Category Archives: Book Talk

Branching Out

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Every generation has one. The Book Aunt. The person you can always count on to send you fascinating things to read at Christmas and your birthday, with the corners of the dust covers cut off so that you can’t see the price, and a warm message scrawled in peacock blue ink on the inside cover.

For me, the book aunt is my mother’s younger sister, Patti. For our nephews and nieces the book aunt is…me. And I’m cool with that. Fuzzy’s family is big on reading, though they’ve never really had much exposure to the classics, and my step-brother’s kids are becoming readers as well.

But books seem anticlimactic when compared with iPods and jewelrey and pictures of dead presidents, so I’m wondering if I should do theme boxes… like, when I give my young nephew a copy of The Jungle Book I could throw in some animal print bedding, a copy of the movie, and a box of animal crackers. (As an aside, I love animal crackers.)

Or when we gift a young niece with Black Beauty maybe we could include a horse figurine, a charm for her bracelet, and perhaps donate to her riding lesson fund.

I like theme boxes. I like small presents wrapped with great love. I like making reading something more than words on a page.

This idea has potential.

Book Geeks in Love

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October evenings make me cook more, because it’s actually cool enough to use the oven. Also, I just re-read Julie Powell’s book about cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book I’ve drooled over while visiting others, but have yet to acquire a copy of.

Tonight, as I made midwestern food for Fuzzy, who works scary hours and never remembers to eat lunch, I thought about other October evenings, when we were first married and lived in South Dakota, and we would use one of our evenings off work to go to Barnes and Noble, me in my favorite leather bomber jacket, he in an ancient North Face jacket that has long since been destroyed. We’d browse through our favorite sections, then meet up and exchange smooches in the science fiction aisle, wash, rinse, repeat.

Afterward, we’d share a table in the little cafe, and I’d have a mocha, and he’d have hot chocolate or hot cider, and we’d share the peach tart they used to sell.

We don’t often linger in the cafe after bookshopping any more.
In fact, lately, our bookstore visits have been surgical strikes rather than literary sojourns.

But we still exchange smooches in the science fiction aisle.

Lost Titles

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Every time Fuzzy goes to Florida for work (which is at least once a quarter), he brings home brochures for Boca Raton real estate and Orlando vacation rental property, and I read them so I can get a sense of what the market there is doing.

I found one the other day, and turned to a page that had a house I swear I’d read about in a novel. Sadly I don’t remember the name of the book, but it took place in Florida, and the lead character was an artist, a painter. I don’t remember it being chick-lit, exactly, but I’m not sure it was overly dramatic, either.

I have a feeling I didn’t read the end, and I can’t remember the title. It might have been a woman’s name, or a reference to art.

But I really want to read it again.

More Coming Attractions

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I just received the emailed interview from Julia Holden, and while she doesn’t talk about fictional Las Vegas homes for sale (or trailers stashed behind hotels or casinos, for that matter) the subjects do include Paris, pseudonyms, future plans, and the Folies Bergere.

The authors who’ve been contacted are picked because they’re fairly accessible – with websites, blogs, etc., – as well as because I like their work, or think my readers will appreciate what they have to say.

So far, everyone I’ve contacted has been really gracious and returned the questionnaire much quicker than anticipated, which is really good for me.

Ms. Holden’s interview won’t be posted until November, most likely, but I wanted to let you all know it was coming.

Coming in October

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Just a brief list of what’s coming to Bibliotica during the rest of October:

– Review of the season premiere of Blood Ties
– Reviews of Rises the Night and The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason
– In Their Words: Emailed interview from Keith R. A. DeCandido, who apparently never sleeps. This will go up either Tuesday or Thursday of this week, and should not be missed – some of his responses made me wish I had protective underwear.
– More site changes. You may have noticed the new layout, but I’m working on one that will spotlight featured pieces a little better.

I’ll also be re-reading the original Dracula by Bram Stoker and posting a list of my favorite fictional vampires.

Thanks for reading.

Moonlight-ing

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I spent this morning cleaning my coffee maker, but I probably should have spent it researching drug treatment centers instead, because after my mini-marathon of Dracula: the Series on Friday, I also finally managed to catch an episode of the new vampire detective show Moonlight which is brought to you, in part, by Ron Koslow who was also involved in one of my favorite 1980’s television shows, Beauty and the Beast.

Friends who managed to see the pilot of Moonlight told me that it was very much an Angel ripoff. I disagree. If anything, it traces more of its roots back to Forever Knight than Angel ever did, and that’s fine, because what makes Joss Whedon’s work stand out is that it is so fresh and difference. It also has more than a passing resemblance to Blood Ties which returns this week.

In any case, Moonlight features Australian actor Alex O’Loughlin as vampire private investigator Mick St. John, who is relatively young in vampire terms, as he was still mortal as recently as 1950. He’s got a torch for a blonde reporter, who is apparently in a stable relationship with someone in the district attorney’s office, so there’s they typical vampire-mortal attraction dance going on, and of course, they fight crime.

It seems like a show still finding its feet, and I’ve read that there were major casting changes at the last minute, and that David Greenwalt who was involved in the show’s creation, walked away from it over the summer, so I’m hoping it will last long enough to have a chance of growing beyond it’s very earnest first couple episodes, and maybe offer a little bit more grit.

My verdict: Worth catching, but don’t cancel plans for it.

Dracula: The Series

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If there’s some kind of drug treatment for people who like cheesy vampire stories, than I surely need it, because yesterday while I was working I went through an entire disc of Dracula: The Series on DVD. Now, an entire disc may not sound bad to those of you accustomed to getting four hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a disc, but you will understand why a disc of Drac is bad when I tell you that, because it’s a half-hour show, one disc = eleven episodes.

Eleven.

Now do you sense the wrongness?

Back in the very very early 1990’s, there was a channel in the NJ/NY area known as “Universal 9” – I’m not sure if it was some precursor to UPN or not, but among the funky syndicated shows they ran were this one, and another called She-Wolf of London that was about an American university student who is bitten by a werewolf while she’s visiting England. Adventure and romance ensue.

Dracula however, is at least partly a sit-com. It features extremely tall Canadian actor Geordie Johnson as “Alexander Lucard” – who lives in a modern castle and conquers the world by conglomerating it. Pitted against him is Bernard Behrens as “Gustav Helsing” – Uncle Gustav to the two American (who are really Canadian) kids who are sent to live with him in Belgium (except it’s really Luxembourg) while their mother wanders around Europe in her job for a bank. The boys are Max (10) and Chris (16), and they are cheerfully geeky in that “still have eighties hair” sort of way. Also staying with Gustav is Sophie Metternich (played by The L Word‘s Mia Kirschner), and of course she and Chris end up flirting with each other, a lot, while Max and Uncle G run off to try and kill Dracula.

There is a lot of wielding of crosses and splashing of holy water, big swirly capes, and near-vaudevillian gesturing, especially when Drac is about to sink his ridiculously long fangs into the neck of the week.

Guest stars are campy in a “If I wasn’t Canadian and it wasn’t thirty years too late I’d be on Gilligan’s Island” sort of way, and most of the 41 Canadian actors who showed up in EVERY US/CAN joint production of the era show up here as well, including, in a recurring role as Klaus “I’m a psychotic giggling loon with fangs” Helsing, Gustav’s son, turned Dracula’s minion, Geraint Wyn Davies. Followers of Vamp TV know that Geraint Wyn Davies would show up wearing fangs (and a better hair style) a few years later as the lead in the “Crime time after prime time” show, Forever Knight.

If I’m mocking this show so much, you may wonder why I bought the discs. Well, for one thing, the entire first season of 21 episodes (there was no second season, which is too bad, because had they chosen to tone down the cheese some interesting plot points were coming out) was a whopping $8.49 at a certain online megabookstore.

Also, sometimes, you just need to laugh.

Talking Pictures

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My favorite details of the Harry Potter books are the moving, interactive paintings and photographs, where you can not only see a bit of movement, but because subjects can visit other frames, it’s like having many different pictures.

Even though we live in a decidedly muggle world, we actually can have something similar, thanks to the use of modern technology. Buy a digital photo frame and use your USB drive to upload images, and you can have either a single still, or a personal slide show, playing in a photo frame of your choosing (metal, wood-tone, or acrylic) in sizes from 7-10 inches, and even better, you can include audio.

The company that makes these digital frames is called Digital Framez, and even though their locations are limited to the UK and Australia right now, they ship worldwide.

Even better, 10 inch digital picture frames come with a free 256 MB memory card, and all of them also support DIVX playback, so you can actually have movie playback, and since DigitalFramez.com takes PayPal, and will give you pricing in your local currency, not only do you not have to figure out what $109 is in galleons and sickles, you also don’t have to convert dollars to British pounds.

Consider a digital frame today. It’s less expensive than a trip to Hogwarts.

Read More About It

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If you’re like me, when you finish a book you absolutely loved, you really want to find something similar to it, whether it’s more work by the same author, more books in the same genre, or titles that people who read the same book also recommend. You could go to one of the various variations of Amazon, but while they offer a lot, the reality is that their search interface needs some help.

A better solution is to visit http://www.lovereading.co.uk, a cheery red-trimmed site that offers deep discounts, searching by author title or ISBN, and, even better, a “like for like” search function (available to members only) that allows you to plug in the last name of the author whose work you just finished, and get back a list of authors who write similar stories.

I tested this search function with the name of an American author, but there were no responses. Testing it with British authors (specifically Dick Francis and Marian Keyes, whose work is vastly different, though still fiction) netted better results, and I’m excited because now I have some new authors to explore.

The registration process is simple – name, email, and password, then tell them your favorite genres – and you can specify how often (monthly, semi-monthly, or weekly) that you want to receive email. You get to start browsing right away, and even cooler, there are downloadable excerpts of almost all the books on the site. (Format is pdf.)

While purchasing books through LoveReading is not cost effective for me, I’d recommend that UK residents do compare prices, as they offer a 25% discount off cover prices. I definitely recommend the site for all users, however, if only because of the Like for Like search.