In Your Eyes
This is shamelessly yoinked from Cavalaxis, but can anyone identify the movie this steampunk-ish shirt from Threadless is riffing?
If you said Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything with John Cusack then you win a prize! The prize being the official You Are Amused By the Same Things As JJ award.
Last night I finished The Amulet of Samarkand and now I’m chomping at the bit for the next in the series. I do have a library card to the New York Public Library, but the honest truth is the NYPL intimidates me a bit. There are so many branches all over the place and each one is specialised for a certain type of book: research, genre, etc. But more than that, I think I am a book hoard. I have packrat tendencies and I obsessively collect things. When I was a child, it was keychains for some odd reason (usually as mementos of my travels), and now it’s Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfumes. I have, however, always amassed a large collection of books and never really considered it an “obsessive hoard” until just now. I am uncomfortable with borrowing books from the library. My parents were very diligent about taking me to the library every couple of weeks when I was in grade school, but soon gave up and just took me to the bookstore instead because what they had to pay in late fees was almost greater than what they had to fork over for me to buy the book instead. I need to own them, crack their spines myself, accidentally spill tea and coffee onto their pages, smell the ink and paper, and be assured that I can pick them up and reread them at any time.
I am resolved not to spend any money on pleasurable things for a while (except my very badly needed haircut) because I’ve indulged in many things this past couple of weeks and now I feel a bit bloated. I actually hate spending money because I am inherently a miser, which clashes with my rampant materialism. So The Golem’s Eye will have to wait. Argh. Besides, in the queue of books to buy The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia are tops.
There is something cracktastic about The Amulet of Samarkand, just like City of Bones + City of Ashes and The Thief and again, I can’t quite put my finger on the reason why. I enjoyed The Amulet of Samarkand more than I did City of Ashes and I believe it is the better book, but I didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it a lot, but there are very few books I love. They are Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (I love this one despite the fact that it’s not my favourite romantic story in her collected works but because I find it the funniest), Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series (well, some of them at least), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Still, I liked it a lot and think it’s fairly good. Here’s my review of The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud.
I started Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief last night after a whole year of putting it off. I’m only a few chapters in, but I will say that no, I don’t find Death’s narration any less irritating after I “got used to it.” However, I will reserve my judgment on its possible pretension until after I am done. The Book Thief does have in its favour unconventional and non-linear storytelling and I adore that. I just hope it doesn’t leave me in a horrible depression because books about World War II Europe will do that.
