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101 ratings | 105 reviews | avg rating:3.42

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Julia Bernd

Goodreads author profile

url

http://www.goodreads.com/jbernd

born

April 04, 1976 in The United States

gender

female

member since

November 2007

About this author

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Julia grew up in Illinois but now lives in San Francisco. She would probably be a linguistics professor if she and academia hadn't had a falling-out a while back; after seven years working as a peace activist instead, she's currently exploring new directions -- or in other words, she's (mostly) unemployed. Besides GUD, she has edited for Night Train and NFG. She likes to think she's open to enjoying work in any genre, but admits that she probably has higher standards for some than others. Good characters are the best hook.

combine editions
Books by Julia Bernd

Average rating: 4.89 · 9 ratings · 4 reviews · 1 distinct work

GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (magazine) Issue 4
by Julia Bernd (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Jim Pascual Agustin (Goodreads Author), Brian Beatty

4.89 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 2009 — 2 editions

My rating:

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Julia is Currently Reading

Julia is currently reading:

Matter

by Iain M. Banks

bookshelves: currently-reading, read-to-me

My rating:

Aug 14, 2011 11:35pm

Julia is currently reading:

Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Julia said: "Started this a while ago and forgot I was reading it. It was given to Michael by an Italian friend of his; she was annoyed she couldn't find an edition with fonts more worthy of the book's artistry. :) He lent it to me because he thought it would be...more "

Jan 10, 2009 11:06pm · see review

Julia is currently reading:

Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

by Wendy Johnson

bookshelves: currently-reading

recommended to Julia by: Kate Bernd-Barnett

My rating:

Julia said: "(Birthday gift.) "

Aug 02, 2011 12:21am · see review

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Julia's Recent Updates

Julia took the Never-Ending Book Quiz

questions answered:	4896
correct:	3176 (64.9%)
skipped:	860
best streak:	14
questions added:	4

May 19, 2012 06:32pm · beat her score

Julia is now friends with Amanda

Apr 06, 2012 08:43pm

Julia gave

to:

Bhagavati (Blood of the Goddess, #3)
by Kara Dalkey

read in October, 2011

My rating:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Oct 08, 2011 01:02am · see review

Julia gave

to:

Goa
by Kara Dalkey

read in September, 2011

My rating:

Oct 08, 2011 01:00am

Julia gave

to:

Bijapur
by Kara Dalkey

read in September, 2011

My rating:

Oct 08, 2011 12:59am

Julia made a comment on Romans, cats, and books. And ponies.:

"Michael says: The OED is right. It comes from vulgar Latin 'cattus' (for '(domesticated) cat'), and got spread throughout the European languages from...more Michael says: The OED is right. It comes from vulgar Latin 'cattus' (for '(domesticated) cat'), and got spread throughout the European languages from there, along with the spread of domesticated cats with the Romans. There were already words for 'cat' in Old English ('catt'), Old High German ('katz' or 'katzu', he doesn't remember which), and Old Norse ('kǫttr'), but with non-native phonology indicating borrowing from Latin. The Old Norse and Old English forms (and the Slavic forms too) are obviously from 'cattus' rather than 'catta'; Old High German could be from either, but given the other two, it's probably 'cattus'. None of them could possibly be from 'catulus'. (You can ask him if you really want more on how the Indo-Europeanists know all that. :) The explanations he gave me were...long. Mostly it's about vowel harmony.) But nobody knows quite how or when it got into Latin. It's not a native word structure; if it had grown there from proto-Indo-European, it wouldn't have two t's. It's assumed it's probably from a North African language, probably acquired when the Romans picked up whole the domesticated cat thing from somewhere in North Africa, probably Egypt. (The Wiktionary entry, which Michael says is not off its gourd, gives some ideas: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cattus) The Perseus Project says 'cattus' wasn't in classical Latin, though (only 'felis' (cats in general)), and didn't become widespread until medieval Latin, hence the assumption that it came from some vulgar-Latin substrate. 'catta' was in classical Latin, but the dictionary Perseus got it from just says it was some unknown animal. (Michael points out that it may have actually been an independent word for some other animal, or it may be that there was a form 'catta' that was probably the feminine of 'cattus' but the dictionary-writers were being conservative about saying so because they didn't have classical attestations of the masculine version.) (Other notes: 'catulus' means young animal in general; not necessarily just puppies. And the Latin corpus doesn't change, but people's ideas about where the words came from and what they meant do, based on new data about other languages (and about population movements, etc.), including about where modern-language words came from. Frex., the writers of the old dictionary Perseus uses for 'catta' said probably-wrong things about the modern German reflexes because they didn't have access to the Old English and Old Norse texts that have since become publicly available. So, newer dictionaries can be better in that way.)

(I have also learned many other things in the last hour that are not included in this comment. Remind me not to say things like 'Hey, Michael, want to answer an etymological question?' :) )(less) "

Sep 15, 2011 02:23pm

Julia gave

to:

Four Comedies: Lysistrata / The Frogs / The Birds / Ladies' Day
by Aristophanes

read in August, 2011

My rating:

Read Lysistrata. Great translation, and excellent fun all around. (And given that all the women were intended to be played by men anyway, Michael was perfect for the parts.)

[Actually read in the Macmillan Literature of the Western World anthology, V...more

Sep 03, 2011 02:00am · see review

Julia gave

to:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Seth Grahame-Smith

read in August, 2011

My rating:

Very...spotty. Which I suppose is sort of appropriate for a zombie book. (This is a critique of Grahame-Smith's additions, obviously; not much point in critiquing Pride and Prejudice here. Suffice to say, Austen's what kept us reading through Grahame...more Very...spotty. Which I suppose is sort of appropriate for a zombie book. (This is a critique of Grahame-Smith's additions, obviously; not much point in critiquing Pride and Prejudice here. Suffice to say, Austen's what kept us reading through Grahame-Smith's ups and downs.) There were some parts where Grahame-Smith had some really funny ideas in terms of how he made the parallels with the original work, and twisted them in interesting ways. And the Hong-Kong-martial-arts-film combat scenes were nicely fun. (Well, when they even rose to that level.) (Better in this context than most, probably, because they were a more interesting clash. (Especially with Austenian realism.)) But a lot of the zombie bits themselves were fairly ho-hum and repetitive, and often badly stitched together with the original.

And he kind of went off the rails about two-thirds through, making Elizabeth an unreliable narrator for exactly one paragraph and adding in a bunch of sexual peccadilloes and innuendos, but only for a few chapters. (Which both made the characters inconsistent and made the plot inconsistent; Grahame-Smith's attempts to make the Lydia denouement still make sense in a world with looser sexual mores didn't hardly cut it. (And it was just badly done at the stitching level. I mean, if you're going to insert something saying somebody screwed around on their spouse, at least remove the sentence earlier in the paragraph that said that he didn't. (I hope he at least knew that's what Austen probably meant?)) The adultery and chintzy sexual humor would have been fine if better done and done from the beginning -- it just would have been a different sort of parody -- but it wasn't, so it was just jarring for it to start in the middle. We got the feeling Grahame-Smith just sort of felt a need to step it up right about there and that was the best he could think of. Generally, that kind of spottiness can be expected in a high-school spoof of great literature, but I was kind of hoping for better from a published work with such hoo-ha around it.

Really, all in all, I think he did decently well for most of it (except the middle where he got bored), it's just that I had such a great vision for how good it could have been... (Especially since it did start out pretty well.) But though we had mixed reactions to the story modifications, we unequivocally enjoyed the non-story additions; the illustrations were quite nicely done and captured the spirit of the blend, and the discussion questions at the end were quite funny.

On an Austen-side note, it is interesting how false it rang when Grahame-Smith tweaked certain things in relatively small ways that gave a character just slightly different motivations... Reminds one what a delicate construction the original was. Also interesting that most of the additions I found funniest or most interesting were the more subtle/human-interactional ones anyway. Yep, we were reading for the Austen.

(Read to me by Michael, with cokibbitzing along the way, hence the 'we'.)(less)

Aug 15, 2011 03:00am · see review

Julia is currently reading:

Matter
by Iain M. Banks

My rating:

Aug 14, 2011 11:35pm

Julia gave

to:

Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes
by Mark Crick

recommended to Julia by: Paul George & Steffy Reader

read in August, 2011

My rating:

A very fun concept, executed reasonably well. Some of the authors' voices were more amenable to being turned to descriptions of cookery with comedic effect than others (and/or Crick was more able to figure out how to do some than others). I think it...more

Aug 08, 2011 03:29pm · see review

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