Golden Compass

I started the Golden Compass (haven’t finished it) but after seeing the movie several years ago I was very compelled. I would like to continue to read it when I find the time. I am just so delighted with a world where another part of our soul is a separate talking personality animal who is always with you. I love it. I want one so bad. It’s like always having a pet with you, and who always understands what you’re thinking and can talk things out. I am so jealous of this little world! And I love how the children’s daemons are always changing because they are unsure of how they are until they grow up. Almost like a career. The idea of what you’re are going to become is always an uncertainty when you are young and clouded with many thoughts. If I were to have a daemon I would very much like to have the exact breed of dog I would get as a pet…a small Klee Kai, a toy version of a snow dog…who are afraid of other people, and much like me, and only trust those who it has gotten quite a lot of time to know. And well if I didn’t have that luck I’d at least love to have an aloof little cat at my side at all times. Oh how I can dream. Back to the book though, Lord Azriel seems to have quite a detached way of thinking about family….when it comes to his relationship with Laira it quite confuses me. So far he has treated her much more like a stranger’s child, or an unruly pupil, who he feels as if he has some sort of obligation to discipline but doesn’t have enough feeling for to care…ah well. I hope to pick it up again soon and continue on my book reading journey.

American Gods

I have to say that I am SO HAPPY that I was told to read American Gods. American Gods has been sitting on my bookshelf brand new and never opened for perhaps four years or something ridiculous. And it seemed quite intimidating. 600 pages or so, fairly generic cover, I don’t know. I had bought American Gods and Neverwhere at the same time when I was looking randomly around in the science fiction/fantasy section and I liked what I read on the backs of the paperbacks. I read about…oh, maybe 30 pages of Neverwhere and never got around to picking it back up again….and American Gods remained never opened. However….upon reading that it was assigned on the class list I thought well I own that book, I should go ahead and see what it’s about…and I am SO happy I did. Yes. American Gods is so rich and interesting and full of character and magic and interest and sex and death and I love it all. The colors were so vivid and oh my lord I need to go to The House on the Rock. Seriously. I need to go there. I loved the careful description of each room and I of course looked it up online as soon as I finished that chapter. And even though it’s in nowhere, Wisconsin, I need to be in a place that crazy. I loved Gaiman’s depiction of Shadow (which by the way I always imagined looked like Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in Iron Man). Gaiman’s writing of him was so honest, and of course I’m sure Gaiman has been in a state like that in some time in his life.

I would say my favorite parts of the book were those with Sam and Bast. I am normally absolutely not interested in female characters in most tv shows or movies. They are often written very shallowly or something. But both Sam and Bast were very empowered, proud, women, rich in personality in the glimpses of them we saw. I loved all the parts with the Egyptian gods in them, and of course how clever it was to make their modern day personas working at a funeral home.

I also was of course very curious about the one god that was a mystery. The one that shadow had riding in the backseat of his car and he was unable to remember his face or what he said. At first I thought that it was an example of a god who had simply been forgotten, and maybe that is the case. But there was also a fuller scene where he is in Vegas and helps a waitress come into a lucky future…so perhaps he could be a very elusive god who blesses those that he finds but can’t be found if you look to him….I definitely can’t get a good grip on who he was supposed to be. I looked online for it and of course everyone is speculating but no one knows. And fans have asked Gaiman himself and he simply implies that we must think it out for ourselves.

Ah well. I am happy about American Gods because I feel like it is the best stand-alone novel I have read in a very long time. And I got through it without problems! I was able to read 600 pages in a very short time…that’s often hard for someone with an attention span like mine!

Interview With The Vampire

I’m glad I got a chance to read this book. I had only recently seen the movie for the first time a year ago, and I did love it. I have to say though that if it wasn’t assigned I probably wouldn’t have read it. I sadly don’t get to read very often. And I used to all the time when I was in earlier school. But now in college with the computer screen taking over my life I don’t often look to books when I come home at night. Harry Potter is the only thing I had been keeping up with on a regular basis (although sadly it’s over.) This class is the motivator that had me spend my summer reading more books than I have in a long time, it’s crazy. And I’m glad, because I got to read some things that would have taken me a while to get around to or never at all.

Interview with a Vampire was great to read. I didn’t mind that I already knew what happened because of the film (which was a fairly accurate interpretation) because I had the delightful images of Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas as vampires. Yes yes I also imagined Lestat as his same actor but only because he was good at it and decently costumed. We don’t talk about him here. Ah well. Anyway the first difference I noticed was the fact that Louie has much more of a back story here, and is not the same as the one with the movie. The movie summarizes his suicidal thoughts at the beginning with “his wife and kids died” when in fact he was never married and it was all about his little brother. What I also loved about the book was the very vividly painted picture of old time New Orleans, for example when Louie takes Lestat’s body out to Lake Ponchartrain. We get much more of a sense of the Louisiana swamp land and the creatures there when we have these nice long descriptions, as opposed to sets that were probably not filmed anywhere near there. Something that was also vastly different in my view was the treatment of Claudia. In the movie, we have a very young Kirsten Dunst playing the woman-child vampire and she is their hot tempered child. But in the book we learn much more about her mature tendencies, and her dualistic personality, and the sexual tones that even come in which the movie doesn’t go close to touching due to the odd nature of the film issue that would arise between such a child actress and an adult male actor. But in the book, with Anne Rice behind the wheel of Claudia, she is a woman who knows how to write as a woman, as opposed to Kirsten Dunst who has never been a woman who knows how to be a child and be directed as she was told to do. Claudia is just a completely different experience to me when reading as opposed to viewing.

I also enjoyed the part that we do not get to see in the movie, where Louie and Claudia search the rural European country side and find the feral corpse-like vampires. There was one part in fact that I did not quite understand where they witness a vampiress, or a supposed one, being dug up from her coffin and staked through the heart. My question is, seeing as the Anne Rice vampire rules seem to be clear that they can’t teleport, how did this vampiress get into a coffin that’s buried in the ground? If I remember, Louie seems to be sure that she was in fact a real one, and not just a dead body mistaken. Ah well. It wasn’t that important. And the scene where the dead wife is on the table at the inn and the man is mourning her and Louie comforts him, I love that!

I particularly love time pieces. Period pieces, what have you. I love thinking about men and women in historical costume. At inns. In carriages. Out and about. With most of their worldly concerns about death. I love books like that. I love anything like that. And this was a delightful experience.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

And of course Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Now let me just add that Sorcerer’s Stone is certainly least favorite of the bunch, seeing as it is the one that is the most simplistic of the series. Not that I dislike, it’s just that all of the others get increasingly better! Now rereading Chamber though made me quite happy. I love Tom Riddle. I’ll say it again, I love Tom Riddle. I think it’s very important that we get to see the young Voldemort, and a Voldemort that Harry even trusts for a few moments of his young life. I love that Tom has so many similarities to Harry, the dark-headed orphan youth who feels that Hogwarts is his only home, not to mention that they share powers due to adult Voldemort’s mishap. I remember reading the second book, of course before the movies had come out, and believing Tom just like Harry, and the dramatic reveal at the end that made me grin. Of course at the time it was also a little confusing. But thankfully, now that the series is done and I understand horcruxes, it all comes back together! I am proud of JK for figuring out her whole plot beforehand. Rereading it with the information I know now helps me see the things that she was building up all along. I applaud her for being so calculated in revealing the big issues and waiting til the end for it all to make sense. I did have to wonder a little bit about how Voldemort went about making the horcrux though. He says to Harry towards the end… “I killed the girl, Hagrid got expelled, I got a special award to the school, then I preserved my self in a diary.” So he wrote the diary quite a ways later from killing Myrtle. Since of course we know now to make a horcrux and split your soul you must kill someone, I suppose that must mean that you don’t have to have the horcux object immediately on hand when you kill someone. And that perhaps your soul is split and you can put it in the object at your own pace? That little piece of information had us talking when we finished the book then. Oh, and now I’m getting all Potter-nerd on this. Oh well. I’m not ashamed of dressing up in costumes to see the movies…on three separate occasions. Er well maybe a little bit. Or going to see the Harry and the Potters in concert four times…wait, five. Also in costume.

Yea.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

So let’s talk Harry Potter. Now of course I’ve read them before, each several years apart, and some so slowly it’s almost embarrassing, but hey, excuse me, understandable: I spent a whole six months getting through Deathly Hallows, my first and only time reading it so far. Stayed off of LiveJournal for months even though I was exposed to some basic spoilers. It wasn’t that I’m necessarily a slow or slacking reader, It’s that I wanted to make it last. That’s important to me. Ah well. The problem with that is of course, that you lose details along the way. And now, to make up for the fact that I didn’t feel like I have soaked in the experience properly, I am going back and reading each of the books quite methodically in order, a little bit every night, and out loud at that, to Nick (who has not read all of them). I am doing all the voices to an accurate degree: in British/Scottish/Irish/Cockney as the movies would have each character speak. It is…loads of fun. And being someone who enjoys projecting and getting into character it’s wonderful (hope it’s just as fun for the listener :D) Anyway, so of course they are being chronologically taken care of, and here we are talking about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. While I haven’t read Deathly Hallows recently enough to say this for sure, but I am fairly certain that she has improved muchly since the first book. I find it interesting how often she performs the exact opposite of the “show, don’t tell” rule that we talk about so often in story concept class in animation. It is very important that you do not say what is about to happen before it happens. Though of course, as Nick argued back, it was a children’s book originally, meant for 11 year olds like Harry, and yes, fine, I can give it that. But compare that to the Hobbit, ha ha. That’s alright. I am quite glad that JK does not at all write like Tolkien, or I don’t know if I would have been able to get through seven of them! What I love about reading them, and why they are enjoyable to read out loud, is the fact that it is an easy literary experience, and quite comical at that. OH! Something I noticed that I never noticed before is how cartoonish her imagery is in these more light hearted earlier books! Several times there was very Warner Brothers like visuals. I quite remember that there was this scene that I believe occurred when Harry won the first Quidditch match…when he came to Gryffindor tower after the victory, he opened the portrait and a hand grabbed him and whipped him through the hole. Sounded very Looney Tunes like, and I remember more such cartoonish writing when they are facing fluffy and fighting the troll. Once the books get darker you see the humor start to wane. Not that the enjoyment does, in fact I find the books progressively more exciting, as anyone should. It’s just that you can very much see the series as a gradient from light to dark, through and through.