jillmwo's Reading Journal

Well, there are a couple of things in progress.

(1) I'm reading The Historian on my iTouch using the Kindle app. There's really no way I'm lugging that 500 page volume with me every day when my primary reading time is on the train.

(2) I'm reading The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown in preparation for a book discussion I'm leading at the public library in two weeks.

(3) I've been on kind of an odd kick that started with me watching both the 1981 and the 2009 versions of Clash of the Titans. I ended up reading Classical Mythology because it was short and then re-read Mythology by Edith Hamilton. So now I'm up to Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea which also has the virtue of being short. All of this is working up to finally finishing The Odyssey -- which I own in both prose and poetic form.

(4) And I'd like to get back to Framley Parsonage which I started early in the summer but which I still haven't got back to. (And it's the end of September already!)

I love Father Brown, and I really need to read more Trollope. I liked the one I read, but haven't cracked open another, though I own several. I think the fact that they require a functioning brain is what is holding me back.

A lot of people dislike it, but I loved The Historian. I could see myself as the main character and that's not something I can say about many, if any, other books.

Another Trollope lover here. Hmm. Is it time to re-read the Pallisers?

Part of my difficulty is that I spend so much time at my job reading scholarly articles as well as mainstream publications, that I have trouble moving forward with any rapidity in my leisure reading.

MrsLee, I enjoy Father Brown as well but I'll be interested in seeing whether my library book group thinks he's too dense and/or dated.

fleela, I'm enjoying the Historian; it's a much faster read than I thought it would be.

Majkia, I do enjoy Trollope. I own a set of the Palliser novels but haven't worked my way over there just yet. But his characterization is so engaging. I have loved the Barset novels.

I love Trollope mostly because he uses irony so beautifully to make fun of the conventions of his day. And you're right. His characters are indeed memorable. Lady Glencora Palliser my favorite.

I did love the Barset chronicles too. So much fun made at the church's entrenched and hidebound 'aristocracy'.

Of course he's just as, if not more biting toward the political establishment in the Pallisers novels.

Part of my difficulty is that I spend so much time at my job reading scholarly articles as well as mainstream publications, that I have trouble moving forward with any rapidity in my leisure reading.

Same with me. Sometimes my brain is so stuffed that the only way to relax is to lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, voiding myself of impressions. I often feel bad, I should read instead but I just can't because I can't process another teensy bit information.

Trying to balance the intellectual aspects of the job is even more challenging when you factor in the variety of screen reading environments.

With regard to The Historian, I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. To her credit, the author clearly has a point that she's making about family histories even as she tells something of an adventure story. I'm about a third of the way through the book and I'm still interested in what happens next to the male and female leads.

Just succumbed to temptation in Borders and bought the Penguin hardcover edition of The Woman in White. I have a thing for Wilkie Collins, and one day they will have to put me in an asylum for reading too many sensation novels.

Let me know what you think of The Woman in White. It got mentioned in The Thirteenth Tale a couple of times among a list of other books I've mostly read and enjoyed.

Busifer, I know exactly how you feel. I should read, I should read That book or This book or get That done - my should list is longer than my reading list. Maybe we should start up a Should thread :)(:

I think that symbol means confusion.

I loved both The Woman in White and the Thirteenth Tale. Similar in a lot of way, mostly evocative atmosphere.

Busifer, nhlsecord, I think that's why I never get very far into The Odyssey. Robert Fagles' version is more engaging than the other version I own, but at the risk of sounding like a shallow idiot, working through it does seem somewhat irrelevant to my concerns and life.

You might try Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls by Norman Fischer - the Odyssey is relevant to our concerns and life, IMHO.

For what it may be worth, I've wish listed Sailing Home over at Amazon for later evaluation. (Really, my wish list over there is more of a reminder list than any really help to those who try to shop for me.)

But my point is that I am now mid-way through The Historian and Helen has shot the librarian.

*How's that for a teaser?*

Really, I'm finding that this might have done well with some tighter pacing in places. Still, I'm buzzing along with it.

And does ANYONE know why the touchstone for this particular title is so particularly wonky?

*sings (in her best Clapton impression, and rather poorly, admittedly): "I shot the librarian....but I did not shoot the vampire..."

And it even scans!

This evening was the book group discussion about The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown. The group had never done short stories in this mystery-themed group so I offered up G.K. Chesterton's priest. Surprisingly there was a very mixed reaction. Some of them loved the humor while others found the stories dull and implausible. We talked a little bit about the 1970's television episodes and how you adapt a story to a new format, specifically how it could improve the pacing of a story to present it visually. Next month, it will be Tony Broadbent's book, The Smoke. I'm not sure they will like that one, but it's modern and uses a different point.

I did like a lot of Father brown - but some of the descriptions started to get very very tedious. Endless sentences of grey clouds building over a darknening sky so that the black sillouetted buildings started looming over the streets where small spec of light cast tiny pools of hope amoungst the percieved terrors of the city .... it was ahrd to stop laughing sometimes. Maybe it because I was reading it aloud to otherhalf and started to add silly voices as the gloom got, pause, deeper.

What had they annotated about it?

Well, in the instance of the story "The Secret Garden", the editor noted Chesterton's fascination with swordplay. Apparently, the man had a habit of fencing with cushions!

Gardner also noted that Chesterton had actually drawn illustrations for Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone

One more passing bit: I've been watching the Inspector Lewis mysteries on DVD for the past few weeks. I am so enjoying the episodes. The stories are far more interesting to watch, more complex, than those on Law and Order.

Today I watched Life born of Fire and was spell-bound. I love stories about the Church in the modern world. I was so sorry when the Kate Charles mysteries stopped being published in this country.

I may have to try those Inspector Lewis mysteries, jillmwo, but the completist in me makes me want to go through all the Morse mysteries first. I've only seen them in patches.

For the British Mystery Connoisseur I'd recommend Midsomer Murders, if available.

Busifer, I watched those when they were on here in the States. Quite enjoyable.

Oh, I must be tired. I almost started this paragraph with a line, "The Person Below Me"....

What I wanted to post was that I am still wading through The Historian. I am definitely disappointed, because I was hoping for something grim and gothic and this (so far and I'm about halfway through) has just been more circuitous than anything else. Exotic travel sites such as Constantinople and Budapest are nice, but I was hoping that the vampire story would be *scary*. So far the only vampire is the librarian and he is just too much of a Casper Milquetoast for me to care. If he's a metaphor for something, I'm not getting it.

I'm thinking I might go find Susan Hill's The Small Hand and hope that the ghost in that will contribute more successfully to my sense of creepiness. Alternatively I may go read The Little Stranger which was recommended by my boss as being a fantastic gothic novel.

On the other hand, if you *really* want a great gothic, I can recommend Grange House. Now that was a good gothic novel.

Okay, finally, finally, I have finished Kostova's book The Historian and my final conclusion is that it is really rather ho-hum. The vampire story (which one wants at this time of year) is not nearly as impressive or as scary as I'd hoped for. How did that title get to be such a bestseller? I don't get it.

Now instead on to the following during the next month:
The Little Stranger
The Fall of the House of Walworth
The Smoke for my library book group

Thoroughly enjoying The Little Stranger on the basis of its gothic tones. I love the dilapidated house and the uncertainty of the narrator.

I really enjoyed The Little Stranger too. The dilapidated house is as much a character as the people isn't it?

I have The Little Stranger on audio, but haven't listened to it yet. Is it a 'creepy' type of story?

It is *very* creepy. With the right narrator, I could imagine this being a very frightening audio book.

The house is indeed a major character and I rather suspect that the house is a metaphor for every human construction that ends up entrapping us. But even without any symbolism applied to this book, it's just a seriously good read in terms of pacing and tone. I can't remember the last time I so enjoyed being frightened to this extent.

I gave up on The Historian because I got tired of waiting for something to happen. Lots of talks, lots of menacing atmosphere, not much of anything else.

#29 Believe me, I came close to giving up on it as well. But I try to finish the titles I pick up, both for the positive reinforcement of finishing the reading as well as the positive reinforcement of being sure I've really heard what the author has to say. Sometimes it takes a long time for a person to make their point; that's an issue if they aren't a good writer, but sometimes persistance pays off!

Just finished The Little Stranger. Honestly, I feel as if it was worth every bit of time I spent with it. The descriptions are evocative, the personalities and actions of the characters are persuasively authentic and the story takes just the right amount of time to tell.

Thematically, the book is about the acceptance of change in ourselves and our times. No one in the book -- even the house (see #28) -- is particularly comfortable with this and thus it makes a perfect foundation for a Gothic tale.

This was a fantastic fall read.

I liked it too and felt sad for the house almost as much as the people in it.

Reading work-related title at the moment I Live in the Future and Here's How It Works. All about how technology is shifting our interactions with content. The author works in the NY Times Research and Development Lab. So far nothing I didn't already know, which makes me wondering why *I'm* not writing some padded business title.

*murfle*

#33 - I'd love to give a book like that to one of my colleagues who seems to have a very difficult time understanding that a computer is what we use for the most part at work. She looks at it like it is something from outer-space.

I'm sure my son would think I need to read it though, there are many technological gadgets I don't have the want to learn about.

Just a brief list of titles I can be absolutely sure that I finished over the course of 2010.

The Broken Teaglass
Mrs. Hudson and the Malabar Rose
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
The Shoes of the Fisherman
The Sunday Philosophy Club
On Tremendous Trifles
The Golden Slipper
Black Amazon of Mars
Envious Casca
Marginalia
A Great Idea at the Time: the rise, fall and curious afterlife of the Great Books
Swordspoint
Privilege of the Sword
Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
Pearls before Swine
The Blackheath Poisonings
Who Killed Zebedee? and John Jago's Ghost
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Holy Disorders

*edited to correct typos*

#33 - Been there, but every time I start I find I can't find the energy to write down platitudes, which seems to be the core of these books ;-)

I am writing an article about the Rate and Like/Unlike and Dislike phenomenon, though, from an user experience point of view (in plain text: when to use which, and why). Presently I'm stuck on the silly fact that Unlike and Dislike is the same word in Swedish ;-)

#36 Now that would strike me as interesting reading (even as I laugh over your issue with Swedish linguistics)!

ah....I think "dislike" is an English word which means some one actively does not like someone or something. I think "unlike" is a cyberspace invention...as when you take back your "Like" on Facebook. I'd be interested if any one else finds "unlike" to be a non-word.

Unlike some, I find unlike to be a fine word.

Unlike is related to Like, as in un-Like something that you have Liked, on Facebook or some other "social" site that has implemented Like-ing ;-)

Dislike is a regular word that is the opposite of Like.

My problem is Swedish do allow for constructs like unLike but the negating modifier is "o-", which in the particular case of Like is used for Dislike - Gilla and Ogilla, respectively. And there's no way to say unLike or Dislike in any other way without bending double (and making people laugh at you). The alternatives would be to use the equivalences of "yuk", "detest" or some such. Which is no-do.

In practical internet interface design you can use symbols for Thumbs up and Thumbs down, but written text discoursing on the matter is another thing...

Is there a Swedish word for antipathy?

Seriously, could you consider a phrase like "exception noted" or "exception taken"? There's a nuance there that might work. I may like something except when it pertains to "X" or similarly, I like something except for when "Y" occurs. In English it might work (although without much thought given to it, it does sound a little labored), but is there anything there that might work?

I was serious, Busifer. It sounds like an interesting piece of work to be involved with.

Ah, and it is! I'll take your proposals under consideration, definitely. I need something to unlock this dilemma.

And the Swedish word for antipathy is... antipati! ;-)
But to use anti- will not work, it will result in the awkward construct "antigilla", which is just unacceptable, heh.

Reading Murder at Mansfield Park and I may have to acquire this one in hard cover for my Jane Austen shelf. The author has done a really brilliant job of creating an alternate reality for Mary Crawford and Fanny Price. The action of the novel mirrors Austen's work, but with some wickedly clever twists. (Of course, Mrs. Norris remains Mrs. Norris, no matter what alternate universe you're residing in...) Shepherd is having some fun with her debut novel.

Finished Murder at Mansfield Park last night. Very nicely done albeit with a slightly convenient resolution. Perhaps tied up too quickly? But far better than most Austen offshoots.

About five chapters into Juliet Nicholson' The Great Silence. Ties roughly into the same time frame as The Little Stranger above. Silence is non-fiction, a lightweight social history of the period just following the end of the first World War. Grim in some respects but fascinating.

Halfway through The Becket Factor, a clerical mystery that mixes espionage with murder and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was written back in the early '90's so has elements that make it feel a bit dated. On the other hand, it's surprisingly hard to put down!

It's been more than a month since I posted anything, but I have been reading -- sometimes ebooks on my Kindle and sometimes printed bound volumes. Format is less important than the brain stimulation.

I read The Glass of Time by Michael Cox. Very well done and thoroughly enjoyable Victorian mystery.

I had put aside The Great Silence but have picked it back up again.

And for Christmas, I got The Cranford Companion. I am such a Gaskell fan! And I loved Judi Dench as Miss Mattie.

I didn't post all that often either but I too have been reading. I think December is just that kind of a month.

I have spent my New Year's weekend revisiting Cranford via text and DVD. The Cranford Companion is a lovely mix of photos of the BBC production with stories of the production and of the company's general interactions and hijinks. If you want to give a wife or sweetheart a wonderful present for Valentine's Day, you could not go wrong by sharing with her the text of Cranford and the DVD of this production. It's domestic fiction and costume drama that ends with an emphasis on friendship and familial relationships.

I also spent time yesterday on New Year's Day reading the stories in Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Pyle is really *not* a literary figure but he is considered a giant of American illustration. The various episodes in this volume are told in what is really somewhat turgid prose, but the stories themselves are still pretty good. One simply wishes that Pyle had stuck to the artwork and looked for someone with whom he might have collaborated who had more of a gift with words.

Finally, because my leather bound edition has been somewhat sadly deteriorating, I also bought the Penguin hardback of Little Women. At some point I'm going to *have* to sit down and decide once and for all whether its really as preachy as my contemporaries have claimed. I don't find it preachy; I think it has some fairly solid values in it, but I have to figure out exactly how to phrase my arguments.

Jill, what was your final verdict on The Becket Factor? For some unknown reason, I find I often enjoy mysteries involving clergy.

I actually liked The Becket Factor sufficiently to go out and purchase the next in that series which is Midnight Come. The detective element in Becket is plausible and the presentation of the Church of England as a major institutional player (as opposed to any individual pastoral role) is good. Some of the political aspects may come across as dated, but that's to be expected. I found The Becket Factor to be refreshingly off the beaten track.

I am reading something offbeat at the moment: The Firm of Girdlestone by Arthur Conan Doyle. I encountered the title on a list created by a Univ of Penn faculty member of books deemed as being of importance as of Dec 31, 1899.

Daily Telegraph's 1899 List of "The Best 100 Novels in the World”
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/1899best.html

The bulk of the titles are ones readily recognized, but perhaps 40% are titles and authors I just don't recognize. Girdlestone was not one I knew by Doyle so I thought I'd check around and see if it was on Gutenberg or Open Library. Kindle formats were readily available so I'm reading this digitally. Fast moving and not overly predictable!

Thanks for the link to the list - I'm a hopeless list romantic, and that one is fascinating! The Doyle book sounds cool too!

Well, we're just chugging along here. I finished Conan Doyle's The Firm of Girdlestone which is largely the model for most modern bestsellers and television movies. I'd no idea he'd invented the concept, but that's how it struck me. It really wasn't predictable in terms of how he told his story, even if the plot elements themselves were a tad predictable.

Quote from Girdlestone: A dingy sideboard, with four still more dingy chairs and an archaeological sofa, made up the whole of the furniture, with the exception of a circular mahogany centre-table littered with note-books and papers. Abvoe the mantelpiece was a fly-blown mirror with innumerable cards and notices projecting in a firnge all around and a pair of pipe racks flanking it on either side. Along the centre of the sideboard, arranged with suspicious neatness, as though seldom disturbed, stood a line of solemn books, Holden's "Osteology", Quain's "Anatomy," Kirkes' "Physiology", and Huxley's "Invertebrata," together with a dis-articulated human skull. One one side of the fireplace, two thigh bones were stacked; on the other a pair of foils, two basket-hilted single-sticks, and a set of boxing gloves. On a shelf in a convenient niche was a small stock of general literature, which appeared to have been considerably mroe thumbed than the works upon medicine. Thackeray's "Esmond" and Meredith's "Richard Feverel" rubbed covers with Irving's Conquest of Granada" and a tattered line of paper-covered novels. Over the sideboard was a framed photograph of the Edinburgh University Football fifteen and opposite it a smaller one of Dimsdale himself, clad in the scantiest of garb, as he appeared after winning the half-mile at the Inter-University Handicap. A little silver goblet, the trophy of that occasion, stood underneath upon a bracket. Such was the student's chamber upon the morning in question, save that in a roomy armchair in the corner, the young gentleman himself was languidly reclining, with a short wooden pipe in his mouth, and his feet perched up upon the side of the table.

Honestly, I find that a very clear description of a student's digs.

I have now started Ventus which is science fiction. I'm only about 50 pages in, but we've already encountered a house that strikes me as a bit of Ray Bradbury in its conception, but the mechanical beasts that prowl the house make it a bit scary. And the opening chapters have grabbed my attention.

I continue to do about two chapters in The Great Silence at the speed of about every three weeks. No problem with the book -- just distractions.

I have finally finished Ventus and I can see why Vernor Vinge recommended it to librarians at a time when the entire profession is transitioning to the digital environment. This is hard science-fiction; much about nanotechnology, terra-forming and similar Big Science Initiatives. But the theme has more to do with the problems that arise when we lose the documentation supporting our history. Man has created machines that encompass vast knowledge, have great strength and which gradually develop some level of self-awareness. What do we do when we need to turn those machines OFF? Can they be turned off when you can't recall how they work? What if the machine becomes a deity, recalling Arthur C. Clarke's statement about any sufficiently advanced technology is indiscernible from magic? It's a particularly interesting set of ideas. What other readers should note is that this 500 page novel has a slow start but about midway picks up dramatically in pace. I want to reread the book again, just because it has so many threads to consider.

Wow! Those are some ideas that have, from time to time, haunted me, too. I am such a fan of history, and knowing your country's history, and not losing the lessons that those who went before us learned. I do worry when no one has the easy capacity to stumble across a "lost" story in the stacks of a library and can sit down, right then, and read it (no technology needed; except, lights and shelter).

I don't think I've got the persistence to read that fine novel, though.

Sounds interesting - I'm adding it to my list!

maggie1944, the author of this novel has made the full text available for free from his web site. If you have a Kindle or a smart phone, you can download the mobipocket format of the text and read it that way. Not quite the same as sinking down into the space between the stacks, but easily accessible.

Busifer, I wrote a formal review on my blog (first one I've done in about 18 months) that has more information about the book. Click through at http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2011/01/ventus.html

Sometimes you have to step outside of the daily routine and sample something entirely different. I have been reading today A Time to Keep Silence written during the 1950's by Patrick Leigh Fermor. It is a very short book -- something of a travelogue -- regarding the author's stays in various monasteries in France while attempting to write a book. Fermor is not particularly religious so he's not making any kind of formal retreat, just trying to find cheap lodgings. The book is apparently drawn in large part from letters to his (later) wife that were written during these varioius stays.

He's totally unfamiliar with the nature of monastic life when he begins so he spends sometime focusing on how monks live so much in silence and solitude. But it's clear he's respectful of it.

I just posted a review to my blog (which in many respects had been abandoned and thus lost what little readership it had three years ago...) of Odd and the Frost Giants. It's the perfect read for March, discussing as it does the need for transitions - from Winter to Spring and from childhood to adulthood. I may have to hold onto this book and reread it each year to remind myself. The hero is sensible and works at his quest; the creature companions travelling with him -- despite their powers -- can't do it for him. The more I think about this book, the more my fondness for it grows.

Blog review posted at: http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2011/03/odd-and-frost-giants-review.html

These past 3-4 days, following my Annual Conference, I've been reading pure fluff. Today, I've been reading The Wizard of London which appears to owe a great deal to Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess. It's not great literature, but it's light -- reminiscent of The Magic Chocolate Pot although this one is set in Victorian/Edwardian England rather than the Regency era of British history. It's not challenging and so far I'm not too irritated by the children's capacity to telepathically speak to their special animal "friends". (In a different mood, I might very well find it just too excruciatingly twee.)

If you like The Wizard of London enough to give Lackey another shot, she has MUCH better books, even within the series. I think Wizard is one of her weak efforts. The Fire Rose is my favorite book of all time.

Warning though - there is lots of telephathically speaking to animals/spirits in her books.

I might try something else of hers, having finished The Wizard of London although I still think it's much more closely aligned to The Little Princess than Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen. Something I read on Amazon indicated that each volume in this particular series of hers is supposed to be a retelling of a fairy tale. I didn't pick up on Snow Queen at all, in this instance.

So what do you recommend, Morphy? (I should say I picked up this one primarily because it was on the remaindered shelf at Borders and I needed something to read that was completely unrelated to work.)

Definitely, The Fire Rose which is based on Beauty and the Beast and is set in 1900s San Francisco. I don't normally play the "desert island" game, but if I did, this book would top the list. But then I have a weakness for books with book shopping trips.

Last Fall I listened to the audio version of Odd and the Frost Giants, read by Neil HIMSELF. I just loved it. I'd like to give a physical copy to my daughter at some point.

I have ordered The Fire Rose on your recommendation, Morphy. Until it arrives, I will have to read Jane Eyre, primarily because I want to be able to do some deep discussion with who ever will go see the new movie with me.

I had no idea they were making a new film version. Who is in it, jillmwo?

I just saw the preview of it in the theater tonight! IMHO, the actress for adult Jane looks perfect. Plain, but not ugly. The actor for Rochester is too young and a bit too nice looking, not dangerous (?). However, it looked promising.

Here's everything I know about the new movie: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/movies/06eyre.html

What I thought was really interesting was the approach adapted by the woman doing the screenplay. After literally writing scenes for every single element of the story line, she realized that she needed to focus right in on a key segment of the story (Jane's time in the Rivers' household) in order to have it make sense. No one else has done that to my knowledge. The other film adaptations -- at least, those I'm familiar with -- use a linear, chronological thread.

Nice article, now I know I will have to go see it. :)

Update on Jane Eyre as movie. The NYTimes critic gave it a *rave* review at http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/movies/jane-eyre-starring-mia-wasikowska-re... so I think I need to scour the bushes for someone to go see this movie with me.

I've yet to read a Bronte book that didn't make me want to kick the authoress and drown the heroines. I'm not about to pay to see it.

Because I like period dramas in general I'll watch it when it hits HBO or another movie channel but I doubt I'll like it any more than I liked the book.

What irritates you in particular about the Brontes, majkia? Is it the gothic tone or something else?

No, I like the gothic tone. It's the whole helpless female falls for big brawny men who treat them like crap and thank them for it that bothers me.

I hate the 'romance' genre for the same reason.

It's true that neither Heathcliff nor Rochester does much for me. I do however like their female characters (Nell in Wuthering Heights is sensible as is Jane herself. Of course, Jane's two cousins, Eliza and Georgianna, are total nitwits. I confess I never made it through Agnes Grey or Villette.

I am about halfway through The Fire Rose on Morphy's recommendation; a retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in San Francisco just before the Great Earthquake. So far I'm enjoying it a little bit more than The Wizard of London, discussed above.

I have finished The Fire Rose and it is indeed far more successful than Wizard of London as a retelling of a well-known fairy tale. Recognizably Beauty and the Beast but with a few fantasy tweaks that make the new setting entirely plausible. (Thank you, Morphy, for that recommendation!) BTW, her shopping excursion was a fun read and vicarious experience. (Imagine walking into a bookstore and into a stationer's with the option of buying whatever it is you want and charging it to someone else's account.)

I've done an awful lot of very light reading in recent weeks. Trying to decide if I'm ready yet to tackle something serious.

I don't know if you are into romances, but Jude Deveraux's Sweet Liar is my favorite and it also has a book shopping excursion where someone else is paying for it!

I don't mind romances (in fact, regency romances represent a lot of the light reading I've been doing in recent weeks), but those are not what I'm looking for at the moment.

Are you familiar with this guy's annual reading challenges? There is one he does in the fall called Readers in Peril (RIP) focusing on gothic stuff and he does another in the Spring called Once Upon A Time. (http://www.stainlesssteeldroppings.com/once-upon-a-time-v). I'm wondering if fantasy and fairy tales will fit my mood for long enough this spring for me to complete one of the quests he has established. I have about five potential fantasies on the TBR pile and I'm looking at a work by Jack Zipes on the politics of fairy tales.

I am reading Tales from 1,001 Nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba and Other Favorites (try this link instead: http://www.librarything.com/work/11009624/71445044 since the touchstones are wonky tonight) which I find at the right level in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. The introduction to the book actually outlines the publication history of these tales which became famous in the French court at about the same time as the fairy tales written by Charles Perrault and Madame D'Aulnoy. Djinn and spells are simultaneously comforting and entertaining.

Prepping for a book talk tomorrow evening at the local public library. We're discussing Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell. It really is a fascinating look at what appears to be an inevitable -- and murderous -- conflict between a pampered suburban family in the UK circa 1973-75 and the woman they hire as their maid. Unlike many murder mysteries, this novel published in '77 tells you immediately that Eunice Parchman has murdered the family and her driving motivation for doing so. It also leads you to form a connection with the victims themselves, even as you know the ultimate outcome of the story. Rendell causes you to like the family and yet watch the convergence of motivations that lead to the murders, much in the way that traffic slows down to a crawl in passing a particularly dreadful car accident. One can't look away!

The other night's book group was eminently successful. They all showed up and they'd all read the book *and* they all had points to make about what they thought. Outstanding participation! (In the words of the A-Team guy, I love it when a plan comes together.)

Tales from 1,001 Nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba and Other Favorites has raised my eyebrows a bit (see #80 above). Other versions usually intended for children have sanitized so much of the original that when one is faced with something a little more closely approximating the language of the original, it's an eye-opener. Bawdy, violent, generally wilder than you might think. Almost too much to process in a single sitting, but each is linked to the tale before it so you find yourself continuing from one to the next.

" Bawdy, violent, generally wilder than you might think. "

Very unlike the copy I had from project Guttenburg which seemed to have edited all those bits out as "suitable only for Arabs and old gentlemen". I think yours sounds more fun!

I am dancing happily, gasping in amazement and awe, clutching a volume to my breast this evening. I had impulsively ordered a version of the Arabian Nights, a special collector's edition of a 1919 edition illustrated by Rene Bull. (see it here http://www.librarything.com/work/3383813/71731815) I wanted something to compare and contrast with my Penguin Hardcover Classic version (with all of its accompanying naughty bits). The impulse buy was sitting in my reading chair when I got home tonight and my husband and I were both totally amazed at how lovely a piece of book production I had purchased. The book is *heavy*, a quality binding with heavy paper, with colored plates as well as with black and white illustrations. This is what a book should be! It is gorgeous, truly gorgeous. The kind of book that makes you want to run out and buy everything else that the particular publishing house has offered to the market. I am so taken with this that I had to burble about it here. I'm a happy little reader tonight.

Reading_fox, you should see this version of Arabian Nights.

*happy sigh*

As soon as I finish Heart of Darkness on DailyLit, I'll start the Arabian Nights I got from my SantaThing. I don't know if it's the "naughty" version or not. It's huge though.- over 900 pages. Translation is by Burton.

Burton's translation will (I think) include the "naughty bits". That's based on what I've read in various articles about The Arabian Nights in the past week or two (translation: I did quick and dirty research). I just posted my review of the two versions I've been dipping into on my blog -- that compare and contrast thing I referenced in #84 (http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2011/04/tales-of-arabian-nights.html). One of the two was aimed at an adult audience and the other was originally published for children. Reading the books and reading some of the background found in the links on that blog post has been really interesting for me. I'd recommend both volumes.

Morphy, there's a lot of meat in Heart of Darkness. I read it and blogged about it and it's one of the most frequently read posts there. (Students looking for help I'm sure). I'd love to know if your reading experience mirrors mine: http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2007/10/joseph-conrads-heart-of-darkness.html

I'm struggling through Heart of Darkness. Three things make a story enjoyable for me: 1) an easy flow of writing, 2) an interesting story and 3) characters I can relate to.

I'm not getting #1 at all, #2 is iffy and #3 is still up in the air. I'm about a third through, and so far, not enjoying it much. I know it has a lot to say, but I have to admit, I'm a surface reader. I don't read for "themes" and such. I want a good story, characters I like and/or can relate to and I don't want to struggle with the writing. I'll finish Heart of Darkness because it's short and there are little bits of story I enjoy.

Perhaps I should reread Heart of Darkness. Like you say, Morphy, it's short so should be manageable. But I truly didn't like it back when I was 18 and was forced to read it.
But perhaps the "forced to" component contributed to that? Back then, just like now, I rather did read something I chose myself.

I don't think I liked Heart of Darkness. I read it because I was curious, but it wasn't a comfortable read at all. I honestly believe that the point was that the darkest interior of any human being could never ultimately be known or understood. That civilization is just a veneer.

The thing of it is that the next book for my book group is Bury Me Deep and there's a certain parallel. There is a young woman left on her own at the mercy of those who are more knowing, more sophisticated than her and she is lured into exploring various vices during the 1930's Depression era. It's very noir in its outlook. Two bodies in a trunk, a revolver, a sleaze-ball married salesman who seduces her, you can imagine the general direction.

Well, crap, we're back to the grim outlook on life. Very depressing stuff. Having watched the evening news -- government shutdown pending, radioactive waste water from the Japanese nuclear power plant, etc -- it is clear that I will need to find something to read that is a little sunnier in its outlook if I'm to make it through the work week.

I have it! I'll read Robinson Crusoe. The butler, Gabriel Betteredge in the Moonstore relied more on that novel for advice and guidance than he did on the Bible when it came to facing life's challenges.

Seriously, I've been reading Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey on my Kindle during my commuting time. I'm blaming Morphy for turning me on to this fantasy series.

Although I did actually have the author in my apartment back in NYC many years ago before, I think, she was famous.

The other new book that has found its way into the household is The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr. One of those locked door mysteries that challenge the intelligence.

I can never figure out Carr, but I wonder if he plays fair? I never care enough to figure out whether or not he does. I don't mind an author tricking me. :)

I finally finished The Gates of Sleep this evening on the train coming home. It's a retelling of Sleeping Beauty; did I already post that somewhere above? But Lackey's Elemental Masters series is set in an alternate universe version of Victorian England. The story has kept my attention (in part because I like the pre-Raphaelites and I believe that Marina's artist foster family is set in that tradition). Mercedes Lackey introduced the pricking of the Sleeping Beauty's finger very nicely, albeit rather late in the book. Surprisingly satisfying for something being sold as a young adult book.

Halfway through another of the Elemental Masters series, in this instance The Serpent's Shadow which I'm enjoying. To her credit, Lackey is offering stronger women in each of these revisions of traditional fairy tales. Prince Charming doesn't just rescue the heroine; the heroine is just as important in potentially rescuing him or the overall situation. (Shades of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman)

But a further thought has occurred to me in the context of the popularity of zombies and vampires discussion elsewhere in the Dragon. And that is that perhaps these are an indication (these being stories like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Gates of Sleep) that either (a) readers who find these stories appealing have underlying anxiety about deviating from the presentation of traditional gender roles in older tales like P&P or Sleeping Beauty or (b) readers just find those stories to be so irrelevant based on their own sense of empowerment that the only way to keep them from falling into utter oblivion is to mock them or reposition them.

Option A would reflect the idea that Victorian obsessions with vampires and other elements of the gothic had to do with sexual anxieties. Of course, the Victorians really didn't have zombies -- at least, not by that name. And they would have found the whole "brains as food" thing for zombies as just totally barbaric and/or horrifying.

Option B would reflect the idea that we've made such tremendous progress in the role of women in this society that stereotypical presentations have no value to the younger reading population so authors must either mock the original source material or else completely reposition the original source material in order to make it palatable and marketable.

Still nowhere with the Carr, but work has distracted me a lot recently from reading. Some days even when I've been productive, I question whether or not I properly understand what's going on in the library and publishing communities.

I'm pondering re-reading the Elemental Masters series because of you. It's all your fault.

Well, not only have I dragged you back in, Morphy, but I persuaded my sf/fantasy/mystery book group to read Fire Rose this month. I finished The Serpent's Shadow this evening on the train ride home.

I spent much time knitting this weekend, trying to remind myself of the time in my teens when I first learned how to do the fundamentals. I'm just futzing around with 8" squares, but spent most of Sunday muddling the current square. That meant that I didn't read much or even think about reading. (I did make a turkey breast for Easter Sunday. That worked out well. And I did watch episode 2 of Game of Thrones on HBO.

Speaking of which, I have started to read the first novel in that series. I continue to blame Morphy and Clam and Dayna. Oh, and Majkia! Who did I leave out? Please speak up.

*ducks behind a tall blue-footed bird*

Too late! I saw you.

*adds maggie1944 to the list to ensure that blame is spread evenly around*

Welcome to the cult club!

Just call us the Sisterhood without Banners...

Game of Thrones is now about to air on Swedish telly too. My daily paper had a multipage special on fantasy because of this, some days past. It upset me. Some noob (actually a lit critic I normally agree with, lol) wrote a piece on maps and their importance for the fantasy genre, stating LeGuin's Earthsea names were uninventive and plastic. Heathen!!!

A fun thing about the special was the front page of the Culture supplement, which it was in, exhibited a huge picture of Sean Bean. On seeing this husband said "what, are they going to make another LoTR film" ;-)

#101 Just call us the Sisterhood without Banners...

Due to allergies, having lots of trouble with my eyes this morning, and read this as "Just call us the Sisterhood without Boners..." Knew that couldn't be right, even in the Green Dragon.

#97 - Hey, I am not ashamed to shoulder any blame. LOL One of my brothers is reading it, too. :o)

It's been a period of busyness the past two weeks without knitting, reading or baking. I am very grateful for this evening of quiet. Haven't done much more here on LT than stop in during quick coffee/lunch breaks. Let's catch up, shall we?

Still reading The Game of Thrones and enjoying it! The other titles on the pile include:

1. Howard Jones' The Desert of Souls - more of the Arabian Nights type of fantasy.
2. Still Life by Louise Perry. The first in her Inspector Gamache series (she just won her fourth Edgar, I think) This one needs to be done by next Tuesday for book group.
3. Silk which I ordered because other people were reading it on LT. It looks short and very intriguing.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here with my legs up on the ottoman and waiting for Law and Order UK to come on. And wondering why the wretched touch stones are acting up.

I broke down and bought Game of Thrones for the Kindle...

Now I just need to find time to read it.

I "think" talk is being tinkered with by the powers that be, and that may be affecting touchstones. But really, I know nothing.

One of these days I'm going to give in and by Game of Thrones. This is not that day, but one of them I will

I finished Louise Perry's Still Life and thoroughly enjoyed it. Inspector Gamache is an interesting sleuth and, while imperfect, not a walking disaster area as you see from other grittier crime writers, such as Ian Rankin. Gamache doesn't drink to excess or suffer excessively from angst of any sort; he loves his wife and she loves him, understanding his job's requirements.

The crime in this instance is the murder of Jane Neal in the small picturesque community of Three Pines. It struck me as very much of an artists' colony situated in the countryside somewhere outside an urban area (Montreal?). The library book group liked it for the most part, particularly as none had been able to guess the identity of the murderer. They liked the warmth and relative normalcy of the community which appears to be very close and caring.

There are plenty of themes to be considered in this mystery which also makes it a worthwhile read -- themes of trust, themes of listening as opposed to hearing, themes of emotional connections that may or may not be strong enough to bridge gaps between people at times of crisis. Really quite good and heartily recommended.

BTW, I did also just finish Game of Thrones which I read at a gallop -- particularly the last 300 pages or so. All of it took me entirely by surprise. In talking about it with my son, I asked him which he preferred -- the book or the HBO series. He wasn't entirely sure but suspected he favored the book and I think I do too. So much in the book that can't possibly be transmitted to screen (assuming that in the real world there are ANY kind of budget constraints). But really, I'm glad to see the women folk (Catelyn, Danaerys, Arya, etc.) are demonstrably strong and hold it together under fire. So now, I am trying to decide if I go and read the next volume immediately or if I want to wait and process.

Elbow aching - must stop typing now.

Jill, I went dashing through the second and am well into the third book of the Ice and Fire series and I do think it might have been an error. I'm getting a bit "jaded" perhaps. I've put book three down for a little bit and will continue to watch the HBO series, as long as my provider keeps giving it to me for free. (hahaha) Once there is a charge, it is going to way of other expensive, not used, items in my life.

Your mystery group sounds like fun.

>109 jillmwo: I just started reading A Game of Thrones too. I'm only a third into it, and I just can't stop reading or thinking about it. It's right here next to me. The direwolf is making a sideways glance at me and telling me to get off the computer to read it. I haven't seen the HBO show, but I've heard that it is really, really good.

Shifting gears and getting back into fantasy tale The Desert of Souls, a mystery set in the same world as the Arabian Nights.

I actually finished The Desert of Souls this week. As it may be obvious from various messages posted above, I've been spending time with stories from The Arabian Nights and this was why I chose Howard Andrew Jones' fantasy novel. It's sufficiently engaging that I kept coming back to it, even if it's not as fast paced as I think the tale demands. Essentially, it's an adventure story set in medieval Arabia with swords, sorcery, djinns and a caliph. Dabir is a scholar and Asim is a captain of the guard. For the purposes of this story they are respectively acting as the great detective and his slightly less brainy sidekick who acts as the muscle in the story. The two work together throughout the story to learn the mystery presented by an undead monkey and the bell pulls the creature wants to steal from Dabir. There is much sorcery in this tale and it is indeed highly reminiscent of the stories one finds in the Arabian Nights. Not much explanation but a fair amount of strange events and creatures. The reader is expected to piece together the significance of much of the tale's events as in the instance of the fortune teller who tells Dabir and Asim and their employer, Jaffar of their ultimate fates.

Honestly, I read this on my Kindle and I think that was probably the appropriate reading environment. I don't really need to re-read this, and yet I'm intrigued enough by Jones' material to want to keep it around. Apparently he is an expert on the adventure writer, Harold Lamb, and much of what he's created in this fantasy tale is reminiscent of Lamb's work.

Actually I'm adding this final paragraph just now to say that this is an origin story. How the team of Dabir and Asim first got involved in detecting and having adventures. Jones has published short stories featuring these two (based on what I can gather on the Web) and this is a full length novel that explains their "early years".

I have been reading a wonderfully lively history of knitting, specifically No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting. Some of the material is no heavier than fingerling yarn but it's been an amusing and fast read.

What got me this week was the discussion of knitting bags and the associated issues that arise with women carrying their knitting about with them in a set of wide ranging venues. ( Do you need to carry a velvet and beaded knitting bag if you're having dinner with a robber baron? Apparently. Is it permissible to carry anything other than knitting in your knitting bag? In many instances, no.) So when I came upon this bit in the chapter about World War I, I was just hooting with delight:

A bag is a receptacle for objects.’ If you can utilize pieces in the house, make yourself an artistic bag, but do not have a very large forty dollar object which contains one small moth-eaten square of gray dangling from your arm. Neither should you load your bag with books, purse, fancy work, a magazine, and your knitting. Be warned in time." And then a little further on --

cramming “onions, carrots, and potatoes on top of a half-finished gray sock, with the sharp points of four needles sticking out, all ready to jab some passenger on the crowded trolley car.” They sniffed at proposals that “knitters confine their bags to holding knitting and carry suit cases or hire delivery wagons for the other purposes for which the camouflage knitting bag is now used.

I confess that I invested in a new bag this week that was on sale -- advertised as being sufficiently capacious in size so that it can hold knitting, book, and iPad (although I don't own one of those yet).

Anyone else recognizing themselves in this discussion?

Okay, so none of you are entangled in yarn and needles. Personally, I've resumed knitting in part because I needed something to prevent me from picking up electronic devices and because I needed projects that were intended to benefit others. Hence my knitting of 8" squares for charity.

Meanwhile, I'm about to embark on a Wilkie Collins "study". I am expecting from Hesperus Press this week one of their great Brief Lives series. In this instance, it's a biography of Wilkie Collins who was a decidedly offbeat character in his time and in Victorian times. His relations with women are particularly noteworthy in that he was officially married to one or two women in his life but unofficially married as well to a different one or two. He didn't refer to them as his mistresses; they were in his view as validly married to him as the others. (And you thought the US Congress had a corner on the market with regard to bad behavior with women.)

But I'm going to seriously settle into some of Collins lengthier works -- specifically The Woman in White and Armadale. I think I'll make more speed with the former. And it's that gorgeous Penguin hard back edition. I do love lovely books.

I have not made much progress on The Woman in White because I was chiefly reading it on my homeward commute (20-25 minutes in length). I think the drawing master who falls in love with Laura Fairlie is a nitwit (as is she). However, the reason one reads Collins are his character descriptions:

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in the house, early and late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages; sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking; sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question--always with the same serene smile on her lips, the same vacantly-attentive turn of the head, the same snugly-comfortable position of her hands and arms, under every possible change of domestic circumstances. A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

Note that last sentence!

Meanwhile next weekend I'm heading out to a science fiction/fantasy relaxacon so I'm trying to come up with a list of what I've read in the past 12 months that fall within those categories!

Delightful!

I was smiling gently until I came to the cabbages. Then I laughed out loud.

It surprised me that I loved The Woman in White. A delightful book. The writing, as you show, is wonderful.

I also think the main characters are absolute ditzes. But you sympathize with them anyway.

I loved The Woman in White, too. For some reason, when I try to start The Moonstone, I can't generate the same enthusiasm.

I don't know if it will help, jnwelch, but I reviewed the Moonstone on my blog some years back. If anything I found Moonstone to be a much more tightly constructed book than The Woman in White has been. On the other hand, Woman in White was originally published as a serial. That tends to have an impact. My blog entry is available at http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2007/01/wilkie-collins-moonstone.html

Perhaps I felt more humor in the Moonstone than I do so far with Woman in White.

Reading your blog entry will help, I'm sure, Jill. I've got to get clear of some work and then I'll check it out, thanks. As you can tell, I need some inspiration. Your comments already make it sound more appealing.

Where is THAT woman? I blame Clamairy. I wouldn't ever have picked up this book if it hadn't been for her talking about how GOOD it was.

I had resisted picking it up with my normal armor of disdain for anything that lasts too long on the NYTimes Best Seller List. I resisted it a few weeks back when it was on the 50% off table at Borders. I hadn't even gotten it for my Kindle. It was just too recent and I lean towards reading older books. I had just gone out and bought an older novel by Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch to satisfy my need for soft, reassuring warmth and coziness.

But I was weak this am at Borders. I saw a discounted price and I fell for it. I bought The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and have been reading it through lunch. It has the same charm as Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day and it is an epistolary novel like Lady Susan -- another of my favorites.

So I'm not knitting and I'm not watching Indiana Jones movies on the next to last day of my vacation. I'm reading Guernsey Literary Society and it's all her fault.

And my summer TBR stack is at least twelve titles in height and this wasn't one of the ones on that pile.

P.S. Four hours after buying the book, I have finished it and in case you couldn't tell, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Summer Stack (and some of these date back awhile!)

A Clash of Kings

The Women

Murder in the Marais

Daemon

Sailing the Wine Dark Sea

That Affair Next Door

Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction

Scenes of Clerical Life

Framley Parsonage

Reading Jesus

The Dean's Watch

Devoured

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective

Silk

Yep, I resisted that book to, then a friend made me borrow it, I couldn't put it down and went and bought my own copy. My mom felt the same way. It's just that fun.

Have started Daemon, seriously hard science fiction involving networks and gaming and potentially artificial intelligence.

I am finding Daemon to be a particularly disturbing read, almost to the point of feeling ill. Given when this was originally written and self-published (2006) and the events of the intervening years in terms of Anonymous, LulzSec, and others of that ilk, I am absolutely looking to cash in all of my bank accounts and stuff my mattress with cash in order to survive this next version of Armageddon.

The author is clearly building to climax in the interests of making a political point and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to find the ending unpleasant.

I need to go find something that features pink unicorns and fairy godmothers and safe magic.

The above doesn't really indicate to you what Daemon is about. It is indeed a techno-thriller, a near-time instance of speculative fiction. Matthew Sobol is a computer genius, but one who has a legitimate distrust of government control over humans. Indeed, the author's point in writing this story is to examine how disruptive technologies might up-end current society and its operation. Up-end government, up-end economic structures, up-end lives.

In choosing to read this, you need to know that character development in the novel is absent. This isn't a novel about people; even Matthew Sobol is not the focus. (He's dead in chapter one and yet he is a relatively constant presence throughout.) There are stock characters such as The Major, representing for the author's purpose, the military industrial complex associated with the Department of Defense. That said, you should recognize as well that other government agencies are equally stereotypical.

I suspect that the author is both a gamer and a hacker since the book focuses on the expertise contributed by such activities. The plot moves in much the same way as the narrative within a game moves. Some scenes are graphic and one can imagine computer generated characters being mowed down by the computer-controlled vehicles just as if one could see it on screen.

I read this at the behest of a friend who has been after me to read it for at least two years. I'm not sorry I read it; it does tend to bolster all the concerns I've had about denial of service attacks and hacking into private corporate IT systems. In that regard, it was quite educational. But I have to say again that I found it an entirely horrifying read.

Now I'm debating whether I should go read the sequel Freedom or if that one will just give me more of the same heeby-jeebies as this one.

Be an optimist in all things, save your finances. In financial affairs, be realistic.

Begs the questions, doesn't it. What is realistic these days?

I get heeby-jeebies without reading these types of books.

I have gone out of my way, maggie1944, to pick up something to read that will act as a calming antidote to the heeby-jeebies brought on earlier. It's not a new book, it dates back to 1960, but it expresses in a more kindly fashion the belief that the essence of humanity is good. It's called The Dean's Watch. I tend to classify it as domestic or gentle fiction. Very ordinary people living very ordinary lives, but the manner in which those ordinary people treat each other is what fuels the slow-moving story and provides the reassurance that the world is not as bad as we make it out to be at times.

I rather think you would like it.

The closing sales at Borders began this weekend. I picked up one DVD (Judge John Deed) starring Martin Shaw (who I liked when he played Adam Dalgleish in Murder in Holy Orders). But with regard to books I picked up two titles:

Pearl Buck in China
C Street

The other night, a friend passed along The Fallen Angel and The Rescue and Romance, both of which are scholarly titles from Popular Press.

I think I might then turn to A Clash of Kings on my Kindle simply because I am looking for something fast-paced.

I'm whipping my way through A Dance With Dragons. I'd say Martin does have "fast-paced" in his quiver.

Oh, maggie1944! You are literally volumes ahead of me. But I just want to state here in unequivocal terms that I really do not like Cersei in A Clash of Kings. What a piece of work. I hope George R.R. Martin sees to it that she eventually gets her comeuppance. Can I hope? Just a simple yes or no will do.

Not telling.

Me, neither. And btw I am distracted right now as my book group, meeting in a few days, has The Elegance of the Hedgehog for this month, so I must finish it. Also, I'm trying to fit in a new group so I have a sci fi (forget which) book to read, too. Then, I'll go back to A Dance with Dragons. You might just catch me.

I'm about halfway through A Clash of Kings. George R.R. Martin kills people off unexpectedly. And the creatures from the other side of the wall are as scary as the computer hackers I was reading about last month!

However, here's a nice story about American Girl dolls: http://host.madison.com/business/article_98919898-c20f-11e0-92d9-001cc4c002e0.ht.... You can read the story and wonder about people paying $100 for the dolls (and there are two new ones this year with intertwining stories) or you can read the story and wonder about young girls killing off their dolls in play during imaginary cholera epidemics. OR you can focus on the nice part about money from the song that is associated with the dolls' story going to the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans.

When my girl was little, I bought her all the stories as each doll came out. Never the dolls. She did have the paperdolls, plays, cookbooks and crafts though. We used them in school a lot. I bought her a beautiful 18" doll at a yard sale with a grown up look and slender figure, then made my own patterns for the Josefina clothes to fit the adult doll. I also made my daughter a matching outfit.

They provided a great jumping off point for imagination and learning. My frugal mind could never have spent the money they cost though.

We've since donated the books, but still have the paperdolls, plays, cookbooks and craft books. :) Oh, and our lovely doll, Juanita, named after my mother, which the doll resembles very much.

I have actually pored over the catalog with a little girl's fervor, MrsLee. Unfortunately, I have no daughters. But I really wanted Samantha (and the carriage for her to ride through Central Park in. *sigh*)

I did stand in bookstores and in their booth at ALA in Chicago one year, looking at the books.

OMG, was George R.R. Martin paid by the word? I am STILL reading Clash of Kings. But I'm enjoying being inside Catelyn's head. She has a lot of stage time in this one.

I agree.

Actually, my Kindle earned its keep this am; I got curious about Theon and went and searched Game of Thrones for references to him. He's been such a difficult personality in Clash and he didn't really register much with me as I read the first book. The search capability on the Kindle really helped me grasp who he had been in Game.

I am in that odd mood again where I pick up a book and sample the first chapter or two then put it down and go look at something else. I'm about 200 pages from the end of Clash but as with Games, the action picks up dramatically at this point and carries one forward.

I have two new books by my chair.
(1) How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne
(2) A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life
and one re-read
(3) Victoria Regina which is a dramatic rendering of the life of Queen Victoria. I saw it once upon a time as a Hallmark Hall of Fame production.

I don't know why I have new books in front of me. Time to read seems very limited at the moment.

*crickets chirping*

*more sound of grass growing*

I'm here, I'm here! Yeah, Theon doesn't really step on stage until later.

I was reading the battle chapters in Clash of Kings and, while you really get a sense of GRRMartin's cinematic approach to story-telling, the battle scenes are particularly violent, graphic and horrifying. Cersei is a wicked witch if ever there was one and I'm exhausted.

Thanks, Majkia, for commenting. I just wanted to know if anyone was out there.

Yep! I'm here! I tend to lurk more than post. But I try to push myself to post at least twice a week on certain threads, like yours!

*continues lurking*

*delurk* I don't share many book choices with you, but watch with interest.

*continues lurking...*

we're all a bunch of voyeurs

Me, three!

Yep, I'm always reading the threads, but if I haven't read the book, I don't comment usually, unless I want to, and I don't want to commit myself to GMMR right now. :)

@MrsLee, I hate to be a GMMR nazi but shouldn't that be GRRM? ;)

LOL! See why I don't want to get involved? I can't even remember that much. ;)

DaynaRT is right (#150), you all are a bunch of voyeurs. But I am glad you're around.

I finished A Clash of Kings this evening on the commute home. And I really am exhausted. People die, people live, it's all rather bewildering. I'm being flippant when I say that all George RR Martin's narrators appear to be unreliable, but still...And he ends the book at several cliff hangers so you HAVE to read the next one to find out what happens next. But I'm worn out with whiplash. Seriously, I continue to favor Tyrion, Arya, and Catelynn as characters. Still, I'm going to set aside GRRM for something else now.

But what?

If you enjoy historical pieces, you might enjoy The Fearless Mrs. Goodwin by Elizabeth Mitchell. I read this story of the first woman elevated by the New York Police Department above the rank of Warden of Female Prisoners after she helped break a major bank robbery case. (see http://byliner.com/elizabeth-mitchell/stories/the-fearless-mrs-goodwin). There's plenty about New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century although in some corners, it might be considered as padding the tale. Note --> I read this one on my Kindle.

And on another note, I have discovered a fun British series starring Martin Shaw. (I suppose he's too old to be considered as a pool boy, but he is delicious.) It's entitled Judge John Deed. The luxury is that each story lasts 90 minutes so you have some actual story telling going on. The downside is that it's a bit of a soap opera at times. But it's good to have on when one is knitting and wanting to have something to listen to in the background.

Working my way through the first three seasons!

I had meant to post this last night, but got distracted. I've been reading two or three different things

(1) How To Live which has caught my attention. I'm surprised because I've not read Montaigne's essays and the second half of the 16th century wasn't of particular interest. And yet Bakewell manages to bring the man alive. I'm only about a third of the way through, but I'm sufficiently captivated to keep going. And maybe then I'll give the Essays a try.

(2) Reserved for the Cat is a retelling of Puss in Boots. Pure fluff, but it's neat to see Lackey manipulate the structure of the tale in an alternate universe.

(3) The Man With The Club Foot by Valentine Williams is another book group selection. It's a public domain espionage World War I story. It's okay, but I am not finding it to be of particular interest. (And you'll note there's no touchstone for it either)

I thought I was going to read Wilkie Collins this fall but that's fallen to the side.

Looking back on what I've purchased over the course of this summer, I realize I've watched a lot of DVDs. 90 minutes of Inspector Lewis or of Judge John Deed seems to be where my focus this summer has been.

I've been quiet but work has been fiercely demanding. And I have been reading.

I finished The Moorland Cottage today on the train, a quiet novella about TRUE LOVE. Maggie is the only nice person in the book (except of course for the man she loves who is - I'm glad to report - WORTHY of her). However Maggie's mother and brother and her love's father are each a piece of work and each more plausibly alive than either our heroine or hero. It was a satisfyingly sensational novel. (There's a ship wreck) It was not a challenging read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also enjoyed that I actually could *finish* the book in a relatively short time frame.

I finished Reserved for the Cat which I liked but which as I stated previously is pure fluff. Still, I liked it.

And I've no time to stop and consider what else I should be reading because I have to finish reading Murder in the Marais by Cara Black for next Monday's book discussion at the library.

Then I shall return to How To Live because the most interesting Tweet I saw today read something like "Blogger made it possible for everyone to publish; the new Facebook platform will make it possible for everyone to be Montaigne". Meaning that the improvements to Facebook announced today will make it possible for us all to document our lives thoroughly and then comment on the meaning thereof.

Yes, Reserved for the Cat is pure fluff with no literary redeeming value.

And I don't care. I enjoyed it so much I've read it twice.

:D

Well, the ladies at the library surprised me. They did not fall in love with Murder in the Marais the way that I had thought. They found Aimee LeDuc to be too much of a super woman/wonder woman type, slipping across rooftops in high heels! They found that particularly implausible, as they found the note left behind in one of Aimee's forays. Writing in lipstick is too much like writing in crayon. Perhaps about a third of the group declined to read anymore by Cara Black, while the others hoped that the series got better later on and they might try another to see.

This next Monday is another book group (the one that alternates between mysteries and science fiction) and the focus is on Miss Marple. Murder at the Vicarage was written in 1930 and the theme is inappropriate pairings across a range of individuals, including the narrator/vicar and his much younger wife who loves him, despite what the old biddies in town may believe. The murder victim is one of those rigid types who believes that he is best suited to sorting things out for the universe and if everyone would just listen to his "wisdom", the world would be a better place. He's actually not the interesting part of this.

**Spoiler Alert**Spoiler Alert**Spoiler Alert**

What has captured my attention is that the crime in the book version of Agatha Christie's debut novel of Miss Marple has been radically rethought for the television versions. In both instances -- the 1984 and the 2005 versions that the BBC did -- the screen writers felt we needed to add dead bodies to spice things up while eliminating several extraneous characters. We lose the narrator's nephew, Dennis, as well as a couple who are the source of much village gossip because they are such an inappropriate pairing. Instead, those writers inflate the importance of a walk-on character (the curate Hawes) and kill him off to add an additional body to the mystery. To those writers, it was more important to emphasize the mother-child relationship as a motive for the crime.

So this will be my contribution to the discussion on Monday evening, the idea that everyone has missed the point that Christie was trying to make in Murder at the Vicarage and that modern adaptations have badly bastardized the story.

BTW, you did know that Marple wasn't necessarily a sweet old lady, right? At least in the debut novel introducing her as a character, she has a certain asperity to her that is sadly underestimated by everyone who comes in contact with her. They all think she's dotty Aunt Jane. Another aspect to the theme of the book - making assumptions about others is foolish if not downright dangerous.

+1

I have been slowly filling out my Christie/Poirot collection via PBS and Bookmooch. When I'm all done with the Poirots, maybe I'll give good ol' Miss Marple another look.

I love Miss Marple, her "sweet old lady" is a convenient act she puts on to acquire more information. I love the way she is able to see to the heart of the people around her, and usually by comparing them to someone she has known in her village. Nice analysis, jillmwo.

I finished another one of Christie's mysteries over the weekend, specifically The Mystery of the Blue Train which features Hercule Poirot rather than Miss Marple. However, the situation as well as the solution to the mystery is one that Christie used in a short story for Miss Marple. (Writers will do what they need to do to make a living; no criticism, but rather a recognition that this is a profession.)

I'm ready to move elsewhere now. Am I ready for the third volume of G.R.R. Martin's series? Or should I return to Sarah Bakewell's How To Live? Some one was recently recommending The Chink in the Armour as a suspense/gothic candidate for reading during the autumn months. I need to go rummage through the TBR pile. I have two used books, The Innamorati and something steampunk that claims to be YA, The Hunchback Assignments.

I am muddled.

What a wonderful way to be confronted with a muddle! Too many books calling you!

And actually, I was tempted away by yet another title, this one recommended by my sister. Johannes Cabal the Detective is an amusing steampunk fantasy novel with wit on a par with that of Pratchett and Gaiman:

A sample: Cabal had been caught trying to check out a book from the library of the Krenz University. The book was in the Special Collection, and Cabal had intended the loan to be of an extended, open-ended sort of period. Anticipating resistance from the library authorities, he had made the loan at half past one in the morning of a national holiday and might have got away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for an enormous mastiff that patrolled the corridors and of which his contacts had unaccountably failed to warn him. When the library was reopened, they’d found Cabal pinned down by 180 pounds of overfriendly dog in the reading room, half drowned in slobber.

they’d found Cabal pinned down by 180 pounds of overfriendly dog in the reading room, half drowned in slobber

....and so should suffer anyone wanting to nick library books!
(Sounds like a great wee read!)

We discussed The Library Paradox this evening at the Township Library and this group of women are sharpening up month by month. They checked out the references to the Dreyfus Affair, the book of Esther, and the mathematical theory of the Library Paradox itself. They figured out what happened in this closed door mystery (and it was a solution that had thrown me when I reached the end).

But the real question they had was about the author, because they had googled Catherine Shaw and hadn't found much. I explained that the author was using a pseudonym but their concern was how were they to find out about authors who create interesting series like this one when there wasn't anything on the web that popped up in a search. Great opportunity to discuss new ways of discovering books via social networking (not something they were big on) or via blogs.

It's been a month since I posted here. I've not abandoned LT but work and family has absorbed far more energy than I'd think they would. And I'm tired. So bear with me, folks, she says as she's headed upstairs to pack a suitcase for this month's business trip.

Just take care of yourself. We'll still be here when you resurface!

Titles read in 2011:

Game of Thrones
Still Life
Agatha H and the Airship City
Lord Savile's Crime
Rest: Living in Sabbath Simplicity
Escapade
Imprudent Lady
Talk of the Town
Snowdrops and Scandalbroth
The Firm of Girdlestone
The Ritual of Life
Winter Wedding
A Prudent Match
Judgement in Stone
Tales from 1,001 Nights (Penguin Edition)
The Arabian Nights (Calla Edtion)
The Desert of Souls
The Gates of Sleep
The Serpent's Shadow
No Place for a Lady
Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter
Odd and the Frost Giant
The Great Silence
Ventus
A Time to Keep Silence
Bury Me Deep
A Clash of KIngs
That Affair Next Door
The Witness for the Defence (A.E.W. Mason)
Daemon
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society
The Dean’s Watch
No Idle Hands: A Social History of Knitting in America
Murder in the Marais
The Library Paradox
The Killings at Badger's Drift
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Death on the Nile

breaking at 38 titles here so I can review what else I did actually finish this year!

1939: The Last Season of Peace
Late and Soon
Knitting Rules

As I'm looking back over this list, I did manage a few clusters - Arabian Nights, Literary Retelling of Fairy Tales, Dystopic Science Fiction, and Agatha Christie.

By my count, this list appears to be 41 titles that I actually finished. By the end of the year, I might make 45 books read. That would be an accomplishment if I hadn't read so much fluff.

Maybe in 2012, I will shift back to more substantive stuff.

I got books for Christmas!!!

The House of Silk
The World of Downton Abbey
Rembrandt and The Face of Jesus
Persuasion: An Annotated Edition

In digital form, The History of the World in Six Glasses

I'm very happy. As of 2012, I will create a new thread for my reading as this one encompasses more than a year's worth.

The house has quieted to the point that I can write one last entry for the year with regard to my reading. There actually has been a bit of a cluster to the reading. As referenced above, I got the lovely World of Downton Abbey for Christmas and I have thoroughly enjoyed paging through it. There are some bits that might be taken as spoilers for Season 2, but by and large, the book focuses on how the modern production picks up the nature of life in Edwardian England in a Great Country House. The photographs included in the book are wonderful, including as it does images from both the PBS series as well as relevant images from special collections dating from the period. And it closes with a useful bibliography of references.

I've skimmed through a related title Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey which is actually about the house used for filming of Downton Abbey. Highclere Castle is the beautiful home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon (of Egyptology fame) and the book is a biography of Lady Almina, the woman who largely ran and preserved the castle during the tumultuous period before and after World War I. While the writing is largely pedestrian, the narrative is somewhat interesting, picking up on themes referenced in World of Downton Abbey.

The thing that occurred to me was that other reading I have on my shelf are tied to this historical period. Juliet Nicolson has two books -- The Perfect Summer about that last summer prior to World War I and The Great Silence which covers the war itself to the years immediately following. Also on my shelf is a book entitled The Return to Camelot which discusses the build-up across Victorian and Edwardian times of a mindset that could not help but be shattered by the realities of war in 1914. After all, English gentlemen didn't expect to fight in the muddy trenches of France.

I don't mean to give the idea that these books represent a scholarly examination, but they do make a rather good foundation for the social aspects of the history of this period.

It's not included here, but I would also recommend the lengthy series (available on DVD) entitled The Fall of Eagles for a general overview of how the political landscape of Europe in this period led to the First World War.

All very interesting! And with this, I think I truly am about to close out this reading year. I'll still be reading today and tomorrow, but I don't think anything will lend itself to another entry before midnight of December 31st!