J'ai tort and Bookwormish Dithering. . . !
Well, summer is here. Suddenly there's time to kill! And, for me, the best way to assinate time, if you want to put it in gruesome terms, is through books and music. Particularly French music, because that language is so pretty and sweet . . . whenever someone speaks French, to me, it's like a little symphony of cute words and sounds. I <3 French. Same feelings for Spanish . . . but Spanish, to me, is much more suave, refined, and more serious. Both languages are my favorites, even though, I'll admit, I really don't speak either of them fluently.
So, just bought J'ai tort and Pour que l'amor me quitte from the album Camille. Goodness! Even though my French is weak, and I only understand fragments, I am still blown away. The songs are so soothing in a way, but also really quite spunky.
... And I've developed a major addiction to the Jeeves and Wooster series by PG Wodehouse. Pure hilarity! Even though I constantly feel sorry for the geeky newt-obsessed Fink-Nottle, and annoyance sometimes with Bertie Wooster for not realizing how silly he is. . . but Jeeves I love. I've got a book-crush, I think.
Oh, and I am very disappointed with Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund. What a waste of money. The first page is superb, yes, but from there it plummets down a cliff (forget a hill)! It's not that the characterization was off -- it was just the style of the book that really threw me off. Naslund dithers on and on, for pages, about nothing. I didn't grow close to the characters because of this, even though Marie and Louis are my favorite historical couple (besides Queen Catherine the Great/ Stanislaw Poniatowski).
But The Knife Man by Wendy Moore is scary! But very interesting... without John Hunter, modern surgery would be gone to pot.
And, despite my better judgement, I've started reading Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. The real opera and the movies are ... very cheesy to me, so I've resisted this book before. But, out of curiosity (killed the cat, I know), I've actually given this book a chance --- and it's pretty good. I like Christine, even though people go on about her beauty too much. She's at least got a brain, which nobody ever mentions. :(
Horatio!! Whoo!! CS Forester's series Horatio Hornblower really does (excuse the pun) blow me away!! I love Horatio. I love that he outwardly is so stoic and in-control, yet he's still a nerdy, angsty, awkward seventeen-year-old who cries himself to sleep. Being seventeen myself, I can totally get what he's going through -- even though I've never manned a sinking French merchant ship or been a midshipman on an English frigate -- the emotions he goes through are all too similar to what I go through in high school and life. I can't wait to read Lieutenant Hornblower ...
That's enough geeking for today I think! :D