June 2009

P&P&Z

I finally finished Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, a book I was very much looking forward to until sassymonkey indicated it wasn’t great.

She was right. It wasn’t great. It was a brilliant idea but I pictured something as wonderfully bizarre as a Christopher Moore book. It wasn’t that wonderfully bizarre. If I hadn’t already had Chris Moore’s version (or what I imagine a Chris Moore version would look like) in my head, I’d have probably enjoyed P&P&Z a good bit more than I did.

Worth reading, yes. Fabulous, not so much.

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Magic Thief: Lost

This is book two in the Magic Thief series, another one that I plucked from my Amazon holding list and I think Lost might have been better than the first one. (A rare occurrence for a second book.)

There are hidden “rune” messages throughout the book and I always spend the time figuring out what they say. TW doesn’t bother with them. The messages in the last book were better than the ones in this book.

I wonder what will happen to poor Conn in book three… and I wonder what will happen to the magic.

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Castle Waiting

I almost forgot to read Castle Waiting! Liz took it up to her room and never brought it back again… until I asked her where it was because it was due back to the library in three days…

Unfortunately, it’s taken more more than three days to read it due to the crazy that is my life. So, I owe a 10 cent fine on an excellent graphic novel. I can live with that.

Did I mention this is an excellent graphic novel.

Liz really liked it. She read it in the car. She read it in the living room, while the TV was on, she read it and read it.

I understand why. I did want to keep reading it and reading it. But I also enjoyed putting it down because of the nice ribbon bookmark built into the book. I really liked that. Nice touch for that book.

Fairy tales with a lot of odd twists.

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Laura Rider’s Masterpiece

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece had me laughing all the way to the bitter end… at which point, I was bitter. I didn’t like the ending.

TW has pointed out that I am often disappointed with the endings of books. She suggests the ending of a book is not important and I could just skip that last few pages or chapters (depending upon the size of the book) and be happier. Hmm she might have a point.

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The Book of Love

I keep a list on Amazon that tracks books we want to read at some point – these books are either not available at the library when I first hear about them or they are books I don’t have time to reserve due to the current reserve list or our TBR pile. I only look at this list once or twice a year and when I do, I end up reserving a ton of books we should have read ages ago… or a ton of sequels to books we read and enjoyed.

The Book of Love is the second book in a series (The Magdalene Line) and honestly I’d forgotten all about it. I’m not sure why I’d forgotten about it since I really did enjoy The Expected One. Too many books, too little time, I guess.

It took me ages to read this book. I’d read a chapter, or half a chapter, and be falling asleep. I think that’s related to my current work load and not the content of the book. TW sailed through it, even more quickly than she normally sails through books, and she loved it.

I don’t think I liked it as well as I liked The Expected One and that’s because the relationships between the characters “today” didn’t evolve very much. We barely saw Tammy or Roland or even Berenger in this one.

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links for 2009-06-09

  • If you are a blogger, BlogHer is the conference to attend each year. While there will be tons o’ learnin’ going on that weekend, there will also be plenty of opportunities for networking, mingling and cocktailing with fellow bloggers. Because it can be hard to keep track of all the festivities, I thought I’d put together a quick list of some of the hotest parties taking place that weekend. If I’ve missed one, shoot me an email (shannanb(@)Gmail.com) and I’ll add it.

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Literary Bigotry, errr yep

A nice gentleman (gender assumption based on the name and email address attached to the comment) stopped by my post about The Little Stranger and decided to call me out on saying that I was going to boycott Waters’ book because I’d heard there were no lesbian characters.

That was apparently an example of literary bigotry or at the very least, in poor taste to say.

I replied to the gentleman (gender assumption based on the name and email address attached to the comment) that he could spin it that way if he liked and I’d cop to a bit of literary bigotry in this case.

Anyone who stops by here at all knows that I read a heck of a lot of books, most of which don’t have queer characters. I don’t choose a book specifically because it’s queer. I also don’t walk away from a book simply because it isn’t queer (look at what I’m reading now for goodness sakes – that’s as unqueer as they come let me tell you.)

I do however reserve the right to criticize, complain or boycott a writer who has previously gained my respect and my appreciation and my book buying dollars if she stops writing the types of stories I want her to write. Does she have to listen, of course not. Does it make me a bigot? I don’t think so.

But if you think so, I’ll own that. (Thanks to @SarahDopp for the nifty button. She rocks.)

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Airman

Look! Another Cybil! Airman is the book I was least interested in reading from that category. It turned out to be a pretty darn good book. No way it could beat out most of the books in its category but I can see this one being a favorite among the kids it was written for.

Good, solid hero. Bad guys who were just bad enough to hate. A princess who wasn’t stupid. And just enough adventure to keep a kid reading and reading and reading.

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