Greetings, fellow readers! I hope that all of you celebrating enjoyed your many holidays and that you all make the most of the last days of 2014. This break, I haven't had much chance to read since I've been back to working full time at the bookstore, but I have made some progress in my A Song of Ice and Fire reread: I finished Game of Thrones and am about a third of the way through Clash of Kings.
Those of you who have been with me for some time know that I adore books which reward re-reading, and Martin's series does not disappoint. I have been reading in conjunction with watching the HBO series from start to finish (it's my second time for both the books and the show), and I'm amazed by how many details I had forgotten or missed, as well as how much more fun it is to read the books after having completed the Hedge Knight novellas and The World of Ice and Fire. This is a story world I dearly love to inhabit.
I'm also continuously impressed by all the work that went into adapting the books for film, which brings me to the theme of my post: books to movies. This Christmas, while I haven't read many new books, I have re-read old favorites in preparation for viewing their film adaptations, starting with . . .
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I was never a fan of this book--the Lord of the Rings series is much better both in terms of story and quality of writing--but since I was going to the theater to see The Battle of the Five Armies with my family, I thought it best to do a quick re-read. This was the first time my eleven-year-old sister had been introduced to anything related to LOTR, and it was a joy to watch how excited she was by the story, gasping, laughing, and crying at all the right moments. She was so curious to know what happened after the events which take place in The Hobbit, but luckily, she has a big sister willing to lend her books, DVDs, and nerdy good times. I'm very much looking forward to introducing her to a world where I spent my formative reading years.
As for the film, I thought the first and third in the trilogy did a decent job of combining elements of the novel with material from The Silmarilion and the original trilogy. I wasn't a fan of how drawn out the plot was; in many ways it seemed like the story was ancillary to the special effects, and I think it should be the other way around. Still, as a fan of all things Tolkien, I enjoyed the movie for what it was.
Next up is Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. One of my dear friends, a retired Navy captain who taught me everything I know about book collecting, gave me my own copy of the book as well as the 1992 film on VHS for Christmas. I read the book on my own in high school, and I've never seen the movie, so I'm looking forward to revisiting an old favorite this Christmas. More thoughts on that to come in the future.
Until next time,
Anna
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Monday, December 15, 2014
Reading Recap: School Edition
Greetings, fellow readers! In the spirit of celebrating finals (see previous post), I now bring you my semester Reading Recap: School Edition.
For the last few weeks of the semester, I didn't have much reading to do, surprisingly enough. In my American Lit class, I finished Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, which I loved. According to my professor, it's "half as long as Moby Dick but twice as hard." I definitely see where she's coming from with that, but still, I am not deterred from the rest of the Melville corpus--it takes more than a big book to scare me away! I'm excited to be working more with Melville in my seminar next semester.
We also read Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft and a really strange novel called A Florida Enchantment, which was the bestselling popular novel of its day (think of it as the Gone Girl of 1892). Both of these were shorter works that deal with more of the fringe aspects of the Confidence Man trope: one being the nonfictional narrative of two escaped slaves, the other a story of magical seeds which cause sex change in those who eat them. These were not my favorite books in this class, mostly because the writing is not very good, but they are important because of what they tell us about the types of stories that get included in the canon of the Confidence Man.
We spent most of the last month in my Shakespeare seminar working on King Lear, which is so beautiful and depressing it makes me want to weep my eyes out every time I read it. So much of it is hard to stomach, but after reading it, I can no longer call Gonoreil and Reagan the "bad daughters." Lear is the true villain of the play, lusting after Cordelia, tyrannizing others with his monopoly on language, alienating his friends with cruelty. In many ways, Gonoreil and Reagan were just giving as good as they got, and poor Cordelia was just trying to survive.
With this pretty dim view of the nuclear family fresh in my mind, I transitioned to The Tempest, a play with a *slightly* less terrible father at its head. This is one of my favorite plays, not least because it's one I've performed in. It has some of Shakespeare's best pieces of poetry, and the whole thing is an homage to language itself (I'm one of those people who loves meta-everything and self-reflexive texts.) Reading the play took me back to our performance of it last year and my many fond memories of the cast, which was a great way to end a tough semester.
That's all I have for school reading; now that break has begun, you can expect many more reviews of pleasure books--huzzah!
Until next time,
Anna
For the last few weeks of the semester, I didn't have much reading to do, surprisingly enough. In my American Lit class, I finished Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, which I loved. According to my professor, it's "half as long as Moby Dick but twice as hard." I definitely see where she's coming from with that, but still, I am not deterred from the rest of the Melville corpus--it takes more than a big book to scare me away! I'm excited to be working more with Melville in my seminar next semester.
We also read Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft and a really strange novel called A Florida Enchantment, which was the bestselling popular novel of its day (think of it as the Gone Girl of 1892). Both of these were shorter works that deal with more of the fringe aspects of the Confidence Man trope: one being the nonfictional narrative of two escaped slaves, the other a story of magical seeds which cause sex change in those who eat them. These were not my favorite books in this class, mostly because the writing is not very good, but they are important because of what they tell us about the types of stories that get included in the canon of the Confidence Man.
We spent most of the last month in my Shakespeare seminar working on King Lear, which is so beautiful and depressing it makes me want to weep my eyes out every time I read it. So much of it is hard to stomach, but after reading it, I can no longer call Gonoreil and Reagan the "bad daughters." Lear is the true villain of the play, lusting after Cordelia, tyrannizing others with his monopoly on language, alienating his friends with cruelty. In many ways, Gonoreil and Reagan were just giving as good as they got, and poor Cordelia was just trying to survive.
With this pretty dim view of the nuclear family fresh in my mind, I transitioned to The Tempest, a play with a *slightly* less terrible father at its head. This is one of my favorite plays, not least because it's one I've performed in. It has some of Shakespeare's best pieces of poetry, and the whole thing is an homage to language itself (I'm one of those people who loves meta-everything and self-reflexive texts.) Reading the play took me back to our performance of it last year and my many fond memories of the cast, which was a great way to end a tough semester.
That's all I have for school reading; now that break has begun, you can expect many more reviews of pleasure books--huzzah!
Until next time,
Anna
"The Book of Lost Things" Review
Greetings, fellow readers! Now that finals are over, I'd like to celebrate by sharing a review with you. In the last couple weeks of school, I had very little homework/assigned reading, so I read The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. I got this book from work over the summer but only just got around to reading it now . . . I know, my TBR really is too long. I really enjoyed this book: it's about a young boy named David who loves to read fairy tales and escapes from his home in World War II-era London into the pages of his favorite books.
Connolly does a decent job of synthesizing elements of many different fairy tales and other works of literature (including one of my favorite poems, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came") into a novel-length work, and his extensive footnotes on the source material made my little academic heart very happy indeed. As a fan of fairy tale retellings, I enjoyed his adherence to the darkness and violence of the original Grimm tales. My one criticism of this book is that the ending was too neat and tidy: for a book which does not shy away from the gruesome, I thought the ending was contrived. Still, I would recommend this to readers looking for a good yarn to while away the long winter nights.
I'm looking forward to seeing what else this author has written.
Until next time,
Anna
Connolly does a decent job of synthesizing elements of many different fairy tales and other works of literature (including one of my favorite poems, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came") into a novel-length work, and his extensive footnotes on the source material made my little academic heart very happy indeed. As a fan of fairy tale retellings, I enjoyed his adherence to the darkness and violence of the original Grimm tales. My one criticism of this book is that the ending was too neat and tidy: for a book which does not shy away from the gruesome, I thought the ending was contrived. Still, I would recommend this to readers looking for a good yarn to while away the long winter nights.
I'm looking forward to seeing what else this author has written.
Until next time,
Anna
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