christmas books <3

[cimorene]

  

These are the principal books I demanded for Christmas from Wax, but I also got a Tracy Chevalier (whom I like, but don't follow eagerly) and an Alexander McCall Smith (been meaning to try) from my mother outlaw. And then I ordered an Alice in Wonderland omnibus for myself (I ordered the one with the awesome cover art, but it remains to be seen whether it will have been a mistake not to get the annotated one)(Those two covers are remarkably similar, but the simple grace of flat mary janes will always triumph over the lumpy, clomping, unattractive outline of platforms).

Yesterday Wax forgot that today was a bank holiday, so our decision to put off visiting Customs for my package first for five hours of fruitless puzzling over taxes and then until today... backfired and now we can't go to Customs after all. Also, we've got a lot of Lindex translashuns to do. Oh, Lindex, World-Class Fashion? How can you claim it, when I was in your store just yesterday marvelling at the dowdiness of your mannequins?

Besides the Heyers, at the recommendation of notjemima I've already read . The introduction was particularly informative - they always do seem to be, on "Classics"-type reprint editions! And I agree with Carter's own characterisation of the stories, except for the part where she claimed they weren't retellings but "new" stories, since that can be accepted only if one construes "new" as a figure of speech for "made new", and saying they are that instead of retellings is still incorrect. The author of the introduction herself acknowledges it freely and compares the tales to each other and to the folk tales they relate to. At any rate, Carter's style is certainly "Rococo", as she remarked, and highly controlled in every particular, and they are certainly tales as opposed to modernistic short stories; the fussy over-lavish style is in light of these facts wholly defended. I enjoyed the book a great deal, but overall I prefer a fusion of modernistic style and the symbolism and imagery of the tale, so I cannot like her attempts as well as the fantasy of DWJ, Gaiman, and my favourite fairy tale, Terri Windling's The Wood Wife.