Nine Muses

What is it about Jane Austen?  Why do her stories keep enthralling me?  And it’s not just me.  Based on the number of republications of the books, movies made (both from her stories and based on them), and other paraphernalia, there’s a broad audience for this.

Now, I am an avid reader.  I devour books, sometimes at a startling pace.  However, there are very few books that I find the time to re-read at all, let alone multiple times.  And I have read Austen multiple times.  I have read each of her books at least three times, and a couple much more than that.  Of her six complete books, I have duplicate copies of three and electronic copies of two.  I have seen, to my knowledge, every movie version of her books.  Yes, even the horrible ones.  While I watch the worse ones, I complain, but I am still enthralled.

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I went into this book knowing that others had said it was a somewhat dark combination of Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia.  I had no idea what I was in for.

When I finished the book last night, I set it down, walked out to my husband and said that I hated it.  I then went on to explain that I didn’t really mean that, that it was an excellent book, and that I loved it, but that it was also very dark and sometimes difficult.

If you’re looking for typical heroic fantasy, where the protagonist rises above his faults to win the day and save the world… this is not that book.  Yes, there are elements of that, and if I felt like playing devil’s advocate, I could probably make a convincing argument for it based on some few bits, but that isn’t what the book is about.

(Minor spoilers below.)
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I’m re-reading Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Sequence and am finally on the last book, Silver on the Tree.  I’ve come to a bit where a man is talking to the main character’s family about a bullying his son participated in a few days before.  This all takes place in the U.K. and the book was written in 1977.  The target of the bullying is a Sikh boy.  This father is going on about those Pakistani and Indian people and how they’re take jobs from honest Englishmen, live 16 to a house, and take advantage of the national healthcare system.  It’s funny (not the ha-ha sort of funny, either) that this is such a precise parallel of the sort of attitude we see here in the U.S. today, especially in CA and the southwest, regarding the Mexican immigrant workers.  I guess that sort of ignorance and stupidity is timeless.

Sheesh, I haven’t updated since September?  I knew it had been a while, but this is just excessive.

So, I had a baby and she’s six months old and beautiful.  She has her own blog.  Ask me for the link if you want it.

I’ve hardly had any time to play games for the last six months.  I just reinstalled Diablo 2 this last week once they announced Diablo 3 was coming out.  I finally managed to get some time to install the expansion for NWN2 as well, but then decided to finish the main campaign first, since I’m so close and someone totally lied about the expansion not following after the main campaign.  It totally does!

I’m also waiting eagerly for Fallout 3 and Spore.  I’ll link to my Spore page later if I can figure out how to do it.

I’m also also re-reading some classics from my tween years right now: I’m about halfway through “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and “The Grey King” (Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series).

Oh, yeah, and I took up knitting.

More comprehensive updates will hopefully come later, as I think I’m turning the corner on being able to find the time to type up a thing or two.

I don’t remember the earliest things I read so well. I remember reading a fair amount of non fiction about whatever caught my interest. (Horses, castles, dinosaurs, wildlife, etc. I could go on, if I tried.) One of the earliest books I distinctly remember reading was Escape to Witch Mountain when I was maybe eight or nine years old. I checked it out from the school library. I was already reading voraciously then, so I’m sure there were many others. I’ve just lost the memory of them in the general fog my childhood memories have become.

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