Andy and Darcy’s Blog

If you missed book club last weekend, then you also missed the biggest pizza ever!

Next book: The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton.

I saw this article about a copy machine for entire books. The result is a bound paperback book. Today I feel like technology is really headed in the right direction.

Our book club definitely benefits from structure. If there is no structure, we end up watching youTube videos!! You know it!!!

So I have found a really awesome site that has reading guides. And there is a guide there for Atonement, our current selection. (I’m 4 chapters into Atonement, and its pretty good so far!)

It’s there if we want to use it…and take a look at the other books there. They have some interesting choices as well.

It was a crazy race to the finish, but I actually finished the book club book, “The Big Over Easy” by Jasper Fforde yesterday and in plenty of time for book club (that’s tonight). It was a good book, and I’m excited because I can see the list of upcoming book selections. They all look really good!!

I also wanted to mention that I found this list of books on Tor’s website that have free reading guides with discussion questions. Andy is a lucky one because the book he has already chosen for book club, The Prestige, is on that site and has a reading guide. If you need a book club book, that site seems like a good place to go for ideas.

As an aside, I have really been enjoying the free digital books Tor is giving away right now. Although I have way too many books to read right now (some of them being library books), I have started every one of those free books (Mistborn and Old Man’s War). Both are good! I hope they start selling books in PDF format…they are super convenient.

Here’s some miscellaneous stuff that I couldn’t write an entire blog about individually.

• American Idol has started again. I’m so glad the WGA[EW] doesn’t consider the reality TV writers to be WGA[EW] material, because if they did I wouldn’t get to watch American Idol. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are now booked for me.

• We broke a chair. This is an office chair with like 6 legs, and one of them broke when someone was going to sit down. It is hard to believe. We threw away the bottom half of the chair, but the upper part is now our new video game chair.
• I’m knitting a sock. Lots of my friends knit, and I’ve finally caught the bug. This isn’t my first time knitting, but I haven’t done it since I was like 12. And I love knitted socks — I have enough for a few weeks worth of them. I may never knit anything other than socks.

Andy and I decided to move the PS2 upstairs, and consequently we have rediscovered Katamari Damacy. In the past week, we’ve rolled up stuff into the moon, made the stars Virgo, Taurus, Gemini, and Pisces, and all in all we’ve made the king of the cosmos very happy. He’s wanted to cry after he’s seen some of our katamaris. We find ourselves with the Katamari music stuck in our heads quite often. We’re going to look into investing in We Love Katamari, the sequel. If I remember correctly, XPlay loved We Love Katamari so I’m guessing we are really going to like it!

• I have fallen off the picture a day wagon. I’m trying to get back on it. Stay tuned.
• I’ve read a lot of books. Maybe someday I’ll tell you what they are.

This book has pretty much erased the bad memories that Shroud of the Thwacker left with me. Garrison Keillor is hilarious, and there were multiple times that I laughed out loud while reading this book. This is not my first time reading this book, but I don’t remember much from that first time. The main character of this book is a teenage boy in rural conservative Minnesota in a morass of teenage hormones.

We discussed the book, and then rest of book club included watching funny YouTube videos and knitting. Our new book is: The Big Over Easy. And our next meeting is only 3 weeks away.

Inspired by Darcy and my friends, Jim, Pam and Jon I have decided to take up another hobby, knitting. Now, I have flirted with crocheting and it was ok, but I just didn’t get into it that much. I think it was mainly because I couldn’t get excited about the things I could have crocheted. This doesn’t seem to be the case with knitting though, socks, hats, scarves, hell even laptop cases. The possibilities are endless.

So in my quest to begin my new found hobby, I went to the place where people go to learn about new hobbies, the internet. A while back while reading my DIYLife.com RSS feed (an excellent site btw), I saw a story about a site called knitty.com. Let me tell you, this is one very cool site. It has articles, a forum and tons of free patterns. They had an article from a regular write that was all about knitting for men, he mentioned a book called “Knitting with Balls”.

I then went to the next place people go to learn about new hobbies, Barnes & Noble. I browsed for a while and found the book, enjoyed a latte while perusing it and decided to pick it up. My adventure into the world of knitting has begun!

Now onto step 2, needles and yarn.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. I must have liked this book. I was extremely interested in it, and I found myself wanting to go back and continue reading it when I was not. It is about rich people in the 1920′s, and this book amused me just like Arrested Development and Dirty Sexy Money amused (or is amusing) me. But it is also a sad kind of love story as well, so it is not exactly the same.

The things that left the biggest impression on me are the story and the unique things that the characters said. I just want to mention a few of those things the characters said because they are probably even more noteworthy than the story itself since you can find a melancholy love story anywhere.

1) This story revolved around the introduction of automobiles in the United States. And according to the story, they were not all that reliable. So when they broke down people would yell “Git a hos!”. Yeah, I find that extremely amusing.

2) George, who is the rich dandy home from college, calls everyone a “duck”. Oh rich people, you are so entertaining.

3) George, the same one I just mentioned, says the same thing whenever he is introduced to someone. Someone says, “This is so and so.” George says, “Oh, that’s a funny name.”. He says it no matter what the name is. It’s rather annoying, and it is also rather funny as well.

Middlemarch by George Eliot. This book was long. I felt the relief of a runner after a marathon when I finished this book. It is like War and Peace with no historical chapters. It is all about marriages–good ones and bad ones. Lots of people marry for the wrong reason in this book, and we just read along and see how they play out. In the end there is peace, but you can kind of tell the peace is due to the people adjusting to their good or bad positions. It isn’t exactly a happy ending, in my opinion.

I have been held up by the untimely demise of my (former) harddrive, and there have been cooler things to blog about than books lately so I’m finally getting around to books. Over the past month there have been good ones and bad ones.

War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Well, this one is no surprise, especially if you’ve seen the movie. Except that the story in the movie is completely different than the one in the book. But the main idea is the same. The Martians tried to take over the world (I mean Great Britain). And as we all know, they were defeated by the common cold. One thing that annoyed me was that the narrator is completely reckless with his life in this book, but I guess that makes it exciting. I think this one got no stars on my book rating scale. The movie was better, but I didn’t like that either.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones. I was just browsing through the library and picked this one up. It was spectacular! It is a book for probably…young adults? But it is a completely enjoyable story that is not too scary and has a pretty good plot. The plot is this: there is a boy named Cat who is an enchanter with nine lives. His has an evil sister, and there is a plot to unbalance the force of good. And one other thing: There is a magician who appears when they call him by name so they call him “You Know Who.” Sound familiar? I checked and this book was written in 1977. So its quite original. Five stars.

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. This one was recommended to me by Ms. Kira Foken. And I must thank Ms. Kira Foken because I did indeed enjoy this book. The heroine’s face is poisoned (and extremely ugly), so this book follows her adventures, and they are pretty entertaining. It was a little scary, but most of it was “fantastical scary” which I would define as “couldn’t happen to me.” Someone else has the next book in this series checked out, but I’m so excited to read it when it comes in again. Five stars.

The Briar King and The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes. These are the first two books in a series, and I have no idea how long that series is. I hope that it is a completed series! This book reminds me of George R. R. Martin, but without a lot of the morbidity. It is still morbid in some parts, but its not horrible. And I do want to find out how the battle between good and evil goes so I really want to read the next one. So the sad thing is that the library doesn’t own the next book in the series (this always happens to me). Five stars for both of these books.

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones. I didn’t love this one immediately like I did Charmed Life, but in the end I really enjoyed it. Four stars.

Myst, The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller. I’ve read some very convincing reviews of this book, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. It was kind of boring, which was possibly due to the lack of changing scenery. The plot is this: the main character and his father live in a city (whose inhabitants are dead) and they create worlds in the books those people left behind. People who played the video game seemed to understand what was going on, but it didn’t do much for me. Two stars.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier. Here’s the plot: The heroine discovers latent magical powers, and she was deceived by her parent. Nothing new there in the world of fantasy. The one unique thing was it was set in Austrailia and had a lot of Austrailian phrases which were interesting. But the story didn’t entertain me. Lots of other people like this book, or so I hear. No stars.

Smoky The Cow Horse by Will James. Forgive my generalizations, but I’m sure there is a 6 year old boy who loves cowboys and would love this book. I hated it. This book is written in the dialect of a cowboy (or that’s how it appeared to me). And the subject-verb disagreements in this book were an abomination. The book is about the life of Smoky the horse and a cowboy named Clint. Smoky goes from running free on the range, to becoming the best cow horse ever, then to becoming the best bucking bronco show pony ever, and then finally after many difficulties he goes home with Clint to spend his retirement on the range. Negative stars?

Now I am done with this book, and I completely agree with everything I said below. I would like to tell you how it ends because it is just so contrived but I think I can hold back for now.

I liked The Mysteries Of Udolpho a lot, despite the interjections of poetry (which I tolerated) and the long descriptions of the European countryside (which I rather enjoyed). To me this book had a remarkable resemblance to a Jane Austen novel, and who can ever have enough of those? So, once done with The Mysteries of Udolpho, I went to the library and checked out one of their nine copies of The Italian (all available on the shelf, weird?).

And to my dismay, The Italian is not of the same caliber as The Mysteries of Udolpho. It is really long, very boring, and I am now forcing myself to keep reading. There is something missing that draws me into this book, and I think that something is meaningful characterization. Unfortunately, I think I like the descriptions of the countryside and spooky convent a lot better than the plot. And I am sadly unattached to any of the characters or their plight.

This book is about a young man pursuing a marriage that is opposed by his family, the plot by the family to kidnap and imprison the young woman in a convent, and the evil monk that advises the family. It is one of the first gothic novels (according to wikipedia) so for that reason it is very important.

The story was completely resolved at the end, but I won’t give it away here. I probably wouldn’t read this again, although it finally got a little more interesting as time went on. And I never figured out what the title means…everyone in this book is an Italian.