Okay, can some one kindly tell me where this last year has gone? Cause look, it is time for this year’s RIP Challenge. Decisions decisions. But I think I’ll go with the first peril, reading any four books from any subgenre of scary-ness. I just got to go find them now. I think that The Host by Stephenie Meyer qualifies, so that’ll be one. And I’ll have to take a gander through the tbr pile to see if any of those fit. And then probably a trip to Chapters and book buying. But its all good, I haven’t been there in at least 2 months, I’ve been very good about not buying books. I think it is time for a splurge.
I haven’t quite managed to keep up with the two proper blogs a week that I mentioned a while back. But you know, intentions are worth just as much as deeds, right?
Yeah, okay, so thats a lie. But you just gotta deal.
Spent most of Sat. watching the telly. Well, I say telly, I mean dvds. And I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but I just love Rocky Balboa. It is just brilliant. Full of cliché and sentimental shots, but it just works. Rocky just works. Still have to watch the commentary, that’ll be fun.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of rewatching stuff lately. Over the past few weeks I’ve been rewatching Firefly. Its been a while. Don’t think I’ve seen any of those episodes since the film[1] came out. And that was years ago[2] It is so great. Every time we’re about to watch a new episode I say “oh this is a great one” or “I love this one”. We just got up to Out of Gas last week. Awww. Watching them all get together and seeing Mal fall in love with the ship.
Oh, and while I’m moaning about time flying, when did it get to be the end of August? For those of you not in Ireland, well, maybe you lot got a summer. Us, we got rain. Followed by more rain. Followed by some more.
So where was our summer? huh? Life is so unfair sometimes…
Tags:
awww,
brilliant,
Firefly,
rewatching,
RIP Challenge,
Rocky,
Rocky Balboa,
Serenity,
Stephenie Meyer,
telly,
The Host
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So I bought my shiny shiny Nintendo DS Lite last night. And got a great deal from Argos. €149 for the console, a game[1] and an accessory pack. So basically I paid for the console and got the rest of the stuff for free. I also bought one of those Brain Training thingies. Which was supposed to cost 30 quid, only they only charged my 15. Score!
And I’ve gone ahead and ordered my R2 card plus 2gb micro card so once that arrives I’ll be well sorted for all my gaming needs.
In other news Carl’s RIP Challenge comes to an end today. And for it I read Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, The Prestige by Christopher Priest, Danse Macabre by Laurell K. Hamilton, Wormwood by Poppy Z.Brite, Lost Souls by Michael Collins, and The Road by Cormac MacCarthy. And I’ve just bought Stephanie Meyer’s Eclipse[2] so I’ll read that this evening. And there are plenty more reviews for you to investigate here.
Linknotes:
- The Incredibles ↩
- w00t! ↩
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DS Lite,
Jim Butcher,
Laurell K. Hamilton,
Michael Collins (author),
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Poppy Z. Brite,
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Posted by: Fence in Books
Author: Cormac McCarthy
ISBN: 9780330447546 DDC: 813.54
Read for the RIP Challenge
See also: LibaryThing ; Darryl’s Library ; Skewed Perspectives ; Cynical Opimitsm ; Bookwomon
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.
This is a novel set at some unidentified point in the future when the world has pretty much come to an end. Something, we don’t know what, has brought society down. There is little food and little shelter left, and for our two main protagonists there is always the danger that they might meet someone on the road, someone who might kill them in order to take what little they have, or maybe someone who might kill them in order to eat them. They travel on, this unnamed man and unnamed boy, constantly on the road, moving trying to find something.
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7 Stars,
813.54,
apocolyptic future,
Cormac McCarthy,
dystopian future,
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future,
humanity,
Pulitzer Prize Winner,
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Posted by: Fence in Books
Author: Michael Collins
ISBN: 0753817853 DDC: 823.914
Read for the RIP Challenge
See also: Allan Guthrie’s Noir Originals ; Telegraph review ; The Little Bird ; Reading Matters
It was past midnight when I got home Halloween night. The car lights swept across the yard. The house had been toilet-papered.
This wasn’t originally on my RIP list, but I decided to take off the John Connolly one and replace it with this. It isn’t exactly a horror, but it does fit under the category of mystery, and it starts on a Halloween night, so I reckon it fits the challenge.
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Tags:
8 Stars,
823.914,
crime,
Halloween,
hit and run,
Lost Souls,
Michael Collins (author),
midwest America,
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Posted by: Fence in Books
Author: Poppy Z. Brite
ISBN: 04402179890 DDC: 813.54
Read for the RIP Challenge
See Also:
“Can’tcha see the time is here for us to fine … Rivers, mountains, nothin’ can be far behind … Can’tcha see… You gotta find out this one for yourself… Can’tcha see…”
Throaty Carolina voice full of gravel and gold, growling deep, rising to a fluttering crescendo that skimmed over the terrible guitar playing.
I’ve said before that in most cases for me to really love a book I have to have well written/developed characters which is possibly why short stories don’t always grab me; they just don’t have the time or space to develop the characters. So is the case with these short stories by Brite. For the most part the writing is excellent. The stories themselves very atmospheric and, in the main, creepy and so perfect for the RIP Challenge, but I just didn’t care about the characters at all. In the first story maybe I could have gotten to like Ghost and Steve, I was pleased when they showed up in a later story, but most of the time I was quite disconnected from the writing.
That may sound too negative. It isn’t really meant to be, because there are stories that really work. Maybe I’m just not that into the stuff she writes, but two in particular I really liked; The Elder and The Sixth Sentinel. Others had parts that I liked, and she certainly has some style in her writing, but they just weren’t my cup of tea.
Tags:
7 Stars,
813.54,
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creepy,
horror,
Poppy Z. Brite,
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sff,
short stories,
Wormwood
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Posted by: Fence in Books
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
ISBN: 1841494747 DDC: 813.54
#14 in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter verse
Read for the RIP Challenge
See also: LibraryThing ; Voracious Reader ; It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity
It was the middle of November. I was supposed to be out jogging, but instead I was sitting at my breakfast table talking about men, sex, werewolves, vampires, and that thing that most unmarried but sexual active women fear most of all - a missed period.
It all went downhill so quickly in this series. The first few books were good solid entertainment. Plenty of action and fairly decent characters. But now they are all merely vehicles for Anita to have sex with as many people as she can. And to top it all they are badly written as well. Thank god I got this one from the library and didn’t shell out actual cash for it.
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1 Star,
813.54,
Anita Blake series,
bad porn,
Bored Now!,
crap,
Danse Macabre,
Laurell K. Hamilton,
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Posted by: Fence in Books
Author: Christopher Priest
ISBN: 0684817551 DDC: 823.014
Read for the RIP Challenge
See also: LibraryThing ; Fantasybookspot ; Review in Haiku
It began on a train, heading north through England, although I was soon to discover that the story had really begun more than a hundred years earlier.
The Prestige is a book that covers three different generations of two families, told by a number of different narrators, all in the first person, as they tell their stories in their diaries. Those of you who have seen the film version will be aware that the prestige of the title is the payoff to a magic trick. What you might not know is that this term was invented by Priest but has since come into common usage among practising magicians. The main story revolves around two feuding magicians; Alfred Borden and Rupert “Robbie” Angier. Throughout both of their careers the two magicians try their hardest to upset and humiliate the other, each action then having a reaction, and then a further action, as is often the way in these things.
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823.914,
Christopher Priest,
feud,
historical fiction,
magic,
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RIP Challenge,
rivalry,
The Prestige
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