In October (or, if you are me writing this post, now) I had this cold where I lost my whole entire voice for several days, and I was all sickly to the point that I stayed home from work, and on the day where I stayed home from work, I sat in my bed under blankets, feeling terribly sad, and I read Year of the Gadfly. This is a very uninteresting story to anyone but me. I don’t get sick that often, so to me this story feels terribly sad, like way overblown sad. Unreasonably sad. Like the death of…
14 CommentsReading the End Posts
So! Kate Morton! In the past I’ve had some feelings about the way Kate Morton does her plots and sentences. This has bothered me in different degrees for different books — The House at Riverton was close to pure joy (I was reading it on vacation) but did not stand up to rereads, and The Forgotten Garden bugged me with some heavy-handed plot devices. But The Secret Keeper is her fourth book, and some of the tics I didn’t love in the first two I’ve read are gone now, and overall it was a fun, engaging, non-annoying read. As a…
20 CommentsHappy All Saints’ Day! More to the point, happy anniversary, Saints! I will always love you no matter what. I am writing this post in mid-October, but I am predicting that I ended up doing nothing for Halloween. I am not a big fan of Halloween ever since I stopped trick-or-treating. I’m not good at designing costumes. Now Halloween is just one more obstacle between me and Christmas. Ah changelings. I was griping the other day about the difficulty of creating a fairy world that has enough specificity to satisfy me, and although The Replacement doesn’t completely nail this, it…
16 CommentsI don’t have as much to say about these two books so I’m putting them in one post. BOOM. Is Everyone Hanging out without Me?, and Other Concerns, Mindy Kaling This is such a good title for a book like this. Which is to say, a collection of short essays about Mindy Kaling’s life and thoughts she has thought on various topics. Mindy Kaling is a charming human person and I think she would be a fun friend. Her book is charming and fun, and slight. She says some charming things about gender performance (but she doesn’t call it gender…
8 CommentsBeacon Press, publisher of Fanpire, says: Why have the Twilight saga’s representations of romance and relationships enchanted millions of fans and generated millions in revenue, selling everything from Barbie-type dolls to blockbuster films? Tanya Erzen-herself no stranger to the allure of the series-explores the phenomenon of Twilight, books and films influenced by conservative Mormon religious ideas, by immersing herself in the vibrant and diverse subculture of “Twi-hards” to understand why so many love the series (sometimes in spite of themselves). She attends Edward-addiction groups, Twi-rock concerts, and fan conventions, and looks at the vast world of online fandom that Twilight has…
20 CommentsMarvel Comics: The Untold Story is a history of Marvel Comics’ superhero comics from its beginnings in the early 1960s all the way up to the present day. Superhero comics started at Marvel as a response to the success of such DC characters as the Green Lantern and the Justice League; and the inventor of most of them in the early days was (at least partly! this was the subject of much dispute!) Stan Lee, the cousin of Marvel’s owner’s wife. So if you say you don’t like nepotism, remember that without it we wouldn’t have the gorgeous Gwendie. What…
29 CommentsSooooooooo. This is mixed. Not mixed in the way like that everything about it was neutral to me. Mixed in the way that some things about it were neutral to me, some things about it I loved so, so hard, and all of me thinks Attica Locke’s second book sounds m.f. amazing and I want to read it. I realize that is a very specific kind of mixed, but I want y’all to know exactly where my head’s at. Jay Porter is a lawyer and one-time civil rights worker in 1980s Houston. When he and his pregnant wife help out…
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