Lady Colin Campbell is hysterically funny if you read her in the right mood and right tone. She wrote a really nasty bio about Princess Di before she died. The book was rather obviously intended as a hatchet job by her caddish husband. Colin actually began life as a boy and then became a girl in her teens so I think she harbors a natural sympathy for Wallis that is wholly undeserved. She’s the sort of woman Americans love to listen to and then heave a sigh of relief that we don’t have to deal with the arrogance of a smug, inherited aristocratic class anymore.
Bought Stardust a few years back and for one reason or another, was never able to crack it. Sat languishing until last night. Two thirds of the way through it I wondered if iTunes carried the movie. Yes, and it was $9.99, so I bought it and loaded it on my iPad. Wouldn’t allow myself to touch it until I finished the book, which I did before I left work today (read most of the rest at lunch and only the last 8-10 pages in the quiet time before the end of my work day). Started watching the movie on the way home. Already disappointed with the changes.
I saw the movie Stardust before reading the story. I really loved the movie, but the book–while very enjoyable–didn’t delight me as much as the movie did. The only exception is that I didn’t really care for Robert De Niro’s character in the movie.
I preferred the book of Stardust to the movie except for the ending. The movie wrapped things up very nicely (albeit in an extremely fairy tale-ish way), while I always found the ending of the book rather unsatisfying.
Elleander Morning:
Ditto!! Unfortunately my copy seems to have vanished during one of my many moves, so I had to ILL it when I wanted to reread it a couple years ago…
Not at all surprised that Elleander Morning would end up on a thread like that. Might have recommended it myself if I’d seen the thread…
“[Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results](Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results by John Scalzi),” by John Scalzi. See scenario 6…
Hope you both like this short-short story: http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory
I finished The Glass Demon. It was a pretty decent read, I’m going to give this author’s other books a try as well.
Next up: The Weird: a compendium of strange and dark stories. I’ve actually had this out of the library before and had to return it because I just didn’t have the time. This book is about three inches thick! Some of these stories I’ve read before, and I may have to cherry-pick the rest, or I’ll be lugging this doorstop around until Halloween.
Have you seen the new Madonna movie about Wallis, W.E.? It depicts Wallis’s “existential loneliness” as she’s swept up by the tide of events and trapped into marriage: “You have no idea how hard it is to live out the great romance of the century, and to know I will have to be with him, always and always and always and always.”
I posted about this back in February. Yes, I liked it too. Now reading Criminal by Karen Slaughter, another serial-killer book. This one has lots of flashbacks to 1975 when one of the female characters was just starting out in the police; it’s shocking and all too true to remember what life was like for women back then. Even more shocking than the murders, because I expected that, because, you know, it’s a serial-killer book.
Thank god that was before I was a mod, or it could’ve gotten really ugly. 
I’m waiting for it on cable. Madonna apparently focused on clothing and little else.
Wallis just gets on my nerves. She was a spoiled whiner who married an in-bred twit, cozied up to Nazis and spent her days doing nothing but buying clothing and complaining that people did not curtsey to her. The only good thing you can say about her is that she took her husband the Nazi appeaser off the throne.
Finished Trunk Music, by Michael Connelly, the fourth book in the Harry Bosch detective series. Much better than the previous installment, The Last Coyote. Those are the only two in the series I’ve read so far.
Now I’ll spend some time reading through relevant sections of the Lonely Planet Japan guidebook. I started a thread a short time ago asking for advice about gorilla-watching in Rwanda, but that will be three or four years from now. For our Songkran getaway next April, I promised the wife Japan.
Find a gorilla in Osaka, and you’re golden.
I finished the Hunter S. Thompson biography, and since I didn’t have another book queued up and ready to go, I’m now re-reading *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas *for like the fifth time.
I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, which was one of the Pulitzer nominees for Fiction, and I cannot figure out why it wouldn’t have gotten the prize. It was really incredible, a very short and sparse novella following a working class man through his life in the northern plains in the early part of the 20th century. The writing is beautiful.
I’ve really been enjoying Yes, Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson. A refugee child from Ethopia, adopted by a Swedish couple, Marcus tells his story of becoming a talented chef whose travels have taken him around the world as well as back to his homeland.
Samuelsson has a very engaging style; and speaks frankly of the mistakes he’s made as well as his triumphs. His love of food and of creation shines through - he references “chasing flavors” many times and provides examples of how he’s done just that. He credits his adoptive family with helping build his character and giving him the tools to succeed. He has also shared his success with his birth family; convincing his father to send his half-sisters to school so that they may have a better life.
Despite not being a foodie; I find myself having read several chef memoirs over the years and have enjoyed the stories overall. I’d love to be in on a conversation between Samuelsson and Jeff Henderson; to hear them compare and contrast their experiences as African/African-American men in the world of cooking. And you know, Tony Bourdain might be more fun to party with; but I think I’d much rather sit down to a quiet dinner hosted by Marcus Samuelsson.
September’s thread: Link
I just started E.M. Forster’s ***Howard’s End ***(I never saw the movie).
Although I very much enjoyed Joe Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, and his short-story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, I never got around to his second novel, Horns, because what little I knew about it (a guy wakes up from a bender with horns on his head and people start revealing secrets to him) frankly didn’t seem all that interesting.
But, in anticipation of his upcoming book, I finally decided to give Horns a read. I wish now that I hadn’t waited to so long. It was very hard to put down. Even though this has been a busy week for me, I picked it up on Wednesday afternoon and finished it by Thursday night.
It’s not a perfect book, but it’s very good.