Rainbow Ravenclaw

When I first came upon Cinder in my search for new Young Adult literature to read, I was immediately hooked. A cyborg Cinderella living in a dystopian New Beijing sounded extremely interesting. In my opinion, the book delivers on this promise. Cinder is working as a mechanic, supporting her stepmother and her two stepsisters. When she was still a child she had to have major surgery that transformed her into a cyborg. Her life before the change is a mystery to her and her family as she was adopted right after the surgery and has no memories before this. Her stepmother resents her, blaming her for her husbands death and for being a cyborg but still relies on her work as a mechanic to finance the family. When the prince brings his broken android to Cinder her life begins to spiral out of control. There is a deadly virus threatening her family, she is afraid prince Kai might resent her for being cyborg and the empire is in danger of invasion. A lot of people have laughed after I tol

The Royal We is by far not a typical book for me to read. To be honest deciding to read this was as much influenced by the very low price of the kindle version as by the fact that the wonderful Prinzessin Paradox suggested it to me. Before starting the book I checked out the reviews on goodreads and there was one (the most popular one) which stayed with me throughout the book.  " This is 100 percent Kate Middleton fan fiction and I have absolutely no problem with that." This is in my opinion exactly the mindset, with which to start reading this and you might just find yourself enjoying it  immensely . Especially because even though it is very much "reality based" (and yes some characters are immediately recognizable), it is not as much devoted to an idea of a fairytale royal romance as one might imagine.  In fact, in a genius meta move the book I expected to read does exist in the fictional world of The Royal We and is called the Bexicon. There the sto

"most men don't fear death, they fear those things - the knife, the shipwreck, the illness, the bomb - which precede, by microseconds if you're lucky, and many years if you're not, the moment of death." Shaking Hands With Death is not a typical book by Terry Pratchett. Firstly, it is a little booklet with only 59 pages. Secondly, it is not set in the Discworld or in any other fantastic space. Thirdly, it contains the speech he gave as The Richard Dimblebly Lecture in 2010. The book itself consists of two parts. An introduction by Rob Wilkins and the speech by Pratchett. Pratchett, who has died in March 2015 after years of him living with Alzheimer's disease. The introduction is as much part of the book as is the speech itself because it describes how Pratchett struggled (because of his illness) to write (he could not type) and deliver (someone else had to read it for him) the speech. This view into his life is an important perspective to remember when

Today is the day, most Harry Potter fans will remember as the day when the story really started. The day Harry Potter changed into The Boy Who Lived. The day Voldemort killed Lily and James Potter. And of course I know that all of this is fictional. And to many people it is just a story. To many other people the Harry Potter books are the story that has been with them through large parts of their life. Many people - like me - have grown up with the story of the boy wizard. The books have influenced and inspired them. Those people created conventions and charities (such as the Harry Potter Alliance ), wrote booklength fanfiction and music that created a whole genre of wizard rock (such as the amazing Margot , whose video I have linked below). Harry Potter has influenced lives in so many different ways. And to many of us, this is a special day. To us, Hogwarts will always be our home. 

I bought this collection of short stories because I had read several pieces of fiction by Alice Sola Kim and wanted to buy her story "Beautiful White Bodies" in printed form. If you are interested you can also find it online and for free at Strange Horizons . In all honesty, I have never been a big fan of zombie fiction. In a way it always seemed rather patriarchal to me with the lone (typically male, often white) survivor fighting against the the forces of evil that hunt him down. As with most fantastic literature it is of course unfair to reduce it on such a shallow level and I have since stated that I enjoy zombie fiction a lot more since I realized that zombies are typically a criticism of consumer culture. The book consists of a variety of stories that often differ significantly from each other in tone and theme. Neil Gaiman contributed one story ("Bitter Grounds") in which he recalls Zora Neale Hurston and her research on Haitian zombie myth. Andy Dunca

Because Halloween is only a few days away and because I have mentioned my other Lego minifigure before, here are a few pictures of the ones I got out of the minifigures series 14 . They are super cute and spooky and some of my favorite fantastical creatures including a werewolf, a gargoyle and a witch. Especially the witches hat is great with a lot of little detail added to it. Still, my favorite has to be the zombie cheerleader. I am a surprisingly big fan of the genre of cheerleader movies (such as Bring It On ) and was understandably exited to see All Cheerleaders Die . While the movie is only so-and-so, the idea of zombie cheerleaders has stuck with me and I love to have my own little minifigure of one. The vampiress on the other hand was the weakest of the figures for me. The hair is not my favorite but something I can live with. The cape on the other hand looks terrible in my opinion. The transparent plastic looks really cheap and so I exchanged it against a black more

I love Gail Carrigers writing. Reading her first novel Soulless made me fall in love with the characters, the world she created, as well as her style of writing. The whole series The Parasol Protectorate remains one of my favorites and The Finishing School books are also always highly anticipated by me. I might write more about any of them at some later point but now I want to talk about Prudence , which is the first book in The Custard Protocol series. Set in the same world as The Finishing School and The Parasol Protectorate and starring the daughter of earlier protagonists, I knew the book would be a must-read for every fan of the world. The world Trying to convince friends to read any of Carrigers books, I typically describe them as a mixture of Jane Austen and steampunk. Then I start ranting about werewolves and vampires and ghosts, many of which are surprisingly openly queer, about the witty writing that has me laughing out loud at times and about the often rather

Literature (with a capital L) seems often measured in its difficulty. How complicated are the words, how complex the themes. As well as its inaccessibility. The fact that only few people actually read something is somehow meant to give it worth. To dissuade potential readers there are thousand upon thousand of words combined into an epic, concerned with questions of humanity. The polar opposite of this seems to be twitter. 140 characters. That's all. Words have to be short. Sentences concise. If you want to tell a story you have to put a lot in very little space. And this is exactly what Very Short Story does. The account tells narratives within one tweet. There are no reoccurring characters. No complicated plots. Still thousand of people are fascinated. At the simple (and sometimes complex) truth held within the stories. At the potential within the characters. At how little we as readers need to connect to a story. I personally, do not believe in a differences

This collection of short stories from 1979 (I have been reading the 1993 edition) is certainly a classic if you like feminism and fairy tales. It includes seven stories that reimagine classic fairy tales (two of them being versions of "Little Red Riding Hood") and changes them into something more. It is not a simple change of roles so the women are cast as the active players in their own stories. Instead they are allowed to be everything. They can be monsters and still remain heroes, they can be damsels who need to be saved, they can be evil and die at the hands of society.  My favorite story might be "The Tiger's Bride," a version of "The Beauty and the Beast," as it starts with the remarkable sentence "My father lost me to The Beast at cards." It then follows the heroine in her way through captivity, reflecting on her life before, in which she is utterly dependent on her father.  "That clockwork girl who powdered my ch

The plan for this blog is to write about books and stories I have read. Maybe review them, maybe just gush about my love for certain quotes. Since I have yet to finish my first book review (procrastination much?), I decided to just start with something. And now for something completely different ... A friend of mine send me a package with Lego in the post yesterday because she knows that I love Lego as well as Halloween. It's set number 40122 for anyone who is interested. I just took a few pictures while building to get started.  The set is nice with quite a few hidden extras such as the cupcake or the brick walls. I do not like the mini figures that much as the witch does not seem especially scary and the top does not even match the trousers that well. Luckily I have a few other witch figures standing around so I might swap that one out later.