Because I Have So Much Time On My Hands

It's been a while ey? Exams,people. Exams which will dictate my future and the rest of my life and which I have to do well in or risk bringing eternal shame and dishonour upon my family.

But I can always make a little time for blogging.


Anyway, it was my birthday some weeks ago, and I was utterly delighted to receive books from most people who actually remembered it was my birthday! And in addition to that I splurged around two hundred buckaroos at MPH bookstores,so what I have now is a proper treasure trove of the freakiest most brilliant books around!

(By the way,forgive my rather poor writing-or blogging- standards this time around. It's hard to be all intelligent and witty and verbose and captivating when you've spent the last four days having your brained mashed into a pulp by History and Math and stuff in a big silent classroom and with another week of the same joy awaiting you.)

In any case, the only book I had time to read before the massive paper chase started was Neil Gaiman's latest offering(or I think it's his latest. I'm not very up-to-date at the mo').




One of the first books to be talked about on this glorious website was,of course, Mr.Gaiman's Coraline,where people had buttons for eyes.
How....cute.
But we all love Neil Gaiman. He da man! The epitome of freakishness! And this book is ah-may-zing for the simple fact that,even though not all the stories in it are brilliant,it's simply unputdownable.
As the title suggests,and the blurb on the back says, "..all are fragile things made out of just 26 letters arranged and rearranged to form tales and imaginings..".
When it comes to fantasy fiction nobody does it quite like Neil Gaiman. His good friends Diana Wynne Jones and Susanna Clarke (I have reviewed both ladies' work in previous entries so go have a look-see) are geniuses as well, but Neil somehow manages to interweave the fantastic and the nonsensical and the weird with the real world in a way that seems so natural and haunting at the same time.
There are wolves,aliens, devils,demons, God in a suit and pince-nez glasses, ships made out of the fingernails of dead men, sun birds, cannibals and even some pointers on how to talk to girls at parties.
I won't give away too much about the plot of each short story, but the Monarch Of The Glen,which is really a weeny bit too long, is really just Beowulf in Scotland without Angelina Jolie.
Or something like that....
I had actually mistaken Monarch Of The Glen for the BBC series of the same name and I wondered when Neil Gaiman had suddenly got into a TV drama set in the Scottish Highlands.
In any case, if I haven't said it already, Fragile Things is a wunnerful piece of work and a brilliant way for new readers to get familiar with the man's style.

You can check out his other work here and his scandalously Scandinavian new movie Beowulf,which has a rather cool soundtrack I must say. Although we all know who the boys will be drooling over.

And aren't you guys just bloody awful glad to have me back?

And have you noticed that "I won't give away too much of the plot." is fast becoming a catchphrase of mine?
Bad..gotta stop saying that.