the one with the Goddesses

The shelf looked interesting. The books were predominantly in dark colored covers and there were interesting illusions and the attractive titles called to me: Goddess of the Spring, Goddess of the Sea, Goddess of the Rose.etc
A cursory glance over the back cover told me they were romances; of the kind I loved best. With the Greek Gods in them(I cant help but admit that I love Hades.).
I was curious but I knew my mother would never knowingly let me read them(a flip through the book assured me of its extreme smuttiness - though not enough to make people wince-) and I left those copies there nestled in the Fantasy section which was occupied by the likes of the Lord of the Rings and many others.
I did have the opportunity to peruse the book later on(thus bringing around a point to this post) and might I say, it ranks the lowest on all the books I have ever read. And that's saying something as I have suffered through things like Inheritance of Loss(Sorry, Kiran Desai. I know you won the Man Booker for it but it just isnt my cup of tea) and assorted lovelies whose first page I cant get past.
While I did get past the first page for this book(Goddess of Spring by P.C Cast; Hades was obviously first), I discovered that the Gods and Goddesses were mere foils for an uninspired story that attempted to touch on the metaphysical(is love only for the soul ?). Hades is nothing more than this well built, sexy man with a deep voice and the manners(If I had wanted just this, I would have gone to Mills and Boons). Where is the melancholy of the God of the Dead ?  The one who reigns over Tartarus and every other deep, damned part of Hell. He has seen things no one else has. Things that scar and change people. He does not go around making furniture or decorating his palace.
Cast in the role of the man who didnt want anyone to see him for who he truly is, all Hades seems to do is be a teenager in front of Persephone. Iapis, a character I expected more from, disappointed. The difference in the time in the mortal and the immortal world could have been gone into a little more clearly(seeing as Lina encounters people with ancient Greek names and Orpheus comes to fetch Eurydice only when Lina is there).
Carolina Santoro the mortal who finally makes Hades fold for her like paper is practically no different from the Mills and Boons novels heroines(other than the interesting ability with the animals).
What could have been a lovely fleshed out fantasy story(Percy Jackson anyone?) crumbles down to a series filled with women who make the Gods fall in love with them(a super hero per say. The Gods have been reduced to this, eh?). Orpheus is a cruel husband; Hades talks of soul mates and love(my apologies but it seemed just like a bad build up for the end) . While Tartarus provides a stronger look at hell, it falls greatly short of the epic reality that Hell would be if it existed(Dante provided a much more realistic view). Hell is not about sexy men and cuddly horses; its darker and more wicked than your imagination can come up with. The conclusion is utterly unsatisfying as well.
The excitement when you think you're going to read about the Greek Gods fizzes out when you realize that they just misclassified a sappy Romance book into the wildly imaginative Fantasy section.
We, Fantasy geeks, like a lot more than this on the plate; we require beings like satyrs, centaurs, a venegeful God and Riptide(^_^)if its Greek Gods you offer us.
P.C Cast, your book disappoints greatly.

(...dont even think about attempting to read Warrior Rising. There goes another fellow I used to like...)

the one with the Daisy

Manga.

There's really nothing like it.

From action to historical fiction, comedy to business, sports and games to fantasy, mystery, horror and sexuality, there's something for everyone.

There's shonen manga aimed at boys and shojo manga aimed at girls(though you're free to read whatever you want ^_^); there are many subdivisions within those and the total amount will make your head spin.

I started watching anime when I was around 13; Inuyasha was my first love(even though I didnt realize I had already watched CardCaptor Sakura when I was ten) and I just tumbled head first into a world where nothing was impossible. Demons, Ninja, Chakra, Mikos, Shinigami, Alchemists, Death Notes and impossibly amazing men, swordsmen with the weight of the world, magicians. etc.

It's 7 years later and I still am awed. This blog was mainly going to concentrate on the books I read but this manga feels very close to the heart. At a time when I felt like I was being held down by the weight of the world, it was Daisy to the rescue.

Dengeki Daisy is a romantic comedy shojo manga by Kyousuke Motomi. Most people will cringe at its cuteness but I find it adorable. Teru is a young girl who finds herself lost after her brother dies of a stomach tumor. Before his death, he gives her a phone and says Daisy will always be there for her; just an email away. And so, starts the most important relationship of both of their lives(both Daisy's and hers').

At times, the plot feels like its trying too hard(for instance, the Jack O Frost; we love Kurosaki anyway. No need to make him more hot.) but its lighthearted humor and the sweetness has you hanging onto it. Beautifully drawn, some of the pictures are so artistic that you just want to stare at them for hours on end.

The author adds humorous touches by maintaining a Q&A column about the characters' traits(how will Kurosaki go bald ? Rofl.). Kurosaki embodies a character that alternates between rough and gentle; both extremes of which readers adore(even the lolicon part :P) and Teru is a funny girl with a mild temperament and a soft heart("Go bald Kurosaki !"). Filled with its share of characters that tickle your funny bone one moment and are serious the next, Dengeki Daisy made the romantic in me go 'Awww.'


http://www.mangareader.net/123/dengeki-daisy.html
in case, anyone's interested ! 

the one with the vampire

"..she lived to put her arms around my neck and press her tiny cupid's bow to my lips and put her gleaming eye to my eye until our lashes touched and, laughing, we reeled about the room as if to the wildest waltz. Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover."

Thanks to the Twilight 'phenomenon' and the TV-series made watchable only by Ian Somerhalder(Vampire Diaries), the vampire is a well known being. While vampire ficiton writers might disagree on some of the basics such as: can vampires walk during the day(Anne Rice and Bram Stoker don't think so but Stephanie Meyer says they can. The only reason they don't is because they sparkle in the sunlight though God knows what use can that be to any creature other than for blinding its prey. Though, the prey might have burst into peals of laughter just after the sparkling begins. That might be how those vampires hunt. Maybe. Superior speed and strength and sparkling. But I digress.), are they truly evil ? (Again, Bram Stoker and Anne Rice don't think so- there is Louis who tries but he succumbs as well- but Stephanie Meyer has given us Edward, the mythical good vampire) and are they mindless immortals driven just by blood lust or are they the cadre of intelligent predators above us, they agree on the most basic thing about a vampire. Blood is essential for survival.
Question upon question about a phenomenon that may or may not even exist.
   Interview With The Vampire(Anne Rice, 1976; also made into a movie in 1994 starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas) has Louis, a 200 year old vampire, revealing his story of suffering and despair to a human male. From the years he spent as human to the second birth he went through(with Lestat as his master) to the daughter he loved and cherished and to the part of himself he lost forever, Louis holds the reader spellbound with his gift for words.
  Lestat converts Louis for his money, plantation and his skill at managing money; Louis soon becomes disenchanted with Lestat upon discovery that Lestat cannot answer any of his burning questions about where they came from, are they the sons of the devil. etc. Lestat looks at everything with mockery and takes joy in the seduction and the kill. To the vampires, the kill is above everything; it gives greater joy than sex and is something that cannot be satisfied with just animal blood. Louis describes it as an erotic process,
 "...for vampires, it is the ultimate experience."
 To keep Louis with him, Lestat converts a little five year old, Claudia and they live in a mockery of domesticity. Claudia matures mentally but not physically, an old soul in a very young body. Her bitterness wounds Lestat and Louis and drives them apart. Claudia kills Lestat to escape from him and they set off to find other vampires so that they can satisfy their own curiosity instead of being permanently trapped by Lestat in New Orleans. They find Armand and his company in Paris (Theatre des Vampires). The company suspects them of killing their maker(a grave offense) while Louis falls rapturously in love with Armand who reciprocates his passion. Louis knows he cant leave Claudia who suspects his passion and asks him to convert a human to become her keeper. Louis agrees under mental influence from Armand and converts Madeline(a woman who lost her child) who becomes devoted to Claudia. This nearly breaks something in Louis because he's sworn to himself that he would never convert someone to his miserable existence. Armand convinces him that it is he who is at fault and not Louis. However, Lestat is not as dead as they think and he returns to have revenge on Claudia and to take Louis with him.
The company, upon discovery of her attempt to kill Lestat, overpowers locks Louis into a coffin and burns Claudia and Madeline alive in the sun. Louis breaks down when he escapes and becomes witness to their ashes and even Lestat is remorse-stricken for the daughter that he has lost("...I didn't think they'd do this..."). He sets the theater on fire to revenge his daughter. He loses a vital part of himself; the part that feels passion upon the monstrosity committed by Armand(who in the end was the one who killed Claudia) and ends up, wandering alone; the grieving human-vampire. The most human of them all.
The story is a warning, not a beckon; a tale of passion and grief and eternal wandering. Louis wants nothing more than to be human again; he is compassionate and emotional in a world of vampires with no humane qualities but only filled with evil and coldness. He realizes he cannot be anything but damned in body and mind. He was evil and the only way out was to attain a depth of evil that would end his pain and make him a cold, merciless destroyer.  He becomes weary of immortality and everything he has undergone. He lives alone, without companions. His story ended in Paris when Claudia died; his life meanders on until the world ends or he chooses to end i. He even loses the hatred he feels for Lestat, the love for Claudia and drifts as a wanderer, cold and bereft of the 'mortal passion' that drew everyone to him.

("...and that's the end of it. There's nothing else.")

the one with the streetcar

"They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries, ride six blocks and get off at the Elysian Fields !"

Written by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire is a play in eleven acts. Engrossing in its madness, it takes place in the two-room apartment of Stanley and Stella Kowalksi. Blanche Dubois, Stella's sister, comes to visit them and it is soon obvious that she is not all together.

With delusions of grandeur, she puts on airs and looks down upon Stanley who dominates over his wife with a passion that Blanche doesnt understand. Widowed at a young age by a husband who killed himself, she sifts in and out of reality. She tells her sister that she was allowed to take a leave of absence but in fact she had been fired from her post as Teacher for having had an affair with a 17-year old student. She talks  constantly of Belle Reve, their ancestral property and of how it was 'lost'.

Stanley gets into a collision course with Blanche as she holds court in his house, drawing his friend and her would-be-suitor Mitch like a moth to a flame.

Stella, defensive of her sister, seeks to keep Stanley from harming her but even she cannot turn a blind eye to the holes in her sisters' story or not see how much she needs help. When Stanley finds out all her secrets(the reason she left her job) and all the flaws that she's seeking to mask with her airs(her alcoholism is no secret through all the acts), he exposes it in a brutish way that pushes her over the edge. Mitch leaves her and Blanche subsides into a alcoholic misery where she keeps hoping for a former beau to call and take her away from all the madness and the unkindness. In the penultimate act, after coming from the hospital where his wife, Stella gives birth to their child, he rapes Blanche, tearing apart her reality.

In the last act, she is taken away by a doctor and his nurse; away to a mental institution. 

The original cast had Marlon Brando as Stanley; an unknown then, he was given cab fare to Tennessee William's house where he gave a brilliant reading and made some house repairs as well ! 

The play is a testament to cruelty and the fragility of the human mind. Blanche totters on the edge of sanity, clinging to memories long gone by. She is unable to face the present but chooses to dwell in the past but then don't we all ? Scarlett O'Hara dreams of Tara and Ellen's soft hands whenever she's faced with hardship. The human spirit is sometimes surprisingly strong. But at other times, it snaps like a thin wafer, leaving just crumbles behind.

the one with the little girl

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta; the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

A novel by Vladimir Nabakov(incidentally, the novel was written in English and not in his mother tongue- Russian), Lolita is one-of-a-kind. The protagonist of the novel is a middle aged man, rather sober and ordinary; a scholar. A tragic romance and a failed marriage behind him, he lives his life quietly, absorbed in translating French Literature for English speaking students while nymphets fluttered in and out of his life. His contact limited to just viewing them in their play and chatter, Humbert Humbert categorizes dreams of possessing a nymphet(a nymph-like girl from the age of nine to 14) as a thing that might never come to pass. His life becomes a whirl when he lodges with Charlotte Haze and he meets Lolita, he loves Lolita at almost the same instant as he met her.

Lolita is neither beautiful nor clever; Humbert laments often about how, no matter how hard he tries, Lolita refuses to bend to his will and become a cultured 12 year old girl. But his love for her is magical and a far greater force than himself. He cant break free even though it becomes obvious that he has caused his nymphet to resent him and his torture of her body. Forced to grow up far before she is ready, Lolita rebels against Humbert and finally breaks free in a combination of circumstances that she didn't think would happen to her. Robbed of her childhood, her story is symbolic of ruin. She's pregnant at 18, married to a man who has no idea of the truth of her relationship with her 'father' and in love with a man who wants her only for monetary purposes.

Lolita is a love story; an obsessive twisted love that disgusts you and thrills you at the same time. Tales of a pedophile, no matter how beautiful and lyrical it is, cannot lose their stench. And even if Lolita, at moments, seems far older than she is, you can never truly forget the nature of their mangled relationship. The relationship is doomed to fail, you can hang on and read and almost sympathize with the pain Humbert feels when torn from his Lolita. And be thankful in the end that even though Humbert manages to reach out to her again, she is far beyond his reach and no longer the four foot seven nymphet with the tanned limbs, the impish grin and the silky bronze hair. Heartbroken and resentful, Humbert drives himself to his ruin and finally with blood on his hands, writes the story of his life - his biggest love, his guilt and his attempt to relive a childish romance that ended before its time.

"...and this is the only immortality that you and I might share, my Lolita."

the one with the lion and the lamb

"Twilight is a young-adult vampire romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer. It is the first book of the Twilight series, and introduces seventeen-year-old Isabella Swan, who moves from Phoenix to Forks and finds her life in danger when she falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen."

This is what Wikipedia has to say for this book.

I don't think i need to go into what millions of teenagers have to say for this book.

I was one of those girls once. I take pride in thinking that since I am past the "I love Edward <3" stage that I can be considered a normal part of the human race.

But anyone who can recall nearly every part of Twilight cannot unfortunately be considered as a part of it.

There is a spell in those pages. A spell which makes you forget everyone else around you; your life, your college life, your friends, family. Scoff all you want but everyone who reads it reads it through. And that is the greatest thing you can say for a book.

What is it about these characters that make us like them ? Maybe its the thought of the macabre- vampires and the bloodsucking that turns us on. Or the eternal dream to be swept off your feet by a charming and suave man with smoldering eyes and an old fashioned gentlemanly manner (extinct now. all those qualities). Whatever it is, it makes us look beyond Bella seeming paper thin(Bella is the weakest character in the book), the laughable notion of the good vampire who seems like every girl's dream rolled into one(he's too perfect, a friend of mine says), how very good life seems for the vampire (I mean come on, they get everything ? good looks. speed. strength. memory. intelligence. immortality. extra sensory powers also ? give me a break).

The 'Twilight phenomenon' however (the craze over the movies)has driven all my love out of me. It is now worse than a boring book. The movie versions almost got me into a coma. All my love has been spent and there is nothing left anymore.

The name Twilight brings up a sense of cold, rain, deserted days and softness. Robert Pattinson makes me cringe and Kirsten Stewart makes me wish i were blind rather than watch her butcher up one of the books I enjoyed a lot.

The name Twilight brings up disgust towards the movie franchise and a little bit of shame. I still love the book. But everytime I read it, it dredges up visuals from the movie and that is just something i cannot take anymore.