Wastin' Away: Part Deux

So I've been wanting to go to Mont Saint Michel since I was a cute, innocent étudiante in Aix-en-Provence. (How many years ago? LOL) It's a little difficult to get there because there's no direct train or bus or whatever, so you basically need access to a car in order to even think about going.

Saturday afternoon at le château it was announced that we were going to take a road trip to ... yar, MONT SAINT MICHEL for Sunday mass! woohoo!

Again, I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking:

Surrounded by intermittent quicksand (apparently someone dies every year on the pilgrimage to this place, what the waht!), this churchy fortress spent time as a prison after the French Revolution, and you can still see the pulley-thingy that was used to wheel up food to the prioners.

My favorite room, of course, was the scriptorium, where the monks used to laboriously hand copy books 'n' stuff. It's empty now, but I filled in the room weird-half-animated-movie style with all the necessary deets: 8 thick wooden desks spread with stacks of books and piles of loose paper, with one monk at each bent over in their brown woolen robes and ink-stained fingers leaving streaks on their cheeks when they absentmindedly reach up to scratch a faint itch. It's silent but for the crackling fire at each end of the enormous room, a scratching of feather-pen on parchment and an occasional cough. Although seriously, maybe those monks sweating over a manuscript just let out a scream now and then, getting to the last of the page and then find some typo (hando? lol!) and were all, "sheeeet, I gotta start over! Again! For the third time! Whatves, I'm just gonna leave it in, no one will notice it should read 'celebrate.'"


It felt like the monastery went on forever and ever ... all the different levels and beautiful cavernous rooms ... it was quite fantastic. The music was awesome (love me some organ tunes), and even though I heart the morbid, I was still freaked out by a darkly-hooded monk slo-mo pulling a fat rope attached to the somberly-ringing bell. muaaahhaahahaha!


Thus concludes kK's quest to fulfill a long-held dream visit, and also the weekend Wastin' Away Again in GreatBigChateau-Ville.

kK

Bien joué: Terrible sequels and horizontal stripes

OK, so there are books one must read even though--nay, BECAUSE--one knows they will be horrible. Current reading list: Dracula The Un-Dead, by Dacre Stoker (direct descendant) and Ian Holt (um, expert).

Putting aside the fact that the book is written by what appears to be two 17-year-old boys and a hopefully appropriately-aggrieved and over-worked editor (I say 'hopefully' b/c to me the book has an air of heavy shit-this-is-the-best-I-can-do-with-what-I've-got-to-work-with editing; otherwise, if this editor actually thinks this acceptable material, well, humph, let's just have a little chat with Elizabeth Kostova, shall we??), it just once again proves that Sequels Are Pretty Much Always Terrible, especially if they deal with Draculas, Rosetta Stones, Knights Templars, and/or Cardenios. (Exception: a sequel by Christopher Moore dealing with ALL OF THOSE SUBJECTS AT ONCE.)

So, anyway, after altering the dates of Bram's story to fit their own arbitrary timeline, scene one opens twenty-five years after the infamous staking. Jonathan Harker is an over-bearing drunk of a father and husband, who thinks Mina is in love with what used to be Dracula and as obnoxiously as possible forces his theater-loving son to go to law school. The Dis-Band of Heros is taking angst to a whole new level, and really, why do people think it's a good idea to try and keep secrets and then be self-righteously surprised when other people discover said secrets, have a huge hissy fit they weren't informed earlier and then storm out into the dark dangerous night? Anyway, the real fun begins when Someone Important is impaled Vlad Tepes-style in the middle of Picadilly Circus, and a hot lesbian vampire reveals her plot to make Inspector Cotford her new pawn in a fun-for-hot-lesbian-vampires game of eat-the-human.

And I mean really, how can you not love lines like these:

"He stood at the crossroads of destiny. His dreams would have to wait."

"His coat, still damp from the earlier rain, did nothing to warm his body. Neither did his swirling, angry thoughts do anything to warm his soul."

"Tears from heaven poured to the earth as if God knew that tonight his reign would finally end."

"The razor-sharp blades sliced his fingers from his hand, the digits spinning through the air as he shoved Bathory's blade aside."

"Feeling cold and unsteady, he looked down. He had been gutted from his chest to his privates, and his innards were spilling out of his body. Marrow felt ill, and a strong urge to vomit. But as he tumbled back, he realized he no longer had the stomach for it."

Oh, did I mention that Bram Stoker has a cameo as a whiny, put-upon playwright stubbornly insisting a drunk John Barrymore play the stage version of Dracula, and, as if that weren't enough, Van Helsing is now suspected of being Jack The Ripper? Throw in a most beatific Luke*-I-Am-Your-Father showstopper followed by a couple of vampire fireballs off a really tall cliff and, wait for it...two mysterious large-enough-to-fit-a-human boxes being loaded onto, oh yes, THE TITANIC...No, it's just too fun. You must read it for yourself. It literally is just as good as you think, if not more so. And by "good" I mean terrible in that awesome must-read way, like Jemaine Clement is Ugly Hot, or Crap TV is Really Fabulous.

And oh yeah, you might have heard of this teensy French (and Squash and The Sultan before they even got to Paris) obsession with black-and-white/navy-and-white/black-and-grey/navy-and-grey stripes. Apparently these stripes cast a magicky spell on anyone who stays in France too long (any amount of time greater or lesser than an hour) and it actually becomes your number one desire to parade yourself around in public with horizontal stripes on your person.

I clung desperately to the edge of reason for about four months.

Now, with your own eyes, you can see how far I've fallen. Next thing you know I'll have stopped shaving my legs and armpits.
Oh wait...

kK
*So I've definitely been in France too long...I just wrote down Luc for Monsieur Skywalker's prénom. I almost left it to see if anyone would notice but wait no, that's just embarrassing.

In fun: BBC booklist

A friend sent me some information about a BBC booklist, and, as you know, I can never resist a chance to check off books on a list, no matter how  ridiculous a compilation or ranking.

Anyway, according to the BBC (apparently), the average person will have only read 6 of the following 100 books:

(I, obviously, put an 'x' next to each one I've knocked off...join in the fun!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ( X)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling ( X)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)

6 The Bible - (X)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare () "COMPLETE"??? 

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (X)

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ()

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ()

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ()

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ()

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ()

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)

34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ()

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - (X)

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ()

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X )

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ()

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ()

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (X)

52 Dune - Frank Herbert (X)

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ()

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (X)

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ()

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X)

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ()

64 THe Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ()

65 ???

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ()

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X )

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (X) 

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (X)

76 The Inferno - Dante (X)

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )

78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )

80 Possession-A.S. Byatt ( )

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X)

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ()

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ()

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ()

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (X)

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ()

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()

I got 60, woohoo! (Everything else, pshaw, totes not worth reading lol!) 

Not too sure what number 65 was...well, let's assume it's something I've read and make my conquests 61! 

In fun,

kK