Dangerous Reads I: The Unsatiable Hunger

Last year Junior gave us one rather dangerous book to read as a birthday present.

Julia Child's My Life In France.

Let us take an exerpt:

"The pièce de résistance for the evening was a mammoth galantine de volaille, which took me three days to creat and had been adopted from a recipe in Larousse Gastronomique. First you make a superb buillion - from veal leg, feet and bones - for poaching. Then you debone a nice plump four-pound chicken, and marinate the meat with finely ground pork and veal strips in Cognac and truffles. Then you reform the chicken, stuffing it with a nice row of truffles wrapped in farce and a fresh strip of pork fat, which you hope ends up in the center. You tie up this bundle and poach it in the delicious buillion. Once it is cooked, you let it cool and then decorate it - I used green swirls of blanched leeks, red dots of pimiento, brown-black accents of sliced truffle, and yellow splashes of butter. The whole wasthen covered with beautiful clarified-bouillion jelly."

Goodness!

When we first started reading the book we immediately had to stop after a few chapters, when Julia Child started talking about her arrival in France.

She has this passionate way of writing and describes food with such detail that, if we were not hungry or eating, we would be while reading her book; and if we were eating a meal and reading her book, we would still get hungry because her meals sounds so much better.

Either way, we lose.

Which is why, while we had this book since last year and Junior's waiting on us to finish the book so he can borrow it, we've yet to finish it (and us being able to finish a book relatively fast). It's like, um, having to lick envelopes to seal them, with the adhesive being salty that for every envelope you lick and seal, you have to stop to drink lots of water, and unable to continue for a while.

We really wonder how to finish this book.

Cover Story

Let's take a look between this:

And this:

And finally, this:

Photos are credited to gamebooks.org. We prefer our cover to be number two, where you can see Lone Wolf standing on the pedestal (and not looking scary, waif-thin and unheroic...come on, he's trained for battle, why is he looking so fragile?!).

We can't say we like the cover art for the Lone Wolf books that were distributed in Bolehland (which is cover art three), but we didn't know that there were alternate cover art until we saw the books at an old schoolmate's house. Compared to the ones we've got, we were impressed with the artwork and the fact that they actually drew out the character of Lone Wolf. Turns out, those nice artwork covers were the American release edition (with grayscale map instead of colour maps and, in some cases, abridged) while the ones we got were by the UK publisher showing some artsy perspective of a monster.

It was only after some 15 books that the UK version came out with art depicting Lone Wolf...but a faceless Lone Wolf it was. Perhaps it was so you can stick a photo of your own face in place, since you'd actually be playing the role of Lone Wolf.

While the US cover art were drawn by different illustrators so Lone Wolf looks different from cover to cover (yes, yes even after factoring in age as he goes on to becoming Kai Grand Master).

Recently we were just in Mage Cafe and came across the Legends Of Lone Wolf Omnibus, covering the first two novels based on the gamebooks (hmmm we should check if 'Ward still has most of the novels) and that brought on the nostalgia for the gamebooks. Our collection of the Lone Wolf gamebooks (and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks) were all given away when we shifted, and we've not gotten back to buying those books because, honestly, who actually honestly plays those gamebooks?

We've tried. But at some point or other, we lost track of which section we were supposed to turn to, or died in combat, or died out of nowhere, we went, "Ahfuggedaboutit!" and just read our way through the books.

And now, since we're feeling nostalgic, we feel like playing reading them through again. But we're lazy to do it at Project Aon (which is a cheaper and easier way to play the Lone Wolf gamebooks) and we're rather not keen on buying the books again yet (for collecting purposes).

For Summerlund and the Kai!

More Book Juggling

While we've never really got off the habit of bookjuggling, we'll now thank BookXcess for taking it a step further. Because, just last week we browsed around and came across an audiobook CD of Making Money selling at RM24.90. With audiobook CDs normally costing well over RM100, can you say, 'spontaneous buy'?

Disregard the fact that said copy of Making Money was an abridge version instead of the unabridged version. It's our first Pratchett audiobook and we want to hear how it goes. Years of reading and rereading the Discworld series and we've a certain impression of how the characters sound (as for how the characters look, Paul Kidby has certainly got them spot-on that we cannot think of them any other way!), and we were interested to hear how the narrator would voice the characters.

We already like how the witches were portrayed in the Wryd Sisters cartoon. Not so much how they look, but how they sound.



And how Lord Vetinari was portrayed in The Colour Of Magic movie, to a certain extent.



Anyways we had the CDs converted to mp3 and synced to our iPod, and next thing you know, we're listening to the audiobook while reading another book.

It's possible, due to the fact that we've read Making Money before and was rereading an Eddings book. Familiar material. Not much attention needed to do both except to laugh to the jokes from one book or the other.

Our impression of the audiobook? Plus we're listening now to the unabridged version of Maskerade.

The narrators, as far as we hear, do a good job of narrating, with the pacing is good and the pronunciation clear and understandable. Only that most voice impressions for the main characters and inflections differ from how we would do it (but then again, they are the ones doing the reading and getting money doing it!). We understand, though, and wouldn't really expect the narrators to do an accurate impression of Granny Weatherwax or some of the others. It's good enough that we can distinguish different people, especially during conversations.

Great. Now we've more books to collect!

Ring Fever I

We've always loved what Peter Jackson and team did for Lord Of The Rings. And so came that sometime after the LotR Symphony last year, we got Ring Fever again. It starts with us wanting to reread the book.

Only...last we remember, Uncle Raf borrowed it for his younger sis and we don't think we ever got it back. And we haven't really kept in touch with Uncle Raf. Should check one day whether it's still with her or not...it's a nice copy too, the large book with all three volumes and the front cover showing Gandalf (this book is pre-Peter Jackson's movies!).

All we have with us at the moment is the Silmarillion. Even our The Hobbit is missing, and we think that one is with 'Ward.

So at bookstores we were checking out the books, and sadly it isn't cheap. Paperbacks are around near RM40, while the complete novel costs RM90! The cheaper option was to get them from BookXcess for RM18 each, but we'd have to make do with different cover art (and The Two Towers was a hardback-sized paperback), but given our Silmarillion cover art is the black one with a nice centerpiece (puts us in the mind of stained glass it does), we wanted the collection to have a more uniformed look.

So we've been biding our time, looking about bookstores for decent copies. And sales.

Took us till late February when we finally had our MPH vouchers (some also courtesy of the Chief) and MPH was having some sale (books at 20%!) where every RM50 spent at MPH 1 Utama got us yet another RM5 voucher. Quite a bit of headache and calculations to do to maximize usage of our vouchers on hand, and wanting to use up the vouchers we'd be getting from our purchases tho'.

Still, in the end we were able to walk away happy with the books - gotten them separate with illustrations by Alan Lee! Of course, we had to get two more cheap Penguin classics and a workbook to do so but still...

Marking Our Spot

We're a person of many bookmarks - people who've looked in our books will know this for a fact. All our books (okay, nearly all our books) will carry leather bookmarks, pieces of paper, scribblings, cards, receipts, cash, movie stubs, odd momentos, parking tickets, expired MPH book vouchers, even our Touch 'n Go at one point (when we used to commute - we'll be reading all the way, even as we walked, and when we reached the turnstile we'll slam our book on the Touch 'n Go panel and walk through when it beeped).

Generally the first bookmark our books gain would be the book's receipt. But not all of them have receipts for bookmarks - we don't just buy one book sometimes, and we've gotten a few more books as presents. After that, the books slowly pick up bits and pieces as we buy stuff and the likes - after all, the book acts as a handy wallet when we need to stash stuff away quickly.

Still - we can't say that the miscellenous bookmarks are a permanant fixture for a book. When someone borrows a book from us, we'll scan the book and remove all bookmarks first - cash especially - and transfer them into another book. When we get our books back then we'll reshuffle bookmarks here and there again.

The interesting thing about having so much of these things in our books? We'll pick back up an old book for a reread, come across an old receipt with the actual date we bought the book, the feather we laminated from our college days, even a faded thermal receipt that'll have us wondering about its origins (most of them quite likely to be Starbucks receipts for a Hazelnut Latte). It's sometimes not just a book we're reading, it's also a trip down Memory Lane.

When dad passed us Reader's Digest's 'Select Editions' that he has been getting to read, we come to realise how handy the binded ribbon bookmark was.

And so we decided to experiment with our book wrapping.

First time around, we made use of whatever materials we had on hand, which was Ikea's ISIG paper string...thingy.

We're not sure how functional it was as a bookmark tho'. We have yet to try it out.

Then we found another kind of ribbon, also from Ikea. This one felt much more suitable but the problem we have with this ribbon was that it was paper - which meant it creased rather easily. It sort of hampered our reading because we had to handle the bookmark with care while we read.

What we needed was something similar to that we came across in the Reader's Digest Select Editions. Narrow and made from polyester or something. Happily we found a roll of ribbon that would do in Papier, while shopping for more scrapbook paper for the sis.

Once we finish Saki, we'll be able to put this new bookmark to the test.

There, the evolution of book wrapping. Now with ribbon bookmark! What about in the future - pockets?

Which Witch?

When we were in Bangkok we brought along a book, Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West, for easy reading whenever we're free. Wicked's tells the backstory about the Wicked Witch Of The West before Dorothy 'destroys' her in The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.

It's been decades since we've last read The Wizard Of Oz, and even then it was an abridged copy. So the gist of what we remembered about the story is that Dorothy and her dog Toto gets blown off in a cyclone from Kansas into the Land of Oz, heads to find the Wizard Of Oz to seek help getting back home, makes friends with a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman and a Cowardly Lion on the way, destroys the Wicked Witch Of The West, everyone gets what they want in the end.

Of course there's a fair bit of how that goes, but to know more go read the book.

Well, we were reading Wicked, and the start of the book proved a bit shocking at first. Probably because sex was mentioned all over the place, and our mindset was still on a children's fairytale. Once we'd set our mind on it being more adult (heck we still aren't sure when kids should start reading Arabian Nights then), we took it for canon.

But the starting was rather promising, and the content quite rich, and things got better when the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, started attending Shiz University. After that, the story gets...messy. We had no idea where the story was going. And near the end bit when Dorothy came into the picture Elphaba seemed a bit off her rockers already.

Once we finished Wicked, we decided we had to reread The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz soon to refresh our memory of how the story went. And what better opportunity to read it then when we happened to be at MidValley for lunch alone and forgot to bring a book along. So we hopped into Borders and picked up a copy - the version published by Signet Classics with original illustration by W. W. Denslow. We thought it would be nice to read it with pictures.

Oh what a horrible mistake. It may have been that our perspective of the story had been skewed after reading Wicked. And we didn't like the pictures, so somehow the following images popped up whenever we think of the characters:

The Tin Woodman was a Steel Golem from Heroes Of Might And Magic II.

The Scarecrow was from Batman Begins.

Aslan became the Cowardly Lion. :S

When the Scarecrow was given brains by the Wizard of Oz, he looked even scarier as the Pinhead from Hellraiser!

Not only were the picturing of the characters already skewed, but we certainly have trouble rooting for Dorothy now. Nor can we easily accept that there are wicked witches and good witches. Oh, long gone is our innocence for this classic tale. We wonder just how many others stories may fall prey to parallels like Wicked.

...Still, while we won't be ever watching the Judy Garland version of The Wizard Of Oz, we'll still consider watching the musical of Wicked, if only to add to the confusion of differing storylines.

Experiment Of Wit & Wisdom

OK. So here's the experiment. This book is sitting nicely in Borders knowing, just knowing that we will pick it up, cradle it in our arms and pay for it, bring it home and nurse it till the end of its days.

But we shall resist for now. If it was a new story (like Making Money) then it would have been zip straight into our arms within a second but since it isn't we could afford to take a second and take a closer look at what's the book about.

So, exerpts from all the Discworld novels up till Making Money. A sort of introduction to each book.

But here's what we're gonna do: seeing how we work in a building with a BookXcess bookstore, where with a bit of patience, we would be able to find books that are anywhere up to 50% cheaper, we would like to see how long it'll take till The Wit & Wisdom Of Discworld appears on their shelves, and whether it'll be RM50-something or cheaper compared to the RM89.90 price tag (with no discounts!) we saw in Borders. Oh, and also must be the Doubleday version (although admittedly the US version doesn't differ much).

Damn, that means we've to check the bookstore almost every other day. Not a good thing for a bibliophile to do, surrounded by cheap books. Soon we'll start filling our cubicle with books too. And if our patience snaps and we end up buying the book from Borders, we're sure it'll just show up in BookXcess the following day.

Just our luck, we'd walked into the place and picked up A Spot Of Bother and Moving Pictures paperbacks for RM17.90 each.

Oh, since we're busy pimping them.

BookXcess
L3-57 Amcorp Mall
18, Jalan Persiaran Barat
46050 PJ.
Tel: +603-79560455

We're Gonna Be Rich

Oh, we're 20% richer than expected because we bought some mechanical pencil lead along with it. So that we can get our 20% discount on this RM100 hardback. Yay for Kinokuniya!

Happiness Is...

Getting a new book that puts away all other things, finishing it within the night before sleep, and rereading it again the next day.