Tag Archives: book review

Caffeinated Links: The Factors for a Happy Relationship, 55 TV Premieres and Finales, more

tumblrfandomflag

The official Tumblr fandom flag. I recognize Sherlock and Doctor Who of course looming large, and I’d assume offhand that the triangle thing in the upper right is Supernatural? Either way, good stuff.

TVLine has 55 TV Premieres and Finales in February.

The ultimate guidelines to a happy relationship, according to science. Most of them are useless. The Atlantic

Incandenza over at Pajiba’s Cannonball Read gives a fantastic review, pondering fantasy as a genere, of Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind, one of the best fantasy books I’ve read in my all too-short lifetime.

Grantland as usual wrote a long and wonderful review, of which these parts are my favorite –

“It’s partly that Beyoncé is just better than Magna Carta, obviously. But it’s also partly about the fact that she’s 32 and he’s 44 and suddenly that gap seems salient. Motherhood as a human hasn’t made Beyoncé the pop star seem all that momlike, but Jay suddenly seems totally dadlike. Works for a corporation, wears a suit, makes a lot of dumb jokes, tries to seem hip by talking about Homeland. His verse doesn’t ruin “Drunk in Love,” but the other night at a party I heard a DJ start the song there, without playing the first three minutes, and I wanted to throw things at him. You’d have to be crazy to think that’s the best part of the song. When Jay walked onto Beyoncé’s stage last night he looked like he’d somehow lucked into taking her to the prom. I love how he walks her down the stairs from the top level of the stage, holding her hand in that almost courtly way, and how the minute they hit the second riser, right when he’s saying “I’m Ike,” she lets go of his hand and just keeps going. She does a little catwalk, lets Jay kind of point at her butt and make a Not bad, eh? face — and then the instant his verse is over, she’s back in control of the whole scene. Jay’s once again just lucky to be up there reflecting her swag, doing that adorable little back-to-back surfboard dance. I loved the surfboard-dance part so much I wish it was a physical place, so I could build a church there and renew my wedding vows inside it. It was A Moment. One the show still cut away from, so we could see how much Taylor Swift was enjoying it.”

“Buckingham and Reznor made perfect sense. They share a passion for innovative recording techniques and writing hot, angry songs about witchy women.”

on Taylor Swift –

“Can’t a girl thrash at a piano like she’s been ravished by the muse/dance in the audience like everybody’s watching/awkwardly configure and reconfigure her hands to a hip-hop beat without having her every awards-show move scrutinized like the Zapruder GIFs? Sure, she’s been lyrically careless with the hearts of the people who have been careless with hers, and yes, she seems painfully aware that the camera’s dead, unblinking gaze is always trained on her, and, uh-huh, she does that thing where she pretends that every new accolade is as unexpected as being named grand marshal of the Three-Legged Rainbow Unicorn Parade when she knows she’s got so many gold statuettes at home she had to build a museum on the back acres of her Dream Garden. ..

And Taylor Swift, god love her, has already entered the Tori Amos–serious artiste stage of her career, where the only special effect needed is integrity. Taylor, your songs about Jake Gyllenhaal are great, but you are 24 years old. Bring back the hobos.”

Book Review: Hush Now, Don’t You Cry

hushnowdon'tyoucryFull disclosure: I only read about a third of this so this is really more my impressions than any full, impressive book review. Rhys Bowen is an award-winning mystery writer with dozens of books, and this is the 11th in her Molly Murphy series – and also my introduction to her writing.

But look – this just wasn’t very good. Molly, an Irish private detective in a world in which lady detectives are an anomaly, has just married a New York City senior detective and the two are off on their honeymoon to an acquaintance’s estate on Rhode Island. Shortly after arriving, their host turns up dead, and the two are naturally pulled into the mystery of solving his murder.

Molly (just so you know, the book is written in the first-person) is an endearing protagonist, as is her husband Daniel – both brave, fairly clever, possessed of senses of humor. But the good characterization is buried in overly long prose and a trite mystery setup. If you’re read even one or two gothic novels, much less a great many murder mysteries, you will start to check out the moment Molly arrives at an old mansion and sees the ghostly head of a mysterious child in a window – a child who was killed years before. From there, it only gets worse – a houseful of wealthy relatives any one of whom could have wanted the victim dead and who are sketched with the barest of details and personality, a suspicious housekeeper who pops out of mysterious corridors, a decanter of whisky conveniently left in a secluded spot…

Continue reading

Caffeinated Links: Spiderman 2 Trailer, Time of the Doctor Stills, Narnia Director

timeofthedoctor

The fourth Narnia film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair, has picked “Life of Pi” writer David Magee as its screenwriter. Apparently it’s a boyhood favorite of his and…I’m excited. Silver Chair is one of the better Narnia films, but as with all the Narnia books, there’s such a danger of hyperbole, kitsch, or silliness in the interpretation – it takes a deft and delicate hand and a sense of magic to do it well. RT

Time of the Doctor Promo Stills can be found here. Now that Matt Smith is leaving, I’m realizing all over again my love for him.

There are few things I love more than blistering book reviews, and Nic of Eve’s Alexandria hits all my aces with withering historical criticism and snark about the characters and style of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which I tried to read once and gave up on immediately. RT

Spiderman 2 Trailer

Book Review – Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

girlwiththedragontattooThis 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.

Book Review: Fire (Graceling Realm #2)

firekristincashorereviewThe 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.

Book Review: The Boyfriend List

theboyfriendlist

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!

Caffeinated Links

Dancers-Among-Us-in-Sarasota-Danielle-Brown62

New Van Gogh Identified –  A painting that sat for six decades in a Norwegian industrialist’s attic after he was told it was a fake Van Gogh was pronounced the real thing Monday, making it the first full-size canvas by the tortured Dutch artist to be discovered since 1928. RT Yahoo

This has been everywhere today, but is also the most joy-filled, magical, breathtaking celebration of the human body and the art of motion that I’ve seen in years.  Photographer Jordan Matter crafted a stunning series of ballet dancers striking poses in mundane situations. Gorgeous and magical. RT Dancers Among Us

The Millions reviews J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

“That’s just gibberish. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does mean something. It means something to me.”

“That may be so but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Language has to mean something to me as well as to you, otherwise it doesn’t count as language.”

In a gesture that he must have picked up from Inés, the boy tosses his head dismissively. “La la fa fa yam ying! Look at me!”

He looks into the boy’s eyes. For the briefest of moments he sees something there. He has no name for it. It is like — that is what occurs to him in the moment. Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try to grasp it. But not like a fish — no, like like a fish. Or like like like a fish. On and on. Then the moment is over, and he is simply standing in silence, staring.

“Did you see?” says the boy. RT The Millions

Last but not least, on the tenth anniversary of The X-Files, Gillian Anderson writes the most adorable letter ever to the world, in which she thanks David Duchovny for wearing those speedos. RT Pajiba