Mystery/thrillers tend to be my book equivalent of comfort food. I go to them when I want something quick and entertaining to read. I can’t imagine that ever changing, but I do occasionally find myself bored of the genre’s trappings. Hard-boiled male detectives or ladies with clumsy romantic comedy love lives try to solve a … More Cormoran Strike in The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith
If you know me at all, you know I’ve spent recent years railing against novels about white dudes who can’t get their shit together (examples here, here, and here). But the thing about hating a certain form of novel is that every once in a while someone does it spectacularly well and forces you to … More Sometimes Less Really is More: A Book Review of Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
Best Original Songs had enjoyed success on the radio before the 1980s, but this is where the floodgates opened and popular stars on the music scene made their presence known, creating greater synergy between the two forms of entertainment. As a result, almost every song on this list is easily recognizable–even thirty-odd years later. 10. … More Ranking Every Best Original Song Oscar Winner of the 1980s
Any gay man who recently saw Love, Simon in theaters can tell you how incredible it feels to see a teen romantic comedy with a gay protagonist after all these years, and how the experience is bittersweet because even though it feels like we’ve finally arrived, it’s still sad that these stories weren’t around for us … More Transgender Teen Romance is Here! If I Was Your Girl, by Meredith Russo: Book Review
As I was finishing Sam Wasson’s biography of Bob Fosse, Molly Ringwald published this article in The New Yorker, and it served as a nice companion piece to how I was feeling about the experience of learning about Bob Fosse’s life. In her article, Ringwald looks back at the John Hughes movies that made her famous … More Looking at Bob Fosse in the #MeToo Era
“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?” In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng makes great use of the town she grew up in, Shaker Heights. A meticulously planned suburban sprawl, Shaker Heights becomes a sort of stand-in for the way life tends … More What Makes a Mother? Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
The idea of reinventing Macbeth as a gritty, noir-ish procedural sounded quite interesting to me, but I confess I had a very hard time getting into this story. The opening chapters are densely populated with information about the setting, its history, the crime that takes place within it, and (curiously) the passage of a single … More Jo Nesbø Reinvents Macbeth as a Gritty Procedural
Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Only Story, posits that while many things happen to a person in their lifetime, at the end of the day there is only one story that matters. In the case of our narrator, Paul, his one story is about his first love, and he seeks to share that story with … More Is Love the Only Story Worth Telling?
I follow the Tournament of Books every year, and every year I have at least one great discovery from the contest. This year, that discovery was Fever Dream. A friend recommended it to me after it defeated the heavy favorite Lincoln in the Bardo in the contest’s opening round. It was described as hypnotic, haunting, and slightly … More Getting Lost in Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin: Book Review
Hope for the Future If I may get personal for a moment, this book was particularly meaningful for me because my husband and I have recently gotten licensed to be foster parents and we have been working on a placement with a transgender teenager. You can imagine, then, that Sarah McBride’s story of coming out … More Tomorrow Will Be Different: Sarah McBride and Transgender Activism
Supposedly Fun 