1. A Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin
2. Girl in Hyacinth Blue – Susan Vreeland
   
3. The Friday Night Knitting Club – Kate Jacobs
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
5. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Seth Grahame-Smith
6. Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris

A pretty good month, I’d say, for reading.

Harry Potter was once again, awesome, although this time I was able to sit back and really look at the book for what it was. While there was some action, I think I found this book much slower than I remember it. Really, it is a prologue to book 7. It is the build up, the explanation before the action. So in a way it didn’t feel quite as neat and tidy as all of the other books had (or at least books one through four, even), in terms of being wrapped up nicely.  But that’s all right. My favorite parts were probably potions classes, Ron playing the game thinking he’d had a bit of Felix Felicitis, and the history concerning Tom Riddle’s childhood. Good scenes.

Dead Until Dark was, I have to admit, a guilty pleasure. I’ve resisted becoming roped into a lot of popular series like Anita Blake, Twilight, and several others, but this one is a series I can get behind. It wasn’t the best book certainly, but it wasn’t awful, either. I found myself entertained by it enough so that I could suspend my skepticism about Sookie’s having telepathic powers. After all, why not? In a world where Vampirism is a virus, why not have telepaths and shape shifters? What did bother me, however, was that everyone seemed to be attracted to her… I would have to say the book definitely walked the thin line between being a Mary Sue (like Twilight) and fairly solid fiction. Anyway, it’s made me want to watch the Trueblood series to see how closely it follows the book, so I think I may rent it from Blockbuster soon.

And finally… Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was funny.  I actually wanted to see more zombies, but quite simply the story of Pride and Prejudice remained nearly intact with occasional mentions of the undead here and there. The characters, however, went on with their lives, as the zombie threat had always been there. Quite amusing. I’ll have to get this for myself. Makes me wonder though, how many other stories could this author potentially re-write with zombies? A lot. And I’d probably read them all.

Well, that’s it for May.

Now I can start The Ruins and the next Charlaine Harris book!

I have noticed that since I started my new job, dropped a few friends, and gained some new ones, that my life has been utterly drama-free. It’s about two months and counting now, and even though my salary isn’t what it could be, somehow I’m much happier. My schedule is full, I always have plans on the weekends (if  I want them), there are people to see and spend time with, and I just feel different.

It’s hard to explain.

But I guess that also accounts for my lack of updates; I feel trite when I’m talking about how happy I am, and worse when I complain about what may happen or what I don’t have. There are so many ways life could be worse, and so many other people who aren’t happy for legitimate reasons other than I can’t go out because I’m down to $100 in my checking account for the pay period.

So anyway, that’s my excuse for being scarce around here. Instead of over-analyzing and endlessly rehashing things, I’ve been holding onto the moments and carefully storing them away for days when I really need them.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t turn a new leaf for this journal. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to link my Tumblr and Twitter accounts to this, but I’m not sure that I’m savvy enough with PHP or anything to do that yet. Which is another goal of mine eventually… to finally sit down and learn this stuff. There’s a book on my shelf that’s been staring at me for months, if only I would take the time to crack it open.

Well, in said-trite news of happiness, boy came down to visit this weekend. He’d been here since Saturday and left today. It was just a nice time. We didn’t even do much that I’d planned for because the weather was kind of crappy. Mostly, it rained, and so instead of walking around and being adventurous like I’d put down, we ended up being our normal selves and combining our two passions into one–food and movies!

AMC Fork & Screen is now my new favorite theater, being one of the cheapest theaters around ($7 for an adult ticket, I believe… and $5 before noon on weekends!!). It also has the added bonus of being a restaurant as well! Food is brought to you when you order it. Not gourmet food, but more than your typical theater fare.

During Star Trek, which yes, I saw again (this is the last time though), I ordered a pizzetta, some cheese sticks, and a strawberry milkshake, while the boy ordered a bacon cheeseburger with fries. Awesome.

I’ll definitely be going back there.

Oh, and yes, we saw Terminator Salvation of course. I agree wholeheartedly with his review; we weren’t expecting a full-blown incredible drama, and so we weren’t disappointed. John Connor, no longer the punkass little spoiled brat from T2, but a hardened military leader, took a backseat to a new kind of terminator, Marcus. An interesting plot with great nonstop action and a lot of one-liners that die-hard fans will recognize and laugh about instantly. There was a special guest appearance as well

Anyway, the weekend was awesome. Last week was awesome. And the week before that, and today, and probably tomorrow.

So things are going well. I’ll be finishing another book soon, and when I do, of course I’ll write about it!

Mostly late in updating, again. I think I’ve been afraid to commit to a list because I have so many books waiting now that I don’t know how I’ll get through them all. This is my list now, and it will carry me through the end of the month (pretty good, if I do say so myself):

1. A Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin
2. Girl in Hyacinth Blue – Susan Vreeland
   
3. The Friday Night Knitting Club – Kate Jacobs
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
5. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Seth Grahame-Smith

I have to admit I’ve been feeling pressured to read anything other than Harry Potter and the Song of Ice and Fire series. Although Harry Potter is no chore, the books easy to read and immensely enjoyable, ASOIAF can drag sometimes. And each book is long, incredibly long. Even reading one to two hours a day, it has still taken me about two weeks to finish the first two books, each.

This means that I haven’t been able to read many other books within my allotted month, although I have many, many waiting. Like the Sookie Stackhouse books, and now books 2 – 10 of the Anita Blake series. Plus, Gone With the Wind, The Duchess, and a book of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. I’m excited to have so many good books to read, but also a bit overwhelmed. I suppose this is my adult, out-of-school homework list, though.

Well, Girl in Hyacinth Blue was interesting. Tracing the ownership of this painting–is it a Vermeer? Is it an imitation?–back through generations until we finally get to see who painted it. I sort of knew who the artist was the instant it started to give details about the artist’s family (having read other literature about this particular painter), and so it ended how I’d hoped it would. Tough to get into, but a nice, simple interlude of a book.

The Friday Night Knitting Club was apparently Jacobs’ first book, and looking back at it now, I can see that for sure. It didn’t end well, the author (spoilers) choosing to kill off the main character in a random and unexpected bout of cancer. Some of the characters weren’t very well developed, while others were almost unbelievable.

Honestly? If my boyfriend knocked me up, then dumped me after an affair with his secretary, then moved to Paris to continue a string of illicit flings, and then came back twelve years later to make amends, I would probably only agree to see him in court. As I was awarded sole custody of my own child.  I would definitely not allow the man back into my life and then get to know him in a romantic fashion again. Even if I was about to die of cancer. Sorry.

Knowing next to nothing about knitting didn’t bother me as much as the finer details of these characters’ lives. So had I been Ms. Jacobs’ editor, I would have had her work on the book a little bit longer, plot out a more realistic and satisfying ending, and rethink a few of the main players’ motivations.

Overall though, interesting after the bumpiness of the first few chapters.

And now I can’t wait to finish P&P&Z. I’ve been saving it for last this month (aside from Harry Potter) because it’s like dessert for me. And I need to buy my own copy, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere other than Amazon.

Oh well! That’s the month.

It feels good to be writing again, just as surely as it feels amazing to look outside on a sunny, clear morning at the green grass and the trees, full of leaves and swaying in the wind.

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I swear that sometime soon I will update with something personal that’s not a reading list or a rant about movies.

(Spoilers!!!)

A big group of friends and I decided to go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine this past weekend at Rio, and my excitement was sky-high until Thursday, when the first true reviews began rolling in.  The movie, which is now holding at a steady 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, was leaked well before it came out in the US, but I refrained from reading reviews and listening to critics before this week because I had been so pumped to see it. I mean… super ripped Hugh Jackman? Another X-men movie? Who wouldn’t be excited?
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Technically speaking, I only finished two books this month since the third, The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin I did not complete until Friday, as the plane landed in DC.  I suppose it was a lousy month for reading, although to my own defense, the two books I did end up reading (A Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) were each well over the average length of a fiction novel.

Hollow Chocolate Bunnies was hilarious and irreverent. It reminded me of Jasper Fforde, Douglas Adams, and John Kennedy Toole together in terms of tone, style, and content; Fforde has written several novels about fairy tales and literary characters coming to life, while Adams and Toole have unique writing styles. Sometimes the audience is addressed directly, where other times the writing takes on a conversational tone.

Either way, it was entertaining and had me grinning in some spots. I think one of the most enjoyable characters was Eddie, the detective bear who teams up with the novel’s protagonist and who likes to drink. Habitually, he gets very drunk by hanging himself upside down from the blinds, to let the alcohol soak from his butt into his sawdust-filled head.

Towards the end, the novel fell apart and kind of adopted this deux ex machina type pace. The protagonist, Jack, who has been something of a gormster the entire book, suddenly comes up with a brilliant plan that pretty much saves the day. There are a few details left hanging here and there, not to mention the decidedly theological turn the novel ends on. Previously, religion and the various Toy City’s deities had been mentioned, but not dwelt upon. Oh well.

For this month, I think I have just as ambitious expectations for the book list:

1. A Clash of Kings – George R. R. Martin
2. Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris
3. Girl in Hyacinth Blue – Susan vreeland
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling

I think this may be manageable as long as I stick to reading at least an hour a day, although the GRRM book will slow things considerably. I may have to double up on reading in that case, or find some empty weekends to fit in a good long read (I seriously doubt that this will happen, given the craziness of the past few weeks, anyway).

My reading list has only grown in the last week, as I’ve discovered that several coworkers are avid readers as well. We’ve even begun swapping books, and now I have five or six more to add to the growing pile of unread books on one of my book cases.  Sigh. If only there were more time in each day…