Lately On My Mind...

• Our new bed (arriving tomorrow)
  
• Pandemics
• Senior Smackdown
• Lakes
• Sawyer
• Tommy and Tuppence
• Vacation, Vacation, Vacation

Ahhh...

A walk after work in perfect weather and the sun still shining at 7pm... the faint smell of sage in the air.  I love Colorado.  I love approaching warm weather. 

Book Review: Howl's Moving Castle

Author: Diana Wynne Jones

Originally Published in: 1986

Read in: March and April 2009

Howl's Moving Castle was my first read for the Once Upon a Time III Challenge.  I have been wanting to read this book ever since I first saw the movie version by Miyazaki, which I regard as one of my favorite movies of all time.  Of course, the book was written years before the movie and I wanted to see how the two differ. I found that they differ quite a bit!

Sophie, the main character, lives in the kingdom of Ingary, where magic is commonplace.  Her two sisters are sent away when their father dies and Sophie is left to work in a hat shop along with her stepmother.  After a brief encounter with the wizard Howl (although Sophie doesn't know it is Howl at the time), Sophie meets the Witch of the Waste who places her under a spell that makes her 90 years old (note that she also can not tell anybody about the spell.)  From here, she decides to make a life of her own and ends locating Howl's castle, which is a huge oddly shaped building that moves all over the place and has a magic door that opens to different locations in Ingary. Sophie moves in under the guise of "new cleaning lady."

Sophie meets Calcifer, a fire demon who moves the castle and has a spell cast on him, as well as Howl's apprentice, Michael (Markl in the movie) who falls in love with one of Sophie's sisters. The main demon of the story, both for Howl and Sophie is the Witch of the Waste.  When Sophie falls prey to her, it's up to Howl to save the day.  Basically it's a coming of age story for multiple characters, with a magical twist.

I thought the book was great.  I love Ingary and found most of the characters believable, even in a world of magic.  I'm glad I watched the movie first because the two differ so much (Miyazaki must have used a lot of creative license) and I rather like an alternate way of going about things.  I might get around to reading the sequels eventually.  Diana Wynne Jones seems to be a great writer.

Book Review: Brideshead Revisited

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Originally Published: 1945

Read in: February - April 2009

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was my first read for the 2009 Classics Challenge.  The story is narrated by a man named Charles Ryder.  Charles meets a fellow student named Sebastian Flyte while studying at Oxford.  Sebastian is a fun-loving and needy guy who brings a teddy bear named Aloysius with him everywhere.  The boys form a very close relationship to the point that Sebasitan rescues Charles from his abysmal, yet comical life with his widower father during the summer holiday.  Charles is brought to the family's home called Brideshead, after a first brief visit at Christmas earlier in the year.  There he gets to know Sebastian's very interesting family, whom are all very different personalities and varying degrees of Catholic, something that Charles has never previously considered.

As Charles and Sebastian's schooling progresses, Sebastian begins to find more comfort in alcohol than Charles, to the point where he flees his normal life and travels to Morocco, and then a Tunisian monastery, where he becomes a charity case.  Even Charles can not bring him back, so Charles distances himself from the family.

The above only encompasses the first section of the book, so there are more serious encounters in store for Charles and the Marchmain family.  What I like most about this book is the range of emotions.  There is comedy, drama, love, very vague homosexual undertones, religion, loss, and much more all wrapped up in British formality.  Even though the book took me quite a while to complete, I enjoyed every minute of it.  I plan to read more Waugh, only in the distant future, as I have quite the pile of British literature at my fingertips at the moment.