First of all, this is a sequel. If you haven’t read the preceding novel A Wizard of Earthsea, then go do that right now. It’s not long. I’ll wait… It’s wonderful, right? I remember how the prose grabbed me when I first read it, and it still grabs me that same way. It’s like The Gunslinger in that way; it feels truly, effortlessly ethereal. The text exists outside of time, as do all great fairy tales. And that’s the one problem with the sequel. Much […]
A Last Natural Wilderness
Milan Kundera wrote “Beauty is a world betrayed… [t]he only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere.” You know that feeling of discovering something beautiful? Something, perhaps, overlooked? In the case of a book, chances are that you didn’t really “discover” it, not in any real sense of the word. Someone else discovered it, and then a lot of other people discovered it too – after all, there it is, printed and bound and sitting in your lap. But maybe you […]
CBR Review #2: Alanna: The First Adventure
The book cover I’m using is the original cover for the first edition of this book, from back in 1982 (I think). To me, this is the only cover that I even acknowledge. It’s the first one I saw, and the best one. It’s so evocative of the story, whereas the newer ones are just blah. I review this book over on my blog. Sorry, my site is slow. I need my husband to upgrade the hosting to a *faster* site, but he’s cheap. […]
Silas Marner Gets the Lifetime Movie Treatment
This novel was, apparently, a New York Times bestseller. I don’t recall reading any reviews of it, but I’m guessing it was a big hit with folks looking for something easy to take to the beach or on long plane rides. The funny thing is, it’s exactly the type of book the main character hates. AJ Fikry is an over-educated 40-ish widower who owns a bookstore on Alice Island, which is near Nantucket. He is grumpy and has very exacting tastes in literature, preferring short […]
Books, Blood, Love, And Barcelona
“Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over, until the breath of dawn touched the window and my tired eyes slid over the last page.”
Slick As Sh*t
There is a very deliberate sort of chaos in Perdido Street Station. Everything about it is designed to force square pegs into the rounder, well-worn holes of our expectations for fantasy and horror. Its pages are occupied by fantastical races, but their separation from humanity is stark and marked. There are no beautiful elves or noble dwarves found in New Crobuzon, but there are frog-like vodyanoi and beetle-headed khepri and culturally alien bird-folk and inconveniently spiny cactus people and…and…and… There is a very deliberate […]
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