prezzies received and Howl's Moving Castle and POLL!

[timepiececlock]

donna_c_punk, I just got your packages! ::bounces happily:: I'm going to watch them as soon as winter break begins in two weeks. After which I'll have to pick up a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and read it for comparison.

Last night I bought a copy of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. In a fit of fannishness and procrastination I called all the nearest bookstores to see if they were still open on Sunday night, and when I got it I read it in a few hours.

OMGLOVE!

I'm not sure if I would have loved it with QUITE the extreme that I do if I hadn't watching the Miyazaki film version first, but I probably still would have really enjoyed it. Regardless, I'm glad I watched the movie first. They're quite a bit different, but watching the movie gave me a fantastic visual framework to apply when reading the book. Particularly with regards to the castle. Oddly, the more I read my mental image of Howl changed to accomodate for the book's details, while my mental image of Sophie stayed almost exactly the same. Especially older!Sophie. Calcifer too.

As a result today I went around smiling that "I have a new fandom" smile. My reaction to acquiring a new fandom tends to be kind of mouselike. Happy mouselike. I start browsing fansites and fanfiction, and I get really excitable and really shy all at once. I'm like a mouse who found a large piece of cheese, and now I'm sneaking the cheese across the floor, looking about furtively to see if anyone else knows how decidedly happy and squeeful I'm behaving. There's this secret element to the shyness, which will fade in a day or two (once I start to gush at high volume to anyone nearby), but for now, if someone were to come up and ask me "Why are you smiling and clinging to that cheese so tightly? Tell us, what's your happy news?" I'd let out a squeak and rush into the hole in the wall deskchair, gathering and hording my bits of fanfiction and book and AMVs cheese around me and smiling and chattering my teeth at the air, like Gus Gus on crack.

This is only the second book of hers I've read, I think. Well, probably the third. I read So You Want To Be A Wizard in either elementry or middle school. I'm pretty sure I read a fantasy young adult book called "Seven League Boots" that's about the same sort of thing as the boots mentioned in HMC, but amazon.com doesn't list a book of that title under Jones's name.

Anyway, it's poll day!

[Poll #622062]

Comments

[memlu.livejournal.com]

I would have recced Hexwood, but it suffers from something I think a lot of Diana Wynne Jones' books suffer from: excellent ideas, fantastic writing, and then in the last fifth of the book (in Hexwood's case, the last 100-200 pages) everything goes to pot. The ending of Hexwood is far too pat and it goes from brilliant writing and ideas to a bit of a letdown -- a ton of potential, but not enough filling it out.

As for the movie -- well, I look at it as something of an alternate universe. (I know I don't visualize anyone in the book as how they were in the movie.) That said? I think it's a wonderful movie, and d00d, I'll take my How(el)l/Sophie where I can get it. *g*

[zebeckras.livejournal.com]

I did rec Hexwood, though I sort of agree with you - both that Hexwood does just sort of trail off, and that a lot of her books have that same problem. But I love the rest of the book so much I had to rec it anyway, and I wouldn't really say it's the last 100-200 pages of the book that fall off - more the last, hmm, 50? Though it's been a few years since I reread it, so I could be WAY off. ^_~

I still don't picture anyone in HMC to look the way they do in the movie, either, though I IMMENSELY appreciate the design for the castle. I also miss the Howell aspect. But! Just a straight adaptation would probably not have been nearly as fun and involved, so I quite loved the movie.

[saxon-dogs.livejournal.com]

Well, Castle in the Sky is the sequel to HMC, but one of my personal DWJ favorites is Eight Days of Luke. For something a little more epic, you might want to try The Dalemark Quartet.

[catystorm.livejournal.com]

I still haven't finished Castle in the Sky, it just hasn't caught me at all. It's not a long book (just like Howl's), but... I just can't get interested in it. Dunno why. It seems...dry.

I haven't read anything else by this author, though, so I can't recommend anything else. ^^;

*too lazy to switch out of my RP account*

[sheep-gotohell.livejournal.com]

Hi, this is Kawcrow.

...Diana Wynne Jones didn't write SYWTBAW, Diane Duane did. They're both two of my favorite authors.

DWJ recs:
The Dark Lord of Derholm and The Year of the Griffin: YES YES YES YES. TDLoD is the first, TYotG is its sequel; Dark Lord parodies high fantasy adventure stories, Griffin parodies fluffy college/academia stories, and they are both AWESOME. They're mostly about a family of wizards with two human parents, two human children, and four griffin children, and the matter-of-fact way in which the interspecies family IS a family is fantastic and sweet.
Chronicles of Chrestomanci: 4 books, nowadays usually sold in 2 paperback volumes 1 & 2.
Castle in the Air: The little-known sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. Most people I've talked to have either loved it or been severely disappointed by it. It's best if you go into reading it thinking of it as a completely separate book from Howl, not really a sequel, just a book set in the same universe, because the Howl cast only pops in for an extended cameo, anyway. That way you can enjoy the new characters in their own right, and then you can be pleasantly surprised when the Howl people finally show up.
Dogsbody: A star accused of murder is reincarnated as a dog and must prove his innocence despite being, well, a dog. One of the best girl-and-her-dog stories ever, and Jones will rip your heart out in her brisk matter-of-fact way.

Book to avoid at all costs: The Time of the Ghost, which made me throw it against the wall.

Re: *too lazy to switch out of my RP account*

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

Diana Wynne Jones didn't write SYWTBAW, Diane Duane did.

Aahhh. Well, I can imagine why I confused them. Thanks for clearing it up.

Yummy recs! I'll definitely keep these in mind when I raid the loca library over break.

In terms of style the HMC reminded me a lot of The Conjurer Princess and its companion book The Changeling Prince by Vivian Vande Velde, though those are both somewhat darker than HMC. I'm actually not sure which one is intended to be read first-- I read Conjurer Princess first and then later read Changeling Prince, only to realize part of the way through that I was reading the backstory of one of the characters that appears in the second half of Conjurer Princess. I think it was okay that way though-- The Changeling Prince was good (and certainly the most creative take on a werewolf story I'd read) but I'm not sure I'd have liked it as much if I'd read it first.

[donna-c-punk.livejournal.com]

I still need to read Monte Cristo. I had a bookmark of the entire novel available to read online. sir_hellsing told me a lot of the changes between the novel and the anime, whose characters had changed, whose were expanded (apparently, in the novel, Franz is nearly non-existent as a character), etc. Hope you enjoy the series, though!

[byakugan.livejournal.com]

Oh god THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME SOMEONE WHO'S READ HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE!! I loved that book so much. I'm desperate to see the movie, but I have no way to til it comes out. (In friggin' March!! Bastards.)

But yay, sharing the love!