I Am a Zombie Filled With Love

by Anna

by Isaac Marion

A friend sent me a link to a short story available online, which she found from The Bloggess:

I Am a Zombie Filled With Love is the sweetest, zombie-perspective love story you will ever read! It isn’t very long, so jump over there and read it right now! I was thrilled to read at the very end that it has become a full-length book called Warm Bodies that will be available in the U.S. in March. It is definitely going on my to-read list. I can’t wait!

Amended: It is out right now! It is being shelved at my library at this very moment, according to their website! I’ll have to run over there as early in the morning as I can drag myself out of bed (which probably means right at the crack of noon). I’m usually pretty frugal in my use of exclamation marks, but I’m just so excited!

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

by Kinsey

I loved The Magicians.  As I said in an earlier entry, I had not been interested in reading it and knew basically nothing about it when I started, but I was sucked in within a few pages and read like a madwoman until I finished. It was engaging and full of magic and fantasy, but also felt grounded and modern. Calling it Harry Potter Says Motherfucker is really quite a good summary.

I don’t want to go into many details, because I went into the book blind and really enjoyed seeing things unfold, but it’s a very Harry Potter-like set up: a normal teenage boy discovers there is magic in the world and enters a magical boarding school. However, it differs from Harry Potter in some significant ways. First, it is an adult book and there is a fair bit of sex and drugs and violence. Second, things are far less cute than at Hogwarts; learning magic is presented as a real slog, like trying memorize endless complicated multiplication tables, and it’s made very clear that magic can’t fix everything and can’t make someone happy. And third, Grossman doesn’t let things end at graduation, so there’s a real exploration of leaving school and transitioning to the “real world.”

The other thing I really liked about the book was that for me the tone and the writing fell somewhere in between young adult and adult. I worry that this sounds like a criticism, and it’s not. It’s just that as much as I love (LOVE) young adult fantasy books, they tend to be somewhat heavy on the fantasy/moral lesson side of things (Narnia, Robin McKinley, Harry Potter himself). Adult fantasy books, on the other hand, are often so dark that the wonder of magic seems tamped down by the MISERY and UNENDING PAIN OF EXISTENCE. The authors that come to mind here are China Mieville and Octavia Butler; I like both those authors, but when I finish one of their books I generally feel the need for a stiff drink and some restorative episodes of How I Met Your Mother. The Magicians does a nice job of balancing the idea that parts of life are sad and miserable but other parts (including magic) are awesome. It also uses a traditional YA template (magical boarding school, parents who don’t understand, real evil in the world) to talk about the kind of adult issues that come up in every hipster literary novel: “Why do I do such stupid stuff sometimes? What am I doing with my life? What does it really mean to be an adult?”

Abigail Nussbaum, who I mentioned last week, hated this book. I don’t personally agree with her take–she seems to ascribe a lot of socio-economic and religious themes to what I read as primarily a coming-of-age story–but she makes some really interesting points. (Note that her review includes a lot of plot details, so you may want to wait to read it until after you’ve finished the book.)

And finally, while doing some Amazon research for this, I stumbled upon the page for The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is fairly recent children’s chapter book about a china rabbit that made me cry and cry. You think The Velveteen Rabbit is touching? That rabbit’s got nothing on Edward. This book is too much for me to ever read again, but everyone else should–it’s a surprisingly layered story about love and ego and heartbreak and personal growth. It’s got nothing to do with The Magicians, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was out there.

Fables

by Anna

by Bill Willingham

Photo: Book Cover of FablesSo, I’ve watched the first two episodes of “Grimm,” one of the two new fairy-tale-themed tv shows this season; I’m not convinced yet that I even like it that much, but I’m not ready to completely give up on it, either. It stars a kind of doofus detective, but has a very funny Big Bad Wolf as a supporting character. While watching the second episode, I thought, “I really wish the Big Bad Wolf was the main character.” Which promptly reminded me of the graphic novel series, Fables, and how much I enjoyed them when I read them several years ago, borrowing the first 5 or 6 volumes from my neighbor.

That weekend when browsing a used bookstore, I ran across and promptly purchased the first issue of Fables. (They also had issues 3 and 5, which I might go back for, continuity-be-damned.) In the series, one of the two central characters is the Big Bad Wolf (named Bigby Wolf now), and he is a hard-boiled sheriff helping keep Fabletown under control.

Quick backup: the basic premise is that an enemy named only as the Adversary has conquered the magical world in which all the fable characters lived, killing many of them and forcing the rest to escape to our world (the Mundane world, i.e. New York City), and set up a hidden community there.

The first graphic novel introduces the reader to many of the characters, gives us the background history, and explains some of the nitty-gritty details of trying to run and control a secret community filled with disparate characters, all while being a clever detective story.

The other main character is Snow White, who is the Director of Operations of the new Fabletown, and is a strong, competent, ambitious businesswoman, which isn’t overwhelmingly common in the comic book world. All the other characters are fun and interesting twists on many traditional fables.

Anyway, the point is, I wish “Grimm” was Fables instead, or that they would make a tv show of Fables, or even better, a high-budget Lord-of-the-Rings-like movie!

More links, and why I sometimes don’t listen to people

by Kinsey

I’m not quite ready to talk about The Magicians yet (although it’s still awesome), so it’s links again. This time I thought I’d share another review site I like: Asking the Wrong Questions by Abigail Nussbaum. She reviews books and movies and TV, focusing mostly but not exclusively on science fiction. Her reviews are tremendously detailed and thoughtful, and I appreciate that she’s in Israel and provides a non-American, non-European point of view that I don’t come across that often. I have to admit that I sometimes choose not to read her when she’s reviewing something I really love (Doctor Who, Persuasion, Community), because she doesn’t pull any punches. I’ve been known to describe her as “not liking anything,” but that’s not really fair. She just expects a lot of her media and isn’t willing to give anything, even a show or book she likes, a pass when its lazy. Which is great, but I’m not very good at disregarding something once I’ve read it, and sometimes I just want to watch a Doctor Who episode without worrying about the character inconsistencies. But I am always interested to see what she’s reading and watching and you can damn sure that if she gives something a good review, it is a really solid piece of media.

Today I specifically want to point to a review she did at Strange Horizons comparing Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I haven’t read Mechanique yet but I love Valentine’s blog. (Her movie reviews are priceless, as are her critiques of Miss Universe contestants’ costumes and her theory that Keanu Reeves is immortal.) I did recently finish The Night Circus and I thought about reviewing it here, but could never quite figure out what I wanted to say about it. I enjoyed reading it. It was very well constructed and featured some beautiful set pieces. But even after reading hundreds of pages, I didn’t have any stronger reaction to it than that. Abigail captured it perfectly in her review when she said that The Night Circus doesn’t inspire much emotion because the characters don’t feel like human beings. And it’s true, at no point did I feel overwhelmingly invested in the characters (with the exception of Bailey and I ended up being worried about how his story ended–join me in the comments if you’ve read this and want to talk about my concerns about Bailey!). At one point Abigail says the book has a sense of “weightlessness” and I think that’s perfect. The Night Circus has some really stunning imagery in it, so I’d recommend it to people who enjoy that sort of it-paints-a-picture writing, but based on the Strange Horizons review I’m thinking that I’ll move on to Mechanique.

The Shining (Part III)

by Anna

Cover Image: The ShiningAlright, I know this is shamefully late, but here is the rest of the book in one long dump. I’m just so, so grateful to be done and moving on to other books!

Maybe I haven’t been giving Stephen King enough credit; perhaps he has been realistically recreating for the reader the sensation of being stuck in a miserable hotel for months on end with horrible people.

Anyway, here’s the final installment of my journal through The Shining (with spoilers, of course):

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Links, plus why I should start listening to people

by Kinsey

I’m not going to review anything right now, because the only book I can think about–one of the only things I can think about at all–is The Magicians by Lev Grossman and I’m not done with it yet. This is one of those books that I kept hearing was good, and hearing people rave about, but for some reason it just didn’t appeal to me. I don’t know if was the title, or the dull cover, or what, but any time I saw the book mentioned I had an overwhelming reaction of “Meh.”

That was really dumb. This book is awesome. So far it’s funny and smart and has magic and a boarding school and has me completely invested in and supportive of a teenage boy protagonist. (I often find teenage boys to be such a different species from me that I have trouble with stories told from their perspective.)

So while I’m off racing through The Magicians, I recommend checking out these two links.

Minimalist Posters for Your Favorite Children’s Stories are just awesome. If every wall of my apartment wasn’t already covered with cool things I found on the Internet, I would buy the Little Red Riding Hood one to put in my bedroom and creep me out.

Better Book Titles reimagines the covers of classic books with more direct titles. So The Great Gatsby is now Drink Responsibly, while Strunk and White becomes Correct Your Friends Like a Dick. Really funny.

I also just noticed tht Better Book Titles says that The Magicians should be called Harry Potter Says “Motherfucker.” If I’d known that I might have read it ages ago.

The Shining (Part II)

by Anna

Cover Image: The ShiningI’m halfway through the book now, and this is the point where I’ve started fantasizing about the light, funny book that I’ll read next, with characters I actually like and am interested in. I’m even starting to wish I’d chosen a different Stephen King book, though still not The Stand. Here’s my the blow-by-blow account of the second quarter of the book, with spoilers:

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The Leftovers

by Kinsey

In my last post I talked a bit about how hard it can be to find books that have elements of fantasy of science fiction, but are not cheesy genre fiction. By all accounts, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers should be exactly my kind of book. Perrotta is a well-respected literary author probably most famous for Little Children, which was made into a move with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. (Topic for another day: while I liked Little Children, as far as I can tell, the only reason it wasn’t classified as chick lit is that it was written by a man. Had the author been named Tara Perrotta, I bet you money that thing would have had a pink cover. Possibly featuring shoes.) In The Leftovers, Perrotta is still focused on normal, middle American families, but he’s put a slightly supernatural spin on this time. Several years before the events of the book take place, a significant number of the earth’s population disappeared—vanished in an instant. While many people assume this was the Rapture, plenty of non-Christians disappeared as well, and nothing has happened since that day to provide any additional information.

It’s an intriguing concept and I was interested in reading a book that deals with a Rapture-like event without being overbearingly religious (in other words, not the Left Behind books). And the book does an excellent job of portraying what might really happen in this situation. Some people assume the world is ending and turn to religious cults, some lose their faith entirely, and some do their best to move forward and not think about it too much. (I would definitely be in that last category.)

But the thing is, this book really isn’t about the disappearance. It’s about normal, middle-class American families in a small town: people get together, people break up, a teenager makes a friend who might not be a good influence. Okay, there is a very creepy Doomsday cult involved, but even that comes off less as science fiction and more like a plot line about someone joining a strict new church. And the characters, even the ones in the cult, don’t even discuss the disappearance much at all. The Rapture wasn’t even necessary—using another significant disaster or trauma wouldn’t have caused that many changes in the book.

Perrotta is known for his detailed descriptions of emotional turmoil under the surface of normal life, and the book definitely does that well. I would have no issues recommending the book to someone like my sister, who hates science fiction books and doesn’t read them at all. But for me, there was a lot less supernatural excitement than I was expecting or hoping for. On the continuum of realistic to fantastical, The Leftovers falls too much on the everyday-life side of things for me.

“Jenny Pox” by J. L. Bryan

by Rebecca

The cover of Jenny PoxJenny Pox
by J. L. Bryan
(2010)

I thought about not reviewing this book because I do not want to give it additional name recognition. But such is procrastination from my work: I not only read the book, I am now gong to tell you all about the experience.

The book’s premise is a high school drama with a few magical powers thrown in. It seemed like a fun quick read.

After reading it, my final conclusion is that if this is common for young adult fiction, I can see why so many people like Twilight. I didn’t like Twilight but it is orders of magnitude better – in writing style, in characterization, and in plot – than Jenny Pox.

Despite being relatively short, Jenny Pox reads like three books. Not complete books, no, but three sections that have very different writers with very different opinions on character and style and plot. It starts off quite well and is enjoyable for about the first third of the book and then doesn’t so much go down hill as fall off the edge of a cliff and hit bottom a long ways down.

And because I think it was awful and not worth reading, I have no compunction about give spoilers.

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The Shining (Part I)

by Anna

Cover Image: The ShiningOoh, you guys are in for a treat (you are not in for a treat). This is perhaps the longest book review in the history of books! It is not as long as The Shining itself, only because that book is very, very long (it’s not actually hugely long, but it sure does read like it is).

I’ve always thought that I just don’t like Stephen King’s books, but to date, I’ve managed to only read his two most commonly disliked books, Dolores Claiborne and Thinner (actually I only read the first third or so of Thinner). Fans assure me that I need to retry King with one of his more famous works. In fact, several people have recommended The Stand, since it takes place in Boulder, but I’m not reading a 1000+ page Stephen King book.

This year for Tom’s* birthday I made us reservations for a night at The Stanley Hotel, where King was staying when he was inspired to write The Shining. (They also play the Jack Nicholson version on loop on one of the tv channels, leading me to rewatch it and scare the bejeesus out of myself on what was supposed to be a romantic weekend.) Watching Shelley Duvall sob and shriek her way through the movie, I was curious as to whether the novel has more nuanced characters, and decided to give it a shot.

Since The Shining is definitely going to take me more than a week to read, I thought I’d give semi-live-blogging a shot. This is a journal of sorts of my progress (absolutely with spoilers):

*I related a story to Tom in which I referred to him as “the dude I live with,” to which he took some exception. However, Tom is the dude I live with.

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