Robin McKinley writes lots of stories where girls (or, ever so occasionally, boys) make friends with people you wouldn’t necessarily think they would make friends with. A Latin geek and a monster; a baker and a vampire; a princess and a pegasus. This friend-making tends to happen in between lots and lots of worldbuilding. Whether I like the book or not tends to depend on how interesting I find the world, and how invested I become in one or both of the characters making friends. Pegasus is set in the kingdom of Balsinland, where the peace treaty between humans and…
43 CommentsReading the End Posts
Books about perceptions of history and historical figures have abounded in my life lately, and I love them. Forever. Heather recently reviewed a book about how the impact of the Moses story on American culture, which I am planning to read soon; I got this book about how the treatment of various events in American history has changed in history textbooks over the years; and then there was Contested Will, which dealt with the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy. In the few months when I thought I was going to write a senior thesis in college, it was going…
24 Comments2010 has been a year of change and good fortune. For the first time in my memory, I aced my New Year’s Resolutions instead of abandoning and forgetting about them two months into the year. 1. Eat more vegetables. Check. I started having spinach salad every day for lunch, and now it has become a habit. Sometimes I eat spinach as a snack, straight out of the bag. This is not disgusting. It’s healthy. I am like Popeye in a skirt (see 2). 2. Stop being so weird about my knees. Check. For years I wore almost no skirts, shorts,…
96 CommentsWell. This is not what I expected. Amanda reviewed this series, of which Blue Is for Nightmares and White Is for Magic are the first two, earlier this year, and they are boarding school books and the series is a bunch of books that are matching and color-coded. Y’all know I had to get some of that. How, you inquire, did I manage to resist for eight months? By my home library always having them checked out, that’s how! But I got the first two at Mid-Manhattan when I came into the city last weekend to see the statues at…
30 CommentsWhat is it about infighting that I find so enthralling? Siegel suggests that American culture has a fetish for girls (women) fighting, and that’s certainly true, but in my case I am just very interested in the distinctions people draw between the groups they belong to, and the nominally similar groups they insist they couldn’t be more different from. I am reminded of Lucas in Empire Records: “Some people say it doesn’t make a difference, but I say it’s the difference that makes it.” Lucas is talking about vinyl, but the principle is, I feel, a universal one. Sisterhood Interrupted…
22 CommentsSO. BOOK BLOGOSPHERE. I had this idea and I am curious to see what you think. I frequently discover that I have music tastes in common with people on my blogroll. I am always on the hunt for new music. I love, love, love making and receiving mix CDs. Would anyone have any interest in doing a book bloggers’ mix CD swap? I thought we could do it in the New Year, maybe in late February or early March (for Mardi Gras, perhaps?). My scheme is to set it up rather like Book Blogger Secret Santa (but not secret): you…
36 CommentsHave y’all ever seen the film Serendipity? I mean it’s not that great. I’m fond of Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack, and I still recognize that this film just isn’t that great. The premise is, they meet once, they have a great date, but Kate Beckinsale wants to leave it to chance whether they meet again. Chance doesn’t work out for them. A few years later, John Cusack’s about to get married or something, and he goes on a mission to track down Kate Beckinsale because she’s the one that got away. He really wants to find her but they…
43 CommentsI recently ranked the colonizing countries of the West in order of how much I like to read about their colonizing ways, and Britain came in first place. And if I had ranked British-colonized countries in order of how much I like to read about their colonized ways — well, I’d never have done that, because it would always be changing — but if I did do it, India would be at the top. I long and long and long to go to India. Someday I will go, and I think it will be amazing (but hot). The Siege of…
26 CommentsIf you are extremely attentive in a way that I am not, you may have noticed that I haven’t yet done a post on the second half of Doctor Zhivago. I finished the first half a few days ahead of schedule, and as a reward I let myself read some fun fiction, and one thing led to another and by the time the end of November rolled around I just hadn’t picked up Doctor Zhivago again. To compensate for being a bad readalong participant, and a bad reader who cannot appreciate classics of Russian literature, I checked out Elif Batuman’s…
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