Summer 2009

Happy First Day of Summer, Los Angeles! I've been away for awhile, mentally if not physically, but I've missed blogging here. I've been on Twitter a lot in the past week or so, reading all the posts from Iran that have gotten through. It's been a heady experience, reading the blow-by-blow descriptions of the protests by the protesters, but it's been scary too. I don't like to think of students being subjected to the brutality of the rulers of that place. Reminds me of Berkeley in the late 60s/early 70s, and of Kent State.

On a lighter note, I haven't been doing much photography lately, but I do have a couple of neat images to share with you. The first was taken in Pershing Square during the lunch hour a couple of weeks ago. The second is of the park that is just across the street from my apartment taken a month or so ago.

Ah, L.A. Gotta love it!

Let the Right One In

Last year, I read Let the Right One In, a really creepy novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist about Eli, a vampire, and Oskar, a lonely adolescent boy. Set in Sweden in 1981, it is part urban horror fantasy, part literary fiction about troubled youth. When Eli (along with her human protector ~ one of the creepier characters in the story) moves to a suburb of Stockholm and befriends Oskar, a geeky 12-year old boy who is the victim of school bullying, murder and mayhem ensue, but with a twist that I found utterly unexpected. In fact, I may really need therapy, because I found myself rooting for the vampire and a troubled and troublesome teenage boy who lives in the same housing project as Oskar. Though the story was uneven, and the tension never reached the almost painful tautness that King at his best can create, it was well-written, gritty, and undeniably worth reading.

Today I learned that the book has been made into a moviewith Kare Hedebrandt playing Oskar and Lina Leandersson playing Eli. I usually avoid films based on books that I've read, because nine times out of ten, they cruelly disappoint, but Robert Ebert really likes it, so I think I may just take a chance and see it.

Weekend Assignment #252: Book Connections

I just stumbled across this cool blog ~ Outpost Mâvarin ~ courtesy of Florinda (thanks for that!) when I was looking at her blog tonight. Apparently, every week Karen of Outpost Mavarin appoint a "guest professor" to pose a question to her readers. This week, Laura of YBTN, gave the Weekend Assignment. As Florinda said, "[b]oth the main question and the extra credit are hers, as we return to a favorite subject for some of us: books!"

Assignment #252: Where do you get books from?
Extra Credit: What was the last book you read, and why?

I had to respond to this one, because I love talking about books and everything to do with them almost as much as I enjoy reading them! Also, it gives me a chance to give a short, glowing review of the best book I've read so far in 2009.

So, without further ado, here is my response: I get the majority of my books from the library, because I just don't have enough room in my tiny apartment to keep a lot of books. I have over a thousand books in storage as it is, and I just can't bring myself to add more while leaving my old, well-loved books all alone in boxes in a storage unit. It just isn't fair. Still, sometimes I simply MUST have a book, and then I either buy it online from Amazon, go to a used book store, go to a Borders or Barnes & Noble, or go to an indie book store like Metropolis Books in downtown Los Angeles on Main between 4th and 5th Streets. I also like to shop at library sales and thrift shops, although I haven't done that in awhile.

The last book I finished (a couple of nights ago) is my favorite so far in 2009 ~ The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. It won the Pulitzer, and for good reason! It simply blew me away. I even dreamed about it last night, about being at Gettysburg ~ not during the battle, but at the national monument. Though I have never been there before, in my dream I saw some of the old cannon still there, a few statues, and stood at the top of the ridge looking down the slope up which the Rebel army swarmed (and died) in an attempt to break the Union line.

Now, I'm not really much one for books about battles and war. I did read Caesar's The Civil War and Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, but those were different. However, Shaara did an amazing job of making the characters real (well, most of them actually were real people, though Shaara gave them personalities and dialogue while staying within the bounds of what we know about them historically), of making the battle scenes horribly real and the action completely comprehensible.

If I tell you that, toward the end, I wept, even though I knew how it was going to turn out & even though I seldom cry anymore, perhaps that will give an indication of just how impressive The Killer Angels is. In fact, just remembering that bit at the end ("It may be years, it may be forever...") brings an ache to my heart and a thickness in my throat. I want to read it all over again and plan to buy it so I have it on hand. It was that good!

THE KING'S ROSE

I gave this YA historical fiction novel a really good review over at Just One More Page...Or Two a few months ago when I finished the advance reader copy. It's about ready to be released, so I thought I'd just post a link to it for those who are interested in really good historical fiction. This is about Katherine Howard, one of Henry VIII's wives who lost her head over him. :)

Don't be afraid of the YA label. This is suitable for discerning adults too.

Happy New Year 2009!

Wishing each and every one a healthy and happy New Year filled with prosperity and great books to read!

New Writing Projects

I've been moping around since NaNoWriMo ended on November 30. This year's WriMo was, as always, both exhilarating and brutal, and I miss it. Yes, it's nice to be able to read again ~ in fact, I've already finished Fool, a truly bawdy but really entertaining new novel by Christopher Moore based on Shakespeare's King Lear (review coming soon to Just One More Page) and am halfway through Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais, one of my favorite mystery writers, and Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, an anthology of "hair-raising holiday tales," featuring Sookie Stackhouse in a really lovely short story about what starts out as a really lonely Christmas. And, compliments of Hachette Books, I just received a copy of Gods Behaving Badly, a debut by Marie Phillips, which I can't wait to start. (Actually, I've read the first chapter and already it's made me laugh out loud.) You can read more about Gods Behaving Badly and enter a giveaway contest on my blog at Just One More Page.

Anyway besides being able to read again, it's also nice to be able to socialize and relax and blog. But, still, I miss the frenzied madness that is NaNo.

So, to try and end my general mopiness, I have joined a critique group. We're going to meet once a week and critique portions of each other's writing. It's a little scary to think of sharing my fiction writing with others, but they are fellow WriMos, so I think I can trust them to be kind, though I hope they are also honest. Just not brutally so.

I have also signed up for Forward Motion's writing course, which takes two (yikes! two!) years to get through but which could result in a submittable (is that a word?) novel.

Maybe, between the two projects, I will actually manage to finish writing a novel or two. How amusing that would be!

NaNoWriMo November Has Begun!

Hi, Fellow Readers and Bloggers ~ For those who have not yet heard of it, November is NaNoWriMo month. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and NaNoWriMo is a website dedicated to the thousands of people who take on the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel during the thirty days of November. This year will be my third year of doing NaNo, and I won both previous years (2006 and 2007).

What do you win? you might well ask. Well, you win a virtual purple bar and the right to print a out a fancy certificate that says you are a NaNoWriMo winner. No publishing deal, no money, no prizes. Just the aforesaid purple bar, a .JPG of a winners' certificate, and the immense and priceless satisfaction that comes from having actually managed to write a 50,000+ word novel in one month.

Now, the reason I bring this up is two-fold. Firstly, I am, as I mentioned, doing NaNo again this November. Therefore, during every free moment of the entire month, I will be frenziedly typing my NaNoNovel on my lovely little AlphaSmart Dana word processor. Ergo, I will have no time to blog, much less read any novels about which to blog. Neither reading nor blogging for an entire month is a real hardship, but participating in NaNoWriMo is worth it.

Secondly, I will be doing a bit of writing about the NaNo experience at my Musings from the Dark Side blog, and I invite you to visit me there during November if you'd like to read about my crazy and wonderful experiences doing NaNo this year. When I emerge from my novel-writing frenzy in December, assuming I make it through NaNo alive (haha, just joking), I hope to resume blogging here at The Anything Blog, as well as on Just One More Page, where I will be reviewing my favorite mystery author Carol O'Connell's soon-to-be-released new novel "Bone by Bone." (I am sooo excited to have been given an ARC of it to read and review! It just arrived today, in fact, and it is going to be very very difficult to resist reading it until after November.)

So, to all those in the U.S., if I don't have a chance to blog here for awhile, don't forget to vote on Tuesday, be sure to honor our Veterans on November 11, and have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving! And to everyone here and in other parts of this great world, have a great month and please come back in December.

New! Hatchette Book's Blog Talk Radio

This afternoon was just tooling around the web, looking for some suggestions for good books, and I came across this cool site where Miriam Parker hosts Blog Talk Radio shows with various authors. The first interview (with Michael Connelly) aired on Wednesday last.

Turns out, I missed the one with Michael Connelly (who is one of my absolute favorite authors), but I was able to listen to it by going to her site and scrolling down to the blue Blog Talk Radio dial. He gave a wonderful interview ~ talked about how he writes, how he finds things to write about, and how he feels about blog reviews. He also talked about his latest novel coming out soon, THE BRASS VERDICT. I so want to read this sequel to THE LINCOLN LAWYER, which I really enjoyed when I read it earlier this year. You know, Harry's going to be featured in THE BRASS VERDICT too!



Then, next Wednesday 10/29 at 1PM ET, Miriam's going to be interviewing Kathleen Kent, author of THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER. Anyone who wants to can post a question on Miriam's blog and she will put you on the agenda. You can either call into the show at (646) 378-0040 or just listen online here.

I know where I'm going to be next Wednesday! Hope you can join in!

Lists, Lists, Lists!

So I just Stumbled Upon a new website that contains nothing but lists, and, as I've written before, I just love lists. Two that I looked at were the 10 Most Disturbing Novels and the 5 Worst Presidential Candidates Who Lost. Both were eye opening and pretty funny, in a macabre kind of way (at least the one that listed the presidential candidates who lost).

BTW, I've found some interesting stuff through Stumble Upon, though I haven't had much time to explore the site.

Banned Book Week - Never Too Late!

Last week was Banned Books Week. I was a bit busy at work so didn't have time to get involved in the celebration, but in my view it's never too late.

From a post at the Book Therapy blog, here is a list of books that have been banned somewhere in the world at one time or another for one reason or another. I just love lists, don't you? This one is interesting because on most of them I have no idea for what misbegotten reason the book could possibly have been banned. But people who think it's their right to control how others think don't really need a reason, misbegotten or otherwise, I guess.

So, how many have you read?

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes *
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman *
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli *
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens *
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo *
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon *
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce *
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque ***
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury *
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson *
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles *
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius *
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl *
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut *
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ***
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume *
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

I am sad to see that I have not read that many of these books (I bolded the ones I have read and italicised the ones I have partially read; *=books I want to read and ***=books I have in my library). Some are books I have long intended to read but just haven't gotten round to yet. Perhaps one goal for next year will be to read one banned book a month.

Let's all do our parts to combat the book banning control freaks of the world by reading a banned book today!