One of my favorite books from recent years is Black Leopard, Red Wolf (BLRW) by Marlon James, a fantasy novel with sharp, African twists on traditional fantasy tropes. There is a lot I liked about it, but the thing that intrigues me most is that it is the first of a...
Jamaican-born author Marlon James has recently become one of my favorites. I have blogged about his novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf in the past, and will someday soon blog about the sequel that (finally!) came out yesterday. I also recently discovered that he does a...
The title of this post was my first thought after reading this wonderful, bewildering, and somewhat depressing novella. For such a short story, Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban has so many holes in its plot, and possible interpretations for these gaps, that I am not...
(Spoiler Warning: I am going to discuss some minor spoilers from Gideon the Ninth.) After reading Maggie's post about Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, I finally picked it up off of my virtual "to-read" stack and listened to the audiobook. I loved it. Muir's writing is...
Confession: I have never really been into super hero comics and stories. The last Marvel Comic Universe movie I saw was the first Captain America. And I was never really into the X-Men or Spider-Man movies and comics either. But Alan Moore's Watchmen is not an...
I don't normally read memoirs, but I did recently for a book club. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it! We read Phuc Tran's Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, a coming-of-age memoir in which Tran describes his life growing...
Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball is a slightly unusual sports book. I've read plenty of books about sports and sports figures, and a common gripe I have with them is that they are usually written by reporters. They may...
I have read several retelling's of old tales and myths over the past few years, but I cannot think of a better one that I've read than Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Song of Achilles is a partial retelling of Homer's Iliad narrated by Patroclus, Achilles'...
I recently finished Ted Chiang's sci-fi short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others, an engaging, smart, and varied set of stories that stretch and contract and circle back on themselves in surprising ways. I have always enjoyed science fiction, but I can...
A short history lesson: poker began to be televised in the late 1990s. What was once a card game played in casinos and at family card tables was now a television sensation. Thanks to the “hole cam”, viewers at home could see each player’s hand and watch as master card...