Elijah David

I'm going to treat this post as something more like a running commentary than an actual review. What follows are my thoughts as I watched the movie The Secret of NIMH for the first time in (at least) 7 years. Wow. There's magic from the first scene of this movie. Which is based on a science fiction novel. Arthur C. Clarke, where are you? Nicodemus is a bit creepy with the warts and such, but I like introducing the mystery of Jonathan's connection to the rats this early. Nicodemus' book sets Jenner's character up and mentions Thorn Valley, though you can't read it all without pausing. (I had to go back because I missed some of the dialogue in this quiet scene.) Mr. Ages' house got moved from an old farmhouse in the book to an old combine in the movie. That's mostly an atmospheric change, I think, but it fits with the technological advancements of the rats. "Great Jupiter, woman!" -- Why don't we have exclamations like th...

Another month has already flown by! My writing got derailed a bit in the middle of the month thanks to a nasty cold (or a mild flu, I'm not sure which), but I still made some excellent headway on Albion Apparent . Without further ado, here are this month's snippets. Darity, Dénsmore, and D’Artangan, the three eldest daughters of the Norn Skuld, walked through the autumn woods of Asgard searching for answers. Being Norns themselves, the sisters ought to have been able to merely open their Second Sight and find the solution to their problem—if the Sight itself were not their problem. *** Grandmother Spider sat by the fire in her audience chamber, bent like an old woman at work even in her twilight years. The stories said she had made the stars with a dew-soaked web and brought fire to humanity. She was also the most knowledgeable of the Aeoni on matters of the Sight. *** My deepest anxiety had been easy to pinpoint, almost too easy, in fact. I had to reap Gab...

I recently read the third of Dan Wells' John Cleaver mysteries, I Don't Want to Kill You . It was so good I wanted to share my thoughts at more length than my quick review on Goodreads . Beware, this is a spoiler-heavy review. Picking up the story shortly after Mr. Monster ended, I Don't Want to Kill You  finds John anticipating the arrival of Nobody, the demon he called at the end of that book. He's done the demon tracking-hunting-slaying thing twice now, so he must be an expert, right? Except Nobody hasn't shown her face yet, and John is getting antsy. Then the infamous serial killer the Handyman migrates from Georgia to North Dakota, and John thinks maybe Nobody is  the Handyman. Either that, or she is working with the Handyman, using one of her demon compatriots to distract John from his mission: killing her and the other demons like her. Not only is John's demon hunting not going quite as planned, but his social life (never the best, due to the w...

Cait over at Paper Fury listed 10 Bookworm Questions  she posed for herself to answer and invited others to post their own answers. They looked like fun (especially the last one) so I thought I'd give it a go. 1. What are your top 5 reads of 2017 so far? This one was fairly easy to answer. I've got 26 books on my Goodreads Challenge so far this year (including several short stories I listened to via Audible and the last few volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist). These five titles rose to the top of the list: Goldenhand by Garth Nix The Heart of What was Lost by Tad Williams The Glass Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg The Dispatcher by John Scalzi I Don't Want to Kill You by Dan Wells (As a side note, the last two titles on this list are not  for the faint of heart. The Scalzi title is an Audible-exclusive novella that, while otherwise solidly written, has some intense use of vulgarity, heavy on the f-bombs. For that reason, I don't recommend it carte bl...

I'm starting off the read/watch marathon with the book that started me on this kick and inspired the film(s) that alerted me to O'Brien's work: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH . Before I get into my thoughts on the book itself, I want to take a minute to talk about my copy of the book, pictured below. I'd actually like to get a better copy, maybe a hardback. This one's a former library copy (hooray book sales!) that's in decent shape, although the front cover is being held on by library-grade book tape. More than that, it has the wrong title because it's a movie tie-in for the Don Bluth film (which I'll take a look at next week if all goes well). It does at least feature the original title in parentheses, but it doesn't have any of the requisite "8 pages of stills from the movie!" inserts. I'll try to avoid any more mentions of the film and its changes to the story in this post because that's what the movie post is f...

As I mentioned last Tuesday, while I was growing up,  The Wizard of Oz was a staple film in our household. I could sing all of the songs and recite most of the dialogue without much thought. (I can do this for a few other films, but my storage capacity seems to be reaching its limit.) Like a great many good movies (and and even greater number of mediocre and terrible ones), it was based on a book. When I discovered the book in our school library, I checked it out to see how it compared to the movie. Big surprise: in many respects, it didn't. The movie shortened the plot in a number of places (the journey to the Witch's castle, Dorothy's journey home, and even the trip to the Emerald City) and dropped characters, adding in a frame story with farmhands and a gloomy old witch. I don't say this to disparage the film. It's a classic and it tells the story well. But the book is a different animal in many respects. It fleshes out Baum's Americana fairyland with more...

Over the last month and a half, I've been posting on blogs other than Inexhaustible Inspiration as part of a blog tour to get the word out about Albion Academy . While I've tried to make sure to link to them here and on the Facebook page, I thought it would be handy for everyone to have a list of all the links on one post. Here they are from oldest to newest: Redeeming Myths at SpeculativeFaith ( Mike Duran's rejoinder to the SpecFaith post ) Interview at Amanda Bradburn's blog Why I keep coming back to Arthurian legend at The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls Interview at Mirriam's blog The Magical Origins of Albion Academy at Further Up and Further In Interview at Lilly's Scribblings Guest Post about Real Life Locations in Fiction Guest Post on Mixing Mythologies at The Other Half of the Story