I am going to cause a tiger.
I was going to post something all meaningful up here, but by the time I got through putting in the links below and raving about books below that, I ran out of steam. Er, next time?
50 iconic writers who were repeatedly rejected.
10 Unconventional Book Stores. Road trip!
Cutaway leaf art.
An owl was here.
Scenes on the ground.
9 Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In. Why yes, I did post this almost exclusively for the treehouse.
50 despised Americanisms. Some of these, I also loathe. Others still seem pretty okay to me.
Tada's Revolution. Creepy? Cute? Conundrum.
Doctor Who travel posters. Make that time travel.
Second Hobbit production video.
John Carter trailer, based upon A Princess of Mars and subsequent books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Very mixed feelings...looks like they took a classic pulp scifi tale (originally written in 1912) and altered it beyond recognition. Still, may be fun.
I am doing this. Maybe everything we do should be so mind-blowing that even dramatic, epic music seems superfluous.
Kitten vs. Two Scary Things.
Paint the street.
Doctor Who fan orchestra's first piece, fittingly performed in different locations at different times.
"I Want a House" by Twin Sister.
"Worlds Apart" by The Mostar Diving Club.
I read The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when I was quite young (12, I think) and loved the adventure and excitement. Reading it 12 years later, the adventure is still good fun, but the racism does rather taint things, and I found many of the characters to be more irksome than I remembered. I still enjoyed it, overall, but I think Doyle might've done better to stick to Holmes.
I recently reread My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart because I wanted to be able to discuss it with a friend who was reading it for the first time. Mary Stewart's novels are difficult to classify: Wikipedia calls her one of the founders of the romantic suspense subgenre, which comes close, but still doesn't seem quite accurate. She does not write romance novels, though there is romance in her books (and the friend reading her book for the first time called it an "intellectual romance). Stewart is a lady, in the best sense of the word (as well as in the nobility sense--she married Sir Frederick Stewart); one need never worry about inappropriate material cropping up. That sounds stuffy, but it's actually extremely refreshing. Her books are infused with literary and historical references, and her descriptions of foreign settings make you feel as though you'd been there. This book is set in and around Delphi and is packed with classical references--one has to be intellectual indeed to catch all of Stewart's allusions, as she is frightfully well-read and taught literature at university.
I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers the other day. Urgh. Not a fan. This reads like a bleaker version of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place, but isn't as good as either one. I get what she was trying to say about human isolation, but somehow the way she said it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Right now I'm working on Wheelock's Latin, The Frigates by Henry Gruppe (in the same series as the clipper ship book I was working on the other week), and Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett, the second book in the series. All are fascinating in their own radically different ways, which is making for a somewhat schizophrenic but thoroughly enjoyable reading experience.
50 iconic writers who were repeatedly rejected.
10 Unconventional Book Stores. Road trip!
Cutaway leaf art.
An owl was here.
Scenes on the ground.
9 Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In. Why yes, I did post this almost exclusively for the treehouse.
50 despised Americanisms. Some of these, I also loathe. Others still seem pretty okay to me.
Tada's Revolution. Creepy? Cute? Conundrum.
Doctor Who travel posters. Make that time travel.
Second Hobbit production video.
John Carter trailer, based upon A Princess of Mars and subsequent books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Very mixed feelings...looks like they took a classic pulp scifi tale (originally written in 1912) and altered it beyond recognition. Still, may be fun.
I am doing this. Maybe everything we do should be so mind-blowing that even dramatic, epic music seems superfluous.
Kitten vs. Two Scary Things.
Paint the street.
Doctor Who fan orchestra's first piece, fittingly performed in different locations at different times.
"I Want a House" by Twin Sister.
"Worlds Apart" by The Mostar Diving Club.
I read The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when I was quite young (12, I think) and loved the adventure and excitement. Reading it 12 years later, the adventure is still good fun, but the racism does rather taint things, and I found many of the characters to be more irksome than I remembered. I still enjoyed it, overall, but I think Doyle might've done better to stick to Holmes.
I recently reread My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart because I wanted to be able to discuss it with a friend who was reading it for the first time. Mary Stewart's novels are difficult to classify: Wikipedia calls her one of the founders of the romantic suspense subgenre, which comes close, but still doesn't seem quite accurate. She does not write romance novels, though there is romance in her books (and the friend reading her book for the first time called it an "intellectual romance). Stewart is a lady, in the best sense of the word (as well as in the nobility sense--she married Sir Frederick Stewart); one need never worry about inappropriate material cropping up. That sounds stuffy, but it's actually extremely refreshing. Her books are infused with literary and historical references, and her descriptions of foreign settings make you feel as though you'd been there. This book is set in and around Delphi and is packed with classical references--one has to be intellectual indeed to catch all of Stewart's allusions, as she is frightfully well-read and taught literature at university.
I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers the other day. Urgh. Not a fan. This reads like a bleaker version of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place, but isn't as good as either one. I get what she was trying to say about human isolation, but somehow the way she said it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Right now I'm working on Wheelock's Latin, The Frigates by Henry Gruppe (in the same series as the clipper ship book I was working on the other week), and Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett, the second book in the series. All are fascinating in their own radically different ways, which is making for a somewhat schizophrenic but thoroughly enjoyable reading experience.