Tasha's Random Book Awards

In honor of GoodReads Choice Awards and Amazon's Top Books of 2012, most of which I haven't even heard of, let alone read, I decided to start my own random voting awards!

How were these books selected to be semi-(actually actual) finalists of the contest? No idea. But even if I knew, I probably wouldn't tell you. You see, it's a complicated algorithm that you couldn't possibly understand because it makes no sense. That's also why most of these books weren't published in 2012 or even fit into their designated categories. Just go with it! Vote in the embedded survey below, or click here to take survey.

And remember, every time you add a random write-in, a reading angel gets its wings.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

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The Definitive Version

Right now I'm "reading" (actually listening to) The Wizard of Oz, read by Anne Hathaway on audiobook. I love Hathaway and am enjoying the story, but it's pretty clear she was influenced by the movie. To be fair, the book and the movie are pretty similar so far; but even the way Hathaway does the voices seems to imitate the way the characters were portrayed in the film.

This isn't a bad thing, but it's interesting to me how certain versions of a story become the one everyone's familiar with, and later interpretations kind of have to be in conversation with that version in order to be relevant. For example, The Phantom of the Opera is one of my favorite books of all time, and in my mind the book and the musical are two separate entities. But when I first think of Phantom, admittedly my thoughts turn to the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical. That was the prism through which I approached the novel. So it was super-interesting for me to watch a silent movie version of The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney--which, unlike every other version of The Phantom I'd seen, was clearly in conversation with the book, NOT the musical. I'm not saying it was the best version, just that it had a very different sensibility from the contemporary adaptations I'd seen.

What about books like Dracula, or Sherlock Holmes, two of the most adapted novels/characters in literature AND cinema, not to mention plays? When I was reading Dracula, I personally couldn't help but think of the 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula, and picturing Jonathan Harker as Keanu Reeves, Mina as Winona Ryder, etc. That movie is actually pretty faithful to the book (probably why I couldn't help but associate the two), but I don't think it's the definitive version, just the one I'm most familiar with. I'm not sure there's an adaptation that has become the "definitive version" of Sherlock Holmes, either, although I enjoy the hell out of nearly all the Sherlockiana I come across. No matter how good it is, it still feels either derivative of or in conversation with the original stories.

In both of these cases, the original versions are still what sets the standard for the characters and the story. But why is that? Why have Oz and Phantom been superseded by a movie and a musical, respectively, while Sherlock and Dracula still rely so heavily on the original text? Is it the quality of the books? I don't think so; as I said, Phantom is one of my favorite novels, and Dracula... well, it has its moments, but it's not the best thing I've ever read. I also don't think the quality of the adaptions have anything to do with it, since there are some truly kick-ass Sherlock adaptations.

Maybe it has more to do with the fan base. Sherlock Holmes fans still go to 221B Baker Street and read the original stories, while Phantom fans (Phantomites?) identify more strongly with the musical.

Have you ever come across an adaptation that overshadowed the original work? What do you think makes something a "definitive version"?

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Guest Post: Inspiration by Charlotte Henley Babb

How far back does the inspiration go? All the way back.

My mother told me fairy tales when I was little—the Charles Perrault versions that are the most popular, and are the ones the Grimm brothers collected from their neighbors. The very first toy I ever remembered wishing for was a baby doll dressed as a pink fairy with wings, but my mom didn't know that, and I didn't get it, even though she worked at the store where it was hanging in a display. I was three years old.

I remember watching Rocky and Bullwinkle when I was eight or ten and wondering if the government knew what the stories were about and how the writers got away with the satire. The stories were very silly, of course, but they pointed out how stupid people could be. And, of course, there were the fractured fairy tales with the snarky narration by Edward Everett Horton. It wasn't so much that the stories were funny, but that they had a wise and knowing twist.

I wear size 11W shoes, usually Birkenstocks 42R. Even as a young woman, my feet were too big for cute shoes. Shopping for clothing was a humiliating experience of being the wrong size and the wrong shape. I felt sorry for Cinderella's ugly sisters who did not have a magical helper to make them clothing that fit perfectly. I learned to sew from my mom, who made a lot of my clothing.

Maven, my main character came to me when I was first playing on the electronic bulletin boards back in the 80s, before the internet was invented. That character developed into Belle, the mistress of the Twilight Lounge, but the name Maven, a word that means a person of specialized and esoteric knowledge, settled on a fairy godmother character who always fractured fairy tales.

I commented one day that as an adjunct English instructor in a community college, I felt like a fairy godmother who had classes full of budding princes and princesses, and my job was to help them transform themselves.  My own life was falling apart at the same time. My first marriage failed, my second ended in widowhood, and then I fell into infatuation with a coworker while working through bankruptcy, depression and my daughter's teen years.

Clearly, I was in no position to write romance. So I wrote about a woman at the end of her rope, who at the time looked a lot like me. At first, I wrote about her adventures after she became a fairy godmother, but when I started studying goddess lore with a teacher, I was convinced to start the story at the beginning, which lead me to write about the events happening in my life. The story I set out to tell will probably be the fourth book in the series, and the first few chapters of it have been written, along with bits and pieces from the third title, as I am outlining the second.

The more I studied goddess lore, the more I began to look into fairy tales to find the older versions, the originals, the less sanitized and Christianized versions. I've learned that our popular fairy tales are fairly modern, dating from the 1600s, like the translation of the King James Bible, and they represent a kind of feminine liberation that is only coming to fruition now, with all the focus on the young woman with her life ahead of her, in conflict with the elder woman: her mother, stepmother, mother-in-law or evil queen.

So as a woman of a certain age, I wondered where the stories for the elder women were, and if there were none, then some needed to be written. I am an elder now, and I am writing those stories, hopefully with a spark of amusement at the foibles we share. That's where inspiration comes from.

Author Bio: 

Charlotte Henley Babb is the author of Maven Fairy Godmother: Through the Veil, available from  Muse It Up Publishing (http://bit.ly/MavenFGM), Smashwords, Amazon and B&N. Her websites are http://charlottehenleybabb.com and http://mavenfairygodmother.com

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New to You: THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

In the explicanation of all that is good, somewhat is left unsold. Your right brain, directing your speech, knows what you want to say, but your left brain doesn't know the words for it. What are you looking for? Be sure to write it down in soap.

In The Hunting of the Snark there are seven characters. One is a butcher but not a butcher and he makes friends with a beaver, which is what he hunts. Beavers are the only animals he kills. Then they hear a jubjub. They fear death and realize they've been friends forever. That was my favorite part.

Actually, I lied. There are ten characters. The best character is the baker, called "Hi," who forgets everything except the most important thing. He tries to warn the crew, but they don't listen, and he winds up being got by the very thing he feared getting.

Blah blah blah. Coming to the point, think of the words read and understand. Now open your mouth and say the first word that comes into your head. Those with a proclivity to one will say "read," while those with an inclination toward the other will say "understand." But only those who know what I'm getting at will say "runderstead."

I rundersteaded The Hunting of the Snark frumiously. The great thing about kids is they don't really care if something makes sense, because to them nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense to adults, either, but they like to pretend it does. Therefore The Hunting of the Snark is beamish fun for multiple-aged persons!

In conclusion, be careful that your Snarks aren't Boojums.



This post was originally published on Project Gutenberg Project. I believe it's the best review I've ever written. Be careful your Snarks aren't Boojums--words to live by.

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Review: THE DAUGHTER OF TIME by Josephine Tey

Inspector Alan Grant is laid up in hospital and bored out of his mind. So, to entertain himself, he decides to learn about Richard III, the infamous villain of English history who killed his two little nephews in the Tower of London. Only after the scratching the surface of history does Grant become convinced that Richard didn't kill the princes. But then who did?

The Daughter of Time is the first book in a long time that seriously blew my mind. It's a mystery novel that takes place entirely in a single hospital room, is told almost exclusively in dialog and narration, and is about something that happened hundreds of years ago in a country I don't even live in. By all rights, this book should NOT work--but it does. The Daughter of Time is one of those books that grabs you from the first page and doesn't let you go until the very end. The mystery is a fascinating intellectual puzzle and I loved all the characters.

This was my first novel by Josephine Tey, and I have to say I really admire her writing and storytelling skills. Most people who set out to write a novel arguing that a historical figure didn't commit a murder would set said novel in the past (or at least that's what I would do); but by setting The Daughter of Time in contemporary Britain, Tey makes a more convincing and interesting argument. Besides which, The Daughter of Time isn't really about Richard III and the Princes in the Tower; it's about the romance of history and how history consists of stories that are sometimes just as fictional as any novel. Yet people cling to these stories with an almost religious zeal, allowing them to shape their view of the world.


Richard III (left) and Henry VII (right). Does Richard have a "nice face," do you think?

You don't really think about that while you're reading the book, however, because you're too caught up in the story. One of the things I love about The Daughter of Time is that this a book that could never be adapted to film--there is no "action," no change of scenery, and nearly all the clues are discovered off-page in dusty archived documents or history books. Yet it's really gripping, because Alan Grant finds it interesting. To him it's not just an intellectual exercise, it's a matter of principle to get the truth sorted out (as compared to a similar set-up in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt by Edgar Allan Poe, which wasn't as successful--see my review at PGP). This supports my theory that books are about what happens in your head, not what you can see.

The Daughter of Time is a very quick, absorbing read that's amazingly well-written and honestly one of the best books I've ever come across, mystery or otherwise. If you like history, especially, you need to hunt this book down like a beast. Near the end of The Daughter of Time, Grant makes a statement that, "Most people's first books are their best anyway; it's the one they wanted most to write." I call bullshit, Tey--this was your last book, and it's hard to imagine anything better than this.

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Mina Harker and Dr. Seward: So In Love.

Warning: there is going to be a lot of capslocksia going on in this post.

Sometimes, when I'm reading a book or watching a TV show, my brain gets really bored. As a result, I start inventing storylines in my head--and, since this is me we're talking about, the stories usually have something to do with a secret romance between two characters.

Some people call this shipping (for more about shipping and what it is, read "To Ship or Not To Ship" at Bookalico.us). I call it LOGIC. Or at least in this case I do.

See, lately I've been listening to Dracula on audiobook (it was free), and I swear to Gott--as Van Helsing would put it--that Mina Harker and Doctor Seward are in love. THEY ARE SO CUTE TOGETHER, YOU GUYS!!! Yet I can't find anything on the internet about their secret, burning romance. What the fridge? It's totally obvious.

Don't believe me? Here is my recap of how they fell in love, which seriously reads almost exactly like the start of a romantic comedy:


Meet-cute: Paddington Station. Mina recognizes Dr. Seward immediately from her friend's description of him. He blushes. She blushes. They go to the lunatic asylum where he lives for some reason (because he's crazy?). He's so excited he has to record his thoughts about their meeting IMMEDIATELY.

Mina knocks on the door.

*gasp* "Here she is!" (Seward literally says this--okay maybe not the gasp. But he's obviously P R E T T Y jazzed.)

And they fell in love: Mina walks in, wondering to whom Dr. Seward is talking, but he's alone. He really is crazy! No, he's just recording in his "diary," which happens to be a phonograph. Mina's all, "You keep a diary? I keep a diary!" (And for the same reason--to improve themselves. RME These two already clearly belong together.)

Mina's account:

I felt quite excited over it, and blurted out, "Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?" 

"Certainly," he replied with alacrity, and stood up to put it in train for speaking. [Gawd they are so cute.] Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his face. 

"The fact is," he began awkwardly, "I only keep my diary in it, and as it is entirely, almost entirely, about my cases it may be awkward, that is, I mean…" He stopped, and I tried to help him out of his embarrassment. 

"You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end. Let me hear how she died, for all that I know of her, I shall be very grateful. She was very, very dear to me." 

To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look in his face, "Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world!" 

"Why not?" I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me. 

Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an excuse. At length, he stammered out, "You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular part of the diary." 

Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naivete of a child, "that's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!" [Seward, you are so awkward. Adorbs.] 

I could not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that time!" he said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?"

Don't worry, Seward. Mina won't just type up your diary for you, she'll index it according to patient, symptoms and illness.

Which brings me to another reason why Mina and Dr. Seward are in love: they need each other! Mina is so bored with Jonathan she's memorized the train schedules on his commute "just in case he's in a hurry." JESUS, MINA. Memorizing the schedule for your own commute is one thing, but another person's?! I'm guessing Jonathan is able to tell time, get a freaking grip. Dr. Seward, on the other hand, needs someone to help him with his research and, um, you know, play with his phonograph. His work is much more interesting than Jonathan's, and he doesn't commute--he lives at the asylum!

Anyway, Mina and Seward exchange diaries, which is like the cutest thing ever, and Seward gets so wrapped up in Mina's he almost forgets to eat. And Mina gets so wrapped up in Seward's diary she cries and tells him,

That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart.... See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.

Aww. She can hear his heart beat.

Adjectives Mina uses to describe Seward: noble, good, thoughtful. Adjectives Dr. Seward uses to describe Mina: sweet, a brilliant mind, pretty, courageous. GAH HE'S SO IN LOVE. Dr. Seward also never refers to Mina as a child, unlike SOME people I could name (coughJonathancough).

After a few days at the lunatic asylum, Dr. Seward remarks that having Mina there has made it feel like a home for the first time ever. So cozy (too bad Jonathan Wet Blanket Extraordinaire is there). Then she decides to talk to Renfield, I forget why, and Seward--who's in the room to make sure she's safe--observes, "She came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once command the respect of any lunatic."

OHHHHHHH MAH GAWSH coming from Dr. Seward that's like a love poem! He might as well have said, "She walks in beauty, like the night." Even Renfield notices. He's all like, "Wait, are you two going out?"

You see? They're totally in love. So Jonathan's going to die at the end of Dracula and Dr. Seward and Mina are going to get married, right? Right guys?



Have you ever shipped any characters in classic novels?

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Movie Review: BEL AMI

Originally released: 2012
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Kristin Scott Thomas
Directed by: Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod
Based on: the novel of the same name by Guy de Maupassant

Georges is a poor young hoofer in 1890s Paris looking to make his mark. After meeting an old army buddy, he gets involved with a group of snooty bourgeoisie and a bunch of women who all want to hit that. His male colleagues hate him and treat him like a pussy, but that's probably because he keeps sleeping with their wives. Don't worry, though, Georges isn't just a hot piece of ass--he has a ridiculously complex Plan to get money so that he never has to watch cockroaches crawl around his apartment again.

I first heard about Bel Ami from Anachronist at Books as Portable Pieces of Thought, and it sounded so incredibly stupid that I seriously HAD to watch it. Bel Ami actually wasn't THAT bad, though (I probably would have enjoyed it more if it was), despite the fact that it contained some of the most awkward sex scenes I've ever seen. The cinematography and set design was gorgeous, and the movie did have some semblance of a plot (even if it didn't seem like it did for at least the first hour). I also thought the gender roles in the film were pretty interesting. As for Robert Pattinson... eh.



I mean, it's RPatt, so he basically spends forty percent of the movie staring and another forty smirking, which is pretty annoying. But he did make Georges sympathetic. I was honestly kind of rooting for the guy, but I'm not sure I was supposed to be. RPatt has said that Georges is amoral, but that doesn't really come across, especially in comparison to the other characters. He seems more of a bumbling idiot than a master manipulator, and he does care what at least one person thinks of him--his true love, Clothilde. I'm not sure if this is a failure on the screenwriter's part or RPatt's, but if you want someone who embodies a sexually objectified male, he does fit the bill.

Anyway, gender issues! Bel Ami reflects the fin-de-siècle paranoia about degeneration and indolence. Men should Do Things On Their Own and Not Rely On Women and all that good stuff. Except Georges basically gets everything from women, and has no intention of doing any work himself. His dad did that and it was for the birds! He'd rather make money on his back (to be fair, it's probably the only thing he's good at, and he is pretty). Georges basically takes on the role of a woman sleeping her way up to the top (à la Nana--post here--or Camille), but he's a dude. And it does get super-awkward sometimes.



Meanwhile, there are a lot of strong female characters in this film, most especially Uma Thurman, who plays Georges' wife, Madeleine. She smokes, drinks, plots to manipulate political elections through the press, and has no intention of letting anyone besides herself wear the pants in their marriage (side note: all the female leads in this movie should send thank-you notes to the cinematographer and director, because they looked freaking gorgeous). Wow, so many awkward sex scenes between those two. Even the other women Georges hooks up with come on to him first. Does Bel Ami pass the Bechdel Test? No way. But it does show women as independent, intelligent, and powerful. I would like to say this is interpreted as a positive, but instead it's more of a sign that civilization is going to the dogs--or at the very least, people like Georges.

When it came to the twisty, Les Liaisons Dangereuses-type plot, however, I thought the film really faltered. We get only the vaguest sense of what's happening at the newspaper Georges work at, or the political and financial manipulations Madeleine is a part of; and frankly Georges' plan to get the better of everyone makes no sense. Does it really take that much effort to infatuate a teenager? There are also a bunch of things left unexplained or that seemed kind of pointless.

Even with the interesting gender role reversals, I would say unless you have a particular love for Maupassant or the setting (which I do), you can skip Bel Ami. It's only minimally entertaining and kind of leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.

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