Happy Samhain, All Hallow's Eve and R.I.P. Challenge wrap-up

Happy Celtic New Year! :-)

Samhain is a Celtic festival that marks the end of summer and the beginning of the long cold season. It's all about the final harvest, preparing for winter and also about the dead. It was thought that the line between the worlds was especially blurry at Samhain and that magical things could happen.

I like thinking of Samhain as the start of a New Year and in the past we have marked this holiday in various ways. My favorite I think was a ritual of letting go of our baggage so that we could more forward. This involved writing what we wanted to get rid of on pieces of paper and throwing them into our fireplace. A bonfire would have been better but hey.

Halloween is the modern, secularised version of this old festival and I love the modern traditions too. Pumpkins and candy and scary things. And lovely little children going from door to door. What's not to love?

I already had some trick-or-treaters knock on my door on Saturday. I'm not sure they counted as lovely littel children, they were boys of about 12 or 13, they were not dressed up and they carried plastic chopping bags. They were going on holiday apparently and had to collect their candy a few days early. Lucky for them, I had just bought mini chocolate bars that morning. I forgot to decorate the house with all the spooky stuff I bought though. Ah well, you can't do it all, eh?

I can't say that I've been in the mood for much spooky reading this year. I think it has something to do with the fact that it's been around 20 degrees here lately, which really doesn't correspond to the atmosphere in which I wish to read my spooky books, i.e. in cold and rain and wind. While cozy inside obviously.





I did read some things that qualified for the R.I.P. VI challenge that Carl hosts each year:

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley
Soulless by Gail Carriger
Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

I'm not doing so well with reviews, but they'll come soon. In a nutshell: I loved The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley because I love, love, love Flavia de Luce; I'm enjoying the Sookie Stackhouse series; I didn't finish either Soulless or A Discovery of Witches, which is a surprise to me.

I love the R.I.P.  challenge but I didn't really give it much attention this year and now I regret it. I should have taken the time to curl up on the couch with a Wilkie Collins or some ghost stories. I'll have to remember that for next year.

Anyway, Happy Halloween everyone!

R.I.P. V Wrap-up

I'm a few days late with this post, but I've been away visiting my parents and with baby Shane in our lives blogging while on holiday has become a thing of the past.

For the R.I.P. Challenge, I aimed to complete Peril the First, which required 4 scary books, and I succeeded. But only because Carl let me cheat a bit and include a book I read just before the challenge started. Thanks Carl! :-) Here's what I ended up reading (as compared to my plan):

Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Room by Emma Donaghue

It's not hard to pick a favorite, since I absolutely LOVED Room. But the others were all great too. I'm particularly pleased that I finally read Dracula, as I've been meaning to explore the more classic scary stories. I guess Frankenstein and anything by Edgar Allan Poe will be next!

Thanks Carl for continuing to host this fabulous challenge, it's been great!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Finally, this book has been on my list practically forever, I finally got to it! Can you believe that although I've heard of Dracula of course, I'd never seen the films so I didn't actually know the story? Seriously, you'd think I've been living under a rock or something.

The main thing that I didn't expect from Bram Stoker's Dracula was that it wasn't about Dracula, in that it wasn't a story told from his perspective. I kind of assumed that it would be. So I was surprised at how many other characters were involved and that it was a tale of a whole bunch of people.

Once I got used to that, I really, really liked it. I liked the historical side of it and I enjoyed the pretty-society-meets-vampire aspect of it. I loved that it was written as a series of journal entries by various characters and that it had things like letters and newspaper clipping thrown in as well.

I didn't find it spooky, but I imagine that the films took care of that. :-) It's an interesting classic that I wasn't expecting to enjoy as much as I did.

Oh, but just like in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, the attitude towards women sometimes really made me angry. Every time a woman made progress in the case or came up with a brilliant idea (which was often), the men would think things like 'She thinks like a man'. How did we ever manage to overcome such widely spread prejudice? Did we overcome it at all?

Bram Stoker is another author who I didn't know was Irish. I feel like I'm being led towards Irish authors lately, I'm not sure why. The other author I recently read and didn't know was Irish was Oscar Wilde - Stoker and Wilde knew each other too, which I think is a really bizarre coincidence in my recent reading.

Challenges: R.I.P. Challenge, 1% Well-Read Challenge

Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris and R.I.P.

Living Dead in Dallas is the second book in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series and is just as good as the first book. I'm really enjoying the world that Harris created, the believability of it all. My friend Larissa is currently watching the True Blood series based on these books and calls is 'Buffy for adults' - I guess largely due to this believability (is that a word?) factor. If you like vampire stories, these books are for you. I bought the first eight I think as a boxset from Amazon - it was on sale - so I have loads of Sookie left to savor. :-)

Challenges: 4 Month Challenge

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Unfortunately, I read this in August and am just really late with the review, otherwise it would have qualified for Carl's famous R.I.P. Challenge. It's the challenge's fifth year and it looks like the list of fans is growing steadily. As is my list of potential books...

As always, Carl offers various levels of participation - I'm feeling ambitious so will try for Peril the First, which requires me to read 4 scary books. Can I do it?

Completed: 4/4 as of 6 October 2010 (wrap-up post)

Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morion
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
The Likeness by Tana French
Room by Emma Donaghue

R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril…IV

I'm a tad late signing up for Carl's R.I.P. IV challenge, but who cares, right?

The challenge is to read from the following genres until 31 October, scary Halloween...

Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

So getting into the mood of the season, here are my possibilities... I'm aiming for Peril the First or Second, depends how many books I can realistically get through while reading for other challenges too!

Check out Carl's original post for more details and visit the review site to see what everyone else is reading.

Completed: ALL 4/2-4 as of 31 October 2009 (read my wrap-up post here)

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Linqvist
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
No Time for Goodbye by Lynwood Barclay
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus, volume 1 by Joss Whedon et al.
Morrigan's Cross by Nora Roberts