Category Archives: books poetry lit
Marriage Advice from Jane Austen
“In the provincial world of Austen’s novels, small-mindedness is among the greatest of personal and social follies, for which an expansive library serves as a counterbalance. Darcy’s fetching library serves as metaphor for a variety of qualities in a marriage partner today which might counteract contemporary excesses and limitations: broad-mindedness in an age of identity politics and narrow partisanship, integrity in an era of brutal pragmatism, strong work ethic in a culture of shortcuts, steadiness in a swirl of passing fancies. While countless other qualities might substitute for those represented by Darcy’s library, these attracted me to my husband and have deepened my love for him more over the years. Not to mention the fact that he built me my own library, and its shelves are overflowing.”
I Learned Everything I need to know about marriage from Pride and Prejudice, via The Atlantic
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Caffeinated Links: YA Dystopia, David Mitchell on Autism, and The Counselor is a Very Bad Film
Joan Aiken‘s website is surely one of the most gorgeously designed author websites I’ve ever seen. Like stepping straight into a fantasy land.
Celeste Ng at The Millions highlights 5 Series You Probably Missed as a Kid (But Should Read as an Adult). I’ve read half of these and HIGHLY recommend them, especially Half Magic, and am adding the other half to my to-read list. RT
Gorgeous, heartbreaking. David Mitchell on translating an autistic Japanese teen’s memoir, and his own son’s autism. “The conclusion is that both emotional poverty and an aversion to company are not symptoms of autism but consequences of autism – its harsh lockdown on self-expression and society’s near-pristine ignorance about what’s happening inside autistic heads.” RT
The ‘verse has been ablaze with the ending of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (which is a great series, by the way. Veronica Roth speaks out. I think she made a brave choice. But I would have hated her for it had I found out only upon reading the book. RT
More The Millions’ goodness, making me want to re-read Colm Toibin’s The Master, which I read prior to reading Henry James. “He feels love profoundly, for women and men alike, but he can’t act on it in any way that might compromise his freedom as an artist, and instead he pours out his love for them in his novels after they’re dead. That, in this case, his love for Minny Temple gave us The Portrait of a Lady may be enough for some. It isn’t for me. As much as I care about books, I think people matter more in the end.” RT
Surprisingly, according to this roundup of reviews for it via Entertainment Weekly, it appears that the star-laden The Counselor was a very bad film. RT
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What I’m Into: Korean Dramas, Hardboiled Detective Fiction, and Cherry Chocolate
1. Heirs. I haven’t watched a Korean drama in a straight two years, but when I heard that my favorites Lee Min Ho, of the charisma and the bushels of talent, and Park Shin Hye, of the adorableness and expressive face, were being paired together, I knew I had to get on that. Heirs has made me fall madly for it; the romance is wistful and delicate and achingly addicting – it’s the small moments that get me, like him watching her sleep, or the two sitting on opposite sides of a winecellar wall, both lost in thought, the wall a visual symbol of how two people can be physically close yet find each other so hard to reach. You can watch all aired episodes so far on Dramafever.
2. The Thin Man. I picked up a vintage copy of Dashiell Hammett’s famous hardboiler (yes I just coined this, why should “potboiler” exist and not “hardboiler”?) at a book sale this weekend, and a fourth of the way in am highly enjoying it. Nick and Nora Charles are a wealthy socialite couple in New York for Christmas. Nick, a former ace detective, left that life behind when he married Nora and devoted himself to running the various businesses she was left heir to by her family. The couple are blithely in love and live in a breezy flurry of cocktail parties and social events, but are left ever so slightly bored by it. So when a murder turns up practically on their doorstep Nora pushes Nick to get involved, and in between throwing back a drink every other page, he manages to do some able detecting. Some people find this book hilarious, but I find it more endearing than anything. Also, best opening line of all time surely – “I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from a table where she had been sitting with three other people, and came over to me.”
3. Seattle Chocolates. This stuff is delicious, y’all, particularly the Rainier cherry – I generally don’t like either cherries or pecans but somehow the blend in this chocolate bar is just perfect, rich and fruity and chocolatey and wildly addicting.
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Book Review – Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
This will be a quick review as I don’t have much time today, but – COMPLETELY riveting. It’s a superbly well-done thriller that manages to surprise every time you think the twists have already happened. What really stands out however is the strength of the character development – Blomkvist and Salander are fascinating, charismatic, fully-sketched figures who leap off the page and feel readily identifiable despite the uniqueness (on Salander’s part anyway) of their upbringing and profession. It is at times also a very dark novel – a thread of fury at violent crimes against women runs through the novel and finds a voice occasionally in graphic depictions of said violence – but this is a thoroughly impressive and completely gripping novel with a strong sense of worldbuilding and the dialectics between good and evil. Well worth the read.
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Book Review: Fire (Graceling Realm #2)
The library didn’t have #1 in the Graceling series, but as I heard they’re only very loosely linked, I went ahead with #2.
I enjoyed this immensely. The world-building is fairly similar to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and many other fantasy novels of the like, in that it’s built mostly on a medieval world of lords, ladies, courts, and stone castles, (and winter. is there some kind of rule that 70% of fantasy novels take place in winter?). Fire is the only human monster left in the world populated by humans and animal monsters. Unlike the animal monsters, she is intelligent, and she has essentially a human form, but she’s also gifted (or cursed) with two un-human qualities: an otherworldly, spellbinding beauty, and the ability to read, and influence, the minds of other living creatures (both animal and human).
This has the same emotional intensity, romantic center, and driving pace of plot as Cecilia Dart Thornton’s Bitterbynde novels, and for those I liked it very much indeed. Said plot is a little threadbare – one of the reviewers I read was completely right in saying that this oddly skirts around both young adult and adult camps without really falling into either. As far as emotional complexity and the unabashed, frequent references to very dark topics such as rape, this definitely falls in the adult camp. But the simplicity of the plot and world-building pull it back into YA, where overall it fits more comfortably I think. This is not at all an experimental or unique book, but it is BEAUTIFULLY realized and vivid and its characters leap off the page. Gripping enough that I finished it in one night. Definitely recommend for any fans of Thornton, McKinley, or Suzanne Collins.
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Book Review: The Boyfriend List
I read this YA novel in an hour flat sitting at the library. And –
Ugh. The appeal of this fantastically titled book with a quirky cover design pretty much begins and ends with said title and cover design. This is boring and frankly surprisingly ordinary given the dramatic nature of the premise, all rife with possibility and comedy. Ruby Oliver is at the end of her rope and in denial about it after a series of unfortunate (though not particularly unusual) events happen to her causing her to lose her boyfriend and her social life and become temporarily a social outcast. So her overprotective parents – volatile comedian mother and abstracted plant-obsessed father – send her off to therapy. Where her therapist instructs her to make a list of all the boys she’s ever liked and thus Ruby’s story (such as it is) unfolds over the course of 11 therapy sessions.
Couple problems: Ruby’s problems are not at unusual – her ex dumps her for another girl, she attempts to get him back, has lots of drama with her girlfriends, etc – and therefore not innately interesting, though really good writing could have covered that – and two, her “boyfriend” stories are mostly rather dull. Half the boys on the list she had a brief and pointless crush on; there’s only a handful in which the history is genuinely interesting. Her childhood friend, her high school boyfriend, and the boy she encounters toward the very end of the novel are the only three interesting ones, and none of these three is fully developed. Her relationship with her current/high school boyfriend is compelling and achingly real at times, but it’s given neither full development nor a resolution, it just sort of peters out. And while this is reflective of real life sometimes, it wasn’t replaced with any other element. She has a few brief exchanges with the interesting, sarcastic, and refreshingly grown-up Noel toward the end, but he simply fades from her life.
E Lockhart in the final act reaches toward a growing-up story of catharsis and independence with a teen girl leaving the drama of high school behind and embracing her own identity – but tells this rather than shows it, and it simply falls flat. Give this a miss – John Green writes a thousand times more tenderly and eloquently and comically about the obsessive, circular, magical period of discovery that is adolescence.
P.S. Add me on Goodreads!
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Pop Culture Love Letter: Jane Eyre, Helen Fielding, New Drama from Castle Writer, more
Instead of buying the film rights to Mad About the Boy, Helen Fielding’s just-released final book in the Bridget Jones trilogy, production companies are instead apparently working on Bridget Jones’s Baby, a film based on an original screenplay by Fielding, which will include Colin Firth. Er….wise choice I suppose? RT
Castle head writer Andrew Marlowe and his co-writer wife are working on an hour-long drama for ABC featuring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character for ABC. COME TO ME PRECIOUS. RT
The lovely Charity has analyzed every personality type according to a famous fictional character (mostly from sci fi shows, to my great delight). I am Anne of Green Gables (naturally). Who are you? The Doctor? Sherlock? Caroline Forbes from Vampie Diaries? RT
From USA Today’s Happily Ever After, 3 little-known facts about Jane Eyre:
- Royal lovebirds love Jane Eyre. No, not Kate and Will. We’re talking about Victoria and Albert, of course! The queen read the book to her prince over the course of many evenings, even staying up quite late because it was “most interesting.” She noted in her diary that Jane Eyre was “really a wonderful book … powerfully and admirably written.” Perhaps Victoria identified with the diminutive heroine. By all accounts, Victoria was plain like Jane, while Albert was not only as worldly as Edward Rochester, but also quite the heartthrob.
- Not all of Jane Eyre was fiction. Lowood Institution, that horrible charity school that Jane attended, well, gulp, it really did exist. When The Rev. Patrick Brontë’s wife died, leaving him with five young children, he decided to send his four daughters to the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge. The students at Cowan Bridge were so cold and malnourished that many of them, including Charlotte’s two sisters, became ill and died. But did their headmaster despair? No, he did not! In fact, he rejoiced because he was sending his students “to heaven.” And what exactly did heaven look like to the girls of Cowan Bridge? Since 70 students were forced to share a one-seat outdoor toilet, the Pearly Gates are probably doors to private commodes.
- Jane Eyre‘s Edward continues to inspire. When she wrote Twilight, Stephenie Meyer named Edward Cullen, a vampire, after Edward Rochester, also a slightly creepy hero. Both men are described as depressed and brooding when they arrive on the scene. These tortured heroes frighten the heroines — Bella and Jane, respectively — with their volatility. Both Edwards reject shallow and empty-headed socialites, choosing instead to love two young women who are insecure about their looks. RT
And finally, two exciting trailers. The first is for Lifetime’s high-budget, suave-looking adaptation of Bonnie & Clyde – can’ t be embedded but watch here. The second is for the upcoming and much-anticipated adaptation of John Banville’s The Sea, which stars Ciaran Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, and others in what looks like a story exactly halfway between broodingly literary and grippingly dramatic.
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Caffeinated Links: Andrew Davies and Steven Moffat Shenanigans, Toni Morrison
Flavorwire on why Toni Morrison is the most important living writer – “A handful of us care enough to groan whenever Jonathan Franzen says something about social media, but when Toni Morrison says something about a president, it’s monumental.” RT
Bong Joon Ho is furious about the Weinstein Company’s cuts to Snowpiercer. Guess which person my sympathies are with – the brilliant and revered foreign director or the grab-all money-grubbing film production company? RT
Joanna Robinson is right as always. This time about Agents of Shield. “But the show should not, cannot rest on the shoulders of Skye and Ward. They are two of the blandest leads of all time. They are shiny-haired porridge. Heck, I don’t even mind if Skye’s weekly job is to dress cute and flirt her way through an op. But in order for that kind of premise to be remotely interesting, you need to have charisma. You need to be Sarah Walker or Sydney Bristow. Sydney Bristow she ain’t. And don’t even get me started on that swirling vortex of anti-charisma that is Agent Ward.” RT
Peter Davison, the 5th Doctor Who, says Steven Moffat is coming up with a way to get around the rule that states the Time Lord can only regenerate 12 times. Of course he is. RT
Andrew Davies said that he had meant for Firth to be naked in the hallowed Pride and Prejudice lake scene. “He added he had intended the scene to be one of “social embarrassment”, showing awkwardness between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.
“In fact it seems to have affected women in wife a different way,” he said. “And who am I to complain?” Indeed. RT
Coffee and Irony 