Once Upon a Bookshelf

To Kill a Mockingbird is my first book for the What’s In A Name Challenge, and is my selection for the “book with an animal in its title” category.

This book spans a couple of years of Scout’s childhood. Taking place in a small Southern town during the Depression, this is both one of the most heartwarming and one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve read. I love this book. I did when I read it for the first (and only until now) time about ten years ago, and I’m so happy that my love for it didn’t die down when I read it again now. I’m also somewhat surprised that so much of the book stuck with me. Even before I saw the play this summer, I could remember a good portion of the book, and it was surprising to realize how little of it I didn’t remember. When a book sticks with you that clearly then you know it’s a wonderful book. Especially when it still brings you tears, still makes you smile and still makes you really think.

The characters in it are so real, and Atticus Finch… what can I say that does justice to Atticus? There should be more people in the world like him, and we should all totally strive to live up to the examples he shows us. Even if he is only a fictional character. Almost every thing that comes out of his mouth is something we could all apply to our own lives.

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.

So happy I reread this, and so happy that it still moved me as much as the first time around.

I think the majority of people have at least an idea of what The Phantom of the Opera is about. It’s been made into countless movies, a musical, etc etc etc. The Paris Opera House in the 19th century is “haunted” by what everyone believes is a ghost, but is really just a disfigured man who has taken to living in the Opera House. The Opera Ghost falls in love with Christine, a soprano who sings at the Opera House, and kidnaps her, resulting in her lover, Raoul, hunting down the Phantom.

I’ve seen the musical, and I saw the movie that was an adaptation of the musical, so I went into this book knowing what to expect in the story. I found that a lot was similar to the main story for the musical. Some of the characters roles, however, had been changed fairly significantly - Madame Giry, for example, in the novel is a concierge who looks after those sitting in the boxes, whereas in the musical she’s a choreographer of the ballet (and in the movie she also saved the Phantom from a circus, and brought him to live at the Opera House). In the movie and musical, Giry is the one to bring Raoul to the Phantom’s house below the Opera House, whereas in the book there’s a completely different character - the Persian - who knew the Phantom from before he established himself at the Opera House.

The Persian was definitely my favourite character in the book. Not only because I hadn’t expected him at all in the book, but partly because his story is the closest we get to learning about the Phantom’s past.

This is my first book for the RIP II Challenge. After reading this book and watching a television special on Ambrose Small (the ghost who haunts the Grand Theatre in London, ON), I’m thinking I may add a book about Small to my RIP list. It would certainly be good follow up to The Phantom - both relating to ghostly stuff in theatres… it might be fun. :)

After my recent readings of gothic novels, I was seriously craving more, so decided to go back to one of the pioneers of the genre, and give Ann Radcliffe a try. This author had not only an influence on the genre in general, but also on some of my favourite authorsd and books. (According to Wikipedia, the list includes Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.)

Julia and Emilia are forced into a hermitage at the Mazzini mansion by their stepmother, so the girls live a very secluded life, while their father, stepmother and brother live in a different residence. The death of an old servant causes the family to move back to the Mazzini mansion. The two girls and their brother are convinced that there’s a ghost in the house, and their father only makes them believe this further.

Of course, now that their stepmother is back, she brings a whole entourage of people with her, and Julia manages to fall in love with a young man from Italy. Just after Julia and said young man confess their love for each other, Julia’s father accepts a proposal for her from a not-so-nice, but oh-so-high-up-on-the-social-scale duke. Julia escapes from the Mazzini mansion the night before her wedding, only to have to keep having to escape capture by her father and the duke, all the while thinking that the man she really loves is dead, and discovering that the ghost that haunts the Mazzini mansion isn’t quite as dead as most ghosts tend to be.

I’m torn about the narration of the book. Parts I loved. I love the language used in older books, and this book was no exception for the most part.

In her way to the church, the gleam of tapers on the walls, and the glimpse which her eye often caught of the friars in their long black habits, descending silently through the narrow winding passages, with the solemn toll of the bell, conspired to kindle imagination, and to impress her heart with sacred awe.

But then when the dialogue would start!

‘O! talk for ever thus!’ sighed Hippolitus. ‘These words are so sweet, so soothing to my soul, that I could listen till I forgot I had a wish beyond them. Yes – Ferdinand, these circumstances are not to be doubted, and conviction opens upon my mind a flow of extacy I never knew till now. O! lead me to her, that I may speak the sentiments which swell my heart.’

It makes me cringe. It’s so over dramatic, and all I can picture in my head is some man in pantaloons waltzing about the room, throwing his hands above his head in a foppish sort of manner.

I’m not sure whether I’ll read more of Radcliffe’s work; this book was predictable, but it was a quick and easy read that I enjoyed when the dialogue wasn’t making me cringe…

This is another one of the books I wanted to read for the From the Stacks challenge. (My second last, hurrah! Am partially through the last one, but won’t get it picked up again until I’m back home in the New Year.)

I don’t know when I bought this book, but it’s been sitting on my shelf for so long that I had forgotten what it was about and why I had bought it in the first place. Nonetheless, I felt guilty that it was sitting there, taunting me because I had never even attemped reading it.

Watership Down is about a group of rabbits. These rabbits leave their home because one of them has a premonition about the destruction that is going to happen to their home, and they go on a journey to find a place to make a new home. While not all of the rabbits get along completely at first, they learn to completely depend on each others strengths in order to get them through the journey and to start a new home.

I will admit to having a very hard time getting through this. I couldn’t relate to any of the rabbits, really felt rather indifferent to most of them, and characters are always what draws me into or repels me from a book. I think if I had read this when I was younger I would have thought it was charming because it was about animals.

As with The Silmarillion, the part that I really enjoyed was the mythology in the book.

I love this story. In all renditions. (Most particularly in the form of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, but we don’t want to get me started on THAT.) And yet, at the same time, this book has not become one of those books I read every Christmas. Maybe one day it’ll be a tradition, but there are currently already 3 other books that I have to read every year at Christmas (Louisa May Alcott’s The Quiet Little Woman, Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express and James Herriot’s The Christmas Day Kitten), and you can only reread so many books at one point in time without getting behind on all those other books that you want to read.

I usually don’t read the forewords and afterwords of books - I usually just want to get right on with the story, but occasionally, if I’ve already read the book a couple of times and want some more in depth knowledge surrounding the book, I will tackle them. This was one of such times, and I have to say that I had no idea that this was one of five Christmas books that Dickens’ wrote. (The others being The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man.) Even though A Christmas Carol is considered his best Christmas book, I’m now curious to read the others, though probably won’t get around to that until next Christmas, what with all the other books I have planned for the next month or so.

This book totally put me more into the Christmas spirit, which, if you were to ask anyone who has encountered me in the past month, is probably the LAST thing I needed. Ah well. On a side note, this is one of two Dickens’ books I had on the go at the same time. I’m also attempting my first Podiobook (an audio book done as a podcast), and for some reason decided to go with A Tale of Two Cities. I’m not sure about my choice of books for my first in podiobook format, wondering if perhaps I should have chosen something a little lighter, but hey! It’s all good fun.