megotelek

Day 1 - Your fav song
Day 2 - Your fav movie
Day 3 - Your fav TV program
Day 4 - Your fav book

This isn't nearly as agonizing as the last few. There are only two books that can vie for "favorite" in my head:

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott -- I've read this book so many times; it's like comfort food to me. And if I don't have the book handy, I'll just pop in the movie (the 1949 version, with June Allyson as Jo and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy).

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card -- I first read this book when I was probably 11 or 12. I've reread it countless times since, and I recommend it to everyone I know. Card captures the essence of the "precocious child/loner" so well, and the story is heavy and real the way so few stories are nowadays.

( the enemy's gate is down )

Over at bookish, stillwaiting21 posted this list of 100 books that the BBC says most people have only read 6 of:

( snip! )

I've read 37 of them (including ones I read and hated. Yes, I'm talking to you, Dune!). And I have 5 or 6 more on the list that I haven't read. Because I'm that big a geek, here's my partially-catalogued library of books. I think I'm about a quarter of the way through them...maybe a third. Scary!

I'm back from my whirlwind Oregon trip! Jessica and I spent basically all of Saturday at Powell's City of Books. It was heavenly! I left with two bags full, including:

Treasury of Gilbert and Sullivan - the complete piano/vocal Gilbert & Sullivan scores - big old used hardcover ($12! !!!)
Ellery Queen books! I found ones I was missing, including: Ten Days' Wonder, Inspector Queen's Own Case, QBI, Ellery Queen's Calendar of Crime, The Greek Coffin Mystery, and The Tragedy of Y. My collection has just eaten another shelf of my bookshelves. Whee!
The Archivist by Martha Cooley
Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play by Jennifer Deve Brody
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Amman Shea
Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas
The complete Messiah vocal score (Schirmer ed.) EEEEEEE!
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (for John - we watched the movie a few nights ago)

and a couple of presents for the family!

Then we headed over to Salem and had dinner at the Best Little Roadhouse and then out to the Pentacle Theater (really cool, intimate theater out in the woods) and saw their production of Corpse! Great play, great cast/crew. Totally have to plan a giant family trip up there next fall when they do My Fair Lady.

Sunday morning we went and had brunch at the Busick Court Restaurant (Rachael Ray went there for "$40 a Day" when she went to Salem), hit a few more little bookstores, and went to see the City of Ember movie. It was...okay. It wasn't bad, but it could have been better. They condensed and dumbed down the whole puzzle-solving aspect and changed a few things, but overall it was still a good, enjoyable movie and it was faithful to the spirit of the book, if not exactly the letter. The look of the movie was perfect and the casting was great. It really says something for DuPrau's book that you can dumb it down that much and still get a really good movie out of it.

Overall, a fun weekend -- it was great to see Jessica and hang out in the brisk Oregon weather. I basked in the cold the way she basks in the sun when she comes down here. Yes, I'm a freak.

Tonight: back to the Choral Society groove and catching up on Heroes, Life and Valentine. Oh, and My Own Worst Enemy starts tonight (the Christian Slater dual-personality one).

So I finished reading Bitterwood by James Maxey. From the Amazon synopsis:

In the distant future—year 1070 of the Dragon Age, to be exact—Earth has been commandeered by dragons, who subject their human inferiors to lives of misery and squalor, either as slaves or pets. Human Bant Bitterwood, consumed with thoughts of vengeance against the dragons he believes murdered his family, goes on a dragon-killing spree that makes him a folk hero among the oppressed human populace. When Bitterwood slays the dragons' crown prince, Bodiel, their king vows to exterminate humankind—the only way he can be certain of victory over Bitterwood. To that end, the king enlists his murderous brother Blasphet to build a city that will serve as humanity's abattoir.

It was terrific. His world has just enough detail to be fascinating and not so much as to be overwhelming. I love the idea of dragons ruling humans in a sort of alternate-future Planet of the Apes style. The sequel, Dragonforge, is out of stock at the library so I'm waiting for it to come in.

In the meantime, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles (my Jessica-assigned work of literature) and in my to-be-read pile are People of Sparks and Prophet of Yonwood (the 2nd and 3rd books in the City of Ember series) and Foundation by Isaac Asimov (because I've never read any of the Foundation books, but I loved I, Robot so...we'll see how this goes).

Playing With Fire (Silver Dragons, Book 1) by Katie Macalister
Genre: Fantasy/Romance
Pages: 352

From the Amazon description:
Gabriel Tauhou, wyvern of the silver dragons, has found the one woman who can withstand his fire. Too bad May Northcott is already bound to a demon lord. But when the demon orders May to steal one of Gabriel’s treasures—an immensely important relic of all dragonkin— Gabriel has to decide which to protect: his love or his dragons.

( Snip! )

4 / 50 fiction books. 8% done!

0 / 25 nonfiction books. 0% done!

x-posted to bookshare , 50bookchallenge , and my personal journal

Why, thank you for asking!

I am:





take the WHAT BAD BOOK ARE YOU test.


and go to mewing.net. not as good as reading a good book, but way better than a bad one.


Hmm...never read it, so I can't judge. But one of the other ones was Beowulf, which...just because something is old and written in an epic style doesn't make it awful.

Although, my father read me Gilgamesh as a bedtime story when I was very small, so I think I'm in another category altogether...

When I'm reading a 'corporate profile' of some CEO in the paper and under the Personal Interests section, they put that their "favorite book" is The Secret Life of Bees or whatever just came out in the top of the fiction bestseller list or (gag) Oprah's book club. Or worse, something like Who Moved My Cheese? "...because it just SPOKE to me, you know?"

Uh huh. Nothing could make you look any more fake in my book, personally. Come on, tell people your favorite book is actually The Hobbit or Ender's Game or Superfudge. It makes you more believable as a real person -- someone will read that and say, "Hey, that was my favorite book as a kid too! I like how this person thinks!"

I know, I know, I've read new books and said that they were my "new favorite book" about a dozen times -- The Prestige and The Time-Traveler's Wife come to mind -- but to me, the actual "favorite book" is the one that's so worn and dog-eared from being read and reread so many times. The old, comfortable friend.

For me, that would be a tie between Little Women and Ender's Game. I know every word, every line, every punctuation mark -- in a new edition of Ender's Game, they changed some lines of dialogue, and I felt betrayed. I have been known to spend an entire day rereading Little Women, and then digging out my DVD of the 1949 movie with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor to watch.

Or, maybe I take books too seriously in today's fast-paced, high-tech world. But I don't think so. After all, books never need troubleshooting and they still work with the power out.

Also, my new favorite blog: The Grammar Vandal. This woman purposefully carries a pen with her at all times to edit menus, signs, and anything else that has been abused, grammar-wise. Awesome.

I got the book at midnight Friday - and haven't had a chance to devour it until last night. I stayed up until about 2 reading it - took me about 4 1/2 hours to do. Dad, I'll call you about your predictions, but here's what I've been able to sort out so far:

( Major spoilers - if you read this, I warned you! )

After I reread, I’ll be in a better position to talk about it more, I think...

Just a little itty bit of linkspam.  Diane Duane, author of my mostest belovedest Young Wizards series of books, is going to online-publish by subscription the third book in her Feline Wizardry series.  They're set in the same universe as the Young Wizard books but center on a group of cat-wizards...oh, just 

go here 

for a full summary and description of everything.  And subscribe, if you feel like it!  We need to keep the Young Wizards alive!  Aliiiive, I say!

Oh wow...I just realized that I probably read the first book in this series when I was...12?  13?  So at least 10 years ago.  And the newest one, Wizards At War, just came out last summer, which I promptly went out and bought the day it was released on hardcover.  Yes, I am that in love with this series.