Pity the iPhone users!

Alas, the poor iPhone users, bereft of the ability to highlight text!

(and the quick-edit link is always above the posting box should you forget)

Thanks, amych! (I have a bad habit of not seeing things that are always there.)

My daughter loved the first 2 Twilight books, and we had to pre-order the 3rd when it came out. She was 14/15 when they came out, so right in the target demographic and all her friends loved them too. They spent hours discussing them.

She begged me to read the first 2, which I did. They weren't my cuppa, but eh? they were OK. Lots of teen angst and twu wuv. She didn't like the end of the 3rd one and told me that it was not what she was looking for - dunno what she didn't like. When I asked if she wanted to get the new one she said "nope I'm reading Neverwhere instead". Now that I see what this one is about, I'm thinking that her choice was the right one.

Your daughter is a discerning young woman, Dawn.

Teppy - my God, you are so right about Skulduggery being Remington Steele. I mean - he really, really, REALLY is. Notwithstanding the fact that he is an animated skeleton.

Thoroughly enjoyed that book. Then this morning I read Blood and Chocolate, which was so much better than the recent movie version that I wanted to go find the movie-making people and beat them to death with a blunt werewolf. (Honestly! What the fuck IS IT with people taking a book and then making it into a crapfest? I didn't have the heart to watch The Seeker, because every single thing I heard about it made me want to weep and/or hunt down the movie makers and strangle them with their own intestines for pissing all over Susan Cooper's fantastic The Dark Is Rising sequence. Rat bastards. Strangulation is too good for them.) Blood and Chocolate turns out to be a very nice little coming-of-age story. A fact which seems to have escaped the film-makers, who retained very nearly nothing at all other than a few names and the fact that the female protagonist is a werewolf. (And, Jesus, it's not like the title is subtle - hello, menstruation, anyone? Time of the month? Hair in unexpected places?) I like the book as much as Ginger Snaps, which it (happily) doesn't much resemble. Apparently she's also written a vampire book called Silver Kiss - anyone happened across it?

On a not-particulary-related note, a few months ago I was delighted to find a copy of Meredith Pierce's Darkangel, which I read when I was 16 or so and loved loved loved. Hadn't read it since, and I was startled to find that it had subsequently become book one of a trilogy. On the whole, I didn't love the trilogy - the first book was strange and vivid and wildly creative, a sort of gothic fairy tale set on the moon, but the subsequent books were a lot more ordinary. No, that's not quite fair. Rather - I loved the fact that the first book DIDN'T explain everything. It had fairytale logic going on, and it was very evocative rather than explicit when it came to worldbuilding. I felt that in choosing to expand her story and fill in the blanks, she actually made it smaller. Like the manga spinoff from the Labyrinth movie. And...wow, I'm really not expressing myself well. However, I really did like the ending of the trilogy quite a lot. And the 2nd and 3rd books weren't bad or uninteresting. Just - less wondrous. Less whimsical, perhaps. Less like a fairytale, and more like a YA fantasy novel sequence.

I don't suppose anyone out there has read them?

eyes tumbleweeds.

shrugs.

surveys other bootie from yesterday's shopping expedition.

Hmm...I'm thinking maybe Delia Sherman's Changeling next. Wonder how it will compare to Holly Black's treatment of the same subject matter?

I think this is probably the right place to post this.... Pauline Baynes, illustrator of the Narnia books - amongst many others - and as such responsible for the pictures inside millions of children's heads, has died.

[link]

Oh no. I grew up on these books, and I'm still a big Narnia fan.

The Narnia in my head is Pauline Baynes' Narnia, just as much as my Alice is Tenniel's and my Sherlock Holmes is Sidney Paget's. You will pry my crumbling Puffin Pauline Baynes' Narnia books from my cold dead fingers.

Teppy - my God, you are so right about Skulduggery being Remington Steele. I mean - he really, really, REALLY is. Notwithstanding the fact that he is an animated skeleton.

He's just such a *suave* motherfucker, you know?

Thoroughly enjoyed that book.

Go read the sequel -- it's just as good, IMO.

On the drive up to Canada, we listened to The Map That Changed the World, which is FABULOUS. And I think it works better as a book on tape because if I were reading it myself, I'd probably wind up skimming over most of the in-depth geology stuff to get to the racy gossip and science v religion bits. But I highly highly recommend it in either print or audio format - it's not something I ever would have picked up on my own (my dad gave me a DVD full of audiobooks right before we left), but I'm very glad to have read it.

Book review time again! Galveston by Sean Stewart and The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips.