Book Meme

Mar. 4th, 2011 10:30 pm
mer: (Book (Heart))
Swiped from [livejournal.com profile] dsudis.

'cause it's been a while since there was a meme.

The book I am reading:
The number of reading platforms has multiplied the number of books I read at once. On my Kindle at the gym, I'm reading Mira Grant's Feed. In paperback, Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. On my phone, The Healer's Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson. On my Kindle but not at the gym, The Blind Contessa's New Machine by Carey Wallace, who is probably the pro writer I've known longest, since she was friends with my roommate in college. (Let me commend that last book to you, because you may not have heard of it: the prose is simply gorgeous, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it.) And about a thousand research books simultaneously. Okay, actually, I only have 59 research books checked out and about 12 in my personal collection relevant to my time period, but it feels like a thousand.

The book I am writing:
So, I'm working on (actively) two books, the awayfromhome book which I shall refer to as The Disenchanted Castle book, and the athome book, which is all Rhine River valleys and dragons and princesses and knights and Evil Horses Being Reformed. I dunno. That's all I can really say about them at the moment.

The book I love most:
Love is such a funny word. And love is fluid, too. In olden times, I might have said Pride and Prejudice or The Blue Sword, but those are more perennial favorites. Love is different. What I love the most right now, the book that gives me the shivers when I think about rereading it, is probably Graceling.

The last book I received as a gift:
Um... er... I got a lot of books at Christmas, you know? And I couldn't tell you which order I got them in at this point. So I'll point to Feed by Mira Grant which I got from [livejournal.com profile] iuliamentis. I'm pretty sure I got it after Christmas.

The last book I gave as a gift:
I gave [livejournal.com profile] splash_the_cat the four Megan Whalen Turner Thief of Eddis books for Christmas, and since it was such a debacle of giving (basically, Amazon just FAILED), that I know I gave them to her most recently of anything I gave. Because it took like a month to solve the problem.

The nearest book on my desk:
The Medieval Dragon: The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature by Joyce Tally Lionarons is open on my desk, as is A Natural History of Dragons and Unicorns by Paul and Karin Johnsgard, T.H. White's The Bestiary, and Ernest Ingersoll's Dragons and Dragon Lore.

Closed and piled nearly as close are also The Nibelungenlied, a children's book in German about Hildegard of Bingen, Old and Midlde English c.890-c.1400: An Anthology, Wheelock's Latin, Newman's Sister of Wisdom, and a guidebook to castles in Rhineland-Palatinate.

It is a very full desk, and everything is very handy. And spread out nearly equidistant from me.
mer: (Default)
Mr. Rochester is supposed to be UGLY. My textual evidence: let me show you it. )

And yet, Hollywood (okay, the BBC, really) persists in portraying Mr. Rochester with the hottest hotties that hotted. Like Toby Stephens.

Toby. Who also happens to be Dame Maggie Smith's son. I don't know how being Professor McGonnigal's son makes someone hotter, but it *does*. )
Also, don't you think Toby should totally play Damian Lewis's brother sometime?

Actually, I lied. Hollywood does an okay job at not finding the hottest hotties that hotted for the rest of the Rochesters. But they have yet to find anyone actually ugly for the role. I think Orson Welles comes closest:

Orson Welles. )

The forehead is so right! And he's not... chiselly. The way Toby is. And his eyes are skeery.

I disapproved of moon-faced Ciaran Hinds in this role, though I'm looking at the pics and thinking: you-gly.

I mean, seriously, especially compared to the hotness that is Ciaran Hinds as Caesar and Wentworth. )

And John Hurt is far too blond. And let us not speak of Timothy Dalton. He was up there way past Toby Stephens in the classically handsome land, though not personally to my taste.

So I started to really think: what DID Rochester look like? John C. Reilly? )

Nah. I probably only think that because of Orson Welles.

Mr. Rochester was Charlotte Bront;ë's weird mish-mash of (certainly) her youthful fantasies based on Lord Byron and (probably) the married man she fell in love with while at school in Brussels, Constantin Heger (also, her teacher). The physical descriptions of Heger and Rochester are pretty much a match, and Heger didn't mind reducing Charlotte to tears in the course of teaching her, which, okay, somehow fits with Rochester in my mind.

Heger )

So. Rochester is basically built like a wrestler, or... something. And looks like Heger. Ish. So....

This is what I'm thinking. )

Yes, that's professional wrestler Hunter Hearst Helmsley.

I am SO going to literary hell.

May 2024

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