Aug 1 2006

Ugly Cover Art: Part 872

I'm currently halfway through Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, and I'm really enjoying it. The books are total Wordcandy, and Stroud is a talented writer with a gift for making up some truly ...

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Jul 31 2006

Wordcandy loves the mass-market paperbacks

I realize that for many people, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was a daunting proposition. After all, the book was A) approximately one million pages long, B) close to thirty dollars, and C) awf...

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Jul 31 2006

Scandal in Spring, by Lisa Kleypas

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Scandal in Spring isn’t Lisa Kleypas’s Best Book Ever, but (like everything she writes) it’s highly entertaining. It has more humor than I’ve seen in her earlier novels, the romance is enjoyable, and it’s a satisfying conclusion to the "Wallflowers" quartet...

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Jul 30 2006

Hollywood brings the creepy

While Ruth Rendell's books consistently give me the heebie-jeebies, P.D. James has also been known to scale pretty high on the give-Julia-the-creeps-o-meter, and her novel The Children of Men has ...

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Jul 28 2006

Further proof...

...that the Warner Bros. people don't monitor their young stars' lives too closely: Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe is set to star in a West End play that will require him to appear in the nu...

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Jul 27 2006

OH MY GOD~!!!

Okay... so I have been missing in action for a few weeks. Sorry guys, this move to D.C. has become so much more time-consuming then I thought. But I was checking my e-mail this morning and on on...

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Jul 26 2006

Meg, Meg, Meg...

So, I picked up Meg Cabot's new book How To Be Popular yesterday. It was fun, as all of Cabot's books are, and it had a great cover (the picture doesn't do it justice--the book jacket is actually ...

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Jul 25 2006

Wordcandy odds and ends

Juicy tidbits regarding Wordcandy-approved books are drifting in left and right…1. The Eragon movieFrankly, I'm not a huge fan of this series. It was okay, but I don't think that it would have be...

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Jul 24 2006

Love!

I WANT one. And you know what the best thing is about this awesome bag? It was made out of a copy of Sense and Sensibility, my least favorite Austen novel, so I don't even need to feel guilty ab...

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Jul 21 2006

Comic-Con

Comic-Con 2006 is underway. Have fun in San Diego, you lucky little devils! Let me know if Snakes on a Plane is as crappy as I hear it is (truly bad, not Plan 9-style enjoyably bad), and if the ...

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Jul 20 2006

You know what I miss?

The Classics Illustrated series from the early nineties. Remember those? I mean, I had some Classics Illustrated rip-offs (including a particularly terrible Pride and Prejudice comic, where all ...

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Jul 19 2006

English As She Is Spoke

I was having a lovely time last night, amusing myself by reading the excellent blog Manolo For the Men (not that I am a man, or am particularly interested in men's fashion, but, hey, it's a good b...

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Jul 18 2006

Uh... okay.

So, apparently there's a new adaptation of the perennial book-to-screen favorite Les Liaisons Dangereuses. This version is called Bulldog in the White House, it's set in an all-gay Bush White Hou...

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Jul 17 2006

Linda Medley

Linda Medley is a Portland-based comic book writer and illustrator, and the author of the excellent Castle Waiting series, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews. Castle Waiting has b...

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Jul 17 2006

Castle Waiting, by Linda Medley

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As I’ve said before, I like stories about people working. I find reading about somebody else’s labor to be deeply satisfying. I’m also a big fan of fairytales, particularly the ones that reward their characters for doing obscure tasks. (I love that one about the girl whose evil stepmother makes her hunt for fruit in the middle of winter, wearing a paper dress.) That’s why the new hardcover version of Linda Medley’s collected Castle Waiting stories had me nearly giddy with excitement...

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Jul 17 2006

Wordcandy Weekly Book Snippet

Excerpt from: The World of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse Why you should buy a copy of your very own:Because no one on God's green earth does this sort of humor like Wodehouse. And these paragraphs are...

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Jul 16 2006

Bone news

Tons of excellent Bone tidbits coming our way...1. You can play a demo version of the Bone computer game here. Don't the little CGI characters look great?2. Jeff Smith will be available for sig...

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Jul 14 2006

Clearly, Christmas has come early this year.

I'm a big fan of Korean entertainment. Their televised dramas are so awesome, even if their sexual politics frequently seem a little strange to my American eyes. Over the past few months, I've p...

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Jul 13 2006

Behold!

Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting finally--finally!!!--gets the cover art it so richly deserves! Okay, it's not perfect. I'm not crazy about the wonky "w", and I'm really not crazy about the "Ne...

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Jul 12 2006

'Sinfest': fresh out of the box

Tatsuya Ishida's awesome (but not always family-friendly--consider yourself warned, impressionable young readers!) webcomic now has a brand-new home. Ishida's update record in 2006 has been more t...

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Jul 11 2006

AHHHHH!!!!!!

And speaking of Harry Potter, has anybody seen these dolls? (More importantly, has anybody been murdered by one of these dolls?) Because, seriously, they scare the crap out of me:Hey, you may mo...

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Jul 10 2006

Aneva Stout

Aneva Stout is the author of the highly original book The List: A Love Story in 781 Chapters, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews. Subject-wise, Ms. Stout’s story is B-grade Bridge...

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Jul 10 2006

The List: A Love Story in 781 Chapters, by Aneva Stout

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Gimmick books—miniature books, books that come with soundtracks, books cut into weird shapes—usually leave me cold. But I really enjoyed Aneva Stout’s The List: a Love Story in 781 Chapters. Sur...

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Jul 10 2006

Mark your calendars...

...because we're just about two weeks away from Lumos 2006: A Harry Potter Symposium! According to the schedule, there will be classes on a variety of topics, from the more high-minded ("Parameter...

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Jul 8 2006

Bleagh.

Okay. At first, I was pretty excited about the upcoming film version of Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust. He wasn't going to direct it (good), it's one of my favorite Gaiman novels (good), and it wa...

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Jul 8 2006

'Alice in Wonderland' Couture

I never realized how many of the, er, lesser filaments of the couture world had been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Check out these little treasures from the Disney Couture (no, I'm not joking--...

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Jul 7 2006

Wordcandy Weekly Book Snippet

Excerpt from: The Thin Man, by Dashiell HammetWhy you should buy a copy of your very own:Because the dialogue, the mystery, and the characters are all awesome--sure, there's all that drinking (the...

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Jul 6 2006

William Morris

While William Morris is usually remembered as one of the founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement (and, to a lesser extent, as one of the first Socialists in England), he also wrote some g...

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Jul 6 2006

Sexton Blake

Sexton Blake is actually a character, not an author, and first appeared in 1893 in the boys’ magazine The Halfpenny Marvel. He was the creation of a man named Harry Blythe, who eventually sold th...

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Jul 6 2006

Jane Gaskell

There's an old Bloom County strip featuring a handful of characters watching TV and wondering what they’re watching—it’s either an entertaining shoot-‘em-up movie or a horrifying news segment. It...

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