Meh. I HATE TO SAY MEH. I particularly hate to say meh when it’s a young-adult book to which I am saying it, because I feel like if I say meh to a young-adult book, I am becoming one of those people who turn up their noses at young adult books and do not pay any attention to YA rock stars like Laurie Halse Anderson and Patrick Ness and, well, and Jacqueline Woodson. I am not one of those people! Except that I have only read one of Jacqueline Woodson’s books after hearing about her all over the place, and…
23 CommentsReading the End Posts
I did a class on Milton when I was at university. The professor was this tiny, enthusiastic woman, clearly in love with Milton and excited for us to be in love with him, too. She would charge up and down the classroom gesticulating wildly and drawing stick-figure pictures of important scenes on the chalkboard. I have her in my head like a soundtrack when I read Paradise Lost. It was the best class I took at university, and the single piece of literature I most enjoyed reading and learning about. So hopefully I will not sound like an idiot when…
28 CommentsI read seven more books in April than I reviewed here (oops). To wit: I read all the rest of the Company books, and at the end I was probably about 85% satisfied, the remaining 15% belonging to Mendoza and her lot, because that was a bit too weird for me. Oh, and at least 1% of my dissatisfaction was down to Kage Baker’s suggesting that there would have been 315 Doctors on Doctor Who by 2351 (though I do appreciate the implication it’s got that kind of staying power). That would necessitate a majority of the Doctors doing one…
35 CommentsClaire of Paperback Reader has selected April as the month to make everybody read Angela Carter, her favorite ever author. Her enthusiasm is contagious! And so even though I got tired of Angela Carter’s fairy tales when I tried to read The Bloody Chamber (I can’t be doing with too many short stories at once), and even though I gave up on Nights at the Circus a while ago (it fell due and I was reading other books), I decided to try again. I am the master of trying again. By the way, I do not like it that “master…
18 CommentsThat’s right, everyone! My puppy voice paid off! My mumsy has agreed to review Blankets here guestily. I am hoping that she will find she loves doing guest reviews and will subsequently write about some of the cool and interesting books she read when she was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology. She has many books about women in the Bible and feminism in Catholicism and like that, and I would slap a Women Unbound label on the reviews she would write of them, and then I would pretend they counted towards my totals. Because I have been shamefully…
16 CommentsThat post title sounds celebratory, but actually it is urgent, because National Poetry Month is nearly over and I have still not gotten it together to write a post about poetry. And now that I am sitting down to do it, I’m not sure what to say, because I do not really understand my tastes in poetry and do not know how to explain them. Sometimes I will like a poem without exactly understanding it, just because of the strange and interesting ways the words have been put together; and then one day, I will be in the middle of…
24 CommentsYou know how sometimes you really, really want to like a book? Because maybe people have suggested it to you with great enthusiasm, and you think they are lovely people, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings by disliking their book? And also it is a book by a British author full of British humo(u)r, and when you were in England maybe several different people told you that Americans have bad senses of humo(u)r and don’t understand irony, and even though you know those people were absurd and Alanis Morrisette is Canadian, there is still a tiny portion of…
33 CommentsMe: I came over to visit my schnooky puppy an’ snuddle her little puppy self and kiss her puppy nose. Mumsy: Why are you like this? Me: Oh, hey, Mumsy, you should do a guest review on my blog! Mumsy: No. Me: Yes! Mumsy, you should! What about all those reviews you do on GoodReads and LibraryThing? I could just– Mumsy: No! They’re no good! Me: Oh, Mumsy. The bar that has been set by me is oh so very very low. Mumsy: Oh I don’t want to. Me: Come on! It’ll be fun! I’ll be all, Heeeeeeere’s Mumsy! And…
45 CommentsI feel like all the Kage Baker books I’m reading should qualify for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, because they do feel more like fantasy than science fiction. However, despite their genre-bending qualities, they have cyborgs, and the time travel is done with machines. So Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules, is my first read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, in which I am pretending I am not really taking part. Weight is a book about looking for new ways to tell stories. That is a theme that I love. It’s…
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