I have a weird fascination with locked in characters facing unimaginable horrors. This is probably why I love zombie movies so much. The battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is my favorite part of the whole trilogy. You put a bunch of people in a structure planted firmly in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean? Yeah, I’m on board. Sphere was always my favorite Michael Crichton book for this reason, probably. Deep Storm is just such a […]
Brings clarity to the opacity of Kubrick’s masterpiece
When I was in college, I fell in love with movies and delved headfirst into trying to understand and appreciate the medium. 2001: A Space Odyssey served as a graduate course of my exploration. I sort of taught myself how to appreciate what would have previously been impenetrable. In a diluted way, I think I’m doing something similar, but with novels. I’m reading far more than I ever have before, and am branching out into areas that were often intimidating or bewildering. So it’s only natural that […]
Hey, look, we’re all different. Isn’t that swell?
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the somewhat unwieldy title to an absolutely delightful story of a tightly-knit group of space-farers tasked with tunneling through space, setting up wormholes that allow for interplanetary travel. It’s set in the distant future (obviously), where humanity has made Earth uninhabitable and are scattered across the cosmos. They’ve joined a collective of alien races called the Galactic Commons. That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell. The broad elements here will be familiar to anyone who’s been […]
Beyond this point, there be dragons
From Amazon, “Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all—a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.” Below this point, there are spoilers. Major spoilers will be written in a white font, but minor spoilers are interspersed throughout the review. Structurally, the book mostly works. There’s a bit of […]