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Category: 5 Stars

Revisiting Harry Potter: The Harry-Dumbledore Buddy Comedy Commences

Okay, “buddy comedy” may be putting it a trifle too strongly. But you know what I mean? When they go off to make Slughorn come to Hogwarts, and Dumbledore goes off to have a poop while Harry (metaphorically) seduces Slughorn with his fame, courage, and loyalty to Hogwarts? And Dumbledore’s all, “Knitting patterns! Well, we must be off,” and cracks wise about his jam preferences. (Raspberry jam is delicious; good call, Dumbledore.) All the trappings of a classic buddy comedy! (Ish.) It is also about damn time someone told off the Dursleys for being terrible child-rearers. I don’t know why…

38 Comments

Revisiting Harry Potter: Crying early and often

You guys. This book. How can everyone be so brave and good, and everything go so terribly wrong for them all the time? All through this readalong I’ve been excited to get to the final segment of Order of the Phoenix because, in my opinion, there is no finer set-piece throughout the entire series (and there are a lot of good set-pieces!) than the sequence in the Ministry. It is so fucking tense. Actually, this entire section of the book is fairly intense. Which is why this post is in a state of near-total incoherence and book quotes. Sorry. But,…

35 Comments

Revisiting Harry Potter: Sirius Black and other concerns

Oh, third book. I wish I had made time to write about you last week, for truly you are the sparkliest of all the Harry Potter books. Your beauty makes me want to sing songs of praise. But I do not do that, because I have roommates and they already think I’m weird. I will get to Sirius Black in a minute, but first I would like to speak in praise of some other aspects of the third book. (Obviously, this will be all spoilers all the time.) One, I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal about…

75 Comments

The new Hawkeye comics you maybe haven’t yet realized you want to read but you totally should because they are amazing. Wait, hear me out.

I know! You don’t want to read the new Hawkeye comics because comics are expensive, Hawkeye is boring, and Marvel comics are too mythology-heavy for a newcomer to leap into. But you’re so wrong. Unbeknownst to you, you really do want to read the new Hawkeye comics. Let me explain real quick why your objections to doing so are inadequate. 1. Single-issue comics are an expensive habit. So borrow a friend’s. Or if you can’t borrow a friend’s, just pay the three bucks a month. If you take a year’s subscription through Marvel, it’s still about the same cost as…

43 Comments

Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Carol Rifka Brunt

OMG y’all. THIS BOOK. READ IT NOW. It’s taken me a little while to spit this review out, because I feel like this is or will be one of those books that gets a lot of hype. I don’t want my review to become one of an avalanche of reviews that raves about a book, and then you are like, “Hey the people really love this book, Imma read it too,” and then you read it with your expectations sky high and when it doesn’t turn out to be the second coming of The Color Purple you’re like, “Why is…

27 Comments

Review: Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine

Before we get to the excellent Delusions of Gender, which I can’t believe it took me so long to read, a word about my blogging habits. I have been (sing it with me if you know the words) the worst blogger ever. My commute, while not bad for New York, is a time-killer, I’m trying very hard to be as social a butterfly as my introverty brain and publishing job budget will permit me, and recently I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn to pronounce Russian personal pronouns. They are harder to pronounce than you’d think. All…

46 Comments

Archer’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones

March has whizzed by in a whirlwind of cherry blossoms and other even lovelier events, doing me a great disservice by never letting me catch my breath long enough to schedule a post about a Diana Wynne Jones book for the Diana Wynne Jones March operated by the wonderful Kristen of We Be Reading. March has happened so fast I didn’t even remember to relish March 4th, the only day of the year that’s a command. Ordinarily I say “March forth!” with tedious frequency on that day, and this year I forgot. Sigh. March, you whirlwind vixen. Archer’s Goon, fittingly…

33 Comments

Review: The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson

My scheme, intended to cheer me up from my mild post-Christmas sadness, was that in January I would order myself an Eva Ibbotson book from PaperbackSwap, one of the romances, as a comfort book. And then I would slowly order more Eva Ibbotson books, gradually, at the rate of one Eva Ibbotson book every few months, as I needed them, maybe alternating with some of the better Barbara Michaels books, and someday, a year or two from now, I would have all the comfort books I needed. This was a drastic underestimation of how awful January was going to be.…

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Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sometimes I do a quick search through my blog archives and find that I have somehow, in four years (four years!!), not reviewed a book that I love more than I love eating cheese fries while watching The Good Wife (in this case, more even than I would love eating cheese fries while watching Kalinda plan and execute a cold-blooded takedown of Dana). Watership Down is one such book. It is also an example of the phenomenon that a late conversion can make you more of a fanatic about something than if you loved it all along. My mother told…

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The Unwritten again. The people oughta know.

I don’t love reading or reviewing graphic novels series when they are in progress. I only started reading Fables after the, whatever, the eleventh? volume came out, which — while that wasn’t the end of the series — was the volume that finished up the storylines that had been set up from the beginning. The climactic battle had happened, and the eleventh (or twelfth?) volume dealt with the aftermath, and that was it. I read Sandman long after it was finished. As you know, I like reading the end. It’s much harder to read the end of a graphic novel…

16 Comments