Author: booknutgirls

booknutgirls http://thebooknutdotcom.wordpress.com I read. I blog. I sell books. I chauffeur my kids. What more do you need to know?

The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights

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I really liked the idea of this book. I was searching for a copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and came across this one, “written” by John Steinbeck. I thought it was interesting: who knew that Steinbeck had done anything with King Arthur? I got it from the library, and perused the introduction. It turns out that Steinbeck hated reading until an aunt gave him a copy of Mallory, and it was because of that book that Steinbeck became who he did. He wanted so much to “translate” it into common vernacular, so he took it upon himself to go to England, study the manuscripts and create a version of the work of his own.

However, he never finished it. This was published after his death, in 1976, with a series of letters from Steinbeck to his agent and editor about the process. I found both the introduction and the letters fascinating.

But. (You knew there would be one, didn’t you?)

When it came to the actual reading of the tales, I was bored out of my skull. I won’t say that it was Steinbeck’s — or even Mallory’s — fault, because there was a part of me that was intrested to see the origins of all the novels I’ve enjoyed. I just realized about 100 pages in that I like the novelizations. I like to have my mythical characters have motivations, and conversations, and to be more fleshed out than they were in this telling. (For the same reason, I don’t really like Greek myths, although Hubby and M tell me I’m missing out.) And since my time is better spent reading something I really like, I abandoned it.

If you’re interested in Arthurian legends on an intellectual level (or you handle myths in pure form better than I do), this really is an interesting way to read it, especially if you can’t get your hands on a good version of Le Morte d’Arthur. It’s just not for me.

Just So Stories

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The Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling, are, I think, some of the most retold stories in English language. I know I’ve heard most of them (though not all) in some form or other before I ever picked up this collection of the original tales to read. Not all the stories are equal: the most famous ones — about how the elephant got his nose, or how the camel got his hump — are justifiably so, being timeless, funny, and enjoyable to read. Some of the others are clever, but kind of silly (like how the alphabet was made… Cute, but… kind of dumb). Some — like the first story about the whale — were just weird. Even so, it was an enjoyable experience.

Although I enjoyed reading the stories, and I could tell the affection Kipling had for his daughter (whom the stories were written for), I really think these stories are better enjoyed told, or with a lot of illustrations, then read straight through. Kipling has an almost Seussian grasp of the language, inventing words to suit his needs. I often resorted to reading out loud just so I could hear what Kipling was trying to do with a certain passage.

It was definitely worth the time, though.

Banned Books Week Meme

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Found at The Book Nest (thanks, Corinne!):

Look through this list of most banned books. If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, *** it.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli ***
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ***
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx ***
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant ***
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus ***
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke ***
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck ***
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau ***
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes ***
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau ***
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle ***
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

A disclaimer on the ***: most of them are my husband’s philosophy books. We own them, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever get around to reading them… 🙂

Audrey, Wait!

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I read a lot (a LOT) of books for kids, and I have come to realize that they fall into, essentially, three categories. There’s the ones that I enjoy simply because they are good, enjoyable, fun, thought-provoking, interesting stories that are mostly well-told. Then there’s the ones that I go into mom-mode, deconstructing and analyzing the book as if these characters were my own children. Then… there’s the ones that are perfectly ordinary teenagers doing perfectly (well, mostly) ordinary teenagery things. I have come to believe that I’m just too old and uncool to even remotely relate.

Audrey is famous. Not because she wants to be. She’s just an ordinary 16-year-old junior who just broke up with her boyfriend, Evan. It’s just that Evan’s in a band, and he wrote a song about their breakup called “Audrey, Wait!” and an agent heard it and radio stations played it, and suddenly it’s the hippest song around and she’s famous. This book is her story.

I really can’t give you much more of a summary of that… because I didn’t finish it. It’s not because it’s a bad book. It’s got a sassy tone, and it’s fast-paced and incredibly hip. I liked the idea, looking at meta-fame of today’s overly connected society, and how one person would deal with all that. But… it was just too hip for me. I found myself feeling old and out of touch when reading it. Granted, I wasn’t even nearly as cool as Audrey when I was a teenager (“band” means that thing with trumpets and flutes that plays on a football field); and I didn’t go see anyone remotely cool until I was a senior and went to see Rush with a friend). So I didn’t even have any past to draw upon here. So, about a third of the way in, I flipped to the end to see if it all ends up happily ever after (it does), and abandoned it.

This one is just for people much, much cooler than me. And I’m okay with that.

My Geeky Best of 2008

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I like this week’s Weekly Geek… though I don’t usually start compiling lists until further down the road. Anyway… the instructions this week are:

1. Compile your list of favorites. Please be sure that books you choose actually were published in 2008, or at the very earliest in the winter holiday season of 2007. Sometimes books that come out then are left out. (Please limit your list to 10 books, though, if you read a lot of new books.)

2. Come back and sign Mr Linky with the url to your top books of 2008 post.

On a side note for the WGers out there… this fits in swimmingly with the Cybils! (Conversely, all you non WGers, Dewey would love to see your lists, too!!) Nominations open on Wednesday (that’s October 1st)… the only rules are one nomination per person per category (follow the link for the category listings), and they have to be published between Jan 1 and October 15 of this year.

So… for my list:

Best YA:
Suite Scarlett, Marueen Johnson
The Patron Saint of Butterflies, by Cecilia Galante
A Curse Dark as Gold, Elizabeth Bunce
The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson

Best Adult:
The Host, Stephenie Meyer

No, I didn’t like it all that much, but I looked at my list, and it’s the only one published in 2008. Obviously, I’m not as up on current adult fiction trends as I am on YA and middle grade…

Best Non-fiction:
um… I have the same problem as with adult fiction… I read three and hated two, so that leaves:

First Kiss (then tell), various YA authors

Best Middle Grade:
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jeanne Birdsall
Out of the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst
Battle of the Labrynth, Rick Riordan

Best Graphic Novels:
Rapunzel’s Revenge, Shannon/Dean/Nathan Hale

Nobody’s Princess

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It’s not a common problem of mine, but there have been instances in the past where I’ve enjoyed the afteword to the book much more than the book itself. This one, as much as I wanted to really like it, was along those lines. It was kind of just blah until I got to the afterword, which was full of information, humor, and held my interest in a way that the novel didn’t.

The idea behind this book was to explore how Helen of Sparta became to be Helen of Troy. We don’t get that far in this book (there is a sequel, Nobody’s Prize), though. Helen is the oldest daughter of the King of Sparta, thereby making her the heir. But she’s also a free spirit, only wanting to do what she would like with her life, hang the expectations that society (even a women’s lib-ish one like Sparta) puts on her. She finds a way to learn to fight. She talks her parents into letting her go with her brothers and twin sister when said sister is sent to Mykenae to get married. She tricks said Mykenaen king out of arranging a marriage for her. She accompanies her brothers along to hunt a wild boar at her mother’s childhood land of Calydon, where she befriends huntress Atalanta and learns to ride a horse. She tags along with her brothers when they go to Delphi and finds a way not only to befriend the oracle, but finds a way for her and her friend/freed slave Milo to go on the same adventure.

I liked Helen well enough; I liked her spunk and determination. I liked how she was willing to do anything to become more “educated” and how she wasn’t willing to let society’s expectations stop her. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted some grand conflict and resolution, something to thrill me and keep me gripped to the edge of my seat (granted, having just finished Dracula had something to do with this feeling) and all I got was a series of vingnettes where Helen learned something or did something. I never really became involved in the plot, partially because by the time it got interesting, Helen up and moved on, and we had to start all over again building relationships, creating conflict. I wanted some overarching story, something to tie it all together and to the story of Helen I know.

I do have some hope, though, that this could all be a grand set up and the pay off very well could be in the next novel. At the very least, though, the afterword is fascinating. As for the rest… I’m crossing my fingers that the sequel is better.

Dracula

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In my quest (though not a very diligent one) to read all things vampire, I figured that I should probably start at the beginning, and read Bram Stoker’s vampire classic. Thankfully, I had the encouragement of the RIP III challenge (and everyone telling me to be excited) to get me off my lazy butt and actually read it. And… well… WOW.

I’m sure everyone’s heard of Dracula — he’s a part of our culture in a way that I don’t think Stoker expected him to become. And vampires, too, especially these days; between Buffy and Twilight they’ve become hip. But, I didn’t know — and I’m not sure how many people who haven’t read the book do — the whole story, the whole mythos. And I found all that fascinating, from the various devices to keep the vampires at bay, to the methods Dracula took not only to access his victims, but to just get around. It was interesting stuff. Even the plot of the book, while a bit simplistic for my taste, still managed to keep things moving enough to hold my interest. I wasn’t expecting that, either.

But what really made the book fabulous (well, as fabulous as a gothic horror tale can be) for me was the mood. Stoker is amazing at setting mood. He has a way with words that just captivated me. The tension and suspense were palpable. I got about 150 pages from the end, at 10 p.m., and realized I’d either have to stop or push through to the end; I was that freaked out by what was going on. There were many occasions, right from the first, when I had to put down the book and walk away because the mood was so intense. Actually, while reading this, I was reminded of why I went on an Edgar Allen Poe kick in 8th grade. We had read The Tell-tale Heart in English class, and I was blown away. Not by the plot, or even by the characters (the ones in Dracula didn’t really do anything for me, either), but because of the mood. While I don’t like to be grossed out (hence my shying away from Stephen King), I don’t mind the occasional fright. And Dracula hit that right on the spot.

Terrific. Creepy, terrifying, and absolutely terrific.

I’ve Been Hearted

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Trish at Library Queue (and Nooky friend extraordinaire), gave me this award. Sigh. I appreciate getting the award — who doesn’t want to know they’re loved — but the problem then becomes the passing on of it. See, I only read and comment (only occasionally, I know) on blogs that I love. Really. Especially recently, when I decided that I really needed to pare back my blogging time, mostly because A and K are demanding more of my attention, and I’ve been feeling guilty that my online world is seeming, to them, to be more important than they are. What I really wish I could do was put up my bloglines and say if you’re on it, I love your blog, and thanks so much for making my world a better place. (And giving me tons and tons of awesome book recommendations and other sanity-saving moments.) (Also it seems I can’t do one of these awards without much guilt and explanations, mostly so no one who reads this will feel too bad that they aren’t in the link list below.)

All that said, here are the rules:
1) Add the logo of the award to your blog 2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you 3) Nominate at least 7 other blogs 4) Add links to those blogs on your blog 5) Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs!

And my bloglove goes to (trying not to double up):
bookshelves of doom
fizzy thoughts
Em’s Bookshelf
Bookwyrm Chrysalis
Bluestalking Reader
Shelf Elf
Tripping Toward Lucidity