Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Currently reading . . .
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!) Interesting vampire foo. Eli is 12. She’s been 12 for two hundred years, but she’s not one of those old-and-jaded child vamps, adults in a bag of kid-bones. She’s really just a kid. Who needs blood to live. And she’s a he.
Hmm, is that a spoiler? I doubt they kept that little detail for the American version of the movie. The Swedish version, Let The Right One In, was quite good, and can be streamed on NetFlix.
Lamentation by Ken Scholes. Far flung future where the one library storing what’s left of human knowledge has just gone up in smoke, along with the city around it. The characters are more archetypes than flesh-and-blood creations, but well drawn nevertheless. Scholes relies heavily on the device of one character somehow intuiting another’s inner thoughts via a facial expression or careless (or careful) gesture. And yet I’m still captivated by it all.
Dexter is Delicious by Jeff LIndsay. Oh, how very different Dexter is in the books than in the TV show! Rita’s alive, Dexter’s brother is alive, Deb knows of Dex’s dark desires, and Rita’s kids are budding Dexters. The one thing in common with the show: there’s a baby! Fun so far but it hasn’t hooked me yet. Like Let Me In, Dexter is Delicious pads a bit too much for my taste. Leave out what your readers skip, dontcha know.
SO what are you reading?
D.
The iPad (aka “The Vampire”) has sucked out my brain. I can’t read books. The Vampire keeps me occupied. Funny you mention Dexter. I had only seen a few episodes until I got the iPad, and now I am using it to watch all the episodes back to back starting from season one. When not watching Dexter, I am talking to my new BF in India who works for Norton and who is desperately trying to reanimate my husband’s virus infected computer. The virus is called AntiSpy Safeguard and it is very, very bad.
*sigh* I’m reading Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010. It’s badly-done magical realism, I think. I haven’t decided yet.
OTOH, I’m going to Smash Putt! this weekend, which promises to be a hoot; I’ll be taking The Boy to their family matinee, so it won’t be as much of a hoot as it would if the bar was open, but still… Survival Research Labs meets mini golf – what could go wrong?
Lucie, nothing compares to a good book. Can you use your iPad as an ebook reader?
ps: omg that looks more like steampunk to me . . . and now I have to see if there are any Smash Putt videos on YouTube.
The iPad has a good reader, iBook, and there is a Kindle app as well as many other reading apps. I don’t like to read books on it. I can’t fight the urge to check email, surf, read news sites and blogs, Facebook, Netflix, iTunes, play games. There are thousands of apps to explore. It’s pretty awesome. At some point the novelty of letting the iPad entertain will wear off. If not, I guess I’ll have to go to iPad addiction rehab. Surely there’s an app for that. I have a ton of great books just waiting on my bedside table.
I am so with the times, I am reading George RR Martin’s (I think he fancies himself a pirate with that RRRR bit) massive set. It has only taken me something like 6 months to read the first volume, the title of which escapes me, but the cover of which is orangey gold, and I am about | | this far into the second one, which is blue.
I’m reading Meljean Brook’s The Iron Duke, which has gotten pretty good reviews. Am a steampunk novice, and it seems kinda cool.
I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which certainly lives up to its name. It only took me 4 months, but that’s partly because I could only read 300 or so pages at a stretch (the whole series is about 2700 densely written pages) before I needed to take a break and read something lighter. In between, I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties (book 2 of the Uglies YA trilogy), a couple of Robin Hobb novels, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which was excellent.