Ark by Veronica Roth
I was worried I wouldn’t like this one since I hard disliked Roth’s “Divergent.” This book though hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting. Roth talks about the last days on Earth before an asteroid hits and wipes out life on the planet as people know it. What I found interesting is that many people realized this was going to happen and that they still went on, had children, etc. That part of the book was interesting to me. I wish that Roth had […]
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm by by Randall Jarrell (Translator), Nancy Ekholm Burkert (Illustrator)
Snow White in New York by Fiona French
So my sister is getting her Master’s degree in Art Education. She’s currently in a class about picture books (or something along those lines). Her homework for this week was to compare three different versions of a picture book, so since I thought at least two of the three books would work for me for bingo squares, I joined her in reading the books for her homework. We got my nine year old niece involved too. She actually read the books aloud to us, which […]
To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
The lovely faintingviolet thrust this upon me a few days ago, and since I still hadn’t found something for my Science square, this little book was perfect. Faintingviolet’s a huge fan of Becky Chambers, and really enjoyed her first book, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. As I’m not so much in the sci-fi end of the speculative world, I’d never come across Chambers’ work before, but I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful this novella was. Chambers builds an entire world in a […]
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany’s the book shares a lot of the same traits as Breakfast at Tiffany’s the film: charming in places, predictable in others, with some questionable and unnecessary ethnic and racist slurs. Truman Capote wrote it in 1958, but the story is set in 1943 as a young, unnamed writer (Capote’s stand-in) moves into a brownstone on the upper east side of Manhattan. He soon encounters his 19 year-old enigmatic neighbor, Holly Golightly. She proceeds to charm and repel him at intervals, while remaining […]
Rashomon and Seventeen Stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke
This is a kind of omnibus collection of stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, most famous for his two stories “Rashomon” and “In a Grove” both of which became the inspiration for the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, which won the first Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Those two stories are the first two stories in the collection. “Rashomon” refers to the large red-lacquered gate under which a few travelers find themselves meeting during a large rainstorm. “In a Grove” is written in a series of interviews with […]
Easy in the Islands by Bob Shacochis
This is a debut story collection by a mostly professor, occasional fiction writer from Florida. Bob Shacochis grew up in Virginia and went to the Peace Corps in the Caribbean (lucky) and these stories, now written in his 30s, seem to be part of the results of that set of experiences. I haven’t come across a more packaged and coaxed collection of short stories in a while–for example, there’s a cheaply printed picture at the beginning of each story that evokes the kind of cheap […]
