I created an account on Shelfari a while back, but never really got into using it. Just today I decided to revisit it, to see a lot of really nifty improvements, both in the look and feel and with the feature set. I love that you can segregate books according to once you plan to […]

I just finished Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, after resolving to read it since it’s been turned into a movie (no, I haven’t watched the movie, and yes, I heard it wasn’t good). As a YA fantasy novel, to me it was pretty typical: fast-paced adventure, magic, dragons, a likeable protagonist who is coming of age. It […]

Lately I’ve just put down Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire and I have to say that it was brilliant — I loved the fully-realized political and spiritual backdrop for the tale, and Elphaba was certainly a character. She’s the title character, but it was […]

I finished Lloyd Alexander’s last work sometime last week. The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio was light, and in keeping with how I know Alexander’s work to be: seemingly simple, but something with great depth. I loved the characters he created, as usual — for all the short time I got to know them, by the time I ended the book I loved them all.

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield’s evocative novel on the connection and bond between siblings, revolves around two sets of twins: Margaret Lea and her deceased twin Moira, and tragedy-born twins Emmeline and Adeline March. The story is two-fold, one story in another story: you have Margaret while she goes about her task to write the life story of reclusive, mysterious author Vida Winter… and then you have Vida Winter narrating her story; Ms. Winter, the successful writer who’s never told the truth about who she is and where she came from. She’s finally coming clean.

I finished Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black just a few minutes ago: a darkly beautiful, haunting tale about model/actress Josie Tyrell and living through the tragedy that is her boyfriend’s suicide. Dealing with questions such as, do we really kill that which we love? and whose fault is it, really?, Paint It Black is a glimpse into the soul of one who has gone through love and loss and is struggling to find the way back.

For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling with one of the books I’m currently reading, specifically Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning. I did desperately want to like it (the premise of the book intrigued me right off the bat) but now I’m having difficulty trying to wade through it, so this morning when I again put it down, I decided to move on to other books.

I was reorganizing my bookmarks a few days ago and came upon quite a few interesting literary/reading/writing websites that I had previously bookmarked, some of them for checking out at a later date. One of these is DailyLit, a service that brings books to you via email on a daily basis.

We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but could not find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved.

I finally read and finished The Bartimaeus Trilogy a few weeks back, due to recommendations of friends. The trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is made up of the books The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, and Ptolemy’s Gate; it follows three principal characters, all of them coming from different backgrounds in life: Nathanial (also […]

I finally whipped up a new layout and upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.1.1, from pre-2.1; I previously never had time (or much energy, actually) to try upgrading. Besides, I was getting tired of the old layout.
That over and done with, I found a gem of a website yesterday, and I’ve been itching to note […]