Lots of books

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) -Wow, what a good book! If you haven’t read it, check it out. This is probably required reading for pretty much every high school student, but I just barely got around to it, and now I’m going to have to watch the movie, so good!

4 in a series by Dianna Wynne Jones (The Worlds of Chrestomanci Chronicles):  Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Magicians of Caprona, and Witch Week - These were pretty fun to read. They are about alternate worlds, and one man, Chrestomanci, who can travel between them. They skip around his life, I liked in the The Lives of Christopher Chant the best because it has to do with dreaming, I have a soft spot for well-told stories about dreams.

Healers Keep (Victoria Hanley) - This is the companion book to another called “The Seer and the Sword” which I loved, but I didn’t love Healer’s Keep. I never grew to love the characters as much. This is young adult fiction/fantasy with magic and everything.

An Incomplete Revenge (Jacqueline Winspear) - I’ve never heard of this author, but I acquired 2 of the books for free, so I thought I’d try it out. I have to say, this was not the greatest mystery novel in the world. I think the author was trying to make the main character very interesting, almost mystical, but it was really too “special.” Plus there were fires. I don’t like fires.

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) - A set of 6 stories set inside of each other, like a nesting doll, or a very tall mirror imaged sandwich, like this 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1. The first 3 are set in different eras in the past, the 4^th is in the approximant present, and the 5^th and 6ths are in the future. My favorite one was the 5^th,, with Sonmi, although I had an I’m-going-to-be-sick moment, you’ll probably recognize it when you see it. I had a very hard time with the 1^st story, so I had a very hard time finishing the whole book. There’s a lot of discussion throughout the about greed and slavery and what that means, and at the very end (which makes me glad I did force myself to finish the last 10 pages) there was a really nice something about it, which I can’t even really remember, but it was very touching. A funny thing, the 2^nd story is about a composer, he writes a piece of music called “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which is the same format as the book, with different instruments solo parts nesting inside of each other, he asks his friend if the format is “genius or gimmicky?” and I kind of think it was a little gimmicky, but overall a pretty enjoyable book.

The Bronze Bow (Elizabeth George Speare) - Set in Galilee in the time of Christ, this is about a boy whose parents were killed by the Romans, and he of course swears vengeance, an eye for an eye. And it’s about love. It was really nice, recommended by Noelle. I had no idea Elizabeth George Speare wrote other things besides The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and I have one more of hers to read.

Picture of Dorian Grey (Oscar Wilde) - I’ve been listening to this book on tape (ipod) for the last 6 or so months, and finally finished it. Yay! It’s a pretty dark story morality and how you can’t be a better person by pretending the things you’ve done wrong in the past never happened. I would recommend it, but not as an audio book, there’s so much that I wished I could have just skimmed over, instead of listening to every single word.

Plays listened to, presented by L.A. Theater Works (I’m counting these as books):

Barefoot in the Park (Neil Simon) - Ah, the struggles of newlyweds…  this one had me laughing out loud at times.

Lady Windermere’s Fan (Oscar Wilde) - “A divinely funny story of good girls, bad husbands, and the moral hypocrisy of high society.”

The Doctor’s Dilemma (George Bernard Shaw) - “… if Shaw could be didactic, he could also be wickedly funny…”