Uncreated Conscience

This past weekend, Bear and I decided to go see Inglourious Basterds. I am completely behind the times as to what’s currently playing in theatres (I’m still stuck on Star Trek and Half-Blood Prince—clearly the geek wins out over everything else), but I figured Quentin Tarantino would be a decent bet.

Review of Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds

Once upon a time, in Nazi-occupied France…

…Quentin Tarantino decided to make an epic “Let’s go kill Hitler!” film.

It’s 1944 and there seems to be no end to the war in sight. The O.S.S. decides to dispatch a commando force of Nazi-killing Jews to Europe to kill every last Jerry they can find. Headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), these ragtag soldiers call themselves the Inglourious Basterds, and damned if they weren’t gonna find them some Nazi scalps. With a little help from an Englishman, a German actress-cum-spy, and a small Parisian cinema, they’re going to take down The Führer, or die trying.

Not exactly Tarantino’s best output. (Spoilers beneath the cut.)

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I had all these ideas for blog posts, but the soupy August weather has caused my brain to turn into mush. I am completely over summer. Sad as I am to have my skydiving season come to an end early this year (stupid med school!), I am more than ready to move on.

August is always predictably horrid in terms of weather across the Northern Hemisphere, even back in Los Angeles. Humidity is a foreign concept out there, but what LA Augusts lack in humidity, they make up in fierce heat. Here in New York, I am smothered. I don’t find it particularly hot so much as I feel like I’m drowning.

As I recall, fall came early last year. I only know this because it turned cold really fast, cutting my season short that way. It started smelling like fall in the middle of the month. Last year we had a gorgeous autumn. I worry this year we won’t get the same.

Every time I try and find coherent things to write about in my blog, I found that I kept returning to my battered copy of JANE EYRE instead. The heat makes me sluggish and unwilling to do anything but read and/or watch movies and TV shows, and for some reason, JANE EYRE was the one story in which I longed to lose myself over and over again.

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Dollhouse

Months after everyone else (but coincidentally about the same time as my friend Katranna), I decided to give Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse a go.

Now, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find Firefly the best of Whedon’s shows for many reasons, not the least of which is because I found its premise the most fascinating. I had seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel at the behest of several of my friends, and while I enjoyed them, I could never fully love them because vampires simply aren’t my thing. ANGST! WOE! IMMORTALITY SUXORS! WAAAH! EMO!

The other reason is simply because the chemistry of the cast is phenomenal. From the pilot episode (I’m talking about “Serenity” here because I only saw Firefly on DVD), I could see why these people were on board the ship and why they cared for one another. Wrap up a good space western/space pirate/space Robin Hood premise (hello…awesome????) with Whedon’s trademark characterisation and humour and I was sold.

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A snippet bit of conversation here at Casa JJ:

RUSS: Do you have SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater?
JJ: YES! OMG, here it is, it’s so amazing.
RUSS: Yeah, I saw it in a bookstore the other day and thought about picking it up, but then I thought I’d better ask JJ if she has it first.
JJ: If it’s YA, it’s probably a good bet I have it.

I am the go-to girl for YA around these parts. If I were a superhero, I would probably be YA GIRL, leaping into the conversations with recommendations for the latest book I read. My superpower? Talking the ears off a gundark. Vanquishing evil? Not a problem! Just give me 10 minutes and a really good YA and I swear they will run away in fear of my loquacity.

But despite my love of children’s books, I do occasionally read adult fiction. Sometimes. When asked. Maybe. The most recent recommendation I had was from both Russ and Wicked Cool Riley: OF BEES AND MISTS by Erick Setiawan.

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I need a Boswell who skydives, mostly because I keep forgetting to log my jumps after I do them and then have to do some detective work to find out which dates I was at the DZ. (Thankfully, this is what Twitter seems to be good for.)

I have a gazillion ideas for blog posts, but I never seem to have the time to update, although I suppose that is because I am either falling through the sky or sleeping off my adrenaline crash. The season is winding down to a close for me (alas!) as Bear has started med school again. I am hopeful that we will get at least one more day of jumping in this summer, if things don’t get too crazy too quickly cutting up dead bodies.

Well, if my season is drawing to a close, at least I can review a book about a different sort of season altogether. (Ah ha! Did you see what I did there, oh-so-clumsily?)

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Despite the fact that I’ve lived in New York for going on 5 years now and despite the fact that I am one of the world’s biggest fans of young adult and children’s literature, I had never stepped foot inside Books of Wonder before Sunday. (Even sadder? I used to live around the corner on 16th and 6th Ave.)

Sunday there was an author event featuring 5 billion YA authors named Sarah, including two writers whom I very much wanted to meet.

The 5 Sarahs were:

1. Sarah Beth Durst, author of INTO THE WILD and OUT OF THE WILD, a series about fractured fairy tales and the author of the upcoming ICE, which is a romantic tale set in the Arctic with fucking polar bears. As you all know, I’ve imprinted on Philip Pullman’s HIS DARK MATERIALS and this just sounds AMAZING. I can’t wait until it releases in October.
2. Sarah Cross, author of DULL BOY, a novel about superheroes and whose blog I happen to follow because she is a fan of comic books and really, any girl who is a fan of comics should be on my reader.
3. Sarah MacLean, author of the teen Regency romance THE SEASON
4. Sarah Rees Brennan, author of THE DEMON’S LEXICON
5. Sarah Ockler, author of TWENTY BOY SUMMER, a novel about a girl figuring out how to tell her best friend that she was in a relationship with the best friend’s older brother before he died.

As you might have guessed, I had my copy of THE DEMON’S LEXICON with me for Sarah Rees Brennan to sign and I had planned to get DULL BOY while I was there for Sarah Cross to sign.

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Sometimes I feel as though I have two distinct blogging selves: the nerdy, YA-bookish half and the laid-back, adrenaline-junkie skydiving half.

I’ve given my skydiving self some good blog time, so I figure I’ll let the YA-bookish self come out to play. I have read a lot of new books in the past few weeks and I ought to review them for you.

Last week I spent the last of my birthday gift card and within two days, had already finished the entire stash of new books (in addition to re-reading all 7 million pages of the GEMMA DOYLE trilogy by Libba Bray). Reviews of the last two to follow.

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My dearest, most darling Sofa is travelling in Europe for three weeks, seeing her family in Belgium and enjoying the sights before buckling down to attend law school. This means I am apartment sitting, which means I am living in Manhattan part-time to make sure her abode doesn’t…I don’t know, burn down or something. (Sofa has a deadly fear of fires.)

It also means that I have no access to the internet, and as we all know, JJ crumbles without internet access. No wi-fi means that JJ spends the entire day re-reading THE SWEET FAR THING by Libba Bray. Upon rereading the GEMMA DOYLE trilogy, I liked them a lot more. The first time I read them, I wasn’t especially enamoured—although I thought each book got better. THE SWEET FAR THING remains the best (and the one that caused me to leave a semi-incoherent fangirly comment on Bray’s blog at 3:00am after I finished) and I sobbed like a baby at the ending.

What is this? I grow more sentimental with age, it seems.

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I don’t know, what’s it like being a human?

Alas, since the weather was 10 kinds of hell on Sunday (with tornado warnings!), Bear and I were unable to jump. Again. However, I did relish the time off to rest my shoulder, but more than that, it was unexpectedly nice to hang out with my Teddy Bear and not do a thing. Nearly every time we’ve seen each other in the past year, he’s either been studying while I’ve been writing or else we’re jumping, jumping, jumping out of planes or driving 18 hours to North Carolina and back to hone our skydiving skills in a wind tunnel.

Sunday we went to the mall as Bear needed to buy a new charger for his MacBook. We also made a stop by Barnes & Noble as he needed some review books for the boards. I took the opportunity to spend the rest of my birthday giftcard.

Books Purchased

• BEYOND HEAVING BOSOMS by Sarah Wendell & Candy Tan (a.k.a. Smart Bitches Who Read Trashy Books)
• 13 LITTLE BLUE ENVELOPES by Maureen Johnson
• IRONSIDE by Holly Black
• HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE by Diana Wynne Jones
• SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater

I read IRONSIDE while lounging about with a lazy Bear and a lazy White-Harp. I first read TITHE while on holiday last year, of which IRONSIDE is the direct sequel. In this “modern faery tale” universe, I actually read VALIANT first, which is a companion book to TITHE and IRONSIDE.

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Thanks to everyone who recommended books to me. I have not yet taken up everyone on their recommendations (I am totally running out and getting Catherynne Valente’s PALIMPSEST when I get the chance), although I did spend part of my birthday giftcard on two books to read on my road trip down to North Carolina. (Amazingly, I did not get carsick.)

North Carolina was the furthest south I had ever been in the United States (excluding Disneyworld, Florida, which in all honesty, is not part of The South) and boy was it enlightening. Bear and I took the I-95 from New Brunswick, New Jersey, all the way down through Philadelphia (which has the highest number of billboards on the highway), Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C. (where we took an accidental detour through the Capitol that delayed us for an hour and a half), and the entire state of Virginia, which seems to be the longest state ever.

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