Since I’m still slogging through a number of books these days (not because they’re bad, but because things got really busy all of a sudden, and I just can’t manage to finish a book), I thought I’d talk about some of the tv shows I’ve been watching lately.

I’m actually not that big of a tv watcher — we only have local channels at home, though I do have a Netflix subscription that we watch through our Wii. And I’d been highly recommended the recent Netflix original series House of Cards. It was kind of an unexpected joy watching that show, and I’ll definitely talk about it more later, but today…

Today I have to talk about Hemlock Grove.

This show, y’all. It’s…it’s a beautiful train wreck.

So the story is that a gypsy family moves to a small former steel town in Pennsylvania (home, apparently, to the best named amusement park ever: Pennsylmania), just in time for a rash of horrible murders to rip through the female population of the local high school. There’s also a big sketchy medical institution run by the big sketchy Local Family of Money and Snobbery. The rich boy heir to the throne with the epic name of Roman Godfrey (a member of the awesome Skarsgaard family, turns out) teams up with the gypsy boy Peter Rumancek, and together they try to find the killer and clear Peter’s name.

But y’all…why do gypsies always have magical powers? Why can’t there be one show (other than The Riches) where gypsies are just PEOPLE? Can’t they just be folks who don’t live like other people? Why must they be prophets and magicians and werewolves and blah blah blah? Seriously, for once I’d love to see a show where a vampire is trolling a town, and it turns out it ISN’T the sexy-rebellious gyspy kid who lives in a trailer in the woods.

Some other beefs? Everyone in this show has a drinking problem. Frankly I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the Rumanceks’ cat Casper crack open a beer with its tiny kitty claws. Alcoholism is a serious, scary issue, and I know it can make a character more real (supposedly), but…use it once. Don’t make everybody a step away from addiction, it’s ham-handed.

But there were definitely some good aspects. It was gorgeous, first of all. I would love to live in the woods of Pennsylvania, assuming it didn’t snow. The little town was adorable and charming and all the things Quaint New England Towns are supposed to be. And the actors were totally gorgeous, too, which helps.

The show also has a really cool mix of fairytale and mad scientist-grade sci-fi. The local Evil Medical Lab of Evil is doing all sorts of sketchy things up in their sinister tower, all while werewolves and fortune tellers and dead bodies are crawling around in the woods. Because why just have one? If anything, Hemlock Grove goes with the mantra of “more is more.”

And my two favorite things:

1: Best werewolf transformation I’ve ever seen in a movie or tv show. And I’ve seen a few (don’t judge). There were some squicky bits, but then a REAL WOLF APPEARED. THANK YOU. I don’t need a CGI frankenwolf to show up and ruin the party! GIVE ME A REAL WOLF.

2: Shelley Godfrey, Roman’s little sister and the mysterious Godfrey Institute experiment gone a little strange. I wish she had her own show, which is saying something, since she can’t speak. She carries her phone on a chain around her neck with a little pen to let it speak for her, but I love her.

But all of this aside, I give you one piece of advice: skip the last episode. It is a full-course, Chinese buffet style of WTF. There’s so much going on, and for some reason there’s a tray of enchiladas in between the General Tso’s and the Sweet and Sour Shrimp, and you’re really just better off staying away. Just…don’t. It doesn’t answer ANY questions, it takes itself far too seriously, and it left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Have y’all seen this show? What did you think?

I’m still working on Cleopatra: A Life, y’all. It’s a long book, and I’ve been busy.

Namely getting people moved. Last weekend we packed up our friend Helen’s place so she could join her husband in Memphis and begin her work at St. Jude with him. I’m glad she’s going to a city so full of culture and history and barbecue, but I’m going to miss her and Cliff a lot. They both worked with my husband Tawbs in grad school, and they’re a lot of fun to hang out with, but I try to remember that now we have a place to crash when we travel up the Tennessee way.

Today I helped another couple of friends pack up. Our very close friends Meg and Robert are moving to Colorado on Sunday, after living here in Louisiana for 27 years. We all went to school together in one way or another, and Meg is actually the one who introduced me to Charles. We’ve been friends for ages. Again, I’m really happy for them, because this is a new stage in their lives, living in a place more attuned to their interests and views, a place where they intend to raise a family. But I want to be selfish and make them stay here until we raise anchor later on this year. We’ve lived in separate cities before — when we were all in college, they were living in the south end of the state, while Charles and I were still up here in the northern corner — but never a different state. Who am I going to make emergency makeup trips with? Who’s going to join us for nerdy board game nights full of booze and gummi worms? I mean, really, it’s very unfair of them to leave first. Obviously they should wait until we’re gone before they run off to the mountains forever.

😉

But this is, apparently, the year of moving. While we have friends moving away, we also have family moving back. My oldest sister, who left home almost fifteen years ago, is finally returning to her home state of Louisiana, bringing the kids and dogs with her. I can’t wait to have her so close, and my stepdad is already raving about how great it is to have my outdoorsy brother-in-law only an hour or two away so they can go play in the woods and get their truck stuck on a levee. I’ll get to spend more time with my nephews, who have such dynamic personalities that I’ve only had glimpses of so far. And they just got a new puppy who obviously needs snuggles from her Aunt Kimmie.

So, in summary, everybody’s moving. Either away or back. Adjusting is difficult, but not impossible.

And we have so many more places to visit with free room and board as a result. So thanks for that, friends.

This blog is being reborn! I’m even going to set a damn alarm on my phone to remind me to write in this sucker, because every scientist ever (no generalizing here!) says that daily writing and journal-keeping makes you smart and rich.

But the purpose of this post is actually to talk about a couple of books I’ve finished lately. BOOKS.

The first is Deerskin, by Robin McKinley. It’s not a new book — I think it was published in 1993? — but I only heard about it recently, and since it’s based on a (pretty jacked up) fairy tale, I decided I needed to read it.

It’s good. Really. If you read the blurb, the big shocker of the book is pretty much right there in the summary, but there’s a lot more to this story than that squicky bit. I think the real story in this book is how the main character Lissar recovers and rediscovers herself after a truly horrifying experience that exiles her from her home. Robin McKinley’s writing, too, is beautiful and lush — and if this weren’t fairy tale-esque, it would be a little too much. And yeah, surprisingly enough, there is an actual Perrault story called “Deerskin,” from which the book draws its story.

I had a couple of issues with it, but they’re mainly quibbles about unanswered questions. Deerskin has a very open ending, and some of the more magical elements are never explained or really even explored. Maybe I’m not deep enough to understand the subtext (of which there is A. LOT.), but Lissar’s famously beautiful mother is a mystery I was still curious about after I finished reading.

I also recently finished Juliet Immortal, by Stacey Jay. This was another one that’s been on my to-read list for ages, and I was kind of dragging my feet about it, because it seems so hokey. Juliet and Romeo, the star-crossed lovers of yore, are reborn as agents of good and evil to help or hinder modern-day lovers IN A BATTLE TO THE DEATH. Well, okay, not exactly.

The real story here is that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet become warriors, one fighting for True Love and Soulmates and Happily Ever After, and the other for Immortality and Evil and General Mayhem. They meet generation after generation in the bodies of two fated lovers (or in the bodies of people around the two lovers) to do the bidding of some mysterious, ethereal beings known as the Ambassadors and the Mercenaries. It’s a race to convince one of the lovers to either sacrifice the other for immortal life or to make a lifelong vow of love (or…something).

I expected to hate it. But I loved it! It’s young adult, so the characters are all high school students, full of all that lovely high school angst and darkness. And it had its troubles, too, but it was so fun and melodramatic and delicious that I overlooked quite a bit. There’s a sequel out called Romeo Redeemed, which continues the story.

Currently I’m working on Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff (what’s with all the Stacys? I don’t know, bro), and I’m really enjoying it so far. Those epic biographies of beyond-famous historical figures can be really dry and slogging, but Schiff keeps a really good sense of humor through the whole thing and seems genuinely to want to put the truth (or at least, the truth we can confirm as truth) out there about this contentious Egyptian queen.

What are y’all reading these days? My to-read list is still miles long, but I like recommendations.

So, I thought I’d try to revitalize this blog. I can’t think of anything particularly witty to say, so let me tell you what’s going on today. 

 

Charles and I just had a dance party to “Eat Randy,” the new video from Julian Smith. If you don’t know who Julian Smith is, look for him on Youtube. He’s the mastermind behind “Hot Koolaid” and (my personal favorite) “I’m Reading a Book.” We have dance parties in lieu of actual exercise, because we are fat and get out of breath really quickly. So we put on a youtube video and dance for the duration of it. 

 

I’m also in the process of doing strength exercises every other day, and I go walking with my lovely momma on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in an effort to stop the fatness. 

 

I did not, in fact, eat Randy today. I ate baked penne with sun-dried tomatoes and spinach, except I didn’t read the recipe all the way through (for shame!) and ended up not layering cheese and pasta. So we had penne with very thin tomato sauce and a couple of slimy bits of spinach, topped with the deliciousness of browned mozzarella. C’est la vie.

I really intend on posting here again. But until then, my tumblr!:

Cat Wearin’ A Tutu

So, my next book on the to-read list was A Northern Light, by Jennifer Donnelly. A little mountain town, the turn of the twentieth century, a tragic and mysterious murder? Definitely my cup of tea… which doesn’t make me sound psychotic AT ALL.

A Northern Light follows teenaged Mattie Gokey, who is working for the summer at a fancy resort in the Adirondack Mountains, leaving behind her father and three sisters back at their struggling farm in order to bring in some extra money in the wake of a family tragedy. During the summer of 1906, however, Mattie and the rest of the employees of Glenmore are shaken when a young woman named Grace Brown is discovered dead in the lake. The murder of Grace Brown is a true story; there have been several books and even a movie made about her death. In A Northern Light, Mattie becomes linked to the woman when she passes on a packet of letters for Mattie to burn if something happens to her.

Mattie’s story opens both in her present day, with the death of Grace Brown, and a year earlier, as she tries to persuade her father to allow her to leave their farm and work at the lodge. Mattie’s mother has just passed away, and her older brother has abandoned them, forcing sixteen-year-old Mattie to put aside her own dreams of going to college and becoming a writer, to work the farm as well as care for her father and sisters.

A Northern Light is all about dreams. Every character has a secret dream that he or she has pushed down deep inside in order to survive the hard daily life of the Adirondacks in the 1900s. Some characters follow their dreams, and some stamp them out, and Donnelly never really shows whether or not anyone finds success.

And that is one of my favorite aspects of this book: the reality of having a dream. Mattie in particular struggles, physically and mentally, with her dream. She struggles with the decision of casting aside her family and the world she has always known to travel to New York, or of staying on her farm, caring for her father and marrying a handsome boy with ambition but never being able to further her education and write about the truths she sees around her. It’s a struggle, dream against reality, that transcends all eras and resonates with everyone.

Another particularly favorite element of this book, for me, is how Donnelly sets up her chapters. Each chapter set in the past begins with a word, one that Mattie has chosen out of a dictionary each day, that ends up becoming a theme for the entire chapter. It’s one of those things that, handled badly, can become awkward and a little bit cheesy, but I loved it.

My only real hitch with A Northern Light is how it ended. Without saying too much about it, I felt like everything was resolved in about five pages, without addressing some of the more important questions. Not that I have a problem with open-ended resolutions, but the abruptness was jarring compared to the rest of the book.

I’m definitely going to check out Donnelly’s other books, though. I was really impressed with how clear a voice Mattie had, and I hope her other main characters are as thought-provoking.

Next time… I have no idea! I haven’t picked out a book yet.

There are, for me, a couple of reactions that tell me if a book is good.

1: Periodically stopping in the middle of reading to shake the book in the air and cry, “THIS IS SO GOOD!”
2: Feeling angry and depressed when it’s over, and scoffing at the next book you pick up for not being as good.

Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, made me do both of these things. I know I waved the thing at my husband at least twice, and I also threw in an emphatic “You HAVE to READ THIS.” Although that last part is kind of useless, seeing as how long it takes him to read books I recommend. I reacted in exactly the same way to Laurie King’s Mary Russell series two years ago, and he’s just now finishing the second-to-most-recent one.

ANYWAY. Doomsday Book. The story centers around a group of Oxford historians in the sort-of-distant-but-not-too-distant future, historians who happen to have the ability to travel through time to do first-hand research on particular eras. Some periods, however, are off-limits for being too dangerous. So obviously someone in the book travels to one of these dangerous centuries.

Main character Kivrin, an undergraduate history student, gets sent back to the 1300s, smack dab in the middle of the Black Death, and ends up stuck there. Back in the (future?) present, her professor and mentor Dunworthy struggles to get her back, all while battling a mysterious epidemic that has broken out in Oxford.

Sounds awesome, right? THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS. Not only is the story tense and absorbing, but the way the setting is presented is vivid and amazing. It was one of those books where the main character tromps through snow, and you feel the snow, and they hear bells, and you hear bells. Amazing amazing.

I do have to confess, though, I was far more invested in Kivrin’s story than Dunworthy’s. I actually groaned every time the book moved back to present (future?)-day Oxford and the Death Epidemic of Great Death. I can understand why Willis wanted Dunworthy’s story there, and obviously the plot wouldn’t have really worked without his side of it, but ugh. I actually counted pages until it went back to Kivrin’s side, like how parents tell their children that if they eat x number of green beans, they can eat all of their dessert. IF I GET THROUGH ALL OF DUNWORTHY’S PART, I CAN READ ALL OF KIVRIN’S BEFORE BED.

Anyway, read this book. It is technically sci-fi, but it’s not overwhelming in the slightest, and that’s coming from someone who can’t stomach sci-fi at all. But be prepared to wave it in the air and get angry when it’s over.

And also, expect to sniffle at the last few pages.

Up next, A Northern Light, by Jennifer Connelly Donnelly.

So, I haven’t written in about a month. Clearly I have staying power!

The book project is going pretty well; I’m currently 8 weeks into 2011, and I’ve read 6 books. My list is as follows:

1- Innocent Traitor, by Allison Weir (finished Jan 25th)
2- One Dance With a Duke, by Tessa Dare (finished Feb 3rd. And can I just say, it’s difficult to say the title of this one without a deep, grunting voice. ONE DANCE WITH A DUKE HEM HEM.)
3- Austenland, by Shannon Hale (finished Feb 5th)
4- The Red Necklace, by Sally Gardner (finished Feb 13th)
5- The Summer of You, Kate Noble (finished Feb 13th – I guess this was a reading weekend.)
6- At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon (finished Feb 20th, after a lengthy struggle.)

So you can glean a couple of things from this list, namely that, yes, I read romance novels. I am a closet reader, as it seems the romance industry makes every effort to embarrass and annoy its audience with ridiculous, windblown covers and dramatic titles that are one exclamation mark away from TOTAL ABANDON (like, for instance, ONE DANCE WITH A DUKE. Seriously, I can’t say it in a normal way).

But I like them. And frankly, many of them are leaps and bounds better than most of the fiction on the market today that strives for attention and acclaim from the more pretentious audiences. Maybe they aren’t about seedy underbellies or existential meltdowns, but, to me, sometimes they feel more normal. The Summer of You, for instance, involves an aging parent’s growing and debilitating senility, and, while I didn’t really like the book overall, I was touched by the way the author handled this. I’ve had first-hand experience with how Alzheimer’s affects the sufferer and his or her family, and I felt connected with the main character as she dealt with a similar situation.

ANYWAY. For a better-written and more interesting blog about the romance genre, check out Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. They’re fantastic, and they offer intelligent reviews and comments on how the romance industry functions.

Mostly, I’m writing to simply say I’m continuing my project (despite…forgetting to blog for a month), and I’ll do some more in-depth reviews of what I’ve read later on.

I forgot to post last week. I’m awesome!

The good news is that I finished my first book of 2011. My sister passed along Innocent Traitor, by Allison Weir, when she came to visit at Christmas, and I finally got around to reading it. Weir usually writes nonfiction, but this was her first foray into historical fiction. Innocent Traitor tells the story of Lady Jane Grey, often called the Nine Days’ Queen for her (very) brief rule over England in the sixteenth century. This is a story most of us know a little about, but it’s occurred to me that most history teachers tend to gloss over this period of the Tudor Dynasty and skip to the juicier bits with Bloody Mary and, of course, Elizabeth I. I was a history major in college, and while I never really focused much on Renaissance England, preferring instead the more melodramatic French Revolution and WWII, I always assumed I had a solid grasp on the Tudors. Reading this book, I have come to the conclusion that, not so surprisingly, I did not.

In survey courses on the Renaissance and Western Civ, professors usually discuss Jane Grey like this: King Henry VIII’s son Edward, a stalwart Protestant during a period of extreme religious upheaval in England, is dying a horrible death at the tragic age of fifteen. He faces the knowledge that his death will bring a (perhaps violent) end to Protestant England with the succession of his eldest sister Mary, who is devoutly Catholic and very, very bitter. In an effort to preserve his faith in England, he names his cousin Jane Grey, who has only the most tenuous of ties to the title of Queen, as his heir. Edward dies, Jane becomes Queen of England, rules for nine days and is then deposed in favor of Mary I, who has her beheaded.

After finishing Innocent Traitor, which is immaculately researched by a very trustworthy author (seriously — check out her other works), I realize that this is not even half the story. This book is fantastic, and, though it starts a little slowly and with slightly unbelievable narration by four-year-old Jane Grey, it sucks you in. When I finished this book, it broke my heart — even though I, probably like most other readers, knew how Jane’s story ended.

I cannot recommend this book enough, particularly to history lovers and those who are addicted to stories of court intrigue.

Next up, I’m reading At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon, as recommended by my lovely momma. Wish me luck!

It’s now the 2nd week of 2011, and I have definitely not finished Island in a Storm. I’m about a third of the way in — in book time, the storm hasn’t happened yet, and all the rich, famous Louisianans are still having a grand old time being rich and famous.

I’ve had a few criticisms about the book so far, but my main reason for not having it read through yet is that it was not the book I thought I was reading. Granted, that was my own fault. I apparently picked the book out without really reading the blurb, the title, the cover, or the About the Author section. Because I’m awesome. Island in a Storm is chiefly about the storm and the island. Who’d have thought, right? A third of the way in, there’s been little discussion of the resort on Isle Derniere, the people who were staying there, and the culture of the island. Instead, the author focuses on the conditions of the marshes in South Louisiana and what the people of the nineteenth century knew about hurricanes.

Accepting the fact that I’m reading a book I didn’t quite mean to read, I have two chief issues with it. The first, there is a whoooole lot of background information, and I suspect most of it wouldn’t be necessary to tell the average reader. It is definitely interesting to read about what we knew of hurricanes in the early 1800s, but I don’t think I needed to be told a chapter’s worth of details of the yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans at that time. My second problem with the book is that the author tends to jump from one topic to the next, with very thin transitions in between. It can be pretty jarring.

And on a final note about Island in a Storm, on page 48, I came across this sentence, which made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down, as I think it was a mistype that resulted in a pretty amazing mental image: “Toward the end of the 1850s, some of these dresses had hoops with diameters of twelve to fifteen feet.” Y’all, picture this. 12 to 15 feet in diameter would be like two of my husband Charles lying straight out, foot to foot. A skirt that size would be bigger than my entire bedroom. Skirts in the 1800s did get to ridiculous sizes, but I think there was just a little confusion about diameter vs. circumference.

So, I’ll finish Island in a Storm eventually, but I have to try to stay on course for this whole 50 Book Challenge thing, so I have since moved on to Innocent Traitor, by Allison Weir. It’s a fictional biography of Lady Jane Grey, and I’ve heard some great things about Weir’s books in the past. I’m definitely looking forward to some juicy Tudor backstabbing.