Literary classics earn their designation by presenting themes that resonate throughout the ages. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just such a literary classic. She wrote this short but brilliant tale when she was about 20, while she, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were on holiday in Switzerland. As the poor weather prevented their outdoor adventures, the three entertained themselves with stories of the “supernatural.” Shelley’s Frankenstein has become a world renowned classic and a staple of Halloween partiers everywhere. And yet, Shelley’s scary […]
How to Survive the Unsurvivable
Reading The Shock of the Fall took me back to my early teens a little bit. Because back then, before wizard, vampires, and dystopian societies had exploded the YA market, the age-appropriate books found in my local library fell mostly into two categories: the ones with horses and the ones with problems. Sometimes the categories overlapped of course, so you’d get books with horses and problems. For a few years, after picture books and Nancy Drew, but before my brief Serious Adult Classics Only phase […]
Survival is Insufficient
Sometimes, a book comes out with a lot of hype attached to it. The writer is supposedly the next “big thing” and there’s a huge buzz for months after the book’s release. Jonathan Franzen. The Dragon Tattoo books. The Hunger Games. Gone Girl. And these books (yeah, I hated The Corrections) don’t always live up to the hype for me. I’ve read tons and tons of rave reviews about Station Eleven over the past few weeks, and I was so worried that it would fall […]
Don’t mess with the Slayer. I’m not having it.
I’ll be honest, ghost stories are not my thing. Every once in a while, I’ll give one a try, and for the most part (major exception for Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub, one of my favorites), they leave me wanting. Anna Dressed in Blood was the October pick for my book club, and is not a book I would normally choose to read. And I didn’t love it. I really don’t have much to say, so let me just hit a couple of […]
Looks like M. Night Shyamalan has some competition
There was a lot of talk about We Were Liars a few months back (see popcultureboy’s review from earlier this year), and about the surprise ending. The buzz on the book was huge, and the tagline in the publicity for it said, “and if anybody asks you how it ends, just LIE.” This piqued my interest. And so I went into it cautiously, hoping that the “twist” didn’t detract from the storytelling. Thankfully, it didn’t. We Were Liars is about a girl named Cady (short for Cadence), […]
Marketing Genius or Load of Rich Creamery Butter?
Have you ever been talking with a group of friends and the subject of marketing comes up? Inevitably, at least one person will make the claim that marketing “doesn’t work” on him. I suppose this claim goes along with having a great sense of humor and impeccable taste as the most common delusions of the human species. I’ve just never understood why people make it a point of pride to claim that they are impervious to marketing efforts, as if that makes a person smarter […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- …
- 137
- Next Page »