Oh dear sweet Shinjo, I didn't realize they'd made a manga of this. (I bought the first four? five? books by Darren Shan on an impulse hoping for schlocky vampire-istic entertainment. OMG so awful.)
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon added 'Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility: The Authoritative Manual for Every Civilized Household, However Harried']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75826794
to: Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility: The Authoritative Manual for Every Civilized Household, However Harried (Hardcover)byJudith Martin
Years ago I had the misimpression that anyone going by the name of Miss Manners would chiefly be interested in the difference between a salad spork (fork, whatever) and a soup spork (spoon, whatever). This is, to my delight, not the case! The approach taken is that of etiquette as a form of socially enforced common sense (for times when common sense is sadly all too uncommon) and social lubricant. The idea is for people to be able to get along or pretend to get along instead of driving each other crazy over each others' quirks, quibbles, and neuroses.
This book is organized by topic, with Miss Manners expounding lightly and sardonically on each (e.g. The People, Visitors, various categories of Entertaining) before going on to respond to example letters. Even if you don't end up agreeing with Miss Manners' solutions or retorts, she is devastatingly witty, especially when she thinks the letter-writer is being asinine. (Disconcertingly, I thought most of what she said made good sense. Um, not that I'm any great shakes in the etiquette department.) You could quite easily pass an hour or two entertaining yourself by reading the letters-and-responses alone, especially if you have a taste for elegantly worded snark.
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon added 'Fun With French']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73340231
to: Fun With French (School & Library Binding)byLee Cooper
A charming, semi-immersive introduction to French aimed at children (later grade school, I'd guess). It goes through the alphabet with approximated pronunciations and makes clever use of cognates, pictures, repetition, and parallel structure to introduce basic elements of the language through a number of short stories. There's also a glossary at the back for when context isn't enough to help you figure out a word. I took six years of French so in all fairness I'm not entirely sure how well this book works for beginners, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
]]>
<![CDATA[new comment from Yoon]]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67640891
Yoon's review of
The Horse in Human History byPita Kelekna
Moira wrote: "Aww this is a great review! You make me want to read it, and horses are Not My Thing." Hee! I was the stereotypical horse-crazed child. I think I must have read almost everything Marguerite Henry ever wrote. Also Walter Farley. But aside from a semester of equitation in college, it just was never feasible. You could read this as a particularly focused world history, but yeah--if horses aren't your thing, probably not a first choice.
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon added 'The Horse in Human History']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67640891
to: The Horse in Human History (Paperback)byPita Kelekna
This book is aptly titled. It reads pretty much like what it says it is: a history of the world as seen through an equestrian lens. Kelekna opens with equid paleontology, then moves on to the domestication of horses and ways in which horses affected the course of human history. She closes with some interesting thoughts on cultures with and without horses and their relative success (e.g. the conquistadors in the Americas).
I find Kelekna's arguments largely persuasive, although in a work this ambitious and wide-ranging it's hard not to feel that the topic could easily be served by an encyclopedia set (perhaps as a follow-up?). The caveat is that I am not an anthropologist (Kelekna's field), an archaeologist, a historian, or an equestrian. I mean, I was pleased to see Hildinger's Warriors of the Steppe cited, or Ann Hyland's book on Roman cavalry, but I've only ever tangentially read about the Almoravids, or the Shahnameh, or any number of other things touched upon.
Kelekna's prose is definitely academic, but for all that it possesses a certain stateliness; I enjoyed reading segments of the text out loud to Joe. (Joe tolerates this because...well, I don't know. You'd have to ask Joe. But I like reading out loud sometimes.) There were times when she lost me, primarily when she was discussing things like funerary rite symbolism or whatever (Reagan as cowboy what? why does the omphalos keep turning up over and over again and why is it important?). It's entirely possible that those arguments made sense, I just don't have the background.
In some ways I feel like this is my favorite book all year, even though it took me months to read it. It is certainly a book that I've kind of been working up to, bit by bit, even if by reading about horses on and off, and reading about (mostly military) history on and off. Really, I couldn't look at a book with this title and not read it. It would have been like denying myself oxygen. And even if not all the arguments pan out, it will be a valuable writing-resource for years to come.
Table of contents for the curious.
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon
is on page 230 of The Horse in Human H...
]]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67640891
Yoon
is on page 230 of 474 of
The Horse in Human History
So what happens when a group of motley oppressed heroes takes on the dark lord who appears to have defeated the prophesied hero an era ago?
Imaginative worldbuilding of the sort where magic is essentially an adjunct to physics; tight, clever plotting; an interesting variety of characters. Problems: Sanderson is never going to win any prizes for his prose, which is generally pedestrian and once in a while descends to wince-worthy. But that's okay; with fantasy epics I'm rarely in it for the prose. More troublesome to me (and I'm sure there are other flaws) was the fact that, despite the protagonist being female, Sanderson seems to think that the default human (skaa, nobleman, whatever), is male. A third of the way through a 600+-page novel, there were plenty of male named characters and only one other female named character, who was a hairdresser and only had one or two lines and was exactly as important to the plot as you might imagine. If I had thought Sanderson was saying something about the society he was depicting (which was indeed patriarchal on multiple levels), that would have been one thing; instead, it simply looked like blind thoroughgoing carelessness. I nearly pitched the book across the room every 20 pages or so.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things I liked about this book--the sheer audacity of the premise, for one--and I'm currently reading its sequel. But if you need more than a single strong female character in a world full of male characters to carry you through a work, you might want to give this one a pass lest you, too, end up pitching your copy across the room every 20 pages.
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon added 'Mistborn: The Final Empire']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67625652
to: Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)byBrandon Sanderson
]]>
<![CDATA[Yoon added 'Palimpsest']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53540497
Palimpsest (Paperback)
byCatherynne M. Valente bookshelves: currently-reading
]]>