To Light a Candle

Earlier this year I picked up the paperback of the Outstretched Shadow on impulse. I was still working at Wal-Mart and didn't have as much time on my hands as I do now, but I had the itch of needing to expand my brain beyond the dullness. I didn't immediately launch into the book, it wasn't very different at first from any other juvenile hero fantasy. Until I noticed the emphasis on the character's emotional state of mind.

I have a complaint about generic fiction. Too many people paint teenagers as serious young capable adults with just enough moodiness to paint them being immature. It lacks the genuine flavor though. I have found the standard in this book. Reluctant but desperate hero? I think most fantasy readers could easily identify with Kellen Travadon. I finished the book in less than three days after I hit the fifth chapter.

I have found that To Light a Candle has not lost the flavor that brought enjoyment to the Outstretched Shadow. I'll post a full review as soon as I'm done, which should be soon since a lot of these library books are due next weekend and I'd rather drop them all off on my way to the office on Wednesday.

Fresh Ink

This will be a long on-going effort.

I want every child to have the opportunity to love reading- instead of hating it because its something your teacher assigns you to do in school. I've seen too many kids grow up with the mentality that reading is in a way associated with punishment since it is reinforced in school with unpleasant things like homework, tests, and essays. We enjoy things we want to do and have an interest in, and these preferences are founded and bolstered at a very young age.

So, to hopefully make posts easier to apply, I will color code book titles as follows:

Ages 4-5	Kindergarten - First Semester 1st Grade	orange
Ages 6-7	Last Semester 1st Grade – 2nd Grade	blue
Ages 8-9	3rd Grade – 4th Grade	green
Ages 10-11	5th Grade – 6th Grade	purple
Pre-teen	7th Grade – 8th Grade	red
Teen	High School	black

I will also try to link to Amazon.com when available. No, I don't think you should buy everything from Amazon, but they make it pretty convenient to get a point across the table.

Less Fatty More Reads

Just finished Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip. Don't let the teen fantasy marking fool you, this is not exactly light reading. I was referred this by my husband- he had read the first book in the trilogy back in the day and brought it up in a conversation. I thought about stopping after the first, it seemed slightly Prydain-ish but somehow unfinished. I'm glad I resolved to finish out the entire trilogy. I won't claim to fully grasp the amount of descriptive imagery that I read, but I finished today feeling highly impressed for the first time in a few weeks.

How Can I Read This Much?

My job- I help people connect to the internet in a business center inside a conference center. I help them make copies, faxes, ship out all their stuff, and help fix all their little problems with their event. So you don't have to. After I do that, after I have all the billing done that is sent to me, I have my own time. Reading the daily comics doesn't fill up all of 7-11 hours that easily. I haven't gotten back around to sketching again, the people interrupt me and make me uneasy to expose that level of creativity to strangers who will forget about what they saw an hour forward.

I feel very happy to be digesting books with my lunch again. Some days are so busy I can only look longingly at my bookbag. Days like today I'm working on my second novel. My desire to devour is bolstered now by my need to codify THE list of books I want to give to my nephews to grow up on. Feels like I'm back at the university.

The past two, no.. three years have been too full to fit in any banquet sized reading as I was accustomed. From the time I was six to nineteen, I would wake and read as I got ready for school go to school and read do schoolwork and read and draw eat dinner and read do laundry and read and draw and listen to music. In that order, I had a very messy room for the most part. Lots of books to organize when I ran out of new material. Only for brief periods (brief in the great span of this time) would I stop to watch TV, play video games, socialize. It wasn't until I was 13 and had constant internet access that being online shared equal time with reading and drawing. Ah, how the bookworm blossoms from the chrystalis to emerge as a pretty renaissance gamer geek.

Now its wake up, do dishes, work, read, go home, do dinner and laundry (selective cleaning on 7 hour days), and play WoW until I need to sleep. We do go out when we get tired of WoW, or watch a Netflix movie. We have no TV, but god bless Netflix, we can still watch CSI. I wish we had a projector. But it balances out a bit more than when I was younger and didn't care to socialize.
And cleaner.

Post Recovery:1c

Been on a reading streak myself lately. After I finally finshed the Great Hunt (Robert Jordan, A-rate stuff for originality and character depth) I realized that the library books I had put on reserve were about to come due and needed to be picked up. So I picked them up and read a young adult novel (Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen- C rate for good premise but really slow pacing) for purposes of compare and contrast with another like themed book (Joust by Mercedes Lackey- A rate although it is in a different category of reading than WoT).

It wasn't as easy to get engrossed with after the rich detail and adventure in GH. I was happy to continue to book 3 of the Wheel of Time, Dragon Reborn. I like the series so far, so much better than Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth (More like Swory of Imitation and Poor Mockery), I refuse to rate such blatant plagarism. However the first three or five chapters I have to force myself past with a will in order to go at any smooth pace. I suppose after reading the large amount of fantasy I have lately, a lot of the beginning chapters sound the same at first.
This results in a read taking three days as oppoosed to one and a half or two, highly annoying. I'll spare the space here from any real review- for now.

Three days though, and I look online- I have returned only one book this past week and a half, and another five are in posession, two of which are close to being overdue. Thank god for their account renew button.

I had let my husband que up a couple books he had recommeneded from when he was a kid, since I'm currently obsessed with making a list for my elementary school nephews to grow on and read. Mike Laumer's Plague of Demons, a short scifi story. Now, crucify me if you wish-but something fantastically outrageous and enthralling was produced in 1965 and hasn't been mangled by Hollywood yet.

Crap like War of the Worlds (multiple times!) and Signs get made, and this slips through the cracks. Seriously, I think it is wild that this was penned in the Silver Ages of comics, it really helps define the era. It's a B+ pick, since it has to do with aliens, cybernetics, and brain snatching. Very thrilling.

I was going to contnue with my alteration of WoT, but I want to get those library book knocked out. So today's pulp is Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy. God most teen literature sucks, no wonder more poeple don't read for leisure as adults.

Post Recovery:1d

Goblet of Fire comes out on11/18... Lion Witch and the Wardrobe comes out at Christmas I read all the books out last month once I discovered the Jax Library system is a vast and awe-inspiring entity that I must patronize. I loved Goblet the most after Azkaban... but I hated the latest one out... Pheonix. I got very frustrated with Harry and recalled how unpleasantly stubborn teenagers could be once they got fixated upon what they perceive to be truth.

My husband has me working on the Wheel of Time series now... comparing and contrasting them as we go to the Sword of Truth series.
Terry Goodkind is a hack and a wacko.

oops.. here we go-
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hp&cf=prev&id=1808475609

Wish Greg and IMDB were merged, would make researching movies and finding out when they will be released a lot more convenient.