Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
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Now, let's get ready for the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of autumn with some fresh deals from Amazon. There's even a little sneak peak of Halloween 2024.
192 years ago today, on January 27, 1832, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pen name: Lewis Carroll) is born. Here's a Spotify playlist I made combining some spoken word tracks with music inspired by Carroll's best-known work, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Artists include Lady Gaga, Franz Ferdinand, Danny Elfman, P!nk, Taylor Swift, Jewel, and Clive Owen. Happy listening!
Host Rob Harvilla begins the episode by talking about how one of Erykah Badu's songs that samples a Kool & The Gang song reminds him of Ron Harper's Basketball Camp. Ron Harper reminds me of the Chicago Bulls, so I said this.
To me, a salient fact about Ron Harper is that he and Toni Kukoč have matching shark tattoos. But that's just me. My thing about Toni Kukoč is, I love him.
P.S. My brother and his family gave me a gift card for the winter holidays. I picked out these books:
One is Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951)-adjacent. The other is a book about British witches written by Juno Dawson, a trans woman, one of America's most-banned authors, and definitely not transphobic.
And now, because I happen to be in between day jobs at the moment, please enjoy the following affiliate audiobook link.
Haw"thorn`, n. Etym: [AS. hagaborn, hæg. See Haw a hedge, and Thorn.]
(Bot.)
Defn: A thorny shrub or tree (the Cratægus oxyacantha), having deeply lobed, shining leaves, small, roselike, fragrant flowers, and a fruit called haw. It is much used in Europe for hedges, and for standards in gardens. The American hawthorn is Cratægus cordata, which has the leaves but little lobed.
“Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade To shepherds” - Shak.
Find the sticker on Redbubble (not an affiliate link)
July 4, 1845: “I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms.”
July 4, 1862: Lewis Carroll writes in his diary, “July 4 (F) Atkinson brought over to my rooms some friends of his, a Mrs. & Miss Peters, of whom I took photographs, & who afterwards looked over my albums & staid to lunch. They then went off to the Museum, & Duckworth & I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the 3 Liddells: we had tea on the bank there, & did not reach Ch. Ch. Again till ¼ past 8, when we took them on to my rooms to see my collection of micro-photographs, & restored them to the Deanery just before 9.”
The little expedition rowing on the Thames with Alice Liddell and her two sisters near Christ Church (Ch. Ch.), Oxford, was the beginning of the author’s inspiration for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
June 16, 1893: According to the Awe-Manac by Jill Badonsky, “On this day in 1893, Cracker Jacks were invented by R.W. Rueckheim."
Friday, June 16, 1995, Sevilla: We took a bus tour of Sevilla, then visited the Spanish pavilion of the American-Iberian Exposition. A Spanish dog attached Courtney’s shoe. Next we visited the Alcazar, a park surrounded by Moorish and Gothic palaces. We saw the Giralda, the bell tower (formerly a minaret) of a cathedral (formerly a mosque) with a giant, revolving sculpture on top, called the Giraldillo.
After that bit of sightseeing we went into a department store. I bought some castanets and a copy of Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas. We had strawberry ice cream. Outside, some street musicians played guitar and sang, and I saw lemons growing on trees that lined the streets.
In the evening, we took a boat cruise down the Guadalquivir River. While the boat was docked along the riverbank, we were entertained by flamenco dancers. Once the boat was in motion, the auditorium became a dance floor and there was a floating disco.
Saturday, June 16, 2007, South Bend: After lunch, a nap, and some writing, Tit and I went to the Chicory Cafè for open mic night. I read a poem, one I wrote for Friends Writing Group. It wasn’t a great poem, but I also got to talk about my books.
Before, I had ordered a decaf with coconut syrup. Afterward, we both got gelato. I picked the tiramasu flavor with crumbled-up ladyfingers in it; very delicious. Tit used the purchase of gelato to flirt with Alison, the joke-telling barista.
The most entertaining performer tonight was a poet who had been in prison and who wrote poems about Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Eve, and the all the great female singers and rappers who inspire him.
Oh, and I saw a streaker in downtown South Bend, running down Michigan Street with his bare ass hanging out.
With 93 episodes on Spotify as of today, you can probably find your favorite classic discussed among the episodes. The first episode is about Macbeth. More recently, Megan and RJ tackled "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
North Carolina writer Carla Pettigrew Hufstedler lives with multiple disabilities, and as a result her podcasting schedule isn't consistent. But no matter, because every new episode is like a shiny new gift to unwrap. She not only keeps listeners updated on her writing, knitting, drawing, and other creative pursuits, but shares ghost stories, synchronicities, folklore, and other subjects that readers and writers of speculative fiction will love. A personal favorite are Carla's Christmas episodes. In 2019, Carla introduced listeners to the tradition of Victorian Christmas ghost stories and read an early Charles Dickens tale that went on to inspire A Christmas Carol.
This is a fun nostalgia trip for Gen Xers like me. (Relevant to my '90s NBA nostalgia zine? Not directly - yet - but maybe one of these days.) Journalist Brian Raftery argued in his book Best. Movie. Year, Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen that this was film history's greatest year. This podcast discusses individual films in detail, with occasional digressions into music and other 1999 topics.
Want to know exactly how Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle is different from the Studio Ghibli movie? Or how closely the movie Clueless mirrors Jane Austen's Emma? The two Margos will not only fill you in on how the written version translated to the big screen but also render their verdict on which one is better. It's not always the book!
Many, many podcasts will deliver a weekly dose of weirdness, but this one holds a special place in my podcast rotation. It's a comedy podcast about everything weird, from conspiracy theories to cryptids to ancient aliens to historical oddities and monsters. This is everything I liked to read about when I was a kid, in podcast form.
“From Here to Eternity is on page 131. I'm pretty sure I read this section before, but I didn't mean as much to me before I finished FHTE…I also learned that the book FHTE beat out when it won the National Book Award was The Catcher in the Rye.
“Catcher in the Rye is a favorite subject of the conspiracy theory bloggers, by the way. See this post at MK Culture, for example, or this post at Pseudo-Occult Media implicating the cartoon ‘Family Guy’ (a cartoon I personally dislike, for the record). The Wikipedia entry on the book mentions that it's been linked to John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon, and Robert John Bardo's shooting of Rebecca Shaeffer.”
The Wikipedia article doesn’t go into any great detail, and for these past three years I haven’t really strongly understood the connection between the book I read as a teen and real-life incidents of violence. Then I stumbled across this video:
In these videos, Joseph Atwill discusses a blog post he’s written about Holden’s relationship with his younger sister and other post called "The Freemason in the Rye." In the articles and subsequently in the video, he attempts to explain how he interprets some of the more cryptic passages in J.D. Salinger’s text.
Who is Joseph Atwill? If you search for Joseph Atwill within Wikipedia, you’ll find two relevant results. One is the entry for “Christ myth theory,” and the other is the entry for Emilia Lanier. Atwill’s 2013 book Caesar’s Messiah is cited as a source for the former. In the latter, he is credited along with John Hudson as having discovered that Emilie Lanier, the first English woman to publish a book of poetry, was possibly the identity of the “Dark Lady” to whom William Shakespeare’s poems were addressed. The citation there is Atwill’s 2014 self-published bookShakespeare’s Secret Messiah.
In the videos, Atwill summarizes his interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye, basically, as follows:
•In the novel, Holden Caulfield (Salinger’s protagonist) mentions being in a secret fraternity.
•Atwill connects that fraternity to the Freemasons because Holden mentions studying the Egyptians (for a test) for 28 days, elements of Freemasonic initiation rituals.
•Holden lying down on Eli’s bed is mentioned three times, which Atwill takes to be a Freemasonic signal.
•The most obvious reason why CITR is connected with various assassinations is that Holden calls his deer-hunting hat a people-shooting hat. Atwill connects the hat with the traditional hoodwink of Freemasonic initiation.
•The titular allusion of CITR is a mishearing of the Robert Burns poem “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” Atwill says a different word ("fuck") is used in the original Robert Burns poem in place of “meet” a body coming through the rye. Thus, it has an explicit sexual connotation. Wikipedia agrees that there is an explicit version:
•Atwill contends passages where the 10-year-old sister, Phoebe, is described as being in states of undress are intended to imply an inappropriate relationship between brother and sister. I suppose it makes sense, then, that Holden was studying the Egyptians, since among ancient Egyptian royalty, brother-sister marriages were common.
•He says the last paragraph of the book is the warning that anyone who tells the secret will be killed. He says Mark Twain put the same warning into the end of Tom Sawyer.
•Boys are supposed to identify with Holden and girls are supposed to identify with Phoebe. Thus, boys are being conditioned to be violent abusers and girls are being conditioned to be victims.
•Atwill’s call to action in this interview is the request for people who have children in the school systems to bring up these issues with the school boards, ultimately to get books that serve as “weaponized anthropology” out of the schools.
Atwill did not invent the term “weaponized anthropology” to describe cultural artifacts intended to have psychological effects upon those who consume them. He refers to a book by David H. Price called Weaponizing Anthropology published in 2011. Price is an anthropology professor whose scholarly works examine the history of the intersection between military intelligence and ethnography/anthropology. Atwill contends that J.D. Salinger worked on military intelligence during World War II.
(There is another university professor/author named David H. Price who is a historian, but they are not the same person.)
If you want to read further into the connection between military intelligence and Mark David Chapman, you can do so with our old friend Visup. (You may remember him from the Buddy Holly human sacrifice conspiracy post.) Atwill’s Freemason article also provides the following link:
But basically, Atwill is saying that CITR is a military experiment explicitly written by Salinger to be morally destructive to U.S. culture.
On a slightly different subject, in one of the videos Atwill calls Lewis Carroll a “Freemasonic monster” and refers to an analysis of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Along with Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, the article discusses the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus.” Atwill contends the poem is about the Biblical book of Revelation (Lewis Carroll was a clergyman, after all) and that Lennon’s song lyrics are about genocide.
So, are the critics right when they want to ban CITR? Should we ban Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass from schools also?
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Freedom by Lynne Gordon-Mündel. $6.99 from Smashwords.com
WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE IS WRONG? What if we have been raised within illusion, within a complex mythology so pervasive, so familiar, so deceptively safe, that it is invisible to most people? The purpose of this book will be to expose some of our myths, thus challenging the ideology that keeps us imprisoned.
Content Warning (CW) for discussion of child abuse. The Bourne Identity
YouTube recommended this video to me the other day.
This video is a bit silly. Mario is essentially just reading an article he found on the (unaffiliated with him) website The Vigilant Citizen. The article is from June 2012, and it includes photos of Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart - separately - in photo shoots from glossy fashion magazines. The article makes reference to MK Ultra, a favorite among conspiracy theorists a.k.a. alternative media sources. (No judgment - remember, I like to examine so-called conspiracy theories through the lens of modern folklore and urban legends.)
Here's how the theory basically goes, according to my understanding:
- During/after the Korean War, the U.S. government saw the American prisoners of war were being manipulated by their North Korean captors to say anti-American things. (This part seems to be factual.)
- As a defense strategy, the U.S. began researching ways in which the human mind can be controlled. The "MK" part stands for "Mind Kontrol." Part of the U.S. government experiments under this program involved giving doses of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, to people without their knowledge or consent. (This part is factual and documented.)
- Although the program was alleged to have ended in the 1970s, it continues today. Actors, musicians, and other popular culture figures undergo mind control experimentation that makes them into Jason Bourne-type "puppets" who can be triggered by their handlers into performing whichever action their handlers want them to take. The process involves taking these people into a secret place where they are abused and tortured until their minds split like people with dissociative disorder. They come out with alternate personalities that don't know what the other personalities are doing. Common triggers include Disney movies, Alice in Wonderland symbolism, and Wizard of Ozsymbolism (This part is speculative.)
Mario is an interesting vlogger. I don't see eye to eye with him on many, many issues. He's anti-feminist, for example, and he doesn't believe in the theory of evolution. I'll never quite understand why a certain segment of the Christian population has to reject the scientific method, but hey, that's just me (and people who believe in a rational universe). But I think he's basically coming from a well-intentioned place, even if his "facts" are intellectually questionable. I say this so you know my intention is not to mock or disrespect him. On a person-to-person level, I kinda like the guy. Like me, he was raised as a Roman Catholic. He's a French Canadian who learned English as a second language.
Ellie Goulding's "Lights"
At this point, I have been exposed to enough YouTube and blog material by The Vigilant Citizen, Mario the Vigilant Christian, and others to be able to "talk the talk" of MK Ultra, as you'll see below. If I were going to pick out a song to use as an example of mind control talk in popular media, that song would be "Lights" by Ellie Goulding.
I know you can interpret the lyrics of just about any song to mean whatever you want them to mean. In college I once wrote a paper about how the lyrics of Hole's song "Violet" could be interpreted as a warning about the dangers of alcohol abuse and another paper on how the Beatles song "I Am the Walrus" was John Lennon's plea for American authors, but especially Edgar Allan Poe, to be taken as seriously by the literary world as classical British authors. I knew those things weren't intended by the songwriters, but at the time I thought it was humorous to tortuously over-interpret things for allegedly comical effect.
So, please take this with a large grain of salt and, perhaps, a rocks margarita.
I hear "Lights" quite often on the station Tit Elingtin and I listen to on our day job as remodeling contractors. We listen to an "easy listening" station, while essentially means Top 40 radio without the rap songs. I liked the way the song sounded before I even listened to all the lyrics. I started to like Ellie Goulding even more when I heard her song "High For This (The Weekend Cover)." Then, of course, she contributed the song "Beating Heart" to the Divergentfilm soundtrack. It was one of my favorite songs for a while.
BUT I can't stand her song "Burn." I just find the very high-pitched section of this song incredibly annoying. Sorry. Even the best musical artists have an occasional fail. Now back to "Lights."
According to SongMeanings.com, which lets anyone add their comments on what they think the song means, the simplest explanation of this song is that it's about Goulding's childhood fear of the dark. She was afraid of the dark, so she had to sleep with a light on in order to feel safe.
Other theories think the song refers to:
- A battle with depression or another mental illness, such as schizophrenia
- Childhood sexual abuse
- An encounter with an extraterrestrial spacecraft and/or Goulding herself being from another planet.
Lyrics
Let's look at the lyrics of "Lights."
I had a way then losing it all on my own I had a heart then but the queen has been overthrown And I'm not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat And I'm not keeping now the strength I need to push me You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone And so I tell myself that I'll be strong And dreaming when they're gone 'Cause they're calling, calling, calling me home Calling, calling, calling home You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone home Voices I play within my head Touch my own skin and hope that I'm still breathing. And I think back to when my brother of my sister slept In an unknown place the only time I feel safe You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone And so I tell myself that I'll be strong And dreaming when they're gone 'Cause they're calling, calling, calling me home Calling, calling, calling home You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone home Light, lights, lights, lights Light, lights, lights, lights (Home, home) Light, lights, lights, lights Light, lights You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone And so I tell myself that I'll be strong And dreaming when they're gone 'Cause they're calling, calling, calling me home Calling, calling, calling home You show the lights that stop me turn to stone You shine it when I'm alone home Home, home Light, lights, lights, lights Light, lights, lights, lights... Writers: Ash Frances Howes, Lorin Ashton, Ellie Goulding, Richard StannardCopyright: Sony/ATV Music Publishing (Uk) Limited, Major 3rd Music Limited, Amorphous Music, Global Talent Publishing Interpretation The first line could refer to a childhood fear of the dark: "I had a way then (when I was a child) of losing it (losing my fear of the dark) all on my own (I simply turned on my night light)."
Creative Commons image by Marple Bridge Photography
The second line, though, seems a little strange in that context. The queen has been overthrown? That fits more with the mental illness theory - the "queen," or rational part of her mind, has been "overthrown" or overwhelmed by the illness. It also makes sense according to the childhood sexual abuse theory: she had a heart then (as a child, before she was abused) but then she learned to shut off her feelings after "the queen was overthrown," which could refer to an adult authority figure, such as her mother, being unable to keep her safe from the abuse. Of course, both mental illness and sexual abuse could be considered part of MK Ultra-type conditioning - a child who is being groomed to be a pop star is abused until her mind splits, and that way she'll be easily controllable.
The chorus starts off with, "You show the lights that stop me turn to stone/You shine it when I'm alone/And so I tell myself that I'll be strong/And dreaming when they're gone." Now this seems to be saying the opposite of what we might expect. The lights were supposed to protect her from fear of the dark, right? So why is saying that the lights "stop me?" This speaks to the alien theory, I suppose: the lights that stop her are the sudden lights from a spacecraft that appear. She is either stopped simply by curiosity, or paralyzed with fear of them, or the extraterrestrial beings have stopped her somehow.
Some theorists, depending on their point of view, would go so far as to claim that aliens are synonymous with demons. They say that when people think they are abducted by aliens, they are really being tormented by fallen angels. If we are going with the MK Ultra theory, then we'd probably say that the handlers who perform the abusive experiments disguise themselves as aliens--or that they're somehow in league with actual aliens, who may or may not be fallen angels.
Creative Commons image by Mingle Media TV
The "I tell myself that I'll be strong" could refer to being strong in the dark when there are no lights - a simple enough explanation, although it doesn't seem to match up with "lights that stop me, turn to stone" line. What does turning to stone mean, anyway? Shutting off one's emotions so that one is as imperturbable as stone, perhaps, which fits with the abuse theory.
"Dreaming when they're gone" seems to fit this theory as well; the child cannot sleep until her abusers are gone. What would "they're" refer to in the context of fear of the dark? Nightmares, perhaps. Maybe she simply means that sleeping in the dark makes her prone to nightmares.
The "calling me home" of the chorus is why some people interpret this song to mean that Goulding herself has come from the star people. The lights call her home? Why, that's her fellow extraterrestrials coming back to claim her. Alternatively, we might say that the lights calling her home are some kind of signal or trigger that her handlers use when it's time for her to "come home" to be reprogrammed. The "reprogramming" process is painful and frightening, and that's why the singer seems to be so scared and depressed.
In the second verse, "Touch my own skin and hope that I'm still breathing" sounds a bit ominous, but fear - including simple childhood fear of the dark - could do that to a person. But then she sings something rather strange: "And I think back to when my brother of my sister slept/In an unknown place(,) the only time I feel safe." The only time she feels safe is when her brother and sister slept in an unknown place - now that seems odd. If a child were simply scared of the dark, wouldn't we expect her to say that she only felt safe when her brother and sister slept in her room with her, or when they were in the house with her - sort of a "safety in numbers" feeling? What is the "unknown place?" Is she saying that she wants her brother and sister to sleep away from where she is, because wherever she is is unsafe, and she wants to keep them safe? That line really makes it seem as if something other than mere darkness frightened her when she was a child.
In short, although this song is supposed to be about using light to ward off fear of the dark, the lyrics actually seem to be suggesting exactly the opposite - that the lights are failing to ward off the fearful thing that the dark brings, whatever that thing may be. But only the songwriters know for sure what they were thinking.
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Freedom by Lynne Gordon-Mündel. $6.99 from Smashwords.com WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE IS WRONG? What if we have been raised within illusion, within a complex mythology so pervasive, so familiar, so deceptively safe, that it is invisible to most people? The purpose of this book will be to expose some of our myths, thus challenging the ideology that keeps us imprisoned.
I haven't had much time for reading or blogging this week. On Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, I had a ton of cleaning to do to the apartment underneath mine, getting it ready to show to a potential renter. I probably spent a total of 12 hours vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, and sorting items to keep or donate to charity - and the guy was a no-show. I'm glad the apartment's clean, but now I'm a day behind on my writing and editing. (Still, I make time to blog.)
Late-summer chaos is contagious, apparently: I popped in to The Vintage Apple and found that the chaos has eaten the weekly Oh How Pinteresting! link-up, which will now be monthly link-up on the first Wednesday of the month, starting September 4. Which is cool with me - I still wanted to show you a thing today.
(You'll see some pre-written Halloween posts pop up on odd Wednesdays in October - just pretend like I knew Oh How Pinteresting! was going to a monthly format and I did them on purpose anyway.)
Here's the thing. Laura Keykens is a self-proclaimed nerdy girl, and she has a Pinterest board of nothing by amigurumi. Said board covers all kinds of subjects knitted in colorful yarn, and many of these subjects overlap with my nerdish obsessions interests. I like this almost as much as Isabelle Disraeli's fictional character ship-fest.
And Harry Potter. (Note to self: you have two Pinterest boards of nothing but Harry Potter, but you've never done a Pinterest post exclusively about The Boy Who Lived. You should do that.)
And even Jane Eyre. Repinning this with the misspellings intact wasn't easy for me, but I persevered.
I personally have no knitting or crocheting skills whatsoever, but I admire the crafty people who do. I don't personally own any amigurumi, either. Somehow, I don't think my husband would appreciate me carrying around a Spiderman doll all the time like I did when I was 3, or going to bed with a stuffed Loki and calling it Tom.
This Stream of Consciousness Sunday's theme is "Pass It On:" what have we passed down to our children and what our parents have passed down to us. Jana wrote about the fear of the dentist she passed down to her youngster. I have the dental anxiety from my own bad dental experience as a 20-year-old, but my anxiety in general is a gift of dubious value from my mom, and she got it from her mom.
I'm nervous a lot. Ask my husband - it drives him crazy. I'm always imagining worst-case scenarios, and it's hard to be happy when you're always anticipating something bad being around the corner. I haven't been happy very much lately - more like just muddling through. It may have something to do with the fact that the prescription I get for my terrible PMS (I would say full-blown PMDD) ran out a little while ago and I haven't refilled it yet. It does seem to make me a slightly happier person at all times of the month.
Right now, things that are hard to tolerate are REALLY hard to tolerate.
Which brings me to a writing update. The husband/co-writer and I are putting the finishing touches on the third book in the Pagan Spirits novel series. Back in July of 2012 (that's how long it's been since I worked on this book), we wrote a really nice romantic scene that takes place at a fairy-haunted graveyard in Scotland, where Zen and Ramesh have gone for their honeymoon.
Not the final draft of the artwork, but it gives you some idea.
We wrote it on our old laptop. Said laptop is now a dead brick. The vast majority of the novel was saved elsewhere, but that one little scene that made the honeymoon chapter so much more interesting and romantic is now just a memory.
I have to rewrite it - and I HATE having to rewrite a lost scene. I know it'll never be as good as the lost one. I have had more than my fair share of anxiety and frustration (mostly frustration!!) over that stupid missing scene. I am not looking forward to the rewrite at all. We attempted to work on it today, but our collaboration devolved into an argument. It's been set aside for a few days until we can work on it without all the high drama and heartbreak.
If you're not a writer, you might not have any idea how hard it is to get your thoughts to cooperate with the scene you intend to write, and how precious the draft is once it's been written. Writing something that reads smoothly and sounds professional is nowhere near is easy as it seems.
But, God willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll have St. James's Day (Pagan Spirits Book Three) back from the proofreader's soon and ready for a late spring debut. I may be just a little burnt out at the moment, especially with erotica and writing sex scenes. I have been doing it since 2006, after all. Maybe I should try writing a children's book for a change of pace.
Which brings us to part 3 of the blog post: a review of The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliver is famous for her books for slightly older readers, particularly Delirium and Pandemonium. There are too many good YA series for me to keep up with these days, so I haven't read those, but I picked up The Spindlers because it was a stand-alone book available for free from Amazon Vine.
The back cover of my ARC compares it to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass and Coraline, but there's really only one scene near the end that really reminded me of Coraline. (For the record, I have only seen the movie of Coraline. I did not read the book.)
It's a fairly dark story, in some ways akin to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, if that couple were a brother and sister and the sister had to go to the Underworld (here simply called Below) to rescue the brother. Like Alice, Liza is a sensible, level-headed girl who finds herself on an adventure with talking animals, strange creatures and homicidal queen. Like Alice, she finds herself equal to the challenge - even when confronted, like Harry Potter, with a 3-headed dog.
Reading this, I had neither the sense that I was reading a wholly derivative retold Greek myth nor the sense that I was reading something wholly original - it falls somewhere in the middle. It touches on the issues of trust, friendship, honesty, the value of siblinghood and how children should treat their parents, but it's not overly didactic. I probably would have enjoyed this as a bedtime story when I was a middle-grade reader.
It's Wednesday, so I'm linking up with Michelle at TheVintageApple for Oh, How Pinteresting. This week's theme is the majestic unicorn. First off, the fiction writers' creed:
Morgan the unicorn was a childhood favorite of mine. My cousin has a daughter named Morgan; I bought this book for her.
Remember Amalthea from The Last Unicorn? It was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid. I found the book, by Peter S. Beagle, in a used book store as an adult and read it, along with Beagle's short story "Lila the Werewolf." Good stuff.
This one's not from The Last Unicorn, but it's still kind of cool.
The unicorn, along with the lion, runs across Alice's path in Through the Looking Glass. There's a poem in which they fight over plum cake.
This one's so fluffy I'm gonna die! I probably blogged this picture before, but it fits the theme. Unicorns come in all shapes and sizes.
You could cover your boo-boos with unicorn bandages.
As Queens Helvetica and Valedictoria could tell you, when a unicorn has two horns, it's a twonicorn.
Happy first day of spring! (Happy first day of autumn if you are in the Southern Hemisphere!) The vernal equinox makes me happy I love the word "equinox" itself - from the Latin for "equal night," meaning equal hours of daylight and night. That's very word-nerd of me...so anyway, let's have some light-hearted, humorous, amusing pins.
No cat is ever too big to get in the box.
Looks like Harry Potter has finally mastered Transfigurations.
This looks like a joke, but it's a real thing: Marvel Comics and Hyperion are planning a line of "chick lit" novels about female Marvel character. First up, She-Hulk and Rogue. I haven't read a comic book since high school, but I'm actually super-excited that the writer of The She-Hulk Diaries is Marta Acosta, because I adore her Casa Dracula series.
Okay, how cute is this little girl in her Wonder Woman outfit?
If you're following me on Tumblr, then you survived yesterday's barrage of Lord Byron posts in honor of the English Romantic poet's January 22nd birthday. New day, new author bombardment.
Sunday the 27th will be the birthday of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll. These images were inspired by his most well-known books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
One of my favorite non-Alice poems by Lewis Carroll is "The Hunting of the Snark." If you haven't read it, you definitely should, 'cause it's hilarious. (Spoiler alert: the snark is a boojum.)
I'm not a usual Waiting on Wednesday blogger, but since it's still early in 2013, I wanted to get down a list of books I'm looking forward to this year. Just yesterday I found out that Dan Brown is releasing a new novel in the Robert Langdon series, to be titled Inferno, on May 14. Yay!
My mom told me if I started The Da Vinci Code I wouldn't be able to put it down, and she was right. I still love that book, Angels and Demons, and (to some extent) The Lost Symbol, and I don't care if you like them or not.
I'm also utterly addicted to J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series - that's my mom's fault, too. I eagerly await Lover at Last, set to come out on March 27.
It will be bittersweet when this series ends, but I've got to read Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris. Amazon says the release date will be May 7th. I wonder if it's too early to put my name on the library waiting list? I never buy the hardcovers in this series - the first ones went straight to the genre paperbacks shelf, and I still contend it was kind of rude (and money-grubbing) of Harris' publisher to start putting them out in the much-more-expensive hardcover first.
...and my mom also got me hooked on Sookie Stackhouse. It was my introduction to paranormal romance, actually.
P.S. How fantastic are the Japanese covers for the Sookie Stackhouse series?!
P.P.S. Doesn't this one look like it might be about Bella Swan and Rosalie Hale?
I love vintage book covers. Now, some pins that are just cool. This is Jack Kerouac in 1944. Kinda sexy (even though he appears to be in some kind of trouble). Is anybody else looking forward to the On the Road movie with Kristen Stewart?
Anybody looking forward to Catching Fire?
This, I feel, is pretty cute. Lewis Carroll's birthday is coming up (January 27th), so I think a full Alice's Adventures in Wonderland post will be called for soon.
(And if it's Thursday, then I'm plotzing*, because it's not only Amazon Vine swag day, but also the library's used book sale AND the Person of Interest Season 2 premiere night! I almost plotzed just typing that!)
This is what I pinned this week. If I had this typewriter pillow, I bet I'd type in my sleep.
This is my fictional boyfriend Pvt. Bob Witt and a pal (Gooch, maybe? Not sure), being AWOL in the South Pacific, chillin' with some Melanesian folks. I watched The Thin Red Line last week, little realizing (at first) that I was far too hormonal to invest feelings in some fictional characters who were about to die. Now that I've read the novel, when Bead dies in Fife's arms, a little part of me dies, too.
I think the translation of that French quote is "A Polynesian garden, or any garden, is a marvelous thing." Je non comprends pas la francais.
OK, je comprends un peu la francais.
It's now officially autumn, which makes it boot season. Still hung up on Rockin' Mama's boot post from last week's hop, I pinned these mirror-heeled babies.
Pulp Shakespeare, with Queen Elizabeth I (possibly, or a similarly-attired Elizabethan courtier) in place of Uma Thurman. Please tell me you remember Pulp Fiction.
Speaking of pulp things, I think Harold Finch needs this (as a poster) for the Library.
October is coming, and with it, Halloween.
Alice in Wonderland cupcakes.
Finally, a little bibbity-bobbity-street art.
*For those of you who did not have the one Yiddish grandmother, "plotzing" means "exploding." My Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) pops up whenever it wants to.
Once upon a time, I used to host a link on this blog to Nibiru Planet X, a conspiracy theory blog. Its author, Ray Austin, contacted me and asked me if I wanted to host a link on my blog in exchange for a link on Nibiru. I put up his link, but I don't think he ever put up mine. But anyway...
What caught my eye about the post mentioned in the link was that it was about Lady Gaga. I'm a fan. Why, only yesterday I was moved to express my support for Mother Monster on Mandy Nicole's blog Pretty Little Endeavors, when Mandy expressed the opinion that she much preferred Madonna to Gaga. But anyway...
I ended up spending a great deal of time reading over MK Culture. Its main premise seems to be that much of pop culture is directly related to, and influenced by, something called Project MKUltra, which a Wikipedia entry defines as "a covert, illegal human research program into behavior modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973." Yeshua contends, however, that it still goes on, and that young pop stars all show signs of having been indoctrinated into a specific mind control program.
Creative Commons
Yeshua has a large number of posts related to Lady Gaga, dating back to 2009. One titled "Just Dance" also makes reference to Madonna, Beyonce, Rihanna, Ciara, Britney Spears, and Janet Jackson, among other pop cultural phenomena. Across several blog posts, Yeshua contends that the on-stage or on-record alternate personalities represented by pop stars (Beyonce's Sasha Fierce, Janet Jackson's Damita Jo, Madonna's Dita) actually represent alternate personalities caused by intentional personality-splitting through ritualistic abuse.
Public domain
It was an odd thing to read - and, like a supermarket tabloid, it was far too odd, disturbing and intriguing to stop reading. Here are a few highlights of the blog, in chronological order:
I notice a lot of these female pop stars are people whose names are already listed in my tags, women I've already blogged about. What does this say about me?
Branching off from Yeshua's blog, I read this intriguing post about the symbolism in The Prestige (the movie that caused me to fall in love with Christian Bale). Then I explored the blog Invoking Mother Spirit (now defunct). Some interesting stuff there, too, such as: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Amy Winehouse all died on the eve of major awards shows. To my chagrin, it didn't actually have much to do with mother spirit. I love my goddess symbolism, not because I belong to the Illuminati (or want to) but because I'm a witch. That's my spirituality.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with any of the theories presented in the posts I read. They were just something that caught my interest today.
Freedom
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