BookJumper

awww, bless you. That's so sweet. Me, I usually use random postcards. This works well except that my favourite postcards have to be excluded from the process as the girly touristy glitter tends to stick to the book, which isn't cool. I tried using random scraps of paper (receipts etc.) instead but I swiftly stopped as I felt I was doing my books a world of wrong. I'd love to upgrade to real bookmarks but they're so expensive... or am I just looking in the wrong shops?

I don't think there is much dissection going on here, really - we're not critiquing, taking works apart chapter by chapter in the way that is useful, say, on a writer's forum, in which case dissection equals constructive criticism. What we do is talk about books, the way they made us cry/laugh/rejoice/weep with indignation, or failed to do so, in much the same way you might reccommend or fail to reccommend a book to a group of friends over a cup of coffee. To be honest, I wouldn't say this goes against everything books are written for - as a (yet unpubished) writer, what more could I daydream that, someday, my work will be known enough to warrant discussion on a forum such as this?

... I succeeded in doing just that a few days ago actually; my long-lost copy of "The Truth" now being a bit soggy around the edges. Nothing, however, compared to the state my copy of Douglas Adams's "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" after three hours in an open bag during a rather thunderstormy Bruce Springsteen concert. That one was actually glued together and had to be re-acquired from scratch. "The Truth", on the other hand, is recovering quite well, and being enjoyed by me immensely. No, not in that sense, the other sense.

Why thank you, I thought so myself I must say. I realised as I wrote it that the double ent

... I'd agree; anything that requires a companion volume longer than itself to explain the unreadable bits is of necessity overrated. IMHO, Joyce is a weird creature who un-learnt his craft: "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is very good; "Dubliners" is alright; "Ulysses" - what was he thinking?!

Apparently, half of my migraines (the aura-less ones) may be explained in terms of my chronic jaw spraining (cf. Ouch) sending complications temple-wards; according to the nice second doctor on my case, if the contraption in my mouth helps my jaw it should also help my head. Let us hope. Until they do, I find Co-Codamol to be the best thing. They might be bad for you and hideously addictive but hey; isn't the migraine worse for you? I usually take 5g of Codeine with 500 of Paracetamol for migraines (available over the counter in the UK); although the whole jaw issue has put me on the 30g of Codeine ones (prescription only, would make an elephant very sleepy and unable to operate machinery).

I tip my hat to you: five painful years of compulsory Latin at school didn't make me any the wiser as to what dear old Umberto was on about (it must be said, I only scraped by because the 10s I got in Literature balanced out all the 1s and 2s I got in Translation, resulting in an unlikely 6 ---> pass average)! I do understand that given the setting the dead language is resuscitated in context; however I do like understanding nigh on 100% of the words in the books I read (to the extent that I jot down and look up the words I don't know even in books with no Latin content whatsoever) so being prevented from doing so by a lack of explanatory footnotes is extremely offputting. Offput I was; never made it past page 46 - the dreaded portal description. And I'm not one to shy away from lengthiness in general; Hugo's 100-odd-page reminiscence of Waterloo was as uphill a struggle as Sisyphus's (especially considering I understand nothing of military tactics), yet not even that, his digression on the Argot (Parisian slum dialect), or the three-page description of a single brick put me off that masterpiece that is "Les Mis

oooh...! *shy & sly* I could help you get rid of your unwanted (?) "Making Money", if you like? I love Moist!

Eco's "The Name of the Rose". Twenty-line sentences the middle ten of which are in Latin (with no ******** footnotes) aren't literary: they're pretentious, and that's all there is to it. Which is a shame, as the story is actually quite good - only known case of a movie (Sean Connery, Christian Slater) being better than its book.

I am a bit wary of e-readers, mainly for the good old reason that they will never be able to reproduce the texture/look/smell of a book, not to mention the dreary comparison between downloading content and traditional bookshop browsing. However, the usefulness is undeniable, especially for books which might be too big to carry comfortably around (i.e. a great many classics), or which you might not be 100% sure you want as a permanent addition to your bookshelf. Still: for the above mentioned slight use I'd make of the thing, the price is preposterous. On the other hand, I'll probably invest in the "100 Classic Books Collection" for the DS; I already own a DS, and the tomes therein contained are generally in excess of 500 pages - as opposed to the light portableness of my nifty Nintendo machine.

It's official: I've given up on "Twilight", and re-consigned it to the care of its owner. Could... not... take... the pain...!

The world is a wondrously diverse place : to think I thought the first two adorable, the third brillant, the fourth a marvellous adventure, the fifth a bit hit and miss, the sixth bad and the seventh unfinishable. I abandoned it about 50 pages in, although I was urged to read "that prologue" and was scarred forever...

I like that one, too. Sadly, every other Poe story I've read has sent me into the kind of deep sleep usually only achieved (sorry, William) by the dullest bits of Wordsworth Prelude. I find Poe's style pompous to the point of boredom, and to think I'm a great devourer of gothic themes and flowery language - I think the problem is he strews so many decorative flowers everywhere I tend to lose the ground I'm meant to be standing on as a reader, if you'll forgive the protracted metaphor. Am I alone?

Ah, but is he a villain? The matter is far from decided; I should know as I'm currently in the midst of writing an essay on the subject. Shylock is a usurer because Christian society won't allow him a more dignifid profession, he has spent all his life being spat upon, called names, discriminated against in every possible way - such treatment would hardly make anyone into a saint, in my opinion. I don't go the full length of some critics and class him as a wronged hero; undoubtedly by the end he's lost all proper sense of right and wrong, but to class him as a clear cut villain is I think also inappropriate. Personally I like to think of him as someone who was made into a villain - more or less like Mary Shelley's Creature from "Frankenstein", the only difference is that in Merchant the side the author is on is less explicit. Someone once said that in a good play, everyone is in the right. Or, as Merchant proves, in the wrong (the added cast of backstabbing, forunehunting, intolerant, misoginistic Venetians isn't exactly in the right, either). Such is the genius of Shakespeare.

As a reader, I think prologues are vital to a certain type of book. Fantasy books requiring to introduce worlds, histories and mythologies before their authors can hope to get a word in about main characters and current events require prologues; as a reader I'd be quite annoyed if not much happened in "Chapter 1", while I'd not expect much to happen in the "Prologue" other than me being informed about the technical nuts and bolts I need to become acquainted with before I can properly engage with the novel itself.

Aww, bless ! Ooh me too, which bit of London? Ditto the handbags (although my finances don't allow me to splash on them as much as I would like) and obviously the reading and the vampires, I think we'll get along. With the XBOX 360, you'd probably get along with my very own wonderful man of the last two years and a bit, he lives with me & in front of the XBOX in equal measure LOL. Anyways. Welcome !

I don't think it's that easy to traumatise a child. I have not read this yet but I did read Anne Frank's "Diary of a Girl", "When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit" and other Holocaust-related books when I was about 10 and they did not traumatise me - which is to say, they affected me greatly and made me cry, but they did not scar me in any inappropriate way. I was moved by them in the same way I was moved by sad works of children's 100% fiction, that is to say that they made me vow never to let growing up twisted enough that I would want to hurt people. Besides, at least where I come from children as young as nine or ten study the Holocaust at school (Anne Frank's book I read as a primary school assignment), so they might as well learn about it through books that explain it through the eyes of someone their age rather than concentrating on history tomes full of graphic massacres. Those, if any, were the books that scarred me.

Welcome . And, DLG stands for...? Dear Librarian Gal?

*meep* no! I swear I'll be good, I swear!!

Welcome. I was about to put a kettle on, would you like a cup of tea?

... oh, alright then. We shall be your guides, your scouts, your sherpas; your beacons of light in the mist of literature! Have a cookie, and let the quest begin...

Hello there *waves*. Cookie?

Hello. Kent, I must admit, to me chiefly means the loyal yet misunderstood and mistreated vassal of King Lear. Am I out of touch slightly? Possibly, God knows where I've been the past 400 years! Elizabethan cookie?

Welcome. Cookie?