Job Update and BOOK reviews/brain dump

No, I don't have a job yet but at least I finished the next round of applications!!! I sent off three cover letters/resumes to theaters and applied for another job at a large health-food store chain. Hopefully I will get some good responses! I also have an application for a bookstore to turn in tomorrow and apparently this store is hiring everyone who walks in the door (but this is just a rumor.)

IN OTHER NEWS, I have had a lot of time to read lately. I just finished To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and have started on The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Connie Willis is a genius, by the way. I read her book Passages over Christmas break and it was completely different yet equally as wonderful as To Say Nothing of the Dog. If you want to read (science) fiction unlike anything else you've ever read, read something by Connie Willis. TSNoftheD was hard to get into at first - this was my second try - but it is a great book to read if you are not trying to do university level courses at the same time. I think that was the reason for my initial failure. This time, I was able to commit to the time travel concepts and even figured out some of the mystery before the end!

I've discovered I really love authors who are able to completely create a new version of a world we know and lead the reader into that world completely. I also just read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova which also takes the modern world we live in and add a fantasy twist (this time with Dracula) and make it seem freakishly familiar. The Golden Compass also exists in a possible future of the world as we know it. A lot of fantasy and science fiction take the reader to a whole new world such as Middle Earth or outer space. I love those stories as well but there is something special about authors who take our world and make it into something more. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is another good example - Susanna Clarke takes a Dickens era England and adds magic which is accepted by the characters of the world and thus the reader. Good authors are some of the most powerful people in the world - they are capable of helping readers envision a different version of the world and completely escape and believe in it. I love reading. Hopefully I'll still be able to read as much when I get a job. I can always hope!