A Newsy Post

By -
I have various things to talk about, some upcoming events and whatnot...

I hope everybody is gearing up for Banned Books Week, which is coming up fast in the fourth week of this month: 21-27 September.  At least, that's how it feels to me!  For the past few years I've been kind of in charge of BBW at work, and now I've been voted official Queen of Banned Books Week.  So I'll be preparing like mad for the next little while.  I guess I don't usually talk about it here a whole lot, since I do it so much at work, but I did post the mug shot I took last year.



Guess what??  Lory at Emerald City Book Review is hosting a special Diana Wynne Jones event!  During Witch Week, there will be a readalong of Witch Week and discuss a new DWJ book daily. 





Here's the schedule:

Preview: October 30 - Master post with link-up and giveaway
Day 1, October 31 - Fire and Hemlock
Day 2, November 1 - Power of Three
Day 3, November 2 - Howl's Moving Castle
Day 4, November 3 - The Spellcoats
Day 5, November 4 - Deep Secret
Day 6, November 5 - Witch Week (Readalong)
Day 7, November 6 - Honorable mentions and wrap-up

I always love a good DWJ event and I think it's a fantastic idea to have it during Witch Week. :)  Can't wait!  I hope you'll join up too!


In other news, I've been reading Romantic fiction for the Classics Club September theme and incidentally for RIP IX.  I've finished Frankenstein and will post on that pretty soon. I'm also well into Melmoth the Wanderer, which is quite interesting and (bonus) Eugene Onegin's favorite book!  So far we have all the classic ingredients of a good Gothic tale: crumbling ancestral halls, an old sheaf of papers found in a drawer, nearly indecipherable, a survivor of a shipwreck with a fascinating tale to tell, and scary bad monks.  As a matter of fact, the monks have kind of taken over.  I'm about a third of the way through, and the shipwreck survivor is telling his tale of oppression at the hands of Spanish monks--and so far he's been talking for about half of the third I've read.  I'm wondering if he will ever escape, or if the book will ever get back to Melmoth.

And I'm reading War and Peace, a tale of Russia and the Napoleonic wars.  I think it's interesting that Tolstoy refused to call it a novel; he seems to have considered it to be something else, and indeed it is not  structured like most novels.  It does, however, remind me of some other giant books I've read, like In the First Circle or A Suitable Boy, where the author wants to give the reader an image of a whole society at a particular moment in time, so there are many, many characters in different walks of life.  War and Peace is not, so far, as all-encompassing as that, but it's kind of similar in feel.  My 1300-page paperback is so unwieldy that it's not easy to read as often as I usually would; this is one case where having it divided into two or three volumes would really help a lot, and would probably be worth the extra price.

Comments

  1. Kristen M.September 6, 2014 at 11:57 PM

    We definitely have an abundance of great reading events and challenges at this time of year! I'm glad you're joining in on the DWJ event too. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. LorySeptember 7, 2014 at 4:06 PM

    Thanks for spreading the word about Witch Week! I'm glad you'll be joining us too.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more