BookJumper
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Oooh, linky
shiny.I am rather dismayed though - February was meant to be the marathon month when I finished The Last Dragonslayer (which is brilliant so far, by the way), re-read TN1 and TN2, wrapped up TN3 and got through TN4 and TN5 before the release of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. Except, I've been ill pretty much all month and have succeeded in none of the above - AAAAAAAAARGH!
What is one to do?! Not that I've got much choice. I'll go and support Jasper when he comes to Birmingham on the 28th, get my copy of TN6 signed in pretty hardback even if it will mess up my shelves, and line it up. Thankfully he's the rare kind of author I trust enough to buy anything by even though I'm not up to speed with the catalogue.
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Ooooh! I really like the sound of this one. As you know, I loved Vance's style from The Dying Earth; this one sounds like way, way more my thing thematically so I shall keep my eyes well peeled for it
thanks for the heads up. -
Ooh, good season, Giulia. I'm watching season 4 at the moment. It just keeps getting more awesome!
I don't know how I survived episode 10.
Dex's just decided he's going to have to kill Miguel, who for his part has just good as handed Dex over to the Skinner.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
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Angel of Heaven - Fair Warning has just finished, now we're onto Play Dirty - Loud 'n' Nasty.
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Dexter, halfway through Season 3, currently eating my hands -
Miguel looks like he's going to misapply Harry's Code
... argh!!!
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No, thank youI didn't see Bookjumper's post before I wrote this. She said what I said, just much more eloquently. Thank you, Bookjumper. I say we were both pretty eloquent.Short of it is, everybody's replied here confirm that no one likes their heroes shallow and two-dimensional, and I don't think that's a particularly Modern preference - after all, life's always been in 3D.
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Merging, merging, merged
thanks for the heads up, Chesil. -
Further from Ninth's excellent points, I would dare to argue that all the literary heroes that have fascinated and intrigued readers through the centuries - nay, longer - have done so not in spite of, but because of their weaknesses. Human beings are interested in investigating other beings in situations they can relate to, and have since the dawn of storytelling; now, what's relatable about perfect courage, integrity and nobility?
I mean, think Knights of the Round Table. Surely they're the paladins of all that's good and true, right? Wrong. They haven't survived the Middle Ages because they were ever perfect, they survived the Middle Ages because of their jealousy, pride and wrath. It's these imperfections that makes them human, their humanity that makes them heroic, and their heroism that makes them immortal.
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Giulia indeed has experienced, at least in part, The City of Dreaming Books, and is over the moon others are tapping into that minefield of whimsical genius that is the imagination of Walter Moers. The man is a legend, his work a treasure. You won't regret it.
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Absolute Hair Metal Volume 1, specifically Hey You - Quireboys.
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AwwwI absolutely love this Bookjumper it made me cry. I'm going to give it to my hubby tomorrow it says I love you so much better than a soppy card
bless you both. My work here is done.
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Tomato soup. I'm sick of soup. I want to eat solids, [insert-bannable-curse-here]!
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How I Met Your Mother, Season 2 Episode 1 (I totally did not watch the entirety of Season 1 yesterday).
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Vanessa, I've merged your topic with the 'Facial Expressions' one as they were very similar, I hope you find food for discussion here
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On occasion, although that was more to do with personal sensitivity to the topic than authorial skill in pushing those emotional buttons. Unless other forces are at play, there's no way I would want to stop reading a book that is engaging me strongly enough to make me cry. Just as Tennyson postulated it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I say better to have read and cried.But did you ever get a book that so upset you that you couldn't continue reading Giulia? -
I totally over-share
I will grin, chuckle, laugh hysterically at my book in public, just as I will not refrain from lip quivering, snivelling, or downright sobbing. I couldn't refrain from it if I wanted to, and to be honest I don't think I want to - I like being involved with my reading material at every level possible. Besides, it sure is good advertising for the work of an author who is clearly skilled enough to push my emotional buttons (some will say I'll cry at anything, but truth is I will willingly cry at what deserves to be cried at). -
My favourite romantic poem? Simple, easy, no contest: today, tomorrow and for the next 100 years (to say it with a well known diamond ring ad), it'd have to be Billie's Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
My favourite romantic read, however, is undoubtedly the 'Heart Beneath a Stone' chapter in Hugo's Les Miserablés, which contains the letter with which Marius declares his love to Cosette:
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!
What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.
Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.
The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.
Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in Intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.
You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.
All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.
What love commences can be finished by God alone.
True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.
If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.
Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.
Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.
"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone to dwell?"
"She did not say."
What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!
Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child of him!
There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.
Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!
Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.
Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.
Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.
Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.
If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.
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Lament (Flexipop Version) - The Cure.
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Started re-reading The Eyre Affair this morning, and I'm finding it so hard to fast read it for plot rather than indulge in the language... Jasper is such a genius. Cannot wait for TN6, better get crackin'.
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Currently reading 'Lost In A Good Book' by Jasper Fforde, and enjoying every second of it!
I myself need to begin my personal Ffordian February Challenge any minute now. This frankly ridiculous situation of Jasper writing quicker than I can read ends now.I'm thinking of having a Thursday next re-reading session before the next one comes out in a few weeks, Chrissy, and I've been thinking about it even more since I've seen you re-reading and enjoying them so much!
And so you should since we are Reading Circle-ing it in March *nudge nudge, wink wink*!Wow! I just added it to my wishlist -
There thereUh oh. I have a few of his books on my shelf. I haven't even opened one yet. Your comment does not bode well. one never knows, you might think I'm talking rubbish. Just, in my experience, those who don't like Eco don't like him for precisely the reason I've mentioned. He can definitely write, just personally I find him too smarmy and pompous to be enjoyable. I hope your experience is different, but let's say I wouldn't hurry to make him your next read...
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My tuppence - maybe you can't get through it because Eco is a smug dullster who seems to revel in feeling superior by ramming his (admittedly) insane knowledge down people's throatsI think its The Island of the day before - Umberto Eco as its actually mine I inherited a few of my grandad's but they stricly speaking weren't my buys. I have tried to read this on a number of occasions but never got through it, shame really its a lovely looking book, hard backed beautiful picture on the front.
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... no despairing allowed. One can always try look for returns between now and then, there usually are. Maybe I can help, seeing as the RST is only a stone's throw from where I studyHubby and I are hopefully coming to Stratford on the weekend of 25-27 March. Sadly we can't go to the theatre as they only have two seats in the upper circle with a very restricted view left. I'm gutted, I'd have loved to have seen Romeo and Juliet, but sadly the RSC isn't something you can decide on on the spur of the moment. I'm still looking forward to our visit though.
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William of Anorak is actually by far my favourite minor character up to this pointWilliam of Anorak and not just because of his fabulous name!Anyway I was about halfway through the book (got me very few sittings to get there, which if you know my deathly slowness you'll realise is a sign of an AMAZING book) but had to press pause on it due to the big essay rush of doom; now that's done with, I'll be picking it right up
should kick-start my Fforde Ffebruary Challenge off nicely.Am LOVING it so far, definitely as good as the Thursday Next books, my inner child suggests that maybe it's even better.
What are you watching now?
in Music / TV / Films
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Just finished Dexter, Season 4, episodes 8 and 9. Can't believe such a good show has gotten so much better. Pats on the back of the writers and actors* for making me truly care about these characters, I've just spent the past few hours variously swearing at my laptop screen, shielding my eyes, punching the air gleefully and going 'awwww!' ... I might just squeeze in episode 10 before bedtime.
*Dexter himself, I've found out, has been in his fair share of off-Broadway Shakespeare. A lot is explained.