A Perpetual Orgy

Patience and Fortitude

by Nicholas Basbanes

Hooray! I have been looking forward to reading this ever since I finished A Gentle Madness. Yay!

FINALLY finished! This book was long and slow going, but very very good. Depressing in parts, mind you - nothing makes me sad in quite the same way as reading about the destruction of books - but good. I utterly adore Basbanes.

Basically, he traces the history of the library from the Library at Alexandria to the present (well, okay, to the year 2000 or so, when he wrote it). I really enjoyed reading it, even if it did take me ages and ages to finish it. I ripped through two fiction books in a matter of days after finishing this, I think out of the sheer joy of reading something lightweight after reading this weighty, well-researched tome.

An Assembly Such as This

Gah. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but ... wow.

If they're going to publish fanfiction, can't they at least publish the fic I like?

This book is basically Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view. Sounds good, I love Darcy. And I heard this was a good book! It was on my list of books to buy at Borders with my free certificates (courtesy of my awesome Borders Credit Card).

Sadly, it is not that awesome. It reads like a twentieth-century gal trying to write like Austen. It's occasionally good, but overwhelmingly mediocre. I found myself rolling my eyes at it. For fanfiction, it's pretty good, but for a published book that cost me $14, it's pretty blech. I gave up when I found it difficult mustering the interest to turn the pages. Life's too short to read boring books. *sigh*

Next up: Patience and Fortitude! I looooove Basbanes, and can't wait to read this one. I've sort of been saving it, the way one might hold off on eating a truly awesome chocolate bar so as to enjoy the anticipation and make the ultimate consumption all the more pleasant. But after An Assembly Such as This I need something that will restore my love of books.

The Golden Compass

by Philip Pullman

I've just started reading this and it's very difficult to put it back down once I've settled in! Much fun.

(Book 11 in 2006, ack. Gotta read more! Damn you, magazine subscriptions!)

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

This is an awesome book. I really enjoyed it. Loads of fascinating punctuation info, and an author I can relate to. I'm a punctuation and grammar stickler myself, and boy howdy, she makes me look laid back about it. She talks about protesting outside a movie theater showing the film Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick (it should be Two Weeks' Notice) and going about armed with a small kit to correct misused or absent apostrophes. Awesome.

Admittedly, the book is British and therefore has some stuff in it that made me blink (their rules for punctuation differ from ours in a few places and she defends those differences passionately), but overall I adored it. Good stuff.

Sticklers, Unite!

The Life and Death of a Druid Prince: The Story of Lindow Man, An Archaeological Sensation

by Anne Ross and Don Robins

This is a fascinating book! It's a quicker read than one might expect from a book on archaeology because it blends plenty of speculation and extrapolation with accounts of test results and fact-finding. The man of the title is a body found in a peat bog. Testing shows him to have died two thousand years ago, and the more the archaeologists study his remains, the more fascinating things they discover. He was killed ritually - axe blows to the head, garrotted, and his throat was cut to let the blood out of his body. Then he was heaved into a pool of water in a peat bog.

More intriguing is the fact that he is unscarred. he lived during the wars between the Celts and Romans, and never saw battle even though he was 30. He also has fine, well-kept hands. The authors put all of this in context, and the result is a sort of murder mystery.

This is a nonfiction book, but it almost reads like a novel. Fascinating stuff. Also, a must-read if you have a "sweetness and light" mental picture of the Celts. Hoo boy, they were some barbaric folks.