Showing posts with label bill willingham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bill willingham. Show all posts

Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Top Ten Tuesday | It's Not Me, It's You


Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!


I've returned from my hiatus, so it's time to jump back into Top Ten Tuesday!

This week's theme is 'Ten Characters You Just Didn't Click With'. Thankfully this doesn't happen to me too often, but there's nothing worse than reading a book in which you don't give a diddly-squat what happens to the protagonist.



Tris from Divergent by Veronica Roth: I ended up DNFing Divergent when I tried to read it. I didn't believe the world and, more importantly, I just didn't care about Tris at all. I felt like she had zero personality and I didn't care what happened to her.

Lincoln from Attachments by Rainbow Rowell: Eh... I just thought Lincoln was a little weird. I enjoyed the sections between Beth and Jennifer for the most part, but I thought Lincoln was a pretty boring guy in dire need of a bit of a gumption.

June and Day from Legend by Marie Lu: Okay so technically this is two, but actually June and Day are basically the same person, only one of them's a girl and the other's a boy. I really, really didn't like Legend (check out my review here), and June and Day were such boring protagonists. I don't care about people who can do everything perfectly. Give me characters with flaws.

Snow White from Fables by Bill Willingham and Various Artists: I love Snow in The Wolf Among Us - in fact I love all the characters in that game - but in the graphic novels? Not so much. Snow in particular, however, grated on me. She was so self-righteous, and perhaps that might have worked with another writer, but I really wasn't a fan of how Willingham wrote any of the characters. You can check out my review of Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile here if you like!

Jocelyn, Allegra, Prudie, Grigg, Bernadette and Sylvia from The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler: I know, I'm cheating again, but this is another instance in which I found it very difficult to differentiate one character from another. I did like this book, but not enough to keep it once I'd finished it. You can check out my review here if you like!



Ayla from Darkhaven by A.F.E. Smith: I liked Myrren and I liked Elisse, but I just didn't get along with Ayla. She spent the entire book as a damsel in distress when she had the potential to look after herself. You can check out my review here if you like!

Stargirl from Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli: She was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and, as such, I found her impossible to relate to.

Tana from The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black: This was another book I didn't really like, you can check out my review here if you'd like to know why, and the characters were a large part of my dislike. I didn't really care what happened to any of them.

Jonas from The Giver by Lois Lowry: I wanted to love this book and I was disappointed, again you can check out my review here to find out why. I just couldn't connect to Jonas at all, and because of that I found it impossible to worry about what would happen to him. Like so many of the characters on this list, I just didn't care.

Ellen Laidlaw from Blood Sinister by Celia Rees: Ellen should have been very cool. She's a young lady in 19th century England who wants to study medicine, but unfortunately she fell into the poisonous 'I'm not like other girls' way of thinking and thought her dreams and ambitions were better than everyone else's; particularly the women who wanted to get married and have children. Feminism is all about choice, and if a woman chooses to be a wife and mother, and enjoys it, she has every right to be as proud of her choice as any other woman, and she shouldn't be criticised for it.

Who made your list?

Monday, 4 May 2015

Monthly Wrap-Up | April 2015


Is it just me or did April fly by? It went so quickly! It's actually a little scary how quickly 2015 seems to be going, so I try not to think about it too much. Things at work got a lot busier last month, but I still managed to read quite a bit and have a pretty good month!




Ms. Marvel, Vol.2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Jacob Wyatt (4 Stars)
Reviewed here!

Copperhead, Vol.1: A New A Sheriff in Town by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski and Ron Riley (4 Stars)
Reviewed here!

Well-Read Women by Samantha Hahn (5 Stars)

Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha, Craig Hamilton and James Jean (2 Stars)
Reviewed here!

Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan (3.5 Stars)
Reviewed here!

American Vampire, Vol.2 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco (4 Stars)
Reviewed here!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (4 Stars)

American Vampire, Vol.3 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Sean Murphy (4.5 Stars)
Reviewed here!

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (2 Stars)

As you can see I'm still loving graphic novels - in fact I enjoyed all the ones I read bar one - and I was able to read a bit more work from Shirley Jackson and Jenny Colgan. Very, very different authors, but I enjoy both of their books!


GAME OF THRONES IS BACK AND I AM VERY NERVOUS.


I'm very, very, very worried about Sansa and I want to take her away from all of the creepy men in her life. I want her and Arya to let Brienne take them to Dorne, and then I want the three of them to stay there in the land where they don't hurt little girls.

STOP HURTING HER!
As always I'm tired of the constant female full-frontal nudity. Do we get to see any dicks? Nope. Now I'm not saying I want to see a dick because, sorry boys, they're not particularly attractive, but I think it's only fair we get male full-frontal nudity, too. I'm sick of the way women are treated in this show, and I know a lot of people wonder why I watch it if there are so many issues with it, but the truth is none of these issues are going to be solved if we all just turn a blind eye. If something's wrong we have to acknowledge it and try our hardest to fix it, not just pretend it isn't there.

On the completely opposite end of the scale, I also watched the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility last month. I'm probably never going to get around to reading all of Jane Austen's books because unfortunately I've never really enjoyed her books that much, but I do enjoy the storylines whenever I've watched an adaptation in the past. I love Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, and it was certainly a nice film to sit back and watch, but honestly I found it a little boring and I didn't particularly like the ending. I feel like both Marianne and Elinor deserved better.

I bought myself the season 2 boxset of Orphan Black and I've been watching that again, along with my Dad, in preparation for season 3 which isn't in the UK yet. Boo! It's such a good show, and so far my Dad seems to be enjoying it, too, which is quite something! I think I get my fussiness about TV shows from him...

This has nothing to do with watching Season 2, this is just one of my favourite Felix quotes.
Oh, and my brother-in-law went to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron. I thought it was alright. It was entertaining enough to watch but I'm not a massive superhero fan, although I do love the new Ms. Marvel comics. I'm more of an X-Men girl than an Avenger girl.


I had a great blogging month in April. I took part in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for the very first time and I did it! I was really proud that I actually managed to schedule my posts so I was never typing something up at the last minute, and though I missed a few days (three, I think - I couldn't think of any authors whose surname began with Q, U or X) I wrote something for the majority of them. The only thing I really failed at was regularly looking at other people's posts, which is very naughty of me, but to be honest I just wanted to take part in the challenge to see if I could do it, and I could!

Because I was on such a blogging high I wrote a bunch of other blog posts, too; not only for April, but for this month, too. I have a lot of posts scheduled already, which is good because May's going to be a very busy month at work.


It was Easter last month - hooray! I had a pretty quiet Easter, not that it's a holiday I've ever done anything special for, it was nice to get a few days off work. My sister and her family came to visit and on Easter Sunday we all went to Folly Farm, which is a diabetes-inducing name of a local zoo/farm. There's everything there from pigs to giraffes to lions to owls, and it was a really nice day weather-wise, too!

I found myself in Swansea a couple of times last month, too. For any of you who might not know I live in south Wales, and one of my friends from my MA course recently moved back to Swansea (she did her BA there, but her MA in Lancaster like me!) so it's been nice to have a friend nearby. The two of us went to a book launch together - the launch of New Welsh Short Stories, published by Seren Books where I work! - and then on the last Sunday of the month I travelled through to Swansea to go to a new book club that my friend has started.

There were six of us in total who turned up - which actually worked out really well because we read The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, which just so happens to have six main characters! - and while I knew two of the ladies already, one of them being my aforementioned friend, I also met some really lovely new people. It was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next meeting where we'll be discussing Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment!

The book club doesn't have a theme exactly, but those of us who attended the first meeting are all really interested in gender, feminism and sexuality, so if that sounds like your kind of thing and you happen to live in the south Wales area why not join us? You'd be more than welcome! Check out the Facebook and the Twitter.

How was your April?

Friday, 24 April 2015

Mini Reviews | Aliens, Vampires and Fairy Tales

Sometimes I have enough to say about a book to warrant a full review, and other times I don't but I still want to share my thoughts somehow. I've been reading a lot of graphic novels recently, and while I've enjoyed the majority of them I haven't found much to say individually about all of the ones I've read. So today I'm going to do three mini-reviews for three graphic novels I've recently read!

Copperhead, Vol.1: A New Sheriff in Town by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski and Ron Riley

I knew absolutely nothing about this graphic novel until it was recommended to me on Amazon, described as a story about a single mother who moves her and her son to a new planet to work as a sheriff there and deal with everything from alien hillbillies to a local massacre. I really enjoyed it; it was a lot of fun, I liked the art style and I liked the world. If you're a fan of aliens and cowboys, or a fan of female-led sci-fi, then I'd recommend checking this one out. I'm hoping there'll be another volume out later this year!


My Rating: 



American Vampire, Vol.2 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco

I read American Vampire, Vol.1 last year after finding it in my local library. Check out my review here!

I wasn't sure if I was going to carry on with the American Vampire series at first, until I realised the fact that it kept popping into my head despite having read the first volume back in October had to be a sign that it was time to track down Volume 2. Sadly Volume 1 was the only one my library had, so I used trusty old Abebooks and found a couple of secondhand copies of Volume 2 and Volume 3 in really good condition. I really enjoyed being back in the world of American Vampire; it's easy for me to get bored by vampires, but I think Scott Snyder's created something really different with this series, and that's special. I'm definitely going to be continuing with this one.


My Rating: 



Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha, Craig Hamilton and James Jean

Unfortunately I didn't like this very much, but considering the reviews I'd seen I didn't expect to, which was the main reason I found myself a secondhand copy rather than spending a bunch of money on a shiny new one. I just wanted to see what it was like for myself. I love Bigby Wolf - I have a big crush on him in The Wolf Among Us - but I didn't enjoy any of the characters in the graphic novel as much I did in the game. It almost felt as though Willingham was playing paint by numbers with fairy tale characters; he made sure they were all there, but he didn't really take the time to make any of them three-dimensional. I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it either. I just felt kind of 'meh' about the whole thing. Needless to say I won't be carrying on with this series, because judging by the reviews it only continues to get worse...


My Rating: 



Have you read any of these? What are your thoughts?