Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to […]
“I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners of war”
After discovering that both my CBR 10 reading list and my personal library have been far-too-heavily skewed towards male authors, I was determined to make a correction, and I set out on my first trip away this year with a too-long wishlist that yielded a bonanza of books by women, sixteen in all, pictured here. I could easily have come home with twice as many but kept myself under control if only to avoid overweight baggage charges. After dinner on my second night in London, […]
Burned; charred, scorched, parched.
I adore a young adult novel that is well written, well thought out and makes me think – Burned did all of that and more. This novel is written in free verse which, at first, can feel daunting, but is a refreshing way to have a story told. Communicated in first person we really get inside the protagonists head, we understand her motivations on an intimate level, we relate to her drive and her desperation. Pattyn’s story is not lost in verse, if anything it […]
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction
“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood. And he’s […]
So much talk of faeries, and none of it good
I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]
Toxic
Louise O’Neill is an accomplished Young Adult writer with two award winning novels under her belt, Almost Love is her first foray in Adult fiction. ( Her third YA book; a feminist re-telling of the little mermaid – The Surface Breaks is due out in May 2018 ) Almost Love follows Sarah Fitzpatrick in both her past and present. Then: In a toxic and manipulative relationship with Matthew and now: In the present day, Sarah can be found mistreating her current boyfriend Oisín and longing […]