Reading Rambo

Since I basically slobbered all over The Emerald Atlas in my attempt to make out with it, I was pretty damn thrilled when I discovered book two in the Books of Beginning series was coming out. I pleaded with Random House Kids to let me review it, so be aware that I was pretty sure I was gonna want to marry this book PRE-reading. So I might be a little biased. And also be aware that the people at Random House Kids are wonderful and magical and probably smell really nice.  Middle books always get the shaft. The beginning of the series is so exciting! The end has all the conclusiony bits! The middle--moves the story along kind of! No one likes Catching Fire  the most. No one loves Prince Caspian  more than all the other Chronicles of Narnia . And I don't think anyone is super gung ho about The Two Towers .  That being said, John Stephens continues in this book what I loved about The Emerald Atlas . Namely, it's funny, has magic and the main characters are appea...

People have been all over Book Riot's Top 50 List , and I could go through the same cliched books we've seen on every You Should Read This Before You Die list and say whether I've read them or not, but fuck that, so I made my own list which peters out in the 40s, because that's when I ceased to find books I SUPER-loved on Goodreads. Basically these are all great. Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis Around the World With Auntie Mame Gone With the Wind , Margaret Mitchell Maus, Art Spiegelman Fun Home , Alison Bechdel Harry Potter , J.K. Rowling The Woman in White , Wilkie Collins Gone-Away Lake , Elizabeth Enright Eugene Onegin , Alexander Pushkin The Lorax , Dr Seuss How I Became a Famous Novelist , Steve Hely Good Omens , Pratchett & Gaiman Roald Dahl. All of Roald Dahl. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , Betty Smith Middlemarch , George Eliot Will Grayson, Will Grayson , Green & Levithan Gaudy Night , D.L. Sayers The Screwtape Letters , C.S. Lewis The Ca...

Whenever a person claims they have an overly morbid interest in things, it seems to instantly turn into a contest with those around them. "Oh man, at least you're not as morbid as I am. I dunno; I'm just drawn to that stuff." I'm not sure why this is a point of pride with people. Maybe it's the desire to seem different, or at the very least slightly odd -- especially since that's been praised by basically every movie ever over the past few decades. "Oh, you like dark, weird shit? You must be special." When I was eleven years old, a decent number of people in my circle died within a short period of time. Couple that with a terrible English teacher who taught us that Disney endings were fake, and real stories did not end happily, and I was the kid who doodled pictures of stick figures dying in semi-creative ways and whose historical fiction stories for Social Studies all ended with everyone dying. Because that was "real." I ...

Where have I been? ENDURING THE UNTOLD AGONY OF A KIDNEY STONE. Let's back it up a sec and think back to Saturday morning. A carefree time, when one could walk down the streets of Hyde Park on the way back from a Gilbert & Sullivan audition, listening to Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA" and think 'Hm, that's a strange feeling in my abdomen.' Cut to eight hours later and there's me and my dad (my parents were up for the weekend) in the aisle of a CVS endeavoring to find something that'll stop the shrieking pain I'm in, and I'm crying and my dad doesn't know what to do because what do you do when your 27-year-old daughter cries in the aisle of a CVS? We go back to the hotel, and I was trying to fight it out, because my parents are older and I didn't want to put them to too much trouble, but it finally got RIDICULOUSLY bad, so I told my dad I had to go to the emergency room. And he took me there at midnight. And he ...

It's Friday afternoon. This is my blog. I can type ANYTHING I WANT and the internet has to either deal with it or click away to an awesome gif of a sloth hugging something. Well GUESS WHAT INTERNET. I've realized in years past that I read a lot of lady authors. I don't know if this was a conscious decision on my part, but probs a mixture of conscious and un-. Because lady authors, especially from the 19th century, were rare, and so if their stuff got famous you're kind of like "Oh yeah. They must've been pretty cool maybe probably." So we have the Brontes and George Eliot and George Sand (I HAVE GEORGE SAND FEELINGS) and Edith Wharton and Austen and...other people I'm not thinking of right now. And they're all swell. And then you've got like Dickens and Wilkie and Balzac and Hugo and Scott and Trollope, and I haven't read ANY Scott or Trollope and that's really terrible, but there it is. I dunno, you want to read about women...

Halloween was swell. And by 'swell' I mean I sat on my couch and watched Agent Dana Scully kick the ass of a man who was sucking the fat out of women. WITH HIS INCREASED-IN-POTENCY STOMACH ACIDS. Man, that's a good episode. It was also made in like 1995, and warned people of the perils of internet dating. Because that guy you're chatting with could just be suffering from a condition where he has no way of producing fat and needs to absorb yours. THINK ABOUT IT. It was kind of like watching that early episode of Law & Order: SVU (or as my friend likes to call it, "Pervert Stories") where Detective Benson is talking about the dangers of chat rooms, and you're like "Ahahahahahahaha." Only NOT because then someone probably dies. You know who're two authors who get a lot of people in a flutter but I'm not really that into? Austen and Shakespeare. Like, ok. They're both great. Reeeeeeal great. And I like some of their stuff a wh...

There're gonna be spoilers here. Because it's the end of the book. But first I would LIKE to say that due to being exposed to the stomach flu this weekend, my yesterday and today have been particularly fever- and sore muscle-ridden. I'm probably going to be blunter than usual in this post. Couple that with an unfortunately nasty text I received on the way to work, and my day was not looking too spiffy this morning, UNTIL I got to work and found this in the mail: Thank you, Laura . Your timing was perfect. So basically, book bloggers are the best and I love you all. What I did NOT particularly love was probably this book. There are definitely certain chapters I would read again and again, because it's Steinbeck and he's lovely, but there's just SO MUCH of his upsetness woven in here that I can't see it as much other than a desperate plea for people not to be assholes. And that's great. But I don't know that it can make for the best l...

There is a 30something professional couple that walks in front of me in the morning on my way to work. They walk extraordinarily briskly and sometimes hold hands and always kiss goodbye at the corner where I turn. If they ever break up, I will cry. I watched the first four Resident Evil movies this weekend with my 16-year-old brother (the fourth is the best one). See, they really all bleed into each other, and the very end of the fourth is the setup for the fifth, which is WHY at the beginning of the fifth, I had no idea what was going on. "There's a boat? What? Hm? People are shooting? Ok." But it made me think about -- wait for it -- representations of women in action films and what this meeeans. Although it's really pretty much gonna be Resident Evil . 'Cause I just saw four of them. The main thing that actually surprised me in the movies is that Milla Jovovich is, IMO, barely sexualized. True, she starts out naked in almost every movie, but that's mor...

So I've (basically) done the reading, and I have Thoughts on the 3/4 mark of Grapes of Wrath . Which shall be SUMMARIZED, because it's late in the day/week. John Ernst Steinbeck, what are you doing. I know you were probably frustrated by how the people emigrating from the Heartland were being treated, and the destitution you saw, but SIR. It was the Great Depression. Things were bad in a lot of places, and not just with farmers, and not just because of tractors. And despite how this section was, in reality a lot of people are not nice. They just aren't. Which is why you can't paint the government camp as this utopian ideal of civilization. It's portrayed like heaven, and if someone is bad, they get kicked out. But if you want all of society to be like that, TO WHERE DO THE BAD PEOPLE GET KICKED? There are so. SO many problems with your ideal. It only works (MAYBE works) in a microcosm. Chapter 23 is poetry. It's beautiful. Let us all respect chapter 23...

Skipping readalong posts in my awesome readalong group (you really should join) is the worst, because not only do you keep optimistically thinking you'll finish the reading and be able to post, but you can't read OTHER people's posts because you're behind. And you can't blog about other things out of guilt ( unless you're Tika ). So here we are, Thursday and still no Grapes of Wrath post. What I WILL say about what I've read is that it's swell, but the government camp is absurdly idealized. ABSURDLY I SAY.  So obviously I've been trying to read Grapes this week, and not a lot else has gone on other than Life Things (booooo). I watched the three aired episodes of Elementary , and get ON that, because Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu and their hilarious dynamic. And don't be all stupid and say you're upset because they're copying Sherlock , for the shows are COMPLETELY different. And *cough* I might like Elementary better.  I'v...

This post is brought to you by Josh Dallas's arms. Yeah. You mine that coal. Or whatever you're doing. WELL. Did everyone have an eventful, cultured weekend? 'Cause, hah, I did. If part of eventful means traveling 20 miles on the Metra to Glencoe to see Hamlet , but then leaving again when the actress my friend and I went to see had an understudy. Because that happened. But I found a pinecone! And carried it back to Chicago with me, for we do not see such things here. On SUNDAY, my friend who works at our natural history museum took me in and I got to see extreme mammals (a subject dear to my heart, because GIANT ANIMALS FROM THE PAST) and Indian art/fancy jewelry. And then -- oh, and then, I met up with Beth Fama in Hyde Park, for she promised to show me the former sites of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and show me she did! Her family is delightful, as is she. Yeah. Check that picturesque shit out. We walked around the University of Chicago, where I was ...

It is FRIDAY. And everyone's being all lame at updating, whereas I have genuinely finished a book, so updating ahoy! Also Sherlock and Irene Adler posted photos on twitter and they are making me SO HAPPY. please do another episode, Lara. please. And I read the apparently BEST-selling mystery novel of all time! And one of the best-selling all-around books of ever. That is crazy. Only not so much, because And Then There Were None , formerly known as Ten Little Indians , formerly known as -- HEY I'm not writing that on my blog, is full of INTRIGUE and not a lot else, but intrigue is enough for a book as short and as intrigueful as it is. I'd never read any Agatha Christies, and I bought this particular book in 2008. Which was four years ago if my stellar math skills are working properly. But the beginning...nope. If you go into Agatha Christie being like "Ah! An English novelist! Huzzah for finely delineated characters and rich description of the Englis...