Consider our fight begun

Having seen and fallen in love with the movie, I picked up the firs two books of the Scott Pilgrim series. I tore through them both super quickly. The art has that distinct manga feel, yet I feel less embarrassed to be reading these as opposed to my old Sailor Moons.

"Okay, this might sound vague, but do you know this one girl with hair like this?" 

Scott is twenty-something, no job, in a band, living in a shitty apartment with his gay friend, Wallace. Also he is dating a high schooler. But then he falls for Ramona Flowers.

Getting his shit together enough to date Ramona is one thing, but she comes with her own baggage. Seven evil exes that Scott must defeat in order to be with her.

"this song is for the guy who keeps yelling from the balcony, and it's called 'we hate you, please die." 

The book goes into much more detail than the movies and includes fun things like guitar tabs for Sex Bob-Omb songs and a recipe for vegan shepard pie.

I think this comic is extremely well put together and I cannot wait to read the rest of them.

Also, hey I am back again. Guess i just don't know how to quit this blog. More updates to come!

Wisdom has no need of violence

That's right. I finally finished War and Peace, this master work by my man, Leo Tolstoy. Having read and loved Anna Karenina, I was excited about reading this book that seems to sit atop best classical book lists, daring anyone to actually read it. 

"The solitude exhausted her, tormented her; but it was necessary for her."

This book is dense and complicated and at times annoying and at other times beautiful. I love Tolstoy when he is showing the characters interacting with each other and their world and I want to smack him when he is rambling about grand ideas all on his own. 

War and Peace is about Napoleon's was in Europe that Russia got involved in and Napoleon's subsequential war on Russia, which did not end so well for him. 

"Such is the inevitable fate of all men of action, and the higher they stand in the human hierarchy, the less free they are."

There are basically two families that we follow, the Rostovs and the Bolloskys and those that are their friends, foes, and acquaintances. The Rostovs have four children, Vera (who I forgot all about until I looked at my notes, Nikolia, Natasha, and Petya and one rather mopey cousin, Sonya. Nikolia and Petya end up serving in the wars while Natasha and Sonya are more focused on battles of the heart.

"Natasha fell in love from the moment she entered the ball room. She was not in love with anyone in particular but with everyone. She fell in love with whomever she looked at, the moment she looked at him."

Andrei Bollonsky and his sister Marya are much richer and while Andrei begins married, he later becomes involved with the beautiful Natasha. Andrei also serves in the war and is determined to distinguish himself as a great hero for Russia. He goes through much spiritual and emotional change throughout the novel, and never seems to die until you want him to finally live.

"Nothing, nothing is certain, except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something incomprehensible but most important."

Also running around Russia is Pierre, the bastard son of a count who is adopted and made extremely rich. He marries a horrible woman and joins the Free Masons in his quest to find spiritual peace. While he does not serve in the army, Pierre is present at the burning of Moscow and is taken prisoner by the French.

"They could not believe it, because they alone knew what their life was for them and thereafter did not understand or believe it could be taken from them."

My main beef with this novel was the points when Tolstoy would tell me repeatedly that history is not made by the choices of great men, or any man, that free will is a bunch of bunk and that power and authority are abstract ideas. This mostly came about in the second part of the epilogue (of course the epilogue had multiple parts) where we leave the story completely and do not pick it up again. I thought that Tolstoy said everything he needed to say in the novel, and at the end was just beating me over the head with it. Perhaps this was necessary when it was originally published, but these ideas are not new to me and I did not enjoy reading twenty pages of them. It was a lot like reading John Galt's gigantic speech in Atlas Shrugged - get to the point!

"If everyone made war only according to his own convictions, there would be no war."

That being said, this novel is great for a reason. I loved Natasha, Pierre, the Rostov parents and even, at times, Marya. I loved all the little details about their lives and how the wars changed so many things for them. He does a great job of illustrating how orders given in war time matter much less than the thoughts of those who are actually in the action (and does so without preaching when focused on the actual characters).

Worth reading. I'm glad that I did and I am looking forward to reading more classics in this coming year. But first I have to finish my book about superheroes.

You've become The Vegan Freak

Having recently made up my mind to become a full-fledged vegan, I have been scouring cookbooks and other vegan guide books. This little one caught my eye at the local library and I devoured it very quickly.

Vegan Freak is written by a married couple that are laid-back and not afraid to drop an eff-bomb.They mostly handle advice on how to respond to questions and attacks one might receive as a vegan, such as where do you get your protein? (I have already gotten this question several times - a few from vegetarians) and what on earth do you eat?

I really, really enjoyed this book and found reassurance that my little family and I are making the right choice. This book is funny and smart, and gives lots and lots of sources for further learning on specific subjects (like vegan pet-food!). They give a brief overview of everything from animal rights to vegan sex toys. 

To sum up their advice, do what you can to be happy and healthy since, like it or not you are a poster-child for all vegans. And try not to be a douche because that will not convince anyone. 

Bob and Jenna Torres run veganfreak.com which has an interesting blog and lots of links to related websites and sources. 

Note: I've posted this over at my vegan themed blog (girlveggie) with a bonus Taft the cat story if you are interested. 

Something more solid than love

First of all sorry for the long time between my last post and this. I moved and am now in Ohio, and am trying to get used to sharing a computer with someone else since mine crapped out on me.

I have not read a lot of French fiction and as this one is pretty famous I gave it  a whirl.

Charles Bovary is an ordinary man who is a doctor of no real skill and has no real big dreams. After the death of his first wife (whom he married basically for her money) he marries Emma. Madame Bovary spends her time trying to be in love with Charles, but feels as if love has fallen so short of what she expected from reading. She wants passion and never ending poetry in life, while Charles would be happy with just a good dinner and a pipe. In order to keep herself from going crazy, Emma throws herself into reading all about Paris and the society there, buying the popular clothes, furnishings and foods that Parisians buy.

"But she, her life was chill as an attic with a northern skylight, and ennui, the silent spider, spun its web in the shadow in every corner of her heart."

She has flashes of romances that burst into her heart and fade away, only to be brought back to flame by the next gentleman who smiles at her and seems to be more in-tuned to emotions than her husband. Nothing comes of these romances at first and Emma has a child with her husband who she is not interested in at all.

"It was the first time that Emma had such things said to her, and her pride, like one reclining in a vapour-bath, stretched itself out languidly, yielding itself wholly to the fervor of the speech."

She falls in love, or at least thinks she does with a man who seems to genuinely care for her, but does not act upon those feelings. However, he leaves and she falls prey to a gentleman who uses her and plays all kinds of games on her emotions. He promises to run away with her, but then doesn't because ew, commitment.

"She was the sweetheart of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books."

She falls ill, and her inept husband fails to see what her real problem is and falls into deeper debt trying to buy things to please her. In the end, like most women characters who have a book named after them, she ends her life.The real sad thing about it though is that her poor daughter has just a shit life because of this woman's selfishness.

I don't know about this book. I felt like I was reading about a modern housewife who religiously reads US Weekly and buys the same Prada bag that Angelina Jolie has while ignoring her mounting credit card bills. I was disappointed that she didn't get more comeuppance and never seemed to learn anything, but I kept reading until the end.



In other news, I am almost 800 pages through War and Peace! Also I am reading a couple of other little books because I can't seem to limit myself to just one.

I passed out on a park bench

I am a big fan of Julia Wertz. She won me over with The Fart Party volumes one and two and delighted me with I Saw You, an anthology of comics based on craigslist missed connections. So when I happened upon Drinking at the Movies at B&N, I grabbed it and didn't let go.

Wertz's website is updated often, but most of the comics included are ones I have never seen. They capture the uncertainty of living in your twenties and having a lack of real goals and ambitions and insurance. I find this lady totally relateable, probably because she seems to love drinking in the bathtub as much as I do.

Check out fartparty.org and check this lady out.

Real or not real?

Having read and loved The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I had to pick up Mockingjay. After waiting on the library wait list, I finally got my copy and tore through it. Collins great skill is her ability to end a chapter while leaving me dying to know what happens next, which led to a great deal of me staying up well past my bed time to finish the book. 

"If we burn you burn with us."

If you haven't read the other two books, I highly suggest you do so. They create a distopian world where the US has been destroyed and rebuilt as districts, each serving the Capital in come capacity. Katniss Everdeen is from District 12 and is a participant of the Hunger Games. These are fights to the death among two children from each district. Katniss sparks the flame of revolution, albeit involuntarily, and in Mockingjay, she is the figure-head for the rebellion.

Those who have not read these book beware of spoilers.

Katniss gets involved in the politics of District 13, which is eerily similar to the Capital. She is subject to TV spots and promotional shots and kept in the dark about what exactly she is standing for. Peeta is still captured in the Capital and she is desperate to save him in order to reconcile her feelings between him and Gale. She is as much a captive in District 13 as she was in the Capital and sees the hidden torture methods that are used.

"I'm sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really its mostly for their own good."

Finally Katniss is forced to go into the heart of the Capital on her quest to kill President Snow. She and her companions face horrible threats similar to those in the Hunger Games and frankly many of the characters die violent deaths that are still freaking me out.

Some of the imagery in this book is truly frightening. To picture tons of children being bombed and then set on fire is horrific. The lizard-creatures eating people are also disgusting. However, I liked how Collins took some of the things we read in the first book and twisted them. Katniss was the girl on fire. In this book she is that literally. Her whole mission was to save the life of her sister, Primrose, so it was sadly eloquent that Primrose dies at the end. 

"We're fickle, stupid being with poor memories and a great gift for self destruction."

The last chapter, much like J.K. Rowlings epilogue, left me feeling a little underwhelmed. I wanted a more complete ending. I felt that the relationship between Peeta and Katniss was rushed over and I wanted more. 

Read these books. Prepare for frightening dreams and read them. 

my soul is made of raw meat

Zadie Smith is one of those authors whose books I look at in every book store and now and then buy one to put on my shelf without ever having read any of her books. I did read a short story of hers once in class, "You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town." And what I vaguely remember of it was good.

On Beauty is not what I expected it to be at all. I am not really sure what I expected it to be, maybe something more like Toni Morrison, but this is not the same at all. Smith writes about an academic white man, Howard, who is married to a large black woman, Kiki. They have a family and they all have issues that are being dealt with. They have three children, all with completely different mindsets on the world around them. Their oldest son Jerome is away interning with Howard's academic nemesis, Kipps, and he falls in love with his daughter. But she has plans of her own and suddenly the whole Kipps family is back in Howard's hometown, working at the same university.

"Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but he did not really know what a software engineer was."

The story is constantly shifting, jumping ahead in time and changing perspective when you think you know what is going to happen. Howard is struggling to keep his marriage together despite the fact that he had an affair and then lied horribly about it. I found it very interesting to see how Kiki dealt with all of this, interesting and depressing. 

"A five-year gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three month apart allows the weeds to grow up between you."

All in all, I found this book pretty depressing. I am not sure what the reader is meant to feel at the ending. I did not think much of Howard at all and frankly most of the other characters seemed very stuck in one mindset for most of the book. Everyone acts how I predicted they would. 

It did made me long for college in a very strong way. Smith does a great job of creating a college that has all of it's pieces running and captures the feel of academia. I just would have liked something more plot-wise. I think that my biggest complaint was that (almost) every time she builds up to a conflict, a scene where shit is going to hit the fan, we are let down. Time is skipped and the characters are already on to another thing while I am still trying to figure out how the hell things happened.

Despite my feelings about this book, I think I would still read her other works. I have White Teeth and really want to read it; hopefully I have a better review for that one.