Notes from a bibliophile

This is the seventh & last book in the Lorien Legacies series. I've talked about the plot before, so I won't go into that again. I'm not sure when they revealed that James Frey was the actual author, but I'm a little bummed actually. I swore I'd never read anything by him and here I've gone & read a whole damn series. Freakin' pen names. I was working at Borders when A Million Little Pieces came out. I gotta tell you, Oprah endorsing a book is fantastic for the author and for the stores, but it annoyed the shit out of me and my coworkers. People would come in asking for the Oprah book and we'd be sold out, natch, because everybody & their pet monkey watches Oprah. Then we'd get yelled at. Yay! So James Frey fits right into the annoying Oprah category. (BTW, I love Oprah. She just didn't give us any head start at the beginning.) Then it came out it was all LIES! BLASPHEMER! To lie to Oprah?!? That's like ring 5 3/4 in Dante'

Poetry. Not a fan. I'm not sure how I failed to see this as poetry when I bought this book. But the title seemed so intriguing. And the back cover says it's "the story of a princess turned damsel turned queen." Maybe it won't be so bad. Truth is, I kind of go through phases. I guess that's nothing earth shattering. There are times when everything seems to go my way. I make plans, I have fun. This can go for months. Then something happens. Reality sets in. I realize I've just been fooling myself. Things aren't great. Things seem shittier than ever. All those plans fall to pieces and the fun turns to bitter regrets. I tend to retreat during these times, into books, TV, movies, daydreams, anything that can convince me that life isn't the giant heap of festering feces that it seems when I'm not doing any of those things. It's hard to pull back out. It's hard to want to pull back out, because I know the crash is inevitably on the other s

This is an exhaustive look at both the musical and the artistic effort put into bringing the musical to life. The behind the scenes narratives are interspersed with the lyrics to the numbers that are either sung by the subject of the narrative or are in some way related to the narrative. It's incredibly clever, I think. You read about what a particular actor went through in coming to the role, right before you read their signature song, and it adds a richness to it. But I think this book accomplishes something really extraordinary. The point of any piece of music is to relay the emotions the songwriter intended. That's usually done not just with words, which are pretty damn emotive, but with the music. They are a vital partnership. Back in ancient days, when the Killer B's (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) were making music, each chord had a certain emotion it was thought to express, so that just by seeing (hearing) a piece was in a particular chord, the audience knew what

During the 2003 invasion of Baghdad, one of the multitude of casualties was the culture of a city that has existed since the 900's. There have been movies made documenting the looting of the museums, but other institutions have suffered as well. One of the victims was the Baghdad Zoo. Brian K. Vaughan explores this part of the invasion in this graphic novel. He tells the story of four lions, Zill, the male, Safa, the old lioness, Noor, the young lioness, and Ali, the cub. The animals are abandoned by the zookeepers before a stray bomb crashes into the zoo and frees the animals. These lions try to find food by leaving their previously sheltered life and advancing into the city, but the civilization they find there confuses them. They have been in captivity so long their hunting skills have rusted. Without ever capturing a prey, they themselves become the prey to their natural enemy, mankind. The story is a bit simplistic and relies on heavy artistic freedom to carry the story (I