October-December 2016 books

I started but did not finish The Well at the End of the World by William Morris (early November), which I downloaded for free on my Nook. The author's name sounded familiar to me so I googled him, and it turns out he's one of the Pre-Raphaelites and the dude that founded the Kelmscott Press, which I learned about in my history of the book class! This explains why the language is extremely old fashioned: that is definitely the way someone obsessed with medieval romance would write. I don't see anyone who isn't at least somewhat an English major being able to understand more than 60% of the writing, though. It makes Charles Dickens sound like Ernest Hemingway. What helped me is that Catherine, Called Birdy was one of my favorite books growing up. Anyway it was pretty good and I can see why people like the Inklings liked it, but I stopped reading it once I stopped traveling. It was just really dense and pretty slow-moving, although I do want to finish it sometime.

Barnes & Noble sent me a 20 or 30% off coupon, so I used it to buy Neil Gaiman's The Spindle and the Sleeper (early December), which was really good. I love and am interested in all fairytale retellings, so when I saw that Neil Gaiman wrote a feminist version of Sleeping Beauty where Snow White saves Sleeping Beauty since she knows what it's like to be trapped in magical slumber, I had to have it. It's a picture book but not necessarily for children; I can see them getting scared of it since there's a lot of freaky stuff in that book. It was illustrated by Chris Riddell, who has illustrated a lot of Neil Gaiman's stuff, and the illustrations are gorgeous and creepy, just the way you'd expect. I'm going to talk about spoilery stuff below the cut. 4/5 stars

I'm continuing my Artemis Fowl series reread, so I read The Arctic Incident and The Eternity Code (books 2 and 3) in early and late December, respectively. These are a great series for very late elementary and middle schoolers. They've got heists and magic and fairy folk and technology and a smart-aleck genius kid who outsmarts adults. I have to admit that, rereading as an adult, they seemed way shorter and less OMG than they did when I first read them. 3.9,4/5 stars

I kind of wanted to continue my holiday tradition of reading my Christmas with Anne L.M. Montgomery holiday anthology and A Christmas Carol, but as I moved in December I packed up my books and couldn't get to them.


HERE BE SPOILERS.
Ok, so, The Sleeper and the Spindle. Fantastically creepy and great, and I loved how they developed the evil fairy's spell, but I was kind of disappointed that the sleeping girl that Snow White kissed turned out to be the evil fairy! Like it was a great reveal and very creative and everything, but everyone knows it's Sleeping Beauty who's supposed to be sleeping. But that's just a quibble of mine. I guess it'd be a wayyy worse punishment to be unable to sleep for a hundred years. At least SB was the one who got to kill the evil fairy at the end. Also tbh I hoped that SW would ditch the prince she was marrying and rule with SB instead.