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Reading the End Posts

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

In 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…

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My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

Verdict: Not as good as Rebecca. Philip, the protagonist of My Cousin Rachel, has been raised by his bachelor cousin Ambrose.  Ambrose goes away to Italy, marries there, and a few years later sends a letter to Philip intimating that he is in danger, and asking Philip to come to Italy straight away.  When Philip gets there, Ambrose has died, and Rachel is gone.  He conceives a hatred for her, believing that she was responsible for Ambrose’s death; but when she comes to stay with him in England, he falls for her straight away.  Is she evil?  Did she poison…

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Takin’ Over the Asylum

So 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…

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The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coehlo

Oh, 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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You know what I love, Internet?

Internet, I will tell you what I love.  I love stories set in Britain right before, during, between, and right after the World Wars.  I LOVE THEM.  Cf. The Little Stranger, The Shooting Party, The House at Riverton, Baltimore, Those Who Hunt the Night, Love Lessons, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Night Watch, etc.  If you say “Britain” and “World War” in your synopsis of a book, I tend to bump it way up on my reading list.  If you also say “aristocracy” and “disintegrating way of life”, I tend to put a hold on it…

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The books I bought in London

First trip to Foyle’s The Ordinary Princess, M.M. Kaye My review of this book is here.  I recently bought it in hardback at Bongs & Noodles, but I really hate the cover, and when I saw a paperback at Foyle’s with a proper cover, I couldn’t resist getting it.  I mean, how could I?  Compare them, and you will see how right I was.  I was going to offer the hardback to you lovely people, but then my sister asked for it, so I’m giving it to her when she gets back from law school. I know, right?  Sheesh. White…

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Booking Through Thursday

I like this one: This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. So here are my fifteen books that will always stick with me, more or less in the order in which they entered my life: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte Emily Climbs, L.M .Montgomery Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card Macbeth, William Shakespeare The Chosen, Chaim Potok The Color Purple, Alice Walker Harry Potter and…

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The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

I got The Little Stranger for my birthday!  And read it on the plane back home yesterday.  Not a good plane book; I should have read Changing Planes, which would have been much better, but by the time I thought of it, it was the last leg of the flight and I was trying to catch fifteen minutes of sleep so I wouldn’t die of exhaustion.  The Little Stranger would be a perfect dark-and-stormy-night type of book.  (Not that there’s any book I wouldn’t want to read at night all cozy with a thunderstorm outside – but some are more…

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (trans.)

So this is a really good translation.  It sounds French, if that makes any sense – the words from the people sound like things that would come out of the mouths of my French friends (if they felt like talking about Tolstoy, which so far they have not shown any particular inclination to do) – but without the awkwardness that bugs me in so many translations of foreign novels. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about a concierge who has spent her life pretending to be stupid so that nobody will notice her.  She is fairly isolated, as you can…

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