Balanchine's Ballerinas by Robert Tracy
The Watsons and Emma Watson by Jane Austen and Joan Aiken
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Reading Dance by Robert Gottlieb
Maureen O'Sullivan: "No Average Jane" by David A. Fury
Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
Maggie: a Girl of the Streets and selected stories by Stephen Crane
Jane Austen's Charolotte by Julia Barrett
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster


updated 6/9

This afternoon I saw UP with my brother. I went in not knowing really what it was about and enjoyed it a lot. Amazing animation, wonderful characters, and brilliant storytelling. I found it different from previous Pixar films (sort of like Wall*E -- a bit melancholy and dark for a kids film. My heartstrings were tugged on a lot. Several hours after seeing UP I'm still thinking about it: how wonderful dreaming can be, yet perhaps we have to let those dreams go, not let them sidetrack us from the path God has in mind for us. And when we let dreams consume us, nothing else matters, they can destroy us, turning us into people who will do anything to fulfill that dream...

Great, great movie.

My favorite fairy as a child was The Prince and the Princess by Marianna Mayer. A retelling of a Bohemian fairy tale, it is a story with magic windows, a prince on a dangerous quest, three unusual companions, loops of iron, an evil wizard, and a princess turned to stone whose spirit roams the world.

I recall the wonder I felt each time my mom bought this book home from the library and read it to me and my brother. I marveled at the prince's strange companions -- growing as tall as the highest tree, able to become very wide, and see for miles away -- who used their special talents to help the prince; loyal, faithful friends. The wizard frightened me with his cruelty and ability to change into terrifying monsters (the illustrations of him the book were so creepy). And I was in awe of the prince who went through so many dangers to rescue the princess, how much he loved her.

I found The Prince and the Princess again at the library several years later, and since then I have revisited the tale many times, and its enchantment has yet to wear off.

Just want to wish Liz a Happy 20th Birthday!!! XOXOXO *offers cake and ice cream*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUQbmFAE5WI

O_o ...Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must be turning in his grave!!

*Final episode of Little Dorrit was amazing: secrets revealed, castles in the air crumbling, and a satisfying ending.

( SPOILERS!! )

Four out of five stars

*Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This was my first reading of Thomas Hardy. Man, that book was depressing! It was hard to root for anyone: Tess I never really grew to care for; Angel was disappointing with how he abandoned her; and Alec I despised completely from his first appearance. The story seemed to offer no hope. And I did not understand the ending. Not as bad as Atonement, but it doesn't make my favorite books list.

Two out of five stars

*Last week I read Charlotte, Julia Barrett’s continuation of Jane Austen's Sanditon and found it very disappointing. The plot (or lack there of) was all over the place once Barrett picked up the story. She did a great deal of explaining characters’ motives and mental states instead showing them really accomplish anything.

( Slight spoilers )

Two out of five stars

*I think I'm turning into a Dickens fan. Bleak House was brilliant. And Little Dorrit, which I finished today, was amazing!! I enjoyed it so so much, more than the miniseries. I understood the story better. I loved the characters more, and despised those who deserved it. Arthur and Amy were... *sigh* An excellent read.

Five out of five stars

*And to close this post: Dickensblog

Part four of Little Dorrit wasn't quite as interesting as the previous episodes. This one focused greatly on Mr. Dorrit, causing Amy to be more in the background. No scenes with both Arthur and Amy, darn it. (Though it was so sweet seeing Arthur read Amy's letters.) Fanny was very good, and she actually grew on me some. Loved John in the brief scene he had with Mr. Dorrit. Arthur is so patient with his stubborn mother. Why was he seemingly being matched up with every lady in sight?! I'm still quite confused about Frenchman Rigaud's connection to Miss Wade and the House of Clennam.

Can't wait for the final installment to tie up all the loose ends, discover what secrets Mrs. Clennam's hiding, and (hopefully!) see Arthur realize what's been under his nose!

1. Comment and I will give you 3 people.
2. Post this meme with your answers.
3. Provide pictures and the names of three people.
4. Label which you would marry, shag, or throw off a cliff.

I'm changing "shag" to "kiss" to protect my innocence! ;)

I got this from miss_kallahan and the names she gave me are: Edmund Pevensie, Link Larkin, Jack Sparrow

...This is going to be hard.

Going to do this backwards to get the worse part over and done with.

I would throw off a cliff:

Jack Sparrow (I heart him, truly I do!!! Of the three he seems to the one most likely to be able to handle the situation; he pulled it off in CotBP.)

I would kiss:

Link Larkin (Just one little kiss and then Tracy can reclaim her guy.)

And I would marry:

Edmund Pevensie (Don't even have to think about that one. I so want to be Mrs. Edmund Pevensie.)

That was fun. :D

Want to play? Leave a comment!

I was given Jack Sparrow by miss_kallahan. *nods to icon*

01. Do you like this character?
Oh, yes! He's the best thing about PotC.

02. What names do you call this character?
Jack or Sparrow.

03. What image/color do you associate with this character?
Brown for his eyes and silver for the tickets in his hair.

04. What image/song do you associate with this character?
"Professional Pirate" from Muppet Treasure Island.

05. What bloody type do you think this character is?
Bloody type? I'm not sure...

06. Of all the titles this character appears in, what character do you like to put this character with?
Elizabeth. They're peas in a pod. :)

07. What would you want to say to this character?
I would ask to become part of his crew.

08. What do you want to do with this character?
Hear stories of his adventures, find the fountain of youth, and catch up with the Black Pearl, of course.

09. What's your favorite quote by this character?
I can't pick just one!
"She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for her, just like you promised. So we're all men of our word really... except for, of course, Elizabeth, who is in fact, a woman."
"Dirt. This is a jar of dirt."
"There'll be no living with her after this."
"No. If we don't have the key, we can't open whatever we dont' have that it unlocks. So what purpose would be served in finding whatever need be unlocked, which we don't have, without first having found the key what unlocks it?"
"Now where is that monkey? I want to shoot something!"

10. Please choose 5 friends with your choice of character.
Okay...
wyntertwilight Chuck Bass
selene_fairy Peter Pevensie
narnialovers Robin Hood
hintofawhisper George Weasley
wibbelkind Prince Caspian

I just finished watching the first three episodes of "Little Dorrit" online.

(This is one of the rare occasions where I'm watching the movie before reading the book. I put the book on hold at my library, but all three copies are out and I'm the forth one on the list... It will be a couple of weeks before I get my hands on Dickens' novel.)

Wow, wow, WOW!!!! I am totally hooked and engrossed in this miniseries. It is both suspenseful and moving. (What a chilling cliffhanger at the close of the last episode!! *shiver*) "Little Dorrit" is brilliantly filmed, and the sets, costumes, and music are all lovely. Its great cast is seemingly as large as "Bleak House"'s; it is hard at times to remember who is who, and what part they contribute to the plot(s). Some characters I love: Amy, Arthur, John, Pancks, Maggy, Frederick; and others I loath: Mr. Dorrit, Rigaud (a very creepy and scary Andy Serkis), Flintwinch, Tip, Fanny.

Clare Foy as Amy "Little" Dorrit is wonderful. She is a pretty girl, with a very expressive face. At times more was conveyed through her eyes when she was still and listening than when she spoke. Good-hearted, caring, loving, quiet, I identified with Amy very much. My heart broke for her, first, in her discovery of her secret love for Arthur being hopeless (his head was turned by a young lady), and later by her family's attitude towards her and her conduct when they became wealthy. I just wanted to hug her tightly.

Arthur Clennam is played by Matthew Macfadyen. I am liking Matthew much more here in "Little Dorrit" than I did in P&P. His is a very human, haunted character here. Determined to discover what it is his dying father wished for him and his cold mother to "put to right." I heart his concern for Amy and her family. There is a wonderful chemistry between Arthur and Amy. I hope he will soon realize how special she is.

There are several elements in "Little Dorrit" I do not like: the mild language scattered throughout; seeing Rigaud start to have his way with a woman; and the disturbing tension between two female characters in several scenes.

Overall this is another great miniseries from BBC. I'm looking forward to episode four.

The Watsons and Emma Watson by Jane Austen and Joan Aiken

The Watsons, a fragment by Jane Austen, is about Emma Watson who returns home after spending 14 years with a dear aunt. Life with her family is drastically different from her old well life: her family is poor, her father ill and weak, and she does not get along very well with her siblings, except for her oldest sister. Emma is introduced to the neighborhood at a ball and, among the guests, meets Mrs. Blake, her son Charles, her brother Mr. Howard, and catches the attention of Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave. Joan Aiken's Emma Watson completes the story.

As a historical drama it was a pretty good read. As a continuation of Austen’s fragment it was a disappointment.

( Slight spoilers ahead )

*I have about a dozen ideas for fanfics and none of them want to be written at the moment. *hits head against wall* I hate it when this happens...

*It feels like spring has finally arrived. The days are becoming warmer, and we had our first spring thunderstorm.

*Murder, She Wrote is one of the best mystery series I've seen in a while. A lot of the mysteries are very intriguing. And Angela Lansbury is brilliant as Jessica Fletcher. If only the series didn't have so much language and infidelity.

*Song of the moment: "The Safest Place" by LeAnn Rimes.

*Thanks to youtube my favorite dancers of the moment are: Veronika Part, Marcelo Gomes, Yulia Makhalina, Viktoria Tereshkina, Yevgenia Obraztsova, and Yekaterina Osmolkina.

*And last but not least, Pride and Prejudice will become a Broadway musical!!!! There's a nice little site about it here. It includes a wonderful video with pictures from a special performance set to a song from the musical: "Had I Been in Love," a duet between Jane Austen and Elizabeth Bennet. P&P is not my favorite novel of JA's, but this news has me excited!

Stolen from indes_elfwine.

Rules:
> Pick your birth month (see the list at the end of post).
> Strike out anything that doesn't apply to you.
> Bold (or italicize) the five-ten that best apply to you.
> Copy to your own journal, with all twelve months under a lj-cut

DECEMBER: Loyal and generous. Sexy. Patriotic. Active in games and interactions. Impatient and hasty. Ambitious. Influential in organizations. Fun to be with. Loves to socialize. Loves praises. Loves attention. Loves to be loved. Honest and trustworthy. Not pretending. Short tempered. Changing personality. Not egotistic. Take high pride in oneself. Hates restrictions. Loves to joke. Good sense of humor. Logical.

( Other months )

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

How do your reading habits stack up? Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Got from miss_kallahan.

Firstly: People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blog and replace any question that they dislike with a new, original question.

Secondly: Tag eight people. Don't refuse to do that. Don't tag who tagged you.

( Read more... )

FanFiction has been having difficulties the past two days. Hope they will be fixed soon!!!