I actually sat down and read all three of those books just so I could more thoroughly enjoy the reviews that amberance is doing (my heavens those are funny).
This post is intended to have spoilers about plot points in the 50 Shades of Grey books. If you do not want the books to unfold in all their suspenseful glory, do not read further. Continue reading
I know a lot of you do, did, or are considering joining a book club. Got any good stories to tell us?
A few years ago I joined one briefly. It met in a large, accommodating coffee shop and I couldn’t hear half of what was said. So, pulled the plug on that.
Now I belong to one that a friend very kindly invited me into. They’re a very nice crowd, accomplished, talkative. It seems mean to say they’re boring, but I fear this is the truth. Well, no, wait. They’re not all boring, or at least they’re not all boring all the time. I can be funny, when on my game. My friend is funny, or can be when not held back by the general atmosphere of… well, let’s take a peek inside and see what the various book-club members are like.
We have the married couple who seem determined to turn the event into a thinly-disguised marital fight for control. They’ll go around and around about a particular point and won’t stop until one or the other concedes. So tedious. Continue reading
Janice “Jan” Berenstain died this past Friday after a severe stroke on Thursday.
Jan along with her husband Stan, created a book series for pre-schoolers over a period of 50 years. Jan and Stan met when they were 18 on their first day of art school. They married years later after Stan returned from a stint in the army as a medical illustrator in an army hospital. During that time, Jan worked as a draftsman in the Army Corp of Engineers and a riveter of seaplanes. Continue reading
Let’s get this straight: This is not book club.
This is a book…discussion. I thought it would be fun to talk about what we’re all reading, so we can all open ourselves to new avenues of words.
I’ve always loved to read. I cannot remember not having a book in my hands.
My grandmother — Gam — had a stack of books by her bedside, bookcases filled to overflowing throughout her apartment, and boxes to catch the overflow. She leaned towards authors like Belva Plain and Nora Roberts. But what I liked, as a little girl, where the two decades worth of Readers’ Digests stacked on the bookcase in the back hall. “These are easy to read,” Gam told me, putting on her reading glasses, opening the old magazines, and pointing with her pink fingernails, always freshly polished. “At the end of the stories, there are always these little jokes.” Continue reading
Our nation’s politics, reality stars, and Justin Biebers may make it seem like we can’t produce anything good anymore, but literature is an annual case for the fact that some excellence will always emerge no matter how hard we try to repress it with Kardashians.
And so, the Question of the Day: what do you think was the best book released in 2011? Continue reading
Writing a book is probably not something you think about doing 140 characters at a time. But that’s exactly what Dan Sinker did with “The F*cking Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.” He might not intended for his parody of Rahm Emanuel’s 5 month long mayoral campaign to become a book, but that’s what happened.
I originally read the @MayorEmanuel twitter feed in real time. It was one of the reasons I finally ended my boycott of twitter. The feed was hilarious then and it translated well as a book. The annotations in the book provided additional background of the characters featured in the twitter feed – both fictional and non fictional. Most tweets on their own are comedic gold, but read again in book form you can see the whole story come together. Continue reading
If you take your cues from the supermarket magazine aisle, manliness is pretty easy. Spend a few days browsing the selection and you’ll learn all about how you, too, can have ripped abs, a ripped chest, and ripped legs. You’ll be able to run faster at the track, lift more weight on the bench, and bike up mountains in no time. You’ll learn how to buy the perfect suit, cook the perfect meal, and be the perfect lover. But is a superficial checklist all it takes to be manly? Brett and Kate McKay, the authors of The Art of Manliness – Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues
For several weeks after George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was released, I debated over how to proceed with reading it. Should I go back over all the preceding books that I hadn’t read in five years? Or should I read it side by side with A Feast for Crows, attempting to match chapter to chapter in chronological order? Ultimately, I decided to just dive right in, with some help from the wiki to refresh particular names or details.
Structure:
The fifth book in the series was the result of a publishing fiasco where the sequel to A Storm of Swords was split into two books due to its unwieldy size. Rather than dividing it chronologically, the volumes were split by region and character, with Feast covering southern Westeros and Dance focusing on the events in the North and the Eastern Continent. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather lackluster fourth novel that consisted of mostly fruitless plotting and intrigue and devoted the bulk of POV chapters to unrelatable or uninteresting characters like Cersei, Brienne, Sansa, and the Greyjoys. Continue reading
You know one thing Zombies don’t currently have? Well, they own all of Hollywood, that’s for sure. And, yawr, they’re pretty popular in books too. And, yes, also, some of us may have zombie apocalypse survival kits. What?! It’s not just me. Anyway, now zombies will have their own convention. Like for serious, guys. Continue reading
Once upon a time, long, long ago, young Delta Sierra attended university*. One noon-time, she took her sad little home-made sandwich (she was poor) to eat in the campus theatre, which was holding a very good programme of short lunch-time plays. Today’s play, quite by happenstance, was a dramatization of Shirley Jackson’s powerful and influential short story, The Lottery. It is a masterpiece of ever-mounting suspense, tension and ohmygodno.
History does not record whether or not DS went to her afternoon classes, or indeed what those classes were. But that moment of ohmygodno has stayed with her all her life.
She sincerely hopes you have had similar seminal moments.
* She graduated with a half-assed BA and a very nice MRS. Comment.