Jilli, have you read Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys?
I glanced at it in the bookstore and the first story was like an elegant marriage of NIN's video for "Perfect Drug" and the Paris section of Interview With A Vampire.
We have to see the chimp playing hockey! That's hilarious! The ice is so slippery, and, and monkeys are all irrational. We have to see this!
Anya ,'Bring On The Night'
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."
DavidS - Oct 17, 2008 12:36:34 pm PDT #7792 of 28414
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
Atropa - Oct 17, 2008 12:43:45 pm PDT #7793 of 28414
The artist formerly associated with cupcakes.
Jilli, have you read Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys
Yep! They're gorgeous. Her Blood Opera series is still my favorite, but the Paradys books are lovely and overwrought in the best sort of way.
DavidS - Oct 17, 2008 12:55:42 pm PDT #7794 of 28414
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
Then you'll like this tidbit from her website:
August 2008
The Blood Opera pours on
A 4th novel? OK, not quite yet, but a definite probable in the not so far off future - more when I have it.
Atropa - Oct 17, 2008 1:29:23 pm PDT #7795 of 28414
The artist formerly associated with cupcakes.
The Blood Opera pours on
A 4th novel? OK, not quite yet, but a definite probable in the not so far off future - more when I have it.
Yesssssss. I have been WAITING for the 4th book for ages.
Fay - Oct 17, 2008 6:11:52 pm PDT #7796 of 28414
"Fuck Western ideologically-motivated gender identification!" Sulu gasped, and came.
Just finished reading The Graveyard Book.
I would say something incisive and telling and reviewish, but mostly I'm in that word-drenched afterglow, where I just want to pet the covers and run lazy fingers up and down the spine. Lovely book.
Gris - Oct 17, 2008 9:41:52 pm PDT #7797 of 28414
Hey. New board.
Rendezvous with Rama is awesome because it's pretty good hard sci-fi that inspired an amazingly terrible set of Future Romance sequels. Which I, of course, devoured in high school. But man was that whole series bad in retrospect.
I'da gotten the Leobowitz one.
As to the poetry list - i'm not much of a poetry connoisseur, but I love me some "Prufrock," so the list is A-Okay in my book. A book that is probably really poorly written.
DebetEsse - Oct 18, 2008 8:09:57 am PDT #7798 of 28414
Woe to the fucking wicked.
Fay, I just finished it within the last week or so and had a very similar reaction.
It also made me want to read Jungle Book, to get more of the parallels.
DavidS - Oct 18, 2008 6:52:03 pm PDT #7799 of 28414
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
Does everybody who would want such a thing know about The Haunted Looking Glass? Ghost stories chosen and illustrated by Edward Gorey.
Pix - Oct 18, 2008 6:57:35 pm PDT #7800 of 28414
The status is NOT quo.
So Drew and I went to Borders today for the first time in forever, and I bought three books. (YAY! Buying books never gets old.) One of the three was A.J. Jacobs' book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. I'm fascinated by theology anyway, but I also teach the Bible as literature to my ninth graders and am about to start that unit, so I thought it would be an educational and timely (if irreverent) book to read right now.
I started reading it around 4:30 and just finished it. So. Good. Funny, yes, but it was also deeply respectful and unexpectedly touching. It was also incredibly well researched, and it was clear that he really tried to approach the process even-handedly. I've done a ton of research over the past couple of years, but I still learned a lot from reading this book and was vastly entertained. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Here are two excerpts from early in the book about how intimidating this process was for Jacobs, and they capture perfectly how I've felt about teaching the Bible:
I felt torn, anxious about my approach, my monumental ignorance, my lack of preparation, about all of the inevitable blunders I'd make. And the more I read, the more I absorbed the fact that the Bible isn't just another book. It is the book of books, as one of my Bible commentaries calls it. I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, ad fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia. No one has been executed for translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It's intimidating, to say the least. (13)
I'm poring over religious study books, desperately trying to get a handle on this [specific Biblical] topic and every other. My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads. (29)
That last excerpt made me laugh out loud in recognition.
Anyway, I thought some of you might also be interested, so I thought I'd spread my love of this book over here.
Dana - Oct 20, 2008 1:36:23 pm PDT #7801 of 28414
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.