Another NaNo Twist

Alright, my NaNo novel has changed again. That's the point of planning, right? Instead of the true crime/fantasy hybrid I'd originally envisioned (it's still on the backburner, don't worry), I'm going to plunge into a novel that started as a piece of fan fiction. Actually, this will be a book set in that universe but not based off of what's already been written. I'm hoping to use this to shape and re-shape some aspects of the universe to fit where I want it to go.

So get ready for sexy vampires. Particularly sexy male vampires. Sorry, straight dudes, there won't be much for you in this one. I'm also trying to goad my husband into writing this November as well, though so far no success in persuading him. He keeps throwing out all these great ideas and not writing them down - hopefully we can change that this year!

So how is your NaNo progress? Any plotting done? 

Book Review: The King's Dragon

This is the first book I've read of the Eleventh Doctor adventures (one of my best friends had gotten me one of the Nine books previously). But I was jonesing something awful for new Who while waiting for the new season, and when I found this on sale in a Borders that was closing down... well, how could I say no?

While I will say that the writing style can become redundant at times (there's repetition of phrasing that a stronger editor would have nipped in the bud), this is definitely a fun read. Like the series, it is just a step above a young adult vibe in terms of tone and complexity. The book offers a fast read and a fun story that likely wouldn't work on the small screen due to budget concerns - which means it's ideal for use as a novel.

The characters are well written and just as lively as they are onscreen, and the geek in me thrilled at finding Star Wars and Buffy references in the dialogue. What more could a girl ask for?

Book Review: Duma Key

I'll start by pointing out that I'm a Stephen King fan. While I've certainly enjoyed some books more than others, I pretty much always have fun with his work. He balances serious supernatural/creepy stories with gallows humor and a love of old rock 'n' roll in a way that never fails to entertain me.

I was excited as usual to be starting a new King book (big thanks to Recycled Books & Music in Denton, TX for always having used copies in awesome shape available on the cheap). This was different from any other Stephen King books I've read. It's not that the story was a complete departure. It was different, yes, more mystery than straight up scares throughout most of the novel. It's also not just the setting, although setting the action in Florida instead of Maine made for an immediate shift in perspective.

There's just plain something different about this book, and I think it really comes down to a combination of all the little tweaks that he made in his own style while building this story. Whether you're a fan or not, I recommend giving this one a shot - especially if you're an art fan. It made me want to pick up a paint brush and let the vibes flow while cranking up some good tunes, and that alone was well worth the price of the book.

The Book List

I blame my friend Ashley for this... but it is pretty interesting. And, no, I'm not doing it via FB, and I'm not tagging people - though I would *love* to see my other blogging and rl buddies do this.
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Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I'll never get those hours of my life back)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I was 11, and the girls getting their dad drunk and taking him into a cave to have sex with him really turned me off)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (and BOY did I hate it!)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I'm named after Beth. And I've even had Scarlet Fever. Yeah, that stuff messes with you)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (now that I love)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (gag - loathed it)

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (lovely - I actually read it twice for class since I liked it so much)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia #33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (can't recall, but I think I didn't finish it or only read excerpts)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (love the whole darn series)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (one of my favorite books ever - READ IT!)

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (so so so so so depressing)

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante 
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (also in the complete works #14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Book Gadgets?

Anyone know any gadgets/widgets/whatever you can add to your blog sidebar that will let you track what books you've read or are currently reading? I think that would be a lot of fun, but searching Blogger's gadgets game up with nothing. Bonus points if it will link to the book on Amazon or something so that if someone else wants to read it, they can grab themselves a copy. heh

EDIT: Thanks to Laura, I now have a Shelfari widget. YAY!

Lonesome Dove

My papau loaned me this one when I was home visiting my family last since I saw his copy of the videos on a shelf and mentioned that I still never had watched it. He insisted that I needed to read the book before I watched and then took me out to the workshop where he keeps his favorite westerns (mostly Zane Gray) and gave me a copy of the book as well as loaning me the tapes when we got back inside. So watching will be the next step.

I think what I was most surprised by was the fact that it just plain wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting a straight adventure story, I suppose, something that reminded me of the Young Guns movies (my primary indoctrination into westerns as a genre). Instead it was, yes, an adventure story but with a lot more emotional scope and depth than I'd expected. I was sad when I finished it and realized I was all out of story. So even if you aren't generally a western fan (or like me don't even know enough to know whether you are or not), I'd say to give this one a try. It starts out a bit slow, but once things pick up, there's always something going on.

Fender Bender

So, Friday I'm on my way home, stopped at a stop sign... and the guy in front of me starts backing up. I naturally honk, but he hits my bumper before he stops. We both pull over into the parking lot we're right next to, and the guy is super apologetic. He's young and works at a print shop that I work with at the school all the time - the shirt I was wearing was one he worked on, even. Since we're a block away from his insurance place, we walk on down. It's surprisingly painless getting the claim filed, and he's obviously distraught and apologizing the whole time.

Despite the fact that it sucks having the paint scraped off your front bumper, it actually went really smooth and quick, and his insurance company got me a claim number to take in for repairs the very next day. Since my car is a lease, there was no question of hesitating about getting it fixed.

So today I took it in. That also went pretty smooth, and since it'll be a few days, someone from Enterprise rental came to pick me up and take me over there. Unfortunately it took awhile to find out from his insurance company what kind of car I was authorized for, then for them to go pick up the car from another location... but everybody was really nice. I just sat around and read the first of the Sookie Stackhouse books that I just started. Enjoy it so far, by the way.

Then I finally got the car and went in to work... and almost gave up on finding a parking spot. Finally got one literally as far from anything as you can park. Then I got to hike in and get a temporary parking pass for the rental. Then back to the car to put it in the car, then BACK to the office to actually start my day. I was almost eleven before I finally got it all done. But now I'm here and (aside from putting this up) being productive.

It's shaping up to be a heck of a week!