strange and random happenstance

The 13th Warrior
Based on the book Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Diane Venora, Vladimir Kulich, Dennis Storhøi, Omar Sharif, Clive Russell, Richard Bremmer, Tony Curran, Eric Avari, Sven Wollter, Asbjorn Riis, and Maria Bonnevie
Release Date: August 27th, 1999
Rating: ★
To Buy

Ahmad ibn Fadlan is a successful court poet in Baghdad. But his poetic sensibilities lead him to love unwisely and he is banished far to the north to act as an ambassador to those tribes of Barbarians. The arrival of Vikings save Ahmad ibn Fadlan and his party great distress from Turkic Raiders. The Northmen are celebrating the death of their chieftain and the ascension of their new leader, Buliwyf. A young emissary arrives to ask Buliwyf if he will come to his father's kingdom and save them from an evil which cannot be named. The Viking's wisewoman comes to throw the bones and tells Buliwfy that the thirteenth warrior must not be a Norseman, and so Ahmad, called Ibn by his new travelling companions, unwillingly heads out to do battle with an evil he doesn't know with warriors who don't even speak his language. When they arrive at King Hrothgar's village the warriors see that the situation is more dire then they feared. The town is almost indefensible, and the mist is coming, and with that, the danger of the Wendol.

It makes sense that the oddest book in Crichton's oeuvre would make the oddest film. But still, I question this adaptation's purpose because whatever the book's failings there was at least a glimmer of something interesting, a little Viking culture, a little mystery in the mist, which has been entirely stripped away to be nothing more then over ninety minutes of battle. There is so little plot that I wouldn't even deign to call it a plot, something other critics and moviegoers apparently agreed with as the movie quickly flopped at the box office. The movie should have just been called "Buliwyf Does Battle." At least re-naming the story for release as The 13th Warrior versus Eaters of the Dead helped to highlight this lack of depth. The simple truth about this film is I struggled with it. This is a nothing film. Watching the movie I kept thinking to myself, how can I even write a review about a movie that is so lacking of anything that it is slipping out or my mind as unforgettable as I'm viewing it? This is just a bad movie, plain and simple, and this is after extensive re-shoots. The curious side of me wonders how bad the film was before the re-shoots. The fact that Crichton had to swoop in to try to save it makes me contemplative. If Crichton didn't step into the breech for the laugh riot that Congo became and the horror show The Lost World turned into, just exactly how horrible was this movie?

Even in this "polished" and "fixed" format it's a weird movie. Antonio Banderas is nothing so much as comic relief and nowhere approaching a romantic hero. Also, the film doesn't feel of it's time. Now I'm not talking about the tenth century when it's supposed to take place, I'm talking about the turn of the last century. This doesn't feel like a film from 1999, it feels like a film from the mid 80s. In fact it feels as if this film is the kindred spirit to Ladyhawke and Masters of the Universe with a little Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom thrown in for the Wendol. Because the Wendol sure as hell don't look like they belong in Scandinavia! India, maybe. If that India came out of the fevered dreams of Lucas and Spielberg. If only we could get this Jerry Goldsmith score, which is laughably bad and uneven, replaced with a score by Tangerine Dream, a la Legend, I think, aside from Antonio Banderas being on screen, no one watching it would think it was made later then 1987. Just look to that 80s hair band appearance of all the vikings, and I think my point has been made.

In a film of weird and awkward scenes strung together with no regard to plot or pace there is one scene that sticks out. I really can't tell if it was really cool or really lame. In the beginning of the film it's a big deal that Ibn can't speak the language and therefore needs not one by two translators. This not only makes the movie hard to get into, but with Omar Sharif re-telling the events happening in the film I felt as if I was watching this documentary I saw years ago on the IMAX about the Nile that he narrated. But these clunky opening scenes are nothing to the scene where Ibn "learns" the language of the Northmen. Over the course of what we presume is many weeks we just see Ibn staring at the mouths of the Vikings around the fire. The first time it is all gibberish, but slowly, through rain and snow, words are decipherable until finally he understands everything they say, being able to then speak to them and also scaring them with the rapidity of his learning. While I like that it had a realism with him slowly learning, like everything in this film, it was handled in such a cheesy and heavy-handed manner that I'm not sure if I liked it or if it was groan worthy. I tend to lean toward groan worthy, just because of the rest of the movie.

The depiction of the Wendol was also just odd. As previously mentioned, they obviously are inspired by the evil death cult in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, what with their sartorial choices as well as taking off their victims heads and gnawing on their bodies. This is also where the movie diverged most radically from the book. The book clearly proposed the theory that the Wendol where really Neanderthals. There is nothing Neanderthal here, as Ibn screams "they are just men!" All their danger lies in the trappings of their appearance, not in their mysticism. The bone shirts and the bear headdresses are the signifiers that these people are evil and mean business. I'm sorry, but no. Looking a little different and killing people isn't enough for what is supposed to be the epicness of Beowulf! Plus, the Vikings kill each other all the time for dominance, land, and fun, so how are the Wendol different? The only real atrocity these people have committed, as far as I've seen, is that they must singlehandedly be responsible for Scandinavia having a depleted bear population because each and every one of their thousands of warriors has a bear headdress. Crimes against nature, yes, crimes against man, debatable.  

But the worst part of this movie I think falls into the category of racial insensitivity. Ibn is from Baghdad, in Iraq; Antonio Banderas is from Málaga, in Spain. These countries aren't interchangeable. Just because Antonio isn't white doesn't mean he's middle eastern! Besides the atrocities of an obvious spray tan and so much guyliner that it's laughable, his accent is in no way correct. In fact, more then once I noticed that if Ibn said "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" it would seem logical. Because he is THAT Spanish. His accent is so Spanish it's stereotypical Spanish. It is obvious that Antonio Banderas did nothing to help the box office of this film so why not just hire an Iraqi actor? But time and again this happens in Hollywood. Don't they get it that here's a chance to do something right and then they go and do something wrong, like Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily! Seriously folks! The reason this pisses me off even more is that Michael Crichton knows better. He has DONE BETTER! Look to Rising Sun! Instead of hiring anyone who looked Asian for the Japanese roles, the movie used all Japanese actors! I know, it's a novel idea, but there it is.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 80s, Antonio Banderas, Beowulf, Congo, Eaters of the Dead, He-Man, Indiana Jones, Inigo Montoya, Legend, Michael Crichton, Racism, Rising Sun, Spain, The 13th Warrior, The Lost World, The Princess Bride, Viking

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
Published by: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: March, 1976
Format: Paperback, 181 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Ibn Fadlan has left Bagdad, City of Peace, as an ambassador to the King of Saqaliba who is interested in adapting the Muslim faith. Traveling up the Volga he and his party encounter many strange and unfamiliar people. Ibn meets a group of vikings who are encamped along the river awaiting the death of their chieftain. Ibn befriends the heir apparent, Buliwyf, which is awkward when another heir tries to assume the mantle of chieftain. Before the matter can be resolved a messenger arrives begging Buliwyf's help. The great King Rothgar is being besieged by monsters that come out of the mist and is in need of a great hero. Buliwyf is that hero. For this epic journey and the battle to come they need thirteen warriors to make up their company, and it is propitious that the thirteenth is a stranger, so they take Ibn with them, much against his will. While Ibn didn't count on this journey, he recounts the vulgar but heroic viking race he is stuck with for posterity. If they live he will have a story to tell about a brave race brought to their knees by mist; but first they must survive.

Of all Crichton's books Eaters of the Dead holds the unique distinction of the book I care least for. It creates neither love nor loathing in me. Eaters of the Dead is just there. A short book about vikings that I couldn't care less about. Yes, the cover of my edition does amuse me, because it has that distinction of being so very late eighties. Is the viking on a Tron esque battlefield? Is the viking trapped in a video game matrix? The skulls on sticks could almost double as palm trees. Other then that, I have rarely given this book a second thought. In fact when the book was being adapted into a movie, unlike every other Crichton adaptation, I didn't even bother to see it. In fact, as I write this, I haven't seen it to this day. Would I say this book was a misstep for Crichton? Not really. I think he needed to do it as an experiment to get it out of his system. He needed to show that he could write something different, even if I didn't care for that different. And this is very different, being first person, being all in the past, and apparently being the settlement of some argument he was having with one of his friends.

The apparent history of why Crichton felt a need to write Eaters of the Dead was that one of his friends labelled Beowulf as being boring. Crichton disagreed. To win this argument Crichton wrote a boring retelling of Beowulf. So I think his friend won the argument. I'm not saying Beowulf is boring, I'm saying that Crichton's attempts to prove that it is a riveting story resulted in a snore worthy book. One of the problems is Crichton is unable to move past his modern mindset. He has always been at the forefront of technology and research, with his books often predicting trends; and while writing about something that happened in the tenth century A.D. he couldn't help but anachronistically slip a few things in, mainly man's similarity to apes, otherwise called "research for Congo is seeping into this story." But the worst was a bizarre post narrative meditation on what exactly the "mist monsters" were. The "Grendel" or "Wendol" here isn't some mythic monster but some Neanderthals that have survived with concurrent evolution. Say what!?! REALLY!?! Um no. Beowulf is a myth and epic story that isn't mean to be explained by evolution. Crichton needed to think about what it looked like to people of the time NOT people of our time. This takes us out of the moment and changes how you look at the book, and not favorably.

Crichton has basically been spending the whole book in second guessing and invalidating his story with his "faux" history, hello Neanderthals. It is fairly obvious that Crichton was a fan of William Goldman and in particular his book The Princess Bride. After all, Ian Malcolm was only "mostly dead" and therefore able to be resurrected for his star turn in The Lost World. They probably even knew each other, being authors who had crossed over into film. When The Princess Bride came out three years prior to Eaters of the Dead I'm sure the interrupted style of the narrative with faux history and the "abridgment " of the "original text" was something fresh and new. In Eaters of the Dead Crichton tries something similar and fails miserably. It's almost as if Crichton missed the whole point of what Goldman was doing. The interruptions were to poke fun at the story, to add something more, and usually that something more was levity. With "faux" history you can never take yourself too seriously otherwise you end up sounding like a textbook. Look to authors who successfully use the footnotes, ie, Terry Pratchett, Susanna Clarke, and Lisa Lutz. They all add some fun with the facts. Crichton misses the boat and it feels like he's taking himself too seriously and with the Neanderthals previously mentioned he seems to almost have a need to make a myth real instead of an enjoyable read.     

The biggest misstep that Crichton made in structuring this book, aside from the "faux" historical framing device, was deciding that it should be a first person narrative. I believe it is the only book he wrote this way, though I have a slight inkling that maybe Disclosure might be first person, but I have no desire to dig up the book to find out. Yeah, I'm lazy at the moment, deal with it. The problem isn't so much in having it first person, but in having it first person with Ibn as the narrator. Ibn would be a prime example of an unreliable narrator and a complete ass. He's the king of the backhanded compliment and derides the vikings for their customs, which he then takes part in as he feels like it, all while saying how disgusting they are. Look how horrid and smelly they are and will fuck anything, oh, I can fuck the slaves too, yeah! Plus, I don't get why Crichton grafted on this true story to the Beowulf myth. I don't think it was to try to push the veracity he was so desperate to claim. The only reason I can think of is to have an outsider to relate to for us non-vikings. But there's no chance anyone is going to relate to Ibn the ass, so his purpose is therefore pointless. Unless Crichton really wanted us to hate the narrator...

Plus Ibn as narrator restricts the story so much. We don't get the grandeur and depth that is possible with this story by being forced into the confines of this bigoted ass's mind. Think how awesome vikings can be? Seriously, to make them boring Crichton should be awarded a special prize. Just look at what's popular on television right now! The History channel has a huge hit with a show just called Vikings! Also how about the whole How to Train Your Dragon book and movie series? This is a culture that we are fascinated with. Their achievements for the time where amazing and Crichton made them boring. Seriously boring. I mean, how did he do this? Maybe the people reading this when it came out in the mid-seventies saw something I didn't, but I seriously doubt it. If there's one Crichton book I would say to skip without compunction it would be Eaters of the Dead. Seriously, skip it. Move along now.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Beowulf, Congo, Eaters of the Dead, Ian Malcolm, Lisa Lutz, Michael Crichton, Neanderthal, Susanna Clarke, Terry Pratchett, The Lost World, The Princess Bride, The Thirteenth Warrior, Viking, William Goldman

At the end of November I was contacted by the publicity manager at Viking about my request for a copy of the new Jasper Fforde book, Shades of Grey. Needless to say, what has transpired since has not only been unprecedentedly awesome, making Viking my new bff, but is also how this post came into being. You see… they offered me an interview! How cool is that!?! Not only did they send me this book, which was amazingly awesome and original and funny (my review), but then they asked if I’d like to talk to the man whose brain is capable of writing such prose. Of course I jumped at the chance… well, danced more like… even if this was something that had me nervous as to how horrid I think my voice sounds to what if this brilliant person thinks I’m a dolt, I had to do it. There wasn’t any ifs, ands, or buts, this was for me. So I spent the days leading up to the early morning hours of December the 18^th (Wales is six hours ahead) swotting up on my Fforde knowledge and trying to craft some interesting questions… did you know there are over 500 questions that he has cataloged on his site that he’s been asked?!? That was a lot of cramming I must say. What follows is, I hope, a funny and interesting interview that sheds light onto this creative author and his wonderful new book, Shades of Grey. (To help those who are less freakishly color knowledgeable, the footnoterphone has agreed to make an appearance, and I also promise there will be no undedicated dialogue traps).

Man who turns out to be Jasper: It is, yes, that’s me.

Nervous interviewer, who will be referred to as Elizabeth from now on: Hi, I’m Elizabeth. I’m calling from Strange & Random Happenstance, we have an interview (internal dialogue, god I hate my own voice.)

Elizabeth: Yeah, I was kind of watching the clock here.

Jasper: Little laugh

Elizabeth: Um, well can I get right to it?

Jasper: Yeah, absolutely.

Elizabeth:Ok, I just loved your new book.

Jasper: Oh, thank you.

Elizabeth: It was really just so fascinating, I’m a graphic designer by trade so I really related to a lot of the stuff in it.

Jasper: Ok, oh good.

Elizabeth: My first question is was Shades of Grey written with artists and graphic designers in mind?

Jasper: It’s interesting that you should say that actually, just this moment I downloaded an animated sort of commercial[1] that Hodder[2] have done for me here in the UK and of course graphic designers are suddenly going, oh great, we’ve got colors, we’ve got things changing colors, we’ve got some things in colors and some things not in colors and feed pipes that lead to colors and you can follow the color along a feed pipe and then it makes a flower green or blue or whatever. I’ve just received it and we’ve been looking at it and we both love it and it does seems a bit as though it is a gift to graphic designers doesn’t it?

Elizabeth: I’ve told a few people just of the RGB to CMYK[3] update and they just love that joke.

Jasper: Yeah, well I thought all you people who actually know about color, color models, might actually appreciate that kind of stuff. Cause most people don’t you see.

Elizabeth: I just thought it was just great. How much research did you go into in color theory for this book, seeing as you know many concepts are familiar to people who've studied color, like Munsell[4] and the Ishihara[5] being the color blindness test?

Jasper: I did enough to make me appear as though I probably knew more than I did. Color is a really tricky thing to get your head round. And even the notion that the color you see on your tv is completely separate to the color that is printed out by your printer[6]. And when I was first researching color I suddenly realized the immense complexity of a program that would allow you to view what you view on your screen to actually come out in a printer roughly the same color. And people take that sort of stuff for granted and I suddenly realized, oh my goodness, this is actually monstrously complicated. And even if you talk about subtractive or additive[7] it’s a sort of major deal. But I’m interested about everything really, so as soon as I have to research a new field I always sort of throw myself into it a bit and think, well ok, there’s got to be real experts out there so lets just chuck in a few little gags, you know, that they’ll pick up and enjoy.

Elizabeth: Yeah for my digital photography class that I took we had a seven-hour lecture on just the basics of monitor to printer.

Jasper: Yeah.

Elizabeth: I mean that doesn’t even scratch the surface at all

Jasper: Yeah, I know, it’s all completely different. And for awhile I’m sure everybody in the class is starring there a bit sort of confused and then after awhile you suddenly start realizing and there’d be this nodding of the heads as you suddenly click as to just how bizarre color is.

Elizabeth: Especially when you think of the fact that color is really a perception of the mind, that paints and dyes are just what is there for the brain to interpret as color.

Jasper: Hmm, oh yeah, color has no color. There is no color in real life. Color is entirely something that we’ve made up.

Elizabeth: It’s just brain functions that create it, it’s just unbelievable.

Jasper: Yeah, color is a function of the brain and the brain alone, and that’s what I think one of my stopping off points, or the jumping off points rather for the whole book. It was that notion when someone told me years ago what color is, what red actually means, and it’s merely a sensation. And the fact that we’d probably never ever be able to even find out what red actually is. It is actually completely in the brain. Color is a wonderful sort of thought really, that it’s there and it’s real and it’s tangible and yes of course it’s red and there it is but, no, it’s not, it’s just in your head.

Elizabeth: One of my friends is colorblind and he’s the best painter I’ve ever seen, colorwise, and he’s just doing it how he’s been taught how to paint, taught what the colors are.

Jasper: I had to speak to people who had color blindness as well to see their perceptions of color and everything. It was fascinating I must say.

Elizabeth: The next question I have is, your books are very graphically branded with National Color[8], The Cheese Enforcement Agency[9] and Goliath[10] and others all having logos giving them a more real presence. When did you decide to do this?

Jasper: I think it was quite early on. The first website we wrote was thursdaynext.com and that was really to give a sort of visual feel to the book, and I think what I was trying to do was to spread out from the edges of the book and say, no we can actually give it an edge of reality by actually creating this sort of slightly visual world with the logos and all that sort of nonsense. I thought it was fun, actually, at the time, and that’s really the reason I did it. But we do live in a very visual, iconic, logo driven world. I think it does give people a sort of routing in reality to the series. Also, I usually put satire in my books, for two reasons, first of all it’s quite fun, and it’s amusing, but secondly it’s because it makes the books very recognizable as something that happens in the real world. It seems very familiar and I think it’s the same when you create logos for companies in my books, it just makes them seem that much more sort of real and familiar. But I think really it’s just a way of expanding beyond the cover of the book to try and make it more real.

Elizabeth: I just think it’s great, even the letters I got from Viking here in the US, they had the little National Color Logo up in the corner, it was just great.

Jasper: Oh good. What I did is, I had that logo made up about a year ago, the little splashy paint logo which I love, and I actually I had it embroidered on the back of a bomber jacket, I’m going to put that up on the website quite soon. But quite early on I sent it to Hodder and Viking and I said this is the logo that’s going to be used in the book. I’m going to use this in merchandising and on the website and everything, so wherever you can use it, like pop it in as well, and then it just makes everything real. Cause what happens often is that the designers for the publishers have a very different idea as to how things look than I do. And I thought, well if I can get Viking and Hodder and me all together with at least some aspects of it, then we can be this sort of united front and don’t give such a disjointed view of the visual impact of the world. So quite early on I had that logo designed and I said to them, right, the type script we’re going to use is Berlin Sans, which I really really like, and could you do this, this, this and this. And, you know, they don’t do it all, but every now and again it sneaks in. I do just think that it makes it just that much more real and interesting, and, I don’t know, I just like it.

Elizabeth: Well it creates a nice continuity with the font choice and the logo choice. My next question is, if each village has a Vermeer[11], there must not be many villages within this society, with only about 31 paintings attributed to him?

Jasper: Yeah, does it say, I don’t think everyone has a Vermeer[12].

Elizabeth: It said like almost every town had a Vermeer.

Jasper: Oh right, or maybe it’s meant to refer to a painting.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense it would be a painting.

Jasper:Yeah, I think that might have been a syntax error, on my behalf[13]. I think what I meant was that everybody had at least one half decent painting. There wouldn’t be enough Vermeers to go around would there?

Elizabeth: No, I was thinking that would make a very small post apocalyptic society.

Jasper: It would. But they might not know it though would they? There’s so little movement between villages.

Elizabeth: Yeah, you get a few names, probably, what ten names for cities, so you’re not sure exactly how big.

Jasper: So we don’t really know how many people there are.

Elizabeth: The color system is like a distinct Caste System[14], from purple leaders to blue teachers, what color do you think you would be in this society?

Jasper: Oh, a writer/entertainer I think came out as orange. I don’t know whether it’s in the final book[15], but I think on the train, there’s a couple of oranges who are sort of traveling players, who do training plays, a bit like training films. And I think they’re oranges and they’re in the wrong place in the carriage and everyone gets very upset about it cause it upsets the sort of natural order and everyone is sort of flustering. So I think I’d definitely be in the orange category, which everyone would kind of ignore, because they’re certainly not going to be purple and they’re kinda sort of half yellow, but not, and they’re sort of red and at the bottom. And they come out quite well actually, because they’re sort of like the greens, they’re half and half, they consist of lower colors, even though they’re sort of higher than the red. So I think I’d probably I’d end up being an orange.

Elizabeth: What do you think would happen if complimentary[16]colors bred? Would it be more of a dilution to grey or perhaps could they view even more of the color spectrum and thus pose a threat to the Colortocracy[17]?

Jasper: Well it certainly sounds like there’s something going on. I’m not quite sure exactly what. But it’s been enshrined in rule and I think there’s a reason for most rules, so I think we might assume that something threatening could come from that union.

Elizabeth: So Jane and Eddie would be even more of a threat then?

Jasper: Yes, could be, but the interesting thing is, if you do start mixing complimentaries, you get a very strange color. You don’t really get a color at all, I mean what is brown but the brain saying, “nope, don’t know, sorry, can’t figure it out.” So, I don’t know quite what’s going to happen if that does come to pass, but it seems such a taboo, a terrible thing, that I don’t think anyone would try it.

Now ends the color centric part of our talk, appropriate for a book so wonderful coated in color. Stop by tomorrow when libraries and killer swans are topics of the day!

[1]
[2] Jasper’s British publishers.
[3] RGB is the Red, Green, Blue additive color model primarily used for televisions and video screens. CMYK is the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black subtractive color model primarily used in the printing process. They are the crux of what graphic designers do on a daily basis.
[4] Albert H. Munsell, in the early 1900s created a 3-D model of a color space, separating color into hue, value (lightness) and chroma (color purity), or as used in the book, hue, saturation, brightness (HSB). Munsell and his color space are still used and taught to this day.
[5] A test for red/green color blindness, named after Doctor Ishihara, who designed it in 1917.
[6] RGB vs. CMYK
[7] Subtractive is mixing of paints and dyes to create colors utilizing CMYK. In Subtractive mixing, all colors together “in essence” are black, in reality it’s an icky brown. Additive is mixing colors of light utilizing RGB. In Additive mixing, all colors together are white.
[8] National Color is the body who look after the collection of scrap color and the manufacture of universally visible colors in Shades of Grey.
[9] Division of SpecOps (SpecOps-31) formed as a result of the growing illegal Cheese Smuggling Industry that arose as a result of the "Cheese levy".
[10] Rebuilt England after the War, but not without their own agenda.

[11] Johannes Vermeer, famous painter of The Girl with the Pearl Earring and others. So few pieces remain that if one were ever found it’s worth would be astronomical.
[12] I know I read this somewhere not in the book, because I wouldn’t make it up… truthfully…
[13] Not his error, but an error in a press release… I swear I read it somewhere… if only I could find it again then I’d not feel as if my mind is slipping away.
[14] Fundamental scale of basic colors, with red as the lowest on the color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.
[15] It is.
[16] Colors opposite on a color wheel, red and green, blue and orange, purple and yellow are all complimentary colors.
[17] The "benevolent" government in Eddie's world.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 2:42 AM 1 comments  

Labels: Additive Color, CMYK, Colortocracy, Edward Russett, Graphic Designer, Ishihara, Jasper Fforde, Munsell, National Color, RGB, Shades of Grey, Subtractive Color, Thursday Next, Vermeer, Viking

So what did my BFF's at Penguin send me today? (And yes, they are quite literally my BFFs, no one treats me as good as they do, Viking, Dutton, you all rock). They sent me the new Jasper Fforde book Shades of Grey! And not just a crappy reviewers copy. Oh no, my BBFs treat me very well. They sent me a 1st Edition hardcover, with all the lovely press info. And, I think just to make my day a little brighter, it was addressed to: Elizabeth Lefebvre - Blogger, Strange and Random Happenstance. How cool is that? Very I do declare. Blogger! (Imagine Kryten from Red Dwarf saying it and then silently laughing... yes I'm a little loopy, so? This is how my brain usually works best.) Also I'm working out doing an interview with Mr. Fforde either by phone or Skype! The coolness never ceases here. So if you have any question you've been dying to ask Jasper Fforde, just post away, and maybe I'll get around to asking him for you! Well I'm off to go read and also figure out how to properly pronounce his last name, I think that would be a good thing to find out before the interview, those wacky Welsh!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 2:35 AM 3 comments  

Labels: ARCs, Blogger, Dutton, Jasper Fforde, Penguin, Shades of Grey, Skype, Viking, Welsh