A Cup of Tea & Biscuits

My mind, the part of it that appreciates a good book, was rather wary and numb of mainstream portrayal of vampires and their kin. It's too much glitter and falling into arms of an immortal one who will protect the helpless heroine for all eternity going on there. It may be what makes them read by all and produce a senseless fan gathering, but it has not allowed imagination grow. Therein lay my mindset when I picked up Vampire Empire by Clay and Susan Griffith. The blurb on the back of   book set my expectations - as simple as it seemed. I was so pleasantly taken in, hooked and surprised. This trilogy, titled Vampire Empire , written by Clay and Susan Griffith , begins with the premise that the Great Killing of 1870 pitted the entire world into a horrifying war. A plague, if you will, of vampires. Millions of humans died at the hands of the parasites while the aftermath ensured the death of more. Empires were brought down and humanity driven to the edge of despair. Vampires settled ...

It occurred to me that I have been ignoring this blog for way too long even though I have been reading constantly. I must admit that I have fallen back on my schedule - 10 books behind last week now reduced to just 5 books - but I've been working my way through it. I have made remarkable progress in my attempts to include American authors, straying away from my comfort zone of British writers. Ray Bradbury and F. Scott Fitzgerald being the two I finally crossed off my list. While I loved their writing and found salient features in both, Farenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby ,  James M. Cain 's  Mildred Pierce , the most recent book that I've put back on the shelf, has brought me back to this blog. Why? Because I read through this unputdownable book with a grimace. Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife of a cheating husband, Bert, and mother to precocious and arrogant Veda and unassuming Ray. Set during the Great Depression, and at a time when Mildred finall...

Heavy metal, or simply metal, is a misunderstood genre. While there is very little of mainstream music I admire or even listen to, metal has been a good friend through my teenage years and has followed me into adulthood.  There is an element of metal music that hits home. It's not just the loudness and the bass and distortions. There is feeling in it, the lyrics are more intense, the music conveys a far deeper meaning. It's not noise. It's larger than that. I'm an 80's child that grew up in the 90's so I know what pop music is supposed to be and I've enjoyed my share of boy bands and solo artists. But most of the artists I like and songs I bobbed to were before my time. They were from the 70's and 80's. I couldn't enjoy a lot of the late 90's music because of the importance given to performance than actual singing or music. It became more about the 'oompf' factor. Metal, on the other hand, goes for the subtle bang. Yes, most to all me...

I love my books and I like good adaptations of them as movies, plays, musicals, television series, etc. So, when my Deutschlehrerin casually told me that she was going to watch Pride & Prejudice I went, literally, berserk. How could I have not known about it?! A little theater company called the  Lifeline Theatre  was putting up a two month production of  Pride & Prejudice  - the third in its history. Naturally, I didn't care where it was (just a half-hour ride on the CTA Red Line, so that was good) or how much the tickets cost (a reasonably priced ticket actually), I looked for a weekend when I would be able to attend, not even bothering to consult the guests I was supposed to be hosting last evening, and got my tickets. I was excited, but a bit subdued. No use getting my hopes up only to be disappointed, I told myself. This is, after all, my most beloved book ever. Nothing else that I have read in the thirteen years since has compared to Miss Austen's writi...

This is not exactly a review - because I don't know the language well enough to write a German review, but I will, in due time. Reviewing the Harry Potter books would take its toll on me because of the details in it - the same goes for the Lord of the Rings. Maybe if I'd  reviewed them as I read them it would've made it easier but... Anyway. Harry Potter in Deutsch . I'm re-learning the language - signed up for the A1 level once again because I haven't retained what I learned three years ago. I can understand random words and simple sentences and make wild guesses at what the more complex sentences convey, but I would like to know the grammar, the structure and the foundation of the language so that I may indulge in German literature. These being my baby steps towards reading Goethe's Faust in German. I thought I'd start with something simple. Fairy tales, not so much, so I picked up a book that I know very well - Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen - wh...

If I recall rightly, one of Guy de Maupassant 's short stories, I forget which, that led me  W. Somerset Maugham 's writing, his short stories in particular - Footprints in the Jungle, Rain and several others that appeared in his collective works. I never went back to reading either of their novels until now. I've known the story of The Painted Veil for a long time, having read excerpts of it here and there and watched the trailer to the movie adaptation starring Edward Norton (sigh) and Naomi Watts , and finally bought the book just last week on a whim - I haven't yet watched the movie. It is the story of a young, silly girl named Kitty who marries Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working in Hong-Kong, soon after her younger sister announces her engagement to a man with a title. While in Hong-Kong, Kitty has an affair with assistant colonial secretary Charles Townsend, a selfish man who believes Walter would rather forgive his wife and continue to live in assumed igno...

I will never get bored of claiming that, to me, one of the greatest love stories ever written is Pride & Prejudice. So far every companion novel, and the so called prequels and sequels, I've read, all recount the love story from different perspectives, hence, I was rather curious to see what a mystery novelist would make of it! Death Comes to Pemberley  written by  P. D. James , author of the Adam Dalgliesh  mysteries, was published in 2011 - I mention this because her first novel Cover Her Face  came out in 1962 and she, the author - Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, is 91 years of age! Why is this significant to me? Personally, she is the oldest living author that I've read. Anyway, the book. The book is about the murder of Captain Denny, whom we know to be George Wickham's comrade-in-arms and, quite possibly, only male friend. Set primarily in Pemberley and the surrounding woods, the story begins with a recap of the events in Pride & P...