Poison Study by Maria V. Synder
Review: Dragonflight
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
When Anne McCaffrey passed away in 2011, I was saddened, as many people in the sf community were. I was also seized by a sudden urge to go back and read The Dragonriders of Pern. Well, go back… I distinctly remember reading a Pern novel featuring a tall, dark villainess in middle school, but, looking back, I definitely could have just imagined that. In any case, 2011 was when I determined to read Dragonflight and get a toehold back in the series, to see if I wanted to continue or not. Naturally, it took me two years to finally sit down with it. Yeesh.
The Sunday Salon: Star Trek Into Darkness and Whitewashing (SPOILERS)
I went to see Star Trek Into Darkness on Friday. I was so brutally disappointed that I had to put my face on the Internet about it. Thus, another video rant. I also direct you to Racebending’s comments on the subject. This io9 post is also a good read.
Page to Screen: Live and Let Die (1973)
Live and Let Die
based on the novel by Ian Fleming
I was driving home with a few friends in the car, on the way back from something, when “Live and Let Die” came on one of Atlanta’s classic rock stations. I usually play Russian radio roulette while in Atlanta since they took my beloved the Journey away, but I paused. “Hold on,” I said. “I think I recognize it.” “It’s that Bond song Paul McCartney did,” my friend Isobel informed me. “Back up, Paul McCartney did a song for James Bond?” Much riffing (on McCartney, Bond, and my own ignorance) ensued. So, as you can see, between Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan, the James Bond franchise is an empty desert dotted by the occasional Grace Jones. I had literally no idea what to expect from Roger Moore, so I went into Live and Let Die utterly blind.
Booking Through Thursday: Returns
What book(s) do you find yourself going back to? Beloved children’s classics? Favorites from college? Something that touched you and just makes you long to visit?
(Because, doesn’t everybody have at least one book they would like to curl up with, even if they don’t make a habit of rereading books? Even if they maybe don’t even have the time to visit and just think back longingly?)
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not that much of a rereader; I’m like a shark, I have to keep going forward. Nonetheless, every time I come across a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I always open it to a random page, read a few paragraphs, and feel better about my place in the universe. And since I’m back where my collection of out-of-print American editions of The Lord of the Rings is, that’s a lot.
Review: Ten Days in a Mad-House
Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly
Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days is a really fantastic piece of nonfiction—the kind that’ll make you gasp out loud, even though you know how this race between two lady journalists in the 1880s is going to turn out. I’d heard of Nellie Bly in passing before (something something asylum something something), but Eighty Days introduced me to her in her entirety, from birth to death. Naturally, despite Goodman’s warnings about Bly’s subpar attempts at writing novels, I was interested in what put Nellie Bly on the map: Ten Days in a Madhouse. While it was originally published as a series of articles in The New York World, it was collected into a book the same year (1887), making it eligible for my establishment.
The Literary Horizon: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
Review: The Man in the High Castle
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
For some insane reason, I thought that my final finals season at Agnes meant that I would have tons of time for reading. This was not only a lie, but a damned lie. I checked out every book I could only get at my college library and a handful of books from the local library. Fines piled up on the school books and the local books went home, unread, save for one: The Man in the High Castle. I’d only known Philip K. Dick by reputation, and I had confused The Man in the High Castle, the “Nazis won World War II” story, with another “Nazis won World War II” alternate history short story that was much more dour and depressing. Well, not that this isn’t…
The Sunday Salon: She’s Leaving Home
For Christmas this past year, I told my brother to buy me a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Surprises are not very popular in Clan McBride.) That started my first exploration into the Beatles: I listened to their discography for the first time that winter. I’m still parsing them out; there’s a copy of Philip Norman’s Shout! in my to-be-read pile, which I’m rapidly starting to think of as my bibliophilic trosseau. I’ve picked up a few more albums since then, but Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band got into my car and stayed in my car.
Review: Tiny Beautiful Things
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
I started Tiny Beautiful Things on a Sunday and logged into my library account later that day. Huh, I thought, it’s due tomorrow. I tried to renew it, but was faced with the fact that somebody else wanted to read it as badly as I did. What was a bibliophile in her last weeks of college to do? Why, finish it the next day, of course, neatly avoiding library fines and actual work in one fell swoop. It’s not procrastination if you’re doing something else productive, we all know that.
