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
Monday, November 17, 2014
"A Secret History" Review
Greetings, fellow readers! It's perfect weather for reading here in Gainesville today, which of course means that I have a paper due tomorrow and can only weep at the happy thoughts of novels and apple cider tea dancing through my head. Fortunately, I make it my policy to give my rough drafts several hours' rest before revising (the better to catch my own mistakes), and I am now ensconced on my bed with The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Now, before we get into the book review, let me just say that reading in bed, while pleasurable, is not my ideal for a wet, gray day like today. What this day really needs is a big, comfy chair and a roaring fire with two greyhounds and a black cat stretched out in front of it beneath my feet as I sip my apple cider tea and listen to the drips drop down. If I really wanted to go all out, this scenario would play out in the oak-paneled library of an old English country house, and I would be joined by an officious butler fond of pipe tobacco and The Pickwick Papers. Take note, ladies and gentlemen--this is the way to my heart!
Anyway, I digress: to the book! I started reading The Secret History last night because I was having trouble sleeping. Before I knew it, my roommate was asleep, and I was nearly 150 pages in, feeling wider awake than when I started. This book sucks you in slowly and softly before punching you in the gut with a plot twist. It's about a group of Classics students and their teacher (ahem, no surprise that I'd find this interesting!) at a small college in Vermont. The group is very insular compared to the rest of the college: the students take all their classes with this one professor, and they spend their free time having witty intellectual debates, complete with quotes in Latin, Greek, and French (read with a dictionary or Google handy to catch all the jokes.) All of this seems harmless enough, if a little eccentric, until the main character, who is also the narrator, reveals that one of the group is fated to die at the end of the book.
Why, you ask? Well, said students and teacher are attempting nothing other than the re-creation of the mystery religion of Dionysus, complete with all its attendant substance-induced frenzy and bloodshed, in the woods of rural Vermont. Fortunately, I just had to write a paper on this mystery religion for my Pompeii Archaeology class, so I can offer some explanation for those of you who are unfamiliar with the myth.
The story goes that Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a mortal woman. Zeus, being a god, came to Semele in human form, but his jealous wife, Hera, tricked Semele into getting Zeus to reveal his true form to her. This burned the unfortunate pregnant Semele to a crisp, but luckily Zeus was able to snatch the baby Dionysus from his mother, sew the baby into his thigh, and wait for him to be born. Because of this and other myths, Dionysus came to be regarded as a protector of lost souls and a god of rebirth.
He's also famous for being the god of wine and altered states. His followers were reputed to drink themselves into a frenzy, whereupon they would flee to the woods to dance, shriek, and carouse throughout the night. The satyrs and maenads were his creatures; legend tells us they suckled and copulated with wild animals and tore both people and animals limb from limb as part of the worship of the god.
Sounds like fun, right? Well, these students apparently thought so, and our main character is only just realizing what his friends have been up to on their midnight jaunts.
There's another important part of this religion which I think is going to be essential to the plot: followers of Dionysus could be initiated into the cult at his temple in Greece, thereby securing themselves eternal life. We don't know a lot about the initiation process (the way it works is that if you told the secret, you didn't get eternal life), but we do know that you had to be able to speak Greek (presumably so you could participate in the rituals) and you couldn't be a murderer. There were some other forbidden professions, but otherwise this religion was open to men and women alike. For those of you who are super curious about this backstory, here's a link to the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, where there are wall paintings depicting what scholars think is a Dionysian initiation ceremony.
Here's what I think: main guy hasn't been initiated yet, but he's about to be, and something goes wrong, which is why one of the students dies. I could be entirely wrong about this, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will simply say this: if, based on this quick review, the book sounds interesting, go ahead and check it out for yourself and let me know what you think. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to continue to take advantage of this excellent reading weather.
Until next time,
Anna
Now, before we get into the book review, let me just say that reading in bed, while pleasurable, is not my ideal for a wet, gray day like today. What this day really needs is a big, comfy chair and a roaring fire with two greyhounds and a black cat stretched out in front of it beneath my feet as I sip my apple cider tea and listen to the drips drop down. If I really wanted to go all out, this scenario would play out in the oak-paneled library of an old English country house, and I would be joined by an officious butler fond of pipe tobacco and The Pickwick Papers. Take note, ladies and gentlemen--this is the way to my heart!
Anyway, I digress: to the book! I started reading The Secret History last night because I was having trouble sleeping. Before I knew it, my roommate was asleep, and I was nearly 150 pages in, feeling wider awake than when I started. This book sucks you in slowly and softly before punching you in the gut with a plot twist. It's about a group of Classics students and their teacher (ahem, no surprise that I'd find this interesting!) at a small college in Vermont. The group is very insular compared to the rest of the college: the students take all their classes with this one professor, and they spend their free time having witty intellectual debates, complete with quotes in Latin, Greek, and French (read with a dictionary or Google handy to catch all the jokes.) All of this seems harmless enough, if a little eccentric, until the main character, who is also the narrator, reveals that one of the group is fated to die at the end of the book.
Why, you ask? Well, said students and teacher are attempting nothing other than the re-creation of the mystery religion of Dionysus, complete with all its attendant substance-induced frenzy and bloodshed, in the woods of rural Vermont. Fortunately, I just had to write a paper on this mystery religion for my Pompeii Archaeology class, so I can offer some explanation for those of you who are unfamiliar with the myth.
The story goes that Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a mortal woman. Zeus, being a god, came to Semele in human form, but his jealous wife, Hera, tricked Semele into getting Zeus to reveal his true form to her. This burned the unfortunate pregnant Semele to a crisp, but luckily Zeus was able to snatch the baby Dionysus from his mother, sew the baby into his thigh, and wait for him to be born. Because of this and other myths, Dionysus came to be regarded as a protector of lost souls and a god of rebirth.
He's also famous for being the god of wine and altered states. His followers were reputed to drink themselves into a frenzy, whereupon they would flee to the woods to dance, shriek, and carouse throughout the night. The satyrs and maenads were his creatures; legend tells us they suckled and copulated with wild animals and tore both people and animals limb from limb as part of the worship of the god.
Sounds like fun, right? Well, these students apparently thought so, and our main character is only just realizing what his friends have been up to on their midnight jaunts.
There's another important part of this religion which I think is going to be essential to the plot: followers of Dionysus could be initiated into the cult at his temple in Greece, thereby securing themselves eternal life. We don't know a lot about the initiation process (the way it works is that if you told the secret, you didn't get eternal life), but we do know that you had to be able to speak Greek (presumably so you could participate in the rituals) and you couldn't be a murderer. There were some other forbidden professions, but otherwise this religion was open to men and women alike. For those of you who are super curious about this backstory, here's a link to the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, where there are wall paintings depicting what scholars think is a Dionysian initiation ceremony.
Here's what I think: main guy hasn't been initiated yet, but he's about to be, and something goes wrong, which is why one of the students dies. I could be entirely wrong about this, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will simply say this: if, based on this quick review, the book sounds interesting, go ahead and check it out for yourself and let me know what you think. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to continue to take advantage of this excellent reading weather.
Until next time,
Anna
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
No Taxation without Defenestration
Greetings, fellow readers! With election day nigh and early American literature at the forefront of my mind, I've been thinking a lot lately about that old motto of the revolution, no taxation without representation . . . only for some reason, I wrote "no taxation without defenestration." This struck me as insanely funny, defenestration being one of the English language's grossly underused words. Therefore, I decided to look up the history of the word, and I came across this delightful Wikipedia article concerning the Defenestrations of Prague, whereby unfortunate members of the city council fell out of favor and the window. I can't imagine why this practice ever fell out of fashion.
Then I got to thinking about some of the major grievances the American colonists had concerning taxation, first among them the tax on tea and stamps. I don't think this resonates with many other people today, but to me, the idea of taxing two of the products on which I spend the majority of my income is horrifying in the extreme. I drink about three cups of tea per day and send anywhere from five to ten letters per week. This behavior no doubt means I have more in common with Americans of the past, who were, in fact, British, than with my contemporaries; however, I will say this: I cannot imagine possessing the fortitude required to abstain from tea and stamps to make a political statement.
This may be indicative of weakness and lack of adherence to ideals on my part, but I seriously doubt I would have the presence of mind to follow through with such a resolution. There are few things I consider worth the fight; for my part, I'd much rather solve the problem with defenestration.
There's my version of a modest proposal for you!
Until next time,
Anna
P.S. I realize this post wasn't very much about books, but rest assured, I am busy reading away and will have more updates for you soon.
Then I got to thinking about some of the major grievances the American colonists had concerning taxation, first among them the tax on tea and stamps. I don't think this resonates with many other people today, but to me, the idea of taxing two of the products on which I spend the majority of my income is horrifying in the extreme. I drink about three cups of tea per day and send anywhere from five to ten letters per week. This behavior no doubt means I have more in common with Americans of the past, who were, in fact, British, than with my contemporaries; however, I will say this: I cannot imagine possessing the fortitude required to abstain from tea and stamps to make a political statement.
This may be indicative of weakness and lack of adherence to ideals on my part, but I seriously doubt I would have the presence of mind to follow through with such a resolution. There are few things I consider worth the fight; for my part, I'd much rather solve the problem with defenestration.
There's my version of a modest proposal for you!
Until next time,
Anna
P.S. I realize this post wasn't very much about books, but rest assured, I am busy reading away and will have more updates for you soon.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Book Sale Weekend
Greetings, fellow readers! This past weekend was a very exciting one for me, as it coincided with the fall Friends of the Library sale here in Gainesville. I went with Jordan and David (friends from Shakespeare in the Park), and we camped out in the early morning under a hastily improvised blanket/tent, waiting to enter the Gates of Literary Glory.
This semester's haul was probably my best yet--I got lots of old poetry books with leather bindings and all the books in the I, Claudius series for Allison, my Latinist roommate. I think my favorite book was the poetry and prose of Ernest Dowson from the 1930's. Some other good finds were Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy in an omnibus edition, as well as the sequel to the trilogy; The Children of Hurin to add to my Tolkien collection; and a bunch of the Miss Read Penguin Classics. That's one of my favorite book series, and it's next to impossible to find it in the U.S., so I was very glad to have spotted them before they were snatched up.
It's going to take me a while to get through all of these--schoolwork is creating quite the backlog--but I will post reviews as I begin to read. For now, some pictures:
Until next time,
Anna
This semester's haul was probably my best yet--I got lots of old poetry books with leather bindings and all the books in the I, Claudius series for Allison, my Latinist roommate. I think my favorite book was the poetry and prose of Ernest Dowson from the 1930's. Some other good finds were Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy in an omnibus edition, as well as the sequel to the trilogy; The Children of Hurin to add to my Tolkien collection; and a bunch of the Miss Read Penguin Classics. That's one of my favorite book series, and it's next to impossible to find it in the U.S., so I was very glad to have spotted them before they were snatched up.
It's going to take me a while to get through all of these--schoolwork is creating quite the backlog--but I will post reviews as I begin to read. For now, some pictures:
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| I found I, Claudius! |
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| Jordan and David reading a guide to food and wine we found for $3 |
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| A close up of the food and wine shot |
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| My feet, walking to the book sale |
Anna
Monday, October 20, 2014
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