Just joined up over at PaperBackSwap.com-- check it out-- what a cool way to share books!! Especially if you're poor like me-- you only pay shipping when you send books out! And most of the time it's only about $1.42!!!!
Swap Your Paperback Books - PaperBackSwap.com
Found over at Gingersmack.
Just sent my first book to be swapped via PaperBackSwap.com. Yay!
So, in between shows today I was browsing at the Daedalus Books Outlet in Columbia, and I saw came across a book that everyone should peruse:
Sexpots: Eroticism in Ceramics
Fun stuff, that. :)
I downloaded Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke from audible.com about a month ago, and here's my review (the italicized sections are portions which I didn't have room to include in the online review):
Maybe I'm missing out on what's so "enchanting" or "enthralling" about this book, but I simply didn't find it very entertaining. At 32 hours of listening time, I didn't expect every moment to be a completely enrapturing experience, but there were times that I honestly felt like it was a chore to tune my iPod to this book to finish it.
The storyline was very interesting, and at times Clarke has moments of real magic in her wordcraft (i.e. the madness of Mrs. Delgado) but the "historical" information inserted between the action made this book read much more like a textbook than a work of fiction, which I'm sure is what Ms. Clarke had in mind. (This idea is bourne out by the interview on her website-- her influences and thought process are right in line with the creation of this work.)
As a fictional textbook, Ms. Clarke's writing is right on the money-- her stylistic execution is perfect at convincing the reader they are studying a Victorian history of the magical lives of the two characters.
(I'd like to reiterate here what a genius she is at creating this illusion- it's flawless. Her world-creation and history relation skills are completely breathtaking when you really think about it. I have enormous amounts of respect for the kind of careful writing and work it takes to achieve this kind of mastery.)
This, unfortunately, is the work's main downfall: the perfection Clarke achieves in Victorian textbook style makes for dry and often downright boring reading. As a fan of writers such as Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and the Brontes, the style of this book was very familiar, and the choice of narrator was excellent to convey this style. His skill in portraying the characters made the book bearable and often enjoyable in ways not necessarily inherent to the text.
However, this book seemed more suited to the readers contemporary with the above authors, used to dry commentary and analysis and slowly-paced action. The character development is the story is also a little below-par. Most of the characters have that static two-dimensional protrayal found in a lot of Victorian literature: gender roles played out exclusively and without much expression, and certainly no question or explanation, which one would expect from a book 800 pages long.
(Once again, I have to interject my inner dialogue here: though the characters seem a little flat, this is largely due to the subtlety of Clarke's writing. The fact that she thought enough about the motivations of the characters to create a poly-motivational set of players is astounding to me. When you consider the nature of good and evil there is rarely an absolute on either side, and there are always reasons for the actions of both sides which are more complex and deeply effective than simple side-taking. She's a genius in this respect.)
I usually listen to audio books as a means of passing the time on my 45-minute commute, and I found myself falling asleep at the wheel a few times during this one, not to mention having my mind wander off constantly because I couldn't keep my concentration on the book-- a problem I have honestly never had before.
My recommendation: if you live for Victorian literature, you will enjoy this book as an exercise in replicating the style of the period, but if you're looking for a well-paced storyline that will keep you from falling asleep at the wheel, skip it until an abriged version is released. As a piece of literary art, this book is incredible, but it's not the kind of art that entertains: it's the kind of mastery true craftsmen should aspire to. The magic in this book is not in its spells, but in its craft.
All right WriMos, National Novel Writing Month is write around the corner-- this will be my third year running, and I have some great material to go for this time! This year I'm going for 60,000 words, which will break my record last year of 57,486.
Sign up on October 1st and write more! Don't let that dream of writing the Great American Novel (or whatever floats your boat) be one of those life-long regrets!
I have a new item for my Christmas Wish List. Annie Leibovitz's new book, A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005.
No need to explain why. After all, she took this photo, and this photo, and of course (*urp*), this photo.
So, most of you know that I'm addicted to my iPod, particulary on the long drives to and from the theaters. Lately I've been attracted to the genre of Young Adult Fiction, into which Audible lumps a whole lot of fairly complex "young adult" sci-fi and fantasy, most of which makes Harry Potter look a little thin on the detail and thought process. (Not to disparage the HP books-- I love them more than the average bear and am salivating more than most people over July 21st.) I love stuff in the Young Adults genre on Audible because it's usually complex enough to have a really good story but not so dense as to defeat the purpose of keeping me awake on the ride home (for that, see Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke).
I have to spare a minute to give y'all a heads-up about a book series I've just discovered (it predates HP by about 15 years-- yeah, I'm behind) --by the fantastic author Diane Duane: The Young Wizards series. I swear, the second book, Deep Wizardry, is one of the best books I've ever read. And to my delight and surprise, at the end of the audio recording of the next book, High Wizardry, was a really fantastic interview with the author.
Can I just tell you, I LOVE this woman-- I love the way she thinks about writing, about religion, about the secret lives of inanimate objects... incredible. Go out and find these books as soon as possible.
Oy. Give me a break.
This is the kind of thing that gives me chills, it's such a beautiful work of functional art: J.K. Rowling's handwritten Beedle The Bard.
We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe. (Amazon.com)
So I think by now we're all aware that I can be a little OCD about organization. The cleaning thing was the first admission, this just follows for a Type-A person, right? (That was for The Muse and for Heidelah, with whom I was debating where we fall on the whole A-B continuum the other night. The first step in recovery is admission I guess.) Anyway, for a while one of the things on my OCD little list has been to catalog all of the books we've got in this house and sort them out in terms of keepers and traders.
Keepers are defined as books we're particularly attached to, have special memories of, or are likely to read again at some point in the near future. There are particular one-offs there, but mostly there are a lot of series authors in this category: Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, Carey, Willams, Rowling, Rice, Montgomery, etc. Stacks and stacks of pristine hardbacks, and a list of to-be-acquireds to replace the paperbacks that have become ragged and overly loved.
This kind of brings us to the traders column: books that we're done with or have too many of in some form, which are promptly posted on PaperBackSwap and hopefully soon winging their way across the planet to people who have some use for them and earning us book credits so we can get the books we're looking for too.
But back to the keepers for a minute-- I have to have a way of keeping them all straight, so to do that I use LibraryThing. (Many thanks to domesticat for that heads-up a long time ago. Smooches-- love ya' for that, and a lot of everything else too, but that's beside the point.) LibraryThing rocks my socks, because Zip, Boom, Bonjour! you whip out your :CueCat and you have a neatly assembled and searchable list of your entire library, complete with duplications and swapping capabilities on the most popular book swap sites.
There are all kinds of other cool bells and whistles, book suggesters, lists of people who have overlapping collections like yours, and probably my favorite one, The Unsuggester.
Basically what The Unsuggester does is figure out what books you are least likely to have in your collection based on those that you've entered, and man does it come up with some seriously awesome and spot-on assumptions. For instance, after my long bout of entries today, The Unsuggester has decided that my sci-fi collection and Christian biblical analyses and sociological literature are uniquely unsuited for one another, which I find strangely validating and pretty much exactly correct-- the only Christian lit I have was basically given to me at some point, outside of a couple of C.S. Lewis analyses that I find interesting on a purely theoretical basis.
To further back up its track record, it also lists Sophie Kinsella and some Jodi Picoult, to which I say, bang-up job, you lovely piece of software because neither of those are even close to on my radar. Apparently I have no love for queens and presidents either, but at this point there's not much room in my heart as I'm spending my days drooling over Aaron Peirsol (rrrrowwrrr) and the American swimming boys.
I wonder what it would "unsuggest" for you guys?
So, D totally helped me solve a lifelong question last night.
When I was in school, I had to read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. In it, there's a point where the main character passes through a market in Dictionopolis where letters are sold after being grown in orchards, and descriptions of a few of the letters' tastes soon follow.
I read Tollbooth when I was about twelve, and ever since I've wondered what all the letters would taste like. Lying in bed last night reading, I explained the question to D, who promptly opened a lively discussion with me about the issue.
Me: Q is so not cardamom. You totally pulled that out of your ass.
...
D: Q is totally garlic because it never goes out on its own and is better with other things. And when you use it on its own it's totally garish.
...
D: See, G is totally banana-- it goes with H (wheat bread) and U (honey), and if you spell dough it totally makes a peanut butter and banana sandwich!
Me: But O is mayonnaise...
Together: Eeeew.
Me: And yet, Elvis would probably approve.
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