Recommended by: Darla at Books and other thoughts Many spoilers to follow, but you can probably guess them while you’re reading anyway. City of Bones is all about a girl called Clary who witnesses a most unpleasant murder and gets drawn into the wild and wacky world of demon-slaying. Turns out her mother used to be a demon-slaying badass chick, but left that life to pursue normalcy as a single mum. Clary has a steamy crush on one of the demon-hunters, Jace, and they have banter and sexual tension; there’s a wicked guy called Valentine (it was hardcore with the…
3 CommentsReading the End Posts
Everybody loves Tom Robbins. Most notably, my sister loves Tom Robbins and keeps telling my mum and me to read Tom Robbins. So I was at the library, and I was near the Rs, and I grabbed Still Life with Woodpecker in order to experience the joy. I read it as part of my new plan of reading a book while I am walking to work in the morning. Initially I had a hard time concentrating on Still Life with Woodpecker as I was very busy with the following process: 1) holding imaginary arguments with my mother about the dangers…
3 CommentsI read about this on this blog here, and I’ve been reading it off and on for the last week and a half. It’s very sad. Very, very, very, very sad. It’s a very woeful book. It’s all about a woman called Lydia and her life in college and then her married life and her children. I’ll just go ahead and spoil this for you: Two of them die, the younger two, the two she raised to tothood without massive travail and struggle. And that’s part of the thing that threads through the entire book – you know from the…
1 CommentThis is what happens when you get books at charity shops. You are swept away by their cheapness and the feeling that you are doing a good deed, and in the end you have more books than you need (I’m kidding; that’s impossible – I mean, of course, you have the wrong books), and must find a way to get rid of the books with discretion and courtesy. I bought The Wizard of Earthsea in small, crappy hardback form, and I really had to force myself to finish it. My mother and sister have always said it’s so, so good,…
2 CommentsFor some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be the last of the Temeraire series. Not really sure why I thought that – evidently Ms. Novik plans to have probably nine of them before she’s done. She must have many, many facts in her brain to want to write so many books (even though she’s now ditched history entirely). Yes, at this point she has abandoned real history in favor of stuff that’s more fun, which, hey, I’m completely fine with. It would be silly to accept dragons and then complain that Napoleon had…
1 CommentAnd once again, I have Neil Gaiman to thank for some charming fantasy reading. First Martin Millar (darling Martin Millar! My only, only regret about my recent abandonment of graduate school is that I can now no longer use the university’s interlibrary loan system to acquire for myself the rest of Martin Millar’s out-of-print books), and now Lud-in-the-Mist, to which, I have to say, I believe Stardust owes a hefty debt. I’m always so pleased when I discover that Neil Gaiman has stolen his ideas or plots, mainly because the man is about ten thousand times more weirdly creative than…
5 CommentsThere has never been a more picked-up-at-random than this book. Basically I was at Bongs & Noodles before the storm, trying to pick out a good hurricane book. And I kind of wanted to get Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I had already read it. And I kind of wanted to get The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro, because of how haunting I remember Never Let Me Go was, but I felt doubtful about it. So I sat on a chair gazing at my options, and then I realized that what I really wanted was to read The Far Pavilions…
3 Comments