Don’t get me wrong, I like me a dystopian mind blow every now and again to make me feel good about my current situation, but guh-damn. I’ve got to read about a lot of unicorns and rainbows to cleanse my palette after this cluster of darkness. The Handmaid’s Tale is an American version of oppressive societies like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere ISIS is in charge. With fundamentalist religious imagery, creepy sex scenes, and people displayed on hooks, I noped my way through this […]
The good ones are often controversial…
Roots is a work of historical fiction written in 1976 by Alex Haley. He begins with the life and eventual capture of his great-great-great-great grandfather Kunta Kinte in Africa. In what follows is a mostly fictional story, except for possibly a few details and Kinte’s lineage. Fiction or not, Roots is an amazing saga of nine generations. The most intriguing part of the book, for me, was the beginning, which focused on Kinte’s life. After Kinte was transported to America to be sold as a […]
If you want to understand deja vu better, this might help…
“Mom, after someone dies and becomes a ghost, do they become a kid again?” My four-year-old asked me this just a day after I finished reading Atkinson’s book, Life After Life. “Well, some people believe that. It’s called reincarnation.” I told him, wondering if his earlier comment about how I should wear a certain necklace “the next time I got married” was related to this conversation. While I’m not sure Life After Life is about reincarnation, parallel universes, or a hybrid of both, it nonetheless […]
I’m pretty sure this interview lasted longer than sundown to sunrise…
According to wikipedia, Anne Rice is an author of “gothic fiction, christian literature, and erotica.” One of these things is not like the other… I know Interview with the Vampire has been around for awhile, after all, I was in high school when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt played Rice’s vampires, much to her dismay. That was more than *gulp* 20 years ago. But crap, the book is 40 years old people! So if you live under a rock, like me, or you just have […]
Whatever weird things you remember about childhood, probably not as weird as this…
In the words of the great John Cleese, “and now, for something completely different…” I don’t know what I was expecting from this book, but it wasn’t that. And yet, it’s probably spot on for Gaiman. So what do I know? I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to say because in reading the back of the book synopsis and other reviews, I just didn’t realize that this story was so out there. Whoever was tasked with writing that synopsis stuck on his best poker […]
You’ve heard of Shirley Jackson, if not this one, then her other…
“Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?” “Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.” “Merricat, said Constance, would you like to go to sleep?” “Down in the boneyard ten feet deep.” What if this was a schoolyard rhyme you learned as a kid, whose origins lay in a mysterious house in your neighborhood where you’ve heard two strange sisters live, but who you’ve never seen? You’ve heard other things, too. That the sisters eat children, and if you think you’ve insulted them, […]
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