I went to the used book store to sell some books - Spring cleaning is ongoing - and I got $27 in store credit! :D I spent $2.75 of that on Asimov's Foundation because I read it in college and never read the rest of the series so I'm going to start over. And I saw a book by WILLIAM SHATNER, not Tek Wars, it's called Believe. So I bought that for $2.50. I left it on the shelf for a few days and I just read the book jacket:

A Master of Illusion. He was the greatest escape artist in history, a world-famous magician who knew that magic was merely illusion. He exposed psychic frauds, debunked spiritualists, and defied supernatural nonsense.

A Master of Reason. He was the most beloved writer of his time. His brilliant mystery novels exalted the science of logic and deduction - yet he firmly believed in the occult. Believed with all his heart and soul.

OK, fair enough. I don't know why I didn't see this next bit coming:

A Psychic Battle of Wits. The skeptic was Harry Houdini. The believer was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Whut. RPF? RPF by William Shatner? Aw, crap!

Also THANKS, I DIDN'T KNOW WHO SIR ARTHUR FREAKING CONAN DOYLE WAS.

It continues:

The contest was sponsored by a science magazine launching a worldwide search for genuine proof of life after death. The novel is BELIEVE. - the most unusual and exciting adventure you will ever read.

SOMEHOW I DOUBT THAT, BILL. And that random hyphen isn't a typo. One sentence ends and the next begins with a hyphen and a lower-case letter.

[Error: unknown template qotd]WHAT? No! If a teenager wants to read freakin' Mein Kampf, let them. Suppression of information is never a good thing. The point is the schools need to teach students critical thinking skills; problems are caused by people believing everything they read, not the books themselves.

ETA: though after reading other people's posts, I'm open to the idea of making an exception for Twilight >;)

OMG a third Wicked book!!

That's going on my wishlist!

I don't feel like doing anything productive right now so I'm going around reading people's reactions on the internets. I really like florence_craye and innerbrat's posts on it. I was reading comments on The Stranger and someone said they don't see why sexual orientation should be mentioned in children's books. Because BEING GAY IS NOT ALL ABOUT SEX. SEX ACTUALLY HAS VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH IT. It's stupid to say it's appropriate that sexual orientation wasn't brought up in Harry Potter because IT WAS BROUGHT UP. The following characters were all identified as having opposite-sex partners:
Harry
Ginny
Hermione
Ron
Remus (sigh)
Tonks (SIGH)
Hagrid
Maxime
James
Lily
Lucius
Narcissa
Petunia
Vernon
Draco
Cho
Molly
Arthur
Cedric
Fleur
Bill

That's just off the top of my head. Sexual orientation comes up ALL THE TIME in children's books because children's books include straight couples. Straight people often don't get that "sexual orientation" means "straight" too. A lot of people think just being out means you're flaunting yourself but if that's true then straight people flaunt themselves all the time, by not actively hiding the fact that they're straight. It's called heteronormativity and it's why many of us are disappointed that JKR didn't just include in DH even one sentence indicating more explicitly that Dumbledore was gay, given that she had evidently planned that he was gay, and didn't just come up with it on the spur of the moment during her public appearance (I think). It would've been easy to include it without disrupting the story. There could've been a line in Rita's book that said Dumbledore was actually in love with Grindlewald and the conversation could've gone:
Harry: "wait, Dumbledore was gay?"
Ron: "Ew!" [because it's already a well established fact that Ron is a huge asshole]
Hermione: (eyeroll) "Well, it makes sense. We've never heard of him being involved with women. Anyway, he's still the same person we knew all along."
Ron: "Yeah, I guess so."
See? And then they move on with the 500 pages of bickering in a tent, which was apparently had such important narrative flow that JKR couldn't risk interrupting it with the shocking fact that gay people exist.

The other thing that REALLY troubles me and makes me think we shouldn't give JKR too much credit is the audience question that prompted her to say Dumbledore was gay:

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

THAT DOES NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION! It was a yes-or-no question. Not "what was Dumbledore's love life like?" or similar. How on earth could she have thought that was a suitable answer? There are only two possibilities: she meant that gay people always find true love - which we know isn't what she meant because Dumbledore didn't - or she meant that gay people never find true love. That's sickening. Maybe I'm just pissed off at the moment but JKR can take her pseudo-progressiveism and all but one of her major characters being straight white males and shove them up her ass. I agree with innerbrat that I'd rather she hadn't said it at all.

Pretending that sexual orientation is invisible is no different from pretending we're "colorblind" and it does every bit as much damage. Characters whose race isn't stated are assumed to be white, and are portrayed by white actors in the movies. Having a story where gay people are never mentioned but practically all of the characters wind up in hetero relationships means either gay people don't exist in the HP universe or they all have to be in the closet - as I suspect is the case with Dumbledore. It's either hopelessly naive or deliberately disingenuous to claim that Dumbledore was gay the whole time but nobody ever brought it up simply because being gay was a total non-issue in the HP universe. And what about Dudley's homophobic remarks? If gay people are totally equal in magical society then why didn't Harry think something along those lines? I don't buy it.

( it's getting long; here's more )

Although I will say it's a credit to JKR and the Harry Potter series that it spurs serious discussion on real-life issues.

Book #8 and 9 Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

I got this on a whim. It was pretty good but I should have gotten Son of a Witch. I still haven't read that one. This one was much more grounded in reality and I wasn't expecting that. I wish the cover illustration hadn't contained a huge spoiler. That would've been nice. Still, I very much like the illustrations. I like them as much as I like the illustrations in A Series of Unfortunate Events. And I like how Maguire writes female characters. In this book, as in Wicked, it was all about relationships between women and men were mostly peripheral. I like how the "stepmother" character is so complex. Nobody's good or evil in his books, they're all just human.

The only complaint I had was the ending felt a little abrupt. That was mainly because there were more pages but it turned out those contained study questions, which was odd because I didn't think I'd picked up a special students' edition. Anyway. I can't help keeping in mind roughly how many pages are left as I'm approaching the end of a book. I don't know why I do that. But when the book ends sooner than I expected, because there's an appendix at the back or something, it's like "woah, what happened?" I especially would have liked to know how a certain character died. I won't spoil it.

It wasn't as epic as Wicked but I still highly recommend it.

****************
I also finished the next Brother Cadfael book but they're all pretty much the same so I don't feel like reviewing them any more. Some new characters are introduced, somebody murders one of them and Cadfael eventually figures out whodunit. The End. I like the characters and setting so I'm going to continue reading the series but I don't have a lot to say about it.

Y'know, come to think of it, if you've got good characters and settings, there could be hardly any plot at all and I'd still enjoy it. Well, unless it's a stupid plot that doesn't make any sense. That would bug me. Characters are always the most important aspect for me. Lousy characters and an awesome plot add up to a book that I probably wouldn't even bother to finish. Or I would finish it and then rip it up on LJ.

Book #5: A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

I'e been meaning to add this one for a while. I've already got the next Brother Cadfael book from the library. I like them but I knew I would, I like Derek Jacobi's TV series based on the books. Luckily, it's been long enough since I've seen it that I don't remember what happens in the stories.

For those of you who don't know, this is a series of mystery novels about a medieval monk named Brother Cadfael, who works with herbs and and solves crimes. A Morbid Taste for Bones took place mostly in Wales, where Brother Cadfael is from, and was about the monks' trip there to get the relics of a Welsh saint and a local guy gets murdered. I figured out whodunnit before it was revealed, which was just right: you want a mystery novel to be neither obvious nor so random that it's impossible to figure it out.

I really like the setting. I want to be a crime solving monk when I grow up.

My Good Omens pinch-hitting swashbucklathon pic is done! Here's the entry.

Book #2: Winter's Heart by Robert Jordan

I've finished it and have moved on to book 10, Crossroads of Twilight.

( the review, cut for length )

ETA: whoops, I forgot to give the book a grade. B. (I'm not going to do + and - for any of these, just letters).

Happy Birthday, mysduende!

And to anyone else who might happen to have a birthday today.

I am full of chocolate. This is a condition similar to being full of cookie dough and as such, I believe I need to lie around and drink water. At least I already had real food: Mum made Christmas dinner/lunch, which is pretty much identical to Thanksgiving dinner except she made pear-and-(soy)sasuage-stuffed acorn squash in addition to the usual yams, carrots, green beans, corn, potatoes and stuffing. I am full of food and chocolate.

I finished reading Path of Daggers. I should've brought Winter's Heart with me but I thought "nah, I won't have much time for reading and I've got about 200 pages of PoD to go." D'oh. My parents are out walking in the cold and my brother is playing Grand Theft Auto (not that he got that as a present but he got new speakers and hooked them up to his TV). I got Pirates of the Caribbean 2 as a group gift for my family (and some stuff my mum picked for herself and a prepaid cell phone for my dad. My brother and I always have difficulty shopping for each other and decided not to exchange gifts this year). So we watched that after dinner. I didn't know it ended with a cliffhanger! Argh!

Oh! I've just remembered there's Christmas pudding! And I'm full of chocolate! Ah well, I'm going to stick around here for tonight, so I could eat that after supper/tea/whatever. Except sticking around means I have nothing to read tonight. I'll have to dig up something. Mum has some books about math. Haha, see, it's not just me, we're all nerds.

But since I can't do a lot of work till we get me a new computer:
from mlyn:
( books whut you've done read )