Oops! Forgot to post this yesterday as planned... (Book haul for the week 29 August to 4 September)

I completely forgot I had intended to post this yesterday, so here it is today. I wanted to say a little bit about these books and why I bought them. In future, I think I might join the Stacking the Shelves meme, but for now I'm just posting this without any fanfare.

Fables: When you come across the first two volumes of something like this, second hand and at 70% discount from the already low second-hand price, you go for it (even without the discount). I am familiar with Bill Willingham's work from The Sandman Presents (I even have a couple of the books) and am looking forward to reading these.

Bone: I have heard a lot of good things about Bone and decided to sample it by reading this book. However, it's volume 8 of 9 and I hope I will not spoil the story for myself by reading it, so maybe I'll get the rest from the library and read them in the right order.

Human Disastrophism: I have one other Love and Rockets book, a collection of Locas stories by Jaime Hernandez, but I'd heard good things about the Palomar stories of his brother Gilbert, so I got this book when I found it.

Guys & Dolls: Loved the musical, have always wanted to read the stories.

The Robert Ryan books: The 'Based on' and 'Inspired by' a true story intrigued me. After I bought them I discovered that they are a series, although they appear to be independent stories.

The remaining two I liked the look of and even if I don't read them, my mother will.

Comments

Jono said…

For me the Fables look intriguing right away.

September 07, 2016 4:47 pm

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Reading in Reykjavík

Search This Blog