one book, two book, three book four... and five

I wanted to write this post ages ago, in responses to the post over on Stuck-in-a-book post, but blogger has been playing up and uni assignments have been calling... so some of these books are out of date, and some have been changed, but here we go...


The book I'm currently reading...




I loved Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles SO MUCH when I was younger, but I haven't read anything else by her (or even the whole set of the Chronicles, for that matter). This is living up to my expectations, it's a regency/fantasy book and it's so much fun! The main character is a street urchin in London who dresses as a boy to stay out of trouble and takes a job breaking into Mairelon the magician's caravan and is then taken on as an assistant. Adventures ensue.


The last book I finished...






I am reading quite a bit of fantasy at the moment I feel, and this is also set in a quasi-regency period, but with the added complication of an alternate history and a spirit world. I'm also reading a lot of books I really enjoy, I loved this one. Kate Elliot has impressed me in the past with her attention to historical detail in worlds not quite like our own (in her Crown of Stars series, which I nonetheless never finished for reasons of timing), and I've been meaning to read some of her other books for a while. Unfortunately, as with the Crown of Stars, the series hasn't been finished yet, but when I finished this book I was dying to read the next one. I guess I'll just have to wait...




The next book I want to read...


This book intrigued me, from the title to the premise (a nine year old girl finds she can taste the feelings of the person who made the food in all the food she eats). Actually I have started reading it in digital form, but I want to get my hands on it and finish it and figure it out. This is a strange one...


The last book I bought...




Latest in a series! Can't resist. I'm always amazed at how Kate Griffin manages to start each one of these books right in the middle of a crisis, but it is definitely a way to get the reader's attention. I like her portrayal of London through magic, I do sometimes feel the lack of secondary characters. Mind you, I wouldn't want to be a secondary character in this series, they don't usually last for long...


The last book I was given...


This is a tricky one, since I tend to be given books in lumps. In fact I guess The Neon Court would count as the last book I was given, since I bought it with a book voucher. But I think the last time I was given an actual book was Christmas, and there were a few: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, The City and The City by China Mieville, The Grimm Reader by Maria Tatar, The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman and Truth by Peter Temple are the ones that spring to mind. Not a big fan of Truth, but really enjoyed The City and the City and The Grimm Reader, also Freedom but it suffered a bit from not being The Corrections.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

famous first words

Skimming through the internet the other day I came across a reference to a line of startling familiarity, a line that made me realise some first lines stick in your head forever: "Sing Goddess, the rage of Peleus' son Achilles" (funnily enough,  I can never remember the first line proper until I see it, as my friend and I spent much of year 12 Ancient History misquoting it as "rage Achilles, rage on Agamemnon". We were also amused by the fact that 'Xerxes' backwards spelt 'Sexrex'. Yeah, mature I know.) From Homer, The Illiad Ironically, a first line that I find impossible to remember is one of the most recognisable for me. I'm not usually very good at first lines, but there are a few I'd know anywhere... "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote" My English classes at university drummed this one into me- the first line of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'. I think Chaucer is a genius, but this first line is not quite ...
Read more

To Start With, Quotes

From my little black book. Sign outside Branxton: "Drive carefully, we have two cemetaries, no hospital" Tombstone, Tilba cemetary: "Whiffo gone fishing A free spirited man who is forever in our hearts" "Heinz tomato ketchup makes food taste KETCHUPPY" - tomato sauce bottle "I was just wondering how I ever could have laughed at you" "I hope you'll always laugh at me" The Day Will Dawn, cheesy movie from 1942 "Each man kills the thing he loves" The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde Ad outside Japanese restaurant in Sydney city "Sexy chicken on rice" "I don't own a house or a car, all I have is a borrowed tv, but that's what you get when you take off and travel." Random bus stop conversation “She had a voice with hormones” ‘A Woman’s Secret’, 1949 movie “Oolong Imperial: A work of tea art” Tea rooms in the city “The burdens and the joys of being chosen to be more than a flu...
Read more

on verse

I had alot of time to kill on the bus trip back from Canberra, and so I was reading through my English textbook (The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, so not too bad at all)for about three hours. This is just so that you understand the cotext in which I came up with the idea for this post. Why do people always associate poetry with rhyme? It doesn't have to be the case. And I think that most people would know that alot of poetry doens't rhyme, or is at least not in rhyming couplets. This is not even a new idea. It's not just these new-fangled poets who dispense with tradition and so rhyme. Old English poetry doesn't rhyme, it alliterates instead. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse which means NO RHYMING. Robert Browning doesn't always write in rhyme. In short, poetry doesn't necessarily equal rhyme even before the 21st century. Now, I have to confess that I am a bit biased in this as I always thought that rhyming couplets tend to sound silly. And abab...
Read more