Faintingviolet is awesome and always on the hunt for research books for me. She sent along “How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads” and I was excited to read this since etymology is something I really enjoy. I was not disappointed. Daniel Cassidy began his interest of the Irish influence on the American language after inheriting a Gaelic dictionary from a deceased relative and realizing how many American words in modern language link back closely to the Gaelic. The book is […]
A Circus I Really Wished Was Real
Half Cannonball!!!!!! And I’ve reached my reading goal! This is my second read of this book and I think I loved it more than the first time. The Night Circus is centered around a magical challenge vetted between a magician’s daughter, Celia, and a mysterious ‘man in a grey suit’ and his protégé Marco. The two players are chosen against their will to compete in a game of skill until their masters decide who has bested the other. Their playing field is a circus, populated […]
Masters Programs Ruin You for Genre Reading
So I finished Scarlet during my first Creative Writing Masters’ Residency a few weeks ago, which may be part of the reason this book got 2.5 stars. True, I was having a hard time swallowing Wolf and Scarlet’s interactions before I went to the program, but after 9 days of intense seminars on nothing but writing and the craft of writing, my disappointment in these two characters solidified. But because I loved Cinder so much, and feel really terrible giving this book 2.5 stars, let’s […]
A Refreshing New Take on an Old Classic
I don’t know why I put off reading this series for so long. It’s GOOD. Meyer is an excellent story-teller and like alwaysanswerb says, Meyer uses the Cinderella fairy tale as her basis, but the story is 100% her own. I think the thing that makes this absolutely brilliant is moving the plot into a super-advanced technological future where we can’t make any real ties to the bucolic setting of the original fairy tale. Cinder (Cinderella) is a cyborg living in “new” Beijing (the old […]