I have never seen the movie “The Last Unicorn”, but I had heard of it, and I knew that the book was supposed to be better. I found the book a couple of months ago at a second-hand shop for only 50 cents, so I had to have it. When I mentioned I was reading it on one of the LibraryThing talk forums, people were jealous I got to read it for the first time.
Did it live up to the expectations? Yes, it sure did. It is a fantasy story about the last unicorn, who, when she hears that she is supposed to be the last, goes on a quest to find out what happened to the other unicorns. On the way, a wizard and a woman join her cause to go to a depressing land with a depressing king and a fierce monster. In essence it is a classic fantasy/heroic story. We have a unicorn, a prince, a beautiful girl, a curse, love, despair, and all those themes. But it is written with a lot of wit and humor, which makes this a very funny and great read. Short but very sweet, four out of five stars.

What if, at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the group led by Van Helsing doesn’t manage to kill Dracula? What if, instead, he stays in England, and charmes the most wanted widow of them all? What if he marries Queen Victoria and becomes the Lord Protector?
That what this book is about. We are in London in the late nineteenth century. Dracula is effectively ruling England, and vampires are very common. It has become fashionable to turn, and most of life takes place at night. Van Helsing is beheaded, and other members of his group are trying to stay out of sight as not to incur the wrath of Dracula himself. Meanwhile, a killer of low vampire whores in Whitechapel is drawing attention, not only of Scotland Yard, but also of the Diogenes Club and of course Dracula himself.
Not only the characters from Dracula appear in this book, also characters from other books, like Lestrade, Mycroft and the Diogenes Club from Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and Inspector Abberline, Joseph Merrick, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and many others. So many others in fact, that a 15 page section is included as to where all the references come from. The story was a fun read, both exploring what would happen with a vampire like Dracula in charge, and what and who Jack the Ripper could be. It is a fun pulpy read, with nasty non-sparkly and some sophisticated vampires. Four out of five stars.

I love reading the works of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. His stories always are slightly unreal. They take place in our world, but magic and weird happenings are very much a part of it. I love how his characters accept this and go with it.
This is a collection of short stories, all weird, all taking place in Japan. The first story is the base for the later novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which I loved), and some of the characters reappear multiple times, making the stories somewhat connected. Other than that, many themes reappear, such as insomnia, a love or fear of Sundays, men alone, western foods or music and death in a specific form. I have a feeling you could analyse this book and come away with many new insights, but even as just an entertaining read, it is very good. For those who love Murakami and his style, I highly recommend this book. Four out of five stars.

I know David Grann from his wonderful book The Lost City of Z, where he tells us about the adventurer Col. Percy Fawcett who tries to find the city in the Amazon rain forest. I really loved that book, so when I discovered this book I couldn’t help but pick it up. This book is very different in both subject matter and set up. This is an essay collection, most published before in the New Yorker or Atlantic, about various topics. The common thread in most stories is crime, either discussing the criminal or the crime itself.
Examples of stories are the suspicious murder of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, after he tried to block the auction of papers previously owned and written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the strange situation of a war criminal living in New York in between the people he helped displace, an old criminal who just can’t help himself and many others. In all stories there is something not quite ordinary, and David Grann wants to know what it is. He carefully tries to show all sides of the story, interviewing the criminal, prosecutor and victims, sometimes following them for long periods.
The stories were all very interesting, and I like Grann’s writing. He really takes you along on his journey. I did like The Lost City of Z better, maybe because it was only about one thing, and there he described the story from his time and his point of view, and from the point of view of Fawcett. Here it is all his point of view. Still, it is an entertaining and interesting read, all about subjects I knew nothing about. Three out of five stars.

After reading all that modern and science fiction recently I felt it was time again for a classic. I chose Emma by Jane Austen because I loved her humor in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Emma is an English girl, rich and smart, pretty independent for her time (early nineteenth century) and a matchmaker. After her governess marries she finds a new friend, Harriet, and because nobody knows Harriet’s lineage, Emma makes it her task to have her marry well. What follows is a long story of mistaken love and looks. We are introduced to numerous men, some very eligible bachelors, some wiser older men.
Jane Austen herself calls Emma “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”, and at first I had to agree. She sticks her nose in everyone’s love life, always thinks she knows best, and is pretty cocky. But slowly she sees the error in her ways and what it does to others, and then the role of the unlikable character shifts to a new lady in town. I didn’t like this book as much as the other two I read, but it was still pretty good. Three out of five stars.

Ever since discovering Neil Gaiman last year, I have bought and read every book he wrote. During our last trip to England I picked up the last one I still missed in my collection, Smoke and Mirrors. This is a collection of short stories and poems with various subjects. One is about Snow White, told by the evil Step-Mother. Except, in this story she is not so evil, and Snow White is not what she seems. Another is about a murder mystery in the land of the angels. Several stories have Lovecraft and the world he created as a base. And several deal with sex and the power and disease that comes from it.
As with all story collections, I liked some, but not all of what I read. Some of the stories had a bit more sex in them than I liked. The poetry style stories went over my head, I feel I would have ‘gotten’ those stories better if they were prose. Then again, most stories were wonderfully fantastic. I love how the ideas are both based on myth, legend and fairy tales and still very original because of the different views that Gaiman has on the subject. Not as good as his novels, but still worth three out of five stars.