New Review: Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #17
You can read my review of Doomed to Fail over at The Drunken Odyssey.
Recent Reading Over at Lost in Arkham
A short survey of recent horror-related fiction and nonfiction is at The Terror Test.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Scary Stories Treasury: Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen GammellI missed this collection of revamped urban legends and folk myths when I was a kid. I went from Godzilla in kindergarten, to the TV edit of Jaws in first grade, to Stephen King books and adaptations by second. I can only […]
It isn’t a glamorous thing to do, but you have to do it: Recent Reading
Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power: Sady Doyle I gulped this down in one sitting, so I’ll have to come back to it in order to write more substantially about it. It hits many of my areas of interest: Gothic literature, monsters, mythology, […]
Even if you knew the language you wouldn’t recognize the book: Italo Calvino’s post-compositional diagram for If on a winter’s night a traveler
I had wanted to start reading Italo Calvino, but wasn’t sure where to start. I found out that my wife had Invisible Cities, so I jumped in there. Cities easily won me over. Soon after everyone was telling me to read If on a winter’s night a traveler. I checked […]
Plain Ordinary People: On Finally Reading The Outsiders
One way I disappointed students was not reading one of their favorite books. This was certainly not the only way I disappointed students, but not having read S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders was at the top of the list from the beginning of my teaching career. This proved to be […]
Our Heart Is Restless: St Augustine’s Confessions
I wrote recently about my initial experiences with The Confessions. Finished sometime around 400 AD, it’s an early version of the memoir, particularly the confessional and spiritual quest genres, though it doesn’t look like the ones published today. If I read it again, I’m going to research current or celebrated […]
An Artificial Certainty: Stanislaw Lem’s Hospital of the Transfiguration
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1971), a sci-fi film full of slow poetry, led me to the author Stanislaw Lem, whose book inspired it. Since I only had the film to go by, I was expecting something similar to Tarkovsky, but Lem is a different experience. More like the feeling after reading […]
The Week That Was, or Emptiness, Eagles, and Snow
While finishing the last week of the 2018 academic year, the family got some form of stomach virus that started last week. Since that cleared up, we’ve been able to do some much needed cleaning and organizing. We’re also planning our next academic year. The youngest got her cast cut […]
McClurg's Marginalia 