A book I acquired in spite of my firm and as-yet-unbroken book-buying ban. My lovely grandmother (my mum’s mum) sent it to me, all shiny and beautiful and hardback, along with an equally shiny and beautiful and hardback book about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots not liking each other (I am excited about this as it has been quite some time since I read anything about the Tudors). My grandmother loves to read. She inherited booklust from her father, my great-grandfather, who loved Rafael Sabatini and who gave a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to my grandmother…
5 CommentsReading the End Posts
I have wanted to read this play ever since I saw the title. This review brought to you by Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, where I first read about this play with its very excellent title, and by the Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road, to which very many props for their mad selection of drama. The Lady’s Not for Burning is a modern (1948) play set in the fifteenth century, and it is brilliant with its words but limited in its action, which all takes place in one room in the house of the city mayor. Thomas Mendip, a disillusioned ex-soldier,…
22 CommentsSo I was mysteriously untempted by the Buffy Season Eight comics for a really long time, and then Fyrefly (inventor of the book blog search, hooray!) started getting all reviewy of them, and that reminded me that I love Buffy like a fat kid loves cake (or a skinny kid – any kid really), and today I went to Bongs & Noodles and (don’t tell) read all four volumes that they had, which was The Long Way Home and No Future for You and Wolves at the Gate and Time of Your Life, but there’s apparently another one after that. …
2 CommentsThis is not so much a review, as a big political thing involving this book and the author of the last one I read. I decided to make it a separate post from the one about Iran: A People Interrupted. Mainly because otherwise the post would have been too disjointed; and because the stuff I want to write about right now is really about Reading Lolita in Tehran. See, Hamid Dabashi really does not like Azar Nafisi. Y’all, he really doesn’t like her – not in a box, not with a fox, not in a house, not with a mouse. …
8 CommentsWhen I was in high school, and my mum was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology, she used to read us excerpts from her textbooks. Sometimes these were interesting, like about Jesus’s genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew and how it’s implying that Mary was sexually suspect. But mostly she was reading bits aloud to us as an illustration of theologians’ complete inability to express themselves clearly. I have no patience with writers who can’t make a sensible sentence – read C.S. Lewis, people! You could all learn a thing or two from the book that is C.S. Lewis! …
2 CommentsMm, I hated the troll sidekick. I hated him. The evil sorceress lady Lamorna (only she’s not that evil – good for her to get the robe at the end despite her wicked ways!) is totally justified in smacking his head off. I would smack his stupid head off too. He spoiled every scene he was in. The Robe of Skulls is all about Lady Lamorna trying to raise enough money to make a robe all out of skulls. With spiders. She’s thrilled about the whole idea, but she doesn’t have enough money, and so concocts a scheme to raise…
Leave a CommentAh, yes, it’s time for another twisted and disturbing retelling of the Pied Piper, courtesy of the animal-loving Jeane. I can’t decide whether this is more disturbing or What Happened in Hamelin – I feel like the latter, because of all the little children – but this is still fairly disturbing. In a good way! I liked it! The Coachman Rat is all about Cinderella’s rat. On the night of Cinderella’s ball (she’s called Amadea here), an ordinary rat is transformed into a coachman; and at midnight, as she runs away, he is turned back into a rat. Now, however,…
7 CommentsStolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger We had to read Zlata’s Diary in ninth grade, and I remember thinking, Sheesh, if I were Zlata as a grown-up, I would really wish these diaries weren’t out there. They are just like the diaries I kept at that age, lots of Oh why is this happening to me, and How can these trivial things make me happy when there is so much darkness in my life? – the difference being, of course, that she actually had bad stuff happening to me;…
2 CommentsYou know what my favorite thing about this book was? And don’t think I’m saying this in an anti-Rebel-Angels way at all, because I’m not and I loved Parlabane even though his (spoilers, I guess?) farewell letter was silly. My favorite thing about this book is that the main character (I think I can call her that), Maria, has a mum that reads Tarot cards, and she reads the Five of Coins (our Pentacles) to mean a loss, but a far greater gain is coming. The very next day, I was doing a reading for my sister, and I realized…
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