wrapped up in books

[ursamajor]

there are six red roses sitting on my counter and leftovers from a yummy dinner last night sitting in my fridge. (stars of said dinner included cornmeal-fried oysters with apple-bacon salsa and a goat cheese fondue; littleneck clams with mixed greens, bacon, and parm; an awesome salad with pecans and dried cherries; beef tenderloin in an orange bearnaise sauce; "duck duck goose," a dish that had duck confit, seared duck foie gras, and goose breast. desserts were a chocolate-banana bread pudding and this amazing clementine-basil sorbet that i've determined i *must* duplicate. coincidentally, i have a box of clemmies and several of my friends have ice-cream-makers. hee. :D )

six months. love you. :*

*

so when hyounpark and i wander into bookstores (which generally means that all bets are off re any other plans we might have had for the evening), he'll head off to wander around, and unless i'm looking for something specific, my parting words to him are: "scifi/fantasy, if not that YA, if not that cookbooks, if not that periodicals."

i'm feeling a bit predictable. ;)

so, dear friends, what is the most awesome book you've read this year? what's the best book you've read that would fall into one of the above categories, and then what's the best book you've read that breaks free from them?

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Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.

- Mark Strand, The Coming of Light

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okay, so there are actually quite a few movies that i need to see before they leave theatres. these include rent, narnia, brokeback mountain, and memoirs of a geisha (which i have two passes for). (people have warned me to stay far, far away from aeon flux, which is sad because that was one of the shows we were always sneaking out to the common room in high school to see.)

so, locals - possibly thinking about seeing one or two of these on christmas day. anyone interested?

edit: also.

*

6/29/23: oh, late 2002 self. I wish you could see just a *little* further down the road. if not to here, at least to fall 2003, but. my heart aches for all that you're going through, but it's what leads you to here, and things do get better. different, yes, but better.

Comments

[bitty.livejournal.com]

so when [info] hyounpark and i wander into bookstores


see, there's a recipe for trouble right there.

[ursamajor]

well, true. ;)

[rhianona.livejournal.com]

So it didn't come out this year, but the most awesome book I read was The Gunslinger by Stephen King.

Of this year, prolly The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I am still waiting for the library to get me The Historian. I did enjoy Lauren Bacall's updated bio, mostly because I'm in love with classic movies and she was married to one of my favorite movie stars of all time - Bogie.

YA: Trickster's Queen by Tamara Pierce
Cooking: Brunch from Five Points Restaurant (If any of you come to NY, go here, b/c the drinks are out of this world. The food is good as well.)
Romance (b/c well, that's what I read a lot of): hard decision. I didn't love anything that came out this year - enjoyed yes, but loved? Maybe Tiger Eye by Marjorie Liu.
Scifi/Fantasy: Well, the latest LKH - Stroke of Midnight. Also, again, this wasn't a new release, but The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

[asciident]

My answer to book questions is always the Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva. It's not everyone's cuppa, but I really liked them. A sort of blend of espionage/thriller/art. But not like Dan Brown. :P

I mostly read about history, which I'm sure 95% of the world would find dreadfully dull.

[hyounpark.livejournal.com]

No worries. I mostly read about sociological/anthro theory and baseball statistics. If you draw a Venn diagram of those interests, the intersection is... me. And nobody else.

Boringly,
Hyoun

[jennifer.livejournal.com]

Best book I've read this year really falls into neither of those categories - The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Nifenegger (I can never get her last name spelled correctly, so forgive me if that's wrong).

One I read recently that's more in the mystery realm and really enjoyed was The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King. It's kind of an alternate-universe Sherlock Holmes story, where the premise is basically, "OK. What if Holmes took on an apprentice years after his retirement? Let's say that apprentice is a 15-year-old female."

No romance or anything, which is a very good thing, but really thought the book was a nifty way to turn Holmes on his head. ;)

[jennifer.livejournal.com]

And just to clarify, when I say "doesn't really fall into either category", I mean, its premise is somewhere in the realm of sci-fi but equally in the realm of romance.

[noghri.livejournal.com]

Seen Rent, Seen Narnia.

Christmas day is already planned to see the Producers.

From what I've heard, Memoirs of a Geisha is awful.

[cretak.livejournal.com]

best book i read this year was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. you may have heard of it.

[snark2]

If you're looking for something different and don't mind non-fiction work, The Code Book by Simon Singh (I think that's the right name) is a great read on the history of codes throughout time.

[mister-skip.livejournal.com]

Saw rent and was rather dissapointed. It had it's moments, but I thought the direction of the film was crappy. Music was great, though.

I'd call it a rental and go see something else.

[xphile101.livejournal.com]

The best book I've read in a long, long time was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hasseini.

[mjw.livejournal.com]

I thought RENT was pretty good; I never saw the show, so I don't have either the original-cast-squee response or the adaptation-yuck response, for what that's worth.

I never like committing to a "best", but really good books I've read this year include JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL (Susannah Clarke), BLOODCHILD (Octavia E. Butler, short stories), archy & mehitabel (Don Marquis, poems), LOOKING FOR JAKE (China Mieville, short stories), METAMAGICAL THEMAS (Doug Hofstadter, cognitive science), IDENTITY CRISIS (Brad Meltzer, comics) and THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (Mikhail Bulgakov). In order, I guess they're pseudohistorical fantasy (Tad Williams meets Jane Austen), political science fiction, magic realism (the poems are written by a cockroach, who can't type in upper case because he can't hold down the shift key; in one of them, he talks to a mummy), horrific fantasy or fantastic horror, nonfiction interlarded with silly fictional thought-experiments, superheroic deconstructionism, and revisionist Biblical fantasy with witches and cats and vampires. Have I ever mentioned I'm not a great fan of genres?


mjw