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Category: 3 Stars

The Shadow in the North, Philip Pullman

I just finished the second book in my “Take Against Matt Smith Unreasonably Before David Tennant Even Goes Anywhere Project”, and I shall watch the film version this evening, taking against Matt Smith with all my might.  And if I haven’t taken against him sufficiently, I’ll just, I’ll just look up videos on YouTube and make complaining comments in my head about how his HAIR is stupid and he’s completely COMMON like a little LONDON GUTTER RAT and he keeps on making PRETENTIOUS HANDS. (I just went and watched a video of him on YouTube and okay, yes, his hair’s…

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The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

The Eleventh Doctor isn’t Paterson Joseph.  I really, really wanted it to be, but no, it isn’t him.  They said so today.  It’s some little child twenty-six years old (my generation, for heaven’s sake!) that nobody’s ever heard of.  Except that apparently he was in the BBC film version of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke.  With Billie Piper, Billie Piper!  Hurrah for Billie Piper!  So I decided to read the books and then watch the films when they come in at the library. The Ruby in the Smoke is about a girl called Sally Lockhart whose father has…

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Keeping Faith, Jodi Picoult

Yeah, pretty much, Jodi Picoult.  Her books tend to be largely the same.  Keeping Faith has all the elements – moral quandaries, relationship troubles, fierce mothers, legal battles, and handsome men hopelessly in love with the protagonist.  I read it because I was at my parents’ house and I didn’t have my books with me, and I needed something to read for a while.  And then of course I got interested and took it home to finish it.  As I say, it was much like all of Jodi Picoult’s other books.  Always entertaining but not generally worth rereading.

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The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hellenga

Recommended by: Trish’s blog I’ve been reading this on and off for a while.  I don’t like it when this happens with a book – when I put the book down for a while, it looks so reproachful every time I see it, and eventually I often come to resent it and think reasons not to finish it.  In the case of The Sixteen Pleasures, I did feel guilty about abandoning it so callously, but last night I picked it up and finished it before I went to sleep.  (I stayed up later than I was going to stay up,…

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The Film Club, David Gilmour

I read about this ages ago over at Sassymonkey’s blog, and I thought it sounded brilliant.  The writer permitted his son to drop out of high school, drop out of high school, and stay home and watch films with him.  And he knew all what films to watch, so he could pick out loads of really good ones.  That’s genius.  I wouldn’t ever know what films to watch, even if I were inclined to permit my offspring to drop out of school, which I really don’t think I would be. I am always a bit distressed – I have probably…

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Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Recommended to me by my dear friend tim, who is extremely clever as she can draw, knit, cook, and do complicated math problems.  She recently became addicted to Barbara Pym so I checked two of Ms. Pym’s books out of the library. Excellent Women is all about a spinster called Mildred Lathbury living in post-WWII England, being excellent by helping out at the vicarage and doing good works.  This is not very exciting for her.  However, she gets some new neighbors – an anthropologist woman who is not good at housekeeping, and her very charming and cheerful ex-military husband, by…

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Not Quite Dead, John MacLachlan (a book I forgot about)

My mother mentioned this book as something she might want for Christmas, if it was any good.  My mother is impossible to buy for so I made a specific effort to acquire it at the library and read it, to screen it for her.  It’s all about how Edgar Allan Poe fakes his own death, and Charles Dickens comes to America, and there’s a conspiracy, and numerous Irish people, making trouble.  People from the homeland are apt to behave in this fashion.  (My people were Irish.  I know British people object strenuously to claims of this sort, but I can’t…

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The Wednesday Sisters, Meg Waite Clayton

This is another one of those I’ve read about on several different websites. Trish’s book blog, Caribousmom, SassyMonkey … probably more, but those are the ones I remember. Everyone kept saying how good it was, but the library hadn’t got it in, and I didn’t like Language of Light enough to finish it, so I put off reading it. The Wednesday Sisters is all about five women in the sixties (then seventies) who become very close friends and form a writing group. Which isn’t doing it justice, because there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist. There are…

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

Holy God, this book is scary. I had completely forgotten how terrifying the scene in the graveyard is. Damn. Goblet of Fire isn’t as unfavoritey to me as I remembered it being. I don’t know why I was so cranky about it. I mean, apart from the Blast-Ended Skrewts, which were a much less important part of the book than I was remembering, and the fact that this book is hard on poor Harry, Goblet of Fire isn’t half bad. I was expecting that I would reread it and decide after all that I liked it even less than Chamber…

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling

You know, if nostalgia was going to cloud my judgment, you’d think I’d like Chamber of Secrets better than I do. It was the first of the Harry Potter books that I bought myself. I remember it really vividly – the Books-a-Million was still open then, and I was young enough that it was a bit of an adventure to buy an expensive hardback all by myself (sheesh, I was a weird fourteen-year-old), and I showed it off to everyone once I got it home, though since none of them had read Harry Potter yet, nobody cared. Except my mother,…

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