OK, I know it’s been a really long time, but I”m not going to be able to catch up on much. There’s two main reasons for this:
1. I’m exhausted
2. I bought a new Sleepytime aromatherapy bath milk and I’m dying to use it. If it works as advertised I will be far too sleepy to write a blog after my bubble bath.
In a nutshell: Works going fine, I’m settling into my house, I’ve become pretty much professional at building IKEA furniture, I got a dog, the dog got parvo, I had a sever allergic reaction, am looking for a new home for said dog, went to Universal this weekend, am going to NY next week for my birthday and am excited about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Turns out its a good thing we rode the Rip It Rock It Ride It roller coaster when we were at Universal because it was apparently independently audited by some German engineering firm and they have suggested that the ride be shut down until a super long list of repairs are made. It’s considered extremely unsafe. So I guess maybe it really isn’t a good thing we rode it when we did……..
My neighbor was arrested for pistol-whipping one of the Jacksonville Jaguars. It made for some real exciting time around here. The SWAT team came to serve a search warrant for the house and me and my roommate sat up in my room with the window open so we could see and hear the cops. It was oddly fun. We took bowls of ice cream up there and it was almost like a movie.
That about covers it. I really have nothing exciting going on.
Eragon– Christopher Paolini. I asked for this trilogy for Christmas two years ago because I felt like I was supposed to really like them. It seemed that most Harry Potter fans had read these and that many fans of Lord of the Rings had, too. In case you were wondering, a sense of obligation is not as effective a motivator as a genuine interest in the book. This has been sitting on my bookshelf for a year and a half and I always though ‘I should read those’ but something else would spark my interest and I’d read it instead. HOWEVER!!! I did finally read it and it was as good as people have told me. It is more like Lord of the Rings than Harry Potter, but I still loved it (yes, I meant that to imply that I’m not a super huge fan of the Rings books). There were times the plot dragged a little bit and there were definitely time that I got completely confused with all the strange names and places but I managed to make sense of it all when it mattered. The map on the inside of the jacket cover came in handy many times! The story is about a young orphan (Eragon) being raised by his uncle, who finds a dragon egg which later hatches. In this fantasy world Dragons are so rare that they are often thought to be extinct or entirely mythical, so Eragon does not know what to do with this baby dragon. The evil king sends henchmen to retrieve the egg, but Eragon and the dragon are in the woods when they come. To send their message, the henchmen burn Eragon’s home to the ground and kill his uncle in the process. The town storyteller, on old man named Brom, tells Eragon that they must leave with the Dragon. The rest of the story is about their travels through the country searching out these messengers of the king. Naturally the come up against unexpected foes and discover information that changes their mission. It took me a little while to get into this story and parts of their travels bored me a little, but overall this is a great book. I’m about halfway through the second one now and I think I like it even better.
Northanger Abbey– Jane Austen. I finally finished it! I absolutely loved it. I haven’t read Emma in awhile, but I think this might rival it as my second favorite Jane Austen novel. The ‘heroine’ of this story is Catherine Morland and she’s waited her entire life to actually live a ‘heroine’s life.’ I absolutely adored this character. She was probably the most like myself of any character I’ve read. She’s a bit of a dreamer, but squelches those dreams by viewing life in a very straightforward way. The secret motives of people who do or say one thing while meaning another are foreign and incomprehensible to her. While in Bath with friends, she becomes close with a silly flirt of a girl named Isabella who falls in love with Catherine’s brother James. Isabella’s brother has convinced himself that Catherine loves him, but she actually is infatuated with another boy named Henry Tilney (yes, this might become a future dog’s name for my list). This is by far Austen’s most sarcastic novel and the funniest, in my opinion. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do. I’m going to try to find a nice copy of it since the one I got was $2 from Chamblin’s.
The Killer’s Cousin– Nancy Werlin. This author also wrote Impossible which I wrote about a few posts ago. So I bought this book at Chamblin’s last time I was there. It had won the Edgar Award and I took this to be a good indicator that the book would be interesting. The last Edgar Award winning book I read was In the Woods and I absolutely loved that. Alas, this is not the best indicator of the quality of a book. Cousin lacks almost everything you need to keep a story entertaining. The character was angry with himself and purposely cutting himself off from the people around him, including the reader. I have read one or two books where this type of behavior by a character fits nicely into the plot, but this was not one of those books. The plot was….I don’t know how to explain it except to say that it was ‘lacking’. There was information that really should have been presented earlier in the story and parts that were never resolved (not the kind of resolved like ‘a mystery for the readers to determine’). I don’t want to spoil the ending, but since I doubt y’all will read it, I’m going to. One of the characters unintentionally killed someone, another consciously and premeditatedly killed someone, but in the end of the story you were supposed to feel pity and forgiveness for both. I felt neither emotion for neither character. On a grading scale, this book would be a D.
Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen... 