V FOR VENDETTA

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd: Yet another step in my descent toward possible comic-book nerddom. Especially the fact that after enjoying the book, I rewatched the movie, a movie I had previously liked, and couldn’t stand how different it was from the book. Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, and Stephen Fry were great, and the segment where Evie is in prison was quite faithful to the book, but everything else—I get that you might have to simplify the plot, maybe remove a few characters and take out the LSD sequence, but so many huge, unnecessary changes! Like, oh, the entire political context? And the ending? And…wait, Evie and V are in love? Ack. Thanks for ruining my multimedia experiences with your superior writing, Alan Moore. (Luckily, I will not under any circumstances be watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, since the consensus is that it’s dreck anyway. I mean, Mina is a vampire and Tom Sawyer is part of the League? Puh-leeze.)

FIRE AND HEMLOCK

Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones: This is my other favorite novel (I can’t believe I have two—pure chance) retelling the Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer legends, so of course I felt compelled to reread it after rereading Tam Lin. I don’t love it as deeply as I love Tam Lin, but it made a huge impression on me as a kid, not only because I like the story but also because it was so dark, complex, and sophisticated that I could never understand why it was shelved in the Juvenile section. I read other Wynne Jones books, but this one seemed like it was in another league. It took on an almost magical quality in my mind. I never knew anyone else who had read it and it went out of print for about 10 years, so I couldn’t even obtain my own copy. I would have started to think I had dreamed the whole thing (this in itself echoes the plot of the book, in which Polly comes to realize she has two sets of memories, one false and one true) if the Dakota County Library hadn’t hung on to the old copy I used to read. Finally, the book was reissued a few years ago and I was able to buy it for myself. It still holds up just as well (even better, in some places) upon adult reading (except for the climactic scene, which still makes as little sense to me as it did back in the day), and I still have a crush on Mr. Lynn.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, VOL. 2

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill: Entertaining, although again I had to rely heavily on online annotations to explicate all the references because I simply have not read enough (any?) H.G. Wells. The most engaging part was the whole Hyde story arc; the most genius part was the absolutely brilliant explanation that all the anthropomorphic talking animals of literature (Mr. Toad, etc.) are horrific experiments created by Dr. Moreau (of Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau)—and they are very, very creepy.

FOREVER ROSE

The last of the Casson books by Hilary McKay, and a rather disappointing ending. It continued the switch to first-person narration begun (detrimentally, as I noted last month) in Caddy Ever After, and worse, this one was written entirely from Rose’s point of view. The series has become more and more Rose-centric with each passing book, and here I found her especially annoying—verging on pathologically self-centered in the first half. (It didn’t help that she hated books; how could I sympathize with that? Even though she learned to like reading later on, it made me want to shake her in the meantime.) As usual, I was most interested in what was happening to Caddy, and as usual, Caddy made the fewest appearances. It was still a pleasant enough read, but it paled in comparison with the first three. Now I guess McKay is blogging from Rose’s POV, so apparently Rose is a hit with the youngsters, if not with me. I might try reading McKay’s older series, The Exiles, next, but my library only has one of the three books, so it will entail a trip to the downtown L.A. library first.