read it, which I thought would be okay, and I’d still get eight hours of sleep, but I wasn’t counting on a) the fact that I was going to start, and then insist on finishing, Ordinary Victories, and b) how much there were going to be wild dogs fighting furiously outside the…

4 Comments

Starseeker, Tim Bowler

*wipes away tears* *throws tissue into trash can* *puts sad book back inside purse* So I won Starseeker in a giveaway from Bart’s Bookshelf (thank you, I really liked it!), and I got it in the mail the other day and I read it today in between being scared shitless by “Hush” (why are the Gentlemen so scary?  why do they do that with their hands and their faces?) and trying to figure out what the hell happens in “Doomed” (hell happens.  They have to go back to high school to fix the stupid Hellmouth; such a subpar episode, plus…

6 Comments