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Tag: fantasy

Taller Tales, Bill Willingham

A graphic novel experiment here.  I have an incredibly hard time reading graphic novel series that are not all of a piece; i.e., that are not written by one writer all the way through.  They feel fragmented.  I don’t read superhero comics for this reason.  I loved Sandman and Fables, and there are many good graphic novels in this world, but I generally find that the people who created the characters tend to be the ones who are able to capture their voices.  So I thought, hey, you know, this doesn’t have to be the case.  I thought, I will…

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Threshold, Caitlin R. Kiernan

I got this book out of the library because I put Martin Millar’s name into the Literature-Map website, and Caitlin Kiernan’s name was close to his.  This is one of those things that I should know straight away isn’t going to work out for me: every time I do this, I find that the closest authors to the name I’ve entered are people I either haven’t heard of or don’t like, whereas the names of authors I do like are farther out to the perimeter.  Douglas Coupland, Neil Gaiman, T.S. Eliot, and Alexandre Dumas are all well out at the…

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Well Wished, Franny Billingsley

Don’t you love it when you re-encounter a book you’d completely forgotten about?  I found Well Wished at the book fair, and as soon as I opened it I felt like I had been flashed straight back to second grade.  I read Well Wished for the first time in the library of my elementary school, one afternoon when I was stuck there for what felt like forever.  I don’t remember why I felt stuck – I like the library – or why I was there at all after school hours, but I remember this book.  Well Wished is about a…

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Those Who Hunt the Night, Barbara Hambly

When I am reading other people’s blogs and deciding which books I want to put on my list to read later on, I have started the habit of writing down what it is about their description of the book that attracted me.  That way, when I am on the library computer examining this book blog to see what I want to read next, I can choose what sort of book I am in the mood to read.  And what I wrote for this one was “a guilt-ridden ex-priest vampire in Victorian London!” which is totally not the point at all. …

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All the rest of the volumes of Fables, except the seventh which wasn’t anywhere, Bill Willingham et. al.

So, 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…

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Fables: The Mean Season, Bill Willingham

My 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. …

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Of Other Worlds, C.S. Lewis

You know how you complain about your family members sometimes, when you’re in a bad mood with them?  And you’re all, My father’s this, my sister’s that, when you’re talking to your friends?  And it’s okay for your friend to say things like “That does sound frustrating” or “She’s being unreasonable”, but if your friend ever says “Wow, your sister’s a bitch”, you get really really angry and tell your friend to mind her own damn business? That’s my exact relationship with C.S. Lewis.  I can say bad things about him, but you had better not.  Or if you do,…

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Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman

Aw, Season of Mists is great.  I like it so much.  It makes me nostalgic for Past Jenny, who was young and dumb and had yet to discover most of her now-favorite films and music and TV shows (including, of course, the other six volumes of Sandman).  Oh, wow, that’s really, really true.  I hadn’t discovered Joss Whedon yet, or The Office, or Doctor Who; I hadn’t yet seen any of my current five desert island DVDs (fifth series of Buffy, MirrorMask, Empire Records, Angels in America, and Before Sunrise); I didn’t know the Decembrists, the Shins, Neko Case –…

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Year of the Griffin, Diana Wynne Jones

I didn’t exactly mean to read this.  I am still intending to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, which I had forgotten about until just now.  I am in the middle of rereading the entire Sandman.  I have a whole bunch of books out of the library about sexual ethics and other interesting things – art controversies, STDs, Bohemians – and instead of reading any of those things, I’ve been reading Diana Wynne Jones.  Once I read The Dark Lord of Derkholm I yearned and yearned for Year of the Griffin and couldn’t concentrate on anything else. In Year of the…

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The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones

I love the hell out of this book.  I read it to my sister when we were younger.  It’s all about this world, and it’s a fantasy world, and a bad, wicked man called Mr. Chesney is using the entire world to give people from the real world tours.  And so the entire world has to do what he says: the elves have to pretend to be wicked, and the wizards have to be Dark Lords and be defeated by the tour groups dozens of times every year; and the cities have to get sacked.  And some wizards get tired…

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