Monday, March 19, 2007

Couple of Quick Points

As I indicated below, blogging will be light this next week to ten days *but* I don't want to leave you without sharing the following tidbits of information:

  1. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle was just as good as I remembered it being. When Persephone Books launches the book in April, I promise you that you'll want to order it as soon as possible. Right now, I've paid my ticket and hope to be in New York for the special tea. Do let me know if you'll be there!
  2. Carl hasn't yet posted his fantasy challenge, but as someone who has read fantasy for years, I just wanted to point to one or two really good titles. If you love Trollope, you owe it to yourself to read Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw. I believe it won a World Fantasy Award in its year of publication and it is something of a take-off on Framley Parsonage. I loved it, was charmed by it, and heartily recommend it.
  3. Anything by Robin McKinley is good, but if you haven't read Beauty, it too is charming and amazingly well done. Deerskin is a much rougher story in terms of content, but it demonstrates that fantasy can be used for difficult subjects.
  4. I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC series called A Most Mysterious Murder. Julian Fellowes, the award-winning screenwriter of Gosford Park, narrates the five episodes which dramatize five unsolved murders between 1876 and 1941. One of you must watch it so we can talk about whether the show got the various murderers' identities right....Engrossing television on DVD!
  5. JenClair did such an outstanding job in reviewing Winterson's Weight in the Canongate Myth Series that I was intrigued and got that title along with Lion's Honey. The latter by the way is not a fictional re-telling as I had thought; it's a commentary on the story of Samson.
  6. It's five hours on the flight out to Arizona so I shall have to read *something* while I'm en route. Haven't figured out what it will be as yet; my whole sense of calm and well-being is disrupted at just the thought of five hours on a plane (with two hours for security at the crack of dawn). Really, whose idea was this?
I'll have to come back at some point and stick in all the appropriate links.