I wanted to let you all know that I've decided to move 'Livre du Jour' to Blogger, where all my other blogs are.  You can view my recent posts at http://www.katharineswan.com/bookoftheday.html.

My reasons for this change are many: I'm not spending much time on myspace, I have several other blogs and I'd like to maintain them all in the same place, and I decided to try out Amazon.com's affiliate program.

I hope you will all continue to read my blog, even if it's not on myspace!

I am currently reading Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, another classic that I am reviewing.  I've seen the 1997 movie version, with Morgan Freeman and Robin Wright, several times, but I've never read the book.

During the first 30 or 40 pages of the book, I was instantly reminded how much I hated Robinson Crusoe, another book by Daniel Defoe.  As was popular in fiction when these books were written - early 1700s - Defoe writes in a very moralizing style.  You'll learn a lot about preaching (though not necessarily about Christianity) and 18th century pretentions by reading Defoe's books, that's for sure.

Moll Flanders is extremely different from the movie, so much so that it's hardly recognizable as the same story, and so far I like the movie better.  As I get further into the book, however, it starts getting a little more interesting.  We'll see what I think in another 200 pages or so.

My review of Kidnapped has been published!

For one of several book reviews I've been hired to write, I am reading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I've read only one of his other books before, Treasure Island, but that was about 15 years ago.

In reading Kidnapped, I'm reminded at how timeless some classics are.  Stevenson's books, although written well over 100 years ago, are exactly the kind of rousing adventures kids today still love - and Hollywood seeks to provide.  The language is sometimes a little outdated, but not too badly.  It's taken me about two and a half hours to read nearly half the book, and I'm enjoying every moment of it.

I have a confession: I have always disliked Stephen King's books.  I read Dolores Clayborne when I was in high school, and hated it.  After that, I had no interest in reading his other books, most of which I thought were based primarily on gratuitous violence.

However, I have always heard - even from others who dislike Stephen King's horror books - that he writes very well about writing.  And of course, I like some things that he had to say so much that I put one of his quotes on this blog.  At last, I decided to read Stephen King's On Writing.

From the very first page, I have loved this book.  I love his conversational writing style as he talks about his own experiences with writing.  I love his descriptions of childhood memories.  I love the ironic sense of humor that crops up every few pages.  And (like, no doubt, any aspiring novelist) I love hearing about his rise to fame.

Although I'm only about a third of the way through this book, from what I have read so far I would hazard to say that On Writing is quite possibly one of the books on the subject that I have read.  It has it all: humor, reflections on the craft, etc.  I would definitely recommend it to any aspiring writer.

I'm a wee bit behind again.  I actually finished this book - Digging Out, by Katherine Leiner - last night.

The book is kind of sad in ways.  As a child, the main character, Alys, survives a landslide in Wales that kills more than 100 children in her mining village - and of course, the moment you read that part, you're hooked!  The events surrounding the disaster are revealed gradually throughout the first half of the book, as Alys (in present day) struggles to cope with the sudden death of her husband.  The second part of the book is about her reunification with her family, and her finding forgiveness and love in her hometown.  This book is an extremely moving book about the lasting impact that tragedy can have on our lives, and how one woman comes full circle and comes to grips with it, 30 years later.

Well, once again I feel compelled to discuss a documentary instead of a book.  This one, Who Killed the Electric Car, is mainly about the attempts of the oil and automobile industries to smother the electric car.

First of all, the electric car isn't a new concept.  As the documentary states, 100 years ago they were the more popular choice; but as the technology for gas-powered cars improved, they also became more popular - and back then there wasn't expensive gas prices to slow that trend.

The arguments against electric cars usually run along the lines of "they're not powerful enough," "it would be such a hassle to charge them," etc.  Well, as the documentary shows, those complaints aren't true.  First of all, in some of the test footage of GM's EV1, they race it against an early 90s model Nissan 300ZX - and the EV1 wasted the Z in a matter of seconds!  (A Mazda Miata ran in the same race, but unsurprisingly was behind almost from the instant the cars left the line.)  Another engineer talks about an electric car he built that did zero to sixty in 3.6 seconds.  No power, my ass!

As for the cars not being able to go far enough on one charge - well, the EV1 model went about 80 miles on one charge, which is more than twice as much as most people drive in one day.  There were also recharging stations set up everywhere in L.A. - even in the parking lots where people parked during the work day.  And the cars were upgradeable - in fact, the reason they went only 80 miles on one charge is because GM was too pigheaded to use any battery manufacturer but their own, even when there were batteries available that could make those cars go 350 miles or more on one charge.  In other words, all you had to do was spend a little extra money for a bigger battery, and your car could go farther without a break than you could.

GM started manufacturing the EV1 in the mid-nineties.  As you can see from the picture, they were very sleek-looking sports cars.  (Other companies made bigger EVs - such as the RAV4.)  GM discontinued the EV1 because they said there was no demand - yet they had to forcibly take all of the existing models away from the people who were leasing them!  Even worse - they crushed almost every single one of those cars.  There wasn't a problem with the cars - so why would they do that?

The only answer is because the automobile and oil companies want to silence the threat.  They don't want us driving electric cars when we could be spending more than $20 on gas every week.  It comes down to - as it usually does - a matter of human greed.

Shut the Door, by Amanda Marquit, is a novel that I picked up a month or two ago at Barnes & Noble.  One of the reasons why I felt so compelled to buy it is because it was written by a teenager: the author started the book when she was 14, and finished it two years later.  When the book was published two years ago, she was 18 years old.

Perhaps because I was a teenaged novelist myself, I enjoy reading books by other teens that have made it into print - perhaps because I wish that I had, too.

In any case, Shut the Door is quite impressive.  In some ways, the maturity level reflected in the prose and the story is above and beyond what you would expect for a teenager, particularly in the way the family dynamics are portrayed.  In other ways, though, it's so obvious that the author was a teen, because most adults would never be able to describe so vividly the agnst of being a teenaged girl .

Although I am not quite halfway through the book, I think I may just finish it tonight, as hooked as I am by the characters and the story.

For the last couple of nights, I've been reading The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia.  I haven't been making as fast progress through this one because I have had more to do other than read - last night was New Year's Eve, and two nights ago I was finishing up an article.

I love The Last Battle just as much as I love the other ones, but again, it definitely shows the culmination of a darkening trend.  Of course, being about the end of the magical country of Narnia, I guess it would be difficult for it not to be dark.  Still, I maintain that if you read the books in the order originally written, you'll see that they get gradually darker as the series goes on.

It's been very nice to return to these old favorites this holiday season, but I am also looking forward to choosing the next book I will read.

Another book-in-one-sitting...  I read The Magician's Nephew all last night!  I loved it just as much as when I was a kid.

Tonight I am going to read (well, at least start) the final book, The Last Battle.