Do I wish I was somebody else right now. Somebody not... married, not madly in love with a beautiful woman who can kill me with her pinkie!

Wash ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'


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."


Connie Neil - Nov 08, 2006 4:07:47 pm PST #1517 of 28159
brillig

I read Jane Eyre for the first time about six years ago and I adore it.


Fred Pete - Nov 08, 2006 4:51:14 pm PST #1518 of 28159
Ann, that's a ferret.

P-C, if you read Middlemarch make sure you get a copy with footnotes, I believe mine is a Penguin edition. Eliot references lots of events and situations that were current to the times but you probably wouldn't know about.

I'd recommend that for a lot of Victorian novelists. A lot of them (Trollope also comes to mind) were very much of their time. Which grounds their work in a reality but also means they make a lot of dated references.


Megan E. - Nov 09, 2006 4:00:53 am PST #1519 of 28159

Had to share this. I was in a bookstore yesterday and overheard this conversation:

Customer: "Do you have the new James Bond book?"
Clerk: o_O ?
Customer: "You know, Casino Royale?"
Clerk: Welllll, if you go to the fiction section under F, as in Flemming, Ian Flemming, we might have a copy. If you don't find it let me know.

(pause)

Customer: "It doesn't have a movie cover so I'll wait. Thanks".

Wasn't Casino Royale the first James Bond book?


Fred Pete - Nov 09, 2006 4:28:16 am PST #1520 of 28159
Ann, that's a ferret.

Yes, Megan. Came out around 1953 or so. (Yes, I have all the Bonds written by Fleming. I would say "novels," except For Your Eyes Only is a collection of shorter stories, two of which were combined for the movie. And I remain of the opinion that The Spy Who Loved Me could have made a great movie.)


Jessica - Nov 09, 2006 4:57:09 am PST #1521 of 28159
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

It doesn't have a movie cover so I'll wait.

t cries

It's people like this who are the reason it took me weeks to find a non-movie cover version of LotR to replace my water-damaged set after they were destroyed in a terrible humidifier incident.


shrift - Nov 09, 2006 5:29:55 am PST #1522 of 28159
"You can't put a price on the joy of not giving a shit." -Zenkitty

The stupid burns. I should be happy that people at least are in a bookstore, but when I worked at Barnes & Noble, people used to come up to me and ask for the blue book.

They never meant the Kelley Blue Book. It was always that one book with the blue cover, no author, title, or genre to be found in their pointy heads.


Nutty - Nov 09, 2006 5:43:06 am PST #1523 of 28159
"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."

Of course, this customer would get Casino Royale home and be like, WTF is all this World War II crap doing in here!

Cause, as faithful as the movie might be (and I'm pretty sure it's not), it sure doesn't look period. The description of the villain, on like page 3, depends strongly on a WWII context. Which I thought was really cool -- it's hard to come up with a scenario where a guy could have no name and no nationality. WWII displaced persons camps are about the only scenario I can think of in the modern era.


sj - Nov 09, 2006 5:56:37 am PST #1524 of 28159
"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

The stupid burns. I should be happy that people at least are in a bookstore, but when I worked at Barnes & Noble, people used to come up to me and ask for the blue book.

The same thing used to happen at Border5s. All.the.time. "It was blue, and it was on your front table a month ago. How could you not know what book I'm talking about?...No, I don't know the title or the author."


shrift - Nov 09, 2006 6:22:14 am PST #1525 of 28159
"You can't put a price on the joy of not giving a shit." -Zenkitty

It's always blue. I don't know why.


sj - Nov 09, 2006 6:28:36 am PST #1526 of 28159
"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

It's always blue. I don't know why.

It is. I think blue is still statistically the favorite color of the majority of people in the US, or at least that was the way I explained it to myself.