SEVEN INTERNET GEMS FOR READERS, including: Cassandra Claire's NEW SERIES, Spritz, Lestat, Book Boyfriends.

I haven't blogged for an age, and there's two main reasons for that. One is a vacation in Oman, the other is the end of the financial year. I'll be telling you more about one of those next week (guess which one). In the meantime, I was thinking how quality news about books and reading is kind of scattered across the web, so I decided to concentrate some of it, the things I've been looking at, here for you...

1. Our favourite fictional characters are never simple, and seldom entirely good. This article claims that a whole bunch of the best loved authorial inventions are much worse, they're bad to the bone PSYCHOS.

2. Do you want to read faster? I'm not sure what I think about this. I don't like the idea that reading novels, or anything for enjoyment, could be some kind of race. Maybe work reading, or research? But to me one of the joys of books is taking your time, going over things twice, or speeding along if you want to. See what you think?

3) Most of the readers of this blog are, well, readers, but still, you might need to persuade somebody else. Here are a stack of quotes saying why reading is the best.

4) Before Twilight, before The Mortal Instruments I first learned the possibilities of the contemporary paranormal from Anne Rice's Lestat, or more accurately, the Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt movie, which led me to the book. The news? Lestat's  ON HIS WAY BACK.

5) Speaking of the Mortal Instruments, everybody knows that there's a 3rd series on it's way, to make TMI and ID ending a little better. The news is that there's  FOURTH series, set in the same kind of era as ID. Cassandra Claire is a WRITING MACHINE.

6) Still speaking of the Mortal Instruments, every day is a little bit better because it's a bit closer to the next book. Getting to the last book in a series is terrible. This article describes the process. How far along are you?

7) And finally, more from Huffpost. We all have our favourite book boyfriends. Apart from maybe possibly they aren't as perfect as we think. Check to see if your flawed 'BBF' is on this list.

Suzanne Collins versus Cassandra Claire: Celebrity Author Deathmatch

uses one of the favourite tricks of YA and kids literature.

Got to get rid of the adults.

Ever since Enid Blyton sent the Famous Five on absurdly dangerous summer holidays, up Mount Everest and through the Amazon Jungle (practically) authors have been finding ways to evade watchful eyes.

Boarding schools are a classic example (more about them HERE)  as are absentee parents, like in Twilight or Amanda Hocking's My Blood Approves.

Suzanne Collins way around it is to essentially have the government isolate the children on purpose. Basically the state takes on the role of the evil stepmother, forcing the kids to the worst chores imaginable.

Cassandra Claire's take on this old problem is innovative and refreshing. She has young people who are that extraordinarily able that they take the roles of adults, then combines that with a life that is so tragically prone to early death that they have to get on with it before it gets on with them.

I read The Hunger Games back-to-back with Cassandra Claire's . the second work is set in the same shadow hunter world as the Mortal Instruments series, but winding it back 150 years to Victorian England. It's nicely Gothic, without over doing the top hats and goodness gracious ma'ams.
And as in the Mortal Instruments there's an institute inhabited by a bunch of teenagers who seem to run around the city, doing more or less what they want. Just like the Mortal Instruments, too, it has a haughty, distant, handsome hero. Jace Wayland as a brunette.
For all the familiarity the story motors along nicely. The plot is excellent, stacks of twists and turns, and the characterisation is very strong, there are a couple of flawed characters who are especially well drawn.
So who wins the death match?
I read these two books, but only when I finished one of them did I buy the sequel straight away. Which one?
Clockwork Angel.

Buying shares in Cassandra Claire, The Hunger Games, Emma Watson and JK Rowling Dress Contest, and Lord of the Flies

The Hunger Games. Current flavour of the month, or at least until they bring out the first of the Mortal Instruments movies.

Let's pause to think about that, for a moment. Outside of teen paranormal fiction fans, Cassandra Claire is a bit unknown. JK Rowling is a billionaire megastar. it's not going to be long before they will be mentioned in the same breath, then Claire will be famous for having out-Rowlinged Rowling. She's got two series on the go, with more to come. the potential is galactic, if you know of any way you can buy shares in Cassandra Claire sell all your shoes and gettem!

But anyway, the Hunger Games. A dystopian YA thriller, without any paranormal elements, but lots of death and suffering. It's about kids at each other's throats, running around in a forest setting traps for one another. At school everybody in the UK has to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, about a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island, who descend into savagery. I didn't like it. I was in the Scouts, and I wanted to believe we would do better. Hunger Games gets around this issue by having the kids FORCED to fight one another, then Suzanne Collins, the author, gets around it a second time by having her heroine, Katniss, somehow - more by luck than judgement - never actually have to hurt somebody who's nice, or who doesn't deserve hurting.

I liked that, it made the story easier to read, but somehow it's not completely buyable.

The other slight downside is Katniss. Though she's a great heroine, especially in contrast to the typical female lead in YA books (think Isaballe Swann) in that she's resourceful, independent, tough, smart and brave, she's also a bit odd. Her response to incredibly intense situations is often muted, and her response to the first romance, ever, in her life is weirdly cold. I didn't get it.

As far as downsides, go, those are it. The world created is believable, tangible, scary and captivating. The characters are rounded and interesting. More than anything it's exciting, man is it exciting. Twists, turns, twisting back again, turning over, then just when you think everything's going to be okay it twists itself all around in a loop again.

Solid recommend, and I'll be writing more about this next week...

Brad Pitt on a horse, win a book, have genuine input into the title of another book, and some Mortal Instruments.

What's in a title?
In the case of the title of this post, the answer's easy.
Too much.
But title's can fail in all sorts of ways. Don't judge a book by it's cover. Absolutely. That's right. But its title? Judging a book by it's title is one of the things you're supposed to do.
The Mortal Instruments series are my current favourite YA books, amazing characters, plotting, imagination.
Rubbish titles. 'City of Ashes,' 'City of Glass.'
Yawn.
'City of Fallen Angels' is the best, but it's not actually true, so that's hardly fair.
'The Iron King.' Similar.
There's definitely something about books in a series having vanilla titles. I guess it's difficult to be both striking, and fit into a theme, but I'm going to give it a shot. After 'Song to Wake to' and 'Rock Anthem' the third levels book will have a title that's got something to do with lullabies. I've got two options.

'Lullaby of Lies'
or
'Lullaby for a Sleeping Lion.'

Please tell me what you think. I'd be really grateful for any input. Use the comments section to tell us which title you prefer, and if you like, tell us your favourite book title. I'm going to start off with 'Legends of the Fall.' Not the film, the book by Jim Harrison, which is brilliant. The film is overblown and histrionic, but if you advance the clip at the top of the page to minute 3:00 you'll find its winning scene. This is how all men should ideally arrive, preceded by a vanguard of galloping horses. It's an Eddy Moon moment.
I look forward to getting your input. One of the comments will win a FREE copy of Rock Anthem...

The Best Book I read in 2011

This recommendation is a tiny bit complicated, as its kind of not just for one book, but for three. The book I'm recommending is the last of a trilogy, and you really should read the first two. Interestingly I almost didn't get to the 2nd one. I think I downloaded it mainly cos I needed something to read, and I was going to be out of wifi range in a moment... Needless to say, I read it, liked it, got drawn along to the 3rd one...

I'm currently in the very early days of writing a long series of books, and so I have especial admiration for what the author of this one has done, really achieving a spectacular climax and answering a ton of questions.
What's the book?

City of Glass (Incidentally, full props to the guys who made this trailer, so imaginitive... )

I'm trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible, but apologies in advance if I give anything away, or tell you something I didn't think was obvious.

So in CoG the Mortal Instruments saga moves to Alicante - long time home of the Shadowhunters. And that makes a nice change. It's fantasy, without being too fantastic. I only have two quibbles, the first is with Venice-like canals, somehow halfway up a hill, the second is that though the setting is a massive confrontation between all the most important supernatural beings in the world, how come 99% of them are from New York? Including practically all the werewolves and vampires?

But that's picky. The Jace/Clary issues are resolved beautifully and Cassandra Clare plays her trump card - the revelation of the angels - with massive style. There's even a little hook left for us into another sequel - a good thing, considering hoe badly everybody wanted City of Fallen Anegls.
So there you have it, heroism, romance, drama, violence. Recommended to everyone.

Kim Kardashian, Apes and Whales, and Cassandra Claire's Mortal Instruments

             Fake tan, hair spray, perfume, make up. This is how glamour is achieved in real life, but in stories, it's better. In stories glamour equals magic. The celebrities on the red carpet use their version of glamour to minimise the ordinary, maximise the extraordinary. They make run of the mill features beautiful, and turn beautiful faces otherworldly. It's a kind of real life magic. In contrast, in The Mortal Instruments, by Cassandra Claire, magical beings use glamour to make themselves seem ordinary, to make themselves seem exactly like the rest of us. Art imitating life, but in an opposite kind of a way.
             A while ago I wrote a post about the appeal - in children's literature - of portals (rabbit holes, wardrobes and suchlike) leading to magical worlds.  Now we come across a second kind of magical world, the kind that exists all around us and we just can't see it. I've just read Claire's 'City of Bones' and 'City of Ashes.'  In these a 17 year old girl learns that the world is full of witches, werewolves, vampires and elves, walking alongside us in magical disguise.
             The theme of this blog, recently anyway, has been looking at ideas in books and trying to understand why they work. The idea of glamour is fascinating, but I think a more important part of the story is the idea of different, intelligent species walking among us. What's the draw? I think it comes from the same desire for the real world to be BETTER, more interesting, more romantic that also drives the appeal of glamour.
             I liked the stories, though not so much as it's raving fans, because to me there's tons of magic to be learnt about the intelligence of creatures we really do share planet earth with. 

            And we shouldn't forget that we know far more about the minds of our furry relatives than we do about whales and dolphins. The biggest brain ever to have existed belongs to the sperm whale, and we know practically nothing about what it uses all that grey matter for, what philosophies fizz through it. I've written an entire novel of guessing...
            The other pull of these stories is the plotting, but by the end of the 2nd it had begun to drag. There's lots of it that I seemed to half recognise from Star Wars, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings and who knows where else. And the characters don't seem to move forwards as much as round in circles. It's very much a series, too, with not much ending to mark the movement from one book to the next. It seems fairly arbitrary.
            But if you're prepared to read all three, and you like the idea of hidden magic all around you, I recommend it. I also recommend finding out what whales and gorillas think, but that's likely to be a bit more tricky...
            If you're interested in the kind of magic distracting me in 2019, find out here... https://sxswx365.blogspot.com/