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

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.