queensthief | While She Knits--Show and Tell

idiosyncreant.livejournal.com posting in

*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*

Threaded | Flat

From:

aged-crone.livejournal.com

I'm going to go the chaos as usual route.

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?

From:

peggy-2.livejournal.com

Ophelia by Lisa Klein

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 : )

From:

karatelunch.livejournal.com

Sabriel, by Garth Nix. I used to carry around that book during my freshman year of high school; when I was feeling upset, I'd pull it out and stare at the cover and imagine until I was calm again.

From:

alineadrklrdsis.livejournal.com

Hee, hee. I actually found KoA before I found TT and QoA. I thought the cover art was amazing. Then I noticed it was part of a series though and bought TT instead. I never would have read the books if the American Hardback Edition didn't look so pretty. Even after I had come to appreciate the awesomeness that is MWT I still get out KoA just to stare at the cover. =P

From:

fabricalchemist.livejournal.com

I really like the cover art for Mercedes Lackey's books...they make me want to imagine stories of my own.

From:

checkers65477.livejournal.com

A series I liked a lot was The Sword-Dancer Saga by Jennifer Roberson. The characters really grow on you and the setting is very fully fleshed-out. How can you resist a rogue like Tiger? The first few sentences from the first book:

"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.

From:

aged-crone.livejournal.com

Years ago (this would be late '70's), I bought the paperback of A Wizard of Earthsea just because of its lovely, grayish-greenish, detailed but distant cover (and then bought the sequels both for the covers and for the stories). Ditto with the old paperback of Dragonsong, by Anne McCaffrey - it had beautiful, bright-but-muted colors in an intricate, almost paisley-patterned picture.

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.

From:

aged-crone.livejournal.com

Hebe and I were talking about the Antonia Forest books in the Conspiracy Room. Her characters are amazing - complex, lifelike, fascinating. It's all the more astonishing because the first book, and three of the others, are "boarding school books" and one would expect the standard cardboard characters - wise, all-knowing headmistress, only-slightly-less-so Head Girl, maths-genius-who-is-also-the-music-genius, pranks, midnight feasts, and so on. That's most definitely not what one gets.

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

From:

traboule.livejournal.com

Does anybody else read Patricia McKillip? Someone mentioned Alphabet of Thorn earlier, but that's it. The orginal hardcovers for the Riddlemaster books have these beautiful paintings on the front - oils, maybe? - that are all sort of smudgy and moving. The Riddlemaster of Hed has the main character in a snowstorm kind of hunched over around his harp and you can practically see the wind blowing around him.

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!"

From:

rosaleeluann.livejournal.com

Robin McKinleys world building always blows me away. She is so amazing. (STILL need to read Dragonhaven... read the first part and I love it already. The library ordered it, but its NOT GETTING THERE FAST ENOUGH. GAH. *pokes book delivery people*)

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*

From:

idiosyncreant.livejournal.com

~I actually will pick up anything with Brett Helquist artwork (Series of Unfortunate Events) because they seem to have branded him for quirky, fun kids books. I have been vindicated thus far. Though my library keeps the hobby from bankrupting me.
~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.

From:

philia-fan.livejournal.com

Okay, y'all are going to think I'm a bit peculiar, but you mentioned "character portraits." Just finished Middlemarch by George Eliot -- all 780 pages -- and the characters are amazingly deep and complex and real, and the way they react off each other is so true. I complained all through the first 200 pages, and ended up, if not actually agreeing, at least not arguing with anyone who thinks it's the "greatest novel in the English language."

From: (Anonymous)

This is not a book, but the character portraits in The Shoebox Project completely blew me away. The Shoebox Project is a fanfic, but it is one of the best peices of writing I've ever seen. The characters are just amazing.