Sophocles - Oedipus Rex:

"You'll marry your mother..."

"No I won't!"

"well, ya did."

(not mine - saw it in Cassie Edwards' to-use list)

Huh. Cell phone novels are huge in Japan

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

Wow.

The legendary and otherwise unavailable Flying Karamazov Brothers version of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is up on YouTube.

Ok - I just picked up the first Libba Bray. While I won't be opening the book tonight I am confused - she looks like my kinda book - why hadn't I heard of her of her until she showed uo in the thread a couple of days ago?

Has anyone ever read Cecilia Dart-Thornton? I checked out a couple of her books from the library, based on rave reviews...and I don't like her at all. I just kept reading with a huge feeling of her trying WAY too hard to be Lyrical and Poetical...and I LIKE formal court-fantasy...but I just felt like I wanted to take her thesaurus away from her and beat her with it and scream "Show! Don't tell!"

I dunnno wht it irritated me so much, but I had to vent. I feel better. Anyone?

why hadn't I heard of her of her until she showed uo in the thread a couple of days ago?

Gaps in the hivemind exist, is my guess.

why hadn't I heard of her of her until she showed uo in the thread a couple of days ago?

We need to be better about posting in Literary? :)

Has anyone ever read Cecilia Dart-Thornton?

Y'know, I thought I had just seen the book "Ill Made Mute" everywhere, but then I looked on Amazon, and read the description and realize I actually read it, at some point? Clearly, it did not make a strong enough impression that I read the rest of her stuff...and yet, I vaguely recall enjoying it. Hrm.

My experience with Dart-Thornton's Bitterbynde Trilogy was decidedly mixed. I loved the first two books ( The Ill-Made Mute and The Lady of the Sorrows ). Her prose was at least a little purplish, but the plot was tight, and I loved the way she mixed in older folk stories. The characters were interesting and developed in logical ways.

I thought the last book ( The Battle of Evernight ) was an absolute disaster. The plot was all over the place. She threw out every bit of character development at a critical point in the story. She decided to write an "Author's note" to the paperback version to explain the ending because (paraphrased) "fans had been writing and asking her to explain". I can't help but think if she wrote the story to be consistent with the other two, such a note would not have been necessary.

I read The Iron Tree, the first book in "The Crowthistle Chronicles". I haven't bothered to read the other books in this series, due to the extreme eye-rolling experience I had with the first one.

I did love the first two Bitterbynde books so much though. It was largely my experience with Dart-Thornton that prompted me to stop buying books and to start using my library more. I find I'm less likely to be so annoyed by books I haven't spent hard-earned money on.

So I'm going to try to follow this thread a bit more closely. Now that i have a Kindle, reading is even easier and more addictive than it was before, and impulse purchases are easier than ever, so this could be bad idea. But whatever.

So far this year, I've read mostly Meg Cabot novels. I'm five books into her "Mediator" series, which is actually pretty great. YA Horror/Fantasy about a girl who can talk (and beat up) ghosts. The series feels like it has a lot of Buffy influence, even down to the Watcher character and the inappropriate supernatural love interest. Though with the added wrinkle that only the heroine and the watcher can (typically) see or interact with the ghosts at all. It has the same casual humor and easy flow of all of her books (YA and otherwise), and the supernatural elements provide for some cool plots. I have never read a Meg Cabot novel I didn't enjoy, but I really think that lots of Buffistas might feel that way about this series.

I also read Atonement after seeing the movie, and loved it. And I got some sample chapters of novels that might come next - some Chuck Palahniuk stuff, "Dead Witch Walking" by Kim Harrison, "A Game of Thrones" by George R. R. Martin, "A Perfectly Good Family" by Lionel Shriver, "Saturday" by Ian McEwan, and/or "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer.

I'm reading You Don't Have to be Wrong for Me To Be Right, The World Without Us, You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty, and got a subscription to The New York Times for my nonfiction at the moment. Apparently, I read nonfiction in parallel, not serial.