Mr Darcy,Vampyre is  a sequel to Amanda Grange’s novel Mr Darcy’s Diary. It begins on Darcy and Elizabeth’s wedding day and follows the two on their honeymoon trip to Paris, the Alps and Venice during a lull in the Napoleonic Wars. Told from Elizabeth’s point of view, the story is about her expanding horizons as she leaves the sheltered life she led at Netherfield for her new world as a wife and a traveler outside England. Darcy’s continued lack of physical attention to Elizabeth makes her realize that something isn’t quite right, but the clues provided in the text are too subtle for her to figure out his secret.

I haven’t read Mr Darcy’s Diary and I don’t think that I will read it after reading this sequel either. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that I hate when authors take an amazing story and try to make it into their own. Some manage to develope a decent twist to the story but others, like Amanda Grange, just don’t make the cut. I can tell you that if I was Elizabeth Bennet I would take a stake, stab him and find myself a new husband. I was bored with Mr. Darcy, something I never thought that I would feel about him, but Ms. Grange managed to make one of the most wanted men in fiction be unwanted. I have to stop reading all these craptastic adaptations of Jane Austen!

I am a sculptor, a molder of form.
In every moment I shape an idol.
But then, in front of you, I melt them down
I can rouse a hundred forms
and fill them with spirit,
but when I look into your face,
I want to throw them in the fire.
My souls spills into yours and is blended.
Because my soul has absorbed your fragrance,
I cherish it.
Every drop of blood I spill
informs the earth,
I merge with my Beloved
when I participate in love.
In this house of mud and water,
my heart has fallen to ruins.
Enter this house, my Love, or let me leave.

~Rumi

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Out of these 100 books I’ve read 26, but I must say that I’m surprised that none of Agatha Christie’s books were included or Paulo Coelho for that matter and many more authors.

This is Love: to fly heavenward,
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils.
The first moment, to renounce life;
The last step, to fare without feet.
To regard this world as invisible,
Not to see what appears to one’s self.
O heart, I said, may it bless thee
To have entered the circle of lovers,
To look beyond the range of the eye,
To penetrate the windings of the bosom!
Whence did this breath come to thee, O my soul,
Whence this throbbing, O my heart?

~Rumi

A new period drama based on the life of John Keats and his romance with Fanny Brawne. I still haven’t seen this one even though it’s been released since the middle of September last year. It seems like it will be a great movie to watch and I bet many teenage girls will start googling for poems by John Keats.

Has anyone seen this one? If so, what did you think of it?

Another year has passed and a new decade will see the dawn of day. Here are the Top 10 most read posts this past year.

1. New Moon: Review
2. The Vampire Diaries
3. Twilight: Review
4. The Vampire Diaries: Review
5. Eclipse :Review
6. By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept: Review
7. North and South
8. The Gargoyle
9. I Like It When You’re Quiet: Poem
10. Reading Lolita In Tehran: Review

Hope that you all will enjoy the new year and that you’ll be back here for new reviews and poems!

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,) I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only, You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

~Walt Whitman

The acting has improved since the last movie, if that’s a positive thing I don’t know, but it’s still improved. Robert Pattinson isn’t a big part of the movie which I’m fine with since he wasn’t a big part in the book. It was weird that he showed up here and there but I won’t complain.

As for Jacob Black, I hate what they’ve done with his character, it’s such a shame that a more experienced actor didn’t get the part, at least then  he wouldn’t come across as a whiney little brat. Taylor Lautner has taken my advise and given himself the gift of acting lessons but clearly it didn’t help him. The clenching of the jaw is his trademark expression and that’s all he has to give! Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan is still horrid, I don’t know why people say that she was the best actor in the movie, but at the same time I can understand why since all they have to compare with is Taylor Lautner.

The movie itself was an average 3 out of 5, the scenery was perfect except for the part where Bella and Alice went to Italy so they could save Edward, that part reminded me of Pushing Daisies. It’s not a bad thing but it doesn’t actually fit into the previous mood of the movie where everything is mostly dark and gloomy. It’s a shame that the other members of the Cullen family weren’t a large part in the movie and that’s why I’m looking forward to Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, even though the same main actors will remain in the franchise.

Robert Langdon is called to Washington at the last minute and hold a lecture at the Capitol. But just moments after his arrival something remarkable is found in the building. Moreover, it is cryptically encoded with five different symbols. Langdon understands that the message is an ancient invocation, meant to entice the recipient into a long-lost world of secret wisdom.

Robert Langdon is my favourite Dan Brown character and I was really looking forward to reading this book. I knew that I would finish the book in one day, max 2 days, just like The Da Vinci Code. So I sat down on a Friday and started reading, thinking that by the end of the weekend I would be finsihed with it. But I was wrong and to top it off, I fell asleep!

It took me a whole week to finish it. I almost had to force myself to turn each new page. It lacked the thrill from The Da Vinci Code and every new twist was expected. The story was predictable and somewhere in the middle it became pretty clear who the villian was which was sort of an anticlimax.

I walked into a cute little bookstore today, looking for nothing in particular and to my surprise there was a book titled Mr Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange. Why do we humans lack so much imagination that we have to copy the same story over and over again?

When I came home I discovered even more novels that were connected to Jane Austen. There was everything from zombies, sea monsters and other supernatural species. But vampires was the one that stood out, there was even one novel were Jane Austen herself was a vampire ( Miss Austen Bites Back).

I know that vampires equals money these days, but that doesn’t have to mean that just because you involve them into an already famous story, the outcome will be great or even good. In my opinion it’s also disrespectful to the original story, it changes so much that it no longer holds any resemblance to what it previously was and the new author just uses the famous names to draw attention to their novel.

People should write whatever they want, but they should atleast try to be original when they do it. Originality is what makes an author rememberable.