I remember, some time after the film for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, having a conversation with orange_crushed about different takes of the dragon in fantasy, and how so few films with dragons as a central element seem to work (eg. Eragon, Reign of Fire, DragonheartAttempts to domesticate the dragon in fiction, especially when they are supposed ( Read more... )

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More details to come (I think) on Laurie R. King's blog and website.

The new book, The Language of Bees, will apparently be released in April (thanks lizbee), by which time I'll be studying in Shanghai. I'm not optimistic about my chances of finding a copy there.

( (Rather spoilery) synopsis )

gacked from tigertrapped:

List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.

The Fern on the Rock - Paul Dehn

The Devil in Love - Jacques Cazotte

Cai Guo-Qiang - Cai Guo-Qiang

The Historical Meanings of Work - Patrick Joyce (ed.)

A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson - ( Read more... )

About eight weeks ago, I went looking in all the bookshops I knew in the city for a copy of Evan Wright's Generation Kill. All had either never heard of it, or were sold out, but I ended up going back to Kinokuniya (where I did manage to find a copy of Nate Fick's book, One Bullet Away). The helpful guys at the info desk assured me that they ( Read more... )

Gould's Book Barn in Newtown is HELL for someone with allergies, but I'm so glad I went in there yesterday because as luck would have it I stumbled across a copy of a book I've been wanting to own for YEARS, but wasn't even looking for at the time: Gabriel Byrne's autobiographical Pictures in My Head. There are also some lovely photographs in it. * ( Read more... )

Chinese, my mother tongue until I was about 8 years old, has a writing system that is so fundamentally different from every other major language of the world (even Japanese, it's nearest linguistic relative), I'm always intrigued by Western authors' attempts, even when seriously misguided, to describe those differences in the which seem completely ( Read more... )

So. Like the big dork that I am I went and bought the Iron Man novelisation today at Kinokuniya (as well as a whole lot of other stuff I've had my eyes on) and now I am reading it when I SHOULD be reading the eco-feminist essays I've saved to go over for my Political Economy presentation on sustainable agriculture ("Down With GM Seeds!") next week ( Read more... )

Watching this talk between Charlie Rose and director Anthony Minghella (RIP) about his movie The Talented Mr Ripley, brings back all of my old frustrations with the adaptation. Especially when Minghella says that he wished Patricia Highsmith had been alive still when he was working on the script and the film, because he would have loved her input ( Read more... )

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Some of my favourite things in one novel:

Chefs
Liquor
New Orleans
Poppy Z. Brite (not in the novel, but you know what I mean)

equals one delicious book that I cannot believe I didn't know about until yesterday. (With a Neil Gaiman recommendation on the cover in which he's referencing Kitchen Confidential - the book - hell, I'm so buying it.) I'm ( Read more... )