jencat | obviously ten past midnight is a perfect time to start posting....

... but hey, I get to rock up to work a teeny bit later tomorrow, so it's totally rational, to my mind.

It was kinda getting to the point where there's a ridiculously long list of stuff I wanted to write about, so may as well make a start while i'm not remotely sleepy *yawn*

Ok, so I take back most of my Taylor Swift bitching from a couple weeks ago - I bought the album on impulse (not totally unexpected since I do own her first one already) and it has a certain earworm quality that's been stuck in my head ever since. Go figure... No, the lyrics of Love Story still make absolutely no sense (wft is it supposed to be about?! Reincarnation?! too much time spent watching the Baz Luhrman R&J?!) and the American lit part of my degree flinches every time she mentions The Scarlet Letter in the context of a love story (unless you only saw the cringingly odd Demi Moore film version instead of reading the book. They certainly... Hollywoodised that ending..!). Have no clue.

But the rest of the album is nicely comforting, i guess - it's been that long since I bought any of the country-pop stuff I used to live on that it makes a nice change now. And I guess she's got as good a shot as any at making the UK charts with some of the songs on there, cos it's forever since we had any crossovers. Plus You Belong with Me is pretty much Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend with less guitars, and that did pretty well.

Hmmm.. segues, segues... reincarnation! Totally the main plot point in

jo_graham 's Hand of Isis. Which I loved, but not quite as much as its predecessor, Black Ships. This probably had something to do with the fact that the ending of the first book wasn't exactly a foregone conclusion, whilst when the main character is reincarnated as Charmian, Cleopatra's half-sister/handmaiden in the second book, everybody knows how that one ends (clue: there's a snake involved).

Of course, Antony & Cleopatra being one of the few Shakespeares that didn't make it onto my mega-intensive Comedy/Tragedy degree module all those years ago, I didn't realise Charmian was kinda from that as well (although, go figure, my course did include Dryden's All for Love. Those boys really loved Cleopatra et al back then...). All of which led to me standing at the bus stop reading Shakespeare on the DS (I love the 100 Classic Books cartridge for DS. I've used it to check three different things in the past week alone.)

Hand of Isis, though, was written as gorgeously as you'd expect from the author of Black Ships - it's mostly set in a fabulously vivid Alexandria, but the real story is Charmian's family and friends, which just happens to be the story of the last of the ruling Ptolemys. And it all ties backwards into Alexander the Great (more reincarnation!) for the next book, Stealing Fire. And, just for installment #5678 of Why I Love LJ, I could go straight to Jo's LJ the minute I finished and pick her brain about which plot threads would be wrapped up in future books and why we're hopping back to Alexander for the next book...Sometimes the interwebs blow my mind.

(stuff that also blows my mind: www.rescueink.org/about.php . Really very fab.)

Gah. As I'm still getting sniffly even thinking about Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, I won't go on about it right now. But it's horrific, and perfect, and it staggers me that all the best, 'grown up' SF books seem to be stuck somewhere over in YA at the moment. This book... ack. I had to stuff it away in my bag all of a sudden on the bus this morning and take several deep breaths, as I reached a bit that would have had me sobbing like a baby had I not been sitting on a crowded bus at the time. Then I spent the whole day alternately raging at it, and psyching myself up to carry on reading later.
I think I'm loving it kinda fiercely right now.
And, yay for my perfect timing, book 2 comes out in six weeks...
(Also, Manchee is one of the best fictional dogs ever. And the most uncute but heartbreakingly real fictional dog since, ooh, Dean Spanley. Which also made me cry. I'm thinking maybe I should give Marley &Me a miss, as I was sobbing just reading an interview about it last week, ho hum...)

Also: the picture of Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson on the front page of the tabloids today is just breaking my heart as well... The most unstaged, genuinely happy photo you could ask for. And it wasn't the best adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, but I have such a soft spot for her playing Offred.
It's officially the first day of spring now, according to Google, and the news recently has felt a little too full of death for comfort.