Title: Skulduggery Pleasant
Author: Derek Landy
Series: Skulduggery Pleasant #1
Genre: YA fantasy
Reason for Reading: It was loaned and recommended to me by my roommate.
Pages: 392, plus an interview with the main character and a bonus short story.
Copyright Date: 2007
Cover: A skeleton wearing sunglasses, a festive raspberry scarf, and a fedora. A young girl with curly hair and freckles is looking at him with a smile on her face.
First line: "Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself."
Best part: I really liked the characters.
Worst part: Does it have one? I'm not convinced.
Imaginary Theme Song: "You Can't Keep a Good Dog Down"
Grade: A-
Recommended for: Wow. Anyone between ten and fifteen, for sure, and adults that like YA.
Related Reads: Children of the Lamp: The Ahkenaten Adventure by PB Kerr, Harry Potter by JK Rowling, Changeling by Delia Sherman.

Stephanie Edgley's uncle has just died. He has left her an unexpected legacy - a house, a mysterious new world, and a strange friend named Skulduggery Pleasant. Will his gifts be enough to guide her through the challenges that lie ahead?

This book is a really fun ride. The worldbuilding is very interesting. But it's the characters that will stay with you. I think this is a very fresh offering to the genre and I definitely recommend it.

Title: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 372
Summary: Iris and her sister Ruth are taken to Holland by their mother after having to flee England. There, Iris is hired to teach English to Clara, a little girl that hasn't been outside for most of her life and is the talk of the town. She is also the most beautiful girl that anyone has seen and is the daughter of a wealthy family. Iris seems to find all sorts of magical beings in this house but is it magic or just her imagination? What happens when the plants that makes her family rich are the same ones that bring them to ruin?

Review: ( MAJOR spoils. If you're going to read this book, don't read this review. No, I'm completely serious. )

I love this book and recommend it to everyone who likes fairy-tale like stories. Maguire manages to take a classic fairy tale and turn it into a real life situation. He melds the magical and real in the most interesting ways and instills a little magic in each of his characters. It was very different from Wicked and much more enjoyable. I know a lot of people read Wicked first and then are turned off to Maguire and refuse to read anything else he writes. However, I couldn't stand Wicked and loved this book so give it a chance.

You can read this review and all my others at my Goodreads account.
Books read this year: 47
Currently reading: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Cupcake says, "Hey! Post more pics! Our fans insist!" Okay, okay - here are a few then...



( more just a click away - includes a meezer video! )

Okay, you know what? I've held out for nearly three and a half months now, but I am nearly at my breaking point (even though we are now in the home stretch). I am SICK of not having my own computer to work on. There are huge disadvantages to sharing a computer that you just really don't even think of until you have to do it yourself. I HATE logging out of everything every time I walk away from the computer, because the hell I'm leaving my email accounts vulnerable to prying eyes. And on your average day? I need to be logged into LJ, JournalFen, Yahoo email, Gmail (with Reader and Documents), Twitter, Delicious for bookmarks, Pandora, a couple of message boards, and my file storage account; my life would be infinitely easier if I could just stay logged in. So I HATE dumping the cache and the cookies and the browsing history and even the SEARCH history if I so much as duck out for a glass of tea, and I HAVE to do it, because you know why? You know why? Researching the @#$%*&@ e-book footnotes, that's why. If I didn't, you'd go to the Google drop-down search box and get "bella's felted womb," "dead from coke," "edward lipstick," "gq motherfucker," "total eclipse sex scene," 5000 Twilight articles, and "twincest." And there is NO WAY I am letting my family know I spent that much time looking up shit about Twilight.

I can't do a whole hell of a lot on this computer either, since it's like eight years old as it is--in excellent condition, but it's only got 30GB storage, you know? You can infer from that what the processor thingamawhatever speed must be like. It just can't do a lot. It can't handle Skype, for example. And I don't have any of my pet programs (Semagic for LJ, TweetDeck, ACDSee photo organizing, and probably a ton of others I've forgotten because IT'S BEEN SO LONG SINCE I'VE USED THEM), because the computer either can't handle a given program or it can't handle them all together. And we THOUGHT it had Photoshop, but apparently not, and while I'm pretty handy on that, I apparently am too stupid to operate MS Paint. People keep telling me how to crop and I just. can't. manage it. And then I go back to Firefox and accidentally hit "home" instead of "new tab" and I lose my entire LJ entry draft, because whenever it tries to recover a "saved" draft, it gives me the previous entry I already posted. HATRED.

And then I can't really save images (no room, plus other people looking at my shit) or watch videos (I hate being walked in on while I'm trying to watch whatever weird-ass thing someone just linked on Twitter. Mostly I just don't have time because I'm under the gun to get anything done before someone else needs the computer), assuming I could get the video to work at all. Because I physically can't get time at the computer as much as I'd like, my Google Reader news items just sit and pile up, so every morning I have "1000+," and one day I cleared 600 items and STILL had 1000+. I keep having to star things I want to go back and use in the footnotes or save pictures from, and I am TIRED OF IT.

If I didn't have the iBella--which at least has a camera, an mp3 player, and apps for Twitter, Pandora and my email that I DON'T HAVE TO LOG OUT OF--I would have gone insane by now. The day I figured out how to copy-paste links on my phone, I nearly wept for joy. Even there, I can't really answer emails or LJ comments at any length--if it's going to be a short reply, I can tap it out with a minimum of head-meeting-wall, but y'all know how wordy I am. We get to more than two sentences and I just can't manage it; I have to wait to answer until I get to the (shared) (family) computer. And then I have to log into umpteen thousand things all over again but then someone else needs the computer RIGHT NOW and I have to dump everything and hope no one noticed that I was at that moment searching "vampire sex toys." Oh, and blip.fm just doesn't work on the iPhone at all. RAAAAAAAGE.

Only one more week until [New Computer's Name] arrives. I will console myself with a peppermint chocolate chip milkshake from Chick-fil-A, I think.


ETA: THE MILKSHAKE MACHINE IS DOWN

WHY GOD WHY


(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

Apparently my brain had a complete meltdown toward the end of the Marathon Posting Month. My inbox is full and filling. I might get to that by the end of the week. I might still finish my Darker Than Black Holiday Special fic (which I haven't touched in almost exactly a year) in time for November 11. I might win the lottery.

Anyway. Wanted to share this because it's funny. And true.


Testosterone is for Dorks by *AngstnoKami on deviantART

Leave it up to a fox to play with someone else's balls... ;*)~

I don't know how much more I can take.

Hello,

I haven't been on livejournal in probably over a year, and I'm guessing with facebook that visitors to this site are probalby pretty scarce, but I thought I'd try.
I don't know if this site is for this at all...but I was wondering if someone would be willing to do a reading for me? You're probably wondering "why?" and "Why would I do it for free?"

The first reason is that I really don't trust my own abilities yet and I need some real answers.
I have recently experienced a pretty horrible thing....after over a year of trying (not knowing what was wrong with me) and then some months of trying with a doctor's help, I finally got pregnant. At 29 weeks I found out my baby had died - actually at least a few weeks prior. For those that have never experienced that I had to go through delivery and then we had to cremate and have a funeral for our baby girl (I didn't even know she was a girl until delivery). So right now I am really just questioning everything, especially why. And in this current situation both my husband and I are off work for a little while so we have no money to spend on something like a Tarot reading. There is only 1 place in town I know of and would trust but it's $50.

I just need to know what's going to happen in my life/my marriage. I need to know if I will be having another child in the near future. My husband and I are firm believers that things happen for a reason but I'm sure you can imagine that it's hard to figure out what the reason is behind this experience.

For any that are willing to help out, please let me know if you need any information to do it. I know people can have readings done over the phone so I can't see why an internet one would be much less correct.

Please....

Internet, this is Anya. Anya, The Internet.

Today I was going to buy The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. Does anyone have a suggestion on whether or not I should buy this book or not?

( Sense and Sensibility ) 
More Reviews over at lovebooks-letter4no1.blogspot.com/

You don’t need to be a fan of Bill Willingham’s Fables comics to like this book--you don’t even have to know what they are to understand Peter & Max. This is a re-telling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story from a different perspective, one of those “what really happened” kind of tales. For every other character or event that might confuse the reader, Willingham explains the course of the comics in a few words and lines that, if anything, spoil crucial points of suspense that have navigated and pushed Fables over the years. But don’t let that discourage you at all if you’re a new fan. What I like the most about the comics and this book, is Willingham’s grasp of consequence and reality. To validate these fairy tales with contemporary ideas, Willingham is always examining the life of our favorite heroes and heroines in the unwritten pages after their most famous moments. Away from the storybook and our imaginations is a far removed perspective that pulls gently in our direction--here is more, it says to us; the story continues; life goes on.

For the folks in fairy tales--Fables, they call themselves--reality is about as pragmatic and mundane for them as it is for us. Forced to flee their fairy tale homes and find refuge in an enchanted portion of New York City’s Upper West Side, the Fables remind us that we know of only a tiny period in their lives; in our world they must learn to coexist in very human ways, without magic or magical objects that would draw attention to themselves. Yanked out of context of course it’s easy to imagine all sorts of wonderful, magical settings that make romantic adventures out of very real, scary episodes. Despite still writing in “happily ever after” endings, Willingham’s come a long way to revolutionize what’s been handed down to us for so long and in the same form.

Peter & Max is about the Piper family (a band of traveling minstrels), two brothers (Peter and Max), and the innocent Peep family who gets caught in the middle of fraternal jealousy and revenge. Like all such things, a combination of skewed perspective and hurt feelings tips the scales of envy towards violence. What begins as an ominous and mysterious set of flashbacks and present-day events, the story gradually finds promise in its most haunting thread: who is the true Pied Piper? Peter or Max? Peter is a sweet boy, always managing to do what’s right and do it well; Max is his older, but less talented, brother who snaps at the slightest attempt to undermine his authority and right as the eldest Piper child. It’s almost impossible to imagine the sweet-tempered Peter luring unsuspecting children out of their beds and away from their homes, but too predictable to assume the blame lays somewhere outside, somewhere obvious.

( Read the rest! )

Speaking of vampires, one of my pet peeves is the use of the term "vegetarian" to describe ones that don't prey on human victims. Twilight seems to have put this in the spotlight, but I'm pretty sure it's been around before. At first blush, the term seems clever, applying the analogy of humans who don't eat meat to vampires who don't eat humans. I get that it's not intended to be literal, the same way a "bear" refers to a gay guy who's all big and burly and hairy, but he's not literally as big and hairy as an actual bear. Still, my beef here is that at least the whole bear thing translates the appearance of bears to the appearance of people. Hair to hair, burly to burly. So-called "vegetarian" vampires may abstain from eating humans, but they don't eat vegetables whatsoever. In fact, usually they seem to opt for consuming animal blood, which is about as far from vegetarianism as you can get.

Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that the only real vegetarian vampire is Bunnicula. Also, Count Duckula, I guess, although he doesn't have fangs, so I'm not sure he's really a vampire anymore after he was resurrected with ketchup.

That doesn't mean the vampires who refuse to drink human blood have no place in vampire lore, mind you. I'm just saying they should be called something else. For one thing, I think another flaw with the vegetarian analogy is that it infers that vampires consume blood as food. I prefer the notion that they just do it because they're hideous monsters, compelled by their unholy nature to do such things. Its more like an addiction than fuel for the body. So you might call vampires that don't drink human blood teetotallers, comparing the thirst for blood to an alcoholic's thirst for liquor. But I think that's also kind of dopey.

I think this is why there needs to be a new word introduced for such a thing, the same way half-vampire/half-human characters are called "dhampirs", as opposed to something lame like "hybrids" or "mules", or "mulattos". Sometimes you just have to have a new word. "Chupacabra" might be worth using in some way, seeing as that's the only mythical creature I can find that drinks the blood of animals and not people. Literally, it means "goat sucker" in Spanish, so maybe if that could be rephrased in Serbian it'd sound more vampirey.

Wait, what was I doing again? Oh, yeah.

( Bung me another crappy chapter. )

...actual swine, no so much.



http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2008/03/miniature_pigs_pets_of_the_fut.php

⌈ Secret Post #1038 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 19 pages, 461 secrets from Secret Submission Post #149.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

( Read more... )

Rating: four and a half stars
Length: 870 pages
Source: shelf
Other books I've read by this author: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (my review), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (my review), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (my review), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my review), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch through the Ages, The Tales of Beedle the Bard (my review)

xposted to bookish and temporaryworlds