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Reading the End Posts

Review: Gunnerkrigg Court, Tom Siddell

Can this count as part of the mini-challenge where we read graphic novels with animals in?  Animals are not main characters exactly, but they are around, and rather important.  And I didn’t like the other graphic novel I read for the mini-challenge, so I hereby decree Gunnerkrigg Court counts.  So let it be written; so let it be done. Gunnerkrigg Court is about a girl called Antimony Carver, who goes to live at a boarding school called Gunnerkrigg Court, following the death of her mother.  (Her father is off somewhere doing some sort of we don’t know what he’s doing.) …

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My day yesterday

Jenny: If fiction is going to be meta, it should be meta exactly like The Unwritten.  I HAVE DECREED IT SO. Universe: Oh yeah? NY Times: Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey is metafiction and sometimes wonderful.  Read an excerpt. Jenny: I am unmoved by this excerpt. Slate and WSJ: Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey is meta-licious.  We love it. Jenny: Whatever.  I will believe it when I see it. The Lost Books of the Odyssey: WIN WIN WIN. True story.

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Review: The Unwritten, Vol. 1, Mike Carey and Peter Goss

For the Graphic Novel Challenge! The Unwritten is about a guy called Tom whose father – long since disappeared without a trace – wrote an incredibly popular series of books about a character with Tom’s same name: Tommy Taylor.  However, it turns out that all the paperwork proving Tom is his father’s son has been forged.  At first it is theorized that he is a fraud, the son of Romanian peasants; then people begin to believe that he is, in fact, Tommy Taylor, brought into existence by the stories themselves.  The word made flesh. The Unwritten is set in London,…

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Dull dreams

I dreamed last week that I had checked out A Time to Keep Silence from the library, on Litlove’s recommendation, and was very let down by it.  Instead of writing about visiting monasteries, it was all about visiting chocolate factories!  In my dream, I got fed up with Fermor’s constant cutesy references to Willy Wonka, and in the end I took the book and stacked it neatly on top of the other library books I haven’t liked enough to finish.  And then this all receded into the fuzzy mess of vague memory, and as happens with absurd regularity, I forgot…

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Update on Fellowship

It is now the middle of the month – tell us all how Tolkien is treating you over at The Literary Omnivore: (omnivore = all standards) If you’ve been with us since the beginning, how do you feel about the narrator compared to the narrator in The Hobbit? BETTER.  I didn’t hate the narrating style of The Hobbit or anything, but it didn’t feel like the Middle Earth world.  Reading Fellowship is nice – it starts out sounding rather cheerful and hobbity, like The Hobbit, but more Lord of the Ringsy, and then it slowly gets darker and darker.  By…

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Review: Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones

So Fire and Hemlock is a retelling of the ballad “Tam Lin”, but it incorporates elements from a dozen other fairy tales, myths, and legends.  I read this article one time that Diana Wynne Jones wrote, about the process of writing Fire and Hemlock and all the different strands of stories she used, which was quite, quite interesting.  The story begins with a young woman called Polly, who is packing her things for Oxford and has come across a book that she remembers being quite different to what it is now.  This leads her to the realization that she has…

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Two books I didn’t like (sad, sad)

I put the words “sad, sad” in the title line here, but that was silly.  I am not sad at all.  I am still very happy, because as you may recall, THE SAINTS WON THE SUPER BOWL, causing me to tear up happily every time Drew Brees opens his mouth (he’s such a sweet dear) or every time I see a picture of all the confetti and rejoicing.  And everyone is all “If only my daddy were alive to see this day,” and New Orleans is throwing the biggest party possibly every thrown, like even bigger than that party in…

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Review: Peter and Max, Bill Willingham

I won Peter and Max from Cecelia of adventures of cecelia bedelia – thank you!  I was having a terrible day, and when I got home I had not one, BUT TWO packages on my doorstep.  One was Peter and Max, and the other was a package of two books and a bookmark from Jeane.  It was amazing.  It caused my day to stop being terrible, and be awesome instead.  (True story.) If you haven’t read Fables, you should really do that.  In fact, go do that now, and when you have finished, you may come back and we can…

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Update

In case you are wondering: 1. I cried several tears of happiness. 2. I have only a very small, croaky voice left. 3. We will have to think up new hell-froze-over jokes. 4. There is much street-dancing, horn-honking, screaming, and fireworks. I BELIEVE THIS MEANS THAT LENT IS CANCELED. I AM HAPPY. WHO DAT!

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My new crush

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…

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