Drinking Midnight Wine
My “I need to read at the airport and REFUSE to take Dart-Thorntot with me” book. A Simon Green, but less dark than his usual stuff, which was refreshing. Quite odd and very entertaining; I was worried it was going to morph into needing a sequel but this story has avoided it, although of course there is always room for another with the same characters. Highly recommended.
Now I need to get back to the Deathstalker series, but a) I think I’ll have to read the lot again, and that will be a bit painful – they’re so dark; and b) I know something bad is going to happen (thanks a lot, Kate). So I’m in denial.
Cecilia Dart Thornton #2
She is driving me nuts. I can’t stand her style at all – way too purple for me, I’m just not that visual – and I don’t like not knowing what words mean, and besides I think she is just being gratuitous in using them. However, I am half-way through the third book because the story is just interesting enough to keep me going. I am very much looking forward to finishing them and getting back to something a little less tortured.
Cecilia Dart-Thornton
I read The Ill-Made Mute over the holidays. I had heard a whole heap of reports, most of them negative bar one. I got a bit annoyed with her style – she tries too hard to be poetic, twisting her sentences around way too much and using words I have never heard before and could only guess at from the context. However, I did enjoy the plot and the characters a bit, and I was so frustrated when I finished it I nearly shrieked (truly; it has a very clever ending). The one person I heard a good report from, though, I thankfully saw at church that night and she has today given me the next two books (thanks, Krick), so that’s good… except that tomorrow I have Parent/Teacher interviews so I start at 2pm (until 9pm!), and I really ought to do some work rather than just reading which I will be very tempted to do.
Books
Well.
I read and finished Garth Nix’s Mister Monday, and I’m excited because there will be 6 more in this series and that’s really, really cool. I am really looking forward to reading the rest.
Then, I had to choose something to read next. I had yet to find Rise of Endymion, about which I was very cranky; so I started The Gutenberg Revolution, by John Mann, which J bought me ages ago. I’ve read the introduction. Then I got restless, so I started The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. Interesting: a number of people have told me it’s crap, then another friend told me she really enjoyed it… so it really will be interesting to see what I think of it. I’ve read the first chapter and a half. And then…I went into the city tonight with Kate because she was involved in a reading night with her CAE class. So, I thought I’d check out Readers’ Feast in the off-chance that they might have it; no. So I bought Ilium, also by Simmons, instead to make me feel better. Then Kate had a brilliant idea: go to the CAE library! And because I have a library card with Yarra-Melbourne libraries, I can borrow there. And they did have it! Hurrah! So excited.
So I’m reading that.
Willow
Not the tree, the movie. Kate come over last night for dinner and brought it with her. I hadn’t seen it in ages, so it was lots of fun. Such a young Val Kilmer! And nobody else I recognised. It must have been a great day for the dwarfish (dwarvish? and is that the PC term?) community when it was made, since they actually used real short people rather than lots of special effects (which they couldn’t anyway, since it was made in the 80s or something). We were convinced that one of the brownies was Flacco, but I don’t think he was. I might show it to my year 9s if ever I get a chance to do my fantasy unit, since I think they would be less likely to laugh at this than they might at Labyrinth (pft; no sense of style).
The Lost Kingdom of Lantia
Picked this up for $5; I knew it was going to be a kids’ book, but that’s partly why I got it – I’m realising I should teen fiction so that I can genuinely recommend books – current ones – to my students. Anyway; it’s by Maggie Hamilton, and I actually thought it was set in Melbourne, until at the end I read she’s based in Sydney so I guess it’s actually set there, although there was no mention of a bridge or Opera House which I thought was odd in a book about kids on holidays.
Overall I guess it was OK; as I read it I thought using the name Lantia was a bit dumb since it was quite obviously about Atlantis (magical kingdom destroyed by volcano) – at the end she does indeed say the book was inspired by her fascination by Atlantis, so I’m relieved the name wasn’t just a really poor way of covering it up. The writing was all right; I found it a bit basic, but I am well out of the target audience. The one thing I found incredibly annoying was her use of rhetorical questions all the time, and in italics. Why did she feel the need to do this? (Ha ha). It really, really got on my nerves.
I think I would recommend it to a kid; one who wasn’t a totally avid reader, but was looking for something fairly engaging and possibly a bit challenging, for younger teens.
Randomly Yours, Alex 