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Title: Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History
Author: Richard Shenkman

Thoughts: Okay, as a person who is used to reading complicated history texts written for academia, I found this book to be incredibly simple and I read it in one day. So I wasn’t incredibly impressed by the book. It was somewhat funny and gave information I didn’t exactly know before, but it seemed to focus on sensationalism and such. It’s basically simple history for someone who isn’t too familiar with it. Rather disappointing to me.

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Title: The Phantom of the Opera
Author: Gaston Leroux

Thoughts: I’m not familiar with the musical based on this book nor the silent film, so I came into reading this only knowing the very basics of the story. I found that I loved the story just from reading the novel. Raoul…while he’s very much the love sick young man, I was kinda annoyed that he just wouldn’t let Christine go. He should’ve seen that she was trying to protect him and stop prying into her business. I suppose he kept at it because it was clear that Christine did love him, but sometimes love can’t be consummated because of circumstances. Erik…is both a figure whom one wants to pity, but one that you have a hard time doing so with because of what he does at the end. It seems he’s the kind that has gone mad with loneliness because of being shunned by humanity due to his deformity.

The way that the story is told, as if it was a true story and such was fascinating and I kinda wonder if it was. After all, I remember hearing in history class about the skeleton that inspired the novel.

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I’m not quite sure what to say about this movie, but I’m going to say that it’s certainly not on my list of movies that I love. In some ways, it is very much like The Craft except with four boys instead of four girls and spiders instead of snakes. Also, the source of the threat comes from the outside of the group of our magic users instead of inside the group.

Apparently it was based off of a comic book, which doesn’t really surprise me at all considering the nature of the movie. Also a lot of the movie was full of cliches, what with all the things dealing with the Salem Witch Hunts and such. No offense, but really, it just reinforces in people’s minds, particularly Wiccans, of the “Burning Times” when the people killed during those periods weren’t burned, but hanged (at least in Salem) and weren’t actually witches. Burning was used for heretics mostly. One thing that would’ve amused me though is if instead of doing “contemporary authors”, they did 20th century authors and made a reference to Arthur Miller, the writer of The Crucible as a nod to the Salem Witch Trials.

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Title: Anansi Boys
Author: Neil Gaiman

Thoughts: I love Neil Gaiman’s writing and this book is no exception. It deals with the two sons of Anansi, the infamous spider trickster of African lore. Gaiman seems to have a fondness of tricksters in his novels as the novel American Gods, which I assume to take place in the same “universe” as this novel, has the Norse trickster Loki in it.

Unlike American Gods this book has a lot more in the way of fun and wacky hijinks and while I felt quite embarrassed at first for Fat Charlie at stuff in the beginning of the novel (this is not untypical of me - I often have trouble with comedy movies because of this), but I found it funny once the main character started to get on top of things instead of everything pushing him down. I could sorta predict the ending once I got close to it, but I loved how everything just seemed to gather together in the end and the mythology that also was invoked in the story.

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