While She Knits--Show and Tell
Oct. 12th, 2007 10:07 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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queensthief*gosh, I'm tired...*
Guiding question for the week:
Is there a book where the descriptions or the character portraits or the settings just blew you away? Or cover art?
Tell us about it. Give us quotes, if you want, as long as they're not spoilery, to give us a taste.
Or, chaos as usual.
As you will have it. Carry on.
*thank you, Checkers, for the poke, I am half-dead and will be till November*
Guiding question for the week:
Is there a book where the descriptions or the character portraits or the settings just blew you away? Or cover art?
Tell us about it. Give us quotes, if you want, as long as they're not spoilery, to give us a taste.
Or, chaos as usual.
As you will have it. Carry on.
*thank you, Checkers, for the poke, I am half-dead and will be till November*
no subject
Date: 10/13/07 11:58 am (UTC)I've just heard of some books by Pamela Aidan that tell the story of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mr. Darcy. An Assembly Such as This, Duty and Desire, These Three Remain.
Has anybody read them? Are they good, or at least bearable, or are they the kind of thing that makes one shake one's head and wonder what on earth is the matter with authors and publishers?
no subject
Date: 10/13/07 11:32 pm (UTC)Or rather, my mother brought them home, my father read them, my sister skimmed them, and I read the first three chapters and blanched.
The family enjoyed them - including the Mother, who is normally a literary purist par excellant - but I found the writing a bit forced. Like the new P&P movie, the joins between writer dialogue and Austen dialogue are gaping and obvious, which is why I didn't bother. Plus I have a low tolerance for Regency.
I gather the sketch of Darcy is nice, and that his valet is very funny. My biggest complaint was that Darcy was showing signs of becoming a four-dimensional character (one who can analyze his own feelings like an author would), and for some reason I found this very annoying.
They're definitely bearable; maybe even good. Just not - great.
Get 'em from the library. ;)
no subject
Date: 10/14/07 09:23 am (UTC)I hate it when people try to do historical dialogue and end up sounding phony. When it's well done - Cornelia Meigs, for example, could do it beautifully - that's one thing. When not... One of the reasons I found it ridiculous that Avi got any sort of Newbery for Crispin: Cross of Lead was that it simply didn't ring true. It sounded like phony-medieval rather than believable-medieval.
Ophelia
Date: 10/13/07 12:01 pm (UTC)The retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's perspective. I bought the book because of the beautiful cover, and while the book was a bit uneven in parts, it's the first time I really felt I could follow Shakespeare's Hamlet. granted, I never tried very hard to figure out Hamlet, but Ophelia made it easy.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=ophelia&z=y
Also the cover art on the original Tam Lin release by Pamela Dean. All rich colors and swirly lines surrounding the elven Queen : )
no subject
Date: 10/13/07 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/13/07 03:43 pm (UTC)King of Attolia...when I found out it was coming out, I printed out a picture of the cover and glued it to a magnet and hung it in my locker. And every time I looked at it, it made me happy (in that sort of "Want book. Want it NOW." way).
Bridge of Birds is interesting so far. ("My name is Kao and my personal name is Li and I have a slight flaw in my character.") It has a nice cover. And I like the subtitle: a novel of Ancient China that never was.
~Feir Dearig
KoA
Date: 10/13/07 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/13/07 05:27 pm (UTC)Sword-Dancer
Date: 10/13/07 06:24 pm (UTC)"In my line of work I've seen all kinds of women. Some beautiful. Some ugly. Some just plain in between. And--being neither senile nor a man with aspirations to sainthood--whenever the opportunity presented itself (with or without my encouragement), I bedded the beautiful ones, (although sometimes they bedded me), passed on the ugly ones altogether (not being a greedy man), but allowed myself discourse with the in-betweeners on a fairly regular basis, not being one to look the other way when such things as discourse and other entertainments are freely offered. So the in-betweeners made out all right, too.
But when she walked into the hot, dusty cantina and slipped the hood of her white burnous, I knew nothing I'd ever seen could touch her."
We quickly learn that Tiger and Del are both terribly damaged by events from their past. Del can't stand Tiger but needs him as a guide as she searches for her kidnapped brother. It sounds like it could be a romance book but it's not. It's adult fantasy set in an exotic world. The books aren't particularly well written but very entertaining.
Some of the covers (http://members.aol.com/misuly/sworddancer.jpg) are pretty nice, too.
Paperbacks
Date: 10/13/07 07:27 pm (UTC)And I bought the paperback of Elizabeth Goudge's A Little White Horse because of the cover, too - lovely, mysterious shades of green with a small, white "horse" glowing beneath the trees. The description on the back was also interesting, but it was the cover that caught my eye.
Antonia Forest
Date: 10/13/07 07:37 pm (UTC)Autumn Term
The Marlows and the Traitor
Falconer's Lure
End of Term
Peter's Room
The Thuggery Affair
The Ready-Made Family
The Cricket Term
The Attic Term
Run Away Home
Re: Antonia Forest
Date: 10/13/07 11:37 pm (UTC)Have you read the ones about Nick Marlow (ancestor, not Nicola) and Shakespeare? Apparently they're good fun too.
Re: Antonia Forest
Date: 10/14/07 09:12 am (UTC)Re: Antonia Forest
Date: 10/14/07 12:19 am (UTC)Re: Antonia Forest
Date: 10/14/07 09:19 am (UTC)Re: Antonia Forest
Date: 10/17/07 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/13/07 11:56 pm (UTC)I don't have those editions, of course...I have mid-eighties trade paperbacks with horrible quasi-sci fi drawings of unnaturally curvy women with enormous impractical sleeves. They're lousy, but they've grown on me for some reason.
Plus McKillip now gets her covers done by Kinuko Craft, which is the most perfect combination of author/cover art I'd seen until I picked up QoA and KoA. I love the cover for Od Magic (http://www.kycraft.com/detail_pages/od_magic.html).
Added bonus - the descriptions of people are are beautiful as (most of) the cover art. Vague and yet evocative - I love it.
"She was silent; he waited, seeing her oddly, feverishly in the firelight, the tangled mass of her hair like harvested kelp, her skin pale as shell, her expressions changing like light changing over the sea. Her face twisted away from him suddenly. "Stop seeing me like that!"
no subject
Date: 10/14/07 12:30 am (UTC)The new cover for the book is just as lovely as the one you linked to, ( http://images.art.com/images/PRODUCTS/Regular/10089000/10089736.jpg ), and I know how you feel. I'm stuck with the vague photograph image cover, which isn't bad, but isn't particularly interesting either.
But while McKillip writer beautifully, the last chapter had me a bit lost. It felt like a bit of a rushed ending in some ways.
no subject
Date: 10/14/07 12:40 am (UTC)I get drawn by anything Craft's done--the main reason I finished Wildwood Dancing, which was worth it, but a bit of a haul for me at that point.
no subject
Date: 10/14/07 01:33 am (UTC)Hmm. I'll have to give it a read; like Rose's, my To Read list just keeps expanding...
While She Knits! Yay!
Date: 10/14/07 01:38 am (UTC)Random Book stuff:
Finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel. The first 900 pages were awesome, it was the last 100 that were weird. But 900 pages of awesomeness--thats not bad!
Started reading Dune. Read the first 100 pages or so... I was bored out of my MIND. It went back to the library. (Sorry to all those here who love that book. It just wasn't my thing. I really wanted to like it, but... it wasn't working.)
Read The Tale of Despereaux on my sister's recommendation. Not bad, but not an absolute favorite.
I got Sabriel from the Library to re-read. (I first read it... two or three summers ago. I liked it enough to finish, but not enough to read the rest of the series. Months pass. I'm in the library with a growing stack of book in my arms... see Lirael on the shelf. I think hey, what the heck... I'll read it. LOVED it. Abhornsen was awesome too. Now I want to re-read Sabriel to see if I like it more this time around)
I'll leave now. *scurries away*
Re: While She Knits! Yay!
Date: 10/14/07 01:12 pm (UTC)In the eye of the Beholder
Date: 10/14/07 02:56 am (UTC)~I cannot tell you what it felt like to see the King of Attolia cover for the first time, not knowing there was another sequel, not knowing there was a new cover series.
~I couldn't resist Valiant, though I knew it was totally not my thing, because it's cover was so singular.
On the other hand, books I had to read past the cover include Queen of Attolia, Blue Castle, Wrinkle in Time, and Howl's Moving Castle. No mean company!
In terms of words, there are some very "literary" books I knew I had to hold on for a bit longer than usual on and at some point thought, "Yes," because of the descriptions of characters. The Game of Kings is the most recent.
Re: In the eye of the Beholder
Date: 10/14/07 05:53 am (UTC)My copy of Blue Castle is dark blue, with light blue lettering. No dust jacket, no picture, no nothing. I bought it because of the author. Kilmeny of the Orchard, on the other hand, is gorgeous: one of those oval-portrait-pasted-onto-the-front-cover jobs. Don't like the story all that much, though.
There's an old book called The Blueberry Muffin, about a tea room. I latched onto a discarded library book copy of it because it was dark green with, in light pink, a picture of the tea room sign hanging on a post. It just looked cozy, and I had to have it. Also, I love reading about tea rooms. I want to open one. (I could call it The Tea Room of Attolia).
I ordered KoA for my library without having read either of the first two books, based on a recommendation on the Lymond list to which I belong, mostly. I thought the cover was among the best I've seen, in recent years anyway, when so many of the covers I've found quite ugly. I think if I had come across it first in a bookstore, I would definitely have taken a second look.
Re: In the eye of the Beholder
Date: 10/14/07 11:58 pm (UTC)You know the Penguin Classic paperback series of the Anne books that come in sets? Well, the romance-involved books all look the same, and Blue Castle etc. have the same artist on them. I liked the earlier ones, but have grown out of them. So I made myself a blue-schemed book cover for my Blue Castle, as I love it to pieces on the inside. Includes a translation cover that's rather classy, though similar in art style to the other one.
I want a coffee shop called Elevenses. Perhaps a B&B. Somewhere I can host poetry readings.
no subject
Date: 10/14/07 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/14/07 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/14/07 09:10 pm (UTC)But really, I read the bulk of it in a couple of weeks. It was that first 200 pages that slowed me down!
no subject
Date: 10/15/07 12:03 am (UTC)And the cover I have is gorgeous: http://louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/griffin/millais6_p.jpg
just on it's own, but fits pretty well, though depicting a different era.
I have to agree with the character-sketch assessment. I so love the picture drawn of Will over time. And Mary!
no subject
Date: 10/15/07 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/15/07 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/16/07 02:18 am (UTC)It's Rickman, even, so yes. Love it. It was just too perfect to pass up.
One of my top 5 in QoA, I think, that section.
no subject
Date: 10/16/07 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2/28/08 01:08 am (UTC)