Hands up everyone who Goblet of Fire was the first book you waited for the release of. It was for me! When I finally got my greedy little hands on it, I stayed up late, late into the night reading it. Then I had nightmare after nightmare regarding snakes and KKK wizards. This was before I met my friend Nezabeth’s snakes, of course. I am now quite fond of snakes and would sort of like to have one as a pet. I wouldn’t use it to kill people like Voldemort does. Goblet of Fire is so dark. It’s murdery from…
42 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
Revisiting Harry Potter: Sirius Black and other concerns
Published 15 Feb 2013
by
Gin Jenny
Oh, third book. I wish I had made time to write about you last week, for truly you are the sparkliest of all the Harry Potter books. Your beauty makes me want to sing songs of praise. But I do not do that, because I have roommates and they already think I’m weird. I will get to Sirius Black in a minute, but first I would like to speak in praise of some other aspects of the third book. (Obviously, this will be all spoilers all the time.) One, I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal about…
75 CommentsRevisiting Harry Potter: Origins
Published 18 Jan 2013
by
Gin Jenny
I know I know. I should have posted a post last Friday too. I didn’t do it because it was my first week back and there were a lot of things going on including buying a TV table and setting up my TV and DVD player and the Roku Box Captain Hammer gave me for Christmas. And buying a new purse (this one here). And organizing a work book club meeting for Five Quarters of an Orange (about which more later). And anyway I am lawless and I cannot be contained by rules. So. (I am writing this in a…
44 CommentsReview: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm
Published 29 Nov 2012
by
Gin Jenny
I think what I love about Janet Malcolm’s biographical writing is that she’s not, properly speaking, writing a biography. I don’t have a lot of patience for biographies (Oscar Wilde biographies excepted); even the best ones tend to have moments where they’re plodding along through the question of what subjects the person took at university, and how they got on in their first job and their second job and their third job before discovering what they were truly meant for. Janet Malcolm — in The Silent Woman and now in Two Lives — is writing not the story of her…
13 CommentsI was not told about this.
Published 5 Nov 2012
by
Gin Jenny
So apparently if you read the blurb of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase you will be informed that the book takes place in “a time in history that never happened”, and that said alternate time involves England being overrun with wolves. WHAT. This is explained? Because it’s not explained in the book itself! Lacking this blurb you are left to make your own conclusions about whether there are or are not areas of England that are overrun with savage, daring, vicious packs of wolves that come out as soon as it’s dark and jump through train windows. I’ve written several…
53 CommentsA Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling
Published 15 Oct 2012
by
Gin Jenny
Y’all know what I hate? I hate it when reviewers say shit like this: Chances are none of these people will be deemed sufficiently “likable” by the pop-culture-coddled, uplift-craving audience that makes up a goodly portion of Rowling fandom. But hats off to her for not toning things down an iota in order to please them. It’s irritating when a reviewer implies that people who didn’t like a book she liked are somehow a less virtuous kind of reader than she is (in this case, the kind of reader who doesn’t want to think about Important Social Issues); or to…
32 CommentsElinor Lipman: The Continuing Saga
Published 29 Apr 2012
by
Gin Jenny
I have read all but one of the available Elinor Lipman books following my great success with The Family Man. And I am now pleased to report that Elinor Lipman has gone on my Favored Authors list. She is the kind of author you want to have on your shelves for when you wake up at night with terrible nightmares (or even just fretful stress dreams), or when you need an undemanding book to read ten pages of while you’re brushing your teeth at night. Not all of these books share the feature of The Family Man that the good…
16 CommentsArcher’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones
Published 31 Mar 2012
by
Gin Jenny
March has whizzed by in a whirlwind of cherry blossoms and other even lovelier events, doing me a great disservice by never letting me catch my breath long enough to schedule a post about a Diana Wynne Jones book for the Diana Wynne Jones March operated by the wonderful Kristen of We Be Reading. March has happened so fast I didn’t even remember to relish March 4th, the only day of the year that’s a command. Ordinarily I say “March forth!” with tedious frequency on that day, and this year I forgot. Sigh. March, you whirlwind vixen. Archer’s Goon, fittingly…
33 CommentsReview: The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson
Published 12 Feb 2012
by
Gin Jenny
My scheme, intended to cheer me up from my mild post-Christmas sadness, was that in January I would order myself an Eva Ibbotson book from PaperbackSwap, one of the romances, as a comfort book. And then I would slowly order more Eva Ibbotson books, gradually, at the rate of one Eva Ibbotson book every few months, as I needed them, maybe alternating with some of the better Barbara Michaels books, and someday, a year or two from now, I would have all the comfort books I needed. This was a drastic underestimation of how awful January was going to be.…
32 CommentsGypsy Gypsy, Rumer Godden
Published 17 Jan 2012
by
Gin Jenny
Okay, I’m going to ruin the whole plot of this book for your sake to save you from reading it yourself and possibly judging Rumer Godden based on this book which you should not, she is actually wonderful. She just is not wonderful here. Gypsy Gypsy is about this girl called Henrietta who lives with her mean aunt Barbe. Yes, the lady’s name is Barbe, and she’s very sarcastic to everybody. It is a trifle on the nose, and I’d like to make some excuse for Rumer Godden like she was only 33 when this book was published, but you…
29 Comments