Archaeology
I bought this magazine while in Darwin; it’s from the US, so it’s quite expensive over here. It’s a fascinating magazine, covering digs and finds all over the world (ish; I’m sure there are lots of things that get left out, but maybe that’s just a fact of life and the magazine world). I bought the next issue when I got home, and then decided that I would like to keep doing so – so Mum has got me a subscription for my birthday; my first copy should arrive right around my birthday, actually. Very exciting. I love it because there are things in there I would never read about otherwise – like ceynotes, or sink holes, in South America and the evidence for ritual sacrifices near/in them. And of course it also includes the stuff that I would deliberately read, like about Egypt.
I tried the Australian magazine as well, but I just found it… too amateurish, maybe. It didn’t have as many articles about interesting things, and the writing left me a bit cold. Sad, really.
Hell Island
A Matthew Riley book; I got it for free when I bought a couple of books in the “Fifty Amazing Reads” or whatever it was promotion. It was very short, but quite entertaining. I’ve only read one other Riley, and I quite liked it too, but the same things annoyed me – too much gratuitous use of italics, mostly, and a few too many exclamation marks! Again, though – as with Cussler – I quite like the adventures, so I am willing to put up with a few annoyances. As long as I have breaks between reading them, so I can partially forget about it in the meantime.
Another Borders 3 for 2 deal – The Little Lady Agency, Almost French, Ewan McGregor
The Little Lady Agency, by Hester Browne
This is not the sort of book I would usually read – really, really not. However… I was looking for a third to round out my group, and this caught my eye. I read the first couple of pages (not, like a friend of mine, a few pages in the middle of the book, randomly chosen), and I thought it looked quite funny. So I bought it. And I read it, and I really quite enjoyed it. It’s that classic tale of someone pretending to be someone they are not – but in this case, being paid for it. The characters were amusing; I liked that it was from the first person, and I really liked that Melissa is very definitely not Bridget Jones (which I refuse to see or read), because she is generally fine with her appearance, only grousing about it as much as a ‘normal’ chick. It was terribly funny to see the portrayals of the upper-class girls and boys: I wonder if the author herself is from the upper echelons… I would be surprised if she didn’t at least have some real contact with it. It got a little bit wearisome in parts, with Melissa worrying about whether she loves someone and if he likes her or not, but the wearisomeness didn’t realistically last that long. I liked it, overall; I can see that this could potentially have a sequel, but I’m not convinced that I would read it.
And I haven’t read the other two yet, so I will post about them when I have.
Borders 3 for 2 – Eragon, Inkheart, Trojan Odyssey
Even though it is part of the Evil American Empire Taking Over the World, I really do like Borders; especially their 3 for 2 tables. I know all about impulse buying and luring people in to buy things they don’t really need, and I don’t really mind that it sometimes works on me.
Eragon, by Christopher Paolini
I didn’t realise, until I got to the author bit at the end, that this was written by a teenager… although I had guessed that it was a first novel, by some of the clunkier bits in it. But I really loved this book; it’s got some good ideas and some great characters, and it’s obvious that it can be developed, probably into a trilogy – I know the second one is out now. I like that there are a couple of secrets not revealed and questions not resolved, and that these haven’t been played up too heavily in the story; there hasn’t been a whole lot of griping about them, nor have there been many clues, so I at least am not positive about how they will be resolved. I am definitely going to read the rest. I like being back with dragons!
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
This book captured my heart. It’s fantastic. Whoever translated it was brilliant; I can’t even imagine how hard translation work like that must be. I love that there were quotes from different books, real books, at the start of each chapter; it’s such a nice touch, particularly when I knew and loved some of them – The Neverending Story (which of course was written in German originally), and The Princess Bride, to mention only two. It’s also given me some new books to find! But back to Inkheart… lots of people have thought about meeting the characters from books, but this is a whole new twist on the idea, and it was very well realised. The characters are wonderful, the intricacies of the plot are brilliant. It’s a kid’s book – teenagers maybe – which is partly obvious from the hints you get throughout that the heroine, at least, has a future after the adventure; my gosh, though, I would recommend this to adults with no hesitation. I’m also going to buy the author’s first book, Thief Lord, which I saw in the shop the other day.
Trojan Odyssey, by Clive Cussler
After Valhalla Rising, I swore that I would read no more Cussler books… it was all just getting way, way too tacky for me, and so formulaic I felt I could guess what Dirk and Al would say to each other. But then I saw this on the 3 for 2 table, and my itchings to keep following their adventures got the better of me. Even though I knew the writing would be a bit painful, I was willing to put up with it for the sake of the adventures. And I was as right as I knew I would be: the writing was a bit boring, some bits were excruciatingly average, but the adventure was a whole lot of fun. Given the ending, I am pretty sure this will be the last Dirk Pitt adventure. I really, really hope that Cussler doesn’t think he can continue the franchise with Dirk Jnr; that would be just wrong. I’m thinking now of going back to the old books and seeing for myself whether it was me or the writing that got old. But I don’t think I will read the other Cussler series; I just don’t have the emotional attachment to the characters to be willing to put myself through it.
Faking Literature
It’s been ages since I wrote about any of the books I’ve read, so I’m going back just a little way in time to comment on some of them.
This book, Faking Literature, I picked up at Readings from the cheapo academic table, partly because hoaxes/fakes fascinate me, but also because the author, Ken Ruthven, was the lecturer of a couple of subjects I did at uni. He was pretty hard to handle in first year – I really didn’t get it – but in second year I thought he was fantastic. I guess I’d grown up enough to understand him and his humour, not to mention lit crit.
This book is, of course, all about fakes and hoaxes in the literary world, and I learnt an awful lot about Great Scams in Literature. It was good to see that he included those few great Aussie ones, too – Helen “Demidenko” and Ern Malley; as well as Milli Vanilli, which was pretty funny. But given that he included that last, I was a bit surprised that he did not include Elizabeth Durack, a white female artist, and her great scam posing as Eddie Burrup, an Aboriginal male artist. The only reason I know about it, of course, is that it’s one of the family’s great stories. Anyway.
Aside from the historical pointof view, the book is also about the reactions of the ‘legit’ literary community to the deception – particularly when they have at first embraced the hoax/fake as itself being legit. His contention, I think, is that the legit vilifies the so-called illegit to stop people from questioning the legitimacy of the legit itself, and also becuase it is only legit by defining itself against the illegit. I love it… dichotomies only exist by defining what each side isn’t, which can only be done with reference to their opposite.
It was a great book. Quite easy to read, which was refreshing, and with some quite witty parts as well. And I’m sure Ken would be gratified to hear that I think so.
Flowers! And it’s the first day of Spring!
Hurrah for Spring.
I got my first viola yesterday! I am so excited; it is beautiful. And it reassures me that the other plants might also eventually flower, in their time. All of the plants at least look healthy, so that’s a good thing.
I also have a couple of daffs in the back yard, which is blissful. And the roses are taking off like weeds after I fertilised them. And… I have one helleborus with flowers on it… the other one that’s been in the ground a while hasn’t flowered and doesn’t look remarkably happy. The new one I planted (did I mention that?) does look healthy, so hopefully next year will reward me with some winter roses.
And I managed not to kill the daisy out the front; how remarkable.
New plants
I’m very excited. To start with, I bought a little punnet of mini cyclamens, which make very good presents. I also bought a new helleborus – one of the ones I got last year is flowering beautifully; not sure the other is very happy though. And the other part is that I’ve added some stuff to the front garden that I am hoping will turn out well. On the right, I’ve planted some alyssum – I did this a while ago but didn’t water it enough and they withered through neglect. On the other side, I have pulled out half the creeper, and added some totally gratuitous cottage plants, which I hope will survive and flower for me: delphiniums, foxploves, snapdragons and violas (I said it was gratuitous). Here’s hoping.
Films I saw in the holidays…
… which was a while ago now, but what the heck.
Batman Begins
Fantastic. So well filmed; Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were great in support, and I barely noticed Katie Holmes (‘ray). And Batman himself – well, he was brilliant. Played the dark and brooding very convincingly. I am definitely looking forward to the sequel, because this Batmas – with all new and improved gadgets – is very entertaining to watch.
War of the Worlds
Yeh. Not convinced. Thinking back on the book, I’m wondering whether it is actually the book’s fault. HG Wells did not exactly write a book that could be easily turned into a movie; I haven’t read it in years, but I think he was writing with less of an idea to character development than to exploring the concept of alien invasion and its consequences for the world. As a result, any movie (and what I’ve seen of the 50s version, while being an intersting commentary on nuclear USA, was crap) has to have some people-stuff inserted by someone else, and I just don’t think it works – not and still calling it War of the Worlds. I think Tom Cruise was actually quite weak in it, but then the character itself didn’t allow for much. There were some cool effects.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Did I see it on holidays? Don’t recall; anyway. I liked it, in defiance of all the purists I think. The fact that it was started before Adams died made me feel a bit better about it. Yes, there were bits that were totally not in the book, but anyone who thinks those books could be successfull translated to the screen and be understood by total Adams-novices, which is a large part of the world, needs their heads read. I liked most of the insertions, actually, and I thought John Malkovitch was quite funny. Truly, though, Arthur was very enteraining, but for me the entire film was owned by Zaphod. He was perfect.
There was another movie we saw in Darwin, too, but I forget what it was…
Sin City
Hmmm.
J has wanted to see this film for a long time, and I thought it looked interesting too – quite like film noir usually, and such a fantastic cast (Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Rosaria Dawson…)! I must say that I hadn’t heard very much about it before we saw it, except that it was black and white with bits of colour. I wish now that I had been a bit more prepared – well, the dude at the theatre warned me a bit, saying it was gruesome, but still. It was very good: fascinating and intertwined stories, very well done as an adaption of a graphic novel because that’s just what it looked like, and the colour was superbly done. However. Gruesome and not a little grotesque; I had not realised that it is rated MA+. I would definitely have to think before I recommended it to anyone.
The Island
Someone I know described this as The Rock (Sean Connery, Nicholas Cage) meets Minority Report, with a little bit of Matrix thrown in. Pretty much. I liked the story, and I thought it was developed well; the characters were mostly quite realistic, and the acting was great – Steve Buscemi is, as ever, very good, although I wouldn’t have recognised Sean Bean until the end if I hadn’t seen his name in the credits, since mostly he looks (unusually) very slick.
Overall, worthwhile. Some superfluous explosions and chases, and some scenes that just made me impatient because of their patent absurdity, but those were fairly minor. The ending… well, you can probably imagine. It is Hollywood, after all.
Randomly Yours, Alex 