So. Get this. There’s this guy, right? He’s a super-secret, super-smart, super-duper spy person. He’s, like, the youngest of his kind EVER. His parents were viciously killed when he was young, but that’s okay because he was adopted by this really rich couple who loved him and turned him into a super-spy. And now? He’s an all-American hero, strong of jaw and willpower, on the hunt for a super evil radical islamist terrorist who is planning to unleash smallpox into the world. The only question […]
Why on earth are you there, when you’re everywhere?
There’s always something eerie about hotels. Whether you find yourself in a grimy one-star hostel sharing your room with seven snoring strangers or in a five-star joint, it takes a certain repression of deeply ingrained evolutionary beliefs to lay down your head on a foreign pillow and surrender yourself to sleep in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by others, some of whom can easily access your room should they choose to. Of course, the sense of company, the knowledge that you are surrounded by those in […]
Oy Gestalt
Chances are that, if you are reading this or any other website concerned with popular culture, you have little more than a passing familiarity with ultra-orthodox Judaism. Like most fundamentalist sects, they mostly keep to themselves. They rarely make the news except for when their behaviour becomes excessive somehow – excessively strict, like when some Rebbe or other gets into hot water for forbidding women Jewish and non-Jewish alike to walk across a public sidewalk or tries to ban children from attending school because their […]
Harry Potter and the Curse of Expectation
I own twenty-one Harry Potter books: a set in Dutch, a set in English, and a set of e-books. This is excluding my copies of Quidditch through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I own three sets of Harry Potter related clothing and all eight films on DVD. I’ve gone to midnight screenings. I’ve braved my irrational yet powerful loathing of Eddie Redmayne and gone to see Fantastic Beasts. I used to moderate subsections of a thriving a Harry Potter internet […]
About that time I included the words “Sperm Gargling” in a review
Here’s a bit of a literary quandary for you: can a book still be good if it deliberately skirts controversy, or does the artificially generated controversy only distract from the other qualities a book may have? I’ve been asking myself this ever since I read Wetlands, and I still don’t know. Wetlands, the debut novel of Anglo-German TV personality Charlotte Roche, tells the story of eighteen year old school girl Helen Memel. Helen is obsessed with her bodily fluids; her own and others’. She likes […]
Well, It’s Obviously Not a Vampire
There is a great mystery at the heart of Dreamcatcher, and it is this: I have no idea how it ended up on my e-reader. I didn’t buy it. Nobody gifted it to me. I’m not a King aficionada so it’s not as if it got lost in my enormous collection. But anyway: there it was, and for reasons that are entirely beyond me, I decided to give it a try. Let me preface this by saying I’d never read a Stephen King novel, […]
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