K. dared me to read this, and I took her up on the dare and... well, I expected something horrific and I wasn't disappointed.
All right, here's what happens... there's this dude, and he's looking for this girl that he sees in his dreams singing some song, and he finds her, and then they get married and have really awful-sounding sex, and then suddenly they're fighting mystery creatures in another dimension, and it sounds like it would be good, but trust me, it isn't. All the characters seem to be the kind of people that in Olden Days would have been restrained from breeding by an interfering government, considering the odd and random way they speak to one another. Also, there's poetry and a pirate ghost and an evil gay guy (I don't even know why I remember this part, except that maybe I was thinking "What could make this romance worse? An evil gay guy? Oh, there he is!") Yeah. "Wizard's Daughter."
Cassie Edwards the plagiarist "Indian" romance writer might still be worse, though. Time for a re-read of "Savage Moon!"
Tuesday 22 April 2008
"The Ides of March," Thornton Wilder
It's been a while - paper writing takes a toll on one's reading abilities. I am not about to regale whoever's looking at this this with tales of psychoanalytic theory...
So, Ides of March. I've been wanting to read this book ever since watching almost all of the "Rome" series last year, yet it was hard to find as it was out of print. Then one day I stop into a closing-down bookstore and what's there but a paperback copy? I'm quite proud of finding it, all the other books were about ancient Egyptian ships or old copies of Debrett's Peerage. I almost missed out!
Anyway, it's an epistolary novel - for the most part, the reader gets to know the characters through letters they send to each other. Wilder carries this off for the most part - it's all good gossipy fun between Caesar, Cleopatra, Catullus, and some lesser known folks like Pompeia (Caesar's wife) and Clodia (the crazy noblewoman), all of whom existed but whose timelines are rearranged to make the story flow. Some of the "what is the meaning of life" pondering from Caesar gets a bit old, but overall this is a solid historical novel and if by luck you find a copy rotting away somewhere, pick it up.
So, Ides of March. I've been wanting to read this book ever since watching almost all of the "Rome" series last year, yet it was hard to find as it was out of print. Then one day I stop into a closing-down bookstore and what's there but a paperback copy? I'm quite proud of finding it, all the other books were about ancient Egyptian ships or old copies of Debrett's Peerage. I almost missed out!
Anyway, it's an epistolary novel - for the most part, the reader gets to know the characters through letters they send to each other. Wilder carries this off for the most part - it's all good gossipy fun between Caesar, Cleopatra, Catullus, and some lesser known folks like Pompeia (Caesar's wife) and Clodia (the crazy noblewoman), all of whom existed but whose timelines are rearranged to make the story flow. Some of the "what is the meaning of life" pondering from Caesar gets a bit old, but overall this is a solid historical novel and if by luck you find a copy rotting away somewhere, pick it up.
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