It's occurred to me that I have left this community much neglected recently.

What's everyone reading at the moment? Are you enjoying it? Do you have a current book recommendation for us all?

I'm reading Memoirs of a Geisha at the moment, which is absolutely compelling reading but at the same time so hard. Some of the things that have happened to this poor girl are so horrific it almost makes me want to look away. I just can't imagine anything like that happening in this country but the sad reality is that sex trafficking happens everywhere.

I figured this was a good place to post this as earlier on Hils asked me to let her know how the Twilight books were since there's been so much hype surrounding them.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series.  It definitely is written for teens and it's Vampire fluff but still quite enjoyable.  My favorite book was Eclipse (the third one) which I thought, allowed the characters to really show their true colors. 
My least favorite book was the second one - New Moon.  It almost seemed like the author was bored writing the second book.

I had a few other issues with all the books - I didn't like that the lead female was whiney a lot of the time.  And that there were definite co-dependency issues.  I'm just not sure, if I had a kid, I'd want them thinking that these books showed the appropriate way to behave in a relationship.  On the other hand - I thought she captured the teen angst and some of the teen feelings/confussion rather well.  And I liked that the main female wasn't all girly girl.  It reaches out to a different demographic of females than most books.

So yeah, in the end, I enjoyed it.  It had it's issues, most of the minor and as long as you remembered this was for a young adult audience it worked just fine.  I'd definitely recommend it - but I'd recommend it as vacation fluff reading rather than intense "I need a really good story that makes me think, cringe, love and hate" (like George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series) books.  Hopefully that made sense!

If anyone is interested in reading Canterbury Tales with us, could you perhaps recomment an issue of the book for us to read? Mine dates to 1982, so maybe a current edition would be better. The line to the relevant post is here

I'm reading "Like Sands Through the Hourglass", an autobiography of Days of our Lives (American soap opera) Bill and Susan Seaforth Hayes. They've been a real-life couple since they met on Days in 1970 (a longevity that's no mean feat in Hollywood) and I'm enjoying it very much. Then again, I was always a Doug and Julie fan.

Susan had a bit to say about literature that I'd like to share (in a section on meeting her favourite author):

"To me a book is magic, a piece of the writer's mind to clutch in hand, and hold in your heart as well. Even if you never meet in the flesh, you and that writer are communing in consciousness."

We have a poll up at jj_in_08 on reading/rereading Canterbury Tales soon. The poll is here if anyone is interested.

The time frame is you have until Monday to Sunday to read each tale, and I will post a discussion thread on the Sunday for anything anyone wants to say about the tale we read in the last week. Shouldn't be any pressure!

I had a poll at my LJ yesterday for "Favourite/Best Shakespeare Play", and Macbeth won. What does everyone else think?

Referring to the Daily Telegraph list, though it might be fun if every few days we posted a couple of the categories with maybe some additional ones suggested like Plays, Fantasy and perhaps Historical Fiction and then add our personal choices to the ones given by the Telegraph as well as suggest changes to their list. A few of my friends disagreed with 'Lord of the Rings' being classed as Children's Fiction and the SF choices seemed fairly dated.

The first category would be 'The Classics'. The Telegraph list is:

The Illiad and The Odyssey - Homer
The Barchester Chronicles - Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace - Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch - George Eliot

So changes and additions to the above?

Shall we also open up suggestions that might be included in Plays?

So I've done my list below the cut, highlighting in bold those I have read, with a few notes about those I haven't.

( 110 Books )

OK, so the 110 books reflect the choices of the Daily Telegraph team, 11 categories and 10 books in each and from the comments to the original article many folk disagree with this list. I was wondering about doing lists of our own categories and titles for a 'perfect library'.

If anyone would like to join in, I would love it! I will start everything off and set it up for you!
From the list of 110 books, bold all the ones you have read.

( This way to the meme )

Seen at petzipellepingo's journal, thought I would bring it over here!

110 best books: The perfect library

From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world… we present the ultimate reading list. ...

( This way to the classics )

If any one is interested we could maybe make it into a meme, and bold all the titles we have read?

I just finished reading Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and I have to say, it is an AWESOME read. You can tell right away why it was so popular when it was first written. Däniken's conversational and yet quasi-scientific style totally win you over after about the third page. I found it very amusing and actually a little nostalgic. As a child I loved to read books on the mystery of Atlantis or the Loch Ness Monster and reading this book totally took me back to when I couldn't get enough on cryptozoology and other "mysteries." Obviously, you can't take the book seriously, although it can be hard not to while you're reading it, just because Däniken's enthusiasm is so contagious.

One other thing I really liked about the book is that its few tid bits of evidence really are real. So you can look them up and get the real scientific scoop. Such as the Piri Reis Map and the Antikythera Mechanism which do beg some historical questions regarding ancient technology and exploration. So I would say that I learned, or was reminded of some stuff I already knew, which is that there are always holes in scientific theory and that its important to investigate.

Which, interestingly enough, is the actual point of his book. While Däniken does posit the idea of alien astronauts and a human/alien breeding program. His basic premise is to discount fanatical religious  doctrine and say that his ideas are no stranger or more bizarre than religious ones. Which, as an atheist, I can agree with. His second point is that people should support all science and space research, because so much of the technology we take for granted today came from that research in the past. He uses examples such as teflon for frying pans.

The true pitfall of Däniken's ideas are the same problem I have with religion, and that is that there's no such thing as human ingenuity. That all the amazing things man has made came from God or Aliens and we couldn't possibly invent or imagine on our own. Personally, I find the idea that humans imagined the pyramids than that they built them because someone told them to.

Total sidenote, Chariots of the Gods was inspiration for Stargate, Halo, Battlestar Galactica, Alien vs Predator, and (in my opinion) The X-Files.

I've already done one gushing review about this but allow me to gush some more.

I have to say I was wary when I started this. It's a long book. Over 600 pages and I'm the sort of person who has to finish a book once I've started it. This was going to take up a lot of my time if I didn't like it

As it was, after a slightly uncertain start, I found myself absolutely sucked into this book. It's the first time I've read any sort of historic fiction (as in based on real events) and Harry Thompson does a wondeful job of fleshing out characters which can only have been mentioned a little in any historical documents he read. On more than one occasion I found myself crying for the natives that Capt. Fitzroy tried to educate. We (the British) really though we were doing the right thing by Christianising all the tribes we found and all we did was make a big mess of things

But that's off topic slightly. As I said in my last post I came to this book knowing nothing other than Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and came up with the theory of evolution. So this book really taught me a lot, and what was especially fascinating what the theological debates Fitzroy and Darwin have on numerous occasions. Harry Tompson writes the dialogue so brilliantly that the arguments are intelligent but not crafted in such a way as to exclude those not overly familiar with it.

It's fascinating seeing the journey these characters go on. The book spans several decades and I loved every minute of the journey.

A definite recommend from me

I'm crossposting this from my own LJ; I know at least the Susan Cooper books are familiar to many members of this comm. They stand up very well to re-reading! The rest I'm including for the sake of completeness.








Other books – I’ve skipped through Peter Quennell’s biography of Byron, which ends, frustratingly, before he did, when he left Italy, not when he died in Greece, and I’m still working my way through my luscious book on satirical cartoons – like Belgian pralines, a little too rich to devour all in one go, but really very satisfying to dip into, and I’m within a hundred pages of the end of that one too.

You know, y'all're going to think I just gush about everything I read, because, once again, I loved this book and couldn't put it down.

The House of Power is a kids' science fiction book (target age 10-15, according to the author's web site) set in a place called Atherton. Much like a medium-sized wedding cake, Atherton has three tiers. These tiers are the Highlands, the Tabletop and the Flatlands.

The world of Atherton is a neat little microcosm of economics and ecology, a sort of terraformed space colony thing, with one tiny problem --

It was designed by a madman. :laughs maniacally while flipping light switch on and off to simulate lightning:

We begin our story in the Tabletop, which is where the protagonist, Edgar, lives. He's an orphan who works in what is called the fig tree grove. As an aside, they aren't really fig trees, they're genetically engineered tree that seems to be a combination of a fig tree and a sago palm. They produce edible fruit and once the tree is cut down, the people who work the grove harvest a pulp from the center of the tree, which is also edible.

When Edgar was a small child, a man came to him and told him that he'd hidden something for Edgar to find on the cliffs above the grove. Edgar then spends every spare moment he has learning rock climbing in order to find the thing he'd hidden. When he reaches the age of 11, he finally finds it. It's a book. A book that he can't read, because everyone in the Tabletop is forbidden to learn how to read.

Which is what sets Edgar off on his quest. He has to go to the Highlands to find someone who can help him read the book.

( There's one particularly disturbing scene, but I feel the fallout of that scene makes a point that seemed, in my opinion, to make up for the disturbingness. )

The only other thing that I can recall that I didn't like about the book is that the narrator breaks the fourth wall a couple of times for no apparent reason. But I found the rest of the book engaging enough that it didn't detract too much from my enjoyment.

Amazon.com link

Upon doing my research, I find that there is a place in Australia called the "Atherton Tablelands," where one of the largest trees in Australia is, the Curtain Fig Tree. It should be interesting to see if this ties in somehow.

:uses squirrels icon because the squirrel in between Hammy and Sandy is Murphy, who is a character in Carman's Land of Elyon series:

Is it fall yet?

xposted to my lj

I think I was a feminist early in toddlerhood, but I didn't realize it nor was I aware of how subtle patriarchy can be until college. I got into reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, which now I'm torn about. I love fantasy. I love wizards. I love, what I like to call, Urban Fantasy or Urban Folklore which is any story that takes place in a contemporary setting with a lot of characters that don't have magic/don't believe in magic/or find magic in something small like a junk yard--see Charles de Lint.

I had a quick question. I know this is a book comm, but I was wondering if the critical analysis of a film or tv show, behind a cut of course with spoiler warnings, would be amiss?

I was in another comm, but their discussions turned horribly shallow; discussing only the protagonists hair and shippy crap, which is fine once in a while, but as an English Major I crave something a little more hardcore, like discussing the actual issues in the story.

Thanks so much,
Amy

ETA: Hils asked me to create a film discussion comm separate from this book comm. So please join if you wish, I'd love to have you :D film_flies

I loved this book. I've stayed up late reading books before, but this is probably the latest I've ever stayed up in a long, long time. I'm not sure I got any sleep at all.

I'm afraid to say too much about the events of the book, because it is a mystery (I refrained from researching any of the paintings, people or events of the book while I was reading it, which for me took quite a bit of restraint, in order to stop myself from spoiling the ending), but I will say that it's fast-paced and involving. I hid my own eyes a couple of times when things weren't going so well for our protagonists and cheered along with them when it did.

"But how accurate is it?" I hear you asking. Well, I don't know much about Italian history, and I know even less about Baroque art, but this book has two pages of acknowledgements (including thanking all of the still-living people named in the narrative for giving him repeated interviews) and four pages of sources. The four pages of sources are prefaced with the comment that "This list does not represent a complete bibliography of works on Caravaggio, nor all the works that I consulted."

Though I'm very tempted to track down an e-mail address and give him a good talking-to about archival practices.

The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece at amazon.com

xposted to my lj

I've been a voracious reader for about as long as I can recall. I'm a stay-at-home mom to an eight-year-old budding scientist, an extremely part-time writer (mostly of fanfiction, though I have a few profic (and a few pro-non-fic) book ideas that are germinating), and a much-less-part-time knitter.

In terms of formal education, I have a B.S.Ed in elementary education, a post-bachelor's paralegal certificate and, as of May, 2007, a Master's of Science in Information Studies. Which means that I'm a trained librarian.

Informally, I'm teaching myself Mandarin Chinese in a semi-immersive manner. Basically, I read Chinese books (the translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorceror's Stone -- I'm not so confident in my abilities that I can go with out any crutch at all), watch Chinese television (I have the DVD set of Diao1 Man2 Gong1 Zhu3), and listen to Mandarin pop music (I have over 100 mp3s captured from streaming radio)。 I'm making progress. Slowly. My local junior/community college *finally* has a beginning Mandarin course, but I'm kind of afraid to throw anything else in on top of the system I've got going now. I also dabble a bit in http://www.chinesepod.com, mostly just the actual dialogue part, which I sometimes practice with my son in the car on his way home from school.

I love being introduced to new universes, so the first of pretty much anything (book series, tv series, etc.) usually outweighs any later installments. I'm also shamefully addicted to book series that don't need bookends, because they stand up on their own just fine, thank you very much.

I'm also fond of children's/YA books, particularly ones with fantasy and/or supernatural-type happenings/settings.

So, with that being said:

Top Ten

1. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (the first book I ever loved)

And the rest, in no alphabetical order (I hope . . .):

The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's and/or Sorceror's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Outlander/Cross-stitch, Diana Gabaldon
The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge

Crap! That's only seven!

Oh, well, I'll sleep on it and maybe the other three will come to me in the morning.

Since lots of us have been playing the Romantic poet meme, I thought it might be nice to post one of my favourite Romantic poems and see what folks have to say about it.



OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


So, that's why I love this poem. Thoughts, anyone?