If you are about to ask, “Jenny, did you get this book for only two pounds at the Charing Cross Road Borders, along with a number of other kids’ books that were, at 3 for 2, absolutely irresistible?”, then the answer is yes. Yes, I did. And I was really pleased about it, I can tell you. And I also couldn’t resist buying a great big heavy book all about writing Doctor Who, because I am interested in how people write TV shows. I mean how the process works. All very interesting. The Tales of Beedle the Bard is another…
7 CommentsTag: fairy tales
I simply cannot get on with Patricia McKillip. I don’t know what it is about her books that displease me. The writing is lovely, her characters are likeable, the plots are interesting – and still, every single time I pick up one of her books, I end up stewing in displeasure and finally asking myself, Jenny, why are you torturing yourself like this? Just put the damn book down and read something else. Winter Rose is a retelling of Tam Lin. I love that story! As previously mentioned, I am reading a bunch of retellings of that story. And there…
10 CommentsI do not appreciate casual slaps at the South for being racist. I do not mind delineations of particular racist things the South has done and continues to do (that’s fair, although I don’t know why the North always gets such a pass), but I just can’t stand this unsupported assumption that the South is full of people ten times more racist than the rest of the country. So I didn’t like it in this book when the Mysterious (read: deeply aggravating and nobody in her right mind would ever bother with him) Boy Next Door, Dominic, says a few…
11 CommentsBlast. I wrote a nice, thoughtful review of this book, and then it somehow got lost when I reviewed Death: The High Cost of Living. Bother bother bother. Suffice it to say – The Queen of Spells is a retelling of “Tam Lin”, which is such a great story that I have checked out or reserved five different adaptations of it, to decide which one is best (apart from, obviously, Fire and Hemlock). The Queen of Spells is not best. The sequence where Janet is hanging onto Tom as he turns into all sorts of things is trippy and nifty…
2 CommentsI read about Baltimore on Jenclair’s blog untold ages ago, and I put it on my list, but I didn’t leave myself a little note explaining what it was about. This is something I do now, but I didn’t always, and so when I would be at the library looking at my list of books, I never checked out Baltimore because I had forgotten anything I ever read about its plot. Fortunately I was incredibly bored recently and took the time to go back through my book list, look up the reviews, and leave myself teeny little plot synopses. Baltimore…
5 CommentsSo, okay, admittedly I am having trouble facing the idea of human interaction these days on account of being totally down in the dumps, but still it seems excessive for me to have read all the rest of the Fables volumes since Tuesday night. It went like this: I got the fourth volume from the library near work on Wednesday, read that; went to two different libraries on Thursday to get one and three and read those; then on Saturday I went to Bongs & Noodles and read two, and that evening I went to the main branch of the…
1 CommentMy sister has talked so much about Fables for months (I mean, not ceaselessly, just when it came up), and yes, I mostly ignored her; and I also mostly ignored Nymeth, who has been saying how good Fables is (are?) for a while too. So now I am sorry that I ignored y’all, because I grabbed a volume the last time I was at the library – I really wanted Goodbye, Chunky Rice but they didn’t have it – and I read it last night. It was the fifth volume, which isn’t a genius way to start out a series. …
5 CommentsI’ve been such a schizophrenic reader lately. I’ve not gotten any books out of the library for the past several weeks, because I’ve been reading Harry Potter and Martin Millar, and planning to get started on Shakespeare. However, the last time I went through reading all the book blogs I read, there were so many books that appealed to me. And I wrote them all down but I was all on board with finishing up my Harry Potter & Shakespeare reading before carrying on to new things. Ah, and then Obama got elected, and I got an unexpected check from…
2 CommentsAnd 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 Comments