I was watching PBS the other evening, and a movie critic on Charlie Rose suggested that we were due to see a lot more sci-fi/fantasy films because of Avatar. I remember someone saying something similar about LotR, and while we did get some novel/comic adaptations, did we get much in the way of original fantasy films? I can think of Mirrormask and ( Read more... )

Because I was doing that "have to teach, can't sleep" thing in the early hours of this morning, I found myself thinking about books involving Elizabethans (or Tudors) and magic or fairies. In theory, this should be a cross-section that is uniformly pleasing to me, but in practice there aren't that many books in this category that I like.

( various lists )

I *finally* read Ironside by Holly Black last night (I bought it ages ago; I think maybe I'd planned to reread Tithe first, but I can't remember what the holdup was, now). And then felt mildly embarrassed when I had to explain to a friend what had kept me up late into the night, reading. I hate that I do that. I'd gotten over it, mostly...and then ( Read more... )

Of course it would be the story about a girl growing up in a magical library that would set me to crying. Of course it would.

I just finished reading a collection of short stories, Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages. (Funnily enough, my decision to read this book had nothing to do with the fact that Neil Gaiman wrote an introduction for it; I ( Read more... )

Finally, I am actually caught up with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. This would not have taken me nearly as long as it did were it not an online novel; funny how I can read blog posts and even fairly short fiction online, but longer fiction requires my brain to make maneuvers it is not entirely comfortable ( Read more... )

Name fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you, and don't take too much time to think about it (the first fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes). Copy this into your own post.Many of these books will be familiar, I think. It was a fairly easy meme to do, since after years of moving from dorm to home and back (mailing ( Read more... )

Yay! The Graveyard Book won the Newbery! How cool is that?

...I never did write about The Graveyard Book, at least not here--I wrote a couple of pages about it in my writing journal--but basically, I was hooked from the moment Bod used an obsolete word he'd learned from a ghost and had to be corrected. Clearly, my kind of book.

Hmph. It might have been Jane Austen's birthday today, but you'd never know it from my lack of success at finding a copy of Love and Friendship anywhere about. (Or Love and Freindship either, ha ha.) I wanted to get it as part of a Christmas present for a friend, but it was not to be had, even though I went to three different stores. Not even ( Read more... )

The local bookstore had a sale today, and I bought several very yummy books that I've had my eye on for quite a while, including a lavish book on Hadrian, Ad Infinitum (a book on the history of Latin), and a biography of Augustus. (I seem to buy books in thematic groups at these sales.) I also got the new Donne biography by John Stubbes--mostly ( Read more... )

I'm trying to decide whether I want to bump Pan's Labyrinth up in my Netflix queue for Halloween. The reason I am hesitating is the same reason I haven't seen it yet: I am a big, big wuss. I *want* to see it, I do, but I am worried about the violence (which several people have warned me about. Which may have had the effect of exaggerating the ( Read more... )