my 2024 in books

In 2023 I read 198 books. In 2024 I read 123 books. So about 60% of the previous total. But still more than I read from 2020-2022 combined.

I feel like there were probably less "really good" books this year. Partially because there were just generally more last year, partially because I think I probably took a few more chances this year, partly because I think I'd had a lot of potentially good book on my radar for a few years, and went through a lot of that list in 2023.

So, once again, because I can, and with the assistance of Goodreads... the images that go along with this post are all the books I read in 2024... in reverse chronological order.

Did I also pull data from Goodreads and make my own spreadsheet again like last year. You bet your sweet ass I did.

The majority of my books were from the library once again, clocking in at 112 titles (91%). The split this year was also a little more in favour of books over graphic novels, (55% to 45% respectively).

And the ratio of queer books stayed about the same, with just under a quarter of everything having queer theming.

But, as I mentioned, my average rating was a little lower, topping out just under 3 out of 5. Which makes sense to me. And once again most of my ratings where either "Liked it" or "Really liked it", so the math checks out.

I did abandon about the same number of books as last year with a total of 8, which means, percentage-wise there were more (even if they don't show up as part of the overall numbers). And yes, there were a few "Hate Completes"... actually most of the 16 books (13%) that I rated 1 out of 5 come under that category. A few of those were fine in the reading, but just left a bad taste in my mouth by the end.

Both non-fiction and manga were still minor entries again this year (6% and 7% respectively).

The overall average page count was also up, to around 260 pages, which may just be because of the number of graphic novels last year vs this year. I still tried to stick to my "below 400 pages" vibe. Honestly, "below 350" is actually more where I like to stay. But a lot of the books that did go over turn out to be graphic novels.

As far as theming goes, I stuck pretty closely to the Urban Fantasy vibes of last year. Beyond that and some of the instances of working my way through a graphic novel series, there was a lot of stand alone stuff this year. And quite a bit of detective fiction of one form or another.

August and December had the highest title counts, mostly due to revisiting Scott Pilgrim in December and some other graphic novels in August.

Which brings us to the best stuff I read in 2024. Starting, as usual, with the honorable mentions. Most of which come from the 4 stars reviews...

The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic and Monster of the Week by F.T. Lukens, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (I need to get back to the series), Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Wranglestone by Darren Charlton (ignore the sequel, it's complete trash), The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (which I said I would be recommending to people and them promptly completely forgot about) and Different for Boys by Patrick Ness.

Then, once again, in mostly chronological order... my Top Reads in 2024...

Horrorstör
Grady Hendrix

Horrorstor is a book that is at least 50% successful at what it's doing BECAUSE of how it looks and how it's laid out. It's an IKEA catalogue. This is a surprise to nobody, because the book is set in a store that is Definitely Legally Distinct From IKEA by being a store that, in the universe of the book, is basically an IKEA clone.

I need to revisit Hendrix. I do love the overall experiment here, where graphic design is doing as much work as the prose.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone & Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
Benjamin Stevenson

I don't even want to talk about why it's good... I just want you, the person who might be looking at Goodreads reviews before choosing to read a book to go and read it. Because it's excellent.

Stevenson absolutely sticks the landing, in fact he sticks the entire "second book". Even if this one is much more meta just due to the nature of the story. And this one is a writer writing about a writer writing about other writers and writing. And manages to not become so "inside baseball" that it loses the reader.

If I was a person who picked a single book as the Best Thing I Read This Year, then these two books would be that single book. Of the two, the first one is stronger overall, but I'm very excited that the first books I'm reading in 2025 is the third book in this series.

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road
Kyle Buchanan

How the hell this movie actually got made, let alone made into such an amazing piece of cinema is a story that it if itself was a movie, people would go "well, that's a bit far fetched, isn't it?".

Yep, non-fiction on my Books of the Year list. Who saw that coming? Mostly I kept this on the list because the overall story is so fucking strange and I appreciate the fact that this book exists and has documented the literal fever dream that was the process of making this movie.

Thornhedge
T. Kingfisher

What if Sleeping Beauty was the villain? And what if the wicked fairy was the hero?

Short, simple, to the point. It does what it says on the tin.

The Wild Robot
Peter Brown

The book is about a lot of things. On the surface it's about a robot trapped on an island with no idea of where she should be who befriends the inhabitants. It's about kindness being a survival skill (to paraphrase the director of the movie). It's about found family and adopted families.

Yes, this is a direct result of the movie. I love them both in very different ways though. And I'm just in love with Brown's writing. There is a style there that goes beyond the intended audience that just works for me. And yes, this is a book written for "middle-grade" children (11-13), I absolutely do not care. This also might have taken the top spot this year if I had to choose just one. I also read the sequel, The Wild Robot Escapes, and that books solves the "it just stops" problem that this book has. I think this is a stronger book though. But you could count the two books as a single entry for the purposes of this list.

my 2023 in books

At the end of January, I wrote the immortal line in my weekly roundup...

...libraries are very much going to define my 2023...

And that was because I'd read 9 books in a month. I had no fucking idea how accurate that was going to become.

So... because I can... here is the parade of everything I read in 2023, presented in reverse chronological order (mostly, Goodreads occasionally gets confused when you finish more than one thing on the same day).

At the end of 2023, I'd officially read 198 books. Which is more books than I read in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined. I'll be honest, it might be the most books I've read in a year since I was a teenager.

Even when I did a montage for the first hundred and then second hundred books I read when I first started adding them to the blog sidebar back in 2006, those still took about 18 months.

But this giant up-tick in books is entirely thanks to the aforementioned Libraries SA and their One Card system where you can borrow books from any library in the state and have them sent to your local library to pick up. In fact, of those 198 books, 177 (89%) were from the library.

Also, yes, beyond just logging them all into my Goodreads through the year (and reading 825% of the 24 books I said I was going to read during the year as part of their yearly Reading Challenge), I also might have made a spreadsheet for some end of the year math. Shush.

Digging into the numbers a little more... just over half of them (52%) were books and just under half (48%) were graphic novels. I also stepped my queer reading up, because a quarter of everything I read this year had gay themes.

My average rating for everything I read was 3.3 out of 5. According to Goodread's star ratings, that puts it somewhere between "Liked it" and "Really Liked It". And that sounds about right given that about 60% of the books I read were one of those two ratings.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. I "Hate Completed" a few titles, pushing myself to finish things that I mostly wasn't enjoying. But I only abandoned 9 books, for a myriad of reasons, mostly because I just wasn't feeling whatever it was or it wasn't grabbing my attention... but sometimes because it was just abjectly terrible. Throughout the year I developed a "100 page" cut off. If I wasn't enjoying the book by 100 pages, I would (and should) just give up on it.

That didn't always work, especially when someone had recommended a book to me, or, like in October, Fluffy and I did a Halloween Book (well, two books by the same author)... and they both sucked.

I discovered (rediscovered? realised?) throughout the year that, for the most part, I love Urban Fantasy, Fantastical Realism or Low Fantasy much more than High Fantasy. Given that I have friends who love to read giant, foot-crushing High Fantasy tomes and every time they talk about them, my eyes glaze over and I'm just not interested. This shouldn't really have been a revelation, thinking back, even to when I was a kid, I'm not sure I ever was. I love High Fantasy movies. Clearly, these days, I love DnD. But I much prefer something more grounded with fantastical elements. Who knew?

That may also have something to do with the fact that my average page count for the books I read was 244 (from a total of 48258 pages read). Honestly, I can't really be bothered with big long books at the moment (with some exceptions)... and it definitely indicates that I read a lot of graphic novels. But, yeah, over the year, I've kind of decided that I prefer books in the 250-300 page range.

I dipped my toes into some Japanese fiction throughout the year, both regular novels that had been translated, but also some manga for the first time. Like, real manga, that you have to read from right to left and from the back.

I went through a cozy mystery phase, specifically a number of ones that were bakery themed. I'll be honest, a lot of them aren't very good. Or that if the book starts out with cozy baking, it will end with somebody being involved in a car chase or being shot at or otherwise one step away from being murdered. I also got sucked into a number of series (both novels and graphic novels) as the year progressed. More on those shortly.

While the majority of stuff that I read was published after 2000, the oldest thing I read all year was from 1884. And was a science fiction/mathematical fiction book that was half social satire, half dimensional geometry. Very strange, and a little dry, but at least I can say that I've read it.

That was one of the fun things about all the reading I did this year, to be honest. If I saw a book that looked interesting, whether that was online, or in the library or because somebody mentioned it to me, I could just borrow it. That included things that have been on my To Read list for several years, things by authors I already liked, or stuff I'd never heard of before. And then, when I was done, whether it was good, bad or indifferent, back to the library it could go.

I also tend to lean towards fiction over non-fiction. Although two of the non-fiction books I read through the year were about working in bookshops. Make of that what you will.

So, taking a leaf out of my yearly movie round up, let's cover some of the best books I read this year...

Before we get there... a brief list of honourable mentions... Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer, Sins of the Black Flamingo by Andrew Wheeler and Travis Moore, Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis, the Locke and Key series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez, and Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty... interestingly, there are several sci-fi titles there.

These following titles are not really in any particular order than mostly chronologically the order I read them... along with except from my Goodread reviews at the time.

Legends and Lattes
Travis Baldree

I don't know that I've fallen in love with a book like this in... a good long while. Or ploughed through something quite so quickly.

This was a very early read, but one that stuck with me through the year. I recommended it to other people, and even thinking back on it now gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Hiro Arikawa

It's beautiful, heartfelt, well written (which, also in this case, means well translated by Philip Gabriel) and just... delightful.

Another early read, and not my first book translated from Japanese, but possible the first one I've read narrated by a cat.

The House in the Cerulean Sea
T.J. Klune

This book is... exceptional. It made me smile, it made me cry, it made me angry (in a good way, at the people who deserved it), and it just made me very, very happy.

I had something of a rollercoaster ride with Klune this year, reading four of his books, and loving three of them. This was the first, and although it has become a little controversial or problematic since, I still love it very much.

They Both Die at the End
Adam Silvera

This book is... sensational. I wasn't sure about it at the start, I wasn't sure I was going to like either of the main characters, but once they meet, the book finds its wings and soars.

This is how you tell a story. And one where Silvera states the end of the book right on the cover, and it still manages to keep you guessing right until the very end.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
T. Kingfisher

Is this exactly the kind of book I would have read when I was in my teens? Oh, definitely that. Is it because it takes place in a universe that has a magic system that I desperately want to explore more of? Hell yeah.

Magical baked good. Gingerbread warriors. Sentient dough. Do I need to say anymore?

The Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern

This book is deep and layered and interwoven and intense. It smells of old books and long closed up spaces... it tastes of honey and lemon and spice.

I adored Morgenstern's previous novel, The Night Circus... I adore this. But differently. And I'm perfectly find with that.

Bloom
Kevin Panetta

Books about people who bake is so my thing right now. And this is a beautiful self contained story with a great art style. Honestly, there's something really lovely about single-colour tonal colouring in graphic novels.

The sole graphic novel on the list. Not because there weren't other good ones (see also the Honorable Mentions list), but this one just did everything right.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built/A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Becky Chambers

Chambers manages to create a world with a full and rich history in less pages than other books use to say nothing at all. It's a world that I would desperately like to visit, if only for a little while.

And while I want both of the Monk and Robot books to be made into one book so that I can press a copy of it into everyone's hand and say "just... read this... then come find me when you're done", I also get why they're two different books. Because they're telling two completely different, yet equally valid stories... or maybe asking two different questions.

There were only a small handful of books this year that went onto the list of "I'd like my own copy of this eventually". These were two of them. They might also need a re-read.

White Trash Warlock/Trailer Park Trickster/Deadbeat Druid
David R. Slayton

What I didn't expect this book to be was possibly the single best version of the Urban Fantasy/Magic aesthetic I've ever read. Because this book is flat out amazing. The world building and mythology/fantasy is top notch, the writing is excellent, the mystery that runs through this book ended in a way that I absolutely did NOT see coming. Plus, gay male, magic using protagonist. Not a thing you find every day.

I picked this up because the title was too good not to... I then fell in love with Slayton's world.

The Murderbot Series
Martha Wells

This is also another one of those books that manages to create a whole world in very few pages. Sure, it doesn't really flesh out many of the characters other than the titular Murderbot, but I also don't think it needs to, given that they are our point of view character.

One of the best sci-fi series I've read. Partially, I think, because it's often less about the sci and more about the people. They're also short and sharply written and I will keep reading them for as long as Wells keeps writing them.

Wolfsong
T.J. Klune

There are a handful of books that I count as being Important To Me. This is very much on that list.

So... this feels like cheating. Because as I said in my review, this book speaks to me in a very, very personal way. Which means that recommending it to other people to read feels... weird. It's like saying "here's a piece of my brain, please read and enjoy". I fully intend to read the rest of that series... but I'm almost afraid to.

art, cars and bookshop saturday shopping

Today has been a very long, very emotionally draining day.

Technically it shouldn't really have been emotionally draining except for the fact that I wasn't feeling 100%, so that took it's toll.

The day started unexpectedly at around 2am when I woke up with the taste of, I'm guessing, bile in my throat and having a little trouble breathing clearly. I have no idea what the hell was going on... but it wasn't pleasant.

And it took a while, and a spoonful of icecream before I could get the horrible taste out of my throat, given that water didn't do a damn thing. Fortunately I did manage to get back to sleep reasonably easily though.

When my alarm finally went off I just felt generally not right. I had a bit of a headache, I was a little nauseous and my brain felt a little like it was operating from a long, long way away.

And it's not like we didn't have a whole bunch of things to do and places to go today... so that was helpful.

Once Ma arrived it started with us getting my recalcitrant car battery started... which fortunately didn't take as long as I feared it might, and then we drove down the road in separate cars so that I could drop my car off at the mechanic for a new battery while we were shopping.

By the time we were finished shopping my car was ready, and actually started when I turned the key, which is always nice.

When we got back to my place, I went through the boxes of my old books that Ma had brought down to see what was headed off in search of new owners. Which turned into a whole saga on it's own...

But before that we packed up the car full of books and the artwork the framing place put the string on the wrong way up plus the extra prints that Ma wanted framed and headed off to the aforementioned framing place.

I picked up the "art doll" I bought a while back from Espionage Gallery which I'd dropped off to be framed when we picked everything else up last time. It actually looked fantastic... there was a little text blurb that came with the piece when I bought it and the guys at the framing place suggested that they could do that as a little gold plaque at the bottom and it worked out really well.

Once I have everything sorted out with my books and bookcases I'm definitely going to need to go through and photograph all my artwork, maybe create a private blog or private Tumblr for them.

I also took over a tiny bit for the two pieces Ma was having framed... the guy was going with something that was "safer" than I thought the prints needed, so I stepped in. If Ma had objected I would have butted out, but she was happy for me to put my two cents in.

And to think that the first time we went in and had a ton of stuff framed the girl said something like "well that's your framing done for the year then"... little did she know.

I wasn't completely sure exactly where I wanted to take all of the books to sell, but there was a bookstore we visited somewhere in Unley last year that I figured would be a good place to start... so we headed there... it was gone, replaced by a beauty shop.

Not a good beginning... but thankfully I had the technology to go looking for other second hand bookstores.

And we found one that wasn't that far away and headed over there... but the woman there was "only looking after the shop for the day" and couldn't buy any books.

At that point we were two for two and I was getting a little annoyed. So I sat in the car looking other bookshops up on my phone and ended up calling them to check that they were a) still there, b) were open and c) could actually buy books...

The first place I tried was a "book exchange" but didn't buy books (sorry, WTF?), the next place only wanted to buy two small boxes/bags worth (I had four boxes and two bags in the boot of the car, so no joy there), the next place didn't buy it only took donations.

By that point I was more than a little frustrated... firstly with the fact I couldn't find anywhere that would take the books but also because it was difficult to even find places online to try. Or at least it was difficult using my iPhone.

Eventually I managed to find a place on South Road, which was basically down the road and around the corner from where we were sitting. And they at least said that they would look at what I had and make an offer.

Hallelujah!

I mean I know the proverbial arse has fallen out of the book market, but seriously, I didn't know it was THAT bad!

Although the place I called did look more than a little dodgy... there really wasn't room to swing a proverbial cat... in fact there wasn't even room to swing a very small book about cats. There didn't even seem to be a counter... it was just a fairly average sized shop crammed from wall to wall with as many bookcases and books as humanly possible.

The older couple who ran the store were quite sweet if a little bit bordering on bibliophilic... and they ended up taking more books than I was expecting, but at the same time they left some stuff that I thought they probably would have taken due to the fact that they already had copies.

By the time we came to talk about cash moneys I wasn't really expecting a lot... to be honest I was just happy to find somewhere that would take the books and give me any amount of cash.

While we'd been going through the books Ma had been wandering around the rest of the shop and had found a couple of books she wanted, so we threw those into the deal, and I still walked away with $40, which was better than a kick in the face.

And because I really couldn't be bothered bringing the books that they didn't want back home, we headed into the city to the Oxfam Shop and dropped them off as donations. The girl looking after the shop was very grateful, and they're now officially out of my hair.

Then we headed down to Arndale to go and see Epic at the movies... now I know that it's school holidays, and a Saturday and an animated movie... but what the hell is with parents not controlling their children at the movies? Or in public generally I guess... but specifically at the movies.

It made me want to stand up at the start of any movie where the audience is largely children and give a presentation on how we behave at the movies. We do not talk during the movie... if we do have to say something, we whisper. We sit in our chairs and don't run around. We do not under any circumstances behave like we're in our lounge room.

But it's not really surprising the children don't know how to behave when the adults seem to be easily confused by the simple combination of a letter and a number denoting their designated seats.

And as much as I dislike the concept of assigned seating (I think it's so that the cinema companies can force people into booking tickets online and therefore they can decrease the number of frontline staff they employ, and reduce their costs... all of which means that the quality of service to the customer is greatly reduced), if you're assigned a fucking seat, you damn well sit in it until the movie starts and they if you really want to, go find another seat.

Because if you sit in a seat you weren't assigned, especially in one of the small cinemas, then the people who were supposed to sit in that seat have to find another seat, which means the people who were supposed to sit there have to find another seat... and so on and so forth.

Anyway... after the movie we headed into the city (again) to pick up the artwork I couldn't bring home on Thursday... and to look at the artworks that had just come in for the show in a couple of weeks, which is one of the perks of being such a good customer. I didn't end up choosing anything other than the one that I "bought" on Thursday without seeing it in the flesh. But it really was gorgeous, and once again it was the only male themed piece in the whole show, so I had to own it.

Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of time to hang around and chat with Josh due to only having a short term carpark, and when we got there there was a random dude chatting with Josh already so we lost some time there.

By the time we got back here it was about 5:30... which, given that we weren't going out anywhere this evening, was a very long day for us. And I really am both physically and emotionally worn out.

Current Mood:

deus ex tintin

When I was a kid I read every single one of the Tintin books (and all of the Asterix stories, but that's another story)...

And when you're a kid, you just think they're whizz bang adventure stories.

I reread some of them in my 20's, and while they'd perhaps lost a little of their luster, they were still enjoyable...

But rereading them again now in my 30's I'm starting to realise exactly how much deus ex machina is going on.

And not just "a seemingly inextricable problem being suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object", since sometimes it seemed like the "machina" was working to both get Tintin into as well as out of the problem in question... sometimes within the same page. Some of the notable examples include:

• Tintin's saved from being shot by a firing squad three times, once by revolution, once by guns jamming and once by invading forces... within the space of two pages
• A lightning bolt blows him out of a window, out of his jacket, out of ropes tying him up and down the road a few hundred metres, but he's still able to get up and run off
• He's dropped out of a plane, still in his seat, the parachute fails and he lands in a big wagon full of hay
  
• Saved from going over a waterfall by a conveniently placed rock and tree branch
• Picks up a burning log to free his tied hands without burning himself
• Discovers conveniently placed tunnel while trapped in a beachside cave that not only saves him from drowning but takes him right into the heart of the bad guy's lair
• Car taking him to State Prison crashes allowing him to fake being unconscious and escape only to get hit by a car carrying the very person he's on his way to see
  

But there's also the fact that Tintin seems to be bullet-proof or invulnerable...

For example, within the three books I've read...

• Tintin involved in car accident: 4
• Tintin hit by car/near miss: 2
• Tintin involved in plane crash: 2
• Tintin rendered unconscious/hit in head: 10
• Tintin shot at: 10
• Tintin has knife thrown at him: 2
• Tintin nearly drowns: 1
• Tintin attacked by a gorilla while wearing a kilt: 1

And after all these things he's shown in hospital... once...

I'd also like to know where he's getting his money... he's supposed to be a reporter, but during none of the books I've read this time around does he appear to go to an office or submit a story or do any kind of actual "reporter" work... he appears to nominally interview one person (or at least is talking to her while holding what looks like a notebook), but the rest of the time he swans off around the globe at a moment's notice.

Isn't he supposed to be around 20 or something? Is he supposed to be independently wealthy or something? Inheritance from dead parents maybe?

Also, why did he never graduate to grown-up pants?

Having said all of that, I'm still enjoying reading them again...

Current Mood:

a hell of a (satur)day

Sweet Jebus, it's been a hell of a day...

To sum up, and in order of occurrence... shopping, books, street art, art gallery, random shopping, rain, specific shopping, food, dance. Essentially we're talking about a ten hour day...

But that was the short answer, and as anybody who has spent any time around this blog knows, I never just go with the short answer...

We started off the day with the usual Supermarket Safari... I was a little narky with myself because I'd gone to all the trouble of actually writing a few things down on a shopping list, things I actually needed... and I forgot the list. Buggeration. And I could only remember about half of the things I'd put on it. Luckily though, when I got home and checked, I actually picked everything up. Result! (I know, small things amuse small whatevers)

When we were finished shopping, we didn't even go back to my place and unpack, we tootled on over to Prospect Town Hall for their seemingly annual booksale. Unlike last time we weren't at complete and total efficiency, so we didn't get there before the doors opened... and when we did arrive it was a little bit chaotic. And I have to say, nowhere near as good as last year. Either that or all the early birds scored all the bookworms (okay, that sounded slightly funnier in my head... yeah, not that much funnier to be honest). I don't think they actually had as many books this time around... once stuff was gone from the tables it wasn't being replaced by new stuff, it was just gone, and giant spaces were appearing... so much so that the volunteers were laying the books flat in some spots. Madness!

Speaking of which, the Book Sale Etiquette was even worse this year, and I really did want to smack some of the people... mostly the ones who were going in the complete opposite direction around the tables to everybody else... closely followed by anybody with any form of trolley or mobile wheelie whatsit. I was much more restrained (from a book grabbing perspective rather than a people smacking one) this year and only ended up with 11 books, partly thanks to the fact that Ma and I did some "grab for each other" things (a couple of the things I originally grabbed went to her pile and vice versa).

Once we waited for the massive exodus line to dissipate, we paid for our purchases, picked up some yummy Apple Cakes and teeny Banana Muffins from the stalls outside, dropped the books in the car and wandered back to Honeysuckle Lane to see what had changed in the street art landscape.

And boy I'm glad we did...

Possibly the BEST Benzo piece of recent times!

We didn't even have to go very far along the lane to find this either... right at the end of the first section, I turned... and there is was...

Allow me to wax slightly poetic for a second and get slightly "wanky art-fag"...

Part of what I love most about Benzo's work, especially a lot of the recent stuff I've been seeing is that there is this amazing development in ideas and style and form... and I can see how the ideas develop, I can see the how, if not the why, of were he's going with ideas... and you know what. I fucking love it! This pencil guy (I kinda want to call him The 2B General) owes his lineage to the Playing Card King... who in turn owes his look to the Waymouth Face... but in the SALA exhibition he replaced the King's sword with a pencil, which obviously lead him eventually to this pencil laden guy. And there's something of his Army Men about it too (the hat mostly)... plus an ongoing obsession with bendy arms.

I just need somebody to explain to me what the hell this "Alaska" tag is all about... it was on the Turtle Master piece, and the piece that was there before that... and I'm sure I've seen it a couple of other times too. And if it's another street artist, then what's the connection with Benzo?

While we're on this particular train of thought... after Ritual Unpacking, we headed off to the gallery to FINALLY pick up our Benzo artworks!

So! Excited!

I want to take a photo of the piece tomorrow, but next to existing things in my apartment, to give it a sense of scale... because I can tell you right now... it's fucking HUGE! I'm sure it didn't seem that massive in the gallery, but then the gallery is a big empty room with empty white walls. Here at my place, well... it seems bigger than I remember.

I do adore it though. It's sitting on my bed at the moment, right across from me, and whenever I stop typing or collect my thoughts for a second, I look over at it. And the more I stare at it, the most I love it.

As I said to Ma at some point today though... I am glad that she got the other piece. While my piece is big and bold and calls attention to itself (hmmm, that sounds kinda filthy out of context, doesn't it), the piece Ma chose is kinda quiet and reflective and a lot more subtle. But equally gorgeous.

I can't believe that the large piece that evolved from the ideas in the one I bought (and was featured on all the promo material for the show)... it didn't sell! And, I'll be honest, if I'd had a spare $1250 laying around, it is absolutely the piece I would have bought. I actually did the justification math in my head a couple of times to see if there was any way I could have gotten away with it. Never could quite manage it. And even if I had, then I would have had to find somewhere to hang it.

I'm not even sure where the hell my little blue German Graph Paper Jamie is going... I have a vague idea, but it's going to take some finagling... so it might just be hanging around at ground level for a while.

After we bid the voiceless Mr Walker goodbye (poor lamb, he could only whisper), we headed back to Honeysuckle Lane (because I remembered to bring my camera this time) so I could snap the shot above (amongst others... although all of the one piece), then we hauled ass down to Arndale for a random wander... nothing much to report on that front... although we did pick up a few bits and bobs and hang around looking at cross-stitch magazines for a little while (I wanted to show Ma the stuff I'd seen the other day). I'm happy to report that none were purchased... because really, that's just taking it to a scary place.

Conventional wisdom says that we really should have headed back to my place at this point... we had two and a half hours of SYTYCD to watch, it was bucketing down with rain and we'd really done all the important stuff... but the cross-stitch bug was a-callin me... and we'd seen some of the Harajuku Lovers perfume I got Ma at Christmas on special, but the shop was in town. So, town it was.

On the way down Port Road, the rain went from "bucketing" to "sheeting" to "Are you fuckin kidding me?". But fortunately before we reached the city it wore itself out and had settled down to a very light sprinkle. Bless you Mother Nature!

While we still couldn't find any of the 666 red (although I'm assured that it's on reorder or automatic restock, or whatever it is that Lincraft does... but it seems weird that three different places are out of the same colour... and it's not even near Christmas), I did buy a giant piece of cross-stitch fabric for the toy soldier squadron (I'm leaning towards two rows of ten).

Then we stopped off to have some late lunch (lunner, dunch... I'm not actually sure there's a word for it like with brunch) before we headed back here for the SYTYCD semi-finals. In a word, awesome. And it's nice that I don't actually know who's going to win... I know who comes second (and based on the particular styles of dance next week I may work it out), but the person that I thought was the winner got voted off a couple of weeks back, so I'm still somewhat in the dark. Which, in this instance, is a very nice place to be (and if anybody tries to spoil that, I will kill them in all kinds of interesting ways). I am pleased that my little choochyfaced Evan made it to the finals though.

Due to the extreme amount of SYTYCD, Ma didn't end up leaving here until just before 6... so, like I said... a hell of a day... long, occasionally intense, exciting and pretty damn good.

Of course there is always a downside and a price to pay for these things... because of the extreme wind and rain earlier in the day (and it sounds like it's blowing a baby gale out there at present, plus the occasional bout of rain), I discovered after Ma left that my hot water heater had quit on me again... but since I allegedly know how to fix it now (hmmm... I was sure I blogged about that... obviously not... but after last time, the plumber did come out and walk me through the process), it should be fine. I haven't actually bothered going out there to relight it yet... it's still pretty windy and rainy, so I'd rather leave it and do it once in the morning than do it now and have to do it again in the morning.

Stoopid weather... stoopid water heater...

Other than that though... awesome...

Current Mood:

the shallow end

The one problem with finding a book you really enjoy reading and that is very hard to put down is that, well, it's very hard to put down and you end up reading it as quickly as you can... and then you get Reader's Remorse because there's no more book...

The Shallow End was one of those books, and I'm not just saying that because it was written by my newly rediscovered friend Ash. I started reading it at midnight last night, was up until about quarter past one when I decided I didn't want to put it down, but I probably should... then I picked it up again when I first woke up and spent about an hour reading in bed (which I haven't done in the mornings for a long while), then after I'd done everything else I needed to do, I picked it back up and finished it.

It's a hard book to classify and to review for a couple of reasons... firstly it's kind of hard to review because I know the author, and I think that coloured some of my feeling towards the novel, and also possibly made me read slightly more into some of it than was there. On the flipside it's hard to classify because it's kind of that I decided to call a "gay-themed oblique mystery"... there's no Poirot or Miss Marple sticking their nose in, and the nameless (and mostly descriptionless if it comes to that) first person narrator doesn't turn amateur sleuth and solve it all between gin & tonics and quips to his Girl Friday. I guess the publisher's tag line kind of sums it up to be honest... "a steady freestyle commentary on sex, celebrity and suntanning"...

But it is written with a really agreeable sense of witt and a fairly dry sense of humour, a lot of which reminded me very much of the Ashley I knew way back when (not surprising really).

It's also the kind of book that you could see yourself reading on holiday somewhere, sitting by the pool (even though that could be a little too close to home given the plot of the book) and having the whole day to do nothing but soak up the sun, indulge in your beverages of choice and read. There's something about it that has that "Vacation Book" feel to it, but at the same time it's not the kind of complete fluff that those books can sometimes be.

Because of the unnamed narrator, it also has a slightly "autobiographical" feel to it, but that could be equal parts because it's a contemporary story about a gay man living in Melbourne written in a conversational style by a contemporary gay man living in Melbourne, and those few details that do ring through as reminding me of Ash are only because I know him. And when I got to the "dirty bits" (which I think were fairly tame in the grand scheme of the universe) I was equally surprised because I know Ash... but I think if it had been any other author I probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.

I will say this for him though... the boy does have a flair for the language (and does love his puns, such as the name of one of the major characters, "Matt Gray")... and I kept finding myself getting lost in both the way the story was written (that conversational, contemporary style), but also in the words he used.

Although again, that downside of knowing the author made me put my "editor" hat on from time to time and want to correct some slightly odd phrasing of things (and at least one instance of "Italics Gone Wild" where the italics fell off the word they were supposed to be on and covered the first letter of the next word, but I can't remember where that was now) , but that's probably more about me than about the writing and I just had to keep telling myself "it's called 'style' and stop nitpicking"...

And you know how there are those words that imitate the sound they're describing (like buzz or bampf or swish... they're called onomatopoeia)... and I discovered my favourite new one... "fwisking", as in the sound sand makes when you brush it off stuff...

"... kind of like being on an archaeological dig, and I was there fwisking sand around with a little toothbrush..."

For some reason it's amongst my favourite sentences in the whole book... but I'm weird...

I would totally recommend the book... it's got stuff about swimming for those of you who like swimming... it's got wit and dry humour (and a few good bitchy one liners) for those of you who are all about that... and it's got the occasional dirty bit (just don't expect porn) for the filthy minded amongst us... but it's well worth a read...

I'd give it a solid 4½ out of 5...

Oh, and for anybody who does read the book, it took me until page 140 to work out who "Mr T" was... I'm a little slow sometimes (that and I didn't instantly connect him with Melbourne)...

Current Mood:

bumper book shopping

Book, book, book, book, book, book, book...

Way back in the dawn of time when I was a wee lad (okay, maybe not THAT wee... but I would still have been in some form of schooling) one of the libraries near our house would have regular book sales (and I count it as a proper "book sale" when fiction books are about 50 cents a piece or less). Big ass book sales too, like "hire out a big educational gymnasium" type book sales... which is why any number of books in my shelves have library shelf stickers on them...

But the last proper book sale was probably over ten years ago, and the only book sale that has come close in recent memory was back in October last year... and it took me a long while to find anything I wanted... plus I don't think I've read more than a couple of those books yet...

Which brings me around to today...

Prospect Library (which, I guess really means Prospect Council) had a book sale this morning (which Ma and I found out about when we stopped off at the Library during SALA)... so after we'd done a very early bout of shopping (I think it turned out that way because firstly I went out to meet Ma at the car when she got here and we went straight out and secondly because I don't think I bought that much stuff, or at least bought stuff quickly) we headed over to Prospect Town Hall and rocked up just a few minutes before the doors opened.

We also discovered Honeysuckle Lane, a little backstreet/laneway near the Town Hall that is sanctioned as a place for street art... I'm going back tomorrow (weather permitting) with my camera to take some snaps...

Anyway, there was a massive line stretching around the front of the building, but because we came from the back of the building, we chose to ignore the line and just stand with a bunch of other pushy people near the doors... and got in pretty damn quickly... woohoo...

I will say that I was in Book Pig Heaven... I snatched up my first book (not that I have any idea what it was) within about the first minute or so and didn't look back, dumping everything in an empty cardboard box. I'm not sure how long we were there, and we might have stayed longer, but the other book sale participants that made me want to leave, rather than running out of books to look for... these people had no idea about Book Sale Etiquette! Grrrr...

Anyway, I think I ended up with about fifteen books and Ma wasn't far behind... then we came home to unpack the groceries and compare book purchases...

Of course, because Ma and I sometimes think with one single mind (which is both scary and wrong, but not really surprising) we both thought it would be an idea to go back again after we'd finished at my place. And it was...

There were a ton less people, and I found a bunch more books... I ended up with 35 books in total (including the original fifteen), for about the price of an average paperback ($17.50)... and some of the books were essentially brand new... there were a mix of library books and donated books, so some of them don't even look like they've been read once. Woohoo!

Sure there are books that I'm not sure why the hell I bought them... and some that I have a feeling I'm either never going to get around to reading or else read and wish I hadn't bothered. It was a case of going "I'm not really sure about this... but, hey, 50 cents!"... and as I said to Ma, we can always pile up any of the crap ones and send them back to Prospect Library for their next sale...

Anyway, after much book-related joyfulness we headed down the road to Makin Mattresses... since I'd gotten all inspired last week to replace my bed with something new, it seemed like a sensible first stop on the quest for a bed... I was actually surprised, given the enormous size of the building, at how few mattresses there were on display... but then it's their factory as well as the showroom, so I guess it makes sense when you think about it.

We wandered about a bit and then were set upon by Nice Salesman... who was actually quite nice and fairly helpful, I guess I was just taken aback by the price of a decent mattress. I was leaning in the direction of the latex type (partially because I thought it would be cheaper), but it seems that they have pretty much the Rolls Royce of latex mattresses... $1895, just for the mattress! Which just seems very steep to me... granted he was talking about the mattress lasting about 25 years (by which point I would be about 60, which is scary)... but he also said something about the people who invented the latex stuff saying that it could last up to 100 years (by which point I probably wouldn't need it anymore)... I'm not exactly sure on that bit, I think I'd gone into retail shock by that point.

On the one hand, having a mattress that's going to last for 25 years at least makes sense... although the one I have at the moment was like a $90 piece of crap from somewhere and it's mostly lasted at least ten years, although it's all lumpy and awful now... but dropping over two grand (once you factor in the frame I was looking at from Ikea) on a bed does seem a trifle excessive to me. And I kinda wanted to buy it all by myself, with my tax cheque which wasn't anywhere near that much... so essentially I am a world of indecision at present.

After the Mattress Shock, we went down to Arndale for a little bit... I got a new, yet cheap-ass, mop and bucket... I've never really liked my mop, even less so after last Monday's cleaning frenzy, and this one looks like it will dry better afterwards. Granted it will probably fall apart in five minutes, but you get that...

We finished off the day with a trip down to Glenelg for pies from Orange Spot by the sea and a somewhat pointless wander along Jetty Road...

Now all I have to do is find somewhere on my already full bookshelves for all these new books... *sigh*... and it might also be time to snap a photo of my bookshelves again...

Current Mood:

two hundredth book

On the 10th of February 2007 I broke the hundred book mark for "Currently Reading" books, today I reached my second hundred (okay, technically I broke it yesterday morning, but I actually wanted to read my 200th book first so that I could blog about it)...

The title that marks 200 books is Peter Pan (which I went searching for back at the beginning of July, thanks to the First Tuesday Book Club)... I think that I was expecting something with a little more oomph to it after hearing what they had to say on FTBC... It's sweet and all, but a little anachronistic (as you would expect for a book written nearly a century ago) and therefore a little difficult to read in spots. I have to say that the 2003 movie version sticks fairly close to the novel for the most part (the beginning and ending probably moreso than the centre section), so I didn't really feel like I was getting that much more of an expanded story. The whole thing is sweet (and if ever there was a slightly lackluster adjective, there it is), and the ending is actually a little on the sad side (and where they obviously extracted the entire setup of the plot for Hook), but, yeah... I didn't find it anywhere near as engaging and affecting as I thought I might have.

But if you compare that to my 199th book, in something of a similar vein (in that it's also a children's book, features an element of fantasy and has been made into a movie that I've seen), Bridge to Terabithia was a much better experience... and although it was also a little anachronistic too (having been written in 1977 when a dollar went a long way), I was more emotionally invested in that book and found myself tearing up in the same place that I did in the movie (whether it was because of the memory of tearing up at that point in the movie or not, I don't know).

Now... talking a little more randomly about the last 100 book...

Nearly 40% of the books in this montage are from the Discworld series... I'd been plotting and planning to read the entire series all the way through for months, and when I was having Book Angst back in January I predicted that because it was a 30+ book series (36 as it turns out, because I got a couple more of the series while I was in the process of reading it) it would take me until "April or May, at the earliest" (which would have made it about four months)... yeah, right... try six and a half months... I started reading the first book at the very end of January, and finished the last one last Friday...

At least this time around I didn't try to orchestrate things so that the most recent Discworld book just happened to be Book 200...

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole series, don't get me wrong (especially the later ones that I'd only read once before, or hadn't read at all), it's not like reading a series that's all about one group of characters, the series flips between four or five major groups of characters and there are also independent books that almost stand on their own, so it never feels like a chore (okay, it kind of did when I got to about the three quarters mark, but only briefly)... but if I ever suggest reading the whole Discworld series again, somebody please slap me upside the head and make me lie down until the desire to tackle the series goes away...

It's also a little disheartening to discover that Terry Pratchett (author of the Discworld books) has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's Disease... although according to him, he has a variant that's apparently "a good one to have" (as far as these things go obviously). And while I know that it's never good when somebody has Alzheimer's, I kinda think it's doubly sad in his case because he's such a talented and witty writer, that it could be stripped away from him is tragic.

I'm also very thankful that I was introduced to LibraryThing (thanks to Tom) the day after the first 100 books... I still don't use it like a normal person (and I haven't listed all of my books under another username), but I did upgrade to "Lifetime Member" recently... not a bad deal at $25...

And yes, anybody being particularly sharp-eyed (and, some would say, obsessive compulsive) will notice that there are some repeats between the first and second hundred books... the Harry Potter series for one, and a couple of the Discworld books... but I said 200 books, not 200 unique titles...

Now we start the third hundred with some Dexter action...

Current Mood:

city shopping search

Nothing like a good Shopping Safari... especially when you finally track down your intended prey...

After the usual Supermarket Adventures and Ritual Unpacking (I totally have to go through all my cupboards now that I have free time and work out what the hell I actually have and use some stuff up... I'm sure I have enough bits and pieces in there to feed the proverbial five thousand, I just don't know what I have) and sticking an old fashioned "comfort food" rice pudding in the oven (which I'm enjoying as we speak... mmmm ricey) to use up some leftover milk we headed into the city in search of our appropriate prey.

Actually only my efforts were a search... Ma knew what she wanted and got it first try... me, I had to search in about five or six stores before I could find it.

Last Tuesday I flicked on the First Tuesday Book Club, and one of the books they were reviewing was Peter Pan. They all spoke about it with such love and in such glowing terms that I just had to go out and get it. Unfortunately I didn't factor in that any number of other people probably watch the show as well and a large number of them all went out and bought it too... it just seemed that NOBODY had it! Borders should have had one on the shelf, but the funky girly and I couldn't find it... the woman at Dymocks knew they were out because of the teevee show, and the other couple of places that we checked either didn't stock it or didn't have it.

I ended up getting it from the ABC Shop of all places. Ma didn't think that they would have it, and initially I couldn't find it, but we asked the nice girly in the store and she pointed us in the direction of a stand where they put the books featured on the show. Woohoo!

Not the same cover as the one they had, but it was fairly cheap so I no complain!

Now I just need to get around to finishing the Discworld books so I can finally start to read all these other things...

And that's about it for today really... not a whole lot going on...

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photo friday: perfect library

Normally my Photo Friday posts are shots I've taken myself... but today, seeing as how it was my last day at work, while I was wasting time looking at blogs with tenuous links to anything work related... err... researching Web 2.0 technology, I came across this post about a bookcase in a house in London.

I want this bookcase!

A bookcase that's a "secret" staircase that also has stairs wide enough to sit on. Too cool, too cool, too cool by half!

Although the colour coding of the books on each shelf is maybe a little much...

I also feel like I'm sitting here channelling a certain blogger a little bit... after work I went out and bought the soundtrack for Sweeney Todd (the Johnny Depp movie version)... I'd thought about it previously, but H-San mentioned something to me about the movie this morning, and I said that I wanted to buy the soundtrack... and that I might go out and buy it after work... and because I don't need much encouragement, so buy it I did.

I'm currently swaying happily while whistling along to "A Little Priest"... I think it was a good purchase... a good way to mark the end of my time with The Gang I think.

It was kinda weird actually... I mean I'm going to be back there on Monday (in the building anyway)... and I have to go up and see them on Monday... Rockchick borrowed my Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs, and I have to pick up the last Y graphic novels from Sugarmonkey...

Oh, and speaking of Pirates... Ma sent me a text message while I was wandering around shopping... she won the "best dressed pirate" at work today... so all that discount shopping we did last weekend paid off!

Current Mood:

if i were a book

Great... I'm a book I've never heard of, about somebody I've never heard of, by somebody I've never heard of...

Stole this from Michael over at Pipedreams... at least he came up as an author I'd heard of...

You're A Prayer for Owen Meany!
by John Irving

Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire
faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers,
and you manifest this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of
destiny pervades your every waking moment, and you prepare with
great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak,
IT SOUNDS LIKE THIS!

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Current Mood:

book angst

In light of today's earlier post, this one seems a bit trivial and pointless... but life does go on...

So... I'm having book angst...

What is book angst, I hear you ask... well, I ALWAYS have a book on the go, even if I'm not actively reading it at the time, there's always something on my bedside table (and in my blog sidebar) that I'm theoretically reading at the present time. And I'm having dramas in my brain about what to read next...

I think it all stems from possibly having too many options about what I could read since Christmas.

And possibly it also comes from the fact that the last couple of books I've read were somewhat disappointing.

Firstly there was Blood Price by Tanya Huff, which was just slow, mostly uninteresting and completely predictable... so much so that I'd worked out how it was all going to end (more or less... maybe not all the details, but the whole general kind of outcome) by about a third of the way in, and it really didn't surprise me or deviate from that idea very much. So I won't be bothering to read any of the others in the series. And I'm just glad that they're on loan from Stu and not something that either Ma or I paid good money for.

That was followed by Stardust.

Now I LOVED the movie version... but the book just fell flat on its butt I think. Whether it was because I'd seen the movie first (more on that in a second) or what, but I just felt like the movie dealt with the ideas presented in the book to a much better degree and took them to their logical conclusions and tied the whole thing up as a cohesive story in a much better way. In the book there's not really any great sense of dread or danger from the main villain (in fact she's absent for large chunks of time)... and she's sent on her way at the end with basically a wave and a handshake which just left me feeling vaguely underwhelmed... whereas the movie gives you that big confrontation and resolves it accordingly. Don't get me wrong, its a sweet book, but the movie is infinitely better in my opinion.

Which brings me back to the whole "Book Then Movie" or "Movie Then Book" dilemma. This tends to happen to me a lot, but whichever version I tend to see first ends up being the "real" version in my head and the other one doesn't always live up to it (and I'm highly likely to pick it apart because it doesn't conform to the standard laid down by the other version).

That's not always true of course, The Princess Bride movie and The Princess Bride book actually compliment each other more than compete, and I like them both for their differences and changes rather than in spite of them. Actually that might be the key... if a book and a film COMPLIMENT each other (meaning they don't have to be exactly word for word the same, but they need to build on each other in some way) then I'm quite happy...

Interview with the Vampire is another example... I'd heard a bunch of stuff about the changes they'd made to the movie and this, that and the other... but during the opening credits I saw that Anne Rice had actually written the screenplay... so I just let the movie be what it was, because it was all coming from the same source, and that was okay by me.

Sometimes having read the book first is a little easier, provided they don't completely butcher the movie version (Eragon and Howl's Moving Castle, I'm looking at the pair of you!), because you know that there is only a finite amount of information they can take out of a, for example, 400 page book when they're turning it into a 110 minute movie. And sometimes when you go from Movie to Book you kind of wonder how the hell they actually got the movie they made out of that book... and you also realise that a lot of time they just kept bits here and there and made it all up.

Which is part of the reason I'm a little hesitant about reading I Am Legend. I mean the movie wasn't stunning, but it was quite good... however I always find myself sitting there reading the book going "well that's different from the movie... and why did they change that... and who the hell is this character... and where's this other character... and why didn't they keep this bit in... or leave that bit out"... that whole kind of thing. And I'm fairly sure that Legend is going to be one of those books... where they changed SO much of it to make the movie that the two versions are going to have just enough overlap to annoy me, and the rest of it will be totally different.

So, that's what... problem 3? 1. Too many choices... 2. Last couple of books were disappointing... 3. Worried whether Legend will be any good... yep... okay, good...

Number Four in my list of book angst items is that I've been intending for AGES now to read the entire Discworld series from start to finish. There are books in there that I haven't actually read yet, and I've never read the whole thing in order, and it's been on my to-do list for probably about a year now. But it's a 30-ish book series... so if I start it now, I'll still be reading it come April or May, at the earliest... and I not only have all the books from Christmas that I haven't read... there's also the books from the book sale in October...

So basically I've settled on Twilight for now... partly because it removes the decision for now, and I want to give myself some thinking space, try and work out a plan... maybe I do just need to dive into the Discworld books after this one... then, hopefully, by the time I finish all of those, then enough time will have gone past that I can read Legend without comparing it to the movie TOO much...

Then of course, there's the books I may or may not pick up when I'm in Sydney... *sigh*

Current Mood:

no more harry potter

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...

Seventh and final book in the series, six hundred and seven pages long, I finished it in around two and a bit days...

I tend to do that though... when it's a new book that I haven't read in a series I really like, I usually tend to finish it in remarkably short order. Even when I don't intend to just go crazy and finish the book really quickly, like this time around, I still end up hearing the siren song of the novel and just keep picking it up and before you know it I've been sitting there reading for six hours...

I think I officially started this on Saturday night... just read the first chapter and then I actually put the book down... but then by the end of Sunday I'd read just over half the book... and, well, you know the rest.

Fellow Potterphile Eddy (possibly a greater one, since he's a little more prompt and obsessive about it than me) said when he read the book back in July that he slowed down when he reached the last hundred pages, and didn't want to read the final fifty pages at all... which I can kind of understand, although I didn't do the same thing... although I did what I think I usually end up doing in these situations, I went back and reread bits that I'd just read. Occasionally my mind will wander just slightly, and although I've been reading the words I don't always take them in properly, so with a new book like this I like to make sure I've taken in everything, rereading the previous couple of paragraphs, especially as the book starts to draw to a close and all the plot starts to tie together and the secrets are revealed.

It's a little difficult to write everything I kind of want to write about the book... I don't want to ruin any of it for people who haven't read it yet. I'm SO not about the spoilers, in fact I've been avoiding EVERYTHING in reference to this book since it came out in July... I even skipped reading a cartoon in the Sunday paper a week or so ago, because it was a spoof on part of the book. So this might sound a bit odd if you haven't read the novel, but if you have you should know what I'm trying to say.

I don't know if it was because this is the final book in the series, or because the stakes are so much higher in the plot or what, but I found myself getting all weepy in spots... a lot of spots actually. Sometimes for the obvious reasons (Chapter 4), but sometimes because I was just touched and moved (Chapter 3)... and it got to the point where I was pretty much turning into a weepy mess just about every other chapter... but nothing at any point in the book quite compared to the complete puddle I dissolved into at the end of Chapter 23 and the beginning of Chapter 24... we're talking "cried like a baby", big heaving sobs in fact!

But at the same time there were a bunch of spots where I cheered... and at least two spots where I actually did it aloud... a little tragic, but it seemed to be the right thing at the time.

I'm not unhappy with the way the book ended... in fact the series had been headed in that direction for at least the last three books, and while there were some surprises (both good and bad), it kind of ended the way I expected. And pretty much all of the little "mysteries" and loose plot ends were wound up by the end of the book, which gave everything a nicely finished off feeling. One thing I am glad about is that JK put the final "epilogue" chapter in which confirmed a lot of the things that I'd suspected... although, I have to say, not all of them... and a quick look around online after I finished either confirmed other things I suspected or were pleasant surprises about some of the things not mentioned.

I will say one thing directly... since Rowling came out (to coin a phrase) with the fact that she'd always considered Dumbledore to be gay, it was interesting to read parts of this book with that in mind. I wonder, if I hadn't known that little factoid if certain parts of the book would have had that slight air of subtext to them... almost like she was laying it in for people who knew... or if it was just because I did know, then suddenly I was reading in subtext where it didn't necessarily exist. I think it's possibly that there was subtext, because at no other point in my rereading this time around did the thought really occur to me, other than during this last book.

While I don't know that reading the book was necessarily a life changing event on it's own, I don't disagree with something else that Eddy said just before he finished the book.... "I know life will never be the same again when it finally ends"... even though I can go back and revisit the story, I'm always going to know how it ends, and it's never quite the same as the first time.

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