Teaser Tuesday: 11.17.09

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

He waited. The small nickelplated revolver in his hand. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

 

Jonathan likes to see movies. A lot. That is, he likes to see a lot of movies… a lot. I knew he wanted to see “The Road” – I could tell when he gasped and choked on my Coke when we saw the preview for the first time before… “Paranormal Activity,” maybe? If at all possible, I like to read a book before I see it adapted into a movie. That doesn’t always happen, but I like for that to be the case. I’ve owned a copy of The Road for a couple of years now and still haven’t read it, so I thought now might be a nice time to do so. We’re going to see if I can manage to finish reading the book before Jonathan snaps and insists that we must see the movie nownownow! I might make it, though – Jonathan might be good on movies for a little bit since we saw “The Fourth Kind” just the other day. In fact, he’s actually threatening to read the book himself, which would be fantastic… maybe more fantastic if he didn’t have to work. A lot.

Musing Monday: 11.16.09

With the holiday season now upon us, have you left any hint – subtle or otherwise – for books family and friends might buy you for Christmas? Do you like to receive books, or do you prefer certificates so you can choose your own?

The truth of the matter is that I don’t trust other people to buy me books, and any book that I realize I want I go ahead and buy for myself. This time of the year especially, the purchase of the desired book comes with a whipped cream-topped hot chocolate (Yes!)

In the past, I loved receiving gift cards to Borders, but I enjoy that less now. What I like about Christmas is that it’s a time to get gifts that are a novelty, and as much as I love books they are not exactly a novelty. They are the one thing I am always, always, always willing to blow my money on. Like I told Jonathan just recently, I am far more willing to shell out a bunch of money for books than I am for clothing – sad but true.

That said, some of the best gifts I have ever received have been books that I did not see coming. Jonathan gave me one of the enormous numbered hardcovers of Girls and Robert McKee’s Story for my birthday in June, both of which I enjoyed immensely (no-brainer). A couple of Christmases ago, my brother found my Amazon wish list completely on his own and bought me Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which was new at the time, and got my mom to buy me Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. Every time I get a book I have actually been wanting, I am just tickled pink, but it’s rare and almost always coincidental.

BREAKING UP by Aimee Friedman: The Sunday Salon

Breaking Up is the major thing that I read today after having bought it yesterday. Jonathan and I celebrated he and Josh having finally turned in issue 20 of The Sword by shopping like mad all weekend long. We began Friday with the mall, dinner with my family, and he dropped me at a Borders to get the new Stephen King (I know, you don’t need to tell me) and the new John Irving while he ran by Best Buy. Yesterday we hit McDonald’s for breakfast (big deal, believe it or not), Crate & Barrel, my comic book store this time, Urban Outfitters, H&M, and we did dinner at Maggiano’s.

This morning we sat around reading for a while before we accomplished anything else, and that was when I read this book in its entirety. When we were at the store yesterday, I was looking at this book and almost picked it up when Jonathan picked it up himself and flipped through it, saying it looked like something I might get. Of course, I use my students as an excuse for reading these things. I am always excited when I encounter a graphic novel that I can justify bringing to the book box at school, but this book was just plain cute.

Truth, I wouldn’t run around recommending it like crazy, but my girls will like it a lot. It’s practically a scene-by-scene reworking of “Mean Girls.” I actually love “Mean Girls” – it’s fucking hilarious, I don’t care what you say – but reading something that’s essentially the same thing would be a little exhausting if I weren’t also excited to bring it to my kids. Not for the top of your TBR pile.

Waiting on Wednesday: LOCKE AND KEY.

I’m going to jump on the bandwagon with Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. Well, I’m jumping on the bandwagon sort of. There are always books that I would be excited to see the release of – the last in recent memory that I was psyched about was the lovely Amy Shearn’s How Far is the Ocean From Here. But I’m going to do WoW about books I’m anxious to get to in the near future rather than books I’m waiting for the release of. (It’s my blog, I’ll end a sentence with a preposition if I want to.)

I am totally psyched to read Locke and Key: Head Games, written by Joe Hill. Funny how much I loved the first volume considering my general distaste for anything written by his father, Stephen King.

The first volume actually scared me, and I don’t think I’m easy to scare outside of the film medium. I think it speaks volumes when a single panel in a graphic novel makes me actually jump and makes my chest clench like a fist. The first volume did that.

So when I’ve finally finished New Moon – I’m a little more than halfway through it now – I need to reread volume 1 before getting into volume 2, but I’m looking forward to it. Highly recommended. Possibly my favorite horror comic.

Favorite links of the day.

I don’t have a review or anything of that sort today. I ran straight from a bad day at work (which involved a Twilight incident I don’t even want to think about) to the vet where my dog pretended to be fit as a fiddle but returned to her original crippled state as soon as we returned home. I was then held hostage at dinner by my father, and must write at some point today. (I swear I will.) So let me just link to some of the lovely articles I’ve encountered today.

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I am now officially looking forward to reading Flow: the Cultural Story of Menstruation. Anything highlighted by Bust magazine has to be good, yes? And I’m always excited about a cultural history of anything taboo, like Virgin, which is also in my TBR pile.

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This will either amuse you or cause you to vomit: midnight release party for Nabokov’s The Original of Laura and Palin’s Going Rogue: an American Life. Ouch.

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Chuck Palahniuk is getting teachers in trouble. If these damned writers wouldn’t produce thought-provoking material, we teachers wouldn’t be tempted to use it in the classroom. Dammit! (Okay, I haven’t read that particular story and I’m really just being a biased and bitter high school teacher. But I can make an educated assumption here.)

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A new graphic novel for the TBR pile: Logicomix: an Epic Search for Truth.

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One in 10 Adult Book Buyers… are geeks. I mean, read graphic novels – pronounced: “comic books”. (I’m allowed to be self-deprecating, back off.)

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An article on being a graphic artist that was at least interesting to glance through. Jonathan can let me know if this is at all accurate.

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Cut to the chase, save me some work, and see Multiversity Comics’s review of Suburban Glamour. They said it better than I would have, and I agree with every bit of it – more or less.

Rick Remender’s SORROW and then some.

To be adapted for the screen by Twisted Pictures of "Saw" fame.

To further incriminate myself, I recommend that you enjoy a funny SNL spoof of “Twilight.” (I am so looking forward to “New Moon,” I just can’t help myself.)

I also recommend you check out this article about Rick Remender’s Sorrow getting picked up by “Saw”’s production company, Twisted Pictures. To channel my students, “Oh. Em. Gee.” I <3 Sorrow big time. I also <3 “Saw” big time. Does life get any better than this? I may burst.

Adaptations are also in the works for XXXombies – the second-most exciting prospect – and Night Mary – the third-most exciting.

I suppose this would be the time to say that I read Sorrow when I was first doing the comic book thing. I saw that it was being compared with the psychological horror of “The Exorcist” and “Psycho” and thought it could only be but so bad. There are actually a good few graphic novels I’ve read that actually make my chest clench and make me say, “Oh, shit.” Sorrow was the very first of all that I’ve encountered so far. If you want to see real horror in graphic novel form, Sorrow is not a bad place to start.

OTOMEN: The Sunday Salon.

I’ve been reading New Moon in preparation for the movie, which I admit I am very excited about. I will never like the style, but the pacing is totally engrossing. I forget where I am and what I’m doing every time I open that book… But I left it at Jonathan’s, so I’m using my day without New Moon to read volume 4 of Otomen.

Otomen: 1) a young man with girlish interests and thoughts; 2) a young man who has a talent for cooking, needlework and general housework; 3) a manly young man with a girlish heart.

This is the first manga series I’ve ever followed, and it’s pretty darn cute. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it’s very interesting, and I might not even have as much of an appreciation for it as I should if it weren’t for the fact that I am constantly looking for books that are safe to share with my students.

The protagonist, Asuka Masamune, was abandoned by his father at a young age when his father became a transvestite and decided he wanted to live his life as a woman. Ever since, there has been extreme pressure on Asuka from his mother – and society in general – to be manly, to shy away from “cute” things, and not to end up like his father. Asuka is generally respected as the toughest, manliest man and fighter in his high school, and the only people who know that he is an otomen are his love interest, Ryo, who is not very girly at all, and his friend, Juta, who is secretly using his relationship with Ryo as the basis for the shojo manga he writes. In other words, it’s just adorable. It’s a very quick read, and each chapter is like a separate episode.

I didn’t know that the fourth volume was out until I happened to see it when Jonathan and I were at a comic book store on Friday. I don’t know what made me think that there were only going to be four volumes in the series, but now there is a volume 5 and volume 6 in the works, apparently. They’re a lot of fun to read and a few of my female students just love them.

“How to Write a Great Novel.”

An article I loved on authors and how they write, courtesy of Maud Newton. I’m a Junot Diaz – what are you?

Buffy vs. Edward.

Bryan J.L. Glass – who I also met in Baltimore and was also a doll – posted this link: Buffy vs. Edward. It’s actually kind of funny. If you don’t find it funny… well, you’re lying to yourself. Don’t pretend to be cool.

25 Most Influential Writers.

So apparently back in March, the fabulous Emily Barton tagged me for this meme and at the time I was not blogging as I should so I missed it. So I’ll do it now!

“Name 25 writers who have influenced you. These are not necessarily your favorite writers or those you most admire, but writers who have influenced you. Then you tag 25 people.” In no particular order:

1. Louisa May Alcott: Little Women was for me, as it was for many avid female readers, a very influential book. I loved Jo, was in love with Laurie – especially later when he was played by Christian Bale – and wanted to become famous for writing my own thinly-veiled autobiography.

2. Judy Blume: I didn’t actually read a lot of Judy Blume when I was younger; I’m basing this largely on Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, which are the greatest young adult books ever.

3. Bram Stoker: Maybe not for the best of reasons, or at least not the most obvious. I only read about two-thirds of the book before I puked all over it in a road-trip incident, so I have never read Dracula in its entirety. But no one is unaffected by Dracula, whether they have read it or not. I used to read How to Care for Your Pet Monster over and over and over when I was little and memorized everything I would need to know to care for a vampire. (Yes, at a point in time I thought horror movie monsters were potential pets; the humor of the book was lost on me.) I also used to type the text of my Children’s Classics version of Dracula on our computer, pretending that I was the author of the book.

4. William Peter Blatty: My aunt had an old paperback copy of The Exorcist that I stole and read when I was staying at her house one night. That is, I read about half of it – I was 10 years old. I borrowed it when I returned home. It hid at the bottom of a pile of junk so that I wouldn’t have to look at it until I eventually returned it to her.

5.  Mary Shelley: I have a love/hate history with Ms. Shelley. I resented the hell out of tenth grade English for requiring me to read Frankenstein. I hated it so much I even delivered a speech about it in my Speech and Drama class. Of course, I was required to read it again in college, and when I was old enough to appreciate it, it became one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read it, I believe, three or four times now.

6. Charles Dickens: If I had to credit one and only one book for my extreme love of reading, it would be A Tale of Two Cities. I read it for the first time when I was thirteen, and only because I knew the entire plot already – otherwise I don’t think I could have stuck it out. (Ever notice Dickens is a bit wordy?) But the feeling I got from the very last page of that book is the feeling I’ve spent the rest of my reading life trying to recapture.

7. Joyce Carol Oates: I know, these are some pretty obvious people. It wasn’t until J.C.O. that I knew that I could like short stories. I always had a weirdness about short stories and it still lingers a bit, but what Oates could/can do with such limited ink is amazing.

8. Ann Patchett: Bel Canto is one of those books I wish I could write – or it was when I read it. I adored Truth & Beauty a couple of years later, but I liked The Patron Saint of Liars far less. Ann Patchett herself, though, was a wonderfully sweet person when I met her. I was the very last person in line at her very last stop on the Run tour, and she was kind enough to humor my dad and me for several minutes.

9. Elfriede Jelinek: There’s only one way to say this: bitch scares me. How she won the Nobel I will never understand. Bitch is crazy. Read her work and you’ll never want to have sex again. EVER. The Piano Teacher I was able to struggle through because I found it fascinating: the subject was sincerely fascinating while her style was fascinating in that horrible bloodbath of a train-wreck kind of way. It will certainly stay with me for a long time, though.

10. Toni Morrison: For weaving impossibly beautiful and intricate stories like Jazz and Song of Solomon.

11. Cynthia Ozick: If you’ve read The Shawl and The Puttermesser Papers, it’s self-explanatory.

12. Alan Moore: He’s responsible for the first graphic novel I read as an adult… the first I read actually expecting a sophisticated story.

13. The Luna Brothers: While I’m on the subject, I should probably throw in the guys who got me into graphic novels in the first place. Not only do they write some amazing stuff, but they are my go-to people to discuss other comic books. Jonathan always buys graphic novels that I insist that he read – although he never gets around to reading them – while from time to time Josh will borrow a book I recommend and read it before I even leave the house.

14. J.K. Rowling: I actually have not read any of the Harry Potter books (I want to someday), but she was my first real understanding of how freaking successful a person can be just by using their imagination.

15. William Faulkner: I took a class on Faulkner in college and even learned to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha” like it was my middle name. The professor made me crazy, but that didn’t ruin Faulkner for me. While As I Lay Dying still may be my favorite, in reality nothing beats Absalom! Absalom!

16. John Irving: As soon as he offers a class on “How to Be Quirky on Paper,” I’m there. The World According to Garp made me love him.

17. Michael Chabon: I haven’t even read much by Chabon, but not because he’s not amazing. It’s actually really, extremely depressing for me to pick up one of his books. He is SO GOOD it just depresses the hell out of me. He’s so good it’s physically painful. Damn you, Chabon.

18. Stephen King: His imagination, mostly. As far as the books go, I’ve only read It, which was painfully long, and Carrie, which was just painful. I admire his… work ethic? I mean, it has to take a lot to crank out as much as he does, right? And he spawned the author of one of my current favorite graphic novels, so there you go.

19. Anais Nin: I know, people don’t like her… I’m not one of those people. I could read those stupid diaries forever.

20. F. Scott Fitzgerald: He wrote The Great Gatsby, not to mention This Side of Paradise. Need I say more?

21. The Marquis de Sade: The mere fact that his work still exists is influential enough. I could never seriously recommend it in good conscience for reasons not unlike the reasons I wouldn’t recommend Elfriede Jelinek, but he’s there and he’s… unforgettable.

22. Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves is the scariest book I’ve ever read. Period.

23. Stephanie Meyer: While I am not a fan of her style, she is influential for reasons similar to #14, as well as her impeccable plotting and pacing – at which I suck.

24. Sylvia Plath: The Dangers of Taking Oneself a Mite Too Seriously.

25. Virginia Woolf: Oh, Mrs. Dalloway, always throwing parties to cover up the silence! Or something.

I’m sure I butchered that.

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I won’t tag 25 people because I’m sure 25 people don’t even know that I’m blogging again, but if the spirit possesses you, I’d like to see others’ 25 most influential authors, as well.

This means you, Luna.