We're Literary 2: To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good
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."
I expect to be beaten for this, but: I don't find Colin Firth sexy in the slightest. As Darcy, or as anyone else.
Also, I like Keira Knightley well enough, but I am already getting tired of her Gwyneth levels of overexposure.
In book news, I am reading the New Yorker. Oh, I did read a book 3 weeks ago - a new-to-me Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck, in a very nice UK paperback edition courtesy of Nutty (not 'Butty' as I originally typed). Not my favorite Heyer - hero too superior and always frickin' right, and the heavy use of actual historical figures as characters took some geting used to - but kicked the ass of most books of its type nonetheless.
NovaChild, I just started reading HP book 4 and just got to the Avra Kadavra part! Spooky timing. =)
flea, it just means more Colin for the rest of us. No prob, honestly. And we all have our quirks - I completely missed the John Cusack meeting. His sister Joan, OTOH, knocks my socks off.
"Regency Buck" is one of my favourites - that's the one with Judith and Perry and Lord Worth, yes? You meet those characters again a few years later, in Heyer's wonderful book set in the days up to, during, and right after Waterloo, "An Infamous Army".
this is the point where I admit with a hangdog expression that even though I majored in history, battle scenes make my eyes glaze over
beth, Infamous Army is less about Waterloo than it is about Brussels and the people (real and fictional) that she's writing about. ALthough she covers the battle, it's not a huge long unbroken battle scene; she does it as much through personalities as through description. It's actually my favourite fictionalised take on Waterloo and the events of that summer; I prefer hers to Thackeray's.
And I know what you mean. Also history major, but most battle scenes? Yaaaaaaawn. Maybe it's because too many of them take them on as somehow heroic, the Grand Sweeping Pageant Of Military Glory.
And I do not now and never have for one moment drunk the Kool-Aid that produces a belief in the rightness of the Grand Sweeping Pageant Of Military Glory.
Also? Don't give a rat's ass about the linear progression of tactics. I want the setting, and I want to care about the people involved. Heyer did that, in spades.
I read Infamous Army sometime in my high school years. I remember skimming through large chunks. It is one of the few of hers that I never reread. I bet I'd feel differently about it now.
I adore Infamous Army. Heyer intertwines the lives of the characters and the battle so naturally and seamlessly that the amoutn of work that went into the piece never shows. The scene where Babs and Judith bond over tea after tending the wounded all day? Brilliant.
The scene where Babs and Judith bond over tea after tending the wounded all day? Brilliant.
Gods, yes. Perfection.
And during the battle itself, what held and kept me were the POVs of people I'd come to care about. Charles, watching a close friend get hit, calling out to another friend shortly after to see if he knew anything, and finding an even closer friend dying nearby...
Crikey. I love that damned book.
Has anyone read
Woman Thou Art Loosed
?
The movie is being released and I'd kinda like to read it. The little girl on a show I watch is gonna be in it and I'm curious if it's any good.
So, I finally read Bet Me, and now I'm all
awwwww
and mushy. Glad to read a nice fun book, after The Mermaids Singing. Also, I had an experience with the current round of library books I've never had -- TWO books I couldn't bring myself to finish. Kind of a bummer.