![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
Books #96-99
*Yep, for anyone who is paying attention I have skipped #95 - that's HP6 and I think it needs an entry to itself.
*I'm feeling a bit better now - physio this morning which at least stopped the back hurting for a couple of hours and an hour's shopping may have given me an idea of how to make a suitable crystal for play #1. Will reply to people's comments Monday, I hope - it was going to be today and then the electrician came.
‘Merry Marches on’ by Clare Mallory. This is the third and final in a series of NZ school stories. I’ve owned the first for years and been very fond of it, and then this year Girl’s Gone By Publishers have brought out reprints of all three so I bough 2 and 3. I read and wrote about number 2 earlier this year. Both don’t quite live up to ‘Merry Begins’, but are still excellent examples of school stories. It’s rather nice having one not set in England too. The characters are well drawn and most contain quite reasonable shades of white and black. I love the details of school life (which should be pretty accurate as in real life the author was the head of a girls’ school). Clare Mallory wasn’t a writer by profession and I don’t know that she originally expected the series to keep going to I forgive her the oopses she has made – mostly by contradicting details she had told us earlier. They are matters of school organisation, not character traits so they don’t make me wince anyway.
‘Men at Arms’ by Evelyn Waugh. I still prefer ‘Brideshead Revisited’, but that largely for sentimental reasons. I can’t actually say if it is, as claimed, *THE* book about WWII but it didn’t strike me that way. Admittedly, it’s always been WWI and Australia’s role that I have focussed on before this. Still it is good – likeable characters, the fascination of the odd (to me) British way of selecting officers, an easy to read style and not too much gloom. I’ll think about reading the sequels.
‘The Amber Spyglass’ by Philip Pullman. My main response to having read this was YAY! I’ve finished the darned trilogy, no more guilt! You see, I was reading the Dark Materials trilogy because a friend recommended them, and they weren’t much to my taste. It took me months and months to force myself to read the second one after having finished the first. I really couldn’t stand Lyra (a true Mary-Sue, in my opinion) and the whole ‘Ooh lookey – a world just like our own but strangely different!’. Fantasy in many ways really isn’t my cup of tea. Universally beloved heroines (despite their patent objectionableness) aren’t my style either. Things looked up in the second book with the introduction of Will. This book had its moments but the sloppy romance, the wheeled animals and their universal wonderfulness and the whole religion-bashing thing all counted against it for me. I’m puzzled as to why poor Harry Potter cops so much hysteria when I thought that this was far more objectionable from a Christian point of view (but then as a Christian I just don’t see the problem with HP.)
‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway. Another book that is supposedly the only WWII (actually I think they may have claimed war) book you’ll ever need to read. Well, I enjoyed ‘Men at Arms’ more but enjoyed this for the glimpse of the war from an unusual side – to that extent it was similar to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. On the other hand I found the girlfriend as annoying a as a handful of ground glass and as believable as Paris Hilton. Could mostly have done without the hero too, come to that.
*I'm feeling a bit better now - physio this morning which at least stopped the back hurting for a couple of hours and an hour's shopping may have given me an idea of how to make a suitable crystal for play #1. Will reply to people's comments Monday, I hope - it was going to be today and then the electrician came.
‘Merry Marches on’ by Clare Mallory. This is the third and final in a series of NZ school stories. I’ve owned the first for years and been very fond of it, and then this year Girl’s Gone By Publishers have brought out reprints of all three so I bough 2 and 3. I read and wrote about number 2 earlier this year. Both don’t quite live up to ‘Merry Begins’, but are still excellent examples of school stories. It’s rather nice having one not set in England too. The characters are well drawn and most contain quite reasonable shades of white and black. I love the details of school life (which should be pretty accurate as in real life the author was the head of a girls’ school). Clare Mallory wasn’t a writer by profession and I don’t know that she originally expected the series to keep going to I forgive her the oopses she has made – mostly by contradicting details she had told us earlier. They are matters of school organisation, not character traits so they don’t make me wince anyway.
‘Men at Arms’ by Evelyn Waugh. I still prefer ‘Brideshead Revisited’, but that largely for sentimental reasons. I can’t actually say if it is, as claimed, *THE* book about WWII but it didn’t strike me that way. Admittedly, it’s always been WWI and Australia’s role that I have focussed on before this. Still it is good – likeable characters, the fascination of the odd (to me) British way of selecting officers, an easy to read style and not too much gloom. I’ll think about reading the sequels.
‘The Amber Spyglass’ by Philip Pullman. My main response to having read this was YAY! I’ve finished the darned trilogy, no more guilt! You see, I was reading the Dark Materials trilogy because a friend recommended them, and they weren’t much to my taste. It took me months and months to force myself to read the second one after having finished the first. I really couldn’t stand Lyra (a true Mary-Sue, in my opinion) and the whole ‘Ooh lookey – a world just like our own but strangely different!’. Fantasy in many ways really isn’t my cup of tea. Universally beloved heroines (despite their patent objectionableness) aren’t my style either. Things looked up in the second book with the introduction of Will. This book had its moments but the sloppy romance, the wheeled animals and their universal wonderfulness and the whole religion-bashing thing all counted against it for me. I’m puzzled as to why poor Harry Potter cops so much hysteria when I thought that this was far more objectionable from a Christian point of view (but then as a Christian I just don’t see the problem with HP.)
‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway. Another book that is supposedly the only WWII (actually I think they may have claimed war) book you’ll ever need to read. Well, I enjoyed ‘Men at Arms’ more but enjoyed this for the glimpse of the war from an unusual side – to that extent it was similar to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. On the other hand I found the girlfriend as annoying a as a handful of ground glass and as believable as Paris Hilton. Could mostly have done without the hero too, come to that.
Comments