keri: ☆☆ (second thread)

My previous 2011 thread.

I looked at my list the other day and was disappointed that I'd let myself read so many junky books/manga, and not enough of the challenging things I want to read. So this time, I'm going to split my Completed Reads list between the two, in order to encourage myself to stop reaching for the easy/quick reads.

My goal for this year is 52 books, but I'm going to revise it to 52 books where at least 12 are in my top list.

☆ Completed ☆
- Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (4 Jan)
- Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Guy Delisle (14 Jan)
- Beowulf trans. Seamus Heaney (18 Jan)
- Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys (27 Jan) (Nov ER Win)
- My Girlfriend is a Geek, Pentabu (30 Jan)
- The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Book 2: The Hidden Gallery, Maryrose Wood (31 Jan)
- Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde (3 Feb)
- Ash, Malinda Lo (7 Feb)
- Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool (20 Feb)
- Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime, Mizuki Nomura (29 Mar)
- The Power of Babel : A natural history of language, John McWhorter (6 Apr)
- Machine of Death, ed. Ryan North & David Malki ! (13 Apr)
- Book Girl and the Famished Spirit, Mizuki Nomura (19 Apr)
- Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh (28 Apr)
- Stones for my Father, Trilby Kent (1 May)
- The Wake of the Lorelei Lee (Bloody Jack #8), L.A. Meyer (4 May)
- The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place #1 : The Mysterious Howling, Maryrose Wood (8 May)
- The Arrival, Shaun Tan (8 May)
- The Professor's Daughter, Joann Sfar & Emmanel Guibert (8 May)
- Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson (9 May)
- Robot Dreams, Sara Varon (9 May)
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick (11 May)
- Daytripper, Fàbio Moon & Gabriel Bá (14 May)
- Poseidon's Steed: Seahorses from Myth to Reality, Helen Scales, PhD (27 May)
- Blankets, Craig Thompson (27 May)
- Birthmarked, Caragh O'Brien (30 May)
- Strings Attached, Judy Blundell (2 Jun)
- Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick (4 Jun)
- The False Princess, Eilis O'Neal (7 Jun)
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell (4 Jul)
- Wandering Son: Book One, Takako Shimura (24 Jul)
- Nat Tate, 1928 - 1960, William Boyd (31 Jul)
- Swamplandia!, Karen Russell (7 Aug)
- The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett (10 Aug)
- Uelsmann: Process and Perception, Jerry Uelsman (27 Aug)
-Retribution Falls, Chris Wooding (3 Sep)
-Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact, A.J. Hartley (12 Sep)
- Inflight Science, Brian Clegg (19 Sep)
- Esperanza Rising, Pam Muñoz Ryan (19 Sep)
- Habibi, Craig Thompson (15 Oct)
- Adios, Happy Homeland!, Ana Menéndez (29 Oct)
- Book Girl and the Captive Fool, Mizuki Nomura (14 Nov)
- That is All, John Hodgman (17 Dec)
- Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis (19 Dec)

☆ Completed Picture Books, Manga, &c. ☆
- Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai (I am not an angel) Vol. 1 - 8 by Ai Yazawa (10 Jan)
- happy birthday coco by Oneones (20 Jan)
- Charlotte in Giverny, Joan MacPhail Knight and Melissa Sweet (29 Jan)
- Charlotte in Paris, Joan MacPhail Knight and Melissa Sweet (29 Jan)
- Yotsuba&!, vol. 7, Kiyohiko Azuma (20 Feb)
- Girl Friends (vol. 1-5), Milk Morinaga (24 Feb)
- Bunny Drop (#3), Yumi Unita (16 Mar)
- Ouran Koukou Host Club (vol. 1-17), Bisco Hatori (22 Mar)
- Aria, vol. 6, Kozue Amano (28 Mar)
- Amnesia Labyrinth, vol. 1, Nagaru Tanigawa (28 Mar)
- Yotsuba&!, vol. 8, Kiyohiko Azuma (29 Mar)
- A Bride's Story (vol. 1), Kaoru Mori (28 May)
- Amnesia Labyrinth, vol. 2, Nagaru Tanigawa (7 Jun)
- Love☆Com (vol. 1-17), Aya Nakahara (14 Jun)
- Bunny Drop (#4), Yumi Unita (3 Oct)
- Yotsuba&!, vol. 10, Kiyohiko Azuma (12 Oct)
- Inukami (Omnibus vol 4-6), Mamizu Arisawa (23 Oct)
- A Bride's Story (vol. 2), Kaoru Mori (1 Nov)

☆ Dropped ☆
- Revolution, Jennifer Donnelly (15 Mar) 245/472
- Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen (14 Apr) 100/360

2012 Thread

☆ Currently Reading ☆
- Lucky Break (Sept 2011 ER win)

☆ Stalled ☆
- The Innocents Abroad (since Sept 2009)
- The Naming (Allison Croggan) (since May 2009)
- Charlotte Temple NCE contexts & criticisms
- Fantomina, Eliza Haywood (currently on 4th section "Love-Letters On All Occasions".)

☆ TBR (Shortlist) ☆
- SANTATHING books :D
- - The Lexicographer's Dilemma
- - The Unfolding of Language
- An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- Three Novellas, Eliza Haywood
- Philidore & Placentia, Eliza Haywood
- Book Girl and the Captive Fool, Mizuki Nomura (series book #3)
- Bloody Jack novel #9

I hope the new thread makes you happy!

I think having a fresh thread to post to will feel less overwhelming, so maybe. :)

The Power of Babel is a book I started in February, but only finished last night, because I got distracted from it by shiny new books, which does tend to happen to me...

For the most part, having had a few introductory/basic linguistics classes as well as having had a classical Greek instructor who kept inserting evolutionary linguistics into our lessons (plus politics, how to make a fine homebrew beer, the way to know if pot is ready to be smoked...), most of the concepts were familiar to me, but I learned a lot from the examples and now feel that I have a much broader and more thorough understanding of the history of language. McWhorter is very easy to understand; he states in the introduction that he tried to keep the non-linguists in mind when writing, and so mostly avoids things like IPA or highly technical terms without explanation.

It's super clear from the reading that McWhorter finds a kind of joy in studying the diversity of language, and I think that anyone who reads the book will be able to appreciate it, if not discover their own joy/fascination. But, then, I may be biased, due to my own predisposition towards being fascinated by language diversity and beauty (why oh why didn't I argue for going to university out of state so I could be a linguist? - but I ask the same thing about folklore).

Although when discussing creoles, pidgins, dialects, and various elements of language (such as articles, gender markers, or different kinds of inflections) McWhorter is careful to use examples from all over the world, rather than limiting them to any particular region or type of language, I found that the book as a whole is most suitable for Americans and maybe Canadians. He includes a lot of pop culture references that I am only vaguely familiar with, but which I know to be part of the American cultural knowledge - I suspect that people from other English-speaking countries might find these references flying over their heads. That said, most of the references aren't strictly necessary for understanding, but rather provide further context for a concept, or an analogy from a different field.

The primary negative to the book goes along with McWhorter's references to pop culture. He uses a friendly, familiar voice that often includes asides or digressions either in the main text or included as a footnote. While some of these are interesting notes about the topic at hand, most of them are personal comments or observations that would have done better to be left out. I suppose that other people might find them to be a sort of ...softening or something to keep the book from being too academic.

On the whole, I do recommend The Power of Babel to anyone who has a passing interest in how languages have developed to where they are today. It was interesting all the way through, without any dull spots, and was easy to read. Plus, it's fairly short - only 300 pages in the paperback edition I have.

(Huh, I started writing about the book as a general "this is what I just finished reading" and ended up writing an almost full-out review.)

 

My next reads will be Pride and Prejudice and Vile Bodies - one is the group read, of course, which I've been putting off, and the other is a completely new-to-me author that I discovered I'd probably love when I was doing SantaThing research. I think after that, I'll read the next part of my Eliza Haywood book and The Wee Free Men from my SantaThing pile (ah, it's April and I still haven't read any of them!)

ETA: And here is my slightly-cleaned up review for The Power of Babel. Also, a note to self that McWhorter recommends Guns, Germs, and Steel and Pinker's The Language Instinct for Chomskyan linguistics.

Very nice review. My interests tend more towards etymology and lexicography than linguists but it sounds like an interesting book. Hope you enjoy your next reads as well (especially P&P).

*waves hello*

5> Etymology is discussed in The Power of Babel, since the meaning of words and how words change is a major function of historical linguistics, in addition to grammars, of course. McWhorter doesn't really use the word "etymology" or anything, but a lot of what he talks about, especially when showing how pidgins become creoles and how some languages intertwine or are influenced by neighbors, is very much etymology or related to it. If you're interested in linguistics at all, I think it's definitely worth reading (well, it might be a bit basic for post-grad linguists, but I couldn't say for sure - I heard about it from someone with a linguistics degree who said it was a good and worthwhile degree).

As for P&P - I hope I enjoy it, too! I wasn't crazy about it the last time I read it, mostly because I loathe Elizabeth and Darcy and don't care to read about them. ;) But I figure I may as well get it another chance.

Found you again, Keri!

Likewise!

I really liked The Language Instinct, but it was also the first pop-linguistics book I read; we used it as a secondary text in the introductory linguistics class I took in college. I don't know if it would be quite as amazing if you're already more familiar with the subject, but I'd still recommend it.

If you're particularly interested in creoles, I really liked Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton. (I've made the same recommendation on the page for Power of Babel, but due to my stalkers it's been thumbed down a few times.)

I haven't actually read many pop linguistics books, and that's something I want to fit into my reading more, so thanks for the note. :) (Actually, not necessarily "pop" linguistics, but I'll work up to the more difficult stuff.)

Also: how dumb, those down-thumbs. It's pretty clear from what I know of the book that it's a great recommendation for anyone wanting to learn more about creoles.

I keep meaning to learn something about linguistics too, probably starting from "pop" linguistics and working up to the more serious stuff as well. I'd really like to find some efficient introduction for people who have studied a lot of languages but know nothing about linguistics, but I'm not sure that exists.

Your comment about wishing you had gone to school out of state so you could be a linguist makes me sort of sad. Is it too late to go back now? Have you considered Canadian universities, which I think are half the price of American ones even with international fees added in?

I still can't believe there's been no staff action about that blatant thumb abuse. Bah.

My university thing is kind of complicated, and I simplified it a lot in that statement. You see, I received a 100% scholarship to any Florida public school through the Bright Futures program. That put a lot of pressure on me to go to a state school, so that I'd only have to worry about living fees. I could have gone to the University of Florida to study linguistics, but it's really difficult to get in, and I didn't expect to be accepted, because I had very few extra-curricular activities or anything really outstanding on my school history.

I also really didn't want to go to a large school (and UF is enormous) because of super-bad anxiety disorder. I ended up applying to New College (only 700 students at the time), and I got a $2,000 annual stipend from the school, which was pretty awesome (it's the state honors college, and the year I attended was the first year it was independent from USF).

But New College is a small liberal arts school and didn't really have that many programs - I decided to study Classics there. I ended up leaving before completing my second semester for various reasons, but one of them being I got in a car accident that Easter and it was a good excuse to come home and switch to UNF in my hometown. I didn't really want to go to UNF because they had no programs that interested me, but after New College, I was looking for something safe and easy, so I settled and got an English degree.

That's the point at which I probably should have argued to attend a school with a program I really wanted to study, but I didn't feel that I had that option, because of the scholarship hanging over my head, and having 4 younger siblings who were also going to be attending university, but only one of whom had any hope of also getting the Bright Futures scholarship (he did, but it's now only 50% tuition, or something).

Anyway, I was in a grad program for archives and records management, but I failed both of the semesters I was enrolled because I'm apparently incapable of online programs (probably for the same reasons I fared poorly at New College). At this point, I'm kind of burned out on school, unless I can move to the city and not go to school online, and also not have to work during the semester. But I've always figured, if I strike it rich, I'll indulge in going back to school for degrees in linguistics and folklore. :D

(Actually, I really want to earn the MLIS degree, because working with archives is probably the only career that doesn't make me dread the idea of working 5 days a week the rest of my life, but I have no idea if that's possible anymore, because of the failing and my mental illness.)

 

 

For less tl;dr about my school history, I'm trying hard to read P&P now. I have myself goaled at 90 pages per day so I can finish it by Tuesday. So far, I'm 20% through the book, and just like before, far more interested in Miss Bingley, Mrs Bennett, and the younger Benett sisters than I am in Darcy or Elizabeth or even Jane (I liked Jane and Mr Bingley last time). I've just finished page 72, and Wickham and Mr Collins have just arrived on the scene, which promises a perking up of the narrative, because I love those two characters. They're fun to read about.

Grr, it makes me so angry to hear of people not getting the education they want because of financial considerations. I still love hearing school stories, though; I think part of me secretly wanted to be an academic advisor, because I've spent long hours plotting out course plans for myself and even for friends of friends.

I think you can still get an MLIS at some point if you really want to. It's definitely possible to overcome the failure, anyway. One of my friends who's currently in an MLIS program initially applied directly out of undergrad and wasn't accepted anywhere, because she had pretty mediocre grades, including one failure. So she did a one-year library technician course at a community college instead (easier than university, and she got good grades), and worked at a library for another year, and then re-applied for the MLIS and got in. There comes a point when they don't much care about the distant past anymore, as long as your recent record seems promising.

Hi Keri. It's been a while since I've visited you. I started Vile Bodies when I saw you'd listed it on TIOLI. I've been listening to the audio version and have to say it's quite funny Hope you enjoy it and are feeling better.

I should probably give up on rereading P&P. It's such a chore to do, I even went and finished reading Machine of Death, which I hadn't touched since November.

I finished it, and I didn't even particularly care for it. My review, which assumes you know the premise of the stories (the other reviews lay it out, anyway).

There were a few good stories in the collection, but mostly they all ran together as existentialist/fatalist mush, and dreary, and all the same. I noted my favorites in the review - the book was available as a free e-book download, so if you're interested in checking out the ones I named, it wouldn't be difficult. :P

Now, I just need to figure out what to do with P&P. It's not that I hate the book or anything (and I do love reading about Wickham and Collins and Mrs Bennet, because the satire is sharp there), but more that I'm very apathetic about it. I don't care for the Darcy & Elizabeth plot at all, and this time around, the Jane/Bingsley one is leaving me a bit cold.

I'll probably still try Mansfield Park in May, but if it doesn't go well, I won't bother with Emma in July.

It sounds as if Austen is just not an author for you, Keri. My suggestion? Go read something else. Forcing yourself to read the books is just going to leave a bad taste in your mouth. Your tastes may change when you are older and you can re-visit Austen then. The books are not going anywhere :)

Just thumbed your review of The Power of Babel and am going to look for it soon. I have The Language Instinct here but haven't read it yet, even though I was excited when I found it at a secondhand book fair a few years back! I haven't done any linguistics (wish I had, but that goes for many university subjects!) but am interested in language learning and how languages develop.

I'm sad you're not enjoying Austen as she's a fave of mine, but I second what Stasia said. Don't force yourself to read them if they're not enjoyable.

Nah, I liked Sense & Sensibility when I read it in 2008, and I really liked Northanger Abbey that year - so I don't think it's Austen that I don't like, at least not on the whole. I didn't care for P&P when I read it in 2008 much, but thought I should try it again now that I'm more familiar with the context and everything, plus there's the group reads to encourage.

But I'm definitely not looking forward to reading it like I have been with my Haywood reading, so I really probably should put it aside.

Hooray, a new book arrived today! Book Girl and the Famished Spirit, number 2 in the Book Girl series. I heard that this one plays on Wuthering Heights (have I mentioned that in this thread?), but the opening piece quoted from the written work (if it follows the same pattern as the first book) doesn't look to be a direct quote from the book...but I guess I'll see how it goes.

Also, I just peeked at the new exhibit opening next week in the museum where I work and, you guys, it's super crazy. It's so obvious the artist was schizophrenic (and not just because he did 42,000+ pieces and never took off his boots ever), and all the scrawled writing plus the creepy eyes is a bit much for me. And I have to be excited about it for four months! Eep. (The artist is the Reverend Howard Finster, if you're curious.)

Some of the work is really cool and amazing, but on the balance...it's so not something I enjoy.

OMG! I just had a look at some of Reverend Howard Finster's work, and... INTENSE is the word. I find what I've seen interesting, but I certainly wouldn't want to be around it all day long. Whew! It might be a good time to practice deep breathing and purposeful meditation, you'll be a pro by the time they feature another artist! :-)

I went to Epcot to enjoy the Flower & Garden Festival displays this past Monday. I mostly took photos of things I hadn't really seen before (I used to go to Epcot a lot as a kid), but also of the gorgeous topiaries. If you'd like to look: http://www.flickr.com/photos/keristars/sets/72157626543710590/

This is one of my favorite photos from the day, though there are several that I think came out really well (plus the obligatory Spaceship Earth photos! it's a great feature to photograph):


The photo is 1600x1200px, so it's suitable to download as a desktop. ;) (Actually, almost all the photos I uploaded are.)

In book news, I finished Book Girl and the Famished Spirit the other day. It was kind of creepy and weird as I saw the Wuthering Heights plot develop and tried to think ahead of the novel to see how everything would resolve. But it was also fun, and very enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to the third installment in the series later this summer.

One of the things I'm really liking about Book Girl is the way each book is primarily a mystery story based on some piece of literature, and the two main characters (Book Girl Tohko and the narrator Konoha) aren't really part of that story, except in that they are the ones helping to bring it to light and resolve the conflict, yet that story is one which also sheds light on their personal histories, which the reader wouldn't really know about otherwise. Well, mostly with Konoha as the narrator. He has some painful stuff from two years before the story begins, but he hates even thinking about it (panic attacks and stuff), which means the overarching story is whether he can heal from it. Anyway, I dunno if I'm explaining it well, but I find it to be very compelling and enjoyable. A nice, 215p book.

I'm only in the second chapter of Vile Bodies, but oh my is it fun. I am tickled by Fanny Throbbing's name, and also all the seasickness descriptions in the first chapter.

I feel a bit as though some of the satire is going over my head, as it's about 80 years old, but even so plenty of it is amusing and accessible, and there are lots of quotable lines and exchanges. I hope it continues to be so enjoyable.

I'm glad you're enjoying Vile Bodies. A lot of it went over my head too, but it hardly matters since there's so much there to enjoy. One thing that bugged me all along is I couldn't figure out if we're supposed to think the angels are *actual* angels or just other characters that are acting as angels. I know it's one of those books that I'll want to keep returning to.

Well, I'm only in chapter 2, so I don't know if something else happens later on, but I think they're just girls (perhaps orphans in Mrs Ape's care?) that are called "angels" and made to dress up as angels as part of her missionary thing. Almost like a school group/club, but of a religious charity nature? I could see Mrs Ape collecting poor girls from wherever she comes across them back home, adopting them into her flock, and christening them with new names.

I don't even know if I'm describing it properly, but what I'm thinking of wasn't uncommon to see in certain types of films from the day, either, because that's where my mental image comes from (also from those cheerful moral books like Pollyanna).

That makes perfect sense to me. I did think that was probably what it was, but then again, not being familiar with Waugh or what effect he was after, I never quite made up my mind about it, but considering how the novel ends, your interpretation makes a whole lot more sense!

Now that I have finished Vile Bodies, I must say that I super loved it. I feel like there's some overarching theme or metaphor that I can't quite place, kind of like a roman à clef where I don't have the key, which is kind of annoying, but nonetheless it was a good read. I'm especially partial to the narrative style - it's a bit dry and detached, fairly minimalist, but also playful and lively. Actually, it reminds me of the champagne that everyone is constantly drinking!

I really did like the narrative style, so I'm going to seek out another Waugh shortly, I just have to decide which one. For some reason, Brideshead Revisited just doesn't seem like quite the one for me...

Some of my favorite parts of the book are when people die. It's so absurd, how little drama or emotion are attached to the deaths - all the attention is elsewhere, with "oh, by the way, when so-and-so did that just then? he died of it". But it's all over the book, with people practically dropping like flies (so it seemed). I think of the deaths, my favorite is of the girl towards the beginning who is rather drunk at a party at Mrs Crump's and decides to swing on a chandelier. The next day, Adam (the character the plot follows most) has come to see her and Mrs Crump is going on about the foolishness of swinging on the chandelier, and oh how the policemen are giving her such a time about it, and then after half a page of this, the fact that the girl fell and broke her neck or something gets about a half-sentence notice.

There are so many other little scenes and bits that I liked in the book, but I'm not sure I can pick them out of my memory, because I'll end up just retelling the entire thing, in order to give context, and that won't do.

On the whole, the end of the book was a bit sudden and weird, but when I stop to consider the plot (or lack of it) and everything, it does work quite well.

Now I've begun my February (March?) ER book Stones for my Father, but the beginning of it is so dreary with references to child-soldiers and abusive religious parents that I'm not sure if I want to push through and finish it quickly or if I'd rather set it aside. It's not as awful as it could be - it is a young YA book after all, but I felt fairly sick to my stomach to read of it. Also, there's some uncomfortable race issues, because it is set during a time of slavery, which didn't help.

I think after I finish it, I'll read The Wee Free Men - alternate something light with something heavy, yes?

Interesting comments on Vile Bodies, Keri. I've just finished Anthony Powell's first novel, Afternoon Men, which was written around the same time and deals with the same sort of material, though I think not as successfully; not enough humour to offset the unpleasantness. For your casually mentioned deaths, I've got a group of young people confronted by the suicide of their host at a country house, who after listlessly debating what they should do about it, end up deciding to have lunch: The Sunday afternoon passed slowly and with the hours it was easier to become accustomed to the idea of Pringle's suicide...

It's disturbing to reflect that these two writers might have been accurately capturing an attitude of the time, albeit satirically dealt with.

You know, I tagged Vile Bodies with "ennui" about halfway through reading it, because it felt like there was this incredible boredom with absolutely everything that was seeping out of the characters, a sort of listless high society "we can be bored because we are wealthy" sort of thing. But when I really look closely at the book, that doesn't quite seem to be there, though it is an element of the parties that the Bright Young Things attend.

At any rate, it's the same sort of feeling I get from The Great Gatsby, with everyone aimlessly moving about, trying to find some excitement, but ultimately falling back to the baseline, with whatever excitement was found only making small ripples that fade out soon. I think that in Vile Bodies, you really see it with the engagement between Adam and Nina. It's a constant refrain: "Nina, we're getting married tomorrow" "Really really?" and then "Nina, never mind about getting married". Or even Adam's attempts to get money (ostensibly so they can marry) - he keeps being given thousands, then loses it before it even reaches his hands, except for the first thousand pounds.

I wonder if this isn't a feature of novels about the wealthy and high society between the wars. Even certain Wodehouse stories have this sort of feeling to it, and plenty of films I've seen from the early 1930s do as well.

Also, I went on to read the introduction included in the Penguin Modern Classics edition, which has pointed out some of the odd things I'd felt but hadn't entirely picked up on that made me feel like I needed the key - doublings, the treasure hunt, and the plot structure, mostly. It drives me crazy that I can feel that there's something going on with a narrative, perhaps even have an idea of what is involved in it, but be completely unable to articulate it without prompting, even when I tried my hardest to do so, as with Vile Bodies. It's something I've been fighting since I first realized my handicap when I was 16. Bah.

Afternoon Men deals with the "artists and parties" part of society, but there's the same sense of pointlessness and disinterest about it all. People wander from club to club, party to party, they get drunk, have sex, start all over again. They don't have the wealth, but they've got the boredom down pat.

When I was filling in some details, I noticed with amusement that there was a copy of Afternoon Men in Evelyn Waugh's library.

Keri, I don't know about whether or not you have a handicap, but I related absolutely when you mentioned the difficulty or articulating things without prompting. I think it's a sign that our vast intelligence makes us think more than the average person which makes our minds that much fuller and therefore makes the retrieval of information that much more difficult. How's that for an excuse? :-)

I thought you summed up the book brilliantly with your comments. I've read quite a few books these pasts couple of years dealing with the aftermath of WWI and this ennui and restlessness certainly seemed to be a sign of the times.

As for the odd and suddenly bleaker than ever ending, I've read that Waugh had just gone through a difficult divorce as he was writing that part of the novel, and the assumption is that his state of mind influenced the direction the book took. Which makes sense to me.

I also "enjoyed" the casualness with which sudden death was received. I don't know whether you've read my review, which probably won't seem all that interesting to you since I wrote assuming the reader hasn't read Vile Bodies yet, but I quoted a passage dealing with Simon Balcairn's suicide which I thought was simply brilliant; ending with "...but soon he fell into a coma and presently died...Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox.". I'm curious to see your own review, if you decide to write one.

I used "handicap" at bit tongue-in-cheek there! To explain it: I do more than likely have Asperger's Syndrome (er, professional opinion from a licensed therapist, 90% certain; official testing is too damn expensive) which has that nice side effect for many of us of having problems with metaphor and being able to read between the lines. Amongst other things. So it's not really a "handicap" (lots of people need help with symbolism and metaphor), except that I need to be able to make connections in written work and read between the lines for deeper comprehension for school. (Well, not anymore since I failed out of grad school, because I suck at online classes.) I'll always remember one professor who took me aside and said, basically, "Keri, you write the academic paper style very well when you put in the effort, but the actual content is fairly shallow and basic, and you need to work more on the analysis" after I was super proud of myself for figuring out what I thought was a none-too-obvious motif in a novel! (FWIW, this is the same instructor who introduced me to Eliza Haywood ♥)

I do like your excuse about having so much more to think about, though. ;)

The ending of Vile Bodies: the introduction in my Penguin edition points out that the whole novel is almost a reverse of a romantic comedy. Adam is an anti-hero who really doesn't do much of anything except observe (sort of underlined in how he was the Chatterbox), and his engagement with Nina is more certain at the beginning of the story than at the end. So it kind of makes sense for the end to not be a wedding - and, of course, the opposite of a party is a place deserted and mourning, and what else is a battlefield after a battle? You can also point to how the final scene is sort of womblike in nature, with Chastity and a father figure next to him, but I'm not too certain about that one myself. I can see the argument, but I think it's stretching to get there. (I just don't see the Drunk Major as a father figure, the way the introduction says.)

Possibly the bleak ending is because of Waugh's divorce, but I don't really know how else the book could have ended than in war, the way it was building up in the background, and how being abroad and alone mirrors the way Adam was at the very beginning. Perhaps it's more bleak than it may have been because of it, but I think the divorce shows more in the way a lot of the marriages are depicted. Or maybe Waugh originally meant for Adam to marry Nina in the end? I don't know if we can know that.

Oh, another thing I noticed - there are three major parties in the book, and also three deaths. Each death is the result of a party, in a way. And, if I'm remembering correctly, Nina and Adam are shown having sex three times.

I'm still mulling the book over and won't write a review for some time, but I will eventually, since I like to say something about all the books I've read, so I can refer to it in the future. (Ilana, I feel bad because I'm so far behind on reading everyone else's threads, I had no idea you were up to #4 already!)

ETA: Also also, I'm going to add Afternoon Men to my wishlist notebook, if I happen across it at the used book store. I really like the modernist, minimalist style (I like Hemingway, too), and I think I'd like to try other authors from around then, and another take on the scene, too, which it sounds like that one is?

Keri, I'm sorry, but that prof of yours who said your content was "shallow" and "basic" was an idiot! I'm always very impressed with the observations you make about whatever you happen to be reading. Very much like the observations you've made about Vile Bodies so far. I used to look out for motifs and so on when I was younger and closer to my school days, but all that seems beyond me now, and I just read without thinking a whole lot, but I always enjoy when someone has something really intelligent to say about the same books.

I know Vile Bodies is a book I'll return to, probably in a couple of years, once I've read more of his work. Personally, I think I will go with Brideshead, but I'm not decided yet.

I also enjoy the modernist style, and Hemingway or course, but for some reason, I'm just really fascinating with that period between the wars. Actually, it starts with the end of the Victorian era, leading up to WWI and into the 20s. Couldn't say why, since I haven't stopped to try to analyze it, but probably something to do with a correspondence with my own life and state of mind, is what I'd say off the top of my head... In any case, I'm also curious about Afternoon Men now, and Anthony Powell is another author I've yet to discover. Adding it to the WL now.

Don't worry about the thread visits. I vastly narrowed down the number of threads I follow after being completely overwhelmed by the end of December, and always feel bad that I don't make efforts to scope out more people.

eta: what's with the touchstones??? drives me mad when they won't show up like that!

eta: of course, now that I said that, they appeared finally...

The prof was right, though. :D I can't remember which book it was, maybe Udolpho? but I googled cliff notes and stuff afterwards, and the motif was one of the basic things they talked about. He was one of the best instructors I had, because he held me to higher standards - and he even wrote me a really good letter of recommendation for graduate school (and said he was a bit dismayed that I was going for an MLIS instead of an MA in English!).

I'm leaning towards Scoop or Put Out More Flags as my next Waugh, though it won't be until July that I get to it, probably. I was thinking of Black Mischief, but I'm not sure I want to subject myself to the racism, and the religion in Brideshead Revisited makes me nervous - both racism and religion are featuring in the ER book I'm currently reading, and both things are continuing to make me feel a bit ill, but those aspects have tapered off a bit as the Boer War comes to the forefront, and besides it's a short book with a historical setting. (Still, I don't see why the author had to include a mother who is super religious to the point of being abusive about it, or the whole character trait in the narrator of being treated as "half-black" because she has dirty blonde hair, freckles, and light brown eyes instead of blonde ringlets and blue eyes like her younger brothers.)

Stones for my Father

Partial Review:

Before reading Stones for my Father, I knew about as much of the Boer Wars as could fit into a thimble. I had a vague idea that there was some kind of conflict between Afrikaners and English in South Africa, and when seeing the "Boer War" phrase, I could recognize the period of history when it occurred and maybe guess two or three places on a map - one of which would have been correct.

Like any good historical fiction, Stones for my Father brought the setting to life for me and taught me a good deal about the war. I learned, in general, what the primary conflict was about, who was involved in it, and what it meant to the people affected by it. For this, I think it is quite a good book, and not too long, either, at 168 pages.

As a novel, however, I didn't enjoy it so much. The plot is, out of necessity, driven by the events of the war in its last year or so, as viewed through the eyes of a Boer girl whose family had resisted as long as possible. The finally leave their farm to join a laager (a traveling caravan of people hiding from the British), and are then captured and sent to an internment camp, where they remain until the war ends. The plot movement is understandable and fairly normal for a historical novel, but I felt that it needed something more, something for Corlie (the 12-year-old protagonist and narrator) to have agency in, rather than being tugged along.

There are a few elements to the story that seemed to have been added to give depth or that elusive character-driven plot, but they felt forced and overdone to me.

Read the rest of the review here

After reading Fences Between Us in December and between shades of gray in January, this one pales quite a bit. Those two were fantastic books about wars and internment camps and had good character-driven arcs as well, but this one... eh. It's not awful, but it could be so much better. And I have no idea why the plot with Corlie's mom was included, except that it gives an excuse for the ending, which itself is kind of weird, because Corlie doesn't really seem to have any thoughts or emotion about it, so why go with it instead of something more expected?

Last night, around 2am, I decided to read "just a chapter or so" of The Wake of the Lorelei Lee before going to sleep. Somehow that turned into over 300 pages and finally forcing myself to shut the book around 7.30am - because I had to be up and dressed at 9 to let the buy guy come in to spray. While waiting for him and while he was here, I got another 70 pages in, and am now about 100 from the end.

I think this is the fastest I've read a book in a long time, but the Bloody Jack series does tend to read quickly and is very exciting and I love it to pieces. I think I've also figured out my reluctance to read this 8th volume until now - when I received it in the mail, I was still in school and couldn't afford to lose 2-3 days to reading it exclusively, and after the semester ended, I wanted to give my attention to other books first. Plus, delaying reading extends the anticipation about it, maybe?

Anyway, I really really want to talk about the book and how much I love it and why it's possibly better than the last two in the series and some of the plot elements that made me go "Oh, Jacky, no" (because that's inevitable in a Bloody Jack book), and the ones that made me cringe because of how stereotypical and problematic and even racist they are (unfortunately, the series is far from free of flaws).

BUT. I don't want to spoil anyone who may be interested in reading further than the first book, because I did see last year that a bunch of people in the group were beginning the series, and I'd really hate for someone to stumble upon my discussion here and be discouraged from reading further because of the spoilers, or because I will undoubtedly highlight the problematic bits. There are certain tropes that this book follows that show up in just about every other book in the series, but part of the fun for me in reading them is discovering what they are, and then seeing how they play out in the new book. :(

I should just join a Bloody Jack discussion forum, but I hate the idea of dealing with a bunch of squealers who don't see the problem bits for what they are, or who don't recognize that the series is over the top camp and meant to be, or who are overly focused on the romance that helps drive the overarching plot. (I dipped my toes in once a few years ago, and never again.)

At any rate, best reference: Jacky mentions one of her friends wants to take a short trip to Brideshead while they are docked in England, to make a revisit. :D (This friend is gay, so everything about the statement amused me terribly, but would have gone over my head completely if I hadn't learned about Waugh recently or become familiar with Brideshead Revisited in the time since I got Lorelei Lee!)

I have now finished The Wake of the Lorelei Lee and it was super delightful and filled with "Oh, Jacky, no" moments right up the end, exactly the way a Jacky Faber book should be. Oh, the ending!

I am going to have to think up how I will review it, and I will probably dust off my blog to discuss the finer details, because this is definitely one of the better installments in the series ever since my favorite, Mississippi Jack (#5). The two in between were a bit lackluster as in one, Jacky is stuck on land almost the whole time, and in the other, she's given limited movement and Jaimy is too close. I have found that I am less likely to enjoy a Bloody Jack novel if she is not at sea exploring and having ship-related adventures, and also if her future happiness with Jaimy Fletcher is too certain. In Mississippi Jack, not only is she on a boat the entire time (more or less), but the Jaimy side-plot involves him sleeping with another girl, so it was basically perfect.

In Lorelei Lee, she's at sea mostly the whole time, mostly amongst a pack of strangers, and she believes for some time that Jaimy is dead (and then something happens halfway through that helps with that requirement for my enjoyment of the book without her needing to fear he's dead, and the ending!!! but I can't say it publicly, because it's a big ole spoiler).

Anyway, yay, awesome Jacky book, despite some very problematic parts (including the Exotic Blonde trope showing up again, this time when she's in the South China Sea), and I'm looking forward to the next one in 5 months.

My next read is the Incorrigible Children book #1, because I finally acquired a copy, and I want to read it so I can send both it and my ARC of #2 to my friend and her 5 year old daughter.

#37/38 -- Oh, I love the Bloody Jack series! I read Lorelei Lee right after it came out, so I can't remember many of the details. I will have to do a series reread soon. I actually listened to the audiobooks of the first three not too long ago, so perhaps I will pick it up from there.

I'd also love to discuss the problematic bits with someone. Is there a Bloody Jack group here on LT? I'm not finding one in a search, but I haven't tried any terms other than "Bloody Jack." Maybe we should make one? The level of discourse here might be a little higher than on a dedicated fan site.

Mm, I think the only Bloody Jack groups here are folded in with Libba Bray, Twilight, &c fan groups for teenagers, and then there's the one pirate group that I'm not sure is very active.

If you want to create a group, go ahead! I'm a bit shy about doing it because the group on LiveJournal is so dead, and when I've posted about problematic things in the past (I think it was when My Bonny Light Horseman came out?), mostly got ignored. And I don't know how many others on LT might want to discuss these things, in addition to the more fun bits.

Several of my friends have read some of the books, but won't read anymore, because the things like the way Meyer wrote the Native American tribe in Mississippi Jack in relation to Jacky (exotic blonde, and all) or the historical anachronisms were too much to make the books enjoyable. I do understand this, since similar things made Revolution completely unworkable for me, and other books, too. But when I bring up the latest book amongst them, the discussion tends to linger on the negative things and never really include the positive or fun parts, so.

I've only read the first two Bloody Jack books (I was a bit disappointed with the second), but I think it's time to continue with the series.

Also, I can completely relate to the idea of not wanting to read a really good book at a busy time. It's sometimes sort of sad that I put off reading books I expect to really enjoy, but I guess that's life.

#40 -- Yeah, I suspect that it would be one of those low-traffic groups that would eventually go dormant. However, if I get motivated to start the group, I will let you know!

41> The second book isn't really a highlight of the series, imo. On retrospect, it exists mainly to set up the relationships and whatnot for future books - in it, Jacky learns French and manners and gains trusted friends (Amy Trevelyne, Mr Pickering, the school), and sets up Boston as her base of operations.

I liked it a lot more when I reread it after reading the third book, and the same with In the Belly of the Bloodhound, the 4th - I enjoyed it much more after I already knew what happens in it and could focus on characterizations and literary/historical allusions and the like.

The best book is Mississippi Jack, the 5th, because she's exploring the wilderness along the Mississippi, bringing to mind Huck Finn (including some plot elements), but on a keelboat with Mike Fink for at least part of the ride, and it's all so very over the top and unbelievable that it's a lot of fun. (YMMV)

I have read the first 3 or so in the Bloody Jack series. I really need to get back to the books! Thanks for the reminder.

I finished The Mysterious Howling today at work. It was still fun and all, but I didn't really like it quite as much as I liked The Hidden Gallery. Several people said that of the second book when reading it, so I'm wondering if this is one of those series that starts out clever and fun, but get a bit oldhat as you see it repeated? That's not to say I didn't enjoy the book - I did like it quite a bit! - I just didn't like it as much.

I also spent about two hours just now reading The Arrival by Shaun Tan. It's a wordless graphic novel, about 120 pages long, and really amazing. Ilana mentioned in the TIOLI thread reading it several times, and I think I'm going to read it again myself before I return it to the library. It's just visually stunning. I almost felt like crying at the end, because it was so beautiful.

There were some really frightening images I had to flip past, though. Luckily, they were offset by lots of other images that I flipped back to look at again, or simply spent a lot of time on, because of the emotion and/or beauty. It's also a very creative story, with lots of imagination given to the setting and creatures that in habit the world.

I very much recommend it. It's a wordless book, and when text is part of the narrative, it's in an alien writing system, which I enjoyed - I found it to be very immersive and also it gave me sympathy for the main character, who is in a new place where he doesn't speak the language.

#45 I've got The Arrival on reserve at the library as I've seen so many positive reviews for it on LT lately.

I have wanted to read The Arrival forever but my local library does not have a copy :(

I have finished reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but somehow it didn't really work for me. I think I may have expected a slightly different storyline from it (more fantastic, perhaps?), but I also found the illustrations to be a bit in the uncanny valley, especially profile views of faces. Also, too, I'm not entirely sure the way Selznick paired illustration and text quite worked for me. That's not to say I didn't like the combination - some of the sequences were quite good, and the way the text was played with to change the pacing by using less or more on a page was interesting. It's just the overall feel wasn't quite right.

I don't think it's a bad book, and I can see why it won an award, and I really liked the inclusion of film stills and photos of actual things, which gave the story a sense of reality, but I think I had too high expectations that it just didn't meet.

If anyone reading this can help me...

My laptop's been acting up for a few weeks, after I upgraded some drivers. I was stupid and didn't make a proper backup, and of course I finally contacted the Support for my machine three days after the warranty expired (honest to god!). So I was poking around and trying to figure out what to do, and it seems that I needed to do a factory reset. So I pulled out my recovery and system discs today and did just that. Only to realize after the fact that the recovery CD is for XP and I was running Vista, and in order to do a factory reset with Vista, you have to do other steps (I didn't come across these instructions, and the System Restore stuff in the Control Panel didn't have any restore points older than a few days, and I didn't see anything that said "Do This To Reset To Factory Settings", at least not obvious enough for me to remember when I got to that point).

I really dislike XP. I've been using Vista Business with Aero for 3 years and I'm used to it, and besides which it's pleasing on the eyes (I really dislike the blue design of XP and always have, especially). Plus, a lot of the programs I saved the install stuff for are for Vista, not XP, and some don't have support for XP anymore.

My copy of Vista was legit and I had it registered, but I can't find the Product ID anymore, which Windows support requires me to give them (though I have the product key and all), and of course Acer will no longer offer support without charging a fee, because my warranty expired 2 weeks ago. Also, the Microsoft website keeps shoving me towards Windows 7, because of course that's the new thing and it doesn't want to sell people old products.

A lot of this is my own fault for not making proper back-ups and not doing enough research (though, to be honest, trying to Google computer stuff is super difficult, because of all the spam and content farm stuff). I'm just trying to find out how to get a copy of Vista Business (32-Bit) so I can reinstall it, use my old Product Key and everything (because I paid for it and it was legit). I don't want to resort to piracy, but I will if that's what it takes.

If anyone can help or give me advice?

So so so behind... but I'm also so glad you loved The Arrival. That book is a true gem.

I felt kind of let down by Hugo Cabret as well, and while I'm usually quite verbal and brutally honest about what works and doesn't work for me, I felt too cowed to give it the rating and review I should have. Funny, because I wasn't shy of ruffling feathers for Jane Austen lovers... but friends of mine recommended TIoHC so highly that I didn't want to hurt their feelings... so whatever.

Can't help you on 'puter issues, and even less so on a PC since I've been on Macs for the past 30 years, and PCs to me seem like an alien life form I definitely don't want to have anything to do with in this lifetime. Sorry. :-|

Oh, wow The Arrival needs to be known more! I give it a 5 heart rating: ♥♥♥♥♥ ;)

What I found interesting about reading it is how difficult it was to shift to reading a textless, image-only book versus a book which is text-only, no pictures, or even a more traditional comic book or graphic novel which uses dialogue and maybe some expository text. It required my brain to work differently, and it took some effort to switch! This isn't something completely new to me, but I took care to notice more about the experience of reading graphic novels this week, because of the TIOLI discussion.

I think part of the problem with Hugo Cabret is that it didn't require that shift, but I didn't know how to describe it in my review. It's like...yes, there are ~189 different illustrations, but only a few of them really had the impact or purpose that helped them stand alone separate from the text. (I mean in comparison to traditional illustrated books, like The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, where the pictures simply supplement the text and aren't necessary at all.) Many of the series of illustrations could have been condensed into a single one, and then part of the following text used in an illustration - like how The Arrival did. Or even Robot Dreams, which was good, or Picturescape (how I love the illustrations in that picture book!)

Anyway, not only do you have these illustrations which don't really fill the role of "a story told in words and pictures", the way Selznick describes it, but the story itself seemed to rely too much on the whole "story told in words and pictures" idea to give it oomph. It's like "because this is a graphic novel, and so much work is going into these illustrations, the story doesn't need to be as deep". And, yeah, it's a children's book, so it doesn't need a ton of depth, but I still felt that it was relying too much on the pictures but there wasn't enough story told through the pictures to make that reliance worthwhile, does that make sense?

(I also don't really expect anyone to know what to do about my computer problem, but I thought I'd throw out a line anyway and see if I could catch something! It's worth a try, right? My dad called me after I posted that and suggested I go to the GeekSquad at BestBuy for help, and at last resort, I can just buy a new copy of Vista on my credit card (even if I was trying to keep the balance near 0 in preparation for a possible trip to Disney for my birthday next month... my brother just bought an annual pass and goes to school in Orlando and has been trying to convince me to come, and my mom just told me that if I'm off the right weekend, I can stay in a hotel on Disney property with her while she's at a conference...!))

I didn't experience that difficulty with The Arrival, but then I'm highly visual and am used to looking at lots of art books (which... I'd think you are too, right?), so that's pretty much the kind of experience it was like for me. Also, I've worked with lots and lots of illustrators in my career, so maybe that wordless 'language' is more familiar to me?

And yes, I totally get you on what you're saying about TIoHC. While I didn't have the same criticism about the quality of the illustrations, I agree about content and lack of depth overall. I've been familiar with (though by no means a scholar of) Georges Meliès for a long time, and to me it felt like "movie history-lite" (sp. intended) which... sure it's a kid's book, but still could have had more depth. What saved it for me I guess was that I was completely taken in by the automaton thing as that was a completely new concept for me, and I guess I was fascinated by that aspect of the story (and thought the illustrations really worked for that) much like a child would be.

You know, "difficult" was probably the wrong word to use. I think I used it because the act of picking up the book require more effort than just reading words, or skimming the pictures to find the words. It's not really difficult, but because I was consciously thinking about the act of reading the book, I noticed it, and by noticing it, I made it less of a simple shift?

Like I said, having to shift modes of thought isn't new, and you're right that I look at art books a lot. I also look at art a lot (benefits of working in an art museum!). You can just look at the art and be done with it, or you can change your brain-mode and really engage it, and if I'm tired or being lazy, it is a conscious decision to shift modes. I was reading The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place immediately before The Arrival, which may have also made me more aware of the need to shift, since I was going straight from easy-read text to complex images. The change did require some conscious effort, but once I switched, it was easy to continue on reading.

It's that there wasn't a need to switch back and forth with TIoHC, because there weren't the same depth or complexities in the illustrations, so no need to "read" the images, that disappointed me. Some were quite good, but not enough.

But I liked the technical quality of Selznick's illustrations in TIoHC! I was impressed with them, actually, and envious that I can never make my monochrome drawings nearly as rich. I just didn't like his profiles or eye close-ups, because they gave me the shivers. ;)

 

(Also, I wrote my review for Carnet de Voyage now. I think that's all my GN TIOLI reads reviewed, though I'm still in the middle of Daytripper. I still need to review the Bloody Jack book, the Incorrigible Children #1, Book Girl #2, and Vile Bodies.)

I've put The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on my reading list this month (for the 2nd or 3rd time in a row) and once again, doubt I'll have time to get to it with all the other stuff I *need* to read this month.

I know exactly what you mean about engaging with art and the shifting between left and right brain thinking. I keep resisting going into right brain thinking for some reason, even though I know it's the healthiest place for me to be a lot of the time. But then, I have a therapist to try to help me figure that out. ;-)

Carnet de Voyage looks like it would be right up my alley. Adding it to the WL.

I'm woefully behind on my book reviews. Keep promising myself I'll catch up and then finishing more books before I have a chance to do so.

I finished Daytripper today. It's very interesting, though I didn't really notice the "Catholic" bit that one of the tags and the current review talks about. Dunno, maybe it just didn't stand out to me since I'm 10 years out of Catholic school and 5 years out of the religion altogether. I also didn't notice the "in a single day" for each chapter that the reviewer mentions - many chapters have events or at least flashbacks to other days, so maybe it's just a case of me not really paying attention?

I liked the achronological narrative, which worked well with the plot device of each change in the main character's life being paired with his death. The book says a lot about what it means to live and die (metaphorically or otherwise), and about making the most of the time we have - even if "making the most of it" is just enjoying a lovely day by flying a kite, or sitting with a loved one in a park, or or or...

The line-art isn't really my cup of tea, though I can tell that it's not awful and does create a diverse cast (and extras), with good expression and emotion. I like the way the line-art works with the settings much more, especially when paired with the color. It's basically scenery porn (TVTropes link), and gorgeous. I'm not sure if the color is digital, but it feels like watercolor to me, and fits the story very well.

I think I give it 3 stars for the thought-provoking and bittersweet narrative and the illustrations. For me, 3 means an enjoyable book, worth a read, but not necessarily one I'll want to reread or rush out to get everyone else to read. Maybe if I'm still thinking about it in a few weeks, I'll bump it up to 3.5.

I was also reading it while hiding in the car at the mall, waiting for my mom to finally finish in a certain store (she was there for two hours!), and I was struggling with sensory overload, so I may not have been in the best mindset to read the book, which may be dimming my perception of the various elements. But since I don't particularly feel a desire to reread it, I'll just leave it as it is.

Despite my To Read list including books I've had around for ages, I just put in more hold requests at the library. I wish that my library's hold system allowed for Future Dates, so that I could request Book X, but not have it go through until, say, three weeks from now, and then I could put in a request for Book Y at the same time, but not have it valid until six weeks from now, so that I can request them all at once, but not have to read them all at once. (My local library only allows 2 check-out extensions for a total of 2 months, and if I'm reading slowly, it's annoying to have more books checked out at the same time than I can read in that period.)

I should see if Library Elf can do that for me.

Anyway, after reading a bunch of graphic novels from the library, I decided to start working on other parts of my LT wishlist, and put in for some recent YA releases, and also started on my Nonfiction, since I want to read more of that.

But I haven't really read anything in the last few days. I've been playing Kingdom of Loathing during a major world event, and it's been so popular that lag has been incredible, and so it's been sucking up my time. Fun game, though. I've been playing since 2007, about the same time I started to really use LT.

Oh, but the main reason I was replying to my thread, except to complain about the limitations of my library's hold/check out system is to mention that one of the holds I requested is for Poseidon's Steed. I haven't read a science nonfiction book in ages (well, not counting linguistics), but I'm really interested in this one. Helen Scales was on Science Friday or maybe To The Best Of Our Knowledge a few years ago giving an interview and talking about the book, and it sounds pretty neat - it's about seahorses and why they're interesting creatures, but also there's a section or two about them in mythology and folklore. I'm hoping it's as good as my memory/several years of anticipation has built it up to be. :)

ETA: I should add about the Scales book - from my memory, it's also about environmentalism and her search to find a seahorse in its natural habitat (she was really excited to talk about the first time she saw one, in the interview), and conservation of the animals. So it's going to be rather different from what I typically read about.

ETA2: Couldn't sleep last night (sheesh, maybe it's because of the 5 hour nap I took at 4pm?), so grabbed my booklight and the nearest book. Got 60 pages into The Wee Free Men by Pratchett before giving up and going to get breakfast. I'm going to try to finish it before I pick up my library holds Thursday or Saturday.

I will hire your Library Elf if he can do that!

Oh my, you haven't heard of Library Elf?! http://www.libraryelf.com/

I use the basic, free service, which I set to alert me to due dates for my library books a few days earlier than my JPL email alerts go out, to give me an extra reminder to have the right books with me the next time I'm near the library for returning.

Cool! I will have to check it out once I am really awake. Thanks, Keri!

I wonder if Library Elf would actually work for faculty members, or would they just ignore it like they do the other notices?

Hmm, considering they'd have to sign up with the Library Elf service themselves....

I'm kind of sad that after looking into it, they don't provide staggered hold request services. Alas. I guess I'll just have to continue holding myself back from requesting all the books I want all at once (except then I get distracted and forget to actually request the books later!).

But I guess it's okay, since I don't lack for reading material. I just preordered another 6 light novels & manga from Amazon last night (I'd've done BookDepository, but Amazon is usually a couple dollars cheaper for pre-orders on this kind of book, plus free 2-day shipping... I get annoyed with myself for only avoiding Amazon when it's convenient, but I really do have to save pennies where I can, since I shouldn't be buying books in the first place). Also, two of my holds are ready for me tomorrow - Birthmarked and Poseidon's Steed. :)

I have heard good things about Birthmarked, but do not think I have ever heard of Poseidon's Steed. I will be interested in your thoughts on it!

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2009-09-02/helen-scales-poseidons-steed-gotham...

I finally found the interview!

I miss the days when I could listen to Diane Rehm on the way to class. Heck, I miss the days when I spent a lot of time listening to NPR before/after/during class (yay art classes). I can't listen to the radio at work, and since I work Thursday evenings and weekends, the programs I like best aren't on during my drive (and I can't listen to music/radio at home or I get overstimulated and feel sick).

Yay! A Bride's Story is here! It's so dang pretty. It's rather interesting to me the way Yen Press packaged the book. They used a hardcover (and it's such a rich shade of brown with scarlet endpapers soooo pretty) and full-art dustjacket. The internal things that signal "this is a manga" are missing (though it does read right-to-left), which gives it a feel much more like the Western graphic novels I've been reading recently.

Actually, I've found that Yen Press does this for its adult-audience books anyway (see: Bunny Drop (josei - adult women) vs. Yotsuba&! (shounen - young people) ), but even so, Bunny Drop is very clearly "manga". I wish I could better describe what I'm talking about, but of course I can't because it's something kind of visceral.

I wonder if it's a conscious marketing choice on the part of Yen Press, or if it's something requested by the licensing party? Another series from the same publisher/magazine will be coming out in July and is also getting the hardcover treatment (and I preordered it two months ago >.>). Wandering Son is also arty with a target audience that probably isn't the typical group that buy TokyoPop and Viz titles like Bleach or One Piece. (Oh, man, I'm so excited about Wandering Son! Not only is the art super beautiful, even if Takako admits she can only draw like 3 different faces, but it's about sexuality and gender and growing up and I love it so much. The anime adaptation this spring had a kind of crappy ending, though, making it seem like Shuu-chan would grow up to be a man instead of a woman, because that's the socially acceptable thing. And the manga sometimes gets a little too convenient, with the kids being a little too accepting of Shuu-chan and Takatsuki, and things just happening to fall out nicely for them, but I figure it's just a fantasy world where things are softer and happier and a more realistic/harsh setting/plot just wouldn't be as fun.) (I really need to go to the Manga! group to talk about this instead. Or wait until July when the first book gets here.)

I wasn't too sure about The Wee Free Men. It was just okay, not really winning me over as Amazing or anything. And then the Nac Mac Feegle showed up and a sheep was returned to the pasture, backward, at high speed. And the "waily waily waily". And "he didn't die - he went back to life. We're in heaven now."

I'm still not sold on Tiffany Aching or the rest of the plot (it's okay and keeping my attention, but mostly "meh"), but those little blue guys are the best. :D I'm about 1/3 of the way through now.

I also got the notice that 3 more holds are available at the library: Blankets, Strings Attached, and The False Princess. I think for Strings Attached, I'm the first person to borrow it. When I placed the hold, it was still noted as "Processing" in the system.

Oh, I love the little blue guys! They are the reason I kept on reading :)

66>

The Feegles are great, but you may find yourself yelling "Crivens!" at the slightest provocation after reading them. :-)

I'm another fan of the Nac Mac Feegle -- crivens! I agree, the Tiffany Aching books would lose a lot of their charm without them.

I finished Poseidon's Steed and have begun Blankets. The seahorse book was very good and informative, and I like how Scales gave a lot of context and history that wasn't necessarily directly related to seahorses, because it showed a broader picture and why seahorses are so special. But I was annoyed that she did a long discussion about Chinese Traditional Medicine without actually saying "by the way, CTM has no basis in actual science", which would have gone a long way towards supporting why CTM use of natural resources needs to be discouraged, because it is a huge factor in why some species are going extinct.

The first few pages of Blankets were really difficult to read, particularly because of what wasn't said directly, but was implied by the illustrations. I knew it'd be difficult going into it, but didn't realize how much. I'll keep on, though.

I've picked up Poseidon's Steed from the library on your reccomendation, but I just don't know if I'll get to it before the end of the month....

And here's my review for the book. If you can't get to it by the end of the month, dejah_thoris, definitely read it anyway. It's worthwhile.

Plus, if you're like me and never really understood about the males giving birth thing, Scales gives a very good description of why it's the case - including examples of other species nearby on the evolutionary tree, to show how it came about. ;)

Great review of Poseidon's Steed -- you got a thumbs up from me!

The TIOLI Challenges have are fun -- they've pointed me toward a number of books I wouldn't have picked up without prompting. I will read Poseidon's Steed; when is the only question.

It's funny that you mentioned lazy reading habits in your review -- I've gotten very lazy the last year or two, reading almost exclusively mysteries and fantasy and science fiction. LT has already encouraged me to read more nonfiction again. I've always enjoyed nonfiction, I just got slack, you know?

At any rate, thanks for the reccomendation.

I think my reading laziness is similar to television - I don't particularly care to watch TV, but I'll find myself curling up on the couch with some program on, just to have the noise and distraction. It might be an awful one, in which case I hardly pay attention and read or art instead, or it might be one that I rather like - but either way, it's a matter of convenience and laziness that I sat on the couch in the first place. There are some TV shows, however, that I don't think of as lazy - not many, but a few. Something like MLP:FiM or Phineas & Ferb, though they're cartoons, don't feel the same as other shows, perhaps because I find myself really engaging with them. Likewise, I watch a lot of old films on TCM, and I make it a special time (usually while doing art), so it's not really a laziness (well, some are!).

My laziness in reading is similar, though the necessity of engaging with the book is a bit different than with TV. But there's a feeling of "this book is amusing and relieves my boredom, but it could be any old thing" that goes along with the way I watch TV most of the time. I read a ton of manga and YA - most of it falls under this category, even if I like it and seek it out. 90% of my manga reading, I don't mention here because it's forgettable or not worth talking about - like having all those wedding shows on TLC on in the background while cooking dinner (ugh, hate those shows! my mom loves them, though).

Not all manga or all YA are "lazy" reading for me - especially something like Yotsuba&! or Bloody Jack, where I find myself really engaging with the material and mentally deconstructing it and whatnot, rather than just going along with the book. And that's where I stop thinking of it as lazy reading - because it's making me think and work (mentally) to really appreciate the reading, even if it's otherwise and easy book to read, maybe fluff or nonsense. It's sometimes difficult to know where the line is, though.

One of the words I use to contrast with "lazy" is "challenging", but that's not really appropriate. Yes, my Eliza Haywood reading is challenging, because she uses early 17th century writing conventions, such as no paragraphs or sentences that go on for decades, so I have to work to untangle the text to figure out what's being said, and then I have to translate the words to modern English to figure out what's being said, and that takes work. It's enjoyable, but it's definitely challenging. However, there are other works that aren't lazy, but challenging isn't quite right - Bloody Jack, perhaps. Or Discworld. I just can't think of Discworld as "lazy reading", with the amount of time and effort I put into reading them, even if I don't ultimately like the book. But they're really not "challenging", not even in the sense that Poseidon's Steed was challenging, because it's a non-fiction book about science/nature that isn't entirely familiar to me, and which also taught me new things about the world.

 

So, yeah, this has been a bit tl;dr, but I really dislike how I go for the easy, no effort involved books so often. Even if I like reading them, and even if they're fun to read, it's frustrating that there are so many more books that I have to reach for, that require more effort on my part, but I just don't bother with. I mean, I'm really interested in reading Nothing to Envy, but I keep putting it off just because it'll take work to acquire a copy and then reading it won't be the "nonsense TV show in the background" kind of experience. (Note how even my more recent library borrowings had only 2 books that required more effort, out of the 5!)

 

 

All that over with...

I read A Bride's Story (vol. 1) while at my dad's house on Saturday. It's really beautifully drawn, and I'm intrigued by the plot - Amir, a 20-year-old woman, is married to Karluk, a 12-year-old boy, and travels quite a distance to join his clan. Her birth family was part of a semi-nomadic clan, while her new family live in a town. In their culture, women are married off at about 15 years old and for trade purposes, making Amir a bit long in the tooth, because her family were being greedy for the most auspicious match possible (ie: they get the most out of it for themselves). However, her sister (cousin?) was married off to an even better match for the family, only to die, so they want to renege on the agreement for Amir and replace the dead girl with her. That's only a small bit of the first volume, but it promises to be interesting in future ones. There's also a quiet not-really-plot about Amir and Karluk getting used to each other, and it's kind of interesting the way she treats him like a little brother, yet because of the gender roles in western Asia near the Caspian Sea in the 19th century, he very clearly holds power over her as her husband.

I know that Mori did a lot of research on the area, also because she was fascinated with the Silk Road growing up, so I wonder just how accurate her depictions of the culture are. Either way, it's interesting to read, and I'd like to see how everything develops. Also, the detail in the drawings - of architectural features, clothing patterns, jewelry, &c. - is amazing.

 

And, finally, I began one of my next library books at work today: Birthmarked by Caragh O'Brien. It's a post-apocalyptic dystopia (is there any other kind of post-apocalyptic story?) that takes place near Lake Superior - on the northern side, I think. Where is that, Ontario? Anyway, it's now an unlake because it's completely dried up, at least according to what everyone knows in the village where Gaia lives.

There's a rigid social structure here, where you have the Enclave, a walled city for the privileged, and then there are those in Wharfton or who have fled to the wasteland, who are poor and downtrodden. The main monetary trade revolves around passes for Tvaltar, which took me a couple pages to figure out, though it's obvious on retrospect. The big element of the society which has started the plot is that the first however-many babies that a midwife delivers each month must be taken from their mothers and "advanced" to the Enclave.

So far, and I'm only 40 pages in, I find the world-building to be rather interesting, despite some of the fairly typical elements. I'm also curious about the whole Advancing thing of the infants, which is lucky, since that seems to be what's going to set Gaia on her way to advancing the plot, and she'll learn more about the sinister parts of it. (See, I am aware of the dystopia tropes!)

Oh maaaan that was a long reply. I'm sorry! The new textbox deceived me about exactly how long, since it kept stretching and stretching.

@74: I hear you with the lazy reading thing. That's most of my reading the last few years. There are LOTS of books I want to read, sitting on my bookshelves gathering dust, because I never seem to have the energy and motivation to be an active, engaged reader who's thinking about the material, engaged with it, scribbling in the margins (it's the only way I can read nonfiction these days), and so on. I like that stuff, but when I get home, all I reach for is the mental popcorn. And then I get irritated at how shallow and terrible the novels are. Self consistent, much?

Anyway, I'm enjoying the reviews. If and when I try exploring manga (friends have offered loans), I will definitely use your thread(s) as a guidepost.

I finished Birthmarked today. After staying up half the night last night, and then lying around half the day today, if I didn't finish reading it, I'd be annoyed.

As I mentioned before, I quite like the world-building, though a lot of the plot elements were fairly standard for a YA post-apocalyptic dystopia. Not all, though - there's an event towards the end which surprised me, because of how glum it was, and I expected that with so few pages left, it would turn out better. I was kind of disappointed that the first character I pegged as a future love interest or potential relative of Gaia's (since part of the story is a quest to discover the identities of her Advanced brothers) did, indeed, end up being one of those, which was kind of trite and cliché, but that's what you get in this kind of book. Still, it'd have been nice to not have a romance thread on top of everything else, no matter how subtle it was. That thread felt cheap and weird, like it didn't really belong with the rest of the book. But if it were a friendship thing, it would have worked for me.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the book is an empathy with the ruling class and their goals. It's kind of awkward to have that empathy, since apparently everyone on the protagonist's side thinks it's Bad, and it is a horrible thing to do in our society. But in the society as described in the book, with a wall separating the castes and rampaging rates of hemophilia and infertility, I can't say that it's really such an awful thing to do. The way that the leaders are going about it is all wrong, but the goal isn't really, especially considering how hemophilia is killing off huge chunks of the population. In the end, I suppose, both sides of the wall are sympathetic, since they're all people with their own concerns, and it's the Protectorat who is the big villain (and the laws he represents). There's also the grey morality of eugenics in this particular society, which is increasingly inbred, with very few resources to combat the problems caused by the inbreeding, except to forbid it between known close-relatives, and to encourage reproduction between people who have good/complementary genes, or else the population will die out in a very few generations.

There is a lot to think about regarding the way the society is set up, as revealed in the book, especially with knowledge of it being filtered through Gaia, who is from the lowest caste, outside the walls. The plot itself is somewhat expected, especially once you learn the basic elements in the first couple chapters, though I was surprised by a few events towards the end which didn't quite fit the mold - however, they do make sense when I consider that there is a sequel, Prized.

Because of the world-building and the ambiguity to many of the characters (are they Good? Bad? Neutral? can they be trusted or not?), I enjoyed reading this book, and I'm looking forward to one day finding out if an acceptable solution to the inbreeding and caste problems is found in the sequel.

(My review, both parts stuck together.)

Nice review of Birthmarked, Keri. Fortunately for me, I already have that one in the BlackHole.

It's a post-apocalyptic dystopia (is there any other kind of post-apocalyptic story?)

Of course. If it's far-enough post-apocalypse, then it's just background setting, and the story can be whatever it wants; rebuilding is a common option. The first one to come to mind is Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore.

Oh, wow! Every single book I've read that could be described as "post-apocalyptic" is dystopic in some sense, at least all of them that come to mind, so now I'm curious about The Wild Shore - I'll have to look into it more and see if it's something I'd like to read.

 
Also, I began Strings Attached while waiting around at the research clinic today. My initial impression is that it's a YA romance with a potential suspense element, and that I'm very curious how it will develop, and how the jacket copy plays into things. Three chapters in, but I don't know much about the main characters yet.

I finished Strings Attached today and ~loved~ it. ♥ ♥

(Of course, now I worry that I wasn't reading closely enough to notice the problematic bits, and oh crap, if I try to reread it, I'll discover that it's absolutely horrible... because that's what happened with Twilight. I am forever traumatized by that.)

http://www.librarything.com/review/69384896 - my review, if you're interested in more detaily thoughts about the book. I really did think it was more of a romance than it was when I started, possibly because of the cover? but it's really more of a suspense/mystery novel, and even then, it's also more of a bildungsroman, as the main character is forced to confront secrets from her childhood and also grow into adulthood.

I've added that one to the TBR list. Thanks for the review, Keri!

Nice review of Strings Attached, Keri. Thumbs up from me :)

Thanks for the review of Birthmarked; it led me to go back and look for my thoughts after reading the novel, because I remember feeling sort of ambiguous about it. It turns out that I liked the nuanced world but found the protagonist's perspectives on it too black-and-white. It seemed like it was more about opposing the enemy than actually trying to resolve complex social problems, which is too bad.

Also, here's a tagmash for non-dystopian post-apocalyptic books. I haven't actually looked through it much myself, but I definitely plan to. I like post-apocalyptic stories that are focused on rebuilding or have elements of discovering the past as a historical oddity.

I think I'm glad that I'm not the only one who disagreed with Birthmarked Gaia's actions! Now if only I could go back and change everything I said to your summary, that her perspective is too black-and-white, because that's exactly how I was feeling when I read it - and her "this is good, that is bad" made me want to defend myself for thinking that the Protectorat's actions weren't completely evil, the way Gaia behaved as though they were.

Also, I just recalled that Alas, Babylon! is a post-apocalypse story, but isn't really dystopic. But I'm not too sure about it...it's been ages since I read it, though I loved it for the fact that that it was one of the very few books I'd ever come across that took place in Florida and the setting was actually important, and I knew exactly where everything took place. (compared to all the stories that take place in Chicago or New York or elsewhere in Real Places in New England or California, where I have never been.)

I stayed up half the night to finish reading Nothing to Envy. I'm so annoyed with myself for not reading it when everyone else was a few months ago! I mean, I'm glad I finally did get around to reading it, but I should've taken more initiative about acquiring it last year.

I literally picked up the book before work yesterday morning (I work next to the library, yay), flipped through it while cataloguing it and found my eyes getting caught by the words, so sat and read it while it was dead at work, then came home and kept reading after my nap. I'll be pretty tired today, but it was worth it.

I have Nothing to Envy in the BlackHole and really wish my local library would get a copy! I am glad to see that you thought the book so worthwhile, Keri.

I fell hopelessly behind on your thread Keri, but thought I'd at least say hi!

From _Zoe_'s list, I'd recommend The City, Not Long After, which is a lovely and very strange magical realist novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area; I've been meaning to reread it for a while now. I don't really think This is the Way the World Ends qualifies; for one thing, the apocalypse takes place during the book itself, for another, it's very bleak. Looking at just the list of books tagged "post-apocalyptic", Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic and is not very dystopian, at least not horrifically so.

I have Birthmarked on my TBR list already, but I loved reading your review of it.

And I am another satisfied user of Library Elf. My library doesn't send out email notices until a book is overdue, and Library Elf has saved me from many a fine.

88> Oh, I wouldn't worry about it, Ilana. I've just about given up reading everyone else's threads and just try to follow the TIOLI ones. i've been reading books so much these last few weeks that I don't have time for threads. Also, I've been pushing myself to art more, which takes up time (the fruits of my most recent arting - still not finished! have to paint in the bird details. also the photo sucks, because my phone's camera washes everything out)

90> My library sends out a notice 1 or 2 days before the books are due, but I just need more time than that. Luckily, I always pick up books when I'm at work next door, so it's not like I'll have to make a special trip to return them on time, but if I'm scheduled off or something that day, the extra few days' reminder time helps me figure out an alternate plan (or just prioritize finishing reading the books!).

89> Oh, thank you, Lorax! I'll add those to my wishlist book, and maybe will read them soon. Well, maybe not Canticle. That one has always intimidated me. :P

 

I have been a bit slower at reading The False Princess, because of getting interrupted with Nothing to Envy, and then sleeping almost all day yesterday. It's turning out to be a very satisfying example of the genre at 1/3 of the way through. Nothing particularly groundbreaking or anything, just a nice princess book - only the princess isn't a princess anymore. I can't believe how callous the king and queen must have been to treat her as their daughter for 16 years, then suddenly kick her out of the castle!

This is a much, much better candy book for my not-so-secret love of princess and fairy tale stories than the one I read last fall, Princess of the Midnight Ball. It's also more enjoyable so far than Ash, because of a more tightly constructed plot and fewer wishy-washy descriptions.

After this one, I have The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet to read, and then the ER I just received, Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact (another genre that I love, I think, from the synopsis - actually, if I were to ever write a novel myself, it would be a children's story about a boy detective who goes on crazy and implausible adventures, in the fashion of old mystery series, because I find them to be a lot of fun).

I also just got a new manga in the mail - Amnesia Labyrinth vol. 2. I had the first volume when it was released a couple months ago, and I'm surprised that the second is out so soon. I was under the impression that it's an on-going series, but the third volume isn't even out yet in Japan. That's some pretty fast turnaround, when all the series I've been following so far take at least 6 months between volumes, and the US is behind on them.

I actually failed to read Nothing to Envy when everyone else was reading it; I took it out from the library and then bought my own copy when I had to return it, but I still haven't managed to get started.

I'll keep an eye out for The City, Not Long After. I usually avoid magical realism, but I do like a good post-apocalyptic story. Thanks for the recommendation, lorax.

I have A Canticle for Leibowitz sitting on my TBR shelf, like so many other books. Sigh.

I just finished The False Princess (at about 20 to 6 in the morning, eesh I need to stop this reading all night thing). It's a very solid, well-done book in the princess/magic genre. I can't say that it's the most inventive or ground-breaking YA fantasy, but if you have a soft spot for princess fantasy, it's worth a try.

I appreciated that the heroine is allowed to make both good and bad decisions, and that ultimately she needs the help of her friends to save the day, even if she's the leader. It's nice when everything is balanced like that, instead of the hero doing all the saving, or the heroine too perfectly doing everything herself, unrealistically.

The setting is a fairly generic pseudo-Medieval fantasyland, both in history/politics and geography. The magic elements are also standard, without anything much that makes them stand out amongst all the books I've read. On the one hand, this is a bit boring in light of the more creative or detailed books, but on the other, a more-or-less generic backdrop can't make the plot or characterisations seem more interesting than they really are, and O'Neal does just fine with both of those.

Because the False Princess is unashamedly part of the princess/fantasy genre, many of the plot points were transparent to me, and I had most of the story figured out by the time O'Neal finished setting it all up - except for one part that snuck up on me halfway through. Nonetheless, I found it to be thoroughly enjoyable and a very good representative of its kind - much better than others I have read recently, though those others might be more imaginative in setting or characters. It can't be said that a standard, like this one, can't be good or worthwhile - especially if you're a fan of the genre, like me.

I spent the last few days rereading the Love☆Com manga by Aya Nakahara, all 17 volumes worth. It's a romantic comedy and totally cheesy, and in some places kind of uncomfortable with the gender roles, and the pacing is really weird at the end (suddenly all sorts of events are crammed into the space of 2 months and dragged out to several volumes' worth, after the first 2 years and 10 months of story time had plenty of skips), but every time I read it, I come away with a big smile.

Maybe now that I've indulged in a cheesy slap-slap-kiss-kiss sort of thing, I can focus on the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I'm trying to read for the group thing.

I already have The False Princess in the BlackHOle, so I can dodge that particular BB!

I already have The False Princess in the BlackHole, so I can dodge that particular BB!

Finished an art today, so just gonna drop off the photo here...



Of course, along with my reading goals, I have my art goals, too. I'm pleased with this, except that I messed up the bird's legs a bit, and the green tones were almost obliterated when I squared it up and cropped the other stuff out in photoshop. Oh well.

I like it!

Thank you, Stasia! It's a lot of fun coming up with different ways to use the text from my old Nancy Drew book as texture. The next one will use it for tree leaves, I think.

In other news: Wandering Son 1 arrived a month earlier than I had expected and it's so wonderfully gorgeous compared to all my other manga. There's nothing like a beautiful book, eh? I think it uses a style more like Western literary graphic novels, from what I've seen of them (the hard cover and size and paper type and everything).

Not only is it a hardcover, which is unusual for manga, it's easily twice the size of standard English-translated books - it's both taller and wider (and thicker, but that's a paper/cover thing).

Matt Thorn is the translator, and I've seen some of his stuff before, and he's fairly respected in the field (or, at least, I've always thought well of him!). He wrote an entire essay of sorts about honorifics and pronouns for the book, and even a pronunciation guide, which is, again, different from all the other manga I've seen in English. Usually there's a perfunctory description of honorifics that is included in each of the publisher's books, whether relevant or not (I mean "bozu"? I've never seen that!), and no pronunciation guide at all.

I think it's really obvious that Fantagraphics and Thorn were attempting to make this a lot more like the more literary graphic novels (which isn't unusual for the magazine it's serialised in), and I think it's a good choice, considering the topic (the two main characters are transgender 10-year-olds at the start and the series follows them as they grow up and shows the successes and problems they face - though it's a fantasy land where everyone is a lot nicer and more supportive than Japan in reality, alas, only if it were more realistic, it wouldn't be such an optimistic and gentle story).

ANYWAY. I'm super excited about this, but since I'm creating a July TIOLI based on it, I have to hold off reading it for two weeks. >.< (Or maybe I can just read it again...)

#99: There's nothing like a beautiful book, eh?

True!

I had an interview today for a possible promotion. It's a lot like my current job, but ten times more awesome (and my job is already pretty rad).

I also have been playing with a Recesky TLR toy camera this last week and got the photos back today. Some are good, others...not so good. That's what happens when it's a completely mechanical non-automated camera, I guess, and you forget to wind the film between exposures...

Here's an example:



I currently have 3 others scanned in, and I'm trying to decide if the less-good ones will get scanned.

Anyway, all this has had me reading hardly anything in the last week, though I'm still working on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet when I can focus long enough. I just started the second book and am finding that the story pace is picking up a bit? or maybe I just think Orito (and her situation) is more interesting than Jacob to read about.

I did read a cool book this weekend about an artist, and I wrote down the name, but now I can't find the slip. She was Polish but painted in Paris in the 20s-50s, I supppose? that was her most well-known period, at least. I love the almost architectural feel of her work, and the way she uses colors. Ah, here we go: Tamara de Lempicka. I love Prestel's art books - they're always such good quality without being bulky or awkward. We carry a lot of them in our museum store, since one of our suppliers has a deal with them, or something.

I'm glad you like your job, and I hope you get the promotion! :)

Well, I didn't get the promotion, but the woman who did declined the offer (and told me privately that she thought I should get it), so maybe I will get it after all? I don' t know, but it's been kind of stressful waiting to see what happens, with the ups and downs.

I just went to the quarterly $10-for-a-bag-full warehouse sale for the public library and came back with 49 books for $20. I probably could have fit more into one of the bags (or both), but I was trying to be mindful of not getting books I'll never read, and of how little space I have, and how I hope to be moving to my own place in 9 months and don't want to have too many boxes of books to take up however many flights of stairs my apartment will require.

At least some of the books I picked out for my 6-year-old nephew, with the intention of keeping them at my parents' place for when he visits, but I'll undoubtedly read at least a few, such as the two about animals in Tall Tales and Folk Stories...

Anyway, this is the first time I've gone to such a book sale, and it was fun, but I feel bad because I just bought 49 new books and still have so many on my shelves that I haven't read yet, or haven't read in a long time and have been wanting to reread. I think I'm going to have to give myself further restrictions next time, or perhaps limit myself to only one bag. (Then again, I was going to limit myself to 1 this time, but since my mom asked for books for Elijah, I didn't want that second bag to be half-empty...)

That was so incredibly decent of her to do that! I hope for your sake that you do end up getting the promotion. If not, you still have a job you love, so that's pretty awesome.

Are you going to list all your new books? What a great deal! And yes, that's the trouble isn't it? Happy about a bunch of new books but "oh no, when am I going to read all the other ones too??". Heh.

Yes, it was really nice of her, when she told me that (privately, of course). I have no idea what the higher-ups will decide, but the fact that the other woman thinks I'm really good at my job and would do good if I had the promotion really made my day, since I do try really hard to be good at it. :) I am young, though, without as much experience, so I understand if they decide to not offer it to me in the end.

I will be entering the books, but not today. I'm too tired from the crowds and heat (it was at least 90°F today, even with the fans going in the warehouse), and I haven't decided how much detail I want to do or anything.

Some of the titles, from memory:
Zel by Donna Jo Napoli (I read this when I was 15 or 16 and loved it)
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (never read this one, but keep meaning to, so)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters(?) (loved the mini-series)
Kawaii Not (book version of webcomic)
Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson
a book about Mary born at sea on the way to Plymoth Rock by Lois Lenski (I think this may be the same copy I read when I was 9!)
Empire Falls (been wanting to read it ever since I fell in love with the Chris Thile song about the book with the same title)
Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
a book about women writers from the 1920s titled something like "Bootleggers and Bobs"
Paris Whore by Gene Wilder (or a similar title)
The Fairy Gunmother
the first Jack Sprat book by Jasper Fforde
Mermaids on the Moon
Widdershins
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

I got the two sequels to Chasing Vermeer, too, not realizing that they were sequels - I thought they were just by the same author :( (Chasing Vermeer is on my To Read wishlist, though)

There's a book by the same guy who wrote The Professor and the Madman about maps.

There's a book about general 1920s American history.

A book from 1966 about the National Parks (thought I could use it for art, but the photos are so pretty that I'm going to keep it for Elijah).

And lots more. I think this is maybe a third? Many of these are books or authors I'd been thinking to read for quite a long time, but never got around to, while others simply caught my eye and seemed interesting.

 

Also, I need to give away my copy of Stones for my Father, an ER children's book about the second Boer War that I won a few months ago. I don't plan to reread it, and I clearly need to make space. PM me if you want it. I'm only offering it here, and I'll cover shipping costs (worldwide).

I have the Simon Winchester book on maps which I also bought at a library sale (same deal too basically, $10 for a box). Haven't got around to it but thought the similarity in acquisition was amusing. :)

My goodness it has been forever since I posted to this thread - a whole month!

My new position at work has been keeping me busy so the time I used to spend reading when it was slow, or browsing LT threads, is taken up doing actual work, and when I get home, I just don't have the mental energy needed to read or do any internetting more complicated than Twittering.

I finished Jacob de Zoet ages ago and really loved it. I might need to buy a copy for myself.

I got Swamplandia! from the library 2 weeks ago and have been reading it, but very slowly (the too tired to read thing, see). It's due back on Thursday, so I'm trying very hard to finish it - I'm currently on page 109/315, but I don't really care about Louis Thanksgiving, so I've set it aside temporarily to read other new books:

I took a few hours today for Wandering Son: book one, which I've been so excited about. I love it so much! I want everyone to read it and also love it! My review is here, but PhoenixTerran also wrote an excellent review, so check hers out, too.

I haven't even added the rest of my book sale purchases to LT yet. I got about 10 in two weekends ago before I had to stop... and then last week, I got more new books, but it's just manga and a light novel...

It really sucks that I now have more money to spend on books, but less time to read them. Hopefully I can find a good balance and start reading more again. It's not like I don't have 60 unread books sitting on my floor waiting for me!

(Also, I've got a G+ for now, but maybe not for long, where I'm posting nonsense and also my reading updates: http://gplus.to/keristars)

(And these last two weeks, I've been fairly fixated on the fact that I'll be going to Walt Disney World the week after Thanksgiving. I love WDW so much, and it's my first long vacation there in years, so it's practically all I can think about.)

Keri --

It always seems to take a while to find the balance in a new postition -- you'll get there. At least you can afford more books!

Enjoy planning your trip to WDW -- I'm very fond of Central Florida myself.

I'm the same as you - my new job is actually leaving me LESS time for LT than I had before, which is very surprising. Enjoy planning your trip - I love trip planning, although I get stressed out with the actual packing. :)

I am glad to hear about the new job, Keri!

Thanks for the comments :)

I just finished reading the Nat Tate ARC from Bloomsbury today. I'm not sure what in my catalogue made me a good match for it, but the ER algorithms chose me, and I'm glad they did. It was really fun to read this fictional biography about a man very involved with the art world in the 40s and 50s. There are many names in our collection that I will be less likely to forget, now that I've seen them in print in a slightly different context (Motherwell, Kline, de Kooning...). I took some art history classes, but not modern or contemporary art, so this was an interesting book in that I was learning about the art scene at the time through a fictional story, yet it's also a true story... and it also appealed to my favorite English majory things, like the nature of truth and identity and fiction vs non-fiction. I kind of like Forrest Gump for the same reason. (Also, there's a book called My Little Blue Dress that I read when I was 17. I loved it because it was also a similar concept, though I later saw that it wasn't very well received.)

Still plugging along with Swamplandia!. Paused it to get through the Nat Tate, but I'm still not terribly interested in Louis Thanksgiving, even if the story is more of the stuff I like about narratives. But I need to finish it soon, because I just requested a new book from the library based on something someone on G+ said (forgive me that I can't remember which LT-identity belongs to him/her), and it'll be ready for pick-up probably Tuesday.

Just finished Swamplandia!. At least half of it is an elaborate love-letter to the wilds of Florida, an echo of my own heart. The other half is a depiction of grief and loss and the way two siblings react to wold-shattering upheavals in their lives.

Reading this book made me reflect on how much I love this place where I grew up, where I've lived all my life. When Russell describes the gator hollows, or the saw grass marshes, or the circling buzzards, I know these things. Yet, for all my love of the marshes and the springs and the limestone caverns and the egrets and gators and everything, I don't really show it much. I'm lazy, and I prefer to sit comfortably with a book to getting suited up and kayaking or diving... so can I really say I love it as much as I do? But, yes. I may have complained at the time, but some of my best memories are of trekking through the state parks and exploring the marshes. One of my favorite memories of my time at New College in Sarasota was when we took a day trip to Myakka and I hung out, mostly alone, by the side of the lake with vultures and gators and raccoons for company (while my friends all went canoeing - I had no desire to exert myself with a paddle that day!) - it was so damn beautiful.

I have been on medication these last few months for depression, and I hope that I'm able to continue taking it. For the first time in forever, I'm finally not too exhausted to do things, rather than stay home and sleep all the time. I've been reminded of how much I love nature here, and I'm going to use my newfound energy to enjoy it, once it cools a bit. I'm going to visit the state parks and marshes and maybe I'll get my uncle in Largo to teach me to scuba dive, despite my absolute hatred of being submerged in water. (Everyone in my family but me dives, it seems.)

Anyway, I love Swamplandia! because it is about something I love and cherish. But I also enjoyed it for the story of Kiwi Bigtree, how he left home to try to save home, and in doing so found himself like a fish out of water. I also enjoyed seeing the world through Ava's eyes, though I could've done without the story of Louis Thanksgiving that she recounts - honestly, I wanted to get back to the here-and-now of the book, not read something that happened so long ago, though it is very illuminating regarding Osceola's part in the story, and it does tell a lot about the history of the Everglades for the unfamiliar.

All three of the siblings reacted to their mother's death in a different way - it is her dying that begins the story, and what happens to the kids that continues it. There's a lot to be said about it, but to be honest, for all that I did enjoy the plot bits, it's the descriptions of Florida that make me love the book most. The Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands are as much a character in the novel as any of the Bigtrees, and like I said earlier, the descriptions are pretty much a love-letter. And I loved that.

My next book will be Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding, but I can't remember the LT name of the G+ person who mentioned it that made me want to read it, so. :(

It was described as Firefly + Steampunk, so... I thought it'd be an interesting change of pace after Swamplandia!.

ETA: here is my Swamplandia! review. Similar to this post, but different - more concise. :)

Ok, the description of your next read has me adding it to the TBR list. I look forward to your review of it. And a lovely review of Swamplandia!, Kerri! :D

I’ve been waffling about reading Swamplandia! – the big draw for me is the role of wild Florida in the book (I have a great fondness for mangrove swamps). Your description of and enthusiasm for the book have tipped the balance; I guess I’ll be reading it! Great review. Thanks.

*waving* at Keri

I loved reading your personal response to Swamplandia!. It was particularly interesting because I can completely relate to your feelings about nature, except that "my" nature is completely different. Gators, vultures? Completely unfamiliar, and yet the sensations that you evoke are the same.

It's always delightful when I read a book that's really about Florida. There's tons of books about the moors of England or the rocky beaches of Maine or the Great Plains or mountains, but all those things are alien to me. Reading the LM Montgomery books when I was small was interesting as much because I'd never seen a birch tree in my life as because of all the imagination that the characters spend so much time with. (I thought birch trees must be magical. I had no idea what they looked like, and imagined some sort of construction paper thing.)

I have still never seen snow except in pictures, and the freak storm of 1989 when we got at most 3 inches.

Thus, I love books where Florida is actually relevant to the story, because I actually recognize the descriptions and know what they mean. I was surprised not long ago when I spoke of "live oaks" and the person I was talking to didn't know what I mean! The same thing with spanish swords (they're a type of palm frond that grows close to the ground - they're among the first green things to sprout after a wildfire, and are very sharp and pointy and you do not want to be out and about around them unless you have sturdy trousers on, like jeans, because they will draw blood if you brush by at the wrong angle).

My uncle lives on the Suwanee River and has, I guess, 4 acres of undeveloped property - you go out there in November and everything is grey and brown from fallen pine needles and spanish moss, except for this enormous patch of spanish swords. It's kind of eery! It's also very different from the Florida described in Swamplandia! because it's so much further north and away from the salt water marshes. No panthers, but there are gators and black bears (not so much in recent years) and armadillos and possums and peacocks and of course chiggers and giant-ass spiders and palmetto bugs (imagine a roach, then increase its size to about 4 inches long - and they love getting inside the house and out of the rain: also, they fly). (You ever see a banana spider? They're harmless, but it's pretty scary when you're skirting around a spanish sword and walk right into one of the webs, unexpectedly, especially if you aren't familiar with the species.)

Another book about Florida that I liked a lot is Tangerine by Edward Bloor. It takes place out near Ocala and YA about a boy whose family moves to Florida to live on an orange farm. It's one of those YA coming-of-age stories, but I liked the attention to the setting, and how it actually mattered to the MC's growth.

A book about Florida I don't like: Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski. I do love the Florida part, but the story is awful. It's all about "civilizing" the crackers in the lake region back around 1904ish to make them build houses like people have houses up north, and to make them wear shoes and stuff. It was written in the 1940s (and won the Newbery), so I guess that's why, but I hate so much how it so thoroughly symbolizes the way much of Florida has been destroyed by people coming down from the North. (Not that I can complain much about that... my dad grew up in chicago and my mom's dad was born in New York.) I hate the golf courses and condos and the way the aquifers are losing water and the springs are turning brown and murky and even the way grass is everywhere, despite grass being completely unsuited to the region and sucking up so much water just to keep it green. Plus, everywhere you go is air-conditioned and if places would just be smart about how they build, a/c wouldn't be quite so necessary, or at least not work so hard...

 
I, uhm, maybe have strong opinions about the way we're ruining this region. You should hear me when another black bear gets into the residential communities out near our beaches, simply because the towns are encroaching on their homes and they get lost. It's the same thing in so many other parts of the world, though.

Monthly update!

I finished reading Retribution Falls last week, though I've yet to write a review for it (I've such a backlog!). It was enjoyable, though I was a little disappointed that the second half wasn't as cliché-filled as the first half. It turned into a straight-up adventure story, a bit more serious than I expected.

I also read Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact, and ER book I received earlier this summer. My review: http://www.librarything.com/review/74249578

I really liked it! It's not really all that new for the genre - I mean, it's a fantasy adventure like Narnia or Harry Potter or maybe Percy Jackson (though I haven't read that series), so it follows a lot of the usual tropes. BUT the characters are fantastic! You have the distant guardian and the bullies and weird but wise old guide, and the protagonist is parentless and in a strange place, but there's so much more. I love how much depth Aunt Honoria is given, despite being stuck in the "distant guardian" role. She very clearly loves Darwen and wants to give him everything, but just doesn't really know what to do, since she's been suddenly made parent to an eleven-year-old. Even Darwen recognizes that she's trying and he tries to make it easier for her, which I thought was nice.

Also, I loved the main girl character! Alexandra is smart and observant, but she doesn't have what I normally think of as a "girl" role. She's not the nurturing type (though she does help when someone gets injured and makes a makeshift tourniquet), nor is she the Smart Girl (though she is intelligent), nor is she the fussy girly-girl (though she does love sparkly girly things and insists on painting their science project purple). In fact, if I equate the three main characters to those from Harry Potter, Alexandra is more like Ron, while Rich is more like Hermione. I think it's really cool that for the most part, Alexandra could have easily been a boy character and still be exactly the same.

I also loved the diversity of the cast. Darwen is half-white and half-black, though this only comes up once in the story - it's more important that he's from England (not London). The children at school are all various races, but you really only hear about it when they're introduced with the first description. After that, it isn't relevant, unless something in the plot hinges on appearance (for example, chasing someone and not knowing who it is, only that the person has dark skin).

So, yeah, I found this book refreshing and fun. I rated it 3 stars, because that's my rating for "good book, will recommend", but if I weren't so stingy, it'd probably get 5. I'm definitely sharing my ARC copy with friends who have middle-school-aged children, because I think the kids will love the book.

 

In other news, I'm doing a "Books as Art" series of discussions/classes at the public library every Wednesday this month. We're talking about books as objects and our associations with them, and it's really fun! Last week we got to see the rare book collection and how old books are as much art as they are anything else, and we talked about e-books versus physical books, and the different kinds of forms physical books can take, and also looked at Rober Racine's and Ann Hamilton's installations and performance art.

Next week (day after tomorrow!) we're going to make sculpture with book, by cutting the pages or folding them, or something like that. I'm not sure yet, but it will be fun, definitely!

Hi, there! Good to hear from you. :)

Ha, yeah, I didn't realize it'd been so long since I'd last posted.

I just don't have as much time to keep up with my hobbies... luckily, I really like my job! (I've actually been working 6-day weeks recently, and this next week is going to be crazy because of exhibition openings.)

I did find a way to fit more reading into my daily schedule, since I really missed it in July - I got a recumbent exercise bicycle and try to do 30 minutes a day when I get home from work. I picked a recumbent one so that it's easier to hold a book while I bike! It's been working out really well - I read at least half of Retribution Falls that way, and almost all of Darwen Arkwright (I was lazy and lay in bed reading the last 75 pages this afternoon, though).

I want to show off!

The Books-As-Art program at the public library is pretty frigging awesome. We had 1.5 hours today, so I only carved through to page 70 of my 700-page book about Rockefeller (Titan, not that I'm actually reading it!), but I've already got a good start.



I think it's coming along nicely, even if my idea is a teeny bit cliché. It's fun, at least!

Very pretty!

Showing off some more, because I like to do that when I'm really proud of something I've done. It's still not finished - I'm only 1/3 of the way through! - but I wanted to add another in-progress photo.



Also, I have become somewhat intrigued by the bits and pieces I've read of this book as I carve through the pages, and I may very well take it out of the library some day to read it more fully. John Rockefeller Sr was an interesting man, it seems, and there was a whole chapter that discussed Flagler and the railroads in Florida, which are very interesting to me (see posts from a few months ago for why :P)

I stayed up until 5 am last night, reading the ER book I received last week, Inflight Science. check out my review, which pretty much says all I have to say about the book.

It was an interesting and fun read (naturally!), but nothing I hadn't already learned, thanks to my very good high school education in chemistry and physics and then the astronomy courses I took at university (also lots of wikipedia browsing).

I think it's worthwhile to give to a teenager or adult who would like to learn some basic, general physics, but isn't looking for a textbook. Because it relates everything back to airplane flight, there's a connecting thread and so you don't have a bunch of things that don't seem to necessarily have anything to do with each other. I can't tell you how much trouble I had with forces in physics because it was too abstract for me. This book provides concrete examples by explaining airplane technology.

In addition to physics and some engineering, the book also discusses geology and meteorology - which are also physics-related, in the end! :D

Also, I have just purchased a new fountain pen and it arrived over the weekend and I used it to write out my draft of the review and you guys it is pure sex, if a pen can be sex. It's $19.99 at xfountainpens.com right now and I highly recommend it, if you'd like a new fountain pen or your first one. It's a Straffen LS Meer with a screw cap and nice, lightweight turquoise/blue plastic shaft. It's beautiful and sleek and writes well and, yeah, is basically amazing. It also comes in white. Here's a link to the duo. The sad thing is that they're only cartridge compatible, and ink bottles are much less expensive, but cartridges are also less messy, so. And xfountainpens.com has a nice selection of cartridges. I really like Chesterfield Ink.

Just read another book. Basically sat down this evening and went through it rather than taking a much-needed nap - Esperanza Rising, which I got free from an early literacy conference held at my workplace a month or so ago. It was enjoyable and showed me some history I wasn't really familiar with before. I'm going to be giving it to a co-worker's 11-year-old daughter to enjoy.

I love your book carving - once I've got over the little gasp of horror at your wanton book-destruction!

126> Ha! If it helps your stomach, the book was destined for the recycling bin anyway, because of water damage and missing pages in the middle (and part of the spine towards the bottom is coming loose).

I haven't taken a good photo of it, but the book is entirely carved now and the background is a nice prussian blue, which really makes the foreground bits pop out. Once I rearrange the stars a bit, I'll take a good quality photo to share.

Last week was Photographing Books week, and I got a couple nifty ones, I thought:



This would be my favorite if the heading on the page weren't out of focus, but I couldn't get my camera to not focus on the fountain pen (which is new and I totally love it and bought it at xfountainpens.com for only $20).



This one is my other favorite and the one I'll be submitting for our end-of-class show.

Tonight, we're going to be doing Art On The Page or something like that - drawing or painting directly onto the pages and using the text for texture and so on.

Loving the creative book art/photography.

Love the pictures you posted and that is a sweet fountain pen! *goes off to the website*

I read this back in August but only got around to writing the review today (link): Uelsmann : Process and Perception. We're featuring several Uelsmann prints in our photography exhibition right now, and I read this book to get some background information about his work and basically what's up with it.

I have to say, it's a pretty cool book! If you're interested in the process behind photographic collages pre-Photoshop or even just photographic/artistic process in general, it's worth a look. It was put together back in the 1980s, but still seemed relevant and interesting to me, though I still dunno if I'm a big fan of Uelsmann's, though I can appreciate his work more (and also brag that he's an almost-local artist).

Finally also wrote my review for Retribution Falls. See the full thing here.

The first half was fantastic - lots of over-the-top trope storming and predictable plot, in fact it was almost like a parody. But then it got all serious and decided it had to humanise the characters and make them more likable, which pretty much ruined most of the fun, because it made me very aware of sexist and racist ideas pervading the writing. Not just in that the pov characters were that way, but the way the female and minority characters were presented, yeah? It was still an enjoyable adventure to the end, though, so I can't fault it too much, but I feel like the ick bits of the second half were put into sharp relief because everything was so much more like a parody in the first half and not serious, but almost mocking.

I'm currently reading Habibi from Craig Thompson. I posted about it in the GN2 thread here, complete with a few cell-phone pics of the illustrations.

So far, I'm thoroughly loving it, but I was predisposed to, I suppose, because Thompson's doing this complex narrative thing with language and Arabic writing and myth/story-telling, which are of course all right up my alley.

Well, I finished Habibi and really liked it, though I fear I didn't understand some of it - it was really complex in places and I felt as though there was a thread going through just beyond my ken, like I couldn't quite see it, and thus the feeling that I missed something about the story.

I loved the complexities of the narrative (including the illustrations in it - something interesting about graphic novels is that it's not just the words on the page or the plot that make up the narrative, but the way the drawings are rendered and composed and stuff), and I enjoyed the exploration of "stories" and "writing" and "purity/corruption" and "love" that went through the thing.

It's probably not for everyone - it's pretty dark and grim in places, and Dodola (the main character) suffers rapes and enslavement and other not so nice things. :/ Plus her Zam/Habibi gets his own crappy things which was difficult for me to read, because it was so heart-breaking (but it ends happily! mostly. sort of.)

 

I also finished my book carving! I hope to have better pictures later this week with better lighting, but I opened it up and tested the glue and it was set tonight, so nighttime indoor photos with crap lighting it is.





I tried to adjust the first one in photoshop a bit so it wasn't so dark, which made the photo itself kind of weird, but at least these photos show all the necessary details. :) My favorite part is probably the ladder. It took me a bit to figure out how to construct it, but it's really sturdy and fits perfectly in the space. Plus, it takes the sculpture to a level that reads more as "whimsical art" to me than without it. It's that little "something" that really makes it feel complete.

Very lovely book art, Keri. And I definitely love the ladder detail which adds a je ne sais quoi to it. :)

I've been reading Adios, Happy Homeland! by Ana Menéndez lately. It was published this summer, I believe.

It's fantastic.

It caught me off guard because it very much uses the Literary Agent Hypothesis (warning: TVTropes link), which is one of my favorite things in fiction. The book is formatted like an anthology of short stories, including author bios in the back, which is the part that tricked me, until I started reading. All the stories are interconnected in some way, and they all share a theme of "flight" (both the literal flying definition and the escape connotation). There is a lot of imagery of trains, balloons, swimming, holes-in-the-sky-to-the-stars, and as related images, wind and the stars.

Ana Menéndez is a Cuban-American author from California. The stories all have a Cuban perspective, which is why I'd originally picked the book up (I wanted to read literature from a place I'd never done before, particularly places in the Caribbean or South America). Some stories take place in Cuba, others in Miami or no-place-in-particular. One story is written in Spanish, though I haven't reached it yet, and a link is included for an English translation.

The book is very modern, with lots of plays on language and meaning...I guess it's postmodern, too? But I mean modern in that it explicitly references the Internet and even has a footnote to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stowaway). I think one of the stories is about the Elian Gonzalez thing back in the '90s, but I'm not positive that it isn't about a similar but fictional child. That's one of the things about the stories and the way they play with reality and the meaning of things - it's magical realism, I suppose, and a fictionalization or warping of actual things. There's math in one of the stories, and poetry, and folk meteorology...

At first, once I realized that Adios, Happy Homeland! uses the literary agent hypothesis, I wasn't sure if it wasn't a little amateurish and ... another word that starts with C that I'm blanking completely on ... because of how obvious some of the themes are. But I think it is a great piece of literary fiction and not so amateur at all - the more I consider it and talk about it, the more I realize how carefully and intricately it is crafted, and those obvious themes are just on the surface.

If anything, the story that follows a woman's life backwards as she succumbs to Alzheimer's and remembers her life in reverse is great.

You did a beautiful job with your book carving. One of the art classes here did art with old books and brought them here to display. One of my favorites was a hollowed out book with fake grass and a miniature tree placed inside the hollow. Another had illustrations in it and the student cut out the figure and propped it open. I wish I had taken pictures.

Well, it's been forever since I had the time/energy to talk about what I've been reading in a blog(forum thread) post.

I need to add my reads since October to my list. But it's so close to starting the 2012 one! At least I've met my goals for this year.

I spent much of November's not-at-work time sewing mouse ears for a vacation at Disney World, which I took the week after Thanksgiving. I hardly read at all. In fact, I started That Is All on 14 November and just finished reading it today.

You can find my review here.

I love Hodgman's books a lot, but Areas of My Expertise was the perfect reading experience, and unfortunately it's hard to replicate it, so I didn't like That Is All quite as much as I hoped, though I still liked it more than other ones, I guess?

In this time, I have also read Book Girl and the Captive Fool (3rd in the series) and A Bride's Story, vol 2. So not so much reading going on.

Thanks to a comment from Zoë when I peeked at my SantaThing page, I realized that i'd been stalking my library's catalogue with a misspelling and the wrong title! Somehow, I'd never picked up on the fact that A Most Improper Magick is known as Kat, Incorrigible in the USA, nor that I was getting the author's name wrong the last few months. So instead of Burgess, I typed in Burgis last week and now I have a copy of the book to read next!

I have also been given an early ARC of Matched to read (finally), and have an ER book on my list when I'm done with Kat, Incorrigible - Lucky Break by Esther Freud.

Pictures of the Books As Art exhibition at my library

Hello, stranger - good to have you back!

Finished Kat, Incorrigible in about 24 hours. It was really fun and cute! Here's my review, though it's not very good.

I think I need to edit my review for THAT IS ALL, because it's focussed a bit much on what I didn't like about it, even though I LOVED the dang thing.

It's always so much easier to say what you don't like, isn't it??

Yay, I'm glad you finally found the book and enjoyed it!

Wishing you all the very best Keri!

Merry Christmas, Keri!

Thanks, guys :)

141> I'm pretty happy that I got impatient/nosy and peeked at the comments on my ST page so that I saw your note!

140> Yes, it's always easier to say what I didn't like... unfortunately, with THAT IS ALL, as much as I enjoyed reading it, I really super enjoyed the first in the series. It was so perfectly suited to my sense of humor and it was also the first time I had encountered Hodgman's writing...so any additional installments will be compared to the first and found lacking as a matter of course - unless they somehow go beyond that first and are even better. Even though I know to expect this, I keep hoping that the next one will recreate that perfect combination, and it doesn't. That's what happens when you happen upon a more-or-less perfect book, I suppose.

I'm starting to notice it with Bloody Jack, though because it has a more traditional format and is a more straightforward narrative, Meyer could avoid it by developing Jacky's character or one of the many plot threads. We're at a point now where character/plot isn't really advancing much.

But anyway.

I've been trying to read Lucky Break the last couple days and am annoyed with myself for requesting it. I'm on page 50 of 300 and it's your basic performing arts plot, near as I can tell (and I've seen plenty of movies about dancers or actors or singers or whathaveyou, and I read lots of books about the same when i was in middle school and high school). I'm hoping that Freud does something else with it soon, because right now I'm reading out of obligation, and I hate that. It's not that it's poorly written, it's just that I've grown out of this kind of story.

I am kind of strung along by the idea that Nell (one of the pov characters) may be bisexual, and I'm looking to see if she becomes aware of it. If not, the scenes from her pov where that pay special attention to the bodies of women with very sexual undertones will drive me crazy, because then they'd be there just to show that Nell is caught up in the decadence of the Drama Arts group or something, that whole bacchanalia thing?, and that's really stupid and kind of a tease.

I finally made my 2012 thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/130563

Thinking of giving up on Lucky Break - when I sit down to read it, I find myself really getting into it, but it's hard to get myself to actually sit down and open the thing. It's just not really compelling. I'm more than halfway through, though, and I feel like I ought to finish it since it's an ER and all.

Nell does get more interesting, and so does another pov character, but the plot is fairly uninspired and there's no real character insight/development or language use that makes the book special to me.