neil gaiman’s bookshelves

so neil gaiman posted a link to his bookshelves on twitter and guess what i’ve been doing, bookshelf perv that i am…

uncle neil has been very gracious and allowed shelfari to post big ol’ closeups of his shelves so that we can actually read the titles on the spines. and the coolest thing happened to nymeth, she spotted her favourite book on his shelf! her favourite author has her favourite book!

i wonder if you guys can spot any of your favourite books? in fact, shelfari have addressed that very issue by creating a forum for discussing which books you and neil share and any other thoughts that you might have about his bookshelves. you can even add the ones you spot to a virtual bookshelf!

hooray for bookshelves!

the end of mr. y

the end of mr. y by scarlett thomas is a novel about ariel manto, a lonely phd student who stumbles upon an extremely rare 19^th century novel. claiming to be a true account, the book describes the discovery of a tincture which transports the drinker to the troposphere – a victorian cyberspace where you can access the mind of any person. ariel is fascinated by the troposphere and as the book contains the recipe for the tincture she is curious to try it, after all, what’s the worst that can happen? it’s only fiction isn’t it?

isn’t it?

rebecca

most of you probably already know about this book but in case you don’t here is a brief description of the premise:

rebecca is about a woman who marries a widower who apparently can’t get over the loss of his first wife just one year ago.

initially everything seems fine but once they return to his country estate in england the spectre of rebecca starts to loom large. she is ubiquitous – everyone talks about her, the servants seem to have preferred her, the entire house appears to be laid out to her specifications and even the garden is arranged according to her wishes!

our narrator is hugely intimidated and is made to feel very inadequate, but as she learns more about rebecca she begins to realise that something about her doesn’t add up and starts to discover that below her squeaky-clean image there are darker secrets lurking.

my summer so far

friends, shamanism is not without its responsibilities, so i am sorry that i have been invisible for so long again. to put it simply, i have been working my arse off. and then, on top of that, we are still without the internet at home.

we have managed to arrange a new computer, though, which is currently at charlotte’s mom’s house – but its been there for over a month now and we haven’t had a chance to go and get it!

apart from working i have been having some fun too. i’ve been to the movies a few times, which is about 3 times more than I did last year! i saw watchmen, star trek and terminator salvation. i thought watchmen was okay but too much of a fanboy movie. i loved star trek and enjoyed terminator quite a lot. in terminator i particularly liked sam worthington’s performance – he was the perfect mix between vulnerable and capable. capable seems an odd word to use, but that’s the word that was going through my head the whole time. he just exuded capability – i thought to myself, “now there is a man!”

of course, i’ve been reading lots too and have read some good books and some less good books. i’m planning to blog about them very soon – come hell or high water (the latter being surprisingly likely with our english summers!). i’ve decided that i will take a gonzo approach to my book reviews as part of the reason that i post so few is that they take me so long to write. so I hope you don’t mind the change in style!

…

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).