happykatie :: katie rocks out the interwebs

Over the moon with The Invention of Hugo Cabret

 I'm head over heels for a beautifully illustrated adult picture book called The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  The video above is an interview with the author, Brian Selznick.  He weaves a fascinating tale intertwining actual true-to-life stories about early filmmaking pioneer, Georges Méliès, and his passion for bringing his magician's tricks to the screen - as well as his final disappearance into poverty and obscurity.

It's an intricate storyline, much like the mechanics, clocks and other automated gadgets described and painstakingly illustrated.  The two (fictional) main characters - a young boy mechanical genius Hugo and Georges (fictional) goddaughter - are perfect and bring a sense of wonder to the story.

A frequent character in and of itself, the moon that is regularly referenced in the book is from the Georges Méliès film entitled 'Le Voyage Dans La Lune' (the very first Science Fiction film), which you can watch below:  

Quickie book review: Skinny Bitch

Skinny Bitch

by Kim Barnouin

This book came into my reading queue at just the right time.  We’ve been eating vegan and increasingly raw for a while now so reading a hip little book advocating some of that lifestyle is a nice fit.

Skinny Bitch is definitely not a book for every gal – particularly if you’re the kind of gal who gets offended by vulgar profanity and descriptive chapters of slaughterhouses.

To be honest, the vulgarity sometimes got a bit old and repetitive.  While the messaging and general ideas definitely worked they definitely could be re-packaged a bit better.  I get the whole ‘trying to be edgy’ thing and obviously it worked – I picked it up just for kicks and it was worth it.

See more about Skinny Bitch

Quickie book review: "The Master Cleanser"

The Master Cleanser

by Stanley Burroughs

Actually, the Master Cleanser hasn’t completely changed my life yet but it’s got me on the right path.

This book is, obviously, a must-read for anyone about to embark on a Master Cleanse (aka: lemonade diet… but I abhor most phrases that involve the word ‘diet’ as I feel like it’s always taken the wrong way…).  Author and Master Cleanse founder Stanley Burroughs is quite brilliant, although I took some of the philosophy with a grain of salt but it’s really not over the top, like Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles or anything similar :).

What you don’t find in the book is real, actionable ‘how-to’ instruction.  I mean, it’s there but it’s kind of muddled.  I’m a ‘give it to me direct, straight and multiple times’ kind of girl—so I’m relying on other sources to really guide me through our upcoming cleanse.

No worries though, this was a great book and very quick/easy read.  Definitely recommended, especially if you are a glutton for punishment and can't wait to NOT eat food for 12 days.  Yay.

Check out what else I'm consuming by visiting the sidebar to your left or by clicking here.

Spam as poetry as a book as an anthology

The most venerable Governor Chavez / Pablo / Morton Hurley has released his first Spam Poetry Anthology.  I am buying one.  You should too.  If you know what's good for you and I think you do.

A quote from a possible inclusion:

Clean faith, my paz.
My reason behind it?
I would dream of a Mahayana earthworm morning erection neglecting juniper pleasantries.

Thick cunning receptors damage how vaccination dysfunction ventilated supermarket, transmitting sadness drugstore selling revolutionary lesbian pheromone. Western suicidal ideation announced “mi hija es ‘El Anticristo’, tiene que morir!”

Iron fisted pin up girls - a high school crush on Ayn Rand

I stumbled across this great essay on The Fountainhead's effect on teenage girls.  I was 15 when I first encountered Ayn and I've been intrigued/disturbed by her ever since. 

If your private high school English teachers didn't force you to swallow it whole during your impressionable youth, The Fountainhead is a fabulous fetishistic book on dependency, anarchy, architecture and orange-headed men.

I am so curious to look at what bizarre pretentious notes I made for myself in my tattered paperback at home.  I think it's sitting next to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain or some other mind-numbingly long (but yes, very good) book.  Ah, the brilliance of youth...  if only we stayed as smart as we thought we were.

Where have all the readers gone?

Feel like you haven't been reading as much as you should lately?  I guess you shouldn't feel so badly -- here are some depressing factoids via ParaPublishing about readers, non-readers, libraries and publishing houses:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
  
• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
• $1.7 billion is spent annually on textbooks. $78 billion is spent on alcohol, $37 billion on cigarettes and $6 billion on pet food.   (I wonder how much is spent on videos, cable TV and gaming devices...)
• 1992: 20% of adults in the U.S. read at or below the fifth grade level.

Found on the BuzzMachine.

So maybe there really are unicorns??

Adam is currently reading Troll: A Love Story (we're all about the love stories this weekend apparently, as I am just about to begin The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia) and we did a little Google search on a couple of creatures that were previously thought to be only mythological mentioned in the book (like some of these).

Yes, we really are that nerdy.  It is Saturday night and we are Googling mythological creatures.  But I digress...

What interests me the most is the fact that:

an estimated 14 million subspecies of animals live on the planet, of which only about 1.7 million are recognised and classified, or less than 15%. (see here)

Considering that we only first saw a giant squid alive for the first time in 2005 and didn't even have scientific proof of giant pandas until 1937 -- what other fantastical creatures are we missing out on?  Rainbow glitter ponies?  Alascattalos?  Marzipan parrots?  The possibilities are endless...

The Mercy of Thin Air - a haunted love story

Besides long days and glaring sunshine, the summertime always brings with it an intense desire to languish about and read through stacks and stacks of books.  An expensive hobby when you devour a few books a week, so I've finally gotten in gear and ordered my first round of books from the library (which is just so awesome.... and free!).

This morning I completed The Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue.  It was slow-paced, beautiful and sad - much as I think of the city it primarily takes place in (Naew Orleans).  The main character is a spunky liberal young woman (Raziela) in the 1920's who dies in her lover's swimming pool and find herself caught 'in between', that is between life and whatever comes after that.

This 'in between' place is fascinating to me, just as the entire unfolding of Razi's life, love, regret and ambitions is - even when re-told 70 years after her death.  The plot twists were good, but it was the intelligent and whole-hearted intensity of the love story that caught my breath.  It is good to have a love's neck to kiss and hand to trace.

Heh heh... and Razi even has a MySpace profile.  Whaddya' know...

Put the Book Back on the Shelf

A and I recently took a quick Austin mini-vacation to refresh, rejuvenate, regenerate and to eat lots of food.  I took lots of nice photos, but haven't made it to get our color slide film developed yet... argh.

One blue sky day, after wandering around the flagship Whole Foods </genuflect> and eating yummy raw cheezcake from their raw food counter on the balcony, we wandered over to Waterloo Records to be smitten by various music, magazine and other delights.

We always  manage to do a good job at being smitten in cool shops, so we brought home:

1. Dave Chappelle Block Party album
2. The sultry new Neko Case album
3. The AMAZING Put the Book Back on the Shelf comic book based on Belle & Sebastian songs 

The Belle and Sebastian book was an unexpected find and is really super - even though the graphic stories aren't always how I pictured them when listening to the songs, but everyone's got a different paradigm and that's cool. 

My faves:  a very, uhm, visual 'Beautiful' and the sweet family story of 'Asleep on a Sunbeam' (which A & I have rather taken as a biographical interpretation of our years to come).

Tags:  put the book back on the shelf | belle and sebastian | comic books | waterloo records | austin

Books on the brain

I read The Time Traveler's Wife about a year ago.  It took me an entire exquisite weekend to finish and, now that I've dug it back out of the top bookshelf for Adam to read, just a few seconds to dive right back into it.  I didn't really even *mean* to start re-reading it... it just happened.

It's haunting, gorgeous, bitter, funny and makes you want to love and be loved and never ever stop.  There's nothing bad that I could say about this book, except that it ended....

Author Audrey Niffenegger has also written an illustrated novel entitled 'The Three Incestuous Sisters' that I've been borderline interested in reading.  I peeked at it when it was first released and totally dug the rather gloomy, pretty illustrations - but I just couldn't get around the incest bit :)  Silly me.

In turn, Adam has handed off his much loved Fantasy novel Philosophical Strangler to me to giggle at and discuss as I progress.  The wordplay is interesting and much more humorous than I expected - I like being pleasantly surprised by genres that I don't normally dive into.  Quirky books are fun.

On a rather unrelated sidenote:  Have you seen the sweet new 'Concordance' feature (like this one for The Time Traveler's Wife) on Amazon.com? It helps you dive into books before you buy them by creating a tagcloud with the top words used in the book, with links to pages/quotes using the words.  Don't know why I like it, but I do.

Tags: Audrey Niffenegger | The Time Traveler's Wife | Philosophical Strangler