Here’s a quick wrap-up of what I read and watched in the last quarter 2022. I found a few great shows even though I read very little. And now we are already gearing up for 2023. How time flies!
Tag: Funnies
Book: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip
Published: 1973
Tropes: Short Story/ Novella, Knight quests, Riddles, Puns, Folktales
Readalikes: Alice in Wonderland, The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Edward Lear
The mad King Magnus sends his knight Caerles on a quest, to look for the Throme of the Erril of Sherill. (A tongue twister, if ever there was one — and it’s not a throne, by the way). If Caerles succeeds, he gets to marry the king’s daughter, who has been locked up in the castle and has never ever laughed. The problem is: the Throme doesn’t exist. Or does it?
“You are cruel and loveless, you and your wanting.”
“I know,” Magnus Thrall whispered. “I know. The Throme is my hope. Find it for me, Caerles.”
It seems like a wild goose chase from the beginning. And poor Caerles seems to be the only sane person in the book. I was chuckling at all his dry witticisms throughout.
“… I do not know what use it is to hurry when I do not know where I am going, and when there will be nothing to find when I get there.”
The whole novella is actually poetry in the form of prose. Does that make sense? Seriously, I’m in awe of McKillip. To pack such a riddle in such lovely words, and to then blend it with humor and pun and brilliant character sketches? This was beautiful. Mesmerizing.
“The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame.”
Rating: 10 of 10. Highly recommended.
In the last week of October, I probably read more books than in the past 3 months. So I’m really hoping that my reading/ blogging blues are finally over. There’s a lot to record and catch-up with, all those blogposts that I missed — still need to get up to speed there! In the meantime, here’s a bunch a mini-reviews / reading wrap-up for October 2021.
It’s time for The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. The topic for August 4, 2021 is Meet My Pets.
It’s a lifelong desire for me to bring home a pet dog. Perhaps some day I shall! So, I have no images to share for now, but I do have some fabulous links about pets that steal the show.
First, look up the YouTube channel by MochaMilk. This YouTuber has two wonderful dogs, though I’m partial towards the Samoyed named Wooyoo (meaning milk in Korean). I just adore this dog, and the videos are always shot so well.
Another YouTube channel is Life with Malamutes. They are giant fuzzballs, so close to their wolfish ancestors. I love Phil the most, and here’s a video of them doing some food-tasting.
I’d recommend the movie Hachiko, on the off chance that you’ve not seen it. It’s a moving tale about a dog that waited for his best friend, years after even his family had moved on. The dog here is the Japanese Akita, and he’s beautiful.
For fictional animal sidekicks, I have a full post here. There’s no scarcity of those in my life, thankfully.
Who are your pets? Let’s go meet them!
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week, we are exploring why we love reading. Here are my reasons, in 10 shots. Do our reasons match up?
1 / Because books are the keys to other worlds.
Categories
Top 10 Funny Book Quotes
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week’s topic was book quotes by any theme. I’m choosing to go with some of the funny book quotes. Because laughter is the best medicine, you know.
Categories
Poetry Friday: A Few Clerihews
Clerihew: A type of light, humorous biographical four-line poem in rhyming style AABB. The Clerihew was named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (also, one of G.K. Chesterton’s close friends). Clerihews start with the name of a famous person, who is then “put in an absurd light”.
A few Clerihews below:
After dinner, Erasmus
Told Colet not to be “blas’mous”
Which Colet, with some heat
Requested him to repeat.
The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.
Sir Humphrey Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”
I discovered a cool meme recently, The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. The topic for March 31 is TV Shows I Binge-Watch(ed). Here they are, and maybe you’ll find something new-to-watch here!
1 / Jessica Jones (Season 1)
Why I binge-watched: the “neo-Noir” tones, a Marvel Comics hero rediscovering confidence, great friendships, Krysten Ritter as Jessica, David Tennant as Kilgrave, and Melissa Rosenberg’s screenwriting.
2 / Stranger (Seasons 1 and 2)
Available on Netflix. A public prosecutor teams up with a cop to fish out the corrupt, while their two departments remain at loggerheads. Realistic but still marvelously uplifting.
Categories
Poetry by Alfred Kreymborg
It’s time for Poetry Friday! And here’s Kreymborg proposing a test for what makes a true “poem”:
Ladislaw the critic
is five feet six inches high,
Which means
that his eyes
are five feet two inches
from the ground,
which means,
if you read him your poem,
and his eyes lift to five feet
and a trifle more than two inches,
what you have done
is Poetry—
Should his eyes remain
at five feet two inches,
you have perpetrated prose,
And do his eyes stoop
—which Heaven forbid!—
the least trifle below
five feet two inches,
you
are an unspeakable adjective.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we spotlight our ten favorite funny books. In no order of priority, here they are!