I have an addition to the Things That Occur to Me While Reading Historical Romance Novels: LUST IS IMPERVIOUS TO COLD. Never mind all those times people in these books get down to their skivvies in drafty old manor houses, lust’s powers are even greater than I supposed. How else could a person wearing a linen shift and corset while standing barefoot in a snow squall be aware of anything than the fact that she is bitterly cold? But I have gotten ahead of myself. […]
What We Do for Love and Greed
Confession time: I listened to this book solely because I decided that I would not be finishing The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood for the Go Fug Yourself book club over on Goodreads. I spent two weeks actively avoiding listening to it on my commute to work, and on a three hour road trip to Philadelphia where I didn’t have a radio in the loaner car from work. I needed a palate cleanser, and I needed a moody atmospheric listen to go along with Halloween. […]
Let’s just wait here a while, see what happens.
Who Goes There? is the basis for both the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World and the much more faithful adaptation, 1982’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, (the less said about the 2011 remake/prequel the better). The novella was published in 1938 and tells the story of American men stationed at Big Magnet research station in Antarctica. While investigating a magnetic anomaly the team discovers an alien ship and a frozen body. They bring the body back to their camp and after some discussion decide […]
Steampunk serial killers are seriously messed up
The Curious Case of the Clockwork Menace – 3 stars Forged by Desire – 4 stars The Curious Case of the Clockwork Menace is a novella set three years before the events of the rest of the London Steampunk series. In it, Nighthawk partners Garrett Reed and Perry Lowell work together on a case involving a missing theatre actress who may or may not have been abducted. Perry, the only other known female blueblood (vampire) has been in love with her partner for years, without […]
The power of imagery and story
My friend K, who is specializing in short fiction in her doctoral work, suggested Season of Migration to the North as something I might be interested in rotating for my global literature courses. I don’t always find novellas satisfying, but sometimes they are handy when you try to fit in a lot of literature for your courses. Plus, in broadening my literary horizons beyond the Western canon, I am interested in the way writers have been translated into English and confront exotic “Othered” myths about […]
Reading Under the New Moon
The Strange Library combines two things that I love dearly: libraries and strange supernatural occurrences. The story begins with a boy returning his books to the library. When he asks the librarian for help finding more books, she directs him to a confined room in the basement where a small old man helps him locate three gigantic volumes on tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. However, when he tries to check the books out, he is told that he must instead read the books there, […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- Next Page »




