So in case you’ve been living in a hole and not hearing about The Hunger Games – it’s a grim, grim dystopian future, and every year the government makes each of the twelve districts send one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to participate in the Hunger Games where they all get placed in a specially designed Perilous Terrain and fight to the death on live TV. Katniss, our dauntless protagonist, volunteers to take her little sister’s place, and the other tribute turns out to be the baker’s son Peeta (I know, right?), who once saved Katniss and her family…
13 CommentsReading the End Posts
I told Colleen at Foreign Circus Library that I love books about research, and she ever so kindly sent it to me in the post! Lucky me, I read it over the weekend. Poor Connie has just got through with her qualifying exams – sounds like a nightmare, that lot, I don’t think I was sufficiently sympathetic to my dear friend tim when she was having quals (sorry tim!) – and her scatty New Age mother demands she go fix up her (Connie’s) late grandmother’s old house and get it sold. While living at the house, Connie finds a little…
11 CommentsI was all sick and unhappy today, but on the other hand, I got a bunch of books from the library on Sunday, including a number of books about Iran – would you believe, with all this shit going down in Iran that is all over the news all the time and everyone is fighting for their freedom, and on Saturday I received from the lovely Colleen a copy of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (hooray! It sounds just like one of Barbara Michaels’ books, with the spooky past and everything!), and today, oh heaven, I received from PaperbackSwap…
2 CommentsIn Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes about the structure, creation, history, and vocabulary (among other things!) of comics. He does it, of course, in graphic novel form, with a little cartoon Scott McCloud telling us what is going on. I love this because when he talks about a technique that graphic novels use, voila, he can show it to us too! The book never becomes boring, which is partly down to the fact that it’s an interesting topic, but also partly because the form allows a lot of room for humor. (I was going to write “and whimsy”, but I…
11 CommentsI wish I could do something more helpful for Iran. I want justice to triumph.
1 CommentSo when I was a wee lass, struggling with greater than/less than and detesting long division that ended with remainders (this is why I don’t like math! – because lots of things end up with solutions that are very untidy and not whole numbers AT ALL), the BBC was creating a miniseries about a DJ at a mental hospital radio station and the patients there, called Takin’ Over the Asylum. And although I was too wee to care at the time, they were being surprisingly careful not to be an asshole, and getting their actors to perform four major mental…
4 CommentsOh, this started out so promisingly. I loved the idea of a bunch of different people telling the story of this one women. I loved how the book would create a space around her that would leave you wondering and wondering what she was thinking all along – like The Moonstone does with Rachel, you know? There are several different narrators, and they all talk about the mysterious, recently-murdered Athena. The witch of Portobello. I was thrilled! I thought Paulo Coehlo was my Next Big Thing! However, the book ended up sort of preachy, and the dialogue fell prey to…
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