Harry Potter Page to Screen, by Bob McCabe

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Thistle

Harry-Potter-Page-to-Screen-CoverFour years ago, I read Harry Potter: Film Wizardry, which was about the Harry Potter movie series as it existed by that point (ie not all eight movies). Harry Potter Page to Screen covers some of the same areas as Film Wizardry, but isn’t just an expanded version of the same book. This is a 530+ page, 7+ pound, $75 (!!!) book detailing the entire movie-making process, from casting to special/practical effects to prop and costume creation. Unlike Film Wizardry, it has no extras like stickers and cutouts (boo! my copy of Film Wizardry was actually lost in moving cross country), but has page after page of photos and information. I learned more than I could ever list in a single review, and since it’s holiday season at the moment, I’m just going to leave this as a mini-review of a book I finished in the lazy hours of Christmas afternoon. This is a fabulous read for HP fanatics, like me, and especially worth it if, like me, you get one of those 60% off coupons before you buy it. 😀

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Top Ten Books I Want for Christmas!

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Thistle

Just about every single one of these books should be absolutely obvious from every other Top Ten list I’ve created in the last few months. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I sound like a broken record! Still. I want these!

warbreaker1 – 3. the Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy by Rae Carson – One of my favorite trilogies from this year. Definitely books to own!

4. the British version of Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson – I have the American version. The cover is AWFUL. I have British versions of four other books by Sanderson and I love the artist  who works on them.

5. Fangirl (audiobook!) by Rainbow Rowell – The print book might be okay, but it’s really the audio production that made this book for me. I listened to it in February, and then again in October/November. It was just as good the second time around.

Landlinegrey-1-e1381519474537-300x4416. Landline by Rainbow Rowell – One of my top books of the year and one that touched such a personal note for me in my current life. Definitely need to own this one!

7 – 9. the Raven Cycle books by Maggie Stiefvater – Um, was there any doubt? I would love BOTH print and audio of these…yes, I want two copies of each book…

10. Thinside Out by Josie Spinardi – I can’t get this one from my library. I think it’s ebook only. It’s all about intuitive eating, and I would LOVE to read it! I don’t, however, like to buy books that I haven’t read yet, in case I don’t like them. Gifts are okay though!

Bonus: Any paleo cookbooks. I would LOVE paleo cookbooks. This kind of eating works AMAZINGLY WELL for me, and I’m getting bored of all my current meal rotations…

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

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The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen (audio)

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Thistle

queen of the tearlingRaised in hiding until her nineteenth birthday, Kelsea Raleigh returns to the city to claim her place as queen. In order to avoid spoilers, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’ve heard such good things about this book since it came out. I put the book on hold at my library this summer, and finally received a copy right before the RIP season. By then, I was more interested in my RIPish books, and put off reading this one. (I did try. I didn’t get through the first page, and that worried me a little, as I didn’t know if it was the timing or the book itself.) I grabbed the audiobook when I had the chance, and given my parenthetical worry, decided to try to listen to this one instead of read it in print form.

This time, the book captured my attention immediately. I didn’t know anything about the book going in, and didn’t know what to expect, so there were many surprises. I didn’t expect Kelsea to start making so many abrupt changes in the kingdom, leading to fallout. I had no idea that this book took place in a future version of our world, technology stripped away and magic discovered, rather than an entirely made up universe. These things both surprised and delighted me (I particularly enjoyed the archaic language in talking about the “seven volumes of Rowling” ha!).

In the end, though, the book didn’t make as much of an impression on me as I’d hoped. Honestly, I suspect that this has less to do with the story/writing and more to do with the audio production and the circumstances under which I listened to it.

At first, I enjoyed the performance by narrator Katherine Kellgren. She set the tone perfectly. Right around the first major battle, however, that went a little sour for me. The actions scenes were read a lot louder and higher-pitched than the rest of the book, increasingly so as the scene progressed. I was reminded a bit of the audio performance of Lyra’s part in The Golden Compass, which I really disliked. The difference in action and non-action speaking volume was so great that as I listened, I had to keep adjusting the volume on my headphones up and down every few minutes. Considering I listened to 2/3rds of the book on a flight down to San Antonio, and the last third on a flight back up to the Boston area, this constant volume-fidgeting was really irritating.

Beyond the volume unevenness, there was just the timing. As I said before, I split the listening up between two days, about a week apart. The audiobook is twelve disks long, and the giant chunks of time I spent listening on flights – my own fault – meant that I took in too much of the book in one day, followed by a week without listening, followed by all the rest being too much in one day as well. I imagine I would have liked the book and audio performance better had I spread it out, and not listened to it all on an airplane…

Still, the audio production wasn’t my favorite, and while I do plan to read the next volume of this series, I think I’ll do so in print next time. I really loved many of the characters in the book, plus the very strange future-past-ish setting, and I think this series has potential to become something I really love going forward.

Also: I love that Emma Watson will apparently be playing Kelsea in the movie version. Fantastic choice. I can’t wait to see that!

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Sunday Coffee – New Reads

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Thistle

IMG_8853I’m home! After eight days in San Antonio, I’m back in Newton with my family (I missed my guys so much!). Not taking too much time to blog this morning, but one thing happened while I was gone that I wanted to talk about.

Twice during my visit, I went to bookstores, both new and used. While there, I realized just how out of sync I am with the book world these days. I follow many book blogs that I’ve been following for years, but many of them no longer post so much about books. For a long time, that hasn’t affected my knowledge of what’s come out and what’s around, because the San Antonio library system had a Wowbrary feed, and I could see new acquisitions (with little snippets describing them) every Saturday morning. I kept up that way. The Newton library system doesn’t use Wowbrary or any other feed, and so my source for new info has dried up.

I suppose I could just resubscribe to the San Antonio feeds, as I’ll be back in San Antonio in six months anyway. It was just a shock to come across so many books I’d never even heard of. I took pictures of quite a few of them so I could add them to my “to investigate” shelf on GoodReads now that I’m home. I know I missed tons, though. It’s hard to believe how much I’ve missed just in the last 4-5 months. Even if I wasn’t interested in the books being released, I had at least heard of many of them.

So I have to ask – other than adding new book blogs to my blog reader, how else would y’all recommend I keep up? How do you find out about books these days?

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Top Ten Books of 2014

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Thistle

Well…2014 isn’t finished yet. There’s a possibility that I’ll read another book this year that will edge one of these out. Some years, my very favorite book comes very last of the year! But there’s only two weeks or so left of December, so I’ll go ahead and participate this week anyway. Here are my top ten books of 2014 (excluding rereads) – as of now, at least! I’m sure none of these will come as a surprise.

In order of when I read them:

fangirl1. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell – Not only did I love this one so much that I ended up spending the entire day listening to the audio, but I went back and re-listened to it again nine months later.

2. Cress by Marissa Meyer – Each book in this series gets progressively better. This is by far my favorite so far.

3-5. the Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy by Rae Carson – These books (The Girl of Fire and Thorns, The Crown of Embers, and The Bitter Kingdom) have some of the best world-building I’ve ever come across.

dreams6. Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor – I was so worried going into this one that it would disappoint me. It didn’t. Everything about it blew me away, from the chills at the beginning to the tempered-but-happy end.

7. Landline by Rainbow Rowell – I came across this one at exactly the right moment, when I most desperately needed to read just this.

8-10. the Raven Cycle books by Maggie Stiefvater – Brilliant characterization, friendships, humor, and tension in these three-so-far books (The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, and Blue Lily Lily Blue).

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

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Sunday Coffee – Tagging Fun

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Thistle

IMG_8680I am currently in San Antonio, visiting friends and family on a much-needed personal vacation. I’m currently sipping coffee at my mom’s house in a mug that isn’t mine (pic to the left is from a few days ago), and enjoying the fact that it’s 20-40 degrees warmer than back in the Boston area. There are probably Christmas songs playing, or a Hallmark Christmas movie on in the background. The cats and chickens are vying for my attention.

I am nowhere near a computer to write up a blog post, nor do I want to take time to blog out of the short week I have back home, so I have drafted this in advance and pre-scheduled it to post. (Hopefully it does so. I don’t always have luck with this kind of thing.)

So. Tags. If you look to my sidebar on the right, all the tags I use to mark up my posts are there. This is one thing that, in going back and forth between WordPress and Blogger over the years, I really love about WordPress. Categories and Tags are kept separate. This allows me to indulge my ordered, organizational side with Categories, and my playful, whimsical side with Tags. Some of my Tags are fairly normal (historical, classics, favorite, audio, etc), and then there are the not-as-normal (ie fun things).

I have Tags for each continent/part of the world, instead of a broader “world lit” grouping. Books marked “memorable” are the ones that have stuck around in my head, be that good or bad. I’ve marked all the RIPish books for future reference (RIP-worthy), all the books that made me bawl or pulled me to pieces in some way (shredded me), the books dealing with death and afterlife and religion (divinity), familiar or soft quiet books (comfort), books that revolve in some way around food/eating (food), etc. Tags make up my own personal little narrative, and there are a few that were so much fun to name and use: “dream invader” for those rare books that enter my dreams (positive or not), “circus horror” for the Coraline-type books, “portentous” for those books I could just feel the doom from page one, “WTF moments” for those books that were…um…weird.

This was my favorite part of rebuilding The Zen Leaf from the ground up. Transferring 700+ reviews from a private location one by one? That becomes exhausting really quickly, even as it can be fun to read through old reviews. The tagging added a little levity to the task, and helped me to get it done without feeling too drained by the end!

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Protected: The Retribution of Mara Dyer, by Michelle Hodkin

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Thistle

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Top Ten New-to-me Authors in 2014

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Thistle

This year, 21 of the 36 authors I’ve read have been new-to-me authors. Of those 21, only 6 have really made a distinct impression on me. So while this is supposed to be a top ten list, it’s going to end up being a top six list, because I don’t want to just name four other authors that were only so-so for me.

Top new authors of 2014, in order of when I read them:

1. George R.R. Martin – I finally started the Song of Fire and Ice series in January this year. The first two books blew me away. While I’m not 100% sure I like Martin’s style of characterization (a lot of archetypes), I certainly spent a lot of time mulling over these books and the stories within.

2. Rainbow Rowell – I really had no desire to read Rowell’s work when everyone seemed obsessed with Eleanor & Park last year. Indeed, I still have no desire to read E&P. But last year during NaNoWriMo, Rowell wrote a really fantastic pep talk that revolved around her novel Fangirl, which sounded fantastic. So I read it, and then others (but still not E&P). I’ve grown to really love Rowell through the year, and two of her books are in my top-ten of the year.

3. Rae Carson – Coming across Carson this year was a complete fluke or a master stroke of luck. I was bored last spring, and grabbed a handful of random books off the YA shelves at my local library. One by one, I read the first few pages of these books and decided they weren’t for me. By the time I got to The Girl of Fire and Thorns, the last book in the pile, I didn’t expect much. I was blown away. The writing, the world-building, the characterization…it was all just brilliant! I adored this series and can’t wait to see what Carson comes up with next!

4. Jonathan Stroud – Another random find. Actually, to be honest I have no idea how I came across this author. I listened to the audio of The Screaming Staircase in June, but made no note at the time of how I found the audiobook. I don’t know why I grabbed it or how I came across it, but I’ve been very impressed with both of Stroud’s books I’ve read this year.

5. Edgar Cantero – Everyone was talking about this author and his debut novel, The Supernatural Enhancements, during RIP season this year. I was incredibly impressed with Cantero’s ability to surprise. I didn’t see ANY of the twists coming in this book, and I usually do. Then there was all the mysticism in this book, built from the ground up – incredibly impressive.

6. Maggie Stiefvater – I’ve been raving about Stiefvater for the last three months. It’s no surprise that she’s on here. The best part, though, is that the first time I tried to read one of her books, I gave up only a couple chapters in. Oh how times change. I adore her now, particularly the humor in her stories, and the incredibly detailed and slowly-revealed characterization. Stiefvater creates characters that feel like people instead of characters, and friendships that feel real and solid. I’ve often said that friendship seems to be an oft-neglected part of books – something I noticed only after Brandon Sanderson’s books started blowing me away – and I’m glad to find another author who puts so much emphasis on it.

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

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Sunday Coffee – Reflections on 2013: Reading Slumps

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Thistle

IMG_8675We all know about reading slumps and we all know how awful they are. Sometimes they come when you just don’t feel like reading, and sometimes it’s because you simply can’t find anything good to read. In 2013, for me, it was the latter. The entire year.

It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t read anything good. Of the 75 books I read, I only disliked 9, and a further 14 were just so-so. That leaves 52 – more than 2/3rds of my list – that were good books. Just…none of them were great books. No blow-me-away books. I read a great book – Shadow and Bone – right at the end of 2012, and the next great book I read (other than rereads, which I escaped to at the end of 2013 just to have SOME great books) was A Game of Thrones in Jan 2014.

So my reading memories in 2013 revolve not around the great books I read, and instead around events. The Chopin Manuscript comes to mind when I think about my first 10K in January that year. The Rithmatist makes me think of the weeks Jason and I were reading books aloud to our boys that summer. I remember our cruise when I think of Beautiful Creatures, and associate the giant puzzle I put together that spring with the hours and hours I spent listening to Les Miserables. That year’s RIP was dominated by Gail Carriger, and December was almost all rereads of old favorites.

I didn’t blog (publicly) for most of 2013. In March that year, I moved all my reviews to a private journal and deleted them off GoodReads and any other location they might have been at the time. It was something I needed to do for my mental sanity, and eventually allowed me to fully return to book blogging here at The Zen Leaf. So in a way, 2013 was a really productive and healthy year for me, even if I didn’t have any super fantastic raving kinds of books. And I suppose, it’s helpful that I didn’t have any of those books in a year when I didn’t have a public place to squee about them anyway.

Having said that, I was really thankful to leave that year-long slump behind when 2014 came around. Seriously. Because reading slumps should never last that long. Oy.

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Together Tea, by Marjan Kamali

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Thistle

togetherteaI’m taking a break from my HP rereading to escape into a few quiet, soft comfort books in December. Together Tea was first up on my list.

The back of the book synopsis is a bit misleading, I felt, and the GoodReads synopsis is not much better. When I first heard of this book, a book club member simply said it was about an Iranian-American family where the mother continues to set up potential marital matches for her daughter via spreadsheet. This is, essentially, how the book begins, but from there it delves into much deeper subjects. There’s a lot of cultural and historical exploration, as well as a wonderful look at what it means to be caught between two cultures.

Who knew if it was right or wrong? They had uprooted their lives. The children. She knew by heart Parviz’s speech about freedom and possibility and the future. But she was taking them away from the safety of the extended family. Plucking them out of the life and the world they knew and dropping them somewhere else. Even if their country had turned crazy, it was still their country.

Mina, the daughter and one of the two narrators of the book, moved to America from Iran when she was only ten years old. Her mother, Darya, moved at the same time. Both have different ideas about their Iranian life versus their American life. Neither idea, for either of them, is purely good or purely bad. There is a lot of balance here. An exploration of culture, drastic change, and dual-existence.

In that sense, Together Tea was wonderful. I’ve read a lot about Iran’s history since first coming across Reading Lolita in Tehran years ago. It took me a long time to really understand the nature of and causes behind the Iranian revolution. Every book I’ve read on the subject – fictional and nonfictional – has shown a different aspect of Iran before and after, on the way things changed.

Mina had to relearn the “facts.” She saw that the definitions of things like “history,” “good,” and “bad” shifted depending on who was in power. Mina realized that whoever had access to the dispensing information drew and colored the world.

It’s a theme not uncommon in books about sudden regime changes. This quote brought to mind 1984 and the shifting news sources in Orwell’s world. Very powerful.

My only real qualm with the book is that the narrative from beginning to end felt a little uneven. At the beginning, it seemed to be a sort of wry, lighthearted look at cultural differences and the immigrant experience, as Darya keeps trying to arrange Mina’s life. Then it switches to an in-depth and very serious look at revolution and fear. Then it moves to a sort of identity awakening, and lastly ends up in romance. The shifts aren’t jarring or anything, just a little strange to move from one focus/seriousness to another.

Still, it was a really wonderful book. If I hadn’t been familiar with Iranian history already, this would have been a great place to start learning. The detail was incredibly rich – scents, sounds, tastes, colors…all of it amazing. I swear I was hungry the entire time I was reading! (Middle Eastern food is my absolute favorite in the world!) The scene by the tree in the park…I could feel every bit of the acute fear mixed with longing, so much so that my heart was racing by the end…it was that good.

So yes. This one is definitely worth reading. (And my copy is autographed! Woohoo!)

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