So it’s a re read, but the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
It fills me with such a longing.
My heart just wants to cross those iron gates, wander past the bonfire and along those monochrome paths. To find the tents that haven’t been found to drift on the clouds, see the stars and chase the dreams.
I wish it wasn’t fiction!
I’ve had the pleasure of attending Cirque du Soleil, it has elements of the Night Circus, but it lacks the adventure and the true wonder of the Night Circus. It’s a spectacle for sure, and possibly the closest thing irl, for now… Gods I want to visit the Le Cirque des Rêves!
I haven’t been getting any reading done since starting my new job.
My brain has been so fried after eight hours of trying to update and balance checking accounts that when I get home all I want to do is watch/listen to mindless blather on YouTube.
Sadly this is my life too. I only recently had significant time to read because I got moved to a project where several days can pass with no action. That is, unfortunately, soon to come to an end…
I got stuck on Project: Hail Mary. Not to be negative, but while I loved the story, the dialogue and broad characterizations just didn’t inspire me to keep coming back to finish it, so I’m moving on to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue per many recommendations here.
Then, I think I want to read The Last Thing He Told Me because I haven’t read a non-supernatural thriller since, I think, Gone Girl or maybe The Girl on The Train? I’ve been craving a fun, easy, airport book (no judgment, I love a lot of them.)
But does anyone else wish for supernatural shenanigans in books like these, knowing it’s not going to happen?
Like, I always want one of these straight, by-the-book thrillers to suddenly veer into full on cosmic horror or something, but know that isn’t a very mainstream thing to do.
I think it’s why I love the movie Hereditary so much. On the outside, it is a dark, brooding drama about a family dealing with horrific tragedy, and then boom! NOT. THAT. It’s one of the most effective horror movies I’ve seen in years. Anyway, I digress.
I’ve been reading a lot of rancher bodice-rippers lately, a taste I inherited from my mother. Just some fluff for the brain since work has been more draining than normal, especially with the heat wave.
I’m a sucker for a silly romance. Most of them do a pretty good job of writing farm and ranch life, especially since it’s just set dressing, but it’s fun to pick out the details that show the author probably never lived on one!
Oh I’m love them too, my enjoyment of a good cheap romance knows no genre bounds. I got hooked on the Mercy Thompson books as a teenager despite reading them terribly out of order. The Innkeeper Chronicles is a good sci-fi one with werewolves and vampires and some interesting worldbuilding!
Have you tried the Magical Rom Com with a body count series? That was my recent conquer of paranormal romance genre and I loved them, they were great, she’s slowly adding to them as well.
Okay I know I’m SO late to the game but I just finished Circe and HAD to come here and squeal about it!!!
It was so good. Absolutely one of the best books I’ve read this year, possibly ever. I read it too fast and now I’m having withdrawal. Thinking Song of Achilles might have to be next on my library list???
Vampire romances are my guilty pleasure. Not into twilight so much, but more the combination of romance and body horror is fun to read. Would I reccomend most of them? Absolutely not, but I’ll read them all anyway.
Omg omg omg!!! So I’ve been looking for this book on and off for the last 10 or so years! I first came across it when I was like 11-12 but unfortunately the last page of the book had been torn out which had all the character stats on it (so I improvised as much as possible but was back in a day before I had access to the internet and could find out how to play the book properly) I had subscribed to a few forums that deal with these style of old adventure/ game books and this finally popped up on it and I recognised the cover instantly!!! Book ordered and will be here in 7-21 days
Anyone else a fan of 80’s adventure/ game books?
Uffda, it’s been a minute since I posted here. I wanted to post though because I finally got through The Silver Chair and now only have The Last Battle left in my read-through of The Chronicles of Narnia (sorry fans of the publishing date order I’m just used to the chronological order). I was stuck for a long time on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader because it just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe it’s my inability to travel because of the pandemic or I’m a bad Weatherwatch, but the sea journey itself wasn’t super interesting to me, so it took me a really long while to get through it.
While The Silver Chair still had plenty of journeying, I enjoyed it a lot more overall (though I continue to be shocked about how nonchalantly C.S. Lewis just ends his books). It’s certainly not a perfect book and I’m not sure it’s the best of the seven, but it definitely feels like the most “traditionally” fantasy of all the books (except for maybe The Horse and His Boy which has its own problems). I sometimes get frustrated with the Narnia books because their plots sometimes feel very rushed and crowded: they’re very much “this happened, then this complication, then this issue,” but at the end of almost every chapter, the problem is solved only for the next to arise. Dawn Treader is like this especially, but I think each of the books has parts where that feels like the case. I think The Silver Chair is a bit better about this and there are moments for the characters to reflect (as well as cool references to The Horse and His Boy which was the next book to be published) which I appreciated. I don’t think those moments of pause and reflection exist in a lot of children’s fiction books in general.
I only make that claim because I also had the chance to reread The Wizard of Oz recently and it had a similar “action, action, action” style of plot as a lot of the Narnia books do. Oz has a lot of different aims: Frank L. Baum literally wanted his book to be the first of a new type of “fairytale” that was devoid of any sort of lesson and was purely for entertainment which would explain the structure of that first book. I’m not sure if or how much influence Baum’s work might have had on Lewis, but I think their similar plot styles are an interesting link despite how much meaning Lewis tried to put in his work compared to Baum.
I might be completely off, though Have any of you recently revisited childhood favorites (that were actually made for children)? How have you reacted to the stories they tell and the way they tell them compared to when you were younger?
I recently went back through the Taran Wanderer series. I definitely saw the similarities to other fantasy books by other authors, such as Lord of the Rings, which I hadn’t read yet the first time I read Taran. I also saw and understood the characters better/differently from my adult perspective vs when I read the series as a child.
I have the boxed set of Narnia books; I’ll have to reread them at some point.
In the meantime, I’m burrowing into Michael Crichton’s Timeline.
I recently read one of my comfort reads - Before Midnight, from a fairy tale retelling series called Once Upon A Time. This one (which I’m sure you’ve figured) is the Cinderella retelling. Cinderella adaptations are my comfort media and I got this one as a kid as a prize through my library’s summer reading program so like…I’m definitely biased, but I absolutely love this book and it definitely holds up. It’s about 200 mass-market-paperback-sized pages, so it only takes a couple hours to read. I think its main success is that it sort of smooths out some of the more fantastical elements of the fairy tale and humanizes the characters. There’s a subtle magical realism to it, but no one does magic on-page. It also builds off of a particular French version of the story where Cinderella’s dad isn’t dead but is, for some reason, still absent. This version does a really good job of motivating each character so that their behavior is much more believable and fully-formed. But it does also still keep the wonder and some of the fairy tale elements just…balanced.
I’ve read a couple other books in the series - the Little Mermaid one (by a different author) which made some big changes and I didn’t…love, and a retelling of 1001 Nights (by the same author as the Cinderella) which was fine but not exceptionally memorable. Now, I also didn’t read these until this last year, when I was on the hunt for some comfort reads, so there was no nostalgia factor like I have with the other one. I have a couple other books from the series picked out to try - they’re not super easy to find…I don’t think my library carries them…but they come up on Thrift Books every once and a while (it doesn’t help that I’m picky and really want the original illustrated covers and not the cheap-looking photo covers)
I’m just used to the chronological order). I was stuck for a long time on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader because it just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe it’s my inability to travel because of the pandemic or I’m a bad Weatherwatch, but the sea journey itself wasn’t super interesting to me, so it took me a really long while to get through it.
Have any of you recently revisited childhood favorites (that were actually made for children)? How have you reacted to the stories they tell and the way they tell them compared to when you were younger?