Year: 2010

Guest Blog: Welski meets Gaiman

Neil Gaiman was over here last week, to the delight of his legion of fans from all over the metro. While I enjoyed The Graveyard Book immensely, I must say I have yet to acquire the taste for his other works.  I’m not a big Gaiman fan so I’ve decided to leave the blogging to one real Gaiman fangirl — Welski, a book club friend from FFP, guest blogging from Bookerella the Enchanted.

I’m actually envious of her fan girl experience. I wish I was a Gaiman fan — he’s over here quite a lot, and there have been a lot of opportunities for fan encounters. I’ve never had a favorite writer (or illustrator for that matter) of mine visit the country for a tour.

Read on for the highlights of Welski’s story (copyediting and comments in blue mine).

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FFP sound trips to High Fidelity

After I missed last month’s Flips Flipping Pages (my book club) book discussion (The Shadow of the Wind, one of my favorite books!) because it coincided with the Ultimate Book Geek finals, I was glad I was able to attend this month’s book discussion: Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, as moderated by Mike, Ronald and Shani.

Holed up in an Irish pub, we had some music related games. We were divided into two teams (morbidly named Team RIP and Team Condolence), and for the first game, Mike produced a list of songs and read them aloud while we attempted to identify the songs’ album, artist, and year released. I was in Team Condolence and we got creamed by Team RIP!  Then we had an Anti Music Snob Name that Tune contest, where we managed (with Ronald’s help!) to squeak by with a one point win over Team RIP.

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Shamanka!

Rum-pa-pum-pa-pum-pum! Rum-pa-pum-pa-pum-pum! The drumming sound was driving me crazy. Maybe it was a combination of the heat and the fact that I’d been walking frantically for the past half hour, but the faint drumming I’d heard as soon as I stepped into the used bookstore complex was getting louder by the minute.

I rounded the corner and found a bookshop I hadn’t noticed before, small and cluttered, with a labyrinthine arrangement of tall shelves. The Hindu storekeeper beckoned with a smile, so I ventured inside. Instantly, the drumming escalated into a frenetic rhythm: Pum-ba-da-bum-ba-da-pum-ba-da-ba-da-bum! Heart pounding, I backed into a shelf, causing a stack of books to fall on the floor in front of me. On top of the pile was book covered in snakeskin, with a strange word emblazoned on the cover: Shamanka.

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The Girl from the Chartreuse

I was poking around at an 80% off sale at one of my favorite book stores when I came across a book that caught my eye: The Girl from the Chartreuse by Pierre Peju. I’d never heard of it before, but I thought it would look pretty on my bookshelf (yes, I judge a book by its cover!)  so I decided to add it to my purchases.

The Girl from the Chartreuse (Fr. “La Petite Chartreuse,” translated into English by Ina Rilke) is a French novella that won the prestigious Prix du Livre Inter in 2003, and was made into a French film in 2005.

It starts off ominously: “Five in the afternoon. It will be exactly five in the afternoon under the bitter cold November rain when the van of the bookseller Vollard (Etienne) spurting down the avenue collides head-on with a little girl who runs smack into his path.”

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Novels in Letters

I love reading epistolary novels — once in a while, it’s really quite refreshing to read narrative that’s broken down into pieces of interesting text (e.g. letters, reports, memos, etc.) rather than plod through long chapters. There’s also the wicked fun of reading other people’s correspondence and attempting to piece together a story based on them.

My favorite epistolary novels include Dracula by Bram Stoker, Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock, Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster,  The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and even Meg Cabot’s Every Boy’s Got One. I read a couple more recently: Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman, and Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.

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