Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia

Note to self: Do not start books at midnight, unless they are treatises on physics, or the like.

So, yeah. I started this last night and could not put it down until I finished it. By now, you'd think I would have figured out not to do this to myself, but the books are just so tempting...

I giggled out loud a lot and all in all had a horribly good time reading this. The book never surprised me, but everything was just so nicely done, and the characters and the plot and the style were just madcap and silly enough that it didn't matter at all. While both Kate and Cecelia could have fallen into the stupid-heroine trap of being willful and constantly getting into horrible trouble, they didn't. And I just love the letter format (and was pleased at the end when I guessed which author had written which character correctly).

There's an enchanted chocolate pot, nefarious magician villains, cute guys, various charms, and assorted balls and other such going-ons.

And I loved the voices of Kate and Cecelia.

Is The Grand Tour out? Is it as good?

Now I feel an urge to reread Freedom and Necessity.

Links:
- rilina's review
- sophia_helix's review

Murphy, Austin - How Tough Could It Be?

The author, a sportswriter for Sports Illustrator, decided one day that he was away from home too much, so he and his wife agreed to an experiment -- he'd take over his wife's job for six months while she tried to revive her career.

I don't know. While the book was sort of funny at times, the author mainly just annoyed me with his self-congratulatory tone. The entire book was a vacillation between, wow, it's really hard being a housewife and people should appreciate them more, and wow, look at me, I'm doing such a good job. His wife Laura is generally not in the book much at all, except for times when she drops in and constantly pricks his bubble by reminding him of things that he isn't doing right. And while I can see why he'd be annoyed, most of my sympathy is with Laura.

He sort of gets a feel as to what being a stay-at-home parent is like, but as his wife said, he's still just playing at it... after six months is over, he knows he can have his career back; whereas his wife, who has done this for ten years or so, is stuck with a future of ten more years of it.

And there was his whole spiel on how he's changed and can now see minor household tasks that have to be done, like the overflowing garbage, etc., but I sort of had my doubts as to how long that would last. That seems to be the only real change that the experiment has had, and you certainly don't see him going out and volunteering to do something like that again, or wondering why it's Laura who stays at home all the time instead of him.

Generally I spent the book feeling like I wanted to kick the author.

(no subject)

I think either LJ or Gmail or something is being wonky and not sending me all the comment notifications. The deceptive bit is that they are sending some, so I'm never sure if I'm missing any or not. So if I'm not replying, that's probably why.

We've pretty much got everything moved out of the old place and only knickknacks left to organize (ah, but that's the worst part!). I've been meaning to post my list of Asian readings on history and gender and whatnot, and now that I have all my notes from college shelved where they should be, I can start! Unfortunately, I've also sort of realized that my list is so far from an overview that it's not even funny =(. Mostly it's just a list of my very, very specific interests (aka gender, homosexuality, popular culture and anime/manga).

I'm feeling better emotionally now, although I suspect it's just because I've been completely ignoring the job search thing -- once that starts again, watch everything go downhill rapidly, heh.

Oh, and on a side note that I should have probably attached to the book entries: if anyone else has written reviews of books I've just posted about and wants to link to them in comments or somewhere, I'd be incredibly grateful (this goes for all past and future book entries too). I know some of you have well-organized LJ memories, but some don't, and I never seem to be able to find stuff in LJ memories despite knowing of their existence.