The Night Circus is about two dueling magicians dueling it out in a circus setting. The, uh, the circus happens at night. It’s a night circus. What happened is that there were these two cranky old dudes wanting to see who was smarter, and they each took a protegee, and when the protegees grew up they were to engage in a Massive Magic Battle until one of them won. The consequences for the loser were not stated directly but were strongly implied to be Dire. Celia works as an illusionist at the circus that Marco (kind of) runs. They are…
34 CommentsReading the End Posts
This Amy here. She was right all along. And so were all the other people who have been saying that The Vampire Diaries (wait, don’t leave yet! Hear me out!) is awesome. As it turns out? It is pretty awesome. I started watching it right after the CW signed a deal with Netflix — thanks, CW! — because I thought it would be a fun show to semi-watch, semi-ignore while cross-stitching a Christmas stocking for my little cousin. I am much more watching, much less ignoring now. Kinda worried about the progress of this Christmas stocking, but I will keep…
31 CommentsI remember when I first read Salman Rushdie. I checked Midnight’s Children out of the library along with a bunch of other books, and I thought that if every other book I had turned out to be lame, I would do my duty by literature and read Salman Rushdie who was bound to be boring but I was going to do my duty. By God. And all the other books I checked out turned out to be lame, so I read Midnight’s Children and hey! It turned out it was funny! Salman Rushdie is funny! I was disproportionately shocked and…
34 CommentsHave you heard anything bad about Janet Malcolm yet? If so, now would be a good time to tell me! The first flush of love from The Silent Woman has worn a little bit off, The Crime of Sheila McGough was not that good, and I haven’t had a chance to get another Janet Malcolm book out of the library. The Crime of Sheila McGough is about a lawyer who was indicted for, I don’t know, some sort of dishonest practices. She was lawyering for a small-time con man, the con man stole from the wrong guy, the guy got…
11 CommentsOkay. Here’s what it is. When a book is called The Book of Lies, I I wanted the narrator to be truly, truly unreliable. Unreliable as hell is what I wanted. I wanted her to bleed unreliability. I wanted to never feel sure what was going on, and at the end of the book, I wanted there to be a SHOCKING TWIST where the book told me, Hey, you thought you knew what was going on? Boy were you wrong (a la A Dark-Adapted Eye). That’s what I wanted. I had it in my head that’s what I was going…
26 Comments(which is what I was doing in my post about Patrick Ness), a word about my Daddy. Many of y’all already know how great my Mumsy is, because she is often lurking around the blogosphere, and because I talk about how she recommends me books, and because she sometimes guest-posts here. And I go on and on about Legal, Indie, and Social Sisters. But I don’t seem to talk about my father very much, which is weird because he is the best father in the world. In fact — this may be controversial but it is true — I’m going…
45 CommentsAt last, at last! I absolutely loved Sea of Poppies when I read it last summer, and I have been babbling about it a lot since then, especially when in company with Teresa, who loved it first and put me on to it. I have been longing and longing for the second book in the Ibis trilogy to come out for, like, ever. Sea of Poppies ended right when all the characters had finally started hanging out together, and I was so excited to read the new book where they would start out together and interact with each other all…
12 CommentsY’all may not know this about me, but I love the Supreme Court of the United States. I love it. I have only ever really talked about John Paul Stevens on this blog, and God knows I adore John Paul Stevens, but more generally, I am a massive, massive fan of the Supreme Court. When fall comes and Dahlia Lithwick starts posting her Supreme Court recaps, my heart is filled with the kind of joy that I normally only feel when someone writes a complimentary post about Oscar Wilde and his continued relevance to modern life. The Supreme Court is…
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