This Will Be A Boring Post. Seriously.

I was going to give you a list of books I freaking need the authors to write ASAP, plus favorite scenes from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (aka One Of The Best Books Ever) but instead I'm just giving you a mash-up of Random Stuff/Things I Like/Have Been Thinking About Recently. This post will be long and boring. Unfortunately, I think that's just the nature of this blog/me. 1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This is an amazing, amazing book, and you must read it posthaste if you have not already. It's a (fictional) history of the revival of magic in England in the 1800s, and centers around the friendship and eventual rivalry of the first two practical magicians England has seen since the disappearance of its half-human, half-fey Raven King, John Uskglass, 300 years prior. It's an enormous, sprawling, beautiful work that's written in this awesomely prim, Jane Austen-ian tone (you know that way she had of skewering social niceties and egos with a few pointedly innocuous lines? Like that). Clarke also weaves a fabulously complex and believable backstory of the history of English magic that draws you into the world of JS & MN, complete with footnotes and extracts from letters and secondary sources for verification. Anyway, it's a gorgeous mashup of history (Napoleon & Waterloo), traditionally British & Spenserian mythology (think the Faerie Queen and Tam Lin, Arthurian legend and ... Norse mythology, I guess--"Uskglass" doesn't sound very British to me), Jane Austen and Charles Dickens (society balls and society scandals), and ... pure awesomeness. Also, I love what she does with language. My favorite scenes are probably too long and need too much explanation for posting, but look at this snippet of casual text: "The box was small and oblong and apparently made of silver and porcelain. It was a beautiful shade of blue, but then not exactly like blue, it was more like lilac. But then again, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the colour of heartache. But fortunately, neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it." OK. I know that wasn't groundbreaking per se, but I love the fact that this paragraph--which is a throwaway paragraph, buried in an immense book--is so precise in its description. Neither blue, nor lilac, nor grey: the colour of heartache. You know exactly what that box looks like now, don't you? And you know it's something not of this world (it contains, by the way, the severed smallest finger of lady who is under enchantment). And then the next great thing: after giving you something touchy-feely and sensitive like the colour of heartache, she goes on, in quintessentially British fashion, to brush past it with the matter-of-fact But fortunately, neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it. Without so much as a comma, people! .... reading over this post I doubt you will be impressed. I'm not explaining this tiny bit of text well. But it's good. Read it. 2. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! Joss Whedon (Buffy and Firefly creator, along with this fall's Dollhouse and some other tv shows) currently has a 3-part web-only musical coming out, starring Neil "Doogie Howser" Patrick Harris as supervillain Dr. Horrible. Dr Horrible just wants the chance to talk to Penny, the cute girl at the laundromat (Felicia Day), and to be able to prove his worth to the Evil League of Evil, which he's trying to join. Alas, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillian, um yum?) is there to save the day and steal the girl. Part I is up now at the link I sent you and it's really hilarious, campy and OTT in the best way. Please watch it. Seriously. He makes a song about a freeze ray into a love ballad. It's amazing. 3. Er ... More Books! Okay so I don't think people understand quite how much I read. In the past three weeks, I have read the following 10 books:

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (and oh, did I mention this is her fiction debut?! freaking amazing)
• Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card (Card's Ender's Game is one of my all-time favorite books, but I just can't quite wrap my mind around how ... altruistic and optimistic Card's views of humanity tend towards in his other books, this one included.)
• The Wrong Hostage by Elizabeth Lowell (Lowell isn't a bad writer, but this was mass market trash. hey, I was in an airport and the selection was small)
• New Moon and Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer (part of Meyer's hugely popular Twilight Saga ... YA fantasy novels. They're OK, but definitely YA, aka, melodramatic/romantic/sappy. And the heroine is really annoyingly helpless.)
• The Host by Stephanie Meyers (This was supposed to be her foray into adult books and scifi; it is slightly more complex than the Twilight books, but still basically felt like a YA fantasy/romance. All of Meyers' stuff is sort of trashy, addictive fun, but not exactly mentally-straining. Which is why I read 3 of them in the past 3 weeks. Also, I was on a roll.)
• The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (This was a very beautiful, thoughtful, and sad coming-of-age story about a girl growing up on a fading ranch in Montana. The title refers to a conversation the girl has with her father when they're weaning foals from mares, a painful process involving forcibly separating the animals, who scream out for each other unceasingly for days before giving up. The narrator wants to know who watches over animals and soothes their pain the way humans believe a God does ours, and the book bring into question all the truths of that, and makes you wonder how much difference there is between us and the horses.)
• In the Woods by Tana French (A fantastic book--a literary mystery about a pair of Irish detectives investigating the murder of a little girl on the same spot where two children disappeared twenty years before. Wonderful characterizations and an amazing narration.)
• The Floating Island: The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme by Elizabeth Haydon (YA novel, first in a series. Capitalizing off the Spiderwick etc trend. I bought it b/c it was $4.95; didn't love it.)
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (speaks for itself. Reader, I married him!)

That, my friends, is a total page count of ... 5,324 pages. Of all of these, the top three are Jonathan Strange, The God of Animals, and In the Woods. They're all very different genres and what they have in common is fantastic writing and an internal resonance with the human condition.