Hey! What a surprise! Hostile 17! Can I get you a drink, Hostile 17?

Xander ,'Dirty Girls'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


JZ - Oct 08, 2010 11:57:07 am PDT #12591 of 28297
See? I gave everybody here an opportunity to tell me what a bad person I am and nobody did, because I fuckin' rule.

I haven't read Winter's Tale in about twenty years, but the last time I did it made me cry repeatedly. Parts of it are still vivid in my dreamscapes -- all those turn-of-some-other-century-that-never-quite-was New York winters. And I'd know the Lake of the Coheeries the second I saw it, if I was ever fortunate enough to find it.


Deena - Oct 08, 2010 11:58:10 am PDT #12592 of 28297
How are you me? You need to stop that. Only I can be me. ~Kara

I love this site for book shirts: [link]

The kids have already outgrown their pigeon t-shirts, but Kara still has a Viola Swamp sweatshirt.


-t - Oct 08, 2010 11:59:18 am PDT #12593 of 28297
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I did (read a Winter's Tale ), a long time ago, and loved it. On the strength of that, I read Memoir from an Antproof Case when it came out and was disappointed.

Edited for context


JZ - Oct 08, 2010 12:06:32 pm PDT #12594 of 28297
See? I gave everybody here an opportunity to tell me what a bad person I am and nobody did, because I fuckin' rule.

If you read Ellis Island, his early short story collection, you won't be disappointed, not even one tiny bit. And IIRC the novel A Soldier of the Great War is also very not-disappointing; it's not up to Winter's Tale or Ellis Island, but it's much more engaging than Memoir (which I started but had to abandon).


Scrappy - Oct 08, 2010 12:06:50 pm PDT #12595 of 28297
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

LOVE Winter's Tale.


Steph L. - Oct 08, 2010 12:08:45 pm PDT #12596 of 28297
I look more rad than Lutheranism

Those book shirts are tempting, but I already have Attack of Literacy (which I have been photographed wearing in many, many locales), the semi-colon (goodness, I never noticed what a little potbelly I have in that picture!), and El Vetica. I already have the wordnerd trifecta.

(I also now have Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman t-shirts. I can literally get my geek on almost every day of the week.)


-t - Oct 08, 2010 12:13:24 pm PDT #12597 of 28297
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I just looked at a synopsis of A Soldier of the Great War and I think I've read it, probably in between Winter's Tale and Antproof Case, so I must have liked it well enough to pick up the last one. Which I kind of wished I hadn't finished, it actually made me retroactively like his other books less, though I think I have finally gotten over that.


zuisa - Oct 08, 2010 12:13:27 pm PDT #12598 of 28297
call me jacki; zuisa is an internet nick from ancient times =)

I will have to check out Ellis Island!! I haven't read anything else by him.

Do any of you know of books that are comparable in any way? Someone recommended "Little, Big" by John Crowley, which I also enjoyed, but nowhere near as much as I loved "Winter's Tale".


Scrappy - Oct 08, 2010 12:35:53 pm PDT #12599 of 28297
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

100 Years of Solitude? Master and Maragarita? Carter Beats the Devil? The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay?


JZ - Oct 08, 2010 12:44:54 pm PDT #12600 of 28297
See? I gave everybody here an opportunity to tell me what a bad person I am and nobody did, because I fuckin' rule.

Seconding Kavalier and Klay. There are also the YA novels of Joan Aiken, many (most?) of which are set in an almost perpetually wintry alternative-history Victorian/Edwardian England that at times feels like it must exist in the same universe as Lake of the Coheeries.