Evil muppets! And books!
Feb. 13th, 2004 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daemonlunaAngel this week--overall plot was pretty weak but it was worth it for many individual scenes, mostly of the Angel-and-Spike-show variety. And for next week's trailer! Evil Muppets! Aaaah! It could be sublimely absurd, or it could fall flat on its face. I will not know until next week.
Due to 1) waiting around for the CD player and alarm to be reinstalled in the car (amazing how the three hour wait turned into six as soon as we actually got the car in...) and 2) unscheduled trip up to Edmonton and back today, I've caught up on most of my library books. So. Let's see.
Sweetblood by Pete Hautman: Lucy is a bright, depressed-with-goth-leanings diabetic teenager with a theory that historical accounts of vampires are based on the physical effects of untreated, undiagnosed diabetes, who starts hanging out with vampire-wannabes. Pretty good, it was nice to see a diabetic character who wasn't part of a problem novel about "oh no, I just found out I'm diabetic! Angst, angst, however shall I cope? Oh, guess what, I coped!" but be prepared for the vampire stuff to play much less of a pivotal part of the book.
Claws by Will Weaver. Jed's life is pretty well perfect until he gets a note telling him to meet at a nearby cafe. He shows, and this pink-haired punk girl sits down and tells him that his father is having an affair with her mother. Angst, angst, stuff falls apart, and in the end it all comes down to a kayak, a sudden storm, and a rescue by helicopter. I was okay with this one (good, solid read even if I liked Zipped by Laura Mcneal MUCH more as a variant on the whole parent-having-an-affair thing) up until the last chapter. Did NOT like how it all turned out. Meh.
Breakout by Paul Fleischman. Del is seventeen, and is running away from her latest foster home in L.A. She's got a car, got a plan, and then, a traffic accident turns the Santa Monica freeway into a thousand-car parking lot. The entire book takes place during the traffic jam, and during her performance of a one-woman play/monologue about an epiphany she had while in another, similiar traffic jam eight years later. What's hard to capture in a summary is the remarkable interweaving of little bits of the lives of all sorts of fascinating, very plausible characters. I really liked this one. And hey, it's short. (You would not believe how often that factors into the I-need-a-book reference questions...)
Sonny's War by Valerie Hobbs. It's 1966, and fourteen-year-old Cory's dad has just died, and the older brother that she hero-worships has been drafted. Coming-of-age, cool hippy rabble-rousing history teacher, etc, etc. Once again, a good, solid read. Didn't fantastically grab my interest, but I think that's partly because it's about the Vietnam War and kind of inherently American in that nothing about that time period particularily resonates with me.
That pretty much covers the waiting-for-the-car-to-be-fixed reading from yesterday. It's been a very long, wretched day. Tired now, will ramble about the stuff I read in the car (The River Between Us, A Stir of Bones, Big Fish, and Jake Reinvented) tomorrow.
Due to 1) waiting around for the CD player and alarm to be reinstalled in the car (amazing how the three hour wait turned into six as soon as we actually got the car in...) and 2) unscheduled trip up to Edmonton and back today, I've caught up on most of my library books. So. Let's see.
Sweetblood by Pete Hautman: Lucy is a bright, depressed-with-goth-leanings diabetic teenager with a theory that historical accounts of vampires are based on the physical effects of untreated, undiagnosed diabetes, who starts hanging out with vampire-wannabes. Pretty good, it was nice to see a diabetic character who wasn't part of a problem novel about "oh no, I just found out I'm diabetic! Angst, angst, however shall I cope? Oh, guess what, I coped!" but be prepared for the vampire stuff to play much less of a pivotal part of the book.
Claws by Will Weaver. Jed's life is pretty well perfect until he gets a note telling him to meet at a nearby cafe. He shows, and this pink-haired punk girl sits down and tells him that his father is having an affair with her mother. Angst, angst, stuff falls apart, and in the end it all comes down to a kayak, a sudden storm, and a rescue by helicopter. I was okay with this one (good, solid read even if I liked Zipped by Laura Mcneal MUCH more as a variant on the whole parent-having-an-affair thing) up until the last chapter. Did NOT like how it all turned out. Meh.
Breakout by Paul Fleischman. Del is seventeen, and is running away from her latest foster home in L.A. She's got a car, got a plan, and then, a traffic accident turns the Santa Monica freeway into a thousand-car parking lot. The entire book takes place during the traffic jam, and during her performance of a one-woman play/monologue about an epiphany she had while in another, similiar traffic jam eight years later. What's hard to capture in a summary is the remarkable interweaving of little bits of the lives of all sorts of fascinating, very plausible characters. I really liked this one. And hey, it's short. (You would not believe how often that factors into the I-need-a-book reference questions...)
Sonny's War by Valerie Hobbs. It's 1966, and fourteen-year-old Cory's dad has just died, and the older brother that she hero-worships has been drafted. Coming-of-age, cool hippy rabble-rousing history teacher, etc, etc. Once again, a good, solid read. Didn't fantastically grab my interest, but I think that's partly because it's about the Vietnam War and kind of inherently American in that nothing about that time period particularily resonates with me.
That pretty much covers the waiting-for-the-car-to-be-fixed reading from yesterday. It's been a very long, wretched day. Tired now, will ramble about the stuff I read in the car (The River Between Us, A Stir of Bones, Big Fish, and Jake Reinvented) tomorrow.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-13 09:52 pm (UTC)http://thewb.com/PressRelease/Index/0,8341,156980,00.html
Re:
Date: 2004-02-13 10:11 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-13 10:23 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-13 10:41 pm (UTC)