Brand new mad crush on June Jordan. How can it be that June Jordan is this great, and yet at the same time I have never heard of her before, and I might never have heard of her at all if I hadn’t been reading random poems on the Poetry Foundation website? June Jordan! She was this amazing poet and activist, and I am in love with her! I don’t really know how to review books of poetry, and I am not through with her memoir, Soldier, to review that either, and I have not yet gotten to the one…
2 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
Writing swear words in the margins (Review: Deep Secret, Diana Wynne Jones)
Published 5 Feb 2010
by
Gin Jenny
I was trying to figure out, earlier today, what year it would have been that I started reading to my little sister. I have read her scads of books over the years, but I’m pretty sure the first one was Half Magic, and I’m pretty sure that after finishing it, we went straight on to Magic by the Lake, which means I must have had them both at the time. I have definite proof that I got Magic by the Lake for Christmas of 1995. Let’s say I started reading to Social Sister early in 1996. That was fourteen years…
59 CommentsChrestomanci Chrestomanci Chrestomanci
Published 28 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
I can’t get any posting done for heaven’s sake! I have finished and not reviewed five books I was planning to review. There are two more books sitting atop the bookshelf by my bed, nearly finished but I don’t want to actually finish them because then I’d have seven books that I was planning to review that I haven’t reviewed yet. Peter and Max and The Book of Secrets will just have to wait. I AM ONLY HUMAN. In a frenzy of love for Diana Wynne Jones, I fetched out Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Conrad’s Fate…
21 CommentsReview: Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones
Published 22 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
I am selectively craving Diana Wynne Jones right now. Diana Wynne Jones is so great that I’ve devoted nearly half of the spinning bookshelf my father made me to her books alone. (The spinning bookshelf denotes great favoritism and also contains Martin Millar, J.K. Rowling, and Rumer Godden.) (Er, just so we’re clear, it doesn’t spin perpetually, like those spinny restaurants. It’s more like spinning earring racks at gift shops, except bigger and wooden and it has books on it rather than accessories.) Does anyone else take great notice of words whose letters are all standards, which is to say,…
41 CommentsFairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, adapted & illustrated by P. Craig Russell
Published 18 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Oscar Wilde told André Gide that he had put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his writing. It’s a typical Oscar Wilde thing to say, especially since he’d all but stopped writing at that point, and if you’ve read about Oscar Wilde, you’ll know it’s best to take anything he says with a grain of salt. Because, you know, hello to the self-dramatizing! But I have to say, in reference to this remark: although I read about Oscar Wilde all the time, I almost never read anything he’s written. Sometimes I’ll get in a mood and…
30 CommentsTwo more short reviews
Published 17 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Sheesh, I just can’t get it together to write proper reviews this month. So here are two unproper ones. One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead I love the title of this book, but it wasn’t as SHOCKING as I had hoped. I was anticipating lots of SHOCKING anecdotes about the SHOCKING American tendency towards excess in weddings. And there was a bit of that, sure, but the book is properly called One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, and it is indeed mainly focused on the selling and marketing of weddings. Mead talks about many aspects of the marketing…
10 CommentsReview: The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch and Ordinary Victories Part Deux
Published 10 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
See me starting challenges all over the place? It’s a new year and I am on the ball. The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli I didn’t start out my Graphic Novels Challenge reading with quite the satisfactory bang that I was hoping for (probably because I didn’t start by doing the January mini-challenge but OH that is all about to change). The Facts, etc., etc., disappointed me. Illustrated by Michael Zulli, this graphic novel tells the tale of a strange night out, with a strange woman whose real name wasn’t…
10 CommentsReview: Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare
Published 8 Jan 2010
by
Gin Jenny
They cut my head off in Titus Andronicus. When I write plays, they’ll be like Titus…I liked it when they cut heads off, and the daughter mutilated with knives. Plenty of blood. That’s the only writing. –John Webster character in Shakespeare in Love Oh, Tom Stoppard. You are so great. I wish you would write screenplays for thousands of movies. I wish you would have your own television show, and it would be called Tom Stoppard Is Not Ha-Ha-Funny But Everybody Loves Him Anyway, and on it, you could make wry comments about hermits who read newspapers and John Webster…
23 CommentsThe Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
Published 13 Dec 2009
by
Gin Jenny
I have this strategy – I’ve mentioned it before – where when I really like an author, I save some of their books. I haven’t read two (2) of Salman Rushdie’s books. Martin Millar has written a number of books that I haven’t read, and I haven’t made the small effort it would take to order them used online. This is not because of any shortage of love in my heart for Martin Millar’s books. It’s because I’m saving them. I do it with rereads too. It’s been at least five years since I last read Persuasion, although (well, actually…
29 CommentsReview: The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare
Published 21 Nov 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Here’s what you should understand before reading Comedy of Errors. My boy Shakespeare, he’s funny. He’s all about being funny; he’s got funny down pat. If you don’t believe me, I can only assume that it’s because you have never seen one of Shakespeare’s plays performed by actors with any hint of comedic timing. He can do it in many different ways – he can do slapsticky visual gags, he can do puns, he can do wry little digs and situational irony and gallows humor. And when he’s not being funny, he’s still being clever. Nearly always! He makes his…
14 Comments