Read this one only in the daylight

[WARNING: this entry may contain possible spoilers for the novel and the film Let the Right One In.]

title: Låt den rätte komma in
author: John Ajvide Lindqvist. His debut novel.

But first, before the review, have a listen to the song that's extensively quoted throughout the book: "Let the Right One Slip In" by Morrissey. [Yes, THAT Morrissey.]



There is a bit of vampire lore that does not quite get remembered as often as the whole bloodsucking/infection/undead thing: vampires need to be invited to enter a place.

If you've read the Artemis Fowl books you know that this concept has also applied to fairies. Only fitting, in a way....

Anyway. Over the weekend I treated myself to a new book: a copy of Let the Right One In. My edition has the cover that also says "The inspiration behind Let Me In" - which is the 2010 American remake of the 2008 Swedish film.

I read the novel in three big gulps over the weekend and let me tell you, this is one of the best vampire novels out there. It really is. The whole atmosphere is cold and forbidding, the characters are all too human and weak [yes, that includes Eli], and the whole idea is of this strange and twisted love that forms between a boy and an androgynous bloodsucker.

[If you prefer to have your characters STAY the gender they're introduced as, you're SOL with Eli, as the pronouns referring to the character actually change from paragraph to paragraph.]

Oskar, the main character, comes off as someone really believable, and it's on him that the narrative of the book is centered, even though there are several POV characters and their stories intertwine throughout the pages. If you cannot stomach/believe/accept the terrible experiences he goes through, you'll have a hard time understanding the relationship he eventually forms with Eli, the character that the title refers to.


A famous still from the 2008 movie shows a bloody Eli. I think I now know which part of the book this comes from.

Have I mentioned that this novel is scary? And only partly because of Eli, believe it or not. One of the important things to note in this novel is that some of the human characters are portrayed as being even more monstrous than the obviously undead ones - and it's really one of the major sources of the horror. You've met them, or I hope you haven't: the bully, the pedophile, the druggie, the shut-in, the isolated, the serial killer groupie. Each character is beautifully and frighteningly described.

[Guess which one of those is the actual PROTAGONIST. Yes, even Oskar has major flaws.]

In short: READ THIS WITH THE LIGHTS ON.

Tai'shar Cairhien! WARNING: SPOILERS!

First-ever official book trailer for the fantasy series The Wheel of Time - and it's for the penultimate book in the series, Towers of Midnight.

Again, SPOILERS. /riversong


Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson - official book trailer.

[Although, if you really want to get technical about it, the voice-over is another version of the letter that a character reads near the end of the last book that Jordan completed before he died, which was Knife of Dreams.

"Burn me for a fool," was Mat Cauthon's response to the character's request, "I'll go."

And the dice tumbling in his head stopped with a crash.]

I realize this is the first time I've introduced the subject of WoT in this blog and some people may be surprised that I'm a fan of the books, to the extent that I went around for a long time associated with a name from the series:

NineMoons.

[Yeah, not a lot of people made that connection. Oh, well.]

Really looking forward to November of this year for Towers, and then December/January of 2011 when we celebrate the release of the final novel, A Memory of Light.

A Hitch and a Holmes: The Return of Reading in my Sleep

After a beautiful Sunday out, I tweeted the following:

New books! New books! Hitchens's Hitch-22 and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Fangirling. Love to my partner. :3

And I told myself that I needed to blog the books, so here they are:


My copy of the hardbound edition of Christopher Hitchens's Hitch-22: A Memoir. It really does look as battered as it seems because for some reason I was able to obtain the last copy in stock at the Fully Booked branch in Bonifacio High Street.

[There were that many people interested in Hitchens in the Philippines? Shock!]

This is an advanced birthday present to me from my partner, hence the last part of the tweet quoted above.

I've already burned through three chapters and I'm looking forward to working through the rest.


This is a lovely little hardbound edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published under the "Collector's Library" imprint.

I found this while snooping through the classics collection at the same bookstore mentioned above; after I'd finished drooling at a lavishly annotated edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, I found an entire cabinet of these little beauties. It's a fair selection of some of the titles in the English literary canon: from Shakespeare to Alcott to Tolstoy to Woolf.


Here's the Holmes, opened to part of "A Case of Identity". My hands are small, but they're tellingly enough to provide scale for this book. If you're looking for an honest-to-goodness pocketbook, then yeah, you could do worse than to pick up some of these Collector's Library editions.

I wonder if I should get A Study in Scarlet next.

Growing My Six-Foot Shelf of Crochet References

Previous entry: Crochet Workshop Library: My All-Purpose All-Occasion Crochet Library - Of Two

I have a policy I follow whenever I visit a National Book Store outlet - or maybe it's more like a plan of attack, a way to not tumble down the rabbit hole of endless bookery-geekery. The plan goes something like this:
> Look at the cookbooks
> Look at the craft books section
> Look at the magazines to hope against hope that there will be issues of crochet or knit magazines (there usually aren't, but I'll never know till I check)
> Look at the bargain books bins.

The last NBS expedition turned out to be particularly fruitful, as among the items on sale I found the next two items to help me grow my stack of crochet references - cheaply!


There is one project in this book that I OWE it to myself to try: a lovely evocation of ribbing AND cables, normally that's done only in knitting. But Davis gives here the pattern for a matching hat+scarf set that has crochet versions of those two amazing, versatile motifs. MUST TRY THIS.


If anyone can be kind enough to tell me what this book's title is, I'd be really grateful; I'd try puzzling it out for myself but most kanji are beyond me, and the lone example in the title has me stumped. Anyway, I got this book because: 1. lovely crochet bags in various sizes; 2. instructions and a template for making mobile-phone cases; 3. flower motifs! I cannot have enough of them; 4. practice for reading Japanese crochet instructions. Or perhaps I should say, symbol charts, since they dispense with written instructions.]

This week I'm making crochet ribbing. :D I never thought that all it took was to work into the back loops of stitches! Learn something new every day, that's my motto.....

Crochet Workshop Library: My All-Purpose All-Occasion Crochet Library - Of Two

For some people, finding new obsessions means assembling an entire library of books, manuals, and other material related to the subject. I believe the relevant idiom is "the six-foot shelf": like a series of essential books to a given field of study.

As for me, it's crochet: I have a massive stash of yarn - most of which is already allocated to one project or another - and I am also now scouring second-hand book shops and the bargain shelves to grow my collection of crochet reference books.

Here's what I have now.


You've seen this one before: Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework. The nice thing about this book is the extensive illustration of basic concepts and stitches in all of the needlework crafts that it mentions: it is really a crash course for every single one of the crafts contained within.

Having participated in a recent discussion about left-handed knitting, I might rest easy with this book if I ever took up the pointed needles. It's so helpful to have full-page, step-by-step how-to illustrations for knitting and purling left-handed, for reference.


And here is my newest acquisition: Beyond the Square: Crochet Motifs by Edie Eckman. I picked this up last weekend and while I haven't yet had the chance to make up any of the motifs pictured in the book, I use it a awful lot now for recreational reading.

What makes this book so nice? Well, it's got 144 motifs in all sorts of cute shapes: circles, hexagons, triangles, and even unusual shapes such as hearts and ovals and stars. Every motif is presented as both a set of written instructions and a graphical chart, using the standard set of symbols used for representing crochet stitches.

What I really love about this book is that it's hardcover + has stiff pages + spiral bound. That's a killer combination for books like this because you can lay it out flat no problem to stitch a motif or two.

I think I will use a few of the motifs in the book for making brooches. And if I had the patience to work with mercerized cotton and other fine yarns, earrings and other crocheted jewelry.... :D

Julia Child's Life in France

Yeah, I know, this post lacks a photo of me reading this book while getting ready to sleep, but you should know that this is what I read when I'm trying to ease out of the working day:


My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme.

If you saw the recent film Julie and Julia then you will remember that the movie was based on Julie Powell's memoir and Julia Child's books Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes 1 and 2, some portions of The French Chef Cookbook, and this memoir of her life-long love affair with la belle France.

My Life in France *talks* extensively about food and the process of making the monumental Mastering cookbooks, but it is definitely NOT a cookbook itself. Julia here tells the story of how she and her husband Paul Child lived in various places in the US and in Europe, including details of their long French sojourns. They lived in Paris and in Marseilles, and also were posted to places like Germany and Norway, so they definitely had a lot of cosmopolitan European experiences.

Reading in My Sleep: Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework, 1982

I remember being quite the disaster in the needle-type Home Ec classes when I was in school: I couldn't figure out a simple embroidery sampler, I pretty much failed a unit on crocheting, and I still have an irrational fear of getting stabbed by the needles in a sewing machine.

So, yeah, imagine my wonder and my absolute overweening (and, needless to say, misplaced) pride in myself when I discovered that there were a few types of sewing that I could actually DO: things like do counted cross-stitch, mend seams in a cotton t-shirt, sew buttons on skirts. I think I can safely blame the cross-stitch part on my mom, who went through an absolute mania for the craft when she was pregnant with my younger sister. And when I say mania I meant she was stitching gigantic designs fit for framing on walls.

Having gained some small measure of confidence in plying a needle thanks to completing my own cross-stitch projects, I find myself more willing now to learn all these crafts. So far, I think I want to tackle crochet again. I want to make a scarf and perhaps a pair of fingerless gloves or two.

So it's a good thing that I spotted this book in a store a year or so ago:


Maybe you've seen one or two of those yourself: an all-purpose guide to needle-craft. Knitting, applique, quilting, rug making, macrame, lace, and of course the essential embroidery stitches.

This is the Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework, edited by Virginia Colton. First published in 1979, the edition I have was printed in the same year that I was born, 1982. Yes, this book is as old as I am. And the amazing thing is, I wish I was that well-preserved: the pages remain crisp and clear, the pictures look great, there are no missing bits or pages or even a stray trail of chewed whatever.

I literally read myself to sleep with this book on those nights when there's so much on my mind. I may not be working the stitches or knots myself, but something about the book leads my mind into the same peaceful pace and patterns, so it's great for relaxing reading.

(I wonder if I'll feel the same, though, once I go and tackle a project or two. Like I said: rank beginner ahoy. I'm thinking of myself as having no knowledge at all - at least, not until I actually begin - and then FINISH a project.)

(Yep, this is what I'm going to do next after the whirlwind that is NaNoWriMo. Weekly update post on that one later.)

Reading in My Sleep: The Joy of Cooking, 1997

[I am really sorry for letting the post count drop some while I've been working on NaNoWriMo. Most of my words are falling straight down the rabbit hole of my novel - I should do better in diverting some of those towards this blog. Two weeks left in the noveling rush.]

As I said in the introduction to the Meal in the City series of posts,

"This is a blog where I talk about a lot of things that I find interesting; one of those topics that really get my motor running is food reading."

When I meet people for the first time I often hear questions about how long I've been wearing them, and the only answer I often give is something on the order of magnitude of "About fifteen years". I honestly cannot remember the days before I had to wear glasses although pictures of those times exist. It seems like I have always had to peer at the world through my specs.

Anyway, so why have I always been wearing glasses? One word: READING. Yeah, I got the four-eyes look in the traditional manner: read too much, read in the dark, read on a moving vehicle, etc. etc.

In this series of posts, there are pictures showing me asleep with a book in my arms - bit of a habit of mine, really. It's also a sideways introduction to my library and the wild mishmash of books that call my apartment home (along with me and my BF, who takes all these pictures for me).

Here's the first one:


The book in my arms is my current prize-winning bargain book find: a 1997 reprint of Joy of Cooking. This is the Irma Rombauer / Marion Rombauer Becker Plume edition. JOC was first printed in 1931 and remains one of the benchmarks of American cooking. Where other cookbooks might have a hundred or a thousand recipes, JOC (this edition in particular) has over 4,500.

And I bought this for just about PHP200.00 - or USD4.29. Yeah. Super bargain mode. I got VERY, VERY LUCKY at the bargain bookstore that I frequent. :)

I've already got a list in my head of all the recipes I want to try from this book. Failing that, I intend to lend it to my sister and ask her to bake some of the treats in it for me. (I have no baking skills and no oven at home.)

Have you got a copy of JOC? When was it printed? What's your favorite JOC recipe?