I didn't feel like doing anything about the house, or watching tv, and I needed to cook some chicken I had defrosting. I "do up" a stack of breasts at one go, then I don't have to cook for the next few days. I can make chicken salad or BBQ chicken sandwiches, or cut up a breast and put it on salad. Quick and easy meals, that's the goal. I still am using that George Forman grill I got in the spring. So while I am tending that cookin' stuff I put on Bernard Herrmann's Mysterious Island score and sat down at the PC to see what I read in August. It's a shorter list than last month. Only 7 books. Right after the Gregor book I felt I needed to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling. In the original language. My copy of the UK edition had finally come from Amazon UK. They're great, give 'em some money and they send you some books from a whole 'nother country. The ironic thing is I decide I really want to have less books just as the internet opens up the whole world for easy and pain free shopping.
I like the UK books because they are smaller and lighter. That's the only reason. The US editions are by far the nicest books I have seen so far. They get top marks just for the Mary Grandpre covers and illustrations. I do like the back cover to the UK edition of HP7 and there are several publishers that have interesting art on their editions. I particularily like the Ukraine editions from A-ba-ba-ga-la-ma-ga. Here is an interview with the publisher. The nice illustration below is from the A-ba-ba-ga-la-ma-ga version of The Snow Queen. Here's an 2005 article that mentions artist, Vladyslav Yerko, who did the Ukrainian Harry Potter covers, and another about the release of Ukrainian edition of HP and the DH. The Ukrainian title is Harry Potter i Smertelni Relikviyi. Here's a Ukrianian Harry Potter fan club site.
Since I was in no hurry to find out what is going to happen next in Book 7 I went much slower this time and it took until the 10th to finish. Five times longer than the first time. Shows maturity, huh. Comes with age, I guess. A couple of days after finishing the book the first time I went back and read the end of the book again. I read the epilogue a couple more times since. I'm in the camp that really likes the epilogue. Likes it a whole lot.
I was sorting my toys for the garage sale about this time. That was cutting into my reading time. I was also sorting and building some old LEGO sets up in the attic. Sets I had broken apart over the years. For some reason things that belong together often get put into different piles and boxes. There are many reasons for this, but over all, I seem to have some inborn urge to disassemble things that come into my possession. I personally have torn thousands of magazines apart with my bare hands. I saved some of them, tossed the unwanted pages out and stored the clippings in boxes around the house. There were boxes of paper on every floor and in every room but the bathroom. This last winter I tossed out over a thousand pounds of paper. I never did get around to doing anything with that paper. Time to go-go.
Like those magazines, my LEGO sets were pretty much broken down into piles of parts. I just didn't toss much out. These parts were then bagged or boxed by type. Sometimes bags were put into boxes. Like all the vehicle parts being all together. I kept most of the instructions and most of the boxes. Some were still turning up a couple of weeks ago. I want to get rid of some of the LEGO that doesn't go with my wanting to build HP themed stuff. I'm not interested in trains, or city scapes, or space ships and robots. I am interested in HP and buildings. This is a perfect way to tie the two together. I still think I want to build an nice Asian temple of some sort. So now comes the Herculean task of putting all the sets back together. Sometimes I would look for hours for one little LEGO part. I think I must have nearly 200 thousand parts up in the attic. After I sort everything then I might have some idea of the quantity. I am making an inventory of all the sets that I have or have had. I only plan to keep a few sets intact. Those Streetsweepers I mentioned before, some recent Castle sets for the Dragons, and one each of the Harry Potter sets. I put all the HP sets together and made sure I had all the parts. Then I packed most of them into the boxes they came in and stacked those up. Several square feet of HP, which I will keep seperate from the rest of the LEGO I am keeping. I managed to buy a lot of the HP sets at discount prices. Ever heard of BOSCOV's? I hadn't, but they were selling HP sets on the internet a couple of years ago. They had lots of sets on sale and they were cheap. KayBee Toys in the Mall Of America had sets on sale. I bought a bunch there. They went out of business at that location and the toy store that fills the space sucks.
About now Bernard ended his assault of the Mysterious Island and I put on the Earth Girls are Easy soundtrack. There are some great songs on there by Julie Brown: I Like 'em Big and Stupid ( 3 versions), her version of Earth Girls are Easy, the wonderful Brand New Girl and my favorite "Cause I'm A Blond. I like Depeche Mode's Route 66, even though I am not a fan of the band for the most part. They came in on the end of the period of my life where I cared about bands. After getting too many cd's with one good song, the remainder a crapfest, I stopped buying CD's by bands and started focusing on scores and soundtracks. They yield a much greater ratio of good tracks per disc. Often the whole CD is enjoyable to listen too. I normally prefer scores to soundtracks and don't buy many of the latter. I'm usually not interested in most of the bands. But this one? It's fun! It's got a nice mix of pop stuff, with a couple of odd things thrown in. There's a wonderfully dark version of that great Quicksilver Messenger Service song Who Do You Love by The Jesus and Mary Chain. You feel like someone might get stabbed in that place. Stabbed real easy and often. I played the original Quickmessenger version over and over when I was younger. I liked that whole Happy Trails album. The movie is great too and by great I mean highly enjoyable for me but some people won't like it. It gets a 4.8 on IMDb and I would rate it higher than that. And who doesn't like that spaceship? A spaceship in a pool and Geena Davis in a bikini. Maybe it's a guy thing.
It took me ten days to read Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook. I liked the book but not as much as the previous ones. It's number ten in the series. Garrett's friend Playmate draws him into a mystery with some sort of "silver elves". Those odd elves have some sort of ray guns and "magical" powers. They have metal ships that can fly. In the sub plot Garrett puts together a business deal with some of his other friends and they build three wheel bikes that are selling like hotcakes to the upper class folks. It's a mix of good and bad for our hero but that's Garrett's lot. One of the silver elves steals the god damn parrot, which makes Garrett almost as happy as when he gets seduced by the two female silver elves. There's more social commentary in the book, for better or worse, as the war vets pour home. They find more trouble than jobs. Still a good read.
I finished the 11th and latest book in the Garret series by Glen Cook in 5 days. Whispering Nickel Idols was the book I was reading the day I had my second garage sale. I finished it and most of another book that saturday. Garrett has some more crap fall into his lap. This time there are some cult guys who come and magically burn people up. At least that's what it looks like. It gets complicated and some people get killed before it gets over. Dangerous times for Garrett. He spends a large part of the book sick from poison. He coulda died. He didn't. He'll be back. The reprinting of the series continues, I think they are up to 5 now. For some reason I don't care for the current bunch of covers to the series. They aren't bad or awful but I'm not clicking with them. That the way it goes.
The book I started while sitting in my garage was Benny and Omar by Eoin Colfer. I am unabashedly happy to plug his books. I like the Artemis Fowl series pretty much to a book and I have liked his stand alone novels. I'd re-read most of them. Benny and Omar is Colfer's first book, from 1998. It's a novel about an Irish kid who goes to live in Tunisia. Dad's job goes there, and so does the family. Benny plans to hate the place and he's got issues and there's some yelling and some running around. He makes friends with Omar, a homeless boy, and that leads to trouble. It's not a greatly happy book, there are hard lessons to learn, but it's still pretty enjoyable. Mostly it sucks to live in Tunisia if you're poor.
Nancy Farmer's The Warm Place was about a giraffe who is kidnapped in Africa by some poachers. She's sold to the San Francisco Zoo. She makes friends with a rat and a chameleon. They escape and head back to Africa. It's an interesting trip. It's a short novel but an interesting one. Full of weird surprises, but not too weird, kinda magical in fact. All of Nancy Farmer's books are different and so far all are enjoyable. I have a couple of them left to read and I see the sequel to The Sea of Trolls out. Waiting for that to turn up at HPB. She's pretty popular, there will be picken's soon enough for me.
I finished off the month with The Hidden Staircase by Carolyn Keene and Footprints Under The Window by Franklin W. Dixon. In the first Nancy Drew helps a couple of old ladies that are being scared out of their house by ghosts. Not only is there a hidden staircase, there's a hidden tunnel too. The Hardy Boys help a chinese guy dress in drag to escape being killed. It's got some pretty un-pc parts that were changed in the 1959 rewrite.
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