omnia_mutantur | bookitybookbook

69. Necklace of Kisses by francesca lia block. weetzie bat has a midlife crisis. it was a little precious for me, no pun intended, but there was a mermaid, and some nice images. i think i've probably had enough weetzie bat for the rest of my life, but i picked this up one afternoon at B&N, and finished it over the course another two brief visits, so maybe I'm not giving it its fair day upon the stage.

70. Silk by Caitlin R Kiernan. i wanted to like this. neil gaiman's blurb on cover made me happy, and i kind of like horror. but it was disjointed, and sort of selfpitying, and did i mention disjointed? not in a useful, narrative-forwarding or atmosphere creating way, but like the author has some sort of accident where all the pages dropped on the kitchen and she put them back in the wrong order. there are some really neat characters and some really neat images, though. and i think i'll always be a sucker for women named Daria.

71. Inkheart by Cordelia Funke. The Thief Lord was awesome. this was awesome. a children's/YA book that mentions a lot of other books. the main character's an avid reader(she travels with a box of her special books, to make her feel at home wherever she goes), her dad's a bookbinder, the villian's someone he accidentally read out of a book. it's translated from german, and it gives it a distinct but thoroughly enjoyable flavor. and i think Capricorn is a fun name for a villian, and i just plain liked it.

(two trashy reads)

72. Eternally Bad by Trina Robbins (who is, per her dust jacket, an award-winning feminist cartoonist). it's a fast and trashy run through a bunch of mythology. i actually learned a little bit, about hawaiian and japanese and native american and etc goddesses. fun, but nothing spectacular.

73. The Virago Book of Erotic Myths and Legends by Shahrukh Husain. Not titilating, but fantastically lush and varied. a bunch of different translations of a bunch of different stories. It opens with "The City of Longing" which opens with the line "You have come now to the city of men who wear black: you will want to know why our garb is so sombre. This is the city where night never falls. But there is often a scarcity of light, when lowering clouds loom above us for days and no rain comes. a city of endless gloomy day. But we have time. Sit down here, on the wall. Smoke a pipe with us, and drink a glass of tea." and it just sort draws you in. it's not my favorite sort of thing to read, i like short stories, but i'm not really a fan of excerpts, no matter what the unifying theme of the excerpts is.

74. miss wyoming by douglas coupland. douglas coupland still rocks my world. somehow, i feel like i was supposed to stop liking him, probably right around shampoo planet. i'm not sure of the chronology of his writing, i know i read at least microserfs and generation x back in highschool (maybe), but i then abandoned him for a number of years. and then i came back. there's a passage from eleanor rigby i keep meaning to talk about in my journal, but i never remember when i'm anywhere near the book. but regardless of whether or not i was supposed to stop liking him in order to stay on some cutting edge of cool (an apparently, the phrase the cutting edge of cool applied to myself makes me snarf tea, even when i typed it originally, and i'm the one spellchecking it) i like the way these two narratives twine around each other, i like the supporting characters, i like that the project of attempting to recreate yourself from scratch doesn't work.

75. The Miracle Palace by Heidi Julavits. I want to like first novels. anyone's first novel, really. and this one had a blurb by amy tan. and i know blurbs don't mean much, but sometimes i buy books wihtout really knowing why i'm buying them, and this was one of them, and looking back, i think it really was that the book had pictures of minerals on the front cover, and the fact it was a first novel by a female author, i wanted to. but it was all oooo scandal, oooo baby, oooo infidelity. i was relieved when the book finally hit its climax, because it was finally over. the terrible secret seemed sort of tawdry, and a little obvious.

i also read four tamora pierce books, but those don't count.
and more notable, i've finally gotten all of the books in my unread bookshelf in the bookshelf itself, as opposed the bookshelf full up and books on top of it as well. and i've started to segregate the books i know i'll never read (a collection of faulkner shorts, wind done gone david foster wallace's first book, etc.)