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...

My friend Stacy Lewis recommended this to me at Halloween, but I was reading something else so I wasn't able to get to it until now. This is Gothic literature at it's finest. It's absolutely over the top. The language is flamboyant, the situations are outrageous; it's just a delightful pudding of sensationalism. It begins in a cathedral in Madrid where we meet some of our main characters. There's Antonia, a beautiful young girl fresh into town. She meets Don Lorenzo de Medina, and they pretty much immediately fall in love, as you do. But then comes the priest, Ambrosio. Even holier than holier-than-thou, Ambrosio is considered by all of Madrid to be without sin. But pride is the worst of sins, because it is the root of all the others. And Ambrosio hides his overweening pride so well. Wouldn't you be a little prideful if people were clambering over each other just to get near you? Antonia has come to Madrid with her mother Elvira because they are down on thei...

Today is January 17, 2017. In 2010, my mother and I were having some difficulties. I had been terminated earlier in the year, but managed to find work in about a month. My mother's birthday is in September, and she always takes the week off. That year, she came back to termination papers of her own. Since she's older, she just decided on retirement. It was fine for a while, but she began to feel a little run down. She visited her doctor to see if anything was wrong. Despite some other issues - including brown urine - the doctor told her nothing was wrong, probably just telling her she needed to lose weight. As Christmastime approached, mom would go to the mall to shop. She told me later that there were times when she was so exhausted, she thought she would pass out, and she wasn't sure how she would get back to her car. Things progressively got worse. We thought maybe she had the flu. One day I called her before leaving work and she wasn't making sense. I got home t...

The full title of this book is The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. Whew! I think about half of those words could be edited out. I'm not going to lie to you, a good bit of this book is above my intellectual pay grade. The different shapes of electron shells and shearing off particles...ummm, OK, my eyes are glazing over. But those bits aren't that common. There were a few times I had to re-read a passage to see if I could actually understand it, and found that no, I in fact didn't, nor couldn't. Most of the book though is really engaging and written in a pretty layman style. You do not need to be a chemist to read and understand 90% of this book. And that extra 10% is not where the jokes are (disclaimer: there aren't any real jokes...I think). Here are some fascinating facts I learned from this book: Antimony (Sb atomic number 51) was once used as a laxative. "Unli...