Tina Fey is Bossypants

If you like Tina Fey in 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, you may want to check out Bossypants.  I started to read it at Barnes and Noble, and then quickly added it to my library queue.

My first question was, why is it called Bossypants?  Quoting Tina, it is in response to the question she often gets, is it hard for you, being the boss?  I like her philosophy of hiring good people and then getting out of their way.  As she says "being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting 'I am the boss!  I am the boss!'"

There are plenty of laugh out loud moments as she tells stories about her childhood, college and career.  The one passage I flagged in the book was this advice from Tina:

"When faced with sexism or ageism or lookisim or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: Is this person in between me and what I want to do?  If the answer is no, ignore it and move on.  Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way.  Then, when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you.  If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you."

Books that define an age

Not too long ago, fellow promiscuous reader Angela shared a link with a decision tool for choosing sci-fi and fantasy books.  It's a flow chart for navigating NPR's top 100 sci-fi and fantasy books.  I took a walk down memory lane as I made my way through the fantasy side.  It made me think about the fantasy book series that have stood out as favorites as I've grown.

Middle School

During middle school, my cousins and I would team up for long sessions of Hero Quest (think Dungeons and Dragons) during sleepover weekends.  From this, I learned about the Dragonlance series.  Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman started this books series, based on their own D&D type game play.  They wrote several trilogies that explored the world of a set of characters.  From there, other authors took the denizens of Krynn through many adventures.  I've lost count, but I've read close to 60 of these novels.  These were definitely a young adult series.

High School

A friend of mine recommended the Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley during junior year of high school.  I'm sure reading this took precedence over my assigned English class reading.  This is an Arthurian/Camelot story from the point of view of Morgainne le Fey.  As the saying goes, every story has many sides and the plethora of Arthurian books attests to this.  In the Mists of Avalon, the priestesses of the Goddess in Avalon are trying to save their traditions from being swallowed by the encroaching priests of Christianity and their God.  I was hooked after reading Mists, and moved on to the many other books Zimmer Bradley wrote in this story-line.  She connects Avalon back to Atlantis, and even reaches ahead to Helena, the mother of Constantine.  

College

I read many books in college to give my brain a rest from studying.   I have to say, I wasn't too creative in my search and went to well-known books to keep myself entertained.  The series included the Harry Potter books and The Golden Compass trilogy.  My list also included other Arthurian novels like Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy.

Grad School 

In graduate school, a fellow student introduced me to Mercedes Lackey.  Lackey has many different series, and I've thoroughly enjoyed three specific series.  I started with the Valdemar books, and polished off 30 of these my first year of grad school.  It was a typical fantasy series, with many strong female characters that appealed to me.  During my second year of grad school, I delved into the Elemental Masters series and the 500 Kingdom series.  Both of these re-work traditional fairy tales and put a new, sometimes much more adult spin on them.  Lackey is still publishing, so I keep my eye on her list for new books to check out at the library.  

What is next?

Surely, there is no shortage of fantasy/sci-fi series to discover or those yet to be written.  I'm truly looking forward to reading the rest of the All Souls Trilogy and was recommended to check out Connie Willis.  Thank goodness for recommendations from friends and the internet!

The Shadow of the Wind

I have spent the last week absolutely spellbound by Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novel, The Shadow of the Wind, and all I can think to write about it in a blog post is a simple plea to readers everywhere: please read this book.

Set in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century, the book follows the story of the boy, Daniel, who discovers a book that he finds absolutely spellbound. He goes on to discover the tragedies surrounding its origin and the eerie disappearance of all of the author’s other works. What ensues is the dovetailing of Daniel’s story with Julián Carax, the author whose life seems to exist in shadow.

At times quietly funny, and at others terribly violent, The Shadow of the Wind is a spooky, erotic, and beautifully written story of the magic and tragedy of life. It shocked me and held me captive. A prequel, The Angel’s Game apparently exists and I plan to hunt it down. I haven’t been so enamored by a story since my reread of One Hundred Years of Solitude or The House of the Spirits, which, anyone who has met me knows, are annual vices.

I can’t say enough about how fantastic a story Ruiz Zafón weaves. I’m positive I’ll return this loaned copy and buy my own because I’ll need to read it again next year. And probably every year thereafter.