Today I reread Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top and Anne Lindbergh (daughter, not wife)’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare. These were both favorites of mine when I was smaller, but in particular I liked Travel Far, Pay No Fare. I loved it. To me it was the most magical and amazing book of all time – twelve-year-old Owen moves to Vermont, where his nine-year-old cousin Parsley has a bookmark that allows them to go inside books. They visit Little Women (nobody there is nice), Alice in Wonderland (ditto), The Fledgling, The Yearling, and even the volcano scene of The…
4 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
Lovin’ on Tom Stoppard
Published 9 May 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Speaking of The Mousetrap, here is a Tom Stoppard anecdote. If you have never seen The Mousetrap and you don’t know whodunit and you don’t want to, don’t carry on reading this paragraph. You have been warned. Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of The Mousetrap and those country house type mysteries, and it’s also a parody of theatre critics. And it steals lots of plot elements from The Mousetrap, as the title The Real Inspector Hound suggests, which might have caused the Mousetrap people to object. But! But but but! They couldn’t! Because if they…
2 CommentsMurder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers
Published 9 May 2009
by
Gin Jenny
So apparently? Dorothy Sayers did not write her Harriet Vane books all in a row. Murder Must Advertise happens after Peter has already met Harriet, but Harriet doesn’t feature in it at all. In between wooing Harriet and solving mysteries with her (and getting woefully rejected), Peter still finds time to gallivant around infiltrating advertising agencies to sort out other problems. I didn’t know this. I thought that the books with Harriet just came one after another in direct sequence. This makes me feel better about Peter and Harriet. You know how the Doctor asks Donna to come traveling with…
Leave a CommentStrong Poison, Dorothy Sayers
Published 3 May 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Strong Poison is a comfort book of mine. I bought it at Bongs & Noodles one time on the way back from a doctor’s appointment regarding my tendonitis. It was a very trying year – I was doing four AP courses and two honors ones, and I was very stressed about getting good grades so I could get into college – and anyway, we stopped by Bongs & Noodles and my mother suggested Strong Poison if I was after a new book. I read it under my desk in calculus (bad, I know, but trust me, nobody was learning anything…
6 CommentsDeath: The High Cost of Living, Neil Gaiman
Published 26 Apr 2009
by
Gin Jenny
For a quick interlude between new books, I paused and reread Death: The High Cost of Living. Neil Gaiman has written two graphic novels about Death, and this one’s the one that’s actually about Death. Although Death: The Time of Your Life is also very, very good. In this one, we get the story of how Death becomes a human once every century, for one day. This time, she meets a bored, slightly suicidal kid called Sexton Furnival, and they go around town looking for fun. They look for the heart of an old, old woman called Mad Hettie, and…
3 CommentsTaller Tales, Bill Willingham
Published 23 Apr 2009
by
Gin Jenny
A graphic novel experiment here. I have an incredibly hard time reading graphic novel series that are not all of a piece; i.e., that are not written by one writer all the way through. They feel fragmented. I don’t read superhero comics for this reason. I loved Sandman and Fables, and there are many good graphic novels in this world, but I generally find that the people who created the characters tend to be the ones who are able to capture their voices. So I thought, hey, you know, this doesn’t have to be the case. I thought, I will…
5 CommentsThe Ordinary Princess, M.M. Kaye
Published 21 Apr 2009
by
Gin Jenny
I am so pleased I got this book! I got it in hardback! For eight dollars! At Bongs & Noodles, totally unexpectedly! This, and jPod, and a hardback of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (I know, right?), and a nice new copy of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and The Annotated Alice (the annotations are ever so interesting), and for twenty dollars altogether total, all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia on CD, read by cool people like Lynn Redgrave and Kenneth Branagh. But of all these things, I am the most pleased…
10 CommentsjPod, Douglas Coupland
Published 18 Apr 2009
by
Gin Jenny
So I didn’t really get into All Families Are Psychotic when I tried to read it ages ago – for whatever reason – and I tried jPod instead and had the same issue. Then recently I was at Bongs & Noodles reading Girlfriend in a Coma and enjoying it mightily, and I wanted to get it out of the library but they didn’t have it; and I decided to do the same thing I am doing with Salman Rushdie, which is read his books in reverse order of how good I think they’re going to be. This didn’t exactly work…
Leave a CommentAmazon’s wicked ways have profited me!
Published 13 Apr 2009
by
Gin Jenny
So today, after reading Nymeth’s glowing review of Fingersmith, and discovering that I wanted to reread Fingersmith more than I wanted anything, I reread Fingersmith and enjoyed it much more this time, now that I knew everything that was coming. Actually I enjoyed it enormously and it was just what I was in the mood for; it was like being desperately thirsty and having a great big class of cool, clean, delicious Baton Rouge water. Which was good because I am feeling sickly today, and actual cool, clean, delicious Baton Rouge water doesn’t taste as nice as it normally does.…
2 CommentsThe New Moon with the Old, Dodie Smith
Published 29 Mar 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Ordinarily I only ever read this book when I have just finished I Capture the Castle and I need my Dodie Smith fix to continue. It’s really not the most fantastic book you’ve ever seen, but it’s rather charming. I am susceptible to its charms even when I know the entire book is totally far-fetched and these things would never ever happen. The book is about the Carrington family, whose father goes on the run for vague and unspecified money-type crimes, just after he has engaged a secretary/housekeeper type, Jane Minton, who plans like Thoroughly Modern Millie to marry her…
6 Comments