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Category: 3 Stars

Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud

Published 3 Jul 2009 by Gin Jenny

So Shan said that she found it difficult to read Understanding Comics because it was lots of information coming at her all it once – and I thought that was ratcheted up a few notches in Reinventing Comics.  It was still full of interesting things to consider.  Scott McCloud talks about the directions comics are taking, the revolutions that have to take place for comics to Take Their Rightful Place, including limited representation by anyone who isn’t white and male.  He handles these delicate subjects quite well, without being a jerk at all or failing to recognize his position of…

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The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

Published 3 Jul 2009 by Gin Jenny

So in case you’ve been living in a hole and not hearing about The Hunger Games – it’s a grim, grim dystopian future, and every year the government makes each of the twelve districts send one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to participate in the Hunger Games where they all get placed in a specially designed Perilous Terrain and fight to the death on live TV.  Katniss, our dauntless protagonist, volunteers to take her little sister’s place, and the other tribute turns out to be the baker’s son Peeta (I know, right?), who once saved Katniss and her family…

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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe

Published 30 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

I told Colleen at Foreign Circus Library that I love books about research, and she ever so kindly sent it to me in the post!  Lucky me, I read it over the weekend.  Poor Connie has just got through with her qualifying exams – sounds like a nightmare, that lot, I don’t think I was sufficiently sympathetic to my dear friend tim when she was having quals (sorry tim!) – and her scatty New Age mother demands she go fix up her (Connie’s) late grandmother’s old house and get it sold.  While living at the house, Connie finds a little…

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Two books by Elizabeth Peters

Published 23 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

Elizabeth Peters – under this pseudonym as well as her other one, Barbara Michaels – is one of my most favorite authors of all the authors.  I like her because she writes the kind of book I like, but she does it (usually) tongue-in-cheek, and furthermore she has read all the same books I have read.  Not just, like, Little Women, which everyone has read, but you know, Rafael Sabatini and The Sheik and trashy things like that.  I appreciate this from Elizabeth Peters. The Love Talker and Devil-May-Care, both of which I read in the last few days, are…

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My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

Published 21 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

Verdict: Not as good as Rebecca. Philip, the protagonist of My Cousin Rachel, has been raised by his bachelor cousin Ambrose.  Ambrose goes away to Italy, marries there, and a few years later sends a letter to Philip intimating that he is in danger, and asking Philip to come to Italy straight away.  When Philip gets there, Ambrose has died, and Rachel is gone.  He conceives a hatred for her, believing that she was responsible for Ambrose’s death; but when she comes to stay with him in England, he falls for her straight away.  Is she evil?  Did she poison…

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The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

Published 5 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

I got The Little Stranger for my birthday!  And read it on the plane back home yesterday.  Not a good plane book; I should have read Changing Planes, which would have been much better, but by the time I thought of it, it was the last leg of the flight and I was trying to catch fifteen minutes of sleep so I wouldn’t die of exhaustion.  The Little Stranger would be a perfect dark-and-stormy-night type of book.  (Not that there’s any book I wouldn’t want to read at night all cozy with a thunderstorm outside – but some are more…

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (trans.)

Published 5 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

So this is a really good translation.  It sounds French, if that makes any sense – the words from the people sound like things that would come out of the mouths of my French friends (if they felt like talking about Tolstoy, which so far they have not shown any particular inclination to do) – but without the awkwardness that bugs me in so many translations of foreign novels. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about a concierge who has spent her life pretending to be stupid so that nobody will notice her.  She is fairly isolated, as you can…

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The House at Riverton, Kate Morton

Published 5 Jun 2009 by Gin Jenny

I am not able to steer myself away from books that deal with the dying aristocracy in Britain before and during and after the World Wars.  Or just books set in Britain before and during and after the World Wars (recently before and recently after, obviously; otherwise that would comprehend the whole of British history).  I love them.  I love books set in Britain in this time period even more than I love books set in the Victorian times.  At least more reliably – there are some books with Victorian settings that are shocking tedious crap. The House at Riverton…

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Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, Martin Millar

Published 29 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

I hope Martin Millar never reads this blog post and decides that I’m a jerk, but I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway: Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation is his first book and you can tell.  I wish you could not tell – I love it when I can’t tell – but you could tell.  You could also tell it was absolutely definitely Martin Millar and nobody else whatsoever, what with all the shifts in point of view, and the brief, brief little snippets of action at one time.  (My short attention span thanks you for that, Martin…

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A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro

Published 29 May 2009 by Gin Jenny

Here is what I think goes on in A Pale View of Hills.  I think.  (There will be spoilers, sort of.)  The frame story concerns the protagonist Etsuko receiving a visit from her daughter Niki, not long after her older daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide.  Etsuko is remembering a friend she knew long ago, when she still lived in Japan, a woman called Sachiko and her young daughter Mariko.  And I believe that what is going on is that Sachiko, actually, is Etsuko, and that Etsuko is trying to make her memories of having been a slightly careless mother to…

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