A small computer problem (motherboard failure) causes me to interrupt my blogging activities for a hopefully short time. While John is slaving away fixing the damn thing I will use the time to read more. Thank God a delivery from Awesome Books has arrived on Saturday…
Carin from A little bookish and I exchanged a few bookish gifts recently. Can you believe that during her move last year she lost the book bag I sent to her in one of our swaps?! For someone who looks so well after her books she certainly is rather careless when it comes to looking after her book bags! But all that aside, I sent her a replacement book bag and some bookmarks and…what else?…I can’t remember whether I sent anything else at all. Maybe that was it.
Carin sent me all this:
She knows I love bags as much as the next girl (or maybe even more) from our big grocery bag exchange in 2010. So she got me a book bag from Powell’s together with some bookmarks, a postcard, a store map (yes, that store has its own map and from the looks of it it certainly needs it) and a sticker (I believe anyone telling me they got lost in the city of books!) as well as another large red shopping bag from a store called Food Fight, a vegan grocery/convenience store in Portland. It’s very sturdy and will definitely accompany on my future shopping trips. Thanks, Carin, for the awesome goodies!
This is a collection of essays and my first encounter with David Foster Wallace. The first essay is about “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” and it starts like this:
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics.
I am only a few pages into this and I find it quite different.
What is YOUR book beginning today? To see more book beginnings go to A few more pages!
There were 46 entrants in the Dreaming of books giveaway where I gave away a used copy of “Gods behaving badly” by Marie Phillips.
Random.org drew number 3
and that is
Kristilyn from Reading in Winter
Congrats, Kristilyn! I will get in touch with you by email. Happy Reading!
OK, so I finally broke down and got a tumblelog. I keptseeing those nice, clean tumblr posts and always wondered what tumblr was. Actually it is quite a nice way to post things that don’t fit exactly on the blog but I want to have together in one place anyway. Photos, quotes, videos, random stuff….So, there I am, at the (still very empty) Teleidoscope 2.0. Have a look and follow me if you like!
Have you got a tumblelog? If so, link me up, please!
Blurb:
Narnia…a land frozen in eternal winter…a country waiting to be set free.
Four adventurers step through a wardrobe door and into the land of Narnia – a land enslaved by the power of the White Witch. But when almost all hope is lost, the return of the Great Lion, Aslan, signals a great change…and a great sacrifice.
In a nutshell:
I read it in: English
I liked it: Kind of yes, kind of no
For people who like: fairy tales, fantasy, good vs. evil
My thoughts:
This was the quickest read for me in a long time. I started some time in the morning and was done in the afternoon (including the usual family interruptions, I might add). According to the target group the story was not overly complicated and extremely easy to follow.
I liked the general idea of the children discovering another world by entering a wardrobe, moving through fur coats and leaving through the back. But there were a few things I didn’t like at all.
- The mishmash of characters in Narnia that just didn’t go together. Giants, trolls, fauns, speaking beavers, satyrs, unicorns, centaurs, for me they don’t all belong into the same universe. What I found even more annoying was the appearance of Santa Claus. What on Earth does he do in a parallel fantasy world? And gives some useful gifts, too. Those gifts sounded more like fairy gifts than from jolly old Santa.
- The witch was mean, but stupid. She could have gotten more use out of Edmund after he came to her castle had she been a bit nicer. As it was she made him realize how wicked she really was and he turned against her. That wasn’t something I would have expected her to do. She should have kept up her sweet, deceiving personality a little longer.
- Aslan, well, that little trick he pulled was not very honourable. I didn’t care about the Christian aspects of that scene but what really annoyed me was that he betrayed the deal with the witch. He gave her his word (implied by his furious roar when she asked about whether she could trust the deal will be honoured) and then he comes up with the even older magic crap which the witch didn’t know about. Not fair! I admit he had to go through a fair amount of humiliation and yes, the witch would have not been honourable and honest either, but two wrongs don’t make a right (sorry about having to quote a commonplace here). Also this is not a very good example for children. I know something you don’t, so I can cheat on you easier. And that is ok, because you are evil and I am good. I didn’t like that. At all.
It was an ok start to the series as the children discovered Narnia together with me. I am curious to know what comes next. At the same time I am quite apprehensive. Will the series continue to give such dubious messages to its readers? The end justifies the means isn’t something I 100% agree with. We will see.
Movie tip
The chronicles of Narnia: The lion, the witch and the wardrobe
Product info and buy link :
| Title | The lion, the witch and the wardrobe |
| Author | C. S. Lewis |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| ISBN | 9780007115617 |
| I got this book from | I bought it |
| Buy link | Buy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe |
If you click on the buy link above you will be taken to The Book Depository.co.uk. If you buy the book through this link I will earn a small commission. You can find my general affiliate links to The Book Depository, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com here.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it? I would love to hear other opinions.
This post is part of
my Narnia Reading Project 2012.
It’s time for another “Quizzical Monday”!
Question:
It’s about a classic today.
What book does Julien Sorel belong into? What are the names of the two real people who were the character models for Julien?
A hint: This is the author of the book.
Leave a comment with your answer. Then, to see whether you got it right, click on "Show" below. As usual, there is nothing to be won, this is just for fun!
Hosted by The Story Siren
This week I mostly got books to feed my McCall Smith addiction and to add a bit more by M. C. Beaton to my shelf. More to come next week.
I swapped
- Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by M. C. Beaton. Since I liked Hamish Macbeth, I decided to try out the Agatha Raisin series as well.
I bought
- The comforts of a muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith
- The lost art of gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith. Those two are the fifth and sixth book in the Sunday Philosophy Club series.
From the library
- The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
What was in YOUR mailbox recently? Check out other In my mailbox participants here.
Blurb:
Isabel Dalhousie—the nosiest and most sympathetic philosopher you are likely to meet—now has a son, Charlie, whose doting father Jamie has an intriguing idea to pose to Isabel: marriage. But Isabel wonders if Jamie is too young to be serious? And how would Cat respond? On top of these matters, the ambitious Professor Dove has seized Isabel’s position as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. However, nothing it seems can diminish Isabel’s innate curiosity. And when she recognizes that two paintings attributed to a deceased artist have simultaneously appeared on the market, she can’t help but think that they’re forgeries. So Isabel begins an investigation and soon finds herself diverted from her musings about parenthood and onto a path of inquiry into the soul of an artist.
In a nutshell:
I read it in: English
I liked it: Yes
For people who like: Edinburgh, Scottish isles, philosophy
My thoughts:
Again, I totally loved Alexander McCall Smith’s style and find it almost incredible how he writes from a woman’s point of view. This is simply amazing, he must have studied women a lot.
Isabel is a mother now. has that mellowed her? Certainly not! She is her old meddling self and again her thoughts about people and her own actions diverge considerably.
Example: She thanks Jamie (the happy father) for not going away when he learned that she was pregnant. She did think it possible that he would prefer his freedom. OK, fair enough. However, only a few pages later she gets irritated when she realizes that people had speculated about whether Jamie would stay or leave. Now, if she herself wasn’t even sure about that, she can hardly blame strangers to wonder, can she?
Her getting involved is once more completely a matter of choice. This time I found her even a little conceited. She tells an expert at a gallery about her suspicion of forgery and even though she has even less clue how to proceed in the matter she still thinks she can do more than the gallery guy.
There are a couple more issues I have with her but I am not going into great lengths about it here (her dealing with Dove which could be called spite, especially since she had no proof for what was going on; her stance on assassinating a tyrant, considering her opinion about the death penalty). All these things are part of her personality and without them the books wouldn’t be as charming as they are.
The next two instalments are already waiting for me.
Location: Edinburgh and Jura, Scotland, UK
Images from Google maps and wikipedia (Barnhill by zilchy111 and Corryvreckan by Russ Baum)
Product info and buy link :
| Title | The careful use of compliments |
| Author | Alexander McCall Smith |
| Publisher | Anchor |
| ISBN | 9781400077120 |
| I got this book from | I bought it |
| Buy link | Buy The careful use of compliments |
| More info | Alexander McCall Smith’s website |
If you click on the buy link above you will be taken to The Book Depository.co.uk. If you buy the book through this link I will earn a small commission. You can find my general affiliate links to The Book Depository, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com here.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it? I would love to hear other opinions.
For the Mount TBR challenge 2012 as well as to continue last year’s Steampunk challenge I am reading “Changeless” by Gail Carriger right now. I am sure quite a few of you know it already.
This is the first paragraph:
“They are what?”
Lord Conall Maccon, Earl of Woolsey, was yelling. Loudly. This was to be expected from Lord Maccon, who was generally a loud sort of gentleman – the ear-bleeding combination of lung capacity and a large barrel chest.
I would say this is the typical style of the Parasol Protectorate books. Have you read any of them? Did you like them?
What is YOUR book beginning today? To see more book beginnings go to A few more pages!
