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the great god pan

 

 

the once upon a time challenge ends today and i’ve only posted one review in all this time! so with today being the final day I thought I’d make a push to get at least one more review out there! 

before i do that, let me just list the books i read for the challenge. i did the read 5 or more from any sub-genre challenge – although, for the first time, i think i could actually fit a book into each of the four sub-genres. i read:

1. courtney crumrin and the night things, a gothic fantasy comic book by ted naifeh
2. barking, a comic fantasy novel by tom holt
3. wizard of earthsea by ursula le guin
4. the time traveler’s wife, which i see as a modern fairy tale (aside from primarily being a romance, of course)
5. the end of mr. y, a sort of urban fantasy sort of psychadelic, novel by scarlett thomas
6. the great god pan by arthur machen

i thoroughly enjoyed all of them and hopefully i’ll be able to review more than just two of these! okay onto the great god pan:

this would probably fit into the mythology bracket but also has elements of horror and folk tale in it. written in the 1890s the story starts off with a typically cruel victorian experiment in which a scientist of some sort does some surgery on a woman’s brain in order to enable her to see the god pan – an experiment which leaves her feeble-minded. many years later high-flying and influential londoners start committing suicide and a mysterious woman appears on the social scene. before long it becomes clear that the woman and the suicides are definitely connected.  

i am now a shaman

well, sort of. well, not really. in the warcraft sense.

some of you may remember when i posted about being a peon two years ago. that was when i was quite new to my job. the good news is that i’ve slowly moved up a bit, but very sneakily.

i wanted to post about becoming a grunt or a headhunter or a witch doctor, but my elevation was never as clear-cut as that. i was sort of like that little unit you have when you sometimes play, who ends up doing little extra jobs that you don’t expect – like the villager who takes up arms, or the lone marine who defends a structure when really you need a tank there or something. and then you play on and play on and surprisingly that little lone unit survives.

“r2!!”

 

 

imagine that. r2d2 in your kitchen. just that sentence makes my mind whirl!

 

i’ve seen this a few times from the street as i walk by and each time it puts a smile on my face.

 

i took quite a risk taking this photograph, though! you’re not even allowed to look at people in the street – never mind through the windows of houses! if i’d been spotted i’d have been drawn and quartered.

 

seriously! you think i’m joking? i mean it. so, i had to be very surreptitious and pretend i was sending a text or something.

courtney crumrin and the night things

courtney and her family have moved to this rich neighbourhood to live with their uncle, professor aloysius crumrin. the good bit is that aloysius lives in a gothic mansion. the bad is everything else – courtney hates her parents, the new town she’s moved to and all the stupid rich kids at her new school. luckily for us, and for little courtney, uncle aloysius isn’t all he seems, and the gothic mansion is exactly what it seems!

the stars my destination by alfred bester

this is one of those big science fiction books, one of the classics (for those of you who have already read it or know the premise, feel free to skip through my intro).

shipwrecked, for months gully foyle floats in space, alone, merely surviving until he sights another spaceship nearby. frantically he lets off numerous flares to attract its attention – it sees him, goes toward him and then, inexplicably, flies past.

galvanised by his rage at being left for dead foyle escapes from his predicament and with his newfound freedom single-mindedly focuses all his attention on one objective: revenge for being left to die.

at its heart the stars my destination is simply and purely a delightful revenge story. there is much to it but its for being a revenge story that i like it first and foremost.

yeeeeeaaahh!!

i love this photo!

and people think cricket is boring…

cupcakes and marzipan mice

to my good fortune charlotte is still happily baking away! since the last cake she has made three more forays into the kitchen and she promises there are many cakes still to come!

the count

 

 

that old vampire, he’s been creeping around in my mind more and more lately. very subtly – much like he does in the book.

 

i really enjoyed it the first time i read it but it didn’t stand out as one of the best books i’d read. but its a creeper. its one of those that stays. that floats in your subconscious. that grows.

 

i find myself thinking about it more and more. not voluntary thoughts, mind, just thoughts.

 

i finally realised that i love the book when i had one particular thought – the thought that is a pure giveaway that a book has become one of my favourites. i was about to recommend it to a friend when, suddenly, i felt incredibly jealous!

 

i envied him so much for being in that position of not having read dracula. of not knowing that wonderful world he was about to enter. for that first meeting with stoker’s wonderful novel… and the count’s warm embrace.

 

snow!

 

 

 

we’ve had a lot of snow here in england recently and it’s been quite exciting! it’s also caused chaos! while it does snow here once or twice a year it’s always very light and if it settles its barely a few inches thick. this time it was about 6 inches thick and britain came to a standstill!

 

well-read?

 

 

so, this 1000 books to read before you die has got me thinking. ignoring the debate about what is and what isn’t “good” and even having a list recommended to one, what has really got me thinking is discovering how few of these books everyone has read.

 

does that mean that all these people aren’t well-read? even nymeth, bookalactus (the devourer of books), the most well-read person I’ve ever encountered? hell no!

 

and yet, all those books seem good. i’ve heard of many of them and those that i haven’t heard of i’m discovering are highly rated too. so they’re all worth a look.

 

what this list has highlighted for me, then, is that we have to adjust our parameters regarding what we consider to be well-read.

 

my wife baked a cake!

 

 

 

charlotte has often said how she used to bake a lot as a child but in the 5 years that we’ve known each other i’ve never seen any of this baking. she often said she fancied baking again but it never happened.

 

then the other day she actually started to write lists of what she’d need to get and even bought a book. she started planning what she was going to bake and on sunday we actually went and bought baking trays! the moment we got home she started fussing about the kitchen like mr. tumnus and before i knew it she was dancing about and madly babbling instructions to herself.

“kill your boyfriend” by grant morrisson

i’ve got a lot of time for grant morrisson. i don’t always like how he approaches things but he has some wonderful ideas. i particularly like his mind-bending stuff, like the filth and flex mentallo which is very much my cup of tea.

i also really rate his arkham asylum which, i recently realised, is even better than i thought it was. thats because i read the special edition last year, containing the original script which is amazing.

kill your boyfriend is about a schoolgirl who is living a boring life with stifling middle class parents and an inattentive boyfriend. she desperately wishes for some fun and meaning to enter her life. it is then when this bloke who she’s seen on the bus comes into her life, urges her to kill her boyfriend and whisks her away on an adventure of sex, drugs and a little anarchy.

compare the meerkat

haha! this is hilarious.

this website actually exists! and its fully functional and very funny. go ahead, you know you want to: compare the meerkat

my christmas blogger secret santa

i had the best secret santa in the christmas blogger thingie. lynda at lynda’s book blog got me an amazing selection of presents!!

i was very lucky to have her as my secret santa and i just want to thank her again for her generosity.

return from the dead

this was one of my choices for the rip challenge and i had a really fun time reading it!

as i’ve written in an earlier post, it’s a collection of mummy stories. here is the line-up:

• bram stoker – the jewel of seven stars (a novella)
• jane webb – the mummy
• edgar allen poe – some words with a mummy
• arthur conan doyle – the ring of thoth
• arhur conan doyle – lot 249

i started with the stoker and flipped back and forth as i also worked my way through the short stories. jane webb’s the mummy is great fun! written in the early 1800s (and influenced by frankenstein) it’s a futuristic story of a company of explorers that unearh a mummy (surprise surprise). 

this is it, jakes

this may be the last time jacquess kallis tours australia. in test cricket there are no world cups in which you can prove yourself and gain acclaim. in test cricket you prove yourself by your performances against the best teams in the world and for a good decade and a half australia has been the team that has stood head and shoulders above the rest. good performances against india, england and south africa are noticed – but its how you play against australia that makes people sit up.

he has performed quite well against them in the past - his maiden test century was against them at the mcg (when warne and mcgrath were in their pomp) and in the 2006 sydney test he scored a century and a fifty in one match. but even though he has performed very well in individual tests he has  never really shone in a series.

ice hockey in oxford

the other day i watched some ice hockey in oxford. i didn’t even know they played ice hockey in england – never mind in oxford! but you know what – it was great fun!

it was a game between the oxford city stars and the cardiff dragons and oxford won 8-3. i was really impressed by the quality of the play; because ice hockey isn’t really big here i was worried that the skill level was going to be a bit limited and that the game may be rather mundane. but it was very exciting and the players had enough skill to give their game a lot of variety.

i really liked the intimacy of the game as well, as, since the playing area is quite small one is really close to the action. there was also a lot of needle in the game, which added to the spice. oxford and cardiff hadn’t managed to beat each other in 3 previous games and the last one oxford drew in cardiff in the dying seconds of the game!

“the mist” – film review

its funny how with some movies the ending has such a big influence on what you think of the film. we enjoyed this film quite a lot but the ending has left me feeling very ambivalent indeed.

in fact, the ending left me feeling awful. it left us both feeling awful. we kept looking at each other saying “no!” and thinking “this can’t be the ending”. it just felt wrong.

it wasn’t the perfect film but we were having a really good time before the end derailed us. it started a little shakily. darabont got up to some crazy shit with his camera work – all his shots were way too tight and he was trying too hard to engage the audience and to try to establish an emotional connection with his big ensemble cast.

also, the first monster moment wasn’t particularly well handled and around then the rhythm also wasn’t great. there were some positives during the opening, however, with the mood being established quite well and braugher being in good form.

after the opening the film got better and better as darabont got some momentum going, and by about halfway charlotte and i were gripped! what also drew us in was how the film started taking on a slightly different direction than expected. after the first monster appears you think you know what kind of film this is going to be but the tone shifts after a while as the crisis starts to take on a different form.

princess and bear go to the movies

one of the things charlotte and i really like to do together is watch films. we always have a lot of fun when we watch films, and look forward to them and have fun looking back at the films we’ve watched. so i thought it’d be a nice idea to have a blog for all the films we watch – so we can look back at them when we reminisce over the films we’ve seen.